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Domino Island: The unpublished thriller by the master of the genre
Desmond Bagley
Michael Davies
Discovered after more than 40 years, a vintage action-adventure novel by one of the world’s most successful thriller writers, involving murder, corruption and a daring hijack in the Caribbean.Robert Armin, an ex-serviceman working in London as an insurance investigator, is sent to the Caribbean to determine the legitimacy of an expensive life insurance claim following the inexplicable death of businessman David Salton. His rapidly inflated premiums immediately before his death stand to make his young widow a very rich lady! Once there, Armin discovers that Salton’s political ambitions had made him a lot of enemies, and local tensions around a forthcoming election are already spilling over into protest and violence on the streets. Salton also had friends in unexpected places, including the impossibly beautiful Leotta Tomsson, to whom there is much more than meets the eye. Armin realises that Salton’s death and the local unrest are a deliberate smokescreen for an altogether more ambitious plot by an enemy in their midst, and as the island comes under siege, even Armin’s army training seems feeble in the face of such a determined foe.Unseen for more than 40 years and believed lost, Domino Island was accepted for publication in 1972 but then replaced by a different novel to coincide with the release of The Mackintosh Man, the Paul Newman film based on Bagley’s earlier novel The Freedom Trap. It is a classic Bagley tour de force with an all-action finale.
Copyright (#udd0c0fdd-3b7d-57ff-85c0-e5f008369781)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications Limited 2019
Cover design: www.mulcaheydesign.com (http://www.mulcaheydesign.com) © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images © Julio Viard/Alamy (aircraft), Folio Images/Alamy (man), Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (all other images)
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 978-0008333010
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 978-0008333027
Version: 2019-04-15
CURATOR’S NOTE (#udd0c0fdd-3b7d-57ff-85c0-e5f008369781)
Desmond Bagley’s novel Running Blind has a brilliantly gripping opening sentence: To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position, especially when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate. As a teenager introduced to this master thriller writer by my older brothers, I was hooked. The Golden Keel, Bagley’s debut novel, came next on my reading list, quickly followed by The Enemy, Landslide and the rest of his exhilarating output. My hunger for more was only stopped by the untimely death of the author in 1983.
Ever since, Desmond Bagley – or Simon, as he was known to family and friends – has been woven into my life in a variety of strange ways. Years after his death, I struck up an email correspondence with his remarkable widow Joan, who completed a couple of his unfinished manuscripts for posthumous publication, before she died in 1999. The baton was passed to Joan’s sister and brother-in-law, Lecia and Peter Foston, with whom I have had the pleasure of developing a delightful friendship over two decades.
Meanwhile, I hassled Bagley’s publisher, David Brawn of HarperCollins, with a view to writing a biography (the brief book-cover rubric hardly does his extraordinary story justice). I wrote a two-part screen adaptation of The Tightrope Men, entitled simply Tightrope – which has yet to be made, if any producers are looking in. I followed with enthusiasm Nigel Alefounder, whose website desmondbagley.co.uk (http://www.desmondbagley.co.uk) reveals the fine work he has done over many years to keep the Bagley flame alive.
My heartfelt thanks and appreciation for their commitment and support go to all these people and more – including, of course, my own ‘Joan’, Tricia, to whom this book is dedicated.
And then came the discovery of a ‘new’ Bagley manuscript among his papers, written in 1972 and subsequently archived in Boston, Massachusetts. Investigative researcher Philip Eastwood – who hosts the website thebagleybrief.com (http://www.thebagleybrief.com) – found the novel there in the form of a typed first draft with extensive handwritten annotations by the author and his original editor, Bob Knittel. In addition, correspondence between the two showed in some detail the plans Bagley had for a second draft.
I couldn’t be more thrilled and honoured to have been invited by David Brawn to implement those plans. Permissions and assistance have been very kindly forthcoming from the trustees of the Bagley estate, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, and Sam Matthews and Leishia-Jade Finigan of Moore Stephens in Guernsey, without whose co-operation this book would not have seen the light of day.
What follows is, unquestionably, a Desmond Bagley novel. The emendations may be mine; the brilliance is his.
Michael Davies
Dedication (#udd0c0fdd-3b7d-57ff-85c0-e5f008369781)
For Tricia – who else?
The island of Campanilla
Contents
Cover (#u111ae6f5-6047-5065-9d50-2438dcdff8ee)
Title Page (#ue4de8240-411f-510e-8572-716a86aeb938)
Copyright
Curator’s Note
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Afterword
Domino Island: A History
Keep Reading … (#u3e557a28-0ea7-5050-9307-3ba22b0902aa)
Desmond Bagley
Michael Davies
Philip Eastwood
By the same Author
About the Publisher
ONE (#udd0c0fdd-3b7d-57ff-85c0-e5f008369781)
I
I was late into the office that morning and Mrs Hadley, the receptionist, told me that Jolly wanted to see me. ‘It’s urgent,’ she said. ‘He’s been ringing like a fire alarm.’
Jolly might have been his name, but jolly he certainly was not. He was a thin, dyspeptic man with a face like a prune and a nature as sour as a lemon. He had a way of authorising the payment of claims as though the money was coming out of his own pocket, which was probably not a bad trait for a man in his job.
He looked up as I walked in and said irascibly, ‘Where the devil have you been? I’ve been trying to find you for hours.’
I did not have to account to Jolly for the way I spent my time so I ignored that and said, ‘What’s your problem?’
‘A man called David Salton has died.’
That didn’t surprise me. People are always dying and you hear of the fact more often in an insurance office than in most other places. I sat down.
‘How much is he into you for?’
‘Half a million of personal insurance.’
That was enough to make even me wince: God knows what it was doing to Jolly’s ulcer.
‘What’s the snag?’
He tried – and failed – to suppress the look of pain on his face. ‘This one is all snag. Salton first came to us twenty-five years ago and took out £10,000 worth of insurance on his life. Over the years he built it up to a quarter-million. Just over a year ago he suddenly doubled it; the reason he gave was galloping inflation.’
‘So on the last quarter-million he only paid two premiums,’ I observed. I could see what was needling Jolly: the company was going to lose badly on this one. ‘How old was Salton?’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘Who gets the loot?’
‘I imagine it will be the widow,’ said Jolly. ‘The terms of his will aren’t known yet. The thing that bothers me is the way he died. He was found dead in a small boat fifteen miles from land.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
I looked past him out of the window at the snowflakes drifting from a leaden London sky. ‘I assume there was an inquest? What did the coroner say?’
‘Death from natural causes. The medical certificate states a heart attack.’ Jolly grimaced. ‘That might be debatable. The body was badly decomposed.’
‘Decomposed? How long had he been out there?’
‘Four days. But it wasn’t so much the time as the heat.’
I stared at Jolly. ‘What heat?’
‘Oh, it happened in the Caribbean,’ he said, as though I ought to have known. ‘Salton’s boat was found off the island of Campanilla – he lived there.’
I sighed. Jolly’s problem was making him incoherent. ‘What about starting at the beginning?’ I suggested. ‘And then tell me what you’d like me to do.’
The way Jolly told it, Salton was a native-born, white Campanillan. In his youth he emigrated to the United States, where he made his pile and took out US citizenship. His money had come from building houses for returned soldiers just after the war and he’d done very well at it. But he never forgot his roots and went back to Campanilla from time to time, buying some land on the island and building himself a home, which he used for holidays. About three years ago he’d moved back permanently and began to do a lot for the island community. He built a couple of hospitals, was the mainstay of higher education and had an interest in providing low-cost housing for the populace – something he’d become expert at in his Stateside days.
Then he died in a small boat at sea.
‘Campanilla is British, isn’t it?’
‘It was,’ said Jolly. ‘Not any more. After Harold Wilson’s “Bay of Piglets” PR disaster in Anguilla, we were all too happy to let them slip away. They even opted out of the Commonwealth.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘That’s one of the problems, of course.’
I didn’t really understand why that was a problem, but then I didn’t know anything of Campanilla. Jolly said, ‘Another problem is that the company invested money in Salton’s house-building schemes. Now he’s dead we want to make sure the money’s safe.’
Wheels within wheels. ‘How much?’
‘A little over three million. You’ll have to talk to Costello about that.’
I knew Ken Costello a little. He and Jolly were the proverbial two hands that didn’t let the other know what each was doing; Jolly was the insurance man and Costello the investment whizz-kid. They didn’t like one another much. While Jolly was a good company man, he wasn’t worried about Costello’s troubles. The half-million potential pay-out loomed larger in his mind than the shaky future of Costello’s three million. But there was something else gnawing at the back of my mind. I knew the company would still pay out in the event of suicide, but not until two years after the death. The idea was to deter any sudden impulse to leave the wife and kids in good financial shape. The realisation that you are worth more dead than alive can be positively unhinging to some men, but the two-year gap helped keep the door from falling off.
I said, ‘Was the usual suicide clause in Salton’s policies?’
Jolly looked hurt. ‘Of course,’ he said peevishly.
‘Then what’s biting you?’ As though I didn’t know.
He tented his fingers and looked magisterial. ‘I’m not too happy about that inquest. The law in these banana republics can be slipshod, to say the least of it.’
‘Do you suspect funny business?’
‘If there is any funny business we ought to know about it.’
‘And that’s where I come in. When do I leave?’
He gave me a knowing look and then smiled. Jolly’s infrequent smiles were unnerving. ‘You’d better wait until you’ve seen the chairman.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You have an appointment with him at eleven.’
During my ten years offering expert consultation to this company, I had met the chairman exactly ten times and I’d already had my ration for the year. ‘What does he want?’
