The Sun Goes Down Read online

  THE

  Sun Goes Down

  THE

  Sun Goes Down

  A MITCH MITCHELL MYSTERY

  James Lear

  Copyright © 2016 by James Lear.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: iStock

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-162-6

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-163-3

  I

  THERE WAS A SOLDIER LEANING ON THE RAILS, LOOKING BACK AT the white wake cutting through the dark Mediterranean water. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing tanned, hairy forearms; one leg was bent, allowing his ass to stretch the khaki of his pants to near breaking point. This wasn’t the thick wool stuff they wear back in England, with layers of unappetizing underpants beneath; this was tropical-weight cotton, as thin as a second skin. If the crossing had been longer I’d have joined him at the rail, engaged him in conversation and used all the Mitchell charm to get him into a cabin or a cupboard. As it was, with just a few minutes to go, I watched his wake as he watched the ferry’s.

  He lit a cigarette and moved fore, trailing smoke behind him.

  A little farther along the deck, huddled in chairs and surrounded by excessive amounts of luggage, was an English family with thin, pinched faces, gray hair and ill-fitting clothes that were quite unsuited for the weather. That is how the parents looked, at least: could have been a schoolteacher and his do-gooding wife. The son was a different matter. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Young, perfectly blond, rosy cheeked. Dressed as if he’d just come off the cricket pitch: a white wool sweater knotted around his shoulders; white shirt; cream trousers. He shaded his eyes with one hand, squinting towards the horizon where the land mass of our destination was now clearly visible, getting larger. Gozo, smaller sister of Malta, separated from the main island by three or four miles of deep-blue sea, half an hour on the ancient vessels that ply the route day in, day out, steaming past the brightly painted fishing boats that bob along the waves, nets cast, waiting.

  “Look,” he shouted, turning a bright, eager face to his parents. “We’re nearly there!”

  They glanced up from their reading matter (religious tracts?), frowned in perfect unison and looked down. The boy’s face fell, his pink lips hanging open, blue eyes bright and wet, perhaps just from the stiff sea breeze. This wouldn’t do. I strolled over.

  “There she blows,” I said, standing next to him. “Journey’s end.”

  The boy smiled and jumped to his feet, grateful for any attention. “At last! I thought we’d never get here!”

  The parents turned stony, disapproving faces towards me. If I’d been wearing a hat I’d have raised it. Instead I said in my best Beacon Hill tone, “Dr. Mitchell. Pleased to meet you.” The “doctor” part always works wonders. They looked away, content to let me babysit their son.

  “You travel over from England?”

  “Yes. We come here every summer.”

  “Lucky you.”

  The boy sighed and looked to the island. “I suppose so.” The side of his face was smooth, soft, his ears red from the sun. “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Sure is,” I said, not meaning the island. His neck was like a column of marble disappearing into the cool whiteness of his shirt. For someone who’d been traveling for so long, he was remarkably unruffled. “I’ve never been before. Perhaps you could show me around.”

  “I’d be delighted.” He smiled, revealing a set of perfect white teeth. I hoped he knew how to shield them with his lips because he was going to need to before long. My dick was getting hard just looking at his mouth.

  “Henry. Come here. We are about to dock.”

  They must have read my mind… But one look at his parents, with their thin lips and flinty eyes, was enough to cool me down. At least I had a name. “I’ll see you around, Henry.”

  He glanced down at the deck, bashful. “I hope so,” he mumbled, then scuttled back to the family nest. They loaded him with ticket and jacket and suitcase and hat, until the poor boy looked like a scarecrow. I smiled and winked, hoping at least to cheer him up; a holiday with that pair of stiffs, even on the most beautiful island in the world, would be a mixed blessing. But he didn’t see me; he stared into the middle distance, a look of utter dismay on his face.

  I turned to see what he was staring at and there, on the starboard side like a mirror image, a negative, was a young man entirely in black, his hair dark, brows drawn down over deep-set eyes in a gloomy scowl, just one dazzling spot of light in the whole silhouette at his neck. A dog collar. Tall and slim, he was rooted to the spot, moving only with the motion of the boat, arms by his side, fists clenched in readiness to run or fight. They faced each other, white and black, port and starboard, across the rolling deck, until suddenly the spell was broken. The boy was absorbed into the disembarking crowd, and the priest was engulfed by a swarm of nuns, habits and veils billowing and flying, concealing him from view.

  I was traveling light: just one small knapsack containing food, water and the latest Agatha Christie novel. Everything else—my clothes, my books and so on—was in the hold. My fellow travelers seemed reluctant to entrust their possessions to foreigners. The English family carried enough to withstand a three-week siege; the nuns were laden with cases, not to mention the weight of their habits. Thrusting her way to the front of the boat, a tall, heavily made-up woman of a certain age commanded various members of the crew, in accents straight from the London stage, to transport her collection of hatboxes and valises to dry land. “If you imagine,” she said, loud enough for the whole ferry to hear, “that I would consign Paris creations to the bowels of a rust bucket like this, you are very much mistaken.” She lit a cigarette, smearing pillar-box red over the butt, and exhaled, as her black, wavy hair fell over her shoulders. I guess I must have smiled. She blew a kiss.

  I was in no hurry; the promised bus was not going to leave without me. I like to take my time at the end of journeys, particularly if, as in this case, there’s a handsome soldier in tight pants and a sweat-stained shirt, the only other passenger traveling without excess luggage.

  “Here on leave?” I asked, as we watched the growing scrum around the gangway.

  “No,” he said, in a London accent. “Work. Worse luck.”

  “You stationed in Valetta?”

  “Yeah.”

  I offered him a cigarette, which he took, and lit it for him.

  “How long you on the island for?”

  “Just one night.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?’

  He smoked for a while, eyes narrowed, an amused look around his mouth. “American?”

  “Yep.” I put out my hand. “Edward Mitchell. My friends call me Mitch.”

  “Mitch. My name’s Bill. I expect I’ll see you around.” He winked, shouldered his bag and swaggered off, his ass rolling in a figure eight.

  “I’m staying at the Continental,” I shouted, but my words were carried away on the wind.

  The vehicle that collected us at the harbor was a heap of rusting metal and worn rubber that hardly seemed fit for the steep and bumpy roads. But somehow we were loaded on, six
of us and our luggage, and we began the slow, wheezing climb away from the harbor. Once on the top road we could see most of the south coast of the island— a series of cliffs and inlets, green-gray foliage, warm yellow sandstone carved into weird sculptural shapes by the wind. For the first time since leaving London I felt that I was truly, properly abroad, on holiday, escaping from everything and everyone I’d left behind.

  This was an escape—from loneliness, sorrow and disappointment, and most of all, from guilt. I’d screwed everything up— again—and for the last time. Vince, my lover, my companion, the man I was supposed to be building a future with, had finally tired of my infidelities and accepted a job in the Far East. We’d parted on good terms, allowing ourselves the comforting lie that this was a marvelous opportunity for him, that when he came back we could pick up where we left off, but neither of us believed it. I’d fucked too many asses, sucked too many cocks, come crawling home at two, three in the morning smelling of other bodies, full of promises that lasted until the next time. And then Vince had enough. He shipped out to Singapore leaving me in London, far from my family in America, with few friends and none at all that I neither worked with nor fucked. When I wasn’t working in the hospital or screwing some fresh, young ass, I was alone.

  And then, although it pained me to admit it, there was Morgan.

  Harry “Boy” Morgan, my old college chum, the man I had spent more time pursuing and seducing and adoring than anyone else, my beloved friend and the best lay I have ever had, was now irreversibly married, and we were estranged. What started as a sunlit frolic in the English countryside—fucking as much for fun as for love—became something dark and destructive, hurting both of us, hurting the ones we loved even more. I knew it had to stop. He wouldn’t see me anyway, but that hadn’t prevented me from trying and plotting and hoping, even hanging around outside his house watching shadows on the blinds. But now…well, perhaps even I had grown up a little. Enough to know that if you keep touching fire, you get burned.

  Thanks to a maiden aunt back home in Boston who had the decency to die just at the right time and leave her money to her favorite nephew Edward, the doctor of whom she was so very proud, I’d quit my job and accepted an invitation from an old pal from medical school who had wound up working for the British Army in Malta. There are worse places to be, I thought, than a beautiful Mediterranean island in the summertime, particularly one with a sizeable military presence. On his advice I’d booked accommodation on Gozo, Malta’s smaller, prettier neighbor, the place where everyone (military personnel included—I checked) came to relax. With Aunt Dinah’s legacy in the bank I could afford an indefinite stay at a small, comfortable hotel, while Frank Southern, now Lieutenant Colonel Frank Southern, brigade surgeon to the garrison at Valetta, would introduce me to people and entertain me when possible. And, he said, there was a “delicate professional matter” on which he needed my advice; he would tell me more in person. It was a far more attractive proposition than summer in stuffy, dirty London, exhausting myself caring for the sick and obeying the whims of my capricious dick, with nothing to come home to but absence and regret.

  And who knows? Here on Gozo, surrounded by the darkly sparkling Homeric seas, under the broiling near-tropical sun, I might find adventure. Sex, for sure, with all those soldiers and sailors. Love, even, if I was lucky, but without the oppressive need to be faithful—it could only last as long as I stayed. And, I thought, fingering the pages of the Agatha Christie that lay unread in my lap, I might stumble upon a crime. The setting was perfect: picturesque enough for novelty, surrounded by water to limit escape, a place where people of all types came together, a melting pot. It would be quite literally melting, if the sun kept beating through the dusty glass windows of the bus like that. The English parents, in their hopelessly inappropriate tweeds, looked ready to expire. They were staying at the Continental Hotel as well, it seemed, the mother, the father and their unlikely son, all freshness and coolness where his parents were crabbed and hot, the beautiful fruit of bony loins. What if he was scheming to push one or both of them off the highest cliff on the island and make it look like an accident, playing the grief-stricken son while planning how to spend his inheritance? He looked like an angel, but wasn’t it always the seemingly innocent who were the guiltiest?

  What of the aging glamour queen, she of the commanding manner and multiple hatboxes? Was she hiding a gruesome secret? Was she, perhaps, a notorious murderer in disguise, starting a new life in this unlikely corner of the Empire? Maybe it would be her body that we’d find bludgeoned to death on an isolated beach, or bobbing in the harbor, rough justice meted out by grieving relatives of her victims. The only other passenger on the bus was a hefty local woman with a string shopping bag digging into her plump wrists, stuffed with bottles of vinegar and olives and capers that she’d brought back from the market—but was she all she appeared to be? Was her native costume a disguise? If anyone was going to find out it was me, Mitch Mitchell, private detective, for so I styled myself after an accidental involvement in a handful of murders. Admittedly I’d detected the killers more by accident than deductive skill; I’m too easily distracted to be a second Holmes or Poirot. My chief, or perhaps my only, advantage as a detective is a willingness to blunder into the murkiest of secrets, unashamed and unabashed by anything I might find there. I’ve usually discovered guilt when I’ve been looking for cock and ass, but if that’s the Mitch Mitchell method, I’m happy to claim it, with all its fringe benefits.

  As for secondary characters and red herrings, I was spoiled for choice. The tall, young priest on the ferry, swallowed up by a crowd of nuns as we disembarked, whisked off to God knows what monastic cell—was he all he appeared to be? And “my” soldier Bill: what was he really doing on the island? Did his cool swagger conceal a deadly intent? Undercover army business perhaps, rooting out enemies of the Empire in the villages, or perhaps turned traitor, selling secrets to His Majesty’s foes…

  The heat was rising as we labored through the dust and potholes, the engine singing a high, cracked note each time it negotiated a rock. Even I, who can sail the roughest seas without the slightest mal de mer, was starting to feel queasy. Cigarette smoke wasn’t helping; someone behind me was puffing away, and I could guess who. The English couple started coughing noisily, tutting and opening windows, which just let the dust in.

  I felt a jab on my shoulder and saw a bright-red nail.

  “Look at them, darling,” said a husky voice, low enough to be intimate but quite loud enough to be heard, “staring at me in that oh-so-disapproving way.” She took a long, theatrical drag on her cigarette. “I suppose they think a lady shouldn’t smoke in public. Well between you and me, darling,”—and here she put her mouth to within two inches of my ear—“I’m not a lady. There.”

  I turned in my seat and managed to put some distance between us. “Perhaps they just don’t like the smoke. It’s kind of stuffy in here.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re the puritanical type,” she said, rearranging her dark curls to flash diamond earrings at me. “You don’t look it, but you never can tell with Americans.”

  “No, ma’am. The pilgrim fathers wouldn’t think too much of me.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. Perhaps, when we have freshened up from our travels, you would like a cocktail. Don’t be shocked. I don’t see why it should always be the man who asks. A girl could wait forever.”

  Forever and ever in my case, I thought, but I mustered what gallantry I could. “That would be very nice.”

  “Been here before?” she said, and without waiting for an answer continued: “I come whenever I can. I call it my island paradise, a perfect getaway from the hurly-burly of London. Oh! All those crowds, the parties, the endless round of society.” She pronounced it ser-SAH-ty. “Sometimes I just want to give it all up—I can hardly be bothered to do my face in the morning. When I’m on holiday I let myself become an absolute hag. Honestly,” she said, waiting for a compliment, “within a cou
ple of days you won’t recognise me.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “Oh, you Americans. Such flatterers! A girl will have to watch herself, I can see that.” She simpered like Shirley Temple, which didn’t show her to her best advantage. The English couple glanced over in disgust. Young Henry noticed nothing—he spent the whole journey staring out the window, his face impassive, his thoughts who knew where. Contemplating murder? It didn’t look like it. Wondering if he could escape from his parents for long enough to sneak off to my room? I glanced down at his pants, hoping to see some tell-tale bulge, but there was nothing, just the usual folds of fabric. Oh well. We had days, weeks even, of sun and sea ahead of us, and I would surely see him naked, or as near as dammit, even if I didn’t get inside him.

  There was plenty to look forward to. Apart from soldiers and sailors and young blond Englishmen, there was my host Frank Southern, a great beauty when I knew him during our medical training, the sort of square-jawed Englishman upon whose broad shoulders the Empire rested. Years had passed since I saw him last, and maybe he’d run too fat, but it seemed unlikely, given his job. All soldiers, even medical officers, keep in shape, don’t they? Frank Southern had the kind of looks that lasted: in his early twenties he already looked thirty, and would probably stay that way forever with his thick fair hair, big straight nose, and wide mouth. Why, if Miss Glamourpuss got a look at him, she’d be booking herself in for a checkup. In the back of my mind was the hope that Frank’s invitation was more than just a holiday. Perhaps, as the years had passed, he’d realized his true nature. Perhaps that was the mysterious “professional matter” on which he needed advice. When we trained, he was devoted to his work and only took his recreation with the occasional nurse, like most of the doctors. I always wondered if his heart was really in it. He seemed more interested in sports—rugby, to be precise—than women. And so, as usual, I was quick to jump to conclusions.