Instruments Of Darkness (15 page)

    'No close friends?'

    'She was born in Nice and spent her childhood there. Then her family moved to Lyons when Miss Perec was twelve. Five years later she went to the Sorbonne, then London, then back to Lyons and finally Paris. She was never in one place long enough to have the kind of friend who would know.'

    'Where did you get this information?'

    'The French Embassy.'

    'What about the evidence?'

    'Kershaw has removed the evidence. Not a stupid thing to have done. He goes back to his house in Lomé trying to think what he is going to do. He then makes a snap decision to run. He gets into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, buys a cheap bag, gets on a bus and he could be in the southern Sahara by now.'

    'Why not destroy the evidence, or take it with him?'

    'That kind of stuff is difficult to burn and hard to throw away without being noticed. I wouldn't like to travel in Africa with those kind of things on me. People are always getting searched, especially now in Togo with the trouble.'

    Bagado ran his hand down his face to clear the board.

    'Second. Miss Perec inadvertently came across something in Lomé, probably criminal, maybe politically harmful, maybe personally harmful. She is friendly with Kershaw, she sticks with him and goes to Cotonou to get away from an ugly situation. Kershaw goes to work on the Monday morning. The person who Miss Perec has been fleeing from catches up with her. He tortures her to find out what she knows and kills her, leaving the body but taking the evidence to plant on Kershaw. Kershaw returns and for the same reasons as in the previous scenario disappears. Or he was killed as well and transported to that lagoon we have just passed and dumped and then the evidence planted.'

    Bagado held on to the back of the front seat with both hands and bent his forehead to rest on the head support.

    'Third. Kershaw is involved in a group indulging in criminal activity which Miss Perec finds out about, or is even involved in herself. Kershaw discovers that she knows without her knowing that he knows, but persuades her to come with him to Cotonou where he kills her in this bizarre fashion, taking the evidence with him to plant on someone else who is also involved, or not involved at all, only to find that he has been second-guessed and is killed himself by the third party who plants the evidence on the deceased Kershaw.

    'Fourth -'

    'Bagado! You're out of the real world now.'

    'I don't think so. You see, we know so little and human beings are so devious… It could be any of the above or a combination of all three. We have to examine every possibility, however strange. We are also in Africa, where anything can happen and regularly does.

    'Fourth. You'll like the fourth. Kershaw has come across something in Cotonou. He is killed. The killers go to search his flat and find Miss Perec designing textiles. A perverted member of the gang comes up with this brilliant solution to the situation. They kill Miss Perec in such a way as to make it look like a "session" gone too far. They dump Kershaw's body and plant the evidence in Lomé. Thus focusing our investigation on Kershaw and Miss Perec. It is for this reason we must keep an open mind.'

    'Nobody would sit in Kershaw's flat in Cotonou designing textiles.'

    'We know' - Bagado lifted his head off the back of the front seat and held up his hand - 'nothing. We know about these people, what we know about almost everybody, even those closest to us… nothing. That's why most murderers are "known" to their victims. That's why most burglaries are committed by "neighbours". That's why children get abused and women get raped. We trust people who are close to us, we trust people who conform to stereotypes, we think we know them, we have no objectivity about them. The fatherly man with his arm in plaster trying to do his trousers up is your killer.'

    'There's no middle way with you, Bagado.'

    'Like many before me, I choose absurdity to make a point.'

    'There are exceptions. We're not all naive.'

    'Who do you think they are, these exceptions?' Bagado asked.

    'Those with a reliable instinct.'

    'And how do they get that?'

    'Disappointment.'

    'Let us hope that the first person to disappoint you is without an axe.'

    'Or that you're not a child.'

    'I think we are being unnecessarily gloomy.'

    'I think you are sick people/ said Moses.

    At the border we went through the formalities. I hadn't seen Françoise Perec's name with Kershaw's when I came through the last time, but that was because she was in the regular ledger which Bagado checked. Kershaw entered Benin with Françoise Perec one day and left on his own the next. I pointed out that this put paid to the theory that Kershaw was killed in Benin, and Bagado asked me how much did I think it would cost to have a name entered into a ledger.

    'Remember, these people have not been paid,' said Bagado, getting into the car. 'They would tell you anything for a few thousand CFA. If we relied on their brand of veracity we wouldn't find Kershaw for a year.'

    We arrived at Kershaw's house after nine o'clock. The young boy was there lying face down on his bench. Bagado was intrigued. The boy snapped to attention as we got out of the car. Bagado took the bench out from under the boy's arm and sat on it. The boy looked from one end of his bench to the other and then up at Bagado. Bagado took him round the shoulders and spoke to him in Ewe, an African language spoken in Togo and Benin; then in Hausa, a language spoken in the northern regions of West Africa; and finally in Yoruba, a southern Nigerian language also spoken in Benin. The boy listened very carefully. When Bagado had finished, the boy drew himself out from under Bagado's arm and danced a small and inept dance. Bagado frowned at the boy who stopped and held his hands open as if he had accomplished what he'd been asked to do. Bagado got up and walked past me saying, 'The boy is an idiot.'

    In the house, Bagado walked up the stairs slower and slower as he took in Kershaw's murals. He walked to the far end and paced its length looking at the work.

    'Kershaw?' he asked, and I nodded. 'Very good,' he said, going into a bedroom. 'It's the boy, isn't it?' he said from inside.

    Bagado came out and walked into the master bedroom. He looked up at the ceiling and opened the bag. He emptied the contents on the bed and his head dropped down on to his chest.

    He opened the wardrobe, flicked through the clothes and rumbled about amongst the shoes in the bottom. He came out with a camera which he threw on the bed. He went through the chest of drawers. In the bottom drawer, which I hadn't bothered to search, he found something that made him snort - a stack of SM mags. Bagado knelt and looked at the front cover of a blonde woman looking over her shoulder, her hands and feet bound to the four corners of a metal frame. There were weals across the back of her legs and her back. A thick, evil-looking black whip lay across her buttocks. She wore a black leather choker which was fastened by leather laces at the back. Bagado shut the drawer without touching the magazines. Still on his knees, he turned and crawled over to the bed, looking underneath it. He stood, picked up the camera and checked to see if there was any film.

    'There's twenty-two in here,' he said. 'Can we get them developed?'

    I called Moses and Bagado left the room. Moses left with the film and I went into one of the other bedrooms and looked at Kershaw's work.

    On one wall there was a naked, tall, muscular African woman of the Amazon warrior type. She had short hair in the shape of her skull, a long neck, and long arms held in a way that suggested flowing and falling like water. She held one leg up bent at the knee, the toe pointed downwards like a dancer's. Her skin was as shiny black as an olive, as if she had just come out of water. The background was the dark green of the rainforest and red parrots exploded upwards to an unseen sky.

    Across the room on the opposite wall was a naked Indian girl lying on her side, supported by one elbow on a white sheet, again with a rainforest background. Her other arm lay along her slim girlish body, the hand resting flat below the hip. There was a bowl in front of her piled high with mangos and pawpaws. She looked across the room with the curious effect of looking straight through me. I backed away until I was up against the water dancer; the Indian girl's eyes now focused and I remembered Charlie talking about Kershaw and his women - 'black girls, white girls, Orientals, Indians'.

    Bagado called from a back room which contained all Kershaw's painting gear. He was standing by the window looking down into the garden.

    'Can you see what I see?' he said, moving me into his position.

    There was the wall, the seat with the small patio and the green swimming pool. I turned, Bagado had gone.

    He had left by the french windows and was striding across the garden to the aviary. There was a large tree there with a long pole leaning up against it. Bagado took this pole which had a net on the end of it and started to skim the algae off the surface of the water. In the middle, not far from the edge of the pool, he hit something.

    He brushed the algae away from the object and as it dispersed we could see, in the green water, a body standing as if to attention. A sulphurous smell bubbled up as Bagado disturbed the body. It was the stuff of projectile vomiting. We coughed and ran for the aviary.

    The smell was no better, but we acclimatized and returned to the poolside. By kneeling down and stretching out, Bagado managed to grab hold of the hair which came away in his hand with a patch of scalp. We pulled on the shirt collar and there was a scraping sound of stone on stone.

    'The fourth urn's weighing it down,' said Bagado.

    We got the body to the side and reached down into the water and took an armpit each. We stood up and pulled. It was as heavy and stiff as a statue. I could feel a couple of hernias about to pop, so we put it down and called Moses, who had just come back from town. The three of us pulled and this time, as the body's thighs came out of the water, I threw my arms around them and heaved up with my shoulders. Bagado shuddered backwards and to the side with Moses crashing against him. The body slewed. There was an ugly cracking noise and the body landed on its side, partly on the grass and partly on the edge of the pool but wholly across Moses's leg; he was kicking at the body with his free foot and bellowing.

    'Was that your leg, Moses?' I asked.

    'Is my leg, Mister Bruce, is my leg!' yelled Moses.

    I lifted out the urn and raised the body's legs and Moses, hollering worse than a sacrificial victim, was pulled out by Bagado. Moses got up on one leg and put his weight on to the other. It held, and in a matter of seconds he was walking around like a child trying on a new pair of shoes.

    'My leg. Is not my leg,' he said.

    'Of course it's your leg!' roared Bagado.

    'No. Is his leg.'

    I undid the ropes at the ankles and rolled up the trouser leg.

    'You won't hurt him,' said Bagado, standing over me, still laughing at Moses.

    Just above the sock was a sharp piece of bone which had torn through the skin.

    The parrot gave Moses an appreciative whistle.

    The body was covered in green slime, which reminded me never to eat Madame Severnou's bush rat dish again. I wiped away the strands of green weed from the head. What was left of the face was white, one eye was missing, the lips were swollen and partially eaten away, as were a cheek and part of a nostril. The tongue protruded and was thick and purple and the tip was missing.

    'Kershaw?' asked Bagado.

    'He didn't look like that in his photograph, did he?'

    'Use your imagination,' said Bagado, patting the breast pockets of the shirt, which were empty, while I clenched my jaw and took a closer look at the body.

    'He looks the right size, the hair colour's right and that eye's the colour it should be,' I said.

    The body's hands were tucked into the waistband of the trousers. Bagado undid the belt and trouser buttons and freed the hands which had no rings, but there was a watch. It was an old Timex. There was a serial number on the back and the usual stuff about water and shock resistance, which hadn't proved to be correct as the watch face was cracked and the inside of the glass was pimpled with droplets of water. He slapped the body on the legs for being so useless at identifying itself and then searched the pockets.

    'Ah!' he said, pulling out a wallet.

    In it, he found some sodden currency, an unreadable restaurant receipt and nothing else.

    'No credit card!' roared Bagado, trying to humiliate the body into identifying itself.

    'He was declared bankrupt. He wouldn't have one.'

    The body's hands were stiff with rigor mortis. I eased up the fingers.

    'He's our man,' I said. 'Paint.'

    'Help me roll him over on to his front,' said Bagado.

    We rolled him and spun him round so his head was over the pool. Bagado searched the back pockets and came up with a credit card which he handed to me. It was Kershaw's expired AA membership.

    'Tell me if anything comes out,' said Bagado, who started to pump against Kershaw's swollen back with the flat of both hands.

    'Nothing,' I said.

    'Plastic bag,' said Bagado. 'Then thrown in the pool. Let's call the police.'

    'There's a call I have to make before that,' I said, and explained.

    'You must,' he said, 'or you're a dead man.'

Chapter 14

    It was very hot in the middle of the lawn where Kershaw's body lay on a stretcher. A couple of policemen stood in the shade of a flame tree by the aviary with their hands over their mouths talking to each other. Kershaw's putrefying body filled the air with a sweet sulphurous stench that had instantly attracted a pair of vultures who stood on the wall looking at each other, and then looking down at the corpse. Moses stood with a handkerchief wrapped around his face and a long pole in his hands.