Bait

by Nick Brownlee

  ‘OK. So can I get one of your boats? A fast one? I’d really like a fast one.’

  Arrogant prick. ‘Not a problem, Mr Noonan. If you would care to see our concierge, he will be delighted to arrange transport for you.’

  ‘Thanks, buddy. I appreciate it.’

  Buddy? ‘No problem, sir. Enjoy your day. And I trust we will see you both for dinner this evening?’

  ‘Count on it,’ Noonan said, gesturing with his finger as if it was a pistol.

  Getty could feel a patina of cold sweat materialising on his brow and, as Noonan sauntered away, he wondered how the hell he had let himself get involved in this industry, this act. As always, he knew the answer all too clearly.

  His greed. His stupidity.

  His cell phone rang.

  ‘What?’ he snapped, without bothering to check the number in the window.

  ‘Captain!’ the voice exclaimed at the other end. ‘How are you!’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Getty scurried out of the atrium and upstairs to the landline in his office. ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for two days!’

  ‘Bit difficult to talk now, Captain. I’m driving.’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we will.’

  ‘When, dammit?’

  ‘Sooner than you think. You in your office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then take a look out of your window.’

  Getty let the phone slip from his ear and hurried to the window. His office was on the first floor of the hotel, and from here he could look out over the clear-glass reception portico and beyond to the main gates. A revoltingly unwashed jeep was barrelling along the Tarmac drive, making a mockery of the speed bumps and chewing up the edges of the manicured lawn that had cost Getty fifty dollars a square foot to import from Ireland.

  He swore and grabbed the receiver. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  Below, the jeep had stopped directly outside the entrance to the reception and the driver was climbing out, cell phone still clamped to his ear.

  ‘Do I leave the keys in the ignition or do I give them to the kaffir?’ Tug Viljoen asked, peering up through the glass and waving at Getty.

  ‘And who the fuck is that with you?’ Getty demanded.

  Viljoen’s passenger was gingerly extricating himself from the vehicle with the aid of an umbrella. With his scruffy clothes and beaten-up face, he looked like the sort of down-and-out bum the security guards were forever moving from the hotel’s private stretch of beach.

  ‘This is Harry from Flamingo Creek,’ Viljoen said. ‘He’s in the market for a little courier work.’

  ‘Are you fucking mad?’

  ‘Easy, Captain,’ Viljoen said calmly, but his eyes were like lasers burning through the portico awning. ‘I don’t have to remind you that we are understaffed and up against a deadline.’

  Getty watched Viljoen hand his keys dismissively to the African doorman. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘That’s all right. Now why don’t you put a call through to that bar manager of yours and tell him to set the beers up. On second thoughts, tell him to make one of them a large bourbon. Harry here is in need of a hair of the dog.’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  In Jouma’s locker at Mama Ngina Drive was a wooden box with a padlock. Inside the box was a .38 detective special handgun and six bullets. The weapon was standard issue to any officer of inspector rank or above, and Jouma had been given his ten years earlier. Ever since, it had remained in the box in the locker, because Jouma had believed that any policeman who felt it necessary to walk around with a pistol was no better than a common Mombasa hoodlum.

  That morning, as he loaded the bullets into the chamber of the .38, the inspector concluded sadly that such high-minded nobility was nothing more than pitiful self-delusion. Yesterday, Michael Kili had despatched two men to kill him. They had failed. Kili would not make the same mistake again. Which was why Jouma had also taken the precaution of signing out a Zylon protective vest. The vest, designed to stop bullets, was bulky and uncomfortable. But under his Burberry raincoat, his pride and joy despite being two sizes too big, it was pretty well disguised.

  As it turned out that day, Michael Kili had been the victim of an assassin’s bullet. But the Zylon vest had done its job. And so had the .38. Strangely, all Jouma could remember of that surreal moment in Kili’s office was Omu staring quizzically at his own knife, the vicious tip bent out of shape as if it had been jabbed against a brick wall, then his eyes widening behind the spectacles as he looked down at the snub-nosed revolver that had appeared in Jouma’s hand.

  In the confines of Kili’s office, the report from the .38 had been like a bomb going off. As Omu lunged for the door, the slug had ripped into the exposed flesh between the hem of his khanzu and his canvas sandal, spattering the wall with blood and shards of ankle bone. With a shriek of agony, Omu had pirouetted twice across the room before slumping to the floor beside Kili’s body. Then Jouma had pointed the still-smoking gun at the stunned Nyami, who was cowering with his hands over his ears beneath the poster of Anna Kournikova.

  ‘Well, Sergeant Nyami?’ he’d said, trying hard to control his breathing and his shaking hand. ‘Are you going to handcuff the prisoner, or do I have to shoot you as well?’

  In his sickbed on a secure ward of Mombasa Hospital, Omu had listened patiently as Jouma detailed with great relish precisely what conditions would be like for an educated man thrown into one of Kenya’s high-security prisons.

  The inspector had described how, apart from the endemic shortages of food, clean water and clothing, the overcrowding and the non-existent medical care, every single one of them had an abysmal record of human-rights abuses including torture, rape and institutional murder.

  ‘Are you trying to scare me, Inspector?’ Omu had asked wearily, wincing as he attempted to wiggle the toes that poked from a large bandage around his shattered ankle.

  ‘I am merely stating fact, Mr Omu,’ Jouma said. ‘These places exist, and you will be going to one of them very soon. How you are dealt with when you are there is a different matter.’

  ‘I see. And, if I tell you everything I know, then I can expect preferential treatment - is that it?’

  ‘You can expect nothing,’ Jouma snapped. ‘You forget that at the top of your extensive list of felonies is the attempted murder of a police officer.’

  Omu waved his hand dismissively. ‘Much is required for a charge to become a conviction, Inspector Jouma.’

  ‘So you have judges as well as policemen on your payroll?’

  ‘I am merely stating fact. Which reminds me - how is Detective Sergeant Nyami?’

  ‘Helping us with our enquiries.’

  Omu laughed. ‘Nyami is so stupid he needs his wife to tie his shoelaces for him in the morning. I have known anything he has ever known, and I assure you that you are wasting your time and energy. Let him go, Jouma. Demote him to traffic duty, but do not punish him for being a traitor. He cannot help what he is.’

  ‘That is very magnanimous of you, Mr Omu. I will be sure to pass your suggestions on to Superintendent Teshete.’

  ‘Teshete!’ Omu spat contemptuously. ‘You look for reasons why Kenya is rotten to the core, then look no further than Teshete and the thousands like him all across this country. Idle, complacent, greedy, ignorant - it is because of people like Teshete that people like Michael Kili gain power.’

  Jouma stared at him in disbelief. ‘What is this? You are a great patriot all of a sudden? You disassociate yourself from Kili just like that? Like a snake shedding its skin?’

  ‘Spare me the moral outrage, Inspector. Kili was a common street criminal who died like a dog. I am no more like him than you are, and you know it.’

  ‘Never compare yourself to me,’ Jouma said, his anger barely contained, jabbing a finger at the man in the bed in front of him. ‘Never—’

  ‘Why? Because you are a policeman? Because y
ou have sworn to uphold the law and protect the people? Don’t think so highly of your vocation, Jouma. You saw what happened when they gave the people ballot boxes. Chaos. Anarchy. Death. They are animals and should be treated as such. No, Inspector, Kenya is about one thing and one thing alone: survival of the fittest. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you do. You honestly think I had anything but utter contempt for Michael Kili? That I thought he was anything other than an animal? No - Kili was my means of survival, just as that badge you so proudly wear is yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jouma said, ‘but I continue to survive.’

  Omu shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But for how long?’

  Jouma realised then that it was pointless trying to extract information from Omu. A man like this would not talk unless it was beneficial to himself, and so far Jouma had nothing to offer him other than vague threats about prison. He would need something else, some other form of bait to dangle in front of him.

  Jouma turned for the door.

  ‘Inspector!’

  ‘Mr Omu?’

  ‘Could you ask the guard at the door to stop whistling, please? It is giving me a headache.’

  After leaving the secure ward, the inspector went to Mombasa’s downtown police station where Nyami was in custody.

  Dressed only in his ragged underwear, Nyami had whimpered like a whipped dog and shrunk away to the corner of his cell, shivering, weeping and huddled into a foetal position against the wall.

  ‘Why, Nyami?’ Jouma had asked him. ‘Was it the money? Is that why you betrayed me? Is that why you betrayed yourself?’

  Nyami hung his head. ‘I was scared. Omu said he would kill my wife if I didn’t give him the information he wanted.’

  ‘It was you who told Omu about my visit to Flamingo Creek yesterday?’

  The sergeant nodded.

  ‘Was it Omu who murdered Kili?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Nyami exclaimed. ‘I swear I know nothing about that,’ he said.

  ‘No. I expect you don’t.’

  ‘What will happen to me, Inspector?’

  Jouma shrugged. ‘I really don’t know, Nyami.’

  On his return to the hospital, Jouma reported to a curtained cubicle in the emergency room where a somewhat haughty registrar prodded and poked him and concluded that no bones were broken.

  ‘You’ll have a nice bruise on your chest for a week or so,’ he said, ‘but things could be worse.’

  Disturbingly, Jouma’s next visitor was Christie.

  ‘I heard you were in here,’ the pathologist said with a smirk.

  ‘You have been misinformed,’ Jouma said, hurriedly climbing off the gurney and reaching for his shirt. ‘I am not dead.’

  ‘No,’ Christie observed, peering at the patient’s notes which were hanging from a lightbox on the wall. ‘But if he’d gone for your throat you would have been.’

  ‘Fortunate for me, then, that he did not.’

  Jouma winced as he saw a jagged slash mark in his precious Burberry raincoat.

  The pathologist shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Jouma. A man of your advanced years getting into knife-fights with hoodlums. What must you have been thinking?’

  ‘I think he came off rather worse than I did,’ Jouma said.

  Christie grinned, and it was not a pleasant sight. ‘Yes - I heard. Anyway, don’t you think you should rest up for a while? You’ve been through a traumatic experience.’

  ‘Thank you for your concern - but I have work to do.’

  Christie nodded. ‘So do I. There’s a chap lying on my table with most of his head shot away.’

  ‘Then it shouldn’t take you long to deduce the cause of death.’

  ‘Come on then, Inspector,’ Christie sighed. ‘I’ll walk with you. And, should you expire on the way, I promise I shall be gentle with your remains.’

  They left the emergency room and proceeded along a rabbit warren of corridors towards the secure ward where Omu was being held. It had been an hour; perhaps Kili’s representative had changed his mind and was now prepared to talk. Jouma was not hopeful, however.

  ‘All this murder and mayhem,’ Christie said as they walked, ‘I assume it’s all related to that body washed up on the beach the other day?’

  ‘Why do you assume that?’

  ‘Call it an educated guess. That and the fact that, ever since it was found, the corpses have been piling up like nobody’s business. My colleague Mr Gikonyo in Malindi had the onerous task of examining the remains of those two chaps who crashed their speedboat into a tree at Flamingo Creek yesterday. It seems that, wherever you go, Inspector, death and destruction follow. I may even be taking my life in my hands being this close to you.’

  ‘Then please don’t let me delay you any further.’

  ‘Unfortunately for you, there is a shortcut to the mortuary through the isolation wards.’

  They rounded a corner and in that instant Jouma’s stomach turned to lead. The guard who had been posted outside Omu’s room was nowhere to be seen. The inspector broke into a run but, when he saw the door was standing open, he knew for certain that it was too late.

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Good God, Jouma,’ Christie said, pushing past him into the room. ‘You really are a jinx.’

  Omu’s body was sprawled in a semi-sitting position by the side of his bed. One end of a length of fabric, torn from his khanzu, had been tied to the metal bars of the headrest. The other was wrapped tightly around the dead man’s neck just beneath the jaw. The middle section, however, hung slackly against his shoulder.

  It was this piece that Christie held up disparagingly with one forefinger. ‘Pathetic,’ he said, shaking his head and levering himself to a standing position on cracking knees. ‘I would have thought even the dimmest murderer in Mombasa would have realised that the ligature needs to at least appear to be taut if the murder is to look like suicide.’

  Jouma looked at him blankly.

  ‘In order to asphyxiate himself with that length of ligature,’ Christie explained, ‘our man would have had to stand on his head and then, once dead, assume his present sitting position. Hardly feasible, Inspector - especially for a man with a rather large plaster cast on his foot.’

  ‘What killed him?’

  Christie indelicately prodded Omu’s exposed eyeball. ‘Oh, he was asphyxiated all right. And the marks on the neck suggest it was probably with that very same ligature. But my guess is he was on the bed when it happened, and didn’t know much about it. Asleep, most probably. I’ll find out, naturally.’ He sighed. ‘You go to all that trouble and then you use a ligature that’s six inches too long. Schoolboy error.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Jouma said.

  Or perhaps not. It was obvious that Jacob Omu had not committed suicide - but then that was not the point.

  The point was that they had got to him. And if they could get to Omu this easily . . .

  Chapter Forty-Four

  ‘Cruickshank?’

  ‘It was my grandmother’s maiden name,’ Martha said.

  ‘Why the subterfuge?’

  ‘I didn’t think you would come all the way out to Malindi for one paying guest.’

  Jake laughed bitterly. ‘The way things have been going lately I would go to Zanzibar if it meant a paying guest. What were you doing in Malindi?’

  ‘There was a boatbuilder my dad used years ago. I was trying to track him down - I thought maybe he would have a few answers. But they turned his workshop into a souvenir shop. So I thought, fuck it. I haven’t been on a game boat for years.’

  ‘There must be a hundred skippers in Malindi.’

  ‘I figured you would be the only one that would let me drive the boat.’

  Martha eased forward Yellowfin’s throttles and brought the boat around in a gentle arc so that the thin smudge of land on the horizon was now off the starboard bow. Beside her on the flying bridge, Jake observed the clean line of the wake and was impressed. The girl clearly knew how to pilot a thirty-footer - but
then she should. From what he knew of her, she’d virtually grown up on fishing boats. His eye caught that of Sammy, who was down in the cockpit tending to the booms. The boy gave a nod of appreciation.

  ‘The first time my dad let me drive one of these things unsupervised, I was nine years old,’ she said. Then she giggled. ‘He had this friend called Howard Miller, some sort of money man from Nairobi, and he was trying to sweet talk him into investing in a new boat. Anyway, poor old Howard was sitting on the stern rail talking business and I decided to find out just how fast a twin-engine thirty-footer will go if you give it both barrels. The next thing I know, my dad is yelling at me to stop and Howard Miller is in the water.’

  ‘Did you get the investment?’

  ‘Unfortunately, Howard didn’t see the funny side.’

  ‘Dennis must have been pissed off with you.’

  ‘Dad never got pissed off with me. I was the daughter who could do no wrong.’

  Off the port bow, a fleet of dhows made their way slowly southwards towards Mombasa, flecks of luminescent white against the rich blue of the sea.

  ‘So what’s your story?’ she asked. ‘How does an ex-cop from London end up fishing for marlin?’ He looked at her with surprise, and she laughed. ‘I’m a lawyer. I make it my business to dig dirt on people.’

  ‘You mean Jouma told you.’

  She shrugged coquettishly, and Jake could see all too clearly how Martha would be one hell of an operator among the alpha males of Manhattan. ‘We had an hour to kill driving back to Mombasa the other night,’ she said. ‘And the local FM station sucks.’

  ‘What else did he tell you about me?’

  ‘Nothing much. He’s a man of few words. It was like getting blood out of a stone to get him to tell me that much. But I’m intrigued. Cop to game-boat skipper - that’s not what I’d call a natural career progression.’

  ‘I wasn’t always a cop,’ Jake said. ‘In fact, my old man was pretty pissed off when I decided not to follow in the family business.’