Instruments Of Darkness (21 page)

    'She's doing drugs too.'

    'Which?'

    'Cocaine. She left the room a few times, came back sniffing and firing on about twelve cylinders with her turbo whistling.'

    'Heroin?'

    'No needle marks on her arms or legs. If she's doing it, she's got to keep it quiet. She can't work in the US Embassy with needle rash all over her.'

    'You think Charlie supplies?'

    'What's he get out of it? He's not going to deal on his own doorstep.'

    'Information. Control. She's going to do what she's told, isn't she?'

    'He gets Nina to leak Kershaw's SM kink to me. I tell her Kershaw's dead and she realizes she's implicated in his death and doesn't like it. The water's got too hot and too deep.'

    'Sounds like a good party,' said Bagado, lying back down.

    'Yvette was with Charlie again and she knew about the Perec connection.'

    'How?'

    'She'd just come from nibbling Charlie's ear.'

    'Is it Charlie's way of telling you he knows what's going on?'

    'She's got Charlie by the pecker, which is how she holds most men. She could get anybody to tell her anything. She could be with Charlie, but she's strong enough to be a free agent.'

    'Out for what?'

    'Who knows,' I said, sucking some more whisky down. 'I've heard from two sources that Charlie's taken some bad hits trading gold… and there's one thing you need a lot of to trade gold.'

    'Cash,' said Bagado. 'If this rice is what I think it is then what we need is a link between Charlie and Jack.'

    We thought about that until Bagado slapped himself and yawned. I heard the whisky jug down his throat. He said he was going to stake out Charlie tomorrow while I put the pressure on Nina when I went to pick up my bag on the way to the airport. His fingers drummed the floorboards. The cicadas whistled in the garden and all but drowned out the sea and traffic.

    'Where's Moses?' I asked.

    'He met a big girl called Mercy from Ghana. I hope she shows him some. You owe him some money, too.'

    'He always says that.'

    'For the photographs.'

    'Anything juicy?'

    'They're mostly of the paintings, but there's two photographs of Kershaw with someone who I think is Kasparian, our Armenian friend from Abidjan. I'm waiting for B.B. to confirm. That's where Mercy fits in. She's taking the photograph to Accra, but it seems there's a price.'

    'In that dimension, Moses is a millionaire.'

    'She's a very big girl, Bruce, very big.'

    Bagado's stomach made the sound of a distant wolf howling. A mosquito whined and banked off. The whisky streamed off me and my brain fixed on nothing.

    'Those paintings were painted by a dying man,' said Bagado out of the black. 'He knew he was going to die.'

    'It's the only certainty in a post-Heisenberg world, my friend.'

    'Some of us are more certain than others.'

    'You've been lying in the dark contemplating mortality?'

    'Immortality,' Bagado corrected me. 'It's why we have children. It's why we put flowers on graves.'

    'Why people paint pictures.'

    'It's an odd thing to do, to paint on the walls when there's yards of unused canvas in the back room,' said Bagado, rolling the empty glass on the floor. 'You can throw canvas away or burn it. The walls, even if they paint them over, are permanent or seem permanent.'

    'Are you just being maudlin or are you taking me somewhere?'

    'I have the feeling Kershaw was going to kill himself anyway. He's painted everything he's lost: youth, innocence, life. That painting on the ceiling in the other bedroom with the light coming through the clouds. What does that say to you?'

    'If it's a vision of death, it's better than mine.'

    'It
is
a vision of death. It's
my
vision of death. I used to just see black, now the last few years I'm seeing more light.'

    'You're getting older, Bagado.'

    'So?'

    'You can't afford to be so final.'

    'Maybe a power cut's not such a good time to talk about this.'

    'We seem to be talking about sex and death.'

    'Anything wrong with that?'

    'Yvette told me sex and death is girls' talk. We get power and money.'

    'I'm stronger on the first two.'

    'Tell me about sex and death then, and make it simple, they're big themes for the time of night.'

'A
death,' his voice said after a while. 'And you might not be happy about it.'

    'Is this something about a death you should have told me before?'

    'Maybe. It's something I remembered at the time but forgot a little detail until I called a friend of mine in London.'

    'A police friend?'

    'A retired detective called Brian Horton. He taught me how to play darts when I first went to London.'

    'Must have been interesting for you. Let's have it.'

    Bagado rolled his empty glass again and it hit me on the foot. I flicked it back at him.

    'In the kitchen on the side,' I said. 'Bring the bottle.'

    Bagado crawled on all fours to the kitchen and brailled his way to the whisky bottle. He came back, his hand sweeping across the floor searching for the glass. Liquid poured into the glass. It was a generous measure.

    'Don't stint yourself, Bagado.'

    'It sounded like two fingers.'

    'Gloved. Come on.'

    'Some time ago, maybe twenty years, I went to a lecture course called the "Psychology of the Psychopath".'

    'Bad start, Bagado.'

    'One of the case studies was about the torture and killing of a seventeen-year-old girl.'

    'Where was this?'

    'I was in London. The girl, I don't know. Brian's looking into it. The girl had been tied down, severely beaten, electricity had been used and she had been strangled.'

    'How unusual is that for a modern murder?'

    'It wasn't that modern. And there's a detail. The girl had money screwed up in balls and stuffed in her mouth which was taped.'

    'And Françoise Perec?'

    'When I got there the body hadn't been touched. Her mouth was still taped. I got everybody out of the room and stripped the tape off. Her mouth was stuffed with screwed up five thousand CFA notes, which, as you can imagine, had been well chewed.'

    'What was the detail Brian remembered?'

    'The notes in the girl's mouth in the case study were ten-dollar bills.'

    'You don't remember anything else about this girl?'

    'It was twenty years ago, one case in a ten-week lecture course. Neither of us could remember. It was just that the money was the significant psychological detail.'

    'And the significance?'

    'The idea of "paying back".'

    'Where does that get us?'

    'Françoise Perec was killed by a psychopath.'

    'I hate psychopaths, you know - the accountant with seven wives in the chest freezer, the insurance salesman with a briefcase full of male genitalia. They can do a hard day's work and then come back to some midnight head-boiling. Where do they get the stamina?'

    'Their intent, driven by whatever it is ticking away in a dark corner of their minds. One thing,' he said, 'all this psychological profiling, it's all rubbish. You don't try and understand a psychopath, you just try and catch him, which isn't so easy. They're very concentrated on what they are doing.'

    'Kershaw's killer wasn't so concentrated. No water in the lungs.'

    'Whoever killed Perec didn't kill Kershaw.'

    'But it was connected.'

    'A hired killer who was told what to do but it didn't turn out right, or it was too difficult to get him in the bath, or he didn't want him to have a lump on his head.'

    'And the police were supposed to find the body.'

    'Or you were,' he said. 'Time for bed.' Bagado lit the candle. He finished off a half inch of whisky, left the candle on the floor and went upstairs.

    'The rest of the photographs are in the kitchen,' he said from the gallery and I heard his door click.

    I blew out the candle. It was after midnight, a dangerous hour to start thinking with a headful of junk and system popping with alcohol. The projectionist got up in his box and started changing the reels. Heike's face cartwheeled into focus. Kershaw's stiffened body slid vertically over it and was swiped away by Nina Sorvino's whirling plait and the camera closed in on the thick black rope which became the creases in Bof Awolowo's ox neck which bubbled into the irrepressible rolling boil of a fart in a tub.

    I wanted to think about Heike but the whisky wanted to surf the channels. After an hour, I felt like an American in front of a TV, the TV dinner uneaten, the ninety channels viewed for a maximum of thirty seconds each, the brain tired and confused, the body disorientated.

    One more jolt of booze and Heike got the screen to herself, there was a net over the lens, soft focus again, the noise of slush filtered through. Another slug and the Bell's was ringing in my head and Heike was clear, sharp, black and white and laughing. We could laugh. That was something. Then cut to Heike naked on a bed. I desired that body. She wanted mine. That was something else. Cut to Heike drinking, then fighting and drinking more, and violence and vowing never to see each other again until morning, when all that remained were bad heads and a millilitre of rancour.

    We attracted and repelled each other. Had the moments of repulsion added up? Was she testing me but really wanted out? Had she decided that I couldn't give her what she wanted? Did she know what she wanted? I used to make her feel alive. Maybe she doesn't want to be so alive any more. It was tiring. Did she want someone more house-trained, less of a raggedy old wolf, somebody who will always, and I mean always, put her first? Was I that person?

    The sound of a Bakelite door handle wobbling against wood penetrated the refereeing of the cicadas. I was still sitting on the floor and my left eye had a clear line of sight to the door by the kitchen. The little light that came in with my visitor was not enough to show anything, but it meant I could make out the corner of the wall at the end of the corridor between the kitchen and the stairs.

    I stood at that corner and listened to a hand moving along the wall, silent where the kitchen door was open and then again rubbing the smooth plaster to where I was standing. The hand reached the corner - a smell of perfume and dainty sweat. I swiped my hand down and connected with the wrist and pulled and twisted it so that the woman would have to spin around into me, which she did.

    I was expecting the back of whoever it was to thump into my chest where I could hold her. The back came preceded by a sharp elbow which buried itself in my unprepared stomach wall and I went down with the noise of a cheap plastic sofa that's been sat on. I sensed a knee coming facewards and got both hands up and pitched myself forward, bringing the woman down underneath me. Her smell told me it was Yvette. I rolled off her in the least post-orgasmic way possible. She laughed and I sucked the dust off the floorboards.

    'Do you always keep your elbow that sharp?'

    'If I'm going out. I need room to dance.'

    'Do you get many partners?'

    'Only the ones I want.'

    I lay on my back and massaged my stomach, suppressing a wriggle of nausea. The adrenaline seemed to have mopped up all the whisky and I felt a hangover doing press-ups in my head. Yvette's tilted face flickered yellow in the darkness and disappeared to a glow as she lit a cigarette. Her breath was sharp as the smoke cut her lungs. She was wearing the same jacket with the same lack of clothing underneath it that I had seen her in at Charlie's on Wednesday night.

    'Did you come to steal some African art?'

    'No,' she said. 'To see you.'

    'What happened to knocking?'

    'I thought you might be in bed.'

    'Well, I'm still up. What do you want?'

    'To talk. I'm a night bird.'

    'Who starts?'

    'You, if you want.'

    'How long have you known Charlie?' I asked.

    'Not very long.'

    'How long?'

    'We met on a Tuesday.'

    'Tuesday last year, or five days ago?'

    'Five days ago.'

    'How did you meet him?'

    'I was drinking in his bar.'

    Her body shifted. The glow of her cigarette moved to my right. She drew on it, her lips hovered and went. Her face was probably only a few feet from mine. She leant back, I heard the candle plate tip. She flicked her cigarette at it and slid it along the floor.

    'Love at first sight for Charlie.'

    'My turn, Bruce,' she said, distracted as if she was staring up at the stars. 'Do you know what you are doing?'

    'In love or work?'

    'Both.'

    'Sometimes.'

    'That's not an answer.'

    'It's your style.'

    'Are you married?'

    'No.'

    'You have a girlfriend?'

    'Yes.'

    'Are you in love with her?'

    The plate rattled on the floor as Yvette crushed her cigarette on to it. She moved closer. The tobacco on her breath and the vestiges of the evening's perfume flavoured the air.

    'Are you?' she asked again.

    'I don't know.'

    'Then you know you're not.'

    'A romantic speaks.'

    'What about the realist?'

    'He thinks: No compromise.'

    'He thinks: I want my freedom. You're the sort who get depressed when you see families pushing shopping trolleys around supermarkets at the weekends?'

    'I've never stopped to think. You're getting a lot of questions in your turn.'

    'I'm curious.'

    'Are you in love with Charlie?'

    'He has his attractions.'

    'Why are you with him?'

    'He has a big powerful body.'

    'Sex? That's good enough.'