Instruments Of Darkness (14 page)

    Bagado told me how he had waited in the apartment since the body was found on the afternoon of 23rd September. Kershaw's maid had found the body. She came in every afternoon to clean and cook an evening meal for him. The first time she'd seen Françoise Perec was face down on the bed, naked, beaten and dead. The woman had been in shock since and they hadn't been able to get any sense out of her.

    Bagado had spoken to the owner of the apartment who had only ever met Kershaw once. The landlord had never heard a company name and Kershaw hadn't been talkative. He didn't even know the business Kershaw was in. Nobody in the expatriate community knew Kershaw, he seemed to have no connections in Cotonou at all. Bagado had spent three days and nights in the apartment waiting for his break.

    'Why wait in his flat. Didn't you check the borders?' I asked.

    'The efficiency of my staff, the fastidiousness of immigration and the total lack of pay received by all for the last two months conspired against us. We are still awaiting a reply. I chose to pass my time in the flat because it seemed likely that someone would have to drop by… eventually.'

    'It doesn't sound like much of a police force you're working for, Mr Bagado.'

    'It doesn't, does it?'

    Bagado had no car, no gun, no umbrella and no pay.

    He had a raincoat, a badge, two sets of clothes, a wife, three children and a house within walking distance of my own.

    'More children than trousers,' he said. 'They are my wealth. I had a lot more pay in Paris but I still felt a poor man until my children were born.'

    We arrived at the house, there was no light. There was a lot of water in the compound and Moses was standing in it. He had sandbagged the door to his apartment and was bailing out. I asked him about Heike and he shrugged. We stood under the dripping palm and I introduced Bagado in the yellow light of a hurricane lamp. Upstairs, we sat at the dining room table with a candle, a bottle of whisky, two glasses and a bowl of melting ice. Bagado leaned forward and droplets of water slid off his hair like globules of mercury.

    'Are you going to tell me something interesting about Françoise Perec, Mr Bagado?'

    Bagado put up his hand and picked up his glass of whisky which he held to the candlelight. I picked up my glass.

    'To life,' he said. 'The dead can take care of themselves.'

    Helen came in from her sister's with an aluminium pot of food. She crossed the living room and went into the kitchen without a word. I poured some more whisky. Bagado sipped his and blinked with pin-ball eyes.

    'This,' he said, 'is outstanding booze.'

    I was about to say something, but he rode through me without a pause and, instantly drunk, told me in a stream of near unconsciousness about other moments in his life in which outstanding booze had figured.

    'Wait,' I said, after ten minutes of unpunctuated surrealism, and called Helen who came out with a bag of groundnut. Bagado tore them out of her hand and went into a frenzy of cracking shells and throwing nuts in his mouth so that in a matter of minutes there were red flakes in his hair, a slag heap of groundnut shells in front of him and an empty bag which he flattened with his hand.

    Helen brought a mountain of rice to the table and swept the shells on to her tray. She came back with the aluminium pot of groundnut soup - chicken in a chilli hot peanut sauce. I gave Bagado a meat platter and three kilos of rice and half a chicken which I covered in the sauce. He polished it off before I'd finished serving myself. He served himself the same again. That was the only time I've seen a man put on a stone in front of me. Afterwards, I had to help him to the cushions on the floor where he slept like a python for an hour.

    'You must forgive me,' he said when he woke up.

    'You haven't eaten for three days?' I asked.

    'And three nights. I was on my last reserves.'

    'I saw you chewing your thumb earlier.'

    'It kept me going.'

    'Didn't anybody bring you food?'

    'They didn't know I was there.'

    'What about your family?'

    'They are used to me disappearing for a few days at a time.'

    'Couldn't you buy some food?'

    'I have no money. No pay, remember?'

    'Didn't Kershaw leave anything?'

    'My colleagues cleaned out the cupboards. They left some coffee filters of little nutritional value.'

    'That was it?'

    'There was a lizard, too. It appeared on the morning of the second day, high up on the living room wall. I stalked it for ten minutes but I only managed to catch it by the tail, which came off in my hand.'

    'Did you eat it?'

    'That afternoon, I caught the rest of it. It was a long campaign which I won't bore you with.'

    'How big?'

    'Four inches.'

'More of an
amuse-gueule.'

    'Not even that. I've eaten monitor lizard, it's very good, like chicken, but it is three-foot long. The other problem was that my colleagues had taken the matches. I had nothing to light the gas with. I couldn't cook it.'

    'You didn't eat a raw lizard?'

    'I decided to keep it for breakfast the next day, and spent some time thinking that the Indians use preserved lizard as a love potion, but when I woke up I couldn't face raw lizard. I put it off until lunch. By lunch it smelt very bad, very bad indeed. No fridge, you see. The landlord cut the power. It stank like a toad's breath. I threw it away. Still, it served its purpose. It filled my day.'

    'You've got to, haven't you?'

    'Police work is a terrible work.'

    'The way you do it, yes.'

    'The stake-out is the worst work of all.'

    'You got your break.'

    'You have been the ultimate break, Mr Medway. You brought information, drink and food. No man could wish for a better break.' He rolled on to his knees. 'I have to be going now.'

    'But, Mr Bagado, you haven't told me anything about Françoise Perec.'

    'Tomorrow. Tonight was for the living. Tomorrow we'll sort out the dead.'

    I stood at the top of the steps and watched Bagado leave. He walked like a heavier man. At the gate, he turned.

    'Six o'clock, Mr Medway. We need an early start.'

    I took a cold shower and changed into a cotton nightshirt that Heike had bought for me from Berlin. I arranged some cushions on the floor, put a new candle in the holder, poured a very weak whisky and waited for Heike to come home.

    The candle was low and guttering when I woke up. In front of me was Heike, lying on the cane sofa. She was up on one elbow looking at me. She swivelled her legs into a sitting position and unhooked the white broderie anglaise top and let it slip off her shoulders. She unhooked her skirt and slid the zip down. She stood and the skirt fell to the floor. She stripped off her white panties, the palms of her hands brushing down the length of her thighs. She lay back down on the sofa.

    I knelt, pulled the nightshirt over my head and flung it somewhere. I crawled towards her and kissed her feet, the insides of her ankles and ran my tongue the length of her calf. I kissed the insides of her thighs, ran my lips over her hot triangle of pubic hair and kissed my way up over her flat stomach to her hard nipples. I kissed her breast bone and throat and up and over her chin, trailing my hand between her thighs. Before our lips met she said: 'I've been waiting for hours.'

    We rolled off the sofa on to the floor and made love, which left us pouring with sweat in the humid night. Afterwards, Heike found her cigarettes and holder and lay on my arm smoking.

    'I'm going back to Germany,' she said, after three drags of silence.

    'When?'

    'A few weeks, when I've finished at the project.'

    'When you've finished what?'

    'My contract.'

    'You're not renewing?'

    'No. I'm going back to Berlin.'

    'For good?'

    'I think so.'

    We lay on our backs, two people in an African night after rain, going nowhere.

Chapter 13

    Friday 27th September

    At 5.30 I woke up with a clanging discord of comfort and anguish. Heike's breathing and warmth "under the sheet we had thrown over ourselves told me that she was there in the morning darkness. I made coffee and split open a pawpaw which wasn't as ripe as I would have liked. I dressed and stood over Heike, sipping coffee, and combed through a tangled, knot-ridden ball of thoughts which got me as far as it gets anybody in that situation.

    Her eyes opened and she rolled on to her back to look at me. I knelt over her and kissed her, the coffee still bitter on my tongue.

    'Where are you going?'

    'I have to go back to Lomé again.'

    'Are you here tonight?'

    'Yes, unless things get complicated.'

    There was nothing to say after that. I had the same feeling as when I once looked over the shoulder of a telephone engineer into a street exchange box to see half a million tiny blue, yellow, green, black and white wires all with somewhere to go. She just ran her hands through my hair again and again until I felt like a dog being absent-mindedly stroked. It wasn't unpleasant.

    I've always thought that dogs have a very good life. Heike was trying to formulate something with the same measure of success as I, so she continued to run her hand through my hair harder and harder until I saw the luminous dial of my watch saying 6.00, and I kissed her and left.

    Bagado was waiting under the palm tree, talking to Moses in a low confessional voice. The morning was cool and earthy with a layer of woodsmoke running through it. We got in the car, Bagado and I in the back, and drove in silence until the sun got up, just as we were crossing a causeway where some fishermen from a village on stilts were paddling out into a lagoon.

    'Françoise Perec was thirty-four years old,' said Bagado. 'French nationality. She had a degree in English from the Sorbonne. She did a course in textile design at St Martin's College of Art in London. She spent four years working for a design company called CHIRAC in Lyons. For the last three years she has been running her own design company in Paris. She was here for a month's working holiday.'

    'That's not very interesting.'

    'It sounds like a good life to me,' said Bagado.

    'Doesn't sound like the type to get herself killed in those kind of circumstances.'

    'People get murdered all the time. Everyday people are murdered every day. Attractive, successful, talented, middle-class French women are not immune.'

    'I hope your theories are more interesting than your facts.'

    Bagado sat in the corner of the back seat and pressed his hands between his knees. He was looking a lot better than he had yesterday. He had filled out, losing that taut, drawn look that hunger had given him.

    'First,' he started, 'Kershaw killed Miss Perec in a sadomasochistic sex session that "went too far". He is naturally terrified at having to explain the death and this kind of behaviour to the Benin police who, he quite rightly suspects, will find this sexual deviancy bizarre in the extreme. He flees the country.'-

    'Africans aren't into bondage?'

    'We don't have to be. We've been in bondage for centuries.'

    I could tell from the back of Moses's head that he was listening and not understanding, but that he was sure it was interesting.

    'So Kershaw planted the evidence on himself,' I said. 'I like it, Bagado. And anyway, what Françoise Perec went through was a little more serious than a sex session.'

    'You and I may think that, but I have seen a great deal worse. Cutting, burning, clubbing, and crushing are also things that these deviants enjoy.'

    'But electric shocks… strangling.'

    'Strangulation, I believe, intensifies the sexual sensation. For instance, I myself have had to cut down half a dozen people, some hetero, some homo and one hermaphro, who had accidentally hung themselves. They arrange a rope and chair, stand on the chair, put the rope around their necks and then step off, doing whatever it is that they do. Then they try to get back on the chair, but if they've left it too late they start to panic and kick the chair over, or in some cases, they are already blacking out before they even think of saving themselves. I've seen people strangled in bed with a nylon cord fed through a pulley system attached to their feet. I've found a man in his wife's clothing throttled by gardening twine passed through the handle of the kitchen drawer. I found a man hanging from a toilet chain with a peacock's feather up his arse, his feet only two inches from the ground. They were all very sad, Mr Medway, very sad and lonely deaths.'

    'Unsafe safe sex. I don't buy it.'

    'But it is possible.'

    'Does she have any history of masochism? Was there any evidence on her body of previous "sessions"?'

    'As far as I know, the First World hasn't got round to keeping readily available data on individuals' sexual proclivities or diseases. I suppose it may come.' Bagado rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger. 'She wasn't HIV positive. She didn't have any scars consistent with this kind of punishment. Her father is an industrialist manufacturing sportswear who has barely seen his daughter in the last ten years; her mother died when she was young (not that parents know anything about their children's sex lives); she was an only child. There aren't many people to ask and there's probably no one who would tell anyway.'

    'Boyfriend?'

    Bagado shrugged. 'If she did, nobody knew about him.'

    'People in her business?'

    'It's not the sort of thing people know about.'

    'Was she a lonely person?'

    'She kept herself to herself. She wasn't high profile on the Paris fashion scene. People say she was reclusive - worked hard and slept. She was on a working holiday.' Bagado threw up his hand. 'Who comes here for a holiday?'