Instruments Of Darkness (38 page)

    'Nina's packed, four suitcases ready to go. I dropped by. She was trying on her new clothes. They look great. She was wearing her most expensive perfume. Had a nice hat on. New shoes. She'll be a credit to you. That's what all this is about, isn't it, Steve?' Kate's face fractured, the bitterness in her gut finding its way to her mouth, her tongue pushing through her stained teeth as if forcing a mouthful of grounds out. The lines on her anorexic face which had never met with any grace before, now looked horrific, as a freak's.
'You
want to get away from
her!'
I said, and Kate's face which had started to break up, stilled.

    'But there's one thing that nobody knows about in here except you and me, isn't there, Steve?' Kershaw's mouth was wide open and most of his tongue was out on the carpet. I could hear Clifford listening now. 'Old Clifford's sitting there smugging for America. He knows all about Nina. He's known it all the time. He doesn't give a damn. He's colder than a North Sea cod on ice. He
does
care about money though, Steve, and that's where you haven't been so straight with Cliff, isn't it? We all know you're a greedy bastard, we all know there's only one number one, but only I know how greedy. It wasn't Clifford who came up with the idea of framing Gildas for the Perec killing, it was you. You wanted to get rid of Gildas as soon as possible. And it wasn't Clifford's idea that you didn't drown him in the bath, it was yours. You wanted it to look like suspicious suicide because you were trying to persuade somebody that you'd been done and the killer had run away with' - Clifford was leaning forward, his slack neck hanging over the collar of his shirt - 'with the million dollars.'

    'Who's the somebody and what million dollars?' asked Clifford.

    'I've had a couple of blindfolded interviews with a big man in the Togolese government who gave Steve a million bucks of his kick-back money to trade with, except Steve died and the million bucks got lost and the big man's very upset.'

    Clifford was on his feet leaning over the desk to see if there was any chance of a word from between Kershaw's clenched teeth. I began to think that the big man had given up waiting by his answering machine. Kate looked as if she had indigestion. Some more time crawled past while three brains chewed their way through the lean meat I'd just thrown. Kershaw was still jawing with the carpet. Kate was rubbing her heartburn. Clifford's pink body stood encased in its white shirt like
saumon froid en papillote.
He looked out of the cone of light. Honour, that miraculous thing which is supposed to exist amongst thieves, was nowhere to be seen.

    'Who's the big man?' he asked anybody who was prepared to answer.

    'I don't know,' I said. 'Steve?'

    Steve wasn't feeling so tiptop. It was good to see him on the floor mopping up his cockiness. He didn't look like somebody who'd been at boot height for some time. We watched him as he pulled himself up on an invisible rung, stepped back and held on to the desk facing Clifford. Clifford showed the anxiety of a man who is about to get puked on by an overdrunk friend, but Steve rolled on his hip and sat on the corner of the desk.

    'Who is he?' asked Clifford again, and still Kershaw didn't speak. I glanced over my shoulder. Kate had left the room.

    'I've got a couple of clues,' I said. 'He likes to wear expensive buckskin shoes and his assistant is…'

    I didn't need to say who the assistant was because Clifford stiffened as if someone had eased an ice cold shiv in between ribs three and four of his back.

    'You stupid fuck,' he said to Steve, the clubby banker suddenly out to lunch, the language dropping a hundred floors of the World Trade Center to the street. 'You custard-brained, Limey fuck. Jeez, I thought Jack was a headless fuck, but you, I fucking told you when I introduced you to that guy not… to… fucking… touch! We gotta get outa here,' he said, quickly opening the drawer and taking out the plastic cuffs, a handkerchief, some gaffer tape and a gun. He got to me in three strides, lifted me off the chair, spun me round and cuffed me. Kershaw, still rubbing his gut, picked up the rifle, leant it against the chair and took the handkerchief off Clifford.

    'You had your chance,' he said.

    'As much as Jack did,' I said.

    'You fucked up like him 'n' all.'

    'Even if he hadn't, he still wouldn't be here.'

    'He only had eyes for the money. That was Jack's problem… and keeping trouble outside his garden wall. That's no way to be in this business.'

    'Especially with you two for partners.'

    'He thought he was running the show - getting you to look for me, cuddling up to Awolowo, fucking Cliff's wife

    'Maybe you should have told him you were going to disappear.'

    'Too big a mouth,' he said, taking hold of my jaw. 'Like you.'

    'You knew I'd talk about the women, didn't you? You wanted me to talk about the women. You wanted it to hurt, you sadistic little shit. You just didn't know I knew about the money.'

    Kershaw grinned, letting a bit of insanity into his eyes. 'I've been looking forward to this,' he said, and grabbing my jaw he stuffed the handkerchief well down my throat until I gagged. Clifford stuck the tape across my mouth and wrapped it around my head. Kershaw clapped me on the shoulder like a good old boy and sat back on the desk.

    'I'm going to kill my wife now,' he said.

    'Not in the house,' said Clifford. 'No killing in the house. You've fucked up enough as it is.' He pushed me to the door and before we went down the corridor he took a last look at Kershaw. 'When you're finished, go to Nina's and get outa Togo and don't fucking come back.'

    The corridor was dark and hot. The bedroom where there'd been the steaming bath was in darkness. There was no sound of Kate Kershaw and there was no sound of the big man's goons coming to the rescue. Clifford took me down to his Mercedes in the garage. He opened the boot and folded a duvet up into the back underneath the rear shelf. I got in and he jammed me in with another duvet so that I was hot and immobile. He loaded crates of wine in front of me.

    The lid came down. The garage door opened. The wrought iron gates squealed. The car huffed as Clifford got in and the motor seemed to come on without any ignition. We rolled out. The gates shut like two guinea fowl calling.

Chapter 32

    There was a police post at the main turn-off to the lake, but we didn't reach it. We turned off left down a bumpy track which joined a smoother one and we began to circle the lake. Clifford wasn't in a hurry. I was thinking of ways to keep him occupied for three or four hours but none of them were as interesting as what he had in mind.

    It was hot work. Four pounds of fear soaked into the duvets, just leaving the salt in all the cuts and grazes on my body to remind me how uncomfortable being alive could be. By the time we arrived at a gate, which Clifford opened, I was rebreathing the boot air for the seventh time and it had lost a lot of its flavour.

    The boot opened and the hot air that flooded into my black hole felt like a fresh breeze whipping off the lake. Clifford unloaded a few crates, pulled me out, stripped off the tape and pulled the handkerchief out. The pressure was high. Over the tops of the tall dark trees around the lake, the black sky flickered like newsreel of the Blitz. We crossed a mud courtyard with high walls around with shards of broken bottles set in cement on top. The house was a single storey fronting on to the lake. We walked in between two semicircles of lawn to the front door.

    'Why did you want me to follow your wife, Clifford?' I asked, because nothing else came to mind.

    'Forget it,' he said. 'You're dead. I got nothin' to say to you.'

    'You didn't like Steve's private million-dollar deal, did you, Clifford? Thought it might jeopardize the big one. It has. I called the big man before I left Nina's, left a message for him to come and look you up.' If Clifford's life had just fallen to pieces with that bland statement, you wouldn't have known it.

    'It'll cost me a million and a half, but I can handle that,' he said, calmer now. He motioned me forward with the gun and told me to kick in the door so that it looked like breaking and entering. I took two steps back.

    'What's the name of the Yoruba god of medicine, Clifford?'

    'The fuck are you talking about now?' he asked, suddenly dog-tired.

    'Osanyin,' I said, and kicked the door just below the lock and a pane of glass shattered as the handle hit the wall and the top hinge popped out. A four-foot splinter of wood flik-flakked across the hall and down a few steps to the living room whose shuttered windows would have given us a view of the lake. Clifford hadn't moved. He held the gun on me and blinked only twice in a minute.

    'It's over, Clifford,' I said. 'You don't want to go adding double murder to your problems.'

    He didn't answer for some time. If I could have seen inside his head, I might have been damned scared, as it was from my side, he looked old and tired. When he did finally speak I almost missed it he said it so quietly and with an odd squeak in his voice that distorted the sound. It let me know, if I still had any doubts, that under the handmade shirt, the Italian tie, the pleated slacks, the buffed black Oxfords on his feet, Clifford Harvey was as mad as a split-gowned maximum- security headcase.

    'Cut,' was the word he used.

    With a new and disturbing energy he steered me to the left and opened the door in front of me. He flicked the light on with a surgically gloved hand and leaned something up against the wall behind me.

    To my right, Heike was lying on her front on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to each corner with a sheet over her. Her head moved as if she'd been sleeping and then stilled. The calico curtains were drawn and dusty. There was an air-conditioner in the corner of the window frame and the curtain had been cut round it. It hadn't been turned on and there was no fan. The only smell was of the mustiness of the infrequently used bed linen. Clifford threw the bag over to the bed, took the cuffs off and told me to strip. He stood in front of me, holding the gun waist-high, his elbow tight against his body.

    When I was down to my underpants he unzipped the bag, took out a pair of lycra shorts and told me to strip and put them on. Heike's head moved again; I looked, Clifford didn't. He positioned a chair three feet from the bottom right-hand corner of the bed. He wanted it just right and was nudging the front legs with his foot when I lunged at him. He didn't bother to shoot but side-swiped my head with the barrel which hit me across the cheekbone and temple and the room spun on the wrong axis.

    He pulled me up by the hair and fitted the barrel under my ear. I sat in the chair and he cuffed my wrists under the seat so that my chin was on my knees and tied my feet together at the ankles with some nylon rope.

    He drew out a floor-length brown plastic apron from the bag, put it over his head and tied it around himself. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. There was a long, low table for a suitcase by the window and he positioned that in front of me. He picked up what he had leaned against the wall, which was a long plastic case like a gun cover. Out of it, he pulled a three-foot long rhino hide sjambok. From the case, he took a length of smooth metal tubing with two wires attached, a switch and a two-point plug, two crocodile clips attached to wires, again with a switch and a two-point plug, a gang socket with an extension, a length of hard plastic with two holes in it and a loop of rope through the holes, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and some lighter fuel, a ball of rags, a scalpel, a box of chilli powder, a rusty coat hanger, some gaffer tape, a pair of long-nosed pliers, a plastic bag and from the side pocket, a clean slab of fresh money.

    'What's the game, Clifford?'

    'There's no game.'

    'You take the tray away and I have to remember what's on it?'

    'I said, it's not a game.'

    'Bankers don't do this kind of thing, Clifford.'

    'We have other instruments.'

    He put each of the instruments in my hands and I printed them up for him. He moved the table over to the bed and looked down at Heike, swallowing hard.

    He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. His neck was shaking. He took a corner of the sheet and walked off with it behind me, leaving Heike naked on the bed. I kicked my fear back down the basement stairs when I saw Heike's white vulnerable nudity next to Clifford's terrible implements.

    The air-conditioner came on, roared and smoothed out to a steely hum. The cool air chilled the sweat on my back and Clifford's voice raised the atavistic hairs up my neck. The sprawling, relaxed business drawl had gone and a constricted throat said: 'You've wet the bed.'

    He strode past me. I roared at him. He took Heike's shoulders and shook them, her head lolled. He dropped her and stood back, his neck and cheeks red. Heike opened her mouth which was dry and clogged with a thick, sticky saliva. Her eyes opened and I watched the memory and the terror worm in. I called her name and she looked at me with black, shiny eyes. She put everything she could into her scream, her whole body dipped into the bed but nothing came out.

    Clifford picked up the slab of money, pulled a few notes out and screwed them into balls.

    'Why the money, Clifford?'

    'Everybody's gotta get paid.'

    'Why her?'

    'You get paid for everything.'

    'What do you mean?'

    'Life's all about moving money around.'

    'You only get paid for doing something.'

    'She's going to. She's going to suffer.'

    'What for?'

    'Because she gets paid. They all get paid.'

    'What did you pay Cassie Mills for?'

    Clifford stopped screwing up the money, his head clicked up and his eyes bolted on to mine.

    'Cassie Mills, Rockford, Illinois, 23rd September 1954,' I said, and time crawled forward on its elbows while Clifford's face lost all expression.