Bait

by Nick Brownlee

  ‘She is very well.’

  ‘Jemima, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A delightful name. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some tea?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  From his position deep within the busted springs of the sofa that rested against one wall of Kili’s office above the Baobab Club, Nyami watched nervously as Omu carefully watered a pot plant balanced on a filing cabinet on the other side of the room.

  ‘Citrus calamondin,’ Omu said, cradling one of the plant’s bulbous orange fruits in the palm of his hand. ‘They make delicious marmalade. Do you like marmalade, Sergeant Nyami?’

  Nyami cleared his dry throat. ‘I prefer jam.’

  ‘Ah!’ Omu exclaimed. ‘Quince? Damson?’

  ‘Strawberry is my favourite.’

  ‘Strawberry is good, but I find the manufacturers tend to add too much sugar to the mixture. Sugar is very bad for the teeth and gums.’

  In one fluid movement, Omu had crossed the room and now stood over Nyami. To his horror, Nyami saw that in Omu’s hand was a thin-bladed knife.

  ‘You should always look after your teeth and gums, Sergeant Nyami,’ Omu said. The tip of knife was now pressing lightly against Nyami’s bottom lip. ‘Let me see.’

  Nyami began to hyperventilate as he felt his lips being prised apart.

  ‘There is nothing to worry about, Sergeant,’ Omu said softly, peering into Nyami’s gaping mouth. ‘Open wide.’

  Nyami heard the tak tak of polished steel against the enamel of his molars as Omu explored the furthest recesses of his mouth. He almost gagged as the blade caressed the back of his tongue.

  ‘When was the last time you visited a dentist, Sergeant Nyami?’

  ‘Aaawwhh-gghh.’

  ‘I am no expert, but there are clearly signs of gum disease here and here.’

  Nyami squawked in agony as Omu jabbed the point of the blade between one of his back teeth and the gum wall. Then, abruptly, Omu removed the knife and wiped it on the sleeve of Nyami’s suit.

  ‘You really should visit a dentist,’ Omu concluded, as he stood up and moved across to Kili’s desk. ‘Look after your teeth and your teeth will look after you.’

  Nyami massaged his throbbing gum with his tongue and tasted coppery blood. ‘I will. Thank you, Mr Omu,’ he muttered.

  ‘Now what was it you were sent here to tell me?’

  Nyami used the seeping blood from his gum to lubricate his throat. ‘A - a body was found at Bara Hoyo this morning.’

  ‘So?’ Omu said coldly.

  ‘It had been washed up on the beach by the storm.’

  ‘So?’

  Nyami reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed Omu a folded piece of paper, a Xeroxed copy of the incident report, and a photograph of the corpse. Omu scanned both items carefully.

  ‘Like a bad penny,’ he mused. Then he said, ‘You say Jouma is investigating this case?’

  Nyami nodded.

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘I believe he has returned to the mortuary.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I - I don’t know.’

  ‘Then keep me informed, Nyami,’ Omu said smoothly. ‘Of every development.’

  Nyami flinched as Omu’s thin hand reached once again towards his khanzu - but, instead of the knife, he produced a plain envelope that he handed to the terrified detective. Inside were five US dollars.

  ‘Buy your wife a new hat, Nyami,’ he said. ‘And get yourself some dental treatment before it is too late.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Missy Meredith had a yard up at Flamingo Creek that was patrolled by six of the meanest guard dogs imaginable. Missy herself could tear a strip off anyone who got on her bad side, but that was usually her younger brother Walton. Most of the time she loved playing mother hen to the game-boat skippers who brought their boats to be fixed, and all the skippers loved Missy because she happened to be the best boat mechanic on the Kenyan seaboard and had been for forty years. She was hard not to love. In her denim overalls and baseball cap, she cut an unmistakable figure as she stomped around the workshop and the dry dock with the energy of a woman half her sixty years, yelling abuse at Walton, who she employed only because ‘he’s a useless son of a bitch who would sit on his arse all day if I wasn’t around to kick it’. A more prosaic reason was the fact that Walton was whippet-thin and was therefore able to access even the most narrow crawl spaces on a boat.

  Poor Walton was getting it in the neck that morning as Jake nosed Yellowfin round the headland and steered the launch up to the jetty.

  ‘Useless son of a bitch went all the way to town to get me some fuse boxes - comes back with the wrong sort,’ Missy explained. ‘I’d send him back, ’cept the useless son of a bitch would still get the wrong sort. I ask you, Jake, why our dear departed mother didn’t drown him at birth I will never know.’

  Almost in the same breath she turned to Sammy, who was mooring the launch, and demanded a hug. The bait boy obliged with a huge smile, and was promptly clasped to Missy’s substantial bosom.

  ‘You run along to the office and help yourself to some lemonade, understand?’ she said, pecking him on the top of the head like a chicken feeding on grits.

  They watched him go and Missy shook her head. ‘Poor little bugger. How is he coping?’

  ‘Better than I would,’ Jake admitted. ‘He still thinks Tigi will walk through the door.’

  ‘Yeah well, he just might. He just . . .’ Her voice trailed away momentarily. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you? Don’t tell me that hydraulic line is playing up again.’

  ‘Actually it’s Dennis I wanted to talk about.’

  They walked along the jetty, past the compound where Missy kept her dogs. She silenced their crazed barking with a single sharp command, and Jake told her about the visit from Chief Inspector Oliver Mugo that morning.

  ‘Mugo is a useless son of a bitch,’ Missy growled.

  ‘Tug Viljoen reckons it could have been a cigarette dropping on to a leaky fuel line.’

  ‘Tug Viljoen? What would that reptile-lover know about anything?’

  ‘I heard Dennis was finding it hard to make ends meet,’ Jake said.

  Missy laughed harshly. ‘Who isn’t round here?’

  ‘I mean, to the extent that he couldn’t afford to keep his boat serviced properly.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Rumours have been flying around. You know what the crowd at Suki Lo’s is like.’

  ‘Yeah. I know what that crowd are like all right.’ She stopped and looked into Jake’s face with clear blue eyes. ‘Let me tell you something, Jake, and this is what I told that useless son of a bitch from Malindi police. There was nothing wrong with Martha B, and there was nothing wrong with Dennis Bentley’s bank account. Those fuel lines were six weeks old and cost ten thousand dollars. I should know, because I fitted them myself and Dennis paid for them in cash. What happened out there was no accident. If a cigarette caused that boat to blow up, then it’s because some son of a bitch lit it with a stick of dynamite.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was all very strange, Inspector Jouma thought, and not a little unpleasant. In fact, as he sat in the shade of a palm tree in the walled compound of Fort Jesus, he felt quite unable to eat his simple snack of goat’s cheese and half a tomato. He had always been a bird-like eater, but this whole affair had suddenly made him lose his appetite completely. He placed his food on the bench beside him and stood up.

  Jouma liked to come to the fort. Positioned on a vast coral outcrop overlooking the Old Town on one side and the ocean on the other, it was one of the few places of quietude in a city that he found increasingly hectic and suffocating. Within its thick walls, Jouma could be alone with his thoughts - a rare pleasure when one shared an office with Sergeant Nyami. But today, as he watched the sunlight glinting on the battery of Portuguese cannon still pointing out to sea after four hundred years, Jouma felt as t
hough his thoughts were stalking him like the muggers who lurked in the city after dark.

  Until today his casebook had been frustrating but straightforward. A sheaf of petty offences to filter through the law courts, an English fishing-boat skipper who still thought he was a detective in the Metropolitan Police, and an Old Town ne’er-do-well called George Malewe who had failed to turn up to his son’s birthday party.

  The body washed up by the storm had changed all that.

  He reached in his jacket pocket and removed a small wooden bead. The bead was hand carved, with a zigzag pattern around its circumference. It was part of a necklace that belonged to Agnes Malewe. An hour earlier, Agnes had been methodically wrapping and unwrapping the beads around her fingers as she waited at the hospital mortuary to identify the remains of her missing husband. As the black rubber bag had been carefully unzipped to reveal George Malewe’s ravaged face, the necklace had suddenly snapped in her hands, spilling beads on to the linoleum floor.

  Jouma heard shrill laughter and looked up to see a white woman tourist posing for a photograph on the ramparts. She was wearing a red vest with a slogan across the chest that read FCUK. The slogan meant nothing to Jouma, but then he could never understand the need of Europeans to have writing all over their clothes. Why, when they had invented the suit, they chose to dress like vagrants when they came abroad was something he could never fathom. Jouma’s own suit had been made in Jermyn Street in London, a fact of which he was inordinately proud - although, of course, it had been through at least six owners before it had reached his back.

  As he watched the woman, it galled him to think that the vest and its slogan was probably worth more money than Agnes Malewe and little Benjamin would ever see in their lifetime. Especially now George was dead. George the breadwinner. Poor deluded George, who thought himself a tausi - a strutting peacock - like Michael Kili, the man who pocketed all but a pittance of the money George conned for Agnes and Benjamin.

  Slain, Agnes had said that day in the office. My husband is slain.

  Yes. But where, and by whom, and why?

  These were fundamental questions that every detective was trained to ask. But what happened when the answers made no sense at all?

  Day Five

  Chapter Twenty

  The Capitoline in Rome had always been one of Whitestone’s favourite European museums. Housed within two Renaissance palaces, overlooking the ruins of the ancient Forum and dwarfed by the marble obscenity that was the Vittorio Emanuele II monument, it seemed to sum up the very essence of the Italian nation: proud and all-conquering, yet schizophrenic and vainglorious.

  The flight from Amsterdam had not suffered the delays he had anticipated, so he was early for his meeting. That was good. His trip so far had been frenetic. He needed a little down time, and where better than Rome? He followed the crowds meandering along the Via Sacra and climbed the Capitoline Hill itself. Two thousand years of pilfering and neglect, allied with incompetent nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century archaeology, had left little but pockmarked columns, empty shells and random piles of ancient debris of what had once been the very centre of the known world. Yet, as he paused at the top of the Capitoline and gazed back towards the Colosseum, Whitestone did not find it hard to imagine what this place must have looked like in its prime: the temples and the triumphal arches gleaming in the sunshine, the Forum packed with people of all nations, a glorious mish-mash of cultures drawn to Rome like moths to a flame.

  At the top of the hill, he crossed the piazza, skirting the bronze replica of Marcus Aurelius astride his horse, and paid for a ticket to the Palazzo dei Conservatori. For a blissful hour he wandered through ornate high-ceilinged rooms filled with ostentatious Bernini sculptures, vast frescoes depicting Rome’s history, and brooding religious canvases by Caravaggio, Tintoretto and Titian. Then he crossed the piazza once again and entered the Palazzo Nuovo. This second part of the museum housed many hundreds of statues and busts, some recognisable as Roman emperors and leading figures of the ancient world, others whose names and lives had been forgotten in the centuries that had passed since their death.

  Whitestone checked his watch and sat down on a bench opposite a room that was lined with the heads of ancient philosophers. Presently, a man sat down beside him. He was heavyset, with steel-grey hair and thick-framed spectacles. When he spoke it was with the insistent tone of someone who wanted to be heard, but not overheard.

  ‘I’ve been hearing good reports about you,’ the man said, getting straight down to business. ‘The organisation are particularly impressed with your dealings with our Russian clients.’

  ‘I was concerned I might be stepping on somebody’s toes,’ Whitestone said, disguising his pleasure.

  ‘Don’t worry about other people’s toes; just worry about keeping on yours. I heard about Barclay.’

  ‘I felt I had no choice.’

  ‘Of course not. You did the right thing. English prick. Remind me to sign you up as a partner next time there’s a golf day. By all accounts you’ve got a good swing.’

  The man laughed perfunctorily, and Whitestone smiled.

  ‘In any case,’ the man continued, ‘that sector is a busted flush. Too many people are asking too many questions, and too many people are opening their mouths. Nobody knows the meaning of the word discretion in southern Europe any more.’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  The man nodded. ‘That’s why we need to keep pushing our routes to the east. The Russian - what’s his name?’

  ‘Dzasokhov.’

  ‘Yes. The organisation are very pleased that you managed to hook him.’

  ‘I just think he appreciates customer care, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, he’s not the only one.’

  Whitestone’s ears pricked up.

  ‘Dzasokhov has got some pretty high-powered friends who have expressed an interest in our East African product. And we are talking blue chip-clients here. How quickly can you get a shipment organised?’

  ‘Everything is in place,’ Whitestone said quickly. ‘Two, three days.’

  There was a pause as a couple of sightseers edged their way around the display before exiting back into the main hallway.

  ‘I heard there had been a problem in Kenya,’ Whitestone’s contact said.

  Damn. ‘A little local difficulty, that’s all. A courier who went off-message. The team down there are highly experienced. They already have a replacement. ’

  ‘Good - because this order comes right from the top. And I want you to take personal charge of it.’

  ‘Of course. Do you have the details?’

  The man handed Whitestone an envelope. Whitestone always thought it touching that, in these technological times, the organisation still preferred good old pen and paper. He opened the envelope and digested the contents. But, as he read, his face registered surprise.

  ‘Twenty. Is that all?’

  ‘It’s just a taster. I have no doubt you’ll make sure they are of the very highest quality.’

  ‘That will not be a problem. I’ll arrange a meeting with Kanga at once.’

  ‘OK,’ the man said. Then he smiled paternally. ‘This could be the leg-up you’ve been waiting for. Do it right and this job’s yours.’

  ‘I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Nah, don’t be so modest. You deserve the recognition. Me? I’m getting out just as soon as I can recommend a replacement. So don’t fuck this up, d’you hear?’

  ‘I won’t,’ Whitestone said.

  The man stared thoughtfully at the rows of sight-less busts. ‘You think, if I ask nicely, they’ll do me one of these when I retire? It would look much nicer on my mantelpiece than a carriage clock.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  One hour after she heard her father was missing, presumed dead, Martha Bentley had hauled Lloyd Jasper into her office overlooking Battery Park and fired his ass on the spot.

  Lloyd’s first reaction had been to laugh. After all, he was a senior vice preside
nt of Rubinstein Zeigler, a man with more than forty years’ experience of high-profile corporate legal representation; a man who, furthermore, was brokering deals on Wall Street when Martha Bentley was still on the goddamned teat.

  When Martha pointed out that he had also been systematically creaming off high-number percentage points from those deals, Lloyd had really lost his cool. How long had she been with the company? Five minutes? What the fuck did she know about how things worked around here? If there was anything to discuss, then he would discuss it with Carl Rubinstein and not some snot-nosed pup from Yale.

  At which point Martha informed him that she had graduated summa cum laude from Michigan State, and secondly that it was Carl Rubinstein who had instructed her to fire him.

  Lloyd’s face had turned as grey as his bouffant hair then.

  The typing pool was in tears at the news, and so were some of the longer-serving staff. The others just glared at her through the glass walls of her office with a mixture of fear and hostility, as if she were some poison-fanged snake in a box.

  Martha couldn’t have cared less what they thought. Lloyd Jasper might have been Mr Popular in the office, but he was also a crook. The worst kind of crook, too. The kind who actually thought he wasn’t. When Lloyd took his hush money from the conglomerates, he believed it was OK because backhanders had been greasing the wheels of industry since forever. It didn’t matter to Lloyd that somewhere down the line some small business or hard-pressed individual was going to the wall as a result. Out of sight was out of mind, even for a nice guy like Lloyd who gave handsomely to the Christmas collection every year and who sponsored a war orphan in Afghanistan.

  No, Martha wouldn’t be shedding a tear for Lloyd Jasper, even if he was just a few months off retirement.

  But then Martha wasn’t the type who shed a tear easily.

  The news that her father was most probably dead had numbed her, but only in the way the death of anyone familiar derails the senses. At no stage did she feel the overwhelming grief of a bereaved daughter. She wasn’t even sure how a bereaved daughter was supposed to act.