Instruments Of Darkness (25 page)

    'I have no time and no money.'

    'I know. I'm only telling you all this because you look like someone who'd want to know what happened.'

    'Do you suspect anybody?'

    'A local businessman.'

    'What about the trollop?'

    'Nina? She knows something but she's too scared.'

    'Why?'

    'I don't know.'

    'What do you think?'

    'I'm still not sure.'

    'What would you do?'

    'In your situation I would sign the papers, take your husband's body home, bury him and forget all about it.'

    'In fact, I have no choice.'

    We went back downstairs and finished the beers in silence. Kate smoked slowly but with such intensity that the cigarettes burned like a bush fire just to get it over with. We left the house and drove to the Hotel Sarakawa.

    A band littered the lobby with musical instruments and splayed legs. I booked Kate in and asked her if she would like to have dinner later on. She said she'd prefer to be on her own, and looking at the frown lines on her forehead and the yellowing bruise of the nicotine stains on her fingers, I was glad. I was about to give her some money for expenses when she had second thoughts.

    'Come and have a drink,' she said. 'I can't face dinner. I can't really face the bar with all these people. I'd like it though. We've had a lot to go through for a couple of strangers… unless you're just being polite?'

    'It'll have to be now,' I said, looking at my watch.

    'Fine. I'll take a shower. You get the drinks.

    We followed the young bellhop to her room.

    Kate took her bag into the bathroom and I took up one of my favourite pastimes - wrecking the mini bar. Kate
shouted for gin and tonic and I poured myself a double Red Label. I slid open the balcony door and walked out into the sea breeze and the purling light from the underwater-lit swimming pool below. It was quite out there, with only the palm trees rattling and distant voices insulated by darkness..

    A barman in a short white jacket wiped down the pool bar counter and drew the shutter. He came out of a door at the side and reached in to turn off the light, his hand in his pocket after the key. A voice can from a table set back from the pool half in the dark. He walked over. There were two women sitting there. '
C'est fermé maintenant
,' he said.

    One of the women gave him a note and said something, leaning across the table, her face in the light from the pool. It was Jasmin. The barman went back to bar and came back out with two drinks on a silver tray which he set on the table. '
Merci. Bonne soirée
, he said and backed off. He locked up and walked off around the pool and into the hotel.!

    Yvette, the other woman, was standing by the pool now with her back to the water talking to Jasmine and using her sandalled foot to scratch the bare tendon of her left leg. Jasmin leaned forward in her usual T-shirt and jeans and slurped the top off her over-full drink. Yvette went back to her chair and on the way ran her hand around Jasmin's shoulder, stroking her neck and hair and then held her head to her stomach while Jasmin leaned in like a cat, enjoying it. There was something in that gesture which was more than just girlish affection. These were two people who were used to touching each other, who were lovers and had been for some time.

    'Bruce?' said a voice behind me which sent a bolt of white hot iron up my back.

    Kate Kershaw stood at the balcony door in a fresh T-shirt and cotton trousers with a towel around her shoulders, rubbing her hair.

    'Your gin and tonic's on the bedside table,' I said, feeling furtive and trying to keep it down, out of my eyes. She didn't move for it, but rubbed her hair and looked through me.

    'Are you married?'

    'No,' I said. 'I don't seem to be the type.'

    'What type are you?'

    'The type who does the wrong kind of work with the wrong kind of people. The type that doesn't give enough of the right sort of attention. The type… Christ, the wrong type, that's all.'

    'Are you the faithful type?' she asked the night air over my left shoulder before focusing on me and regretting the question. 'You don't have to answer.'

    She turned into the room and picked up her drink and took a three-fingered slug of it. The coldness and the fizz springing tears which she wiped with the towel. I ducked into the room.

    'I've tried being unfaithful,' I said. 'Didn't like it.'

    'Not even the screwing?'

    'The lying was the problem.'

    She finished her drink, handed me the empty glass and I made her another.

    'He's dead,' she said, taking the full glass from me, 'and all I can think of is the bloody women.'

    'When my father died from a lung disease my mother spent a' month asking me why the bloody fool had to keep smoking - the only time I heard her swear.'

    'The women didn't kill Steve though, did they?'

    'You have to get angry with him for something. You've been left behind.'

    She sat up straight at that, and lit another cigarette, the smoke not mingling well with the smell of soap and shampoo and wet towelling in the room.

    'That must be it,' she said, smoking with her mind off the job, her hand going up automatically, the smoke leaking out of her from everywhere.

    I put my empty glass down.

    'You want another… Help yourself,' she said, crushing her cigarette out.

    'I can drop by later if you want.'

    'I'll be fine,' she said. 'You go. I'll see you tomorrow.'

    I opened the door looking back. She lay on the bed now, her feet crossed at the ankles. She waved and then stared at the ceiling, folding her hands across her stomach.

    Down in the lobby where the band was still waiting, I spoke to a friend who worked in reception who said he would look out for Kate in case she needed anything. I was about to leave when Yvette and Jasmin drifted over. They asked for a single room key. Despite the time of night, Yvette was wearing sunglasses. She saw me and pushed them down her nose and looked over the top of them in the only way possible.

    'I had a visit from someone after you left last night,' I said.

    'Someone I know?'

    'Perhaps mutual.'

    'What happened?'

    'He hit me on the head.'

    'Hard?'

    'No, with a rolled up comic… What do you think?'

    'Did he say why?'

    'He told me to drop what I was doing.'

    'And what
were
you doing?'

    'At the time I was having a pee.'

    'Bad advice.'

    'Your taxi was followed last night after you left.'

    She took her sunglasses off and swung them by the arm between her thumb and forefinger. Jasmin looked over Yvette's shoulder, the room key swinging from her hand.

    'What are you doing here, Yvette?'

    'I'm buying African art.'

    'Are you?'

    'I am,' she said, locking antlers. 'I buy in Zaire, Cameroon, Gabon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast. We're thinking of expanding north to Burkina and Mali later this year.' She tapped Jasmin on the arm, who took a card from her purse, and gave it to me. Yvette Dussolier - L'Art des Africains and an address in Paris which meant nothing to me.

    I clicked the card on my thumbnail. 'I might have something for you,' I said.

    'Call me,' she said, raising her eyebrows.

    'You must know a lot.'

    'Enough so they don't roll me,' she said, walking to the lift.

    I asked my friend if I could use the phone to call Gerard, a French retired hydrologist who collected African art, books and empty whisky bottles. While his phone rang, I got annoyed with Yvette and her fabricated sexiness, her cocky, air-plucked intelligence, her practised coolness. She was a fine act with a tough veneer but no heart to pull it off. The manipulation was showing like suspenders and stocking tops below a hemline. Gerard answered and I arranged to meet him at his house for a drink at ten o'clock. I turned away from the counter and ran into one of the musicians, a colossal African, who was as annoyed as I was, who'd done 'waiting in the lobby' for too long, whose face looked as if a bee had just flown up one of his cavernous nostrils.

Chapter 21

    The Harveys' house wasn't far from the Sarakawa but I was still going to fail on the first of Clifford Harvey's requests. It was close to half past seven when I arrived at his solid wooden gate. I pressed the bell and was surprised by the man himself answering on the intercom.

    'You're late. Stay where you are,' he said.

    I leaned back against the car and twenty seconds later Clifford appeared at the gate, well-dressed for an unobtrusive night-time chat in a lemon polo shirt, sky blue slacks and white shoes.

    'I been calling you not to bother come,' he said. 'You can't turn up on time, I got no use for you.'

    'Shall we call it good night then?' I said, getting into my car.

    'You wait a minute!' he said in a voice that drew blood.

    'I'm not the obedient type,' I said, closing the car door and fitting the keys in the ignition.

    'This is delicate, Mr Medway,' he said, changing his tack but not his tone.

    'How'd you get my number?' I asked, trying to get a better hold on the client relationship:

    'Nina Sorvino gave it to me last night. Now look…'

    'You look,' I said. 'Your money doesn't buy my knuckles to rap. It buys me to work for you. Now what is it that we have to hang around outside your house exchanging pleasantries in the dark?'

    He stared in at me through the open car window. The chief executive in him wanted to strip the pips off me but the man needed something so he took the bite out of his voice, just leaving the bark.

    'My wife is having an affair. I want you to find out who with and get me photographic evidence that's good enough to use in a divorce court. You get it and you're two million CFA richer.'

    'And. how much richer are you, Mr Harvey?'

    'That's none of your goddamn business.'

    'I don't do domestics,' I said, starting the car. He didn't understand. 'I don't follow people's wives or husbands, loved or unloved ones. It's tacky and I have enough trouble looking at myself in the mirror every morning as it is.' I put the car in gear. 'What you've told me is totally confidential… even though I'm not working for you. Good night.' I drove off with Clifford Harvey featuring in my rearview for three hundred metres before I turned right and up on to the coast road to go back into central Lomé. I was glad I didn't have the time nor need the money so badly that I might've had to reconsider one of my two business ethics. As it was, if Bagado was right about Jack's rice that was my first business ethic shot to hell. If I'd had to take to snapping Jack with Elizabeth Harvey I could have found myself on the same ethical footing as a paparazzo.

    I was looking forward to a lie-down with some aspirin in my veins and something cool on the back of my head. I pulled up outside the wooden gates to the house and didn't see them at first under the trees overhanging the wall on the other side of the street. I got out of the car. The officer who'd been in charge of the road block and who had also taken Kershaw's body away was sitting on the bonnet of his Peugeot. He beckoned me over.

    'Je suis fatigue,'
I said.
'Je vais me coucher.'

    Three of the car doors opened at once and four soldiers got out.

'Je viens de repenser
…' I said, putting my hands up.

'C'est bon ga,'
said the officer.

    I was thrown into the same footwell as before. I recognized some of the same smells. The feet were planted on my back, the rifle butts next to them. There was little air down there and the sweat sprang out in fat gobs and ran into my hair. The car moved off. The deep breathing began and I noticed that the flash of anger I'd felt seeing Yvette gliding through the lobby with her lover had moved from the back of my head. It was now settled in my stomach. I could feel it like a hot crystal as I lay contorted over the hump of the drive shaft.

    In twenty minutes, I was in the same leather and book room with the lazy overhead fan. There was the smell of pear drops, a solvent, as if someone had recently rain-proofed some sensitive buckskin shoes.

    'Thank you for your call the other day,' said the deep voice in French. 'I'm sorry to drag you out at this time of night.'

    'It's not the time of night, it's the dragging I'm not so keen on.'

    'How very…'

    'Don't talk to me about my amazing sang-froid, and don't call me M. Medway. The name's Bruce. What do you want this time?'

    'More cooperation,' he said, with a little steeliness to his voice.

    'The guy's dead. There's not much more I can do for you on that front.'

    'I know he's dead,' said the big man in a way that told me the ice was getting thinner. 'Do you know how he died?'

    I didn't answer that one and heard the man shift in his seat.

    'The message you left said he'd been found in the pool.'

    'That's right.'

    'Drowned?'

    'I presume.'

    'You're wrong. I had an autopsy done. I'm told he was smothered by a pillow or cushion. What does this
tell
you?'

    'He was murdered?'

    'So that it would look like suicide.'

    'And you're going to tell me why.'

    'M. Kershaw had some money of mine,' he said, letting out a pained sigh. 'I gave it to him to trade with. He said he would give me a return of nine per cent.'

    'What sort of trade?'

    'Sheanut, cashew nut, cashew nut shell liquid, cotton seed and oil, cocoa… that kind of thing.'

    'How much did you give him?'

    'A million.'

    'You're sending me to the ninth circle of hell and back for a million CFA… For four and half thousand dollars?'