Instruments Of Darkness (39 page)

    'I paid her back,' he said, only moving his lips, the slab of money cocked stiff in his hand.

    'You paid her back for making you suffer.'

    'Yes, I did.'

    'What did she do?'

    Clifford's mouth clamped shut. His eyes stared through me.

    'What didn't she do?' I asked.

    'She didn't mean anything.'

    'To you?'

    'She didn't
mean
anything.'

    'She lied to you.'

    'They all lied to me.'

    White deposits had gathered at the corner of Clifford's mouth. His tongue tried to lick them away but they were tacky like glue and they stuck his mouth together. He was swallowing a lot but nothing was going down.

    'They all lied to you?'

    'Cassie, Bob, Whitey, Doug, Lena…'

    'Your friends?'

    'My friends,' he said, with matte black eyes. His body was still, his breathing shallow. There was a long pause filled by the cool air rushing from the air-conditioner. Clifford seemed to have dropped below some horizon. He was out in an open boat again, surviving a childhood trauma that had never fitted into the way he was told things should be.

    'She paid them,' he said from a long way off.

    'Cassie?'

    'Mom.'

    'Mom paid Cassie?'

    'Thirty bucks a week.'

    'She told you?'

    'She told me. She got a five-buck bonus for kissing. She told me.'

    'When did she tell you?'

    'We were doing it. She got double for doing it. She told me.'

    'What about Bob?'

    'Ten bucks. Whitey ten. Doug twelve, he was on the Softball team. They showed me the money. They all showed it me. They all showed me they got paid to be my friends.'

    'What did your mom say?'

    'I found the cheque book. Hundred bucks every Friday. Pay day. They always had money at the weekend.'

    'You paid Cassie back?'

    'I paid her back.'

    'It's quits.'

    'Uh huh. They all have to pay.'

    'Where's Mom?'

    'They all have to pay.'

    He looked at the money in his hand and peeled notes off and screwed them up and dropped them to the floor. He went down on his knees and pulled Heike's head back and pushed the balls of money into her mouth.

    He filled her cheeks and then taped her mouth over. He picked up the sjambok.

    'It didn't happen, Clifford. Your mom didn't pay them. She took a hundred bucks out on Fridays for weekend shopping. They were just kids haying a sick joke like kids do. Listen to me. You killed Cassie Mills. Did they come looking for you? They would have linked you to her. They would have found out about the money if your mom had paid them. They didn't. You never went down for her killing. You weren't even a suspect. Clifford!' I roared. 'CLIFFORD!'

    He stood both feet apart and brought the sjambok above his head. I threw myself forward and hit him in the leg with my head. Clifford went down hard, the sjambok toppled out of his hand and sprang off one end into the corner of the room. Clifford clawed away from me in a panic before he realized I had turned turtle. I could see he had a cut on his head and his glasses hung over his mouth. He pushed himself up on his good leg, straightened his glasses and hobbled over to the sjambok.

    He brought the sjambok down across my face and chest, across my shoulder, then the stomach, the legs, the arms and ribs. Blood ran, pain opened in lines across my body with junctions of agony. Warm blood pooled in my eye and ran over my forehead. The sjambok slashed the cool air and white hot welts swelled. New pain stopped. The chair lifted and fell on its side, my wrist trapped underneath. Heike thrashed about on the bed, her head whipping from side to side. The sjambok thumped across my ear and I felt an eyebrow split. I swung round, using my wrist as a pivot, and caught

    Clifford below the knee with my bound feet and he went down again. I heard the glasses fall off his face.

    'Fuck…,' he said. 'You fuck

    Across the floor, the door opened.

    'Clifford!' a voice said.

    'Mom?' he said, in a voice so strange my scalp tightened over my cranium.

    Two thin legs in flat black shoes appeared. I turned to Clifford, who stood over me, his hands empty. His glasses crunched underfoot. Kate Kershaw put three bullets into his chest and a fourth into the wall. Clifford fell back with three black holes in the bib of his apron. His body crashed through the table of instruments and his head bounced off the bedside table, dislodging the lamp which shattered on the floor. The white deposits at the corners of his mouth frothed in small bubbles like boiled milk, blood appeared in the foam which turned pink and darkened to a thick red. He ended on his back, his head crooked up against the blood-smeared wall, a surgically gloved hand across himself and the other arm twisted behind him.

Chapter 33

    Kate left the room and came back with a chopping knife in her hand. She cut the leather strips at Heike's wrists and ankles. Heike tore off the gaffer tape and spewed out the saliva-coated balls of money. She pulled the sheet around her. Kate picked up Clifford's gun and stuck it in a bag over her shoulder. She cut the plastic wrist cuffs and the rope around my ankles.

    I showered a lot of blood off me and got dressed. Only the split eyebrow continued to bleed. Kate found a first aid kit and sealed the cut. Heike's clothes were in a plastic bag in the bathroom. She dressed on automatic. Kate cleaned the floor and asked me to wipe off all the instruments. Heike started to shake as if she was malarial.

    'What's going on?' I asked.

    'Clean up and go/ said Kate. 'KLM have confirmed my take-off for 5 a.m. There's a walk to the car.'

    She kicked the air-conditioner off. Dry thunder growled somewhere over Benin. Heike got to her feet and leaned on me. We left the house with Kate knocking the light switches off with her elbow. She picked up a torch she'd left by the front door. After the chill of the room, the heat hugged us like a duck-down duvet. We crossed the baked mud of the courtyard, closed the gates and walked down the tree-lined path next to the lake. There were no lights around the lake. The storm was closer. The lightning flickered longer and the thunder rumbled nearer.

    Kate gave Heike the cigarettes and told her to light one up for her and anyone else who needed the calm. She kept her distance, the gun still in her right hand, her finger on the trigger guard, the torch in her left armpit, shining on the path. The lightning shattered the dark long enough to show her face, her eyes fixed open, the brain engaged elsewhere, her mouth open a crack where the cigarette burned. She was going to tell us something and I couldn't be bothered to tell her we didn't want to know.

    'I'm not a very impressive person,' she said slowly, the line coming out of the dark like a stage prompt. 'I have my weaknesses.'

    'Don't we all?' said Heike.

    'But they don't screw up your life like they have mine.'

    'They haven't yet.'

    'If I told you…' She stopped herself. 'Not if… I'm going to tell you something you won't understand, that pretty people don't understand. Why I…' She drew on the cigarette, trying to get it all in the right order. 'Pretty people don't know what it's like to be missed, I mean, overlooked, not noticed. I've watched them, the pretty people, sitting in cafes, standing around in bars, hotel lobbies, at parties, weddings, the races, even funerals, for God's sake… They're always getting something. They're always getting seen, they're always getting touched, things are said to them… They get given to. They get attention. I never had that. I'd been hungry for it all my life until I met Stan, Steve, whatever you call him. He said things to me, nice things, he looked at me, he touched me, he made me feel… He let me know what it was like to be a beautiful woman. You don't understand that, do you? Sometimes I don't. Sometimes when I stopped to think how much I was paying for it, I really didn't understand it either. And Christ, did I pay for it. Everyday I paid for it. I've had to turn my back on some terrible things. I've waited for some very long nights to be over. I've spent a lifetime and a half scared to death. And this… now… this was supposed to be the end. The death of the old Stan Davidge. The end of fear. And it happened. Everything was going to plan. His plan. With me out of it.' She straightened the torch, drew on the cigarette again. The trees on the other side of the lake rushed with the wind and settled.

    'He lied to me. He thinks after twenty years he can still lie to me and I don't know it. I let him do it. I let him get away with it. He's lied to me about his business, he's lied to me about the women, he used to lie to me about whether he'd been to the fucking bank or not. He lied to me about killing Françoise Perec and Gildas Sologne. He lied to me about Nina Sorvino. And I let myself believe him, and I let myself believe him again and again, because I wanted to be with him… But,' she said, through a long, exhausted, predictable sigh, 'I found the suitcase with the money. I found the two airline tickets, one with his new name - Michael Caswell, the other with Nina Sorvino's name on it. It was there waiting in his room, waiting for me to leave, waiting for me to be out of the picture. Then I realized it wasn't me, wasn't just me… that he's planning his new life with Nina bloody Sorvino and - this is when you know you're doing the world a favour - he's fucking Franqoise Perec while he's doing it. And after that he can sit there and watch her being killed

    She'd already smoked her cigarette down to the filter. She threw it down the path, the tip splintering into sparks. She asked Heike for another. The thunder and lightning of a different storm crackled in the distance somewhere out to sea.

    'I've done a lot for my husband. I've put up with a lot. I used to get sick from all the police pressure. I hated the types he had to deal with. Strong and nasty with tinted glasses and too much jewellery and a fondness for small children.' The lightning etched her face out of the night for a moment and it broke whatever thready line of thought was going through her. 'I shot him,' she said. 'I shot him where it didn't hurt. I shot him how he said to shoot people. Don't think about it. Bang. Next. He's in the bath. When you left he came looking for me. Calling me in his soft voice, using his pet name for me. Chicken. When I heard that, I knew. I waited for him in the dark room, his voice getting closer. The smell of his new woman's perfume still up my nose. I turned the light on and I didn't give him time to smile.'

    The thunder crashed almost overhead, and the trees roared in the wind blowing across the lake. She threw away her newly lit cigarette in disgust.

    'I heard Clifford putting you in his car, I followed in Elizabeth's. Clifford's insane,' she said, in case we hadn't realized it. 'He's been on the brink for some time. If he hadn't been married to Elizabeth, he'd have been put away a long time ago.'

    'What was he doing here?'

    'He was a New York banker who laundered drug money until they cracked down on it. The bank let him go and nobody would touch him. He had a reputation. He liked hurting women. When he was powerful in the bank because of the drug money they put up with him. They knew what he was doing, but all these guys are into something. When the drug money went, he was out. He picked up the Lomé job through Awolowo, who pushed money through him in the old days.'

    'What's the connection between Steve and Clifford?'

    'Stan knew Clifford since he came down a couple of years ago to put a Nigerian connection into his European operation. They just teamed up again.'

    Kate's mind wandered off and we finished the walk to the car in silence, the storm shunting around in the background, hanging off for the moment but building. Kate got in and rolled down the window, asking Heike for the cigarettes. 'I can't trust you not to call the police. Maybe I deserve it but I'm not spending any more time in this place than I have to. You're walking from here.'

    'Where's the money?'

    'Goodbye.'

    'You're taking it with you?'

    She nodded once as she closed the window and then drove back to the guest house to turn around. A few minutes later, she floated past us, staring straight ahead. The red taillights disappeared into the trees. The lightning whited Heike out, the clouds boiled overhead before returning to a deeper black. The thunder woke up in long, lazy, discontented growls, stretching itself out, its bones and tendons cracking further and further away to some distant point over the sea where the last joint in the furthest reaching knuckle clicked.

    I had a lot to say to Heike. She had more to say to me but not what I wanted to hear. I took hold of her hand and she didn't bat me away. My eyes, just used to the dark, could see her, with her hair blowing across her face, her eyebrows questioning, her slim white shoulders, tired. I pulled her to me and didn't get a dead leg from it. We held each other, not with the usual urgency and desire but something better. She pressed her face into my neck and whispered: 'I've been waiting for hours.'

    'It took some time.'

    She leaned back from me and held my beaten head in her hands, but softly so I only winced from what she might have done.

    'When she was talking about the pretty people, she didn't mean you,' she said. I laughed. She smiled and then wiped it off her face. 'Don't think, for a moment, I've forgiven you.'

    'It hadn't crossed my mind.'

    'That's good,' she said, letting me go.

    'I've got a lot of work to do, I take it?'

    'A life's work…' she said. 'Maybe more.'

    The lightning flashed overhead. Wild and angry, it hovered so that the whole lake burned itself on my retina. After a fraction of a second, something thumped the air hard in the gut and the thunder cracked like a rock split down its back. Another stronger wind rushed across the lake, the water chopped up and Heike's dress snapped like a flapped flag. A single drop of water hit me on the back and then warm rain poured down in sheets.