Murdered Midas by Charlotte Gray

Author:Charlotte Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2019-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

There seems a lot of grumbling from the golfers by the sea,

Who follow little pilules round the course at Cable B.,

They criticize the livestock browsing quietly on the green;

When putting, curse the cards they leave which scarcely can be seen.

The players call them Oakes acorns . . .

The animals turned out to be infected with screw-worm fly, and eventually all died.

On the first Wednesday in July, the sky was so overcast that everyone knew a thunderstorm must be on its way. Drained by the humidity, Nassau’s residents went about their business in slow motion. Sir Harry had already confirmed his ticket to leave the island the following day and travel to Bar Harbor to spend the summer there with Eunice, teenagers Sydney, William, and Shirley, and ten-year-old Harry. This would be Sir Harry’s last full day in the Bahamas for several weeks.

In the early afternoon, he dropped into Harold Christie’s real estate office on Bay Street to suggest that his friend come and admire his sheep the following morning, before his departure. Christie, always happy to oblige his friend and best client, and perhaps hoping for improved publicity for Sir Harry’s latest scheme, suggested that they invite someone from the Daily Tribune to join them. Both Étienne Dupuch, the editor, and Raymond Moss, a reporter, were keen. Dupuch agreed to appear at Sir Harry’s house the next day.

Next, Sir Harry and Christie drove back to Westbourne, the Oakes residence, where the two men played mixed-doubles tennis with Christie’s young niece Sally Sawyer and her friend Veronica McMahon. For all his expanded girth and advancing age, Sir Harry could still serve an ace. Guests arrived for cocktails: Charles Hubbard, a Woolworth executive who had retired to Nassau and was Oakes’s neighbour, and Mrs. Dulcibel Henneage, wife of a British Army officer, who was rumoured to be having an affair with Harold Christie. After gin and tonics, the two younger women left; Sir Harry suggested that Hubbard and Mrs. Henneage, nicknamed “Effie,” stay for dinner.

Freddie de Marigny was also hosting a dinner party that night, at his house on Victoria Avenue. He had returned home from the yacht club in high spirits, after a windy sail in Concubine and then a drink at the Prince George Hotel. Oblivious to the dangerously sullen clouds and threat of a tropical storm, he invited several guests to dinner at his house, including Alfred Ceretta, an American engineer involved in the airport construction. At the Prince George bar, de Marigny had discovered Ceretta enjoying cocktails with Dorothy Clarke and Jean Ainslie, wives of RAF officers, who were promptly added to the dinner party. Eventually, eleven people would sit down at de Marigny’s table, including his cousin Georges de Visdelou (his friends usually omitted Guimbeau, the final part of his name) and Georges’s lively blond girlfriend, Betty Roberts, the seventeen-year-old cashier at the local cinema.

Although de Marigny himself rarely drank, he had a reputation as a generous host, and as the wind rattled windows and blew palm

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