I waited some time at the entrance to Lyford Cay, but Jack never turned up. Only some workmen, back and forth, who took no notice of me. I found a rock to sit on and tried to seize some kind of control of my rattled nerves. I felt as I had in the days after I killed Tommy Randolph, like I had been flattened out by God’s rolling pin, and though my body strained for sleep and my head felt like it was made of dough, my brain kept spinning round and round inside. I mean, could you blame me? A day earlier I had stood inside the drawing room at Government House and been married to Benedict Thorpe by the Duke of Windsor. Now my husband was gone across the ocean, Sir Harry Oakes was dead, Mr. Smith was dead, and it seemed to me that evil seeped from the stones around me and hung in the air like a cloud of poison gas. I started breathing in shallow sips, so as not to draw it into my lungs. My watch ticked away. An hour passed. Across the empty, landscaped ground of Lyford Cay there was a marina, and I remember thinking what a remote, convenient location it was, that dock, if you wanted to land on New Providence Island incognito, or depart it the same way, with no more noise or notice than a cloud of poison gas, say.

Or maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe I had this thought later, in the weeks before the trial, when stories of the night of Oakes’s murder began to sift into my ears.

Eventually I got into the car and drove back to the canteen, exhausted. The fishermen on the beach with the dead body had left by now, but the crowd remained milling outside of Westbourne as I passed. I didn’t stop, I made straight for the canteen and returned the keys to Mrs. Gudewill. I had the feeling that I didn’t want to know, I had no desire at all to learn how poor Sir Harry had died. Instead I got on my bicycle and pedaled into town through the same taut, warm silence. I walked straight into the Prince George hotel in my canteen uniform, wet with perspiration, but Jack wasn’t there, he wasn’t anywhere. Like a lot of fellows over the course of those strange months following the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, he had simply disappeared.

The next day, when I bicycled to the canteen, the ladies were all abuzz with the news. Had I heard? The chief prosecutor of the Bahamas had arrested a man and charged him with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes.

Not, as you might expect, the fellow who had slept in the adjoining bedroom the night of the murder, who had discovered the body the next day, who had been in debt to the dead man to the tune of untold thousands of pounds.