Evolution of Fear (4 page)

The BMW was fast and smooth, the roads empty.

Crowbar’s words came to him in a flash:
might even take it on myself
.

Jesus Christ Almighty. Crowbar had betrayed him. He’d tried to use his own guys to collect Regina Medved’s three-million-pound reward. The tip-off and the hit. Clay could not bring himself to believe it, would literally have wagered his life against it. In so many ways, he already had. But there they were, lying dead and injured in the gorse, Boers like Koevoet, bloody Natal farm boys, lately of the DCC or 32 Battalion or some such outfit, guns for hire, mercenaries, using their years of experience to fight other people’s wars now that their country no longer wanted them.

Clay turned on the stereo, an expensive Blaukpunt. A CD loaded. He eased back the seat and settled in, the night air buffeting cold through the empty side window. A tinkling synthesised intro filled the car, building, mournful, that long single chord lasting and lasting in the background, and it made sense, really, that the men he had just killed would have been listening to this on the way here, anticipating perhaps the payoff and all it would bring. All of them of the same era, fighting that same race war. Now they were fighting each other. And then that haunting guitar and those four notes that always seemed to be asking him:
where are you now?
All of it always reminding him of Eben and that cheap tape deck and the
Wish You Were Here
cassette he played over and over in their tent at the Kunene River encampment, and the way Koevoet always came round and told Eben to turn it off, threatened to shoot the thing, run it over with a Buffel,
give them all extra guard duty, and the way Eben always laughed and turned it right back up as soon as the old man had gone, and those long nights on standby, sitting by the fire, screaming the lyrics they were living out into the night with all the strength of their glorious youth:
caught in the crossfire, blown on the steel breeze
. Then, like now, none of it real, somehow. As he gazed through the trembling tunnel of light, the confused shadows of his memory twinned then trebled, the embers from the fire spinning skyward then blurring,
come on you target
, dissolving in the rain until they were gone and he was no longer sure that they had ever existed. He drove on through the night, sang it out at the top of his lungs until his already bruised throat ached. How I wish you were here.

The rain had intensified now and was falling in a continuous sheet. Dark hedgerows flew past, road spray hissing from the wheels and past the open window. He passed the first farmhouse, a distant light across the fen, and joined the B road for Launceston. Soon he was trundling along with the evening traffic, a light rain falling, the lights of the cars swimming across the wet pavement. He stopped at a newsagent and picked up a fifty-pound phone card, paying cash.

A few miles down the road he pulled into the carpark of a Tesco supermarket on the edge of town. The place was busy with afterwork shoppers, the lot almost full. Outside the main entrance was a bank of public telephones. He searched the eaves of the building. A single CCTV camera watched the automatic doors. Another was perched atop a lamppost at the far end of the lot. Clay pulled up his hood, wandered to the opposite end of the carpark and circled back towards the phones, avoiding the cameras’ eyes.

Closing the phonebox door, Clay brushed the rain from his jacket then cradled the receiver between his shoulder and ear and dialled the number. The line clicked, fuzzed and finally rang. Clay imagined the telephone on the little pinewood table next to the kitchen window, her walking from the lounge, looking out across the valley, the Dents du Midi towering in the distance, perhaps in cloud now, early snow falling at altitude. She was safe there, he told himself,
veiled by a new name, a new identity, a place to live free from questions and intrusions. The ring tone pulsed for the fourth time, a fifth. Clay looked down at his boots, the rain falling across the pavement, the shoppers scurrying past with fists clenched over straining plastic.

‘
Allo?
’ A woman’s voice. Not Rania.

‘Is Rania there?’

‘Who is calling, please?’ A strong French accent, an older voice.

He decided to take a chance. ‘It’s Clay, Madame.’ He doubted that they would be monitoring her calls, that the police had made any sort of connection between them, yet.

‘
Monsieur Clay?
’ the woman gasped.

Clay knew the voice now. It was the old lady who’d led him to Rania after the violence in Yemen. The violence that had brought him here. Madame Debret.

‘She is not here, I am afraid.’

‘Where is she?’

Silence. Caution. Good.

‘Do you remember the Café Grand Quai in Geneva?’ he said. Where he and Madame Debret had met for the first and only time.

‘
Oui
.’

‘You held my hand. Told me about Rania’s father.’

A deep breath. ‘I am worried, Monsieur Clay. I told her that she should not leave, but she insisted.’

‘Where has she gone?’

‘
Chypre
.’

‘Cyprus?’

‘Nicosia, yes. Her editor has given her this assignment. He contacted her two weeks ago. At first she did not want to go. But he was insisting very much, calling her many times.’

‘LeClerc?’

‘She did not say his name.’

It had to be LeClerc, the man Clay had met in London, the one who’d finally published Rania’s story, the one who, in doing so, had helped to blow the casketlid off Medved’s corrupt and deadly oil
production activities in Yemen, helped expose the murderous cover-up entrusted to the Bulgarian mercenary, Zdravko Todorov.

Soon after publication, the Medveds had lost all financing for their Petro-Tex venture in Yemen and were forced to sell the company at a loss.

‘When did she leave?’ Clay asked.

‘More than two weeks ago. You might see one of the stories she has written in the
journaux
.’

‘Did she say when she’d be back?’

‘No.’

‘Have you heard from her since?’

‘
Non
.’

‘Forwarding address?’

‘None.’

‘Telephone number? Mobile?’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Thank you, Madame.’ He was about to hang up when he heard her call out.

‘Monsieur Clay, please. Wait. She left a message for you, if you called.’ Noise down the line, scraping, a drawer being opened and closed. ‘I have it here. She wrote it for me.’

Clay waited, said nothing.

‘It says only: ‘
Ecoutons la confession d’un compagnon d’enfer.
’

Clay understood only one word:
enfer
. Hell.

‘It is Rimbaud, I believe,’ she said. ‘Listen to the confession of hell’s companion.’

A tumour of ice materialised in Clay’s chest. He knew this, from the boy-poet’s
A Season in Hell
, the chapter entitled ‘The Infernal Husband’. He curled his lip, hung up the phone and stared out into the half-light of day. She’d chosen carefully, knowing he’d read this prose-poem over and over while he was in Geneva searching for her, this lament, taken by its power:
I am lost. I am impure, a slave of the infernal husband. A widow
.

Why this? Something was wrong. Clay pulled in a half breath,
let it flow back out as vapour, then looked long both ways along the storefront pavement, out into the carpark, through the big front windows into the fluorescent glow of the supermarket, the patchwork of vivid primary colours, his insides roiling in a Southern Ocean gale.

Shoppers raced for their cars, newspapers and umbrellas over their heads. Raindrops drummed on the stretched skins of car roofs and pelted the tarmac like bullets. Clay stared at the rain guttering down from the roof.

He picked up the phone and dialled his Cayman Islands banker. It was the first time he’d made contact since the killing. Clay gave the password and his account number.

There was an urgent message for him, the banker said. It had arrived only three days ago. Clay jotted down the name and telephone number. The prefix was for South Africa, the area code Johannesburg. He put down the phone, checked his watch, took a breath and dialled.

A receptionist put him straight through to the clinic’s director.

‘This is Declan Greene,’ he said. His new identity, a recent and unintentional gift of the Yemeni secret police, complete with offshore bank accounts, an Australian passport and an apartment in Perth, Western Australia. ‘I had a message to call.’

The director paused, as if searching his memory. ‘Yes, thank you for calling, Mister Greene. We were expecting to hear from you sooner.’

‘I’ve been busy, Doctor.’ Doing nothing. Waiting.

‘I am very sorry to disturb you like this, but you see…’ The director stopped, cleared his throat. ‘There is no easy way to say this, I am afraid, Mister Greene.’

The line crackled, empty.

‘Then you’d better just tell me.’

‘Yes, of course. We traced you through the payment you made
to the clinic earlier this year, Mister Greene, and since there are no direct living relatives, not any more, you were the only person we could contact.’

Clay’s throat tightened.

‘I’m very sorry to inform you that Eben Barstow died four days ago.’

Clay’s legs quivered. Eben, the best friend he’d ever had, wounded in action in Angola all those years ago, a bullet to the head. Clay had carried him to the helicopter and he had survived, if you could call it that, physically functioning but otherwise dead. How many times had he tried to convince Eben’s parents to let him die? Now it was done. Relief surged through him, a decade of regret. It took him a moment to catch his breath, to fully process this information. ‘Did you say no living relatives?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about his parents?’

‘They died the same day.’

Jesus. ‘The
same day?
’

‘Yes. Tragic. But there is something you should know, Mister Greene. The circumstances of Mister Barstow’s death, were – how can I put this – unusual.’

Just say it, for Christ’s sake. So many times he had anticipated this moment, such had always seemed the inevitability of it, but now that it was here he couldn’t quite believe that Eben was gone, that the tiny shard of hope he had carried with him all those years – wrapped up in a teardrop, a pearl, hidden away somewhere so secure he’d almost forgotten it was ever there – had turned out to be the folly he always knew it was.

‘Mister Greene, are you there?’

‘Tell me.’

‘He was shot, Mister Greene.’

Clay thought he had misheard. He was hot. Died of fever.

‘Someone broke into the hospital at night, went to his room, and shot him three times. Twice in the chest, and once in the head.’

Clay’s blood stopped pumping. Jesus Christ.

‘And whoever it was, they also broke into our records department. It seems they were after information about Eben, about our accounts.’

‘What did they get?’

‘Everything, I’m afraid, Mister Greene. The police said it was a very professional job. The perpetrators were in and out without being seen by any of our staff, or waking any of the other patients.’

Jesus. ‘And Eben’s parents?’

‘They died in a car accident. As I said, a tragedy.’

Clay’s mind blanked, raced. All three of them, on the same day?

‘Mister Greene, are you there?’

‘Yes.’ No, not really.

Outside, the rain was coming down again, hammering against the thin steel of the supermarket’s cantilevered roof. He pushed the receiver onto his ear.

‘There is a sizeable credit on Mister Barstow’s account,’ came the voice, faint against the din, ‘which you paid in advance, if you recall. What would you have us do with it, Mister Greene?’

Clay stood staring out at the cars and the rain coming in trembling panes. ‘Are there any others?’

‘Pardon me, Mister Greene? Others?’

‘Any others like Eben.’

‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

‘Vets.’ Fucked up unfortunates. The half-digested shit of a forgotten war, a failed system. Him.

‘Yes, of course. There are three others.’

‘Give it to whoever needs it most.’

Silence there, so far away, in a place he used to call home. And then: ‘That is very generous, Mister Greene.’

Clay said nothing, waited a moment, was about to hang up, when the director’s voice came again, urgent: ‘Mister Greene, before you go. There is something else.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You must understand. We are all very shocked here.’

Clay waited for the director to continue.

‘When we found him…’ The director paused, cleared his throat. ‘You can imagine. It was a horrible sight.’

Yes, he could imagine. All too well. Did so on a nightly basis.

‘The killer, or killers, left a message. We have no idea who it was intended for, or what it means.’

‘Tell me.’

The director paused, then continued, his voice wavering. ‘It was written on the wall, in Mister Barstow’s blood. It said:
“She’s next”
.’

Clay stared down at the wet concrete, the implications of this moving through him now like a slow dose of poison. ‘Are you sure, Doctor? Absolutely sure that’s what it said?’