A Good Day To Die

by Simon Kernick

  I’d taken the day off and was in no mood to hurry back to our place, so when I’d paid the bill and driven back into Puerta Galera, I turned south instead of taking the road north to Sabang, and drove along the winding and potholed cliff-top coast road in the direction of Calapan.

  And all the time I was thinking.

  6

  It was early evening and already dark by the time I returned to the Big La Laguna Dive Lodge, the place I now called home. It was only a small hotel, with sixteen whitewashed guest rooms arranged round three sides of a tiny courtyard, containing an even tinier pool. In front of the courtyard, facing directly onto the beach, was our open-air bar and restaurant, and next door to that was the dive shop we ran. We’d given the whole place a complete refit and paint job when we’d bought it, and had even gone so far as installing expensive rattan furniture in the rooms and the drinking and eating areas, and although I say so myself, the place looked good.

  My room was right at the back of the hotel and faced straight into a Filipino family’s apartment, but since I didn’t spend much time in it, the view didn’t really bother me. I went straight up to it now, saying hello to a couple of our guests on the way, and showered and changed, before going back out to locate Tomboy.

  I found him in the back room of the dive shop, sitting at the table with a load of paperwork spread out in front of him. He had a half-full bottle of San Miguel and a crumpled pack of Marlboros within easy reach. On seeing me come in, he smiled expectantly. ‘How’s it going, mate? I was beginning to get worried about you. It all went all right, didn’t it?’

  I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me, a signal that we could talk. ‘It’s all done.’

  He nodded appreciatively. ‘Good. Now we can get back to running this place. Did you get rid of everything?’

  I told him I had and he asked me whether it had been in the place we’d discussed.

  I nodded.

  ‘You did a good job, Mick,’ he said, calling me by my nickname, and sounding not unlike a man I used to do work for back in London. ‘And it’s going to tide us over for a long time. We won’t have to do it again.’

  I felt like taking him up on the ‘we’ bit, seeing as he hadn’t done a lot, but I didn’t bother. I was too tired for an argument. ‘When are we going to get the balance of the cash?’

  ‘As soon as he’s seen the photos. You took ’em all right, yeah?’

  I nodded and he reached over and picked up the cigarettes, watching me with an expression that might have been sympathy. ‘It’s all over now. You can forget about it.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not over, Tomboy. Billy Warren wasn’t who he said he was. He was Billy West, a villain I had dealings with back in the old days. You must have known him. You knew every villain round our way.’

  He scrunched up his face into an expression of acute concentration. ‘The name rings a bell,’ he said after a pause, ‘but I can’t picture him. It must have been after my time.’

  ‘It wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him in at least ten years before today.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nah. Like I said, the name rings a bell, but that’s it. I honestly don’t remember him.’

  I wondered why he was lying. Tomboy had known every villain on our patch, most of whom he’d put behind bars with his information, but if he had known Slippery Billy he wasn’t saying, and I decided to let it go for now. ‘Anyway, Billy West was also a shooter on the side. He’d moved into that line of business recently, and the last job he did, the one that brought him over here, was Asif Malik.’

  ‘The two-man hit in the café?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Shit, how’s that for a coincidence?’ He shook his head, looking suitably taken aback. I decided he couldn’t have known about Slippery’s involvement in Malik’s murder, otherwise he’d never have let me near him. Tomboy had never known Malik, but he knew he’d been my partner and was a man I’d liked and respected. ‘I’m sorry about that, Mick. Or maybe I’m not. At least it gave you a reason to sort him out.’

  ‘Who’s Les Pope?’

  Tomboy sighed and lit one of his Marlboros. ‘I was afraid you’d ask that. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m interested,’ I told him. ‘Apparently, he was also the man who set up the Malik job.’

  I thought he’d resist telling me too much, but I think he saw in my expression that I wasn’t going to be fobbed off. ‘He’s a lawyer.’

  I managed an empty laugh. ‘Well, there’s a surprise.’ So at least Slippery Billy hadn’t been lying about that. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He does defence work as a solicitor, and he knows a few bad types, but he’s always kept his nose clean, so he’s never really received much attention from the law. He’s also well-spoken and well-educated, which helps.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘The usual. He defended me on a couple of cases years ago, before I knew you. We kept in touch, and I did a little bit of work for him now and again.’

  Just like Slippery had. ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘The illegal sort. Providing other clients of his with alibis, helping them out of binds. Nothing too serious, but put it this way: he’s not the sort of geezer I’d like to mess with. He knows people who could make life very difficult for you if they wanted.’

  ‘The sort who’d pay to have people killed?’

  ‘I suppose so, although I’ve got to admit it was a bit of a surprise when he rang me out of the blue last year about our man in Manila.’

  ‘He’d never asked you to get involved with anything like that before?’

  ‘No, course not.’

  I wasn’t sure I believed him. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed odd that Les Pope would have asked Tomboy to help commit murder on two occasions in the space of a year, unless he knew something about his former client that made him confident he’d go along with it. I think I’d deluded myself that Tomboy’s involvement in crime while he’d been an informant of mine back in London had always been on the periphery. I still didn’t want to believe that it had been anything more. After all, I liked the guy. He’d helped me out when he could have earned himself a lot of money by turning me in to the Philippine authorities when I first arrived here, and we’d lived cheek by jowl for the three years since. He was a friend. Even so, the doubts that had prickled away all day remained.

  ‘Why do you want to know all this, Mick?’ he asked, picking up his beer bottle. ‘What good’s it going to do? We’re thousands of miles away from Pope and London, and you know what they say. Let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘Because,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘he was responsible for killing someone I liked and respected. If it had been you he’d killed, I’d be asking the same questions.’

  ‘Keep it down, can you?’ he hissed, dragging on his cigarette.

  ‘It’s all right, I locked the front door. We can talk.’

  ‘Look, I appreciate why you’re asking the questions, but what’s done is done. You know what I’m saying? It’s spilt milk and all that. I’m sorry about Malik – I am – but nothing’s going to bring him back, and the man who pulled the trigger ain’t no more, so let’s just forget about it, eh?’

  ‘That’s easier said than done.’

  He took a swig of beer, banged the bottle down on the table and stood up, craning forward in my direction. When he spoke, his voice was a forced whisper. ‘What the fuck are you going to do, Mick? Go back to London and pop Pope? Then get on a plane like nothing’s happened and fly back here?’ He raised his hands, palms outwards, in a gesture of ‘What more can I say?’ ‘It don’t work like that. You’re a wanted man in London; chances are you’ll be picked up before you even locate him, let alone pull the trigger. And if that happens you ain’t ever going to see the outside of a nick again, are you? Not with your record. They’ll throw away the key. Are you willing to risk all that just to kill the bloke who had something to do with organizing the hit on some
one who you worked with once, but ain’t seen in over three years? Because I’m telling you, mate, if that’s the case, it ain’t worth it. Honestly.’

  He was right, I knew that. And for exactly those reasons. In the end, it was far too risky. I’d built up my life here. I was happy, and even on those days when I got tired of the heat and the sight of palm trees, it was still a vastly preferable alternative to the inside of a cold English prison. Plus, I told myself for maybe the thousandth time in my life, injustices are perpetrated every day by people who will never be brought to book for their crimes. Take most politicians, for a start. I couldn’t kill them all. Why tear apart my whole life just to get at one person, when there’d be a dozen more waiting to take his place?

  Because Malik was my friend.

  Because he was a good man.

  Because I was not.

  ‘Ah, forget it,’ I sighed. ‘I’m just talking.’

  ‘I know it’s pissed you off. I can’t believe it myself, as it happens. Small fucking world.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and got back down to business. ‘You got the key to Warren’s room? I’m sending Joubert over later to clear it out.’

  I fished it out of my pocket and handed it to him, disappointed that his mind was already on other things. It struck me then that I didn’t really know Tomboy Darke at all, even after all these years, and it was a thought that depressed me, because it exposed my failings as much as his.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, taking the key and finishing his beer. ‘Let’s go get you a drink.’

  I followed him back through the dive shop and next door to the bar, where, not for the first time in my life, the booze beckoned invitingly. For the moment, at least, I’d try and forget the ignominious fate of Slippery Billy West and those he’d murdered back in the old country.

  7

  But sometimes it’s not so easy to forget.

  The days passed and life carried on as usual. It was late November, the beginning of the drier, cooler season in Mindoro, and the lodge was about three-quarters booked, so there was more than enough to keep me busy. We had staff who did the cooking and cleaning, but now and again I helped run the bar, and most days I’d take groups of divers out on our outrigger to the many dive sites that littered the craggy Sabang peninsula, and which most of our guests were here to see. Diving had become something of a passion for me since coming to the Philippines. I’d learned while we’d been in Siquijor and was now a qualified instructor, unlike Tomboy, who couldn’t even swim and had to make do with running the shop and doing the books.

  In the week after Slippery’s death, I took divers out every day, enjoying the opportunity to immerse myself in the island’s warm, clear waters and forget the torments that were beginning to wear me down. It’s easy when you’re underwater. It’s quiet, for a start. There’s no one to hassle to you, and there are enough breathtaking sights amongst the fish-covered reefs and canyons to take your mind off even the largest of troubles. The only problem is there’s only so much time you can spend down there before your air runs out and it’s time to come back to reality. And reality for me meant remembering Malik as a living, breathing, talking person, and remembering what had happened to him, and my own very indirect part in it.

  I couldn’t get it out of my head, no matter how hard I tried. One night in the week after Slippery’s death, I had a dream. It was an almost exact replica of an incident that had occurred not long after Malik and I had started working together, about four years back. At the time, I hadn’t been too sure about my new recruit. A five-foot-eight, slightly built Asian university graduate, who was already shooting up the ranks even though he was barely in his mid-twenties, I’d already come to the conclusion that he was only there to make up the ethnic numbers. So when we did our first op together, a raid on the home of a habitual burglar named Titus Bower, I decided to test my new partner’s mettle and see if he was more than just a prime example of affirmative action and Met Police political correctness.

  Bower lived in a small, terraced house with a shoebox-sized rear garden that backed onto an alley. I was leading the team sent out to arrest him, which sounds a bit more glamorous than it actually was, as there was only Malik, me, and two of the station’s uniforms. Since I knew that Bower might well make a run for it, I decided to post an officer at the rear of the property to intercept him. Ordinarily, I’d have used one of the bigger guys for this, but instead I chose Malik, much to his surprise and the surprise of the other two on the op. He didn’t complain, though, I remember that. Just did what I’d asked, and when the rest of us had knocked on the front door and Bower had opened it a few inches, realized who we were and made a dash out the back, Malik had been there to greet him.

  It had been a one-sided contest. Running through Bower’s cluttered hallway in hot pursuit, I watched as our suspect tore open the rear door and charged straight into Malik, knocking him down onto his back and literally running right over him like something out of a cartoon, his Nike trainer trampling Malik’s face as the poor sod tried without success to tell him he was under arrest. Bower was a big guy, and he’d run from us before, so I knew I’d been unfair on my new partner, but the thing that I remember about the incident was that Malik hadn’t given up. Although shocked and probably in a lot of pain, he’d grabbed hold of Bower’s ankle as he’d come past, and had refused to let go. Bower had staggered along the garden, struggling to shake Malik off, and had even tried to kick him in the head (an act that had caused him to lose his balance and fall over, much to our mirth). But Malik had grimly held on to that ankle right up until the moment we’d had Bower in cuffs, and I thought that there probably weren’t that many coppers out there with that level of determination. He’d had to go to hospital for treatment to the injuries he’d suffered, which included a fractured cheekbone, and though I never apologized for putting him in the firing line (and he never held it against me, either), I always treated him with respect after that.

  In my dream that night, the whole event played out exactly like it had happened that cold winter morning four years ago, except for one thing. As I’d come out the back door and seen Malik holding on to Bower’s ankle, I’d produced a gun from my pocket and had started shooting. I’d hit Bower four, five, six times (I can’t honestly remember the exact number), killing him instantly, but somehow one of the bullets had gone astray and hit Malik in the head, killing him too. He hadn’t even screamed. Like Slippery Billy West, he’d simply fallen on his side and lain still. Then everything had stopped and I’d stared at what I’d done for an extremely long moment while the two uniforms stood silently on either side of me, one with his gloved hand on my upper arm as if effecting an arrest, before finally and mercifully I’d woken up.

  I don’t know how an expert would have interpreted that dream, but I knew exactly what it told me. That I was going to be tormented for God knows how long if I didn’t do something about what had happened to him. For all Tomboy’s arguments – and there were many – I simply couldn’t let it go.

  It was still there at the back of my mind a week after that. Every day I checked the Internet for news of a breakthrough in the case. Whenever I could, I checked the papers. But there was nothing, and I had little doubt that by shooting Billy West I’d severed the last thread of an investigation six thousand miles away. Here I was, living it up in paradise, staring at the same gorgeous scenery day in, day out while Malik rotted in the ground, Les Pope counted his money, and whoever had wanted my former colleague exterminated in the first place walked round scot-free.

  I also wanted to know why he’d had to die. What did he know, or had he done, that had put him on a collision course with Pope’s clients, the same people who’d wanted Slippery Billy out of the way? Plainly, they were people with power and influence, as well as access to intelligence; people who thought they could do whatever they pleased.

  I wanted to find them.

  I wanted to find them, and I wanted to kill them.

  I knew it would be dangerous to go ba
ck home – there was no getting around that – but not impossible. Three years had passed. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge; a lot more killers had emerged into the public consciousness; September the Eleventh had left the watchful amongst us looking in different places for our villains. Three years was a lifetime in the multimedia click-on-a-button world that I’d left behind, and Dennis Milne, copper turned hitman, was part of a dim and distant past that no one was keen to resurrect.

  So I made my decision.

  Late on a Wednesday evening twelve days after the death of Billy West, and with the balance of the money for that contract now paid, I found Tomboy sitting in near darkness at a table facing the sea in the lodge’s empty open-air restaurant, the remains of a San Miguel in front of him. He’d been working the bar that night so I knew he wasn’t drunk. Joubert, one of the kitchen staff, was cleaning some glasses out of earshot. I could have got a drink if I’d wanted one, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down next to Tomboy and said I was going home.

  Tomboy shook his head wearily and gave me a look of deep disappointment that seemed to accentuate every line on his face. It made him look five years older. The same conversation we’d had on the day of the Billy West killing then began to play out, but it didn’t last anything like as long because this time he could see that I’d made up my mind. He called me a fucking idiot. ‘Look what you’ve got here,’ he declared, waving his arms expansively.