Free Walking Dead by Peter Dickinson

from nowhere in the last three weeks, a little further down the beach. He drank two cans of the fizzy, thin, quinine-flavoured Island beer, which he rather liked, and ate fresh-caught mullet with hot green-pepper sauce. A fat American at a nearby table leaned across and remarked that at least the Islanders knew how to cook fish, and Foxe agreed with him—it was one of those mysterious pockets of competence which the Islanders managed to maintain, like jungle clearings, amid their general chaos.
    Another such pocket, Dreiser said, was spying. Curiously, Foxe’s anger had been a little appeased by his success in lying to lying Mr Trotter, and he could now consider the incident almost objectively. Talking about the spirits was illegal, and Mr herbalising Trotter had talked about Asimbulu. He had told the girl not to listen, but she’d listened—and, presumably reported to the police. Mr herbalising Trotter was in jail now, most likely; it must have been the girl who reported that Foxe drank Bloody Marys and worked at the lab, though it was a little curious that Mr Gibson Trotter had bothered to brief himself on these facts—unless he was the sort of born hotelier who automatically registers people’s likes and habits. At any rate, it didn’t seem to add up to a spy network on the Dreiser scale. Foxe decided to forget about it—though at least Lisa-Anna would have been delighted that he’d managed to get angry over something outside his work.
    Lisa-Anna. That was over. He decided to forget about her too. In ten days, he thought, I shall have some spare time again. I’ll get a new girl.

5
    â€œI n a few years they will have a hotel here,” said Dreiser, pitching his voice above the rattle of tumbling water.
    â€œNo beach,” said Foxe.
    â€œThey’ll build one. With forty-five miles of perfect natural beaches round the Cay, they’ll still decide to build an artificial one.”
    â€œWhy on earth?”
    â€œBecause they’ve only got one waterfall. That makes it necessary to spoil it with a hotel, and people won’t come to the hotel without its having a beach.”
    â€œIt might be cheaper to build an artificial waterfall where one of the beaches is.”
    â€œExcellent thinking, David. Send in a report to the Minister of Tourism.”
    Dreiser finished paying out the anchor cable, made it fast and came aft to sort through the fishing tackle. His sea personality was markedly different from his shore personality. In the hour’s journey up the coast Foxe had noticed none of what Galdi called “typical Dreiserisms,” those almost deliberately self-induced accidents of phrasing or behaviour, a sort of creative clumsiness, which invariably on shore destroyed Dreiser’s image of the brisk but reliable administrator. The time when he’d squirted dye all over himself from his safe had been a fair example. But at sea he seemed to relax. Here there was no need to put on a show of competence, because he was already competent. Even the jerky, inhuman movements of his limbs became somehow functional and controlled. Foxe found it difficult to get used to. It was like a trick with perspective, where the object drawn on the paper seems at moments to recede and at others to protrude towards one; in the same way, though it was natural for Foxe to think that he was now seeing the real Dreiser, and the other one—the Dreiser of the Dreiserisms—was a sort of mask or carapace, he kept going through moments when things seemed the other way round; this Dreiser, this efficient seaman, was the mask and the spy-bedevilled gawk was the real thing.
    The same uncertainty affected the bay where they had come to fish. Here Nature was at her most artificial, carelessly achieving a series of symmetries and contrasts which a human landscape architect would have rejected as excessive. The boat hobbled gently at the edge of the marbled turbulence below the