My Christmas On You... A Nine Days of Christmas Inspector Gloria Mystery DAY EIGHT
Day eight: Riddles and secrets
It took Gloria and Lawrence several hours and two cars to finally collect all the masque parade costumes. Neither of them could tell if anything was missing but Gloria recognised some of the main ones, including the lead costumes made with the famous Haitian cloth, and there were so many of the others that they thought it must be most of them.
It hadn’t taken long to work out why they had been taken – everything was undamaged except that all the hems had been unpicked, the heavy country cloth costumes all open at the sides and edges.
‘Wow’, Lawrence looked at the piles of cloth, ‘easy to see what was going on then. Someone had hidden something, maybe the jewellery, in the costumes and needed to get it all back. Quite clever really.’
Gloria did not feel so happy. ‘Still too many questions though. The first question being, how did those kids know where to find all this, so quickly?’
Lawrence shrugged. ‘Luck?’
Gloria sniffed. ‘Luck! Most of those kids never go outside the area where they live and work. Come on, you know this. The ones in the town centre stay in the centre, the ones at Red Light don’t go far from there, the Freeport ones the same. So, how come they all rushed off to the clinic on 12th street or a school in Matadi. No, they are clever but not that clever.’
‘So, not clever but organised?’
‘Maybe. But by who? And where is all this jewellery?’
By this time they had worked their way through Waterside market which was teeming with stalls and sellers, into Westpoint and right up to the Bathhouse. Ismael Tartoh seemed completely uninterested in any explanation of how they had found everything and instead called people to carry the newly-recovered costumes back into a safer storage place.
‘Gloria, you have done well-ooh, hmm, some people said you would never solve this, that you only good for murder business.’ He laughed as he said it and Gloria thought she had never seen such obvious relief on someone’s face. Did he really believe in the wrath of Mammy Wata?
‘I’m not sure I solved anything. The kids somehow managed to find all the costumes in a very short time but I don’t know how, I don’t know who took them in the first place and, most importantly, where all this jewellery is now.’ She looked pointedly at the open seams in a costume one of the helpers was carrying in.
Tartoh was already shaking his head. ‘Forget it Gloria. There is no jewellery, not now anyway. Someone heard the story, took all the costumes, searched them and found nothing. That’s what I think. It doesn’t matter, you have saved Christmas for us. Thank you.’
He turned back to his workers and that was the conversation finished.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow but Gloria was scowling. She felt she had been very cleverly used and that was not a feeling she liked. ‘Tha only murder business I good for eh?’
‘Listen, before you get too vex, I agree with you. Something here is bend-bend.’ That made Gloria smile. Lawrence hardly ever used colloquialisms. ‘I asked Abu how he managed to find the costumes and...’
‘The one street kid in his group knew exactly where to go?’
Lawrence nodded. ‘Yes.’
But when she had gathered all the kids to give them their small something for helping her and started asking questions they all stared back at her in silence. No jokes, no comments and definitely no information.
‘I don’t understand why you all want to act like gronna gronna people. You know I want to help you, why you can’t help me?’
It was Pascal who finally spoke as they started to drift away. ‘Ol ma, don’t blast us please. You are very smart but your eyes are looking in the wrong direction.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t look at us ma, look at the places!’
‘The places?’ Gloria frowned. ‘So, everything is riddle now eh? What places?’ But the kids had melted away into the noisy Westpoint crowds. She turned to Abu and his footballers but he just shrugged. ‘Me? I know nothing about riddles and places. Tha your job Aunt Glo.’ And then they were gone too.
It was only when she turned, and heard Lawrence on his phone listing all the locations where the costumes had been found, that it hit her that those were the places the kids had been talking about. Her annoyance at not realising that before Lawrence had quickly turned to curiosity.
‘That was my Press Officer’, he hurried on, ignoring Gloria’s smirk at the fact he had a press officer on his team, ‘I have asked her to check if there’s any connection between those different places. If there is, she will find it.’
‘Well, good I suppose. It won’t take too long will it?’
‘She’s checking the press database on our ancient system Glo, I have no idea how long it will take.’
Gloria nodded in the direction of the coffee house but before they could even sit Lawrence’s phone was ringing again. When he ended the brief call he looked at Gloria. ‘Those children were right Glo, we should have been looking at the “places”, He paused but continued when he saw her impatient expression. ‘There are stories in newspapers about children going missing from each of those sites, reports stretching back years and always at this particular time of year, just before the Christmas Masque Parade.’
Gloria looked grim but before she could speak Lawrence went on.
‘That is until you solved that case a few years ago. You remember you discovered all those children who had been kidnapped and were being used in the illegal mines up country.’ Gloria nodded. It had been her first case as Inspector. ‘Well, since then no further children have gone missing. So, I can’t really see the connection here.’
But Gloria was shaking her head, she had an idea of how this made sense. ‘Maybe Mr. Tartoh can explain it. Let’s go.’
It took only a few minutes interrogation before Ismael Tartoh slumped in his chair and started talking. ‘Look, I knew nothing about this, I swear. I told you my grandfather used to make sacrifices but the sacrifice was arranging for children to be kidnapped every year, just before Christmas, and taken to work in the mines in the interior. There was no killing. My father continued it right up until you found one of the illegal mines. That’s when it stopped and that’s when he told me what they had been doing and that’s why I asked you to investigate.’ He breathed out noisily and slumped further down in his chair.
Gloria sucked her teeth. ‘So, nothing to do with Mammy Wata after all? What a surprise!’
But Ismael looked puzzled. ‘Of course it was to do with Mammy Wata, since we stopped the sacrifices our luck has just run out. Every year there’s a new problem.’
‘You mean since the money stopped coming, or the diamonds?’
‘I told you, we never benefitted from diamonds or jewellery, as far as I know. And I only know what my father told me.’
Lawrence looked doubtful. ‘I’m just confused...’
But Gloria’s face had cleared. ‘Well, it’s clear to me Lawrence, or at least some of it is. The jewels used in that fancy jewellery must have come from the mines. We don’t know how, or why it was hidden in the parade costumes and then taken out of them at those sites. But perhaps it was a kind of memorial to the children who were kidnapped from those places, we know many of them never made it back to their homes. Or maybe it was a message to me?’ She looked at Tartoh but he just stared blankly at her.
‘The only other name we have is the woman who paid for all that jewellery to be made, Queenie Seapoint. If anyone can give us any more answers it must be her. Do you know that name Ismael? She must be connected to the parade.’
Tartoh leaned forward shaking his head. ‘All I know is the Christmas parade must go ahead. If it doesn’t then we are finished.’
Gloria shrugged. ‘You have a few days before it starts, let’s see what happens.’
‘No, Gloria, it starts tomorrow. You don’t remember? The Children’s Masque Parade is welcomed by the president at the start of the Presidential Ball and that marks the beginning of all the Christmas celebrations.’
Lawrence and Gloria looked at each other and Lawrence laughed. ‘It looks like you will be going to the Ball after all Inspector.’