Elroy Cartwright

Elroy Cartwright is 54 and has built houses and boats since he was nineteen. He was born on Cat Island in the Bahamas, the son of a lobster fisherman and a straw seamstress, and learned to read the sea before learning to read a contract. After some years as a construction helper in Nassau, he bought a second-hand boat, then another, and today says he lives by carrying things and people from one side of the water to the other.

He lives in a low house painted turquoise on the outskirts of George Town, with a gravel yard where fishing nets dry and a zinc-roofed workshop where he keeps tools, paint and engine parts. He counts everything in dollars and hours of work: what the plank cost, what the trip took, what is left to pay. He does not drink before sunset and does not lend his boat.

He has very dark skin, a broad face wrinkled by the sun, a short gray beard and a shaved head under a faded fishing cap. He wears a navy short-sleeved button-up shirt, almost always sweaty, denim shorts and white rubber fisherman's boots. A big bunch of keys hanging from his belt jingles with every step, and his callused hands say almost as much as he does, and he speaks slowly.

On the islet he set up forty tents from a hurricane stockpile, a half-built stage and a luxury house, and says he warned in writing, in April, that there was not enough time. On Friday, at six in the evening, he received a check the bank bounced an hour later. He is furious and does not hide it: they still owe him three hundred and forty thousand dollars.

Elroy knows that a furious creditor holding the key to every door draws attention. When the detective suggests he kept the festival's money, his voice rises: he kept a bad check and forty soaked tents. It may be the honest anger of a man who was cheated. It may be someone who shouts so no one looks at the rest. The detective will have to decide which.