For The Death Of Me

by Jardine, Quintin

  ‘What about the lady? Ms January? She’s supposed to be here, or so Davey told us.’

  ‘No, she on Dayang, over there.’ He pointed to the smaller island. I looked across and saw, behind the landing, a silver-white beach, lined by tall coconut palms, and beyond a small wooden building, not much more than a hut. ‘I tell her she crazy; we don’t use it no more. There no water supply over there other than the rain, and toilets don’t work well, but she insist. So she take some food and water and I take her over in boat.’ He frowned across the water, then back at me. ‘Other man come looking for her earlier, in hire boat like you. I send him across, but he must have gone. Boat not there no more. Never saw him go.’

  Dylan and I exchanged glances. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Untie us,’ I told the boy. ‘We’re going across.’

  I fended the boat off then started the engine. The current was strong in the strait, flowing across us, but I leaned the cruiser into it, keeping the speed as steady as I could. When we reached the Dayang jetty, Dylan jumped ashore with the rope this time. ‘You know what we’re going to find here, don’t you?’ he murmured, as I joined him on the wooden walkway.

  ‘I fear that I do.’

  ‘Ever seen a headless woman?’

  ‘A couple of post-modernist sculptures, but never in the flesh, so to speak.’

  ‘It’s just as well oral sex is illegal in this part of the world.’

  ‘Wash your mouth out,’ I replied tersely.

  We walked up the jetty. There was a barbecue area in front of the old lodge, with a few tables and benches that hadn’t been oiled or varnished for a while. On one of the tables, there was a large blue plastic cool-box, big enough to hold a day’s supply of beer for two . . . or something else. While Mike kept an eye on the lodge, I opened it, wincing as I raised the lid, but it contained only a few frozen blue blocks; I found that I was able to breathe again.

  Dylan slid a hand into his trouser pocket and produced the gun I’d taken from Madeleine. ‘What the . . .’ I began.

  ‘So I lied,’ he said.

  The door of the lodge was barely open, no more than an inch. I don’t know what made me call out, ‘Maddy!’ but I did. Dylan gave me a sneering look, and pushed his way into the building, the tiny pistol held ready.

  There was a body on the floor, all right, but it still had its head on its shoulders. As far as I could see, it still had most of its bits: hands (one held a long, sword-like knife), feet, dull blue eye staring into the wooden floor, and its penis, for there was a pool of urine beneath it. The hair was scorched just behind its left ear, by muzzle-flash, I guessed, and a single line of dried blood ran down its neck into a very small puddle. I keep saying ‘it’, and I suppose that technically I’m correct, but it had been a ‘he’.

  It had been Sammy Grant.

  31

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Panic would seem like a logical first step,’ said Dylan.

  ‘Let’s do that on board. But first, let’s get the fuck out of here.’ There was a gun on the floor beside Sammy’s body, another Beretta, the twin of the one Tony Lee had been carrying in the Next Page. I picked it up. It must have been loaded with soft-nosed ammo, for the opposite wall was a mess. I thought I saw another eye stuck there among the gore, but I didn’t investigate.

  We didn’t high-tail it. Dylan untied, I eased the Goddess away from the landing and steered her smoothly out of the strait and past the third tiny island, which seemed to be guarding the entrance.

  Then we high-nosed it: I opened the throttle, driving the twin propellers deep as they cut through the water and thrust us back towards Mersing.

  I had my fingers crossed all the way against two possibilities: the first and less serious that we would run out of fuel, the second and more likely that the kid on Aur would decide to go across to Dayang to investigate, and that we’d find the police waiting when we got back to port.

  Fortunately, the owner had been right about the tank capacity. Even more fortunately, the kid had not been inclined to do anything that wasn’t in his job description. We made it back to Mersing by eleven and moored the Goddess in her own empty berth. The charter office was closed, so we posted the keys through the letterbox and checked the Mondeo out of the car park.

  I overtook every fucking racing Proton we encountered on the road to Johor Baharu, and we made it back to the hotel just before one. The gun? That, and the tiny one Mike had been carrying, were at the bottom of the China Sea, or on their way there, depending on how deep it was at the point at which I’d watched Dylan throw them over the side.

  In the relative safety of my suite we started to think for the first time in several hours. The first thing we contemplated was self-preservation. Jimmy Tan had given Dylan a number. ‘Day or night,’ he had said, so we took him at his word. Mike called him; I switched the phone to speaker mode as he answered.

  ‘Martin.’ His amplified voice sounded fresh, as if he had been awake. ‘What the fuck you call this time for?’

  ‘We’ve had a little trouble up in Malaysia. We got a lead to the woman and went looking for her, on an island called Aur, out past Bali fucking Hai, whatever its real name is. Someone got there before us, though.’

  ‘She dead this time, then?’

  ‘No, he is. She’s not dumb: she placed herself on a small island, in an old dive lodge, where she would see anyone approaching. When someone did show up, as soon as he stepped through the door she put one behind his ear, then took his boat and got out of there.’

  There was a long silence . . . or almost a silence: music was playing somewhere in the background. ‘The dead guy,’ Tan finally said, ‘what about him?’

  ‘He was European, Scottish. He was a guy who latched himself on to Oz and me the night we arrived, and he’s been sort of following us around ever since. His name’s Sammy Grant; at least, that’s what he said it was. He was in the Next Page when we got there, when Tony Lee was killed. He seemed nervous about being there when your lot showed up; we actually told him to get out. He stabbed the guy, and we got him out of there. Sorry, Jimmy.’

  ‘No matter, he dead now; save me the trouble of hanging him.’

  ‘Fine, but the problem is that sooner rather than later someone’s going to find him. A couple of days and the fucking smell will drift over to the big island, suppose nobody goes over before then.’

  ‘We hear rumours,’ the superintendent said slowly, ‘about a Westerner that the Triads sometimes use for business like this, when a Chinese might stand out. Never find him, though. Sammy Grant, you say?’

  ‘Age late twenties, medium height, fair hair; he told us he worked as a dealer in the DRZ Bank.’

  ‘Then they got a vacancy. No worries, Martin: I have colleague in Kuala Lumpur. I explain to him and this boy be fish food.’

  ‘You won’t tell him about me, though,’ said Dylan, quickly, ‘that I’m still alive.’

  ‘Don’t worry, boy, that secret safe with me.’

  ‘Where would she go, Jimmy, from Mersing?’

  ‘You still want to find her? Sound as if this woman don’t need help.’

  ‘I still want to find her,’ I said.

  ‘That you, Oz? You still worried about brother-in-law? ’

  ‘I made him a promise. A judge’s ex being murdered by Triads won’t make nice headlines in Scotland either.’

  ‘Maybe not. Well, she won’t come back to Singapore, that dead fucking sure. So I reckon she have to go to KL. From Mersing she get there by bus or by KTN, the national railway. Hell, she could hire car, or take taxi. Once she in KL, you lost her: there are many ways out of there. And she could be in KL by now.’

  He chuckled. ‘Go home, boys, you done here. Martin, go back be dead. Oz, go back pretend in movies. ’Bye.’ There was a click as he hung up, then a buzz.

  ‘Sounded like good advice to me, Oz,’ Dylan murmured. ‘We’ve got a better chance of finding Nemo than of tracking her down. We’ve lost her.’

  I c
ouldn’t argue with that. The thought of getting back into the Mondeo and driving to KL did flash across my mind, but I let it pass through and out the other side. Still . . .

  ‘What about the boy Sammy?’ I said. ‘Weird, him just latching on to us like that.’

  ‘Maybe, but weirdness happens sometimes. Fuck, look at you. Look at me. We’re weird, but we’re real.’

  ‘I need to know about him, though.’

  ‘Don’t look at me. I can’t help you there, not any more.’

  ‘No, but there’s someone who might: your old boss.’ I dug out my mobile and called an Edinburgh number I had stored there.

  ‘Ross,’ a voice answered smoothly.

  ‘Ricky, how goes? It’s Oz here.’

  ‘It goes fine, and so does your estate.’ Ricky’s security firm looks after Loch Lomond for us while we’re away.

  ‘Good, because my dad will be through there soon, to recuperate.’

  ‘Aye, I heard he’d been ill. He’s on the mend?’

  ‘He’s going to be fine. Listen, I’d like you to do me a favour. I’ve run across a Scots guy who says his name is Sammy Grant; claims to have left Maryhill eight years ago, when he’d have been early twenties. Can you check him out?’

  ‘A picture would help.’

  As it happened, I could do that: when we’d all had a few in the Crazy Elephant, I’d taken a couple of snaps with the camera on my mobile. Sammy had been in one of them. ‘I’ll send you what I’ve got through the phone. The quality won’t be great but you’ll be able to do something with it.’

  ‘Okay. Where are you?’

  ‘Singapore.’

  ‘Movie business?’

  ‘No, just a stag trip, scuba-diving with a pal.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had pals like that any more, not since Dylan copped it.’

  I laughed. ‘There was only one Mike Dylan, right enough. Call me on my mobile if you get anything before Wednesday. We’ll be heading back to Monaco tomorrow night.’

  I killed the call: Benny Luker was gazing at me, with a sad look in his eyes. ‘It guts me sometimes,’ he said. ‘I liked Ricky Ross, but I can never see him again, because he’s in Scotland and I can never go back there. Too many people know me. My mum’s still alive, too, and I can’t even send her a fucking birthday card. I can’t send her an anonymous bouquet of roses, for she’d wonder, and tell her friends, and they’d wonder, and soon every fucker in Edinburgh would be wondering. I’d love to go back home, Oz. I’d love to walk into my mum’s kitchen and make myself a coffee and just sit down and wait for her getting back from the shops.’

  ‘And watch her have a heart-attack when she saw you sitting there? Michael’s dead to her: that was part of the deal you made.’

  There were tears in his eyes now. ‘I know. But it’s hard, man, it’s really fucking hard.’

  ‘But you came back to us, to Susie and me.’

  ‘Because you’re not in Scotland, and because you’re the only two people in the world I can trust, other than my mum . . . and if she knew, she couldn’t keep it to herself.’

  ‘But there are others. You’re trusting Prim, and now you’re trusting Miles and Dawn. I haven’t had a chance to tell you: they’re okay with the deal. You can trust me on something too. Your mum gets a birthday card every year, and a Christmas card, and roses. She gets them from me, and every time I’m in Edinburgh, I go to see her; the last time was ten days ago.’

  The tears had escaped, two big, slow rollers. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine, man, fit as a fiddle. You know what? Once we announce this deal, once we make the movie, once your book sales shoot up as a result, and you get a chunky advance on the next one, you’ll be able to pluck her out of Edinburgh, if you wish, and have her live with you in the US.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll invite her to our place in Los Angeles. You can take it from there.’

  He frowned at me. ‘For a slightly psychopathic egomaniac who’s risen way above his station and is reaping good fortune far beyond what his talent or behaviour merit, you’re not a bad guy.’

  32

  As summings-up go, that one was pretty near the mark. ‘Doesn’t make you a bad person,’ Rod Steiger once said, in one of the greatest ad-libs ever filmed. That’s how I try to look at my less user-friendly side.

  I got some sleep; not a lot, but enough, I woke at seven thirty and went straight down to the gym, where I ran the treadmill, rowed till it hurt, then slammed a hell of a lot of weight up in the air. I was punishing myself. Why? Because I had a sense of failure, that’s why. I had seen myself going back to Scotland and handing Harvey a slim, if expensive, envelope, then watching while he reduced it to crispy black ashes. Instead I was going back with the news that his former wife . . . since he’d married the woman, he must have loved her at some point . . . was a killer, out there somewhere, on the run. Or maybe not: maybe she wasn’t running any more, maybe she’d been caught in KL and her pickled head was in some Triad chieftain’s trophy cabinet. If it was at least her hair would look good: the Philip Kingsley Trichological Centre had made sure of that. (You’re a bastard, Blackstone, you really are. No, I’m not; not that bad at any rate. We all have our own ways of dealing with horror when we meet it, that’s all.)

  I was punishing myself for giving up, too. I had met the woman; I had reached an agreement with her. There was a bond between us, a shared obligation. Just because she wasn’t in a position to honour her side, did that absolve me of mine? There was even more to it than that. Maddy January was a chromium-plated bitch, no doubt about that, but when we had met in that steaming hot place, I had seen something in her, buried pretty deep, I’ll grant you, but something I liked. Maybe she showed that to all the guys, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like the idea of someone cutting it off at source . . . or at the shoulders.

  I felt better when I’d finished: I went upstairs and rang Lufthansa to get us on to their evening flight, then called Reception and arranged a late check-out. Once I’d done all that and showered, it was nine thirty and I was ready for the day. I called Mike, but he wasn’t, so we agreed to go our separate ways and met up at five thirty, to check out, dump the bags and have a drink in Raffles before we headed for the airport.

  He mumbled something about sightseeing, but there was only one sight in the city that I wanted to see before I left, so I called her. ‘Hiya,’ I said, as she answered her mobile. ‘Are you working today?’

  ‘Reading scripts,’ Marie replied, ‘but I don’t have to. You call to tell me you leaving?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I only have a few hours left in Singapore, and I was hoping I could spend some of them with you.’

  ‘You want to get in my pants now?’ Her voice had a lovely laugh to it.

  In other circumstances I’d have said, ‘Yes,’ no hesitation. As it was I just went along for the ride, so to speak. ‘And if I did?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe still too soon.’

  ‘Let’s just meet up, then.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go to the zoo. You like animals?’

  Fact is, the animals I like most are those I eat, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I have a hire car, can I pick you up?’

  ‘No, I meet you there. I take a taxi, it’s quicker. I see you ten thirty.’

  I can take or leave zoos, leave them mostly, although I have taken the kids down to San Diego. It’s bigger than Singapore, but probably no better. Marie seemed to know it like the back of her hand. The girl in the ticket booth seemed to know her too, for she smiled at her as I bought the tickets and said something quietly in Chinese.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked, as we moved off.

  ‘She asked if you are my lover.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I said you were my friend . . . for now.’

  ‘Time we saw the zoo,’ I said, and let her lead me to the tram ride.

  We spent three hours there, getting to know every part of t
he place. There was a sound commentary on the tram, but Marie overrode it, acting as my personal guide. As you’d expect, the orang-utan, a near native, is the star of the show, but there was just about every other species of mammal on display, or so it seemed. The only part I didn’t like was the polar-bear enclosure; as I watched the poor bastard parading back and forward, forward and back, oblivious to the gawpers on the other side of the glass screen, I knew, instinctively and beyond doubt, that it had been driven quite insane.

  When we were done there, I took her for lunch. I expected her to choose a fish restaurant, but she took us to an Italian place called Al Dente, on Boat Quay, where she said they did a killer lasagne. It looked pretty good, but I passed and chose a shark steak, and a nice bottle of well-chilled Frascati to go with it.

  Our table was by the river, shaded by an umbrella but still hot. That was okay by me: too much air-con is bad for you, and probably explains why half the people in Singapore seem to suffer from fairly noisy sinus conditions.

  ‘Are you serious about the film part, Oz?’ she asked, after we had eaten and were staring into a couple of cappuccinos.

  ‘Of course. Why would I not be?’

  Her answer was a smile and a raised eyebrow.

  I replied in kind. ‘And when will you have known me long enough?’ I asked.

  She looked at me with honest open eyes. ‘I don’t know; maybe never. Or maybe this afternoon. I’m a very careful girl. I don’t know how to be impulsive, but maybe I can try.’

  I took her hand, drew her across the small table and kissed her. ‘Marie,’ I told her, ‘you go on being careful. Impulsiveness is for guys like me, not girls like you, and now even I avoid it like the plague. It can get you into a hell of a lot of trouble.’

  I said that, yet I confess that my impulse was to take her back to the hotel and make love to her until it was time to go to the airport. The harder I resisted it, the more I found myself wondering what it would be like. Resist I did, though.

  ‘The movie part is yours,’ I promised, ‘without conditions before or after the event. You give me an address where I can write to you.’