The Payback (19 page)

Only when we were back on the street did Tina finally speak. ‘That was horrible,’ was all she said as we walked down towards the main road, ignoring the hawkers.

‘It had to be done.’

‘Did it? I don’t see that we’re any further forward. That kind of description hardly narrows down our list of suspects.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ I said, turning towards her. ‘I know exactly who he’s talking about.’

‘Who?’

‘My old business partner. Tomboy Darke.’

I’d booked us into separate rooms in a small, family-run guesthouse in one of the less touristy areas of Manila, paying in cash so we couldn’t be traced. On the way there I told Tina about how I’d fallen out with Tomboy.

‘He was always a rogue and a liar. But he was a character too, and I never had him down as anything more than a petty criminal with a bit more ambition than most. We were good mates as well as business partners. But when I went back to the UK to find out who killed my old colleague, I discovered a link between Tomboy and the group of paedophiles Wise was involved with. As far as I’m aware, he was never one of them, but it was Tomboy who got rid of the body of Heidi Robes. If it had been anyone else, I would have gone after him. As it was, I told him that if I ever clapped eyes on him again, he’d be a dead man.’

‘So he knew Wise?’

I let out a deep breath, still thrown off-balance by what I’d just found out. ‘I guess he must have done.’

‘Do you think he knew it was you he was delivering the gun to?’

I’d been wondering about that. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I don’t think he’d have done it. But the thing is, he’s involved, which means we need to pay him a visit.’

‘Have you any idea where he’s based these days?’

‘He used to live in Mindoro. We both did. It’s about three hours south of here, so it’s as good a place to start as any.’ I looked at my watch. We were outside the guesthouse now and it was dark. ‘It’s a bit too late to go now, but do you want to take a trip down south tomorrow morning?’

She eyed me warily, as if still unsure of my intentions. In all honesty, I couldn’t blame her. Finally, she nodded.

I asked her if she fancied joining me for a bite to eat, keen to demonstrate that I wasn’t some kind of monster, but I wasn’t surprised when she said no.

‘I’m tired and jetlagged,’ she said. ‘I just need to sleep.’ As if to reinforce the point, she yawned. ‘I’ll meet you here in the morning. Make it nine. That’ll give me time to get myself together.’

‘Sure. And, Tina? Trust me. Please. I know it’s not easy right now, but I’m not going to do anything to harm you. I promise.’

‘I’m going to have to trust you, aren’t I?’ She was looking me in the eye, her face set hard. ‘Look, I appreciate the fact that you didn’t pull the trigger when you had a chance, but that doesn’t change the fact that I despise you for all the things you’ve done. And I always will. Make sure you don’t forget that.’

And with that, she turned away and walked inside.

I watched her go in grim, shameful silence. I was a pariah, a man who could expect sympathy from no one. It was a painful thought, but one I’d become used to; yet sometimes I still felt misunderstood. Because the fact was, I had a conscience. I’d always had one. I was no sociopathic killing machine, whatever the tally of the men who’d died by my hand might suggest. I’d been a good
cop once. I still wanted to make the world a better place, even in my darkest moments. And, in the end, it was because I still cared that I found myself in the position I was in, defying the one person with the power to destroy me.

Bertie Schagel not only knew my true identity, it was he who’d created my fake one as well. He knew what I looked like, and on more than one occasion he’d suggested that he’d had photos taken of me at our meetings that could easily be released to the police if he wanted them to be. I suspected he also tracked my movements through the ID, which wouldn’t have been that hard, and meant that he knew I lived in Luang Prabang. In short, he owned me, and without his help or the fake ID I was effectively trapped in the Philippines.

My only hope was that he wouldn’t want to betray me to the police, just in case it somehow backfired on him. That said, he would certainly want me out of the way, and the best way to do that would be to kill me. I knew I wasn’t the only killer on his books, and certainly not the cruellest. The decapitated Russian woman in Kuala Lumpur was a perfect illustration of that. If I were Schagel, I would send someone else to kill Tina, then me as well.

All this meant we had to move fast. But as I checked the phone I’d bought the previous day, I saw that I had three missed calls from blocked numbers, which meant Schagel had been calling me, no doubt hunting for an update on Tina’s status. I’d had the phone on silent, because I’d been putting off talking to him for as long as possible, but I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. It was only a matter of time before he found out that I’d gone over to the other side.

Before I called him, I went to an internet café across the street and got online. It had always been a habit of mine, since I’d begun
to work for Schagel, not to read anything about the individuals I’d killed once the job was done, because I never liked to know too much about those whose lives I’d ended. But tonight I was making an exception. I needed to reassure myself that, by sparing Tina’s life and effectively destroying any hope of a comfortable retirement in the rolling hills of Laos, I’d made the right decision.

I Googled O’Riordan’s name and read everything I could about him, concentrating particularly on the articles that, if Tina was to be believed, had ended up getting him killed. He’d written three on the disappearance of the thirteen-year-old Danish girl, Lene Haagen, from her Manila hotel room in 2008, all within a month of her disappearance. A photo of Lene appeared in one of them. She was pretty, with lots of blonde curly hair, and had a big gap-toothed smile. Although no trace of her had ever been found, O’Riordan stated in his two later articles that she’d almost certainly been snatched to order on behalf of a western paedophile gang with strong connections to establishment figures within the Philippine judiciary. He provided a number of pieces of evidence to back up his claims, including the disappearance of two local girls of the same age in the previous eighteen months. Most damning of all was the death, five days after Lene’s disappearance, of the nightwatchman at the hotel from where she’d gone missing – a man O’Riordan claimed police sources had told him was a prime suspect in the case – who’d been shot dead outside his home during an apparent robbery. It looked a hell of a lot like O’Riordan was on the right track. But then the articles stopped, just like that, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t find anything more that he’d written about Lene. It was as if the world and O’Riordan had simply decided it was time to move on. I guessed that he’d been warned off by someone.

Finally, after close to half an hour on the PC, I logged out,
feeling sick about what I’d done to Patrick O’Riordan. I’d murdered a decent man. I remembered Tina’s parting words, the hardness in her voice as she’d said how much she despised me, and thought once again how badly my life had gone wrong.

When I got back up to my room, I called Bertie Schagel’s number and left a message.

He was back on the phone in the space of a minute. ‘News?’ he demanded tersely.

I kept the hatred I felt for him firmly under control. ‘I’ve lost her.’

‘How?’

I explained that when I’d got to Tina’s room, she wasn’t there. ‘I must have missed her on the elevators. I stayed inside her room for the best part of the last six hours, but she still hasn’t come back.’

Schagel cursed. ‘This I do not need. Where are you now?’

‘In the hotel lobby. That’s why I’m talking quietly.’

‘OK, here is the deal. If you want to retire, make sure you find her before midday tomorrow and eliminate her. Otherwise I will use someone who can, and our deal will be off. Call me the minute it’s done.’

He cut the connection and I stood staring at the phone for a long time, knowing I’d now burned all my bridges, and wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake. It even crossed my mind, for just a split second, to go down to Tina’s room and do what Schagel was paying me to do. But I recognized the feeling for what it was: a moment of weakness. This wasn’t the time for regrets. For the first time in a long time, it felt like I was doing the right thing.

I switched off the phone and removed the SIM before throwing it in the bin. I had no further use for it now. Then I opened the
window, bent the SIM in half, and sent it fluttering into the warm night air. I stood there looking out over the vast cluster of low-rise buildings, interspersed with the occasional tower block, that was the Manila skyline. It was an uninspiring sight that only added to my sense of utter loneliness.

In truth, I’d been upset that Tina wouldn’t join me for a meal. It had been months since I’d had female company for dinner, the last person being a middle-aged German woman called Ilsa who was on a year off following a messy divorce. She’d stayed in Luang Prabang for a month and during that time we’d had an uneasy, rather unsatisfying fling. Both of us were in need of some kind of physical closeness, and were going for the nearest available option, but there were no tears, and only the briefest of goodbyes, when she moved on to her next destination. Other than that, there’d been no one since Emma.

Emma. I started thinking about her again, as I did so often, but forced the thoughts aside. I couldn’t change the past. It was gone. Finished with. All I could do now was change the future.

Paul Wise. A man I’d never known, and whose name before today I’d heard only once. That had been on a cold winter’s night in England more than six years earlier, when I’d been told by a bleeding, broken man that he was dead. Except he hadn’t been dead. Instead, he was linked somehow to my old friend Tomboy. Linked to me too. Inextricably.

And not just for my actions of the past forty-eight hours.

You see, the first job I’d done for Bertie Schagel, shortly after he bribed the Cambodian police to release me from their custody, had been in Phnom Penh. It had involved killing a western man called Robert Sharman. All I’d known about Sharman was that he was a private detective who was snooping around where he shouldn’t have been. At the time I was just grateful to be free, and
knew that there was no point in worrying too much about what I had to do.

I’d shot him in the back of the head using a nine-millimetre pistol with suppressor, not far from the world-famous tourist bar the Heart of Darkness. He’d been drunk at the time and an easy target, stumbling into the night having just had a shouting match with a rickshaw driver. He seemed a rude, obnoxious sort, which was how I justified his killing to myself.

But when I was in the internet café earlier, I Googled the name Robert Sharman and discovered that he’d been hired by the family of missing twelve-year-old Letitia McDonald, the girl Tina claimed had been murdered by Wise, to investigate her abduction from a hotel in Phnom Penh six months earlier on a family holiday, after the local police had drawn a blank, only to be shot dead in an apparent robbery three days after arriving in the country.

That was when I realized that for the last three years, I’d been working on behalf of a cabal of child killers.

Now was my chance to make them pay for their sins.

Whatever it cost me.

Tina Boyd lay stretched out on her hotel bed, and laughed out loud.

A wanted man had tried to kill her today, and had come close to succeeding, and not only had she not handed him in to the local police, she’d actually gone into partnership with the guy. Even in a life as dramatic as hers had become these past few years, the day’s events would take some beating.

Although exhausted from all the travelling, she was still wired from the adrenalin punch of having to fight for her life only a matter of hours earlier. Once again she’d come within a whisker of death, yet somehow her luck had held out. Bizarrely, she trusted Milne. She even felt sorry for him after what he’d told her about his years on the run, particularly the woman and the unborn child he’d had to leave behind.

It was possible he could have been spinning her a yarn, of course, but Tina didn’t think so. She might have become something of a cynic over the course of her career – an inevitability, given the violence and the tragedies that the job had flung in her
face – but the heartfelt manner in which Milne had told his story rang very true. If it was an act, it was a damn good one. And the thing was, nobody she’d ever spoken to who’d known Dennis Milne had ever described him as a psychopath. They’d thought him a flawed, bitter character who’d betrayed his colleagues and his profession terribly, but still a man who’d been brought low by circumstances, rather than having started off that way.

And he was a useful, if dangerous, ally. Tina might not have agreed with his methods – putting a gun to the head of a man and scaring him so much that he wet himself was brutal in the extreme, and she’d almost intervened – but the fact was, they worked. The man had talked. Others would too. At home, Tina was constrained by a constant stream of rules and regulations, and the rights of suspects were paramount. Out here, and especially with Milne helping her, everything was far more flexible. She knew she would have to watch herself, so she didn’t cross the same line that he had all those years ago. And she knew too that she had to keep her distance from him emotionally. Milne was a criminal. She wasn’t. Their partnership was a marriage of convenience. Nothing more.