Instruments Of Darkness (32 page)

    'I do?'

    'It hurts,' he said, holding off a laugh. We reached Badagri at eight o'clock and I bought a second-hand shirt from a stall in the market. It was the only one in my size - a bat-winged affair in turquoise and pink. I looked like a jobbing flamenco guitarist from a package resort hotel who'd thrown himself under a truck. I tucked the gun and the spare clip in the springs under the driver's seat. Bagado lay in the back under his raincoat and looked malarial without trying.

    There were a lot of checkpoints leading up to the border, but most of the officials were having breakfast and waving people through. We weren't sure whether Madame Severnou would have found Dayo and the college boy and if she had, whether she had the influence to have us detained at the border before she came and rag-dolled us for good. We drove into the border post compound pumped up with adrenaline with Bagado intoning the word 'calm' as if he was on a language tape.

    An Immigration official with half-closed muddy eyes stamped my passport and flipped Bagado's identity card back at me without looking at it. I walked to Customs where a large pot-bellied officer with the bottom four buttons of his tunic open finished eating. He washed his hands and face from a bowl held for him by a small boy and raised his large frame off the small stool he'd been sitting on. He eyed me with an apparent lack of interest while he cleaned his teeth with his tongue and wrestled his tunic over his tight brown gut. He hitched his trousers up.

    'I like your shirt,' he said and walked past me, taking my passport as he went.

    He walked with a solid step, the heel hitting the ground as if he was preparing it for a place kick. He rolled his head on his neck and fluttered his hand over his hair, hovering at a bald patch that had just started in the centre of his crown.

    The sun was already hot at half past eight. The officer stuck his fingers into his waistband, flapped his arms, revealing two plate-sized damp patches, and wafted his pungent sweat smell in my direction. He stopped at the boot of the car and pointed a finger which he wiggled as if he was bouncing a miniature ball on its end. I opened the boot. He didn't look in, but looked around him, surveying the people in the compound and nodding as if counting them off. Then, with the same finger, he bounced the ball down again. I shut the boot thinking this was all we needed - a performance from one of the great Nigerian hams.

    The officer had composed himself about five yards from the rear door and clasped his hands in front of his groin. He nodded at the door, which I opened. Again, he looked away at the crowd and brought his hands up to his hips. One hand slid up to his breast pocket and brought out a toothpick which he put in his mouth. He looked in the car and his eyes popped out and his mouth dropped open, leaving the toothpick jammed in between two teeth.

    'What is this?'

    'He's my driver. He's sick.'

    He folded his face back down again.

    'Driver!' he roared.

    'Yessir,' said Bagado.

    'Your driver is alive,' he said showing me his teeth, tongue and quivering uvula as if he was considering eating him.

    I shut the door. He opened the driver's door himself, went down on his haunches, and his knees cracked like plastic bottles in the sun. He put his hands under the seat. I went down next to him and stared at his neck. I could see Bagado's eyes through the gap behind the seat and they weren't 'calm' any more. The Customs buffoon took his hands out and put them on the sill. For a moment, nothing happened. Our eyes connected.

    What I saw in them was not what I had expected - pain and embarrassment. I blinked the white fear in my own away and the policeman whispered: 'Help me.'

    His knees had locked. I stood behind him and shoved both my hands into the moist underworld of his armpits. A white hot needle shot through my ribs. With both of us grunting, we still couldn't get his knees beyond ninety degrees. I walked him back to the Customs shed and fitted him on to a stool where he wrote out my gate pass.

    At the barrier, I gave the old man the pass and 100 CFA and the white metal pole shot up. There was a shout. Bagado yelled something from the back. The barrier dropped. Bagado groaned.

    'Now we are dead people,' he said.

    A young man in a floor-length white robe strode with the maximum stride that the robe permitted and arrived at my window. He bowed and put his hand into a slit pocket and took out my passport.

    'Good journey,' he said, and Bagado laughed like a hyena.

    In forty minutes we were in the Cocotiers district of Cotonou where they have the airport, the Sheraton, all the Embassy residents and a private clinic. I made a deposit of 75,000 CFA for Bagado's treatment and they told me to come back in an hour.

    I drove back to the house using the accelerator and the horn with occasional reference to the brake. I was crazed with lack of sleep and wild with hope that Heike would be there and that, for the first time in my history of human relations, I could come up with something tender, loving and careful. I wasn't dressed for the mission and my brains were leaking out of my head, which wasn't encouraging, but a reckless voice somewhere in the muddle was yelling: 'What the hell, go to it' and other high-spirited exhortations. It hadn't escaped my attention that tightening around my empty stomach was a thin garrotte of fear, that I'd look and sound pathetic, that she wouldn't believe me, that she'd be gone already.

    I left the car outside the gates to the house and saw Heike's 2CV in the garage. I ran up the steps of the house, stripping off the flamenco shirt which hung on me like a three-toed sloth. The front door was open and part of the door jamb split. The banister saved me from an involuntary Acapulco dive back to the car. I got the gun out and, in a time that wasn't going to win me any prizes, found that there was a bullet in the chamber and the safety was already off.

    I pushed the door open. The furniture was pleased to see me, piled as it was with cushions and carpets to the ceiling in a corner of the room. There was an envelope on the stripped floor addressed to me in Heike's writing.

6.30 Tues 1st Oct.

You were told to leave this alone. I told you to leave this

alone. Now these people are taking me somewhere and

they're telling you that if you involve the police or

continue whatever it is you think you are doing, they

will kill me.

                           H
.

    The sun was hot on my legs. I moved out of the doorway and stood in the room with my thoughts in Brownian motion. I felt sick, with nothing in my stomach but concentrated hydrochloric acid. The wild hope had addled, the fear of not knowing what to say had curdled into a terrible anguish and my mouth was suddenly full of ghastly-tasting spit. This was the worst possible thing that could have happened. This was worse than any tragedy. This was going to be unforgivable. I went to the kitchen and picked up a bottle of water off the flooded floor. It had been thrown out of the now empty and defrosted fridge. I rinsed out my mouth and looked at a broken bottle of separating mayonnaise.

    In the wreck of the bedroom, I stripped and through some psychosympathy stubbed my toe on the way to taking a long shower, during which my thought processes steeplechased over an impossible course, the blood thundering in my ears.

    Big blue contusions marbled with a sickly yellow covered all available skin area. Several of my fingers were swollen fat like sausages in the sun and the skin around the nails split like overripe tomatoes and my head was soft and lumpy like slapdash mash. I was becoming a canteen meal. I was sick of getting whacked around the place. This didn't use to happen. I did my job, got paid little bits of money, drank some beer, some whisky, read a few books and yet somehow did something which shot my horoscope into another galaxy where nothing was panning out and everything was screwing up.

    I swam briskly through that sea of self-pity and settled on the jagged problem that even if it was resolved was going to shatter another person's life and my own in the process. I didn't tread lightly on the broken glass but ground it in and stoked up some top grade, undiluted, sulphuric wrath. Somebody was going to suffer and it was probably going to be me again, but before that happened Jack Obuasi was going to feel my hard, blunt knee in his flaccid undercarriage.

    Dressed, with a long-sleeved shirt on, I looked like the lucky one in a fifteen-car pile-up. I improved my speed with the gun, the mirror telling me I needed a badly chewed cigar. A clip of film ran in my head. Dayo lying on his back with the stain growing around his head, and the college boy with a gob of gelatine on his cheek. Something like a cold hand landed on my back, slid over my shoulder and caught me by the throat. My heart surged and pushed a huge quantity of blood into my brain and I leaned against the wall with my vision throbbing red. It was over in a moment, leaving me with a mark, black and deep somewhere in me I didn't know I had, but which reminded me with unfading permanence that I had killed a man.

    I took the last money I had out of a window box on the verandah and, as I got into the car, had a sudden insight about the photographs. It was something about the two-shot of Kasparian and Kershaw. I took the photo out and drove back to the clinic.

    Bagado was in reception with his arm in a plaster cast above his head looking despondent. There was no change from the deposit I'd given the clinic and we left and sat in the car. I showed Bagado the photograph and what I'd thought was suddenly important now looked less so, and I realized that I hadn't solved the whole puzzle but I had an interesting part of it in place.

    'I assumed it was a self-timer,' I said.

    'And now?'

    'I know it's not.'

    'How?'

    'There isn't the posiness that self-timers have. The person who's pressed the button always has an inanity to their face. It comes from not trusting the camera to take the picture on its own. This photograph was taken by somebody.'

    'The killer?'

    I shrugged. 'The "friend" of Mrs Kershaw, perhaps.'

    Bagado handed back the print, he was tired and in pain.

    'You may be right, but it doesn't get us very far.'

    I took Bagado back to my house with his arm out the window and told him about Heike. We came up with a plan, which began with a visit to Jack and ended with a confrontation with Charlie. With a gun in my hand and most of the puzzle in place I should be able to get Heike released. Bagado was going to contact his friends in Interpol about the heroin in Madame Severnou's warehouse and I would call him from the house in Lomé about the fax on the
Osanyin.

    It was going to take some time for the investigative system to kick in, Madame Severnou could have cleared the warehouse, we didn't know where the cotton bales were, and it was conceivable that the
Osanyin
was already loaded and steaming for Europe. Our only advantage was that Madame Severnou didn't know that we had any idea about the
Osanyin.

    Bagado was going to get some sleep then wait by the phone in my house from eight o'clock that evening. I was going to take a room in a hotel in Lomé, sleep, pick up the fax and then get to work on Jack Obuasi.

    I left Bagado outside my house waving at me with the fingers of his permanently raised hand. I made quick time to the border and ate my first food for twenty-four hours. At two o'clock, I booked myself into the Hotel Ahodikpe Eboma, whose name sounded dyspeptic but whose rooms were large and had fans. I lay on the bed with the gun under the pillow and went to sleep fully clothed with the fan churning the heavy afternoon air.

    I woke up with something in my throat that wanted to be a loud scream. It was dark. The heat was packed hard into the room and the fan barely turned. I lay on my back with a weight on my chest which proved to be my hand. The pillow was sodden. Passing cars lit the room through the slatted blinds in rushes. My watch told me it was eight-thirty. There was the sound of people drinking outside in the street. I showered and dressed in a loose T-shirt, jeans and black trainers. I put the gun in the bag, went down and paid for the room and drove to the Lomé house where I hoped the fax and nobody else would be waiting.

    I parked some way from the house, near the Grande Marche, and, armed with the gun, walked across the wasteland which brought me to the garden wall. I climbed the wall, which left me feeling trampled to death on the other side. I set off towards the french windows and the parrot treated me like a piece of skirt it had just seen from its scaffolding; I stopped dead, waiting for the searchlights to come on. Nothing happened. I reached the french windows which were locked. I should have done something nifty with a credit card but I didn't carry one. I kicked the door open, which juddered to its hinges, and I just saved the glass from smashing against the wood carving.

    I found the fax from my friend Elwin Taylor curled up under the table. It told me that the owners of the
Naoki Maru
had received reports of engine trouble between Cotonou and Lagos and then lost contact with the vessel Thursday 26th September, 20.00 hrs. The
Osanyin
hadn't been so easy to track down. Elwin hadn't been able to get any information on the ship from any UK source connected with the Baltic Exchange or Lloyd's. He had found it very difficult to get through to Monrovia, the Liberian capital, and when he had, the official he had been speaking to cut the line after he had given the vessel type (an SK-14, same as the
Naoki Maru)
and owner's name, A & S Shipping Ltd, Lagos. There was no such company traceable in Lagos. Elwin, being of the rare, intelligent type of broker, had then contacted some agents he knew in Lagos who had told him that A & S Shipping Ltd did not exist but the
Osanyin
was at dock in Apapa. The agents knew this because they had arranged a part to repair some lifting gear over No. 5 hold so that a consignment of hi-fi could be discharged. Payment for everything was being made in cash, in dollars. The fax finished with the words: 'Does this help?'