“So it’s true?” she asked. “Teddy is still alive?”
“It seems Lance thinks so,” Pepper said.
“Did you ever meet Teddy?” Holly asked Annie.
“Once, in passing.”
“Do you think you could recognize him?”
“I doubt it, but anyway, I hear he uses a lot of disguises.”
“I hear that, too,” Holly said. She turned to Pepper. “Bill, do you have any opinion on who might replace Croft?”
Pepper shrugged. “Who knows? He has a Haitian assistant, but I don’t know if he has the weight to succeed his boss. His name is duBois.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He came from Haiti with Croft, so my assumption is that he is of the same stripe.”
“Do you think duBois is conducting the investigation into Croft’s murder?”
“Possibly; that will be up to Sir Winston Sutherland, of course, and I expect he’s pretty heavily involved in the investigation himself.”
“If you were running the investigation, who would be your initial suspects?”
“Well, there are people in Parliament and in the government who are opposed to Sir Winston, but they keep quiet about it. Certainly, there’s no violence-prone clandestine resistance that we know of, and I would doubt that any native of the island would be likely to lay his hands on the kind of weapon that must have been used-that is, high-powered and silenced. Nobody heard a gunshot.”
“So they’ll look at foreigners?”
“I expect so; visitors before residents, I should think.”
“So Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby would not be among the first suspects?”
“I’m only guessing, of course, but probably not. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I want us to get to them before duBois or some cop does.”
“You want to just go and knock on their doors?”
“Not yet, but if we get some sort of ID of one of the photos from Langley, yes.”
There was a crunch of tires on gravel from the driveway, and they heard a car door slam.
“Who would that be?” Holly asked.
“Either somebody from the embassy with my laptop or the police, take your pick.” Pepper got up, went to the front door and opened it.
Holly could see a young man hand Pepper something. Pepper closed the door, walked back to the dining table and set a very small laptop computer on it. “Let’s take a look at those photos,” he said, switching it on.
40
Sir Winston Sutherland sat at his desk, reviewing a stack of files. His phone buzzed.
“Yes?”
“Prime Minister,” his secretary said, “Major duBois is here, as per your request.”
Sutherland closed the file he had been studying.