Bait

by Nick Brownlee

  ‘There you go, honey,’ he said, handing her a foolscap envelope. ‘You want me to come with you?’

  Martha smiled thinly and climbed down from the passenger seat. ‘No. But you can buy me lunch when I’m done.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  He watched her jog smartly across the street to the offices of one of Mombasa’s leading law firms and found himself admiring the tight lines of her figure silhouetted against the white linen of her suit. He grinned. If ever there was an example of the benefits of a hands-on approach to the job, then Martha was it. Had it not been for his insistence in running background checks on all of his network operatives, he would never have discovered that the daughter of one of his East Africa couriers was not only intelligent and beautiful, but also living in New York.

  Another philosophy dear to Whitestone’s heart was that work should never be to the exclusion of pleasure. And Whitestone took pleasure wherever and whenever he chose. Until now, he’d had no idea how long this particular relationship would last. Until he tired of it, he’d supposed, or until the inevitable question of commitment arose. It was just a shame that circumstances should have precipitated this unscheduled reunion. He thought about Martha’s father and was gripped with a spasm of anger at the complete fuck-up the Mombasa cell had made of liquidating the old man. Once this latest valuable shipment was complete, he had plans for Conrad Getty and his team - and they were not pleasant.

  There was a tapping at his tinted window and, when he lowered it, Whitestone found himself looking down into the melted-chocolate eyes of a small African girl who was standing on her tiptoes on the pavement beside the BMW.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, ‘but my ball has rolled underneath your car and I cannot reach it.’

  ‘Then I’d better move my car,’ he said, and the girl smiled - an angelic toothy smile that lit up her whole face. ‘Stand back now,’ he said, starting the engine and reversing a few feet along the kerb.

  The girl picked up her ball and, with a wave of thanks, skipped happily away towards the apartment complex on the other side of the road. She could not have been more than eight or nine years old, yet she was truly exquisite, Whitestone thought, appraising her with the eye of a connoisseur.

  He was certain there would be many others who would think the same way.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Jouma’s beverage looked and tasted like water in which root vegetables had been boiled; but the toothless hag who owned this particular roadside refreshment stall did not serve English breakfast tea. Indeed, she seemed most put out that anyone should have the temerity to ask for a drink that she’d never heard of. ‘Mama’s Nectar’ she called it, this insipid pondweed brew, and she claimed it was more beneficial to the innards than any English breakfast tea. Indeed, Jouma had to concede it was refreshing, but only in the way that splashing one’s face in stagnant river water was refreshing.

  The stall, which was little more than a trestle table laden with plastic bottles of warm cola, was situated at the northern end of Nyali Bridge, and was one of a number of similar stalls optimistically erected by traders hoping to make a few shillings from wide-eyed tourists on their way to the hotels and resorts further north along the coast.

  It was not a salubrious spot. Every few minutes a huge pantechnicon would roar past with a noise like the bowels of the earth erupting and threaten to sweep up the traders and their flimsy stalls and deposit them in the river gorge a hundred feet below. Jouma checked his watch. Quarter to nine. He had been waiting here a little over ten minutes and his suit was already coated in a filthy film of dust that meant it would most certainly require professional cleaning.

  Presently, a car approached the bridge from the north and swung off the road on to the dirt parking area adjacent to the stalls. It was a garish green colour and appeared to have more holes than bodywork. The door squealed open and Jouma breathed a sigh of relief when Jake Moore levered himself out.

  ‘It would have been no trouble to meet you in the city, Inspector,’ Jake said, squinting uncertainly at his surroundings.

  ‘Mombasa is not a good place right now,’ Jouma said. ‘Thank you for coming, Jake.’

  ‘As I said on the phone, I was heading this way anyway,’ Jake said.

  Another eighteen-wheeler hammered past in the direction of Malindi, and Jouma was forced to grab hold of Jake’s arm to stop himself being blown over by its draft.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ Jake shouted over the din. ‘It sounded pretty urgent over the phone.’

  Jouma nodded and led Jake away from the highway to where his Panda was parked beside the refreshment stall. Once the two men were inside, Jouma held up a cell phone.

  ‘I have never understood these devices. But this morning I bought this for five dollars from a trader in Jamhuri Park. He says it only has thirty minutes of credit before I have to throw it away, but I do not trust him.’

  Jake laughed. ‘Why the sudden quantum leap into the twenty-first century?’

  ‘Because I suspect that the telephone in my office will soon be bugged - if it is not already.’

  Jouma described the events of the previous day. When he reached the part where he’d stumbled across Michael Kili’s body in the office above the Baobab Club, Jake blinked with surprise.

  ‘Omu killed his boss?’

  Jouma shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ He described his surveillance of customers coming in and out of the club that morning. ‘Most of them, to my shame, I have been able to identify as known members of the Mombasa community. The rest were tourists. Despicable as their intentions may have been, they all had legitimate reasons for being there. This man, however, interests me.’

  He handed Jake a creased Polaroid. Although the subject was blurred and distant - Jouma was no photographer - Jake instantly recognised the barrel chest and the spindly legs.

  ‘Tug Viljoen?’ Jake exclaimed.

  Jouma nodded. ‘According to our records, Mr Viljoen runs a reptile park near Flamingo Creek. Do you know of it?’

  ‘I know it all right. But you think Viljoen murdered Kili?’

  ‘Supposition,’ Jouma admitted. ‘But the killing took place while Mr Viljoen was on the premises, and none of the staff in the club recalls him in the bar or the dancing areas.’

  Jake was stunned. ‘Tug’s a nutcase, I’ll agree - but a killer?’

  Jouma passed Jake a sheet of Xeroxed paper. On it was what looked like the kind of previous-convictions charge sheet Jake remembered from the days when he was a young beat officer. But, instead of burglary, breaking-and-entering and car theft, the list contained details of beatings, looting, drugs offences and conspiracies to murder stretching as far back as the early 1970s.

  He whistled. ‘This is all Tug’s handiwork?’

  Jouma nodded. ‘A brief résumé of his years in the South African Army. Propitiously for him, at least, the regime was such in those days that he was allowed to get away with it. He was eventually discharged for hospitalising a protester during a public disturbance in Gauteng Province in 1999. Needless to say, the matter was swept under the carpet by the military authorities.’

  ‘Jesus. But why would he murder Kili?’

  ‘I was rather hoping you might be able to assist me with that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Believe me, Jake, I would not ask for your help if there was anyone else I could possibly turn to,’ Jouma said apologetically. ‘Anyone else I could trust. But—’

  Jouma sighed and finished his story. And, when Jake had heard about Sergeant Nyami’s treachery and Jacob Omu’s murder, he said, ‘Shit. What a mess.’

  ‘Sadly, yes. That’s why I need your help.’

  ‘But what can I do?’

  The car shook as another lorry thundered past in the direction of Mombasa.

  ‘It is quite simple,’ Jouma said. ‘I need you to be a policeman again.’

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  At the Tamarind restaurant, overlooking Mombasa from the
Nyali shore, Martha was eating cold lobster and wondering why Patrick kept looking at his Rolex.

  ‘It’s two minutes later than it was last time you looked,’ she said irritably.

  Patrick looked up and smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You got to be somewhere?’

  ‘I’m still getting used to the time difference,’ Patrick said, which was one of the lamest excuses Martha had ever heard. But then Patrick had been acting as if he had ants in his pants ever since they’d arrived at the restaurant. OK, the place wasn’t Sardi’s and Mombasa wasn’t Manhattan, but the food was good and—

  ‘Goddammit, Patrick, will you stop looking at your watch!’

  His face fell into that ‘scolded little boy’ expression that always made her melt, but now just got under her skin. She’d told him not to fly out. This wasn’t a holiday. Sure, he’d had to wait two hours outside the lawyer’s office, but she’d been the one wrangling with a man who in New York wouldn’t even get a job as an ambulance chaser.

  ‘I have to pee,’ he said presently, and Martha was glad when he left the table. She reached across to his untouched plate and speared a shrimp that was the size and shape of a telephone receiver.

  Conrad Getty had been expecting the call, but when the phone rang he still jumped out of his skin.

  ‘Is everything on schedule?’

  A sheen of cold sweat instantaneously formed on the hotel owner’s forehead. ‘The van is on its way, Mr Whitestone.’

  ‘And the shipment?’

  ‘It will be in position on the border.’

  ‘Good. I don’t have to remind you that this is a very important delivery, do I, Conrad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I can’t stress enough what will happen if anything goes wrong.’

  ‘I understand, Mr Whitestone.’

  ‘Then we have nothing to worry about, do we?’

  Whitestone pressed the End button on his cell phone, then removed the SIM card from the handset and tossed it into the urinal trough. He unzipped himself and drove the chip along the trough and down the pipe with the force of his piss. Then he zipped himself up, fitted the handset with a new SIM, and went back outside to the restaurant. It was a precaution - some would say an unnecessary one, but Whitestone didn’t care what other people said. If Augustus Kanga had taken precautions, he would never have got to the position where he trusted his driver so implicitly - and so fatally.

  Ah, there she was, Whitestone thought as he approached his table. His little Martha, scavenging from his plate of leftovers like a hungry dog. Once he had found her pathological hatred of wasted food rather endearing. But now, like so many other things about her, Whitestone found her habit suddenly tiresome. It puzzled him why, and indeed how quickly, this feeling of indifference towards her had materialised. Perhaps it was because for the first time ever he was attempting to combine business and pleasure. Before, Martha had always been a welcome release from the stresses of his profession. He used to look forward to seeing her, being with her, making love to her; now that she was in such close proximity to his real life, well - she felt like more of a hindrance.

  He sat down opposite and for a while they talked. Or rather Martha talked. Whitestone was thinking about the shipment and about the damnable truism of business that, no matter how hands-on you were, you could never be in two places at the same time.

  And then it struck him that this whole situation was ridiculous. Why the hell was he sitting here listening to this shit about insurance documents when potentially the most important deal of his life was going down somewhere else? And the more he thought about it the angrier he became, and the angrier he became the more he needed a focus for his anger.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Martha,’ he exclaimed. ‘I have had it up to here with this crap about your dad!’

  As soon as he said it, he knew that it was an unforgivable loss of self-control, but suddenly he didn’t care. In that moment, he was not Patrick Noonan.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘You bastard.’

  Whitestone regarded her with cold eyes. Then it was as if the demon possessing him was suddenly exorcised, and his shoulders sagged.

  ‘Jesus, babe - I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘Get away from me,’ she said, brushing away his outstretched hand.

  Curiously, as she stood from the table and hurried towards the exit, Martha was almost relieved that he had said it.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  As far as Jake could see, when he was not hanging around strip clubs or getting drunk in Suki Lo’s bar, Tug Viljoen’s existence was about as interesting as that of his crocodiles. Unless, of course, you counted murdering Mombasa gangsters.

  For the last two hours, the South African had been holed up in his rundown caravan, emerging only to berate the two young Africans whitewashing the maintenance sheds at the far side of the compound. Jake, watching from the bough of a mangrove tree overlooking the perimeter of the compound, was in grave danger of seizing up with cramp and plunging thirty feet to the jungle floor. Even the proboscis monkeys in the trees near by had stopped their jabbering and now regarded him with something approaching pity in their mean eyes.

  But at least being up here gave him time to think.

  And Jouma had given him plenty to think about.

  The inspector was sure Viljoen had pulled the trigger on Michael Kili, and that the murder was connected with what had happened up at Dennis Bentley’s boatyard the other day.

  Jake wasn’t so sure. As far as he could gather, there were any number of people prepared to off the Mombasa gangster, and for just as many reasons. But it was a lead, and he could tell from the haunted look in Jouma’s eyes that the little detective needed every friend he could lay his hands on.

  ‘I need you to watch him,’ he had said. ‘I believe that things will happen today that will precipitate an answer to our conundrum.’

  Jake Moore was no stranger to surveillance. Seven years ago, he, Mac Bowden and Tom Kent had spent nearly three months in an attic in Canning Town, watching a flat belonging to an armed robber called Charlie Green. As surveillance went, it had been a textbook job. Green had a big mouth, and right now he was serving twenty years in Belmarsh, along with the rest of what remained of his crew.

  But it was now 11 a.m. in a sweltering mangrove jungle, and Jake was no longer as patient as he was when he was a Flying Squad officer. In fact, he was of half a mind to pay Tug a visit and simply ask him if he’d shot Kili. At that moment, however, the trees erupted with the piercing alarums of birds, and the monkeys scattered like a gang of teenage vandals routed by a police patrol. Jake flattened himself against the bough as a white Transit van rumbled into view along the dirt track leading from the highway and passed directly underneath him. The van was unmarked and unwashed, and as it swept through the compound gates Viljoen emerged from the caravan and directed it towards a yard behind the storage sheds.

  Relieved to have an excuse to get down from his vantage point, Jake shinned down the mangrove trunk and dropped silently on to the soft jungle floor. Staying out of sight in the undergrowth, he followed the line of the perimeter fence round to the rear of the compound. Now between him and the fence was a cleared area that Viljoen obviously used as a junkyard. The dusty ground was littered with twists of rusted metal, plastic containers, stacks of old tyres and, he noted ominously, scattered bones. It provided good cover. Nimbly stepping around the junk, Jake was able to get to within ten feet of the fence and had an unobstructed view of the compound beyond.

  The van was parked beside a gibbet on which hung the skinned remains of a crocodile, its marbled flesh rotting sweetly in the heat of the sun. There were two Africans in the cab in T-shirts and ragged jeans, and Jake saw them flinch with revulsion as they jumped down and began stretching their stiff limbs. He also saw that both men had machine guns slung over their shoulders, the familiar crescent-shaped magazine telling him that they were AK-47s, the paramilitary’s weapon of ch
oice.

  Viljoen approached them, barking sharp instructions in Swahili. The two men scuttled round to the back of the van and unlocked the rear doors. Viljoen looked inside and nodded. The doors were slammed shut as the three men left the yard in the direction of the caravan.

  Jake waited until they were out of sight, then crept forward to the fence. It was made from cheap plastic-coated metal that provided no obstacle as he climbed over it into the compound. Keeping as far away as possible from the corpse of the dangling reptile, he went to the rear of the van and opened one of the doors. The interior was dark, empty and smelled of sweat and piss. In the roof was a single air vent and at the far end, stacked against the cab wall, were three plastic buckets.

  It was a good job Viljoen’s voice could strip paint at ten yards, because if he hadn’t heard the croc owner tearing a strip off one of the men with guns Jake would not have known they were returning.

  Shit! Realising in an instant that there was no way he could get back to the fence without being seen, and with no other place to hide than under the vehicle’s chassis, he leaped up into the van, scrabbling at the lock housing on the inside of the heavy doors in a desperate attempt to close them behind him. As he flattened himself behind the wheel arch bulkhead, he could hear Viljoen shouting orders and the intermittent subservient grunt of the gunmen. Then there were footsteps and Jake froze as a shadow passed in front of the tiny crack of light between the doors. If they were opened now, there was precisely nowhere for him to go. And if, as he suspected, the Africans were twitchy with their guns, then—

  But the front doors slammed shut, and he felt the vehicle lurch as the three men climbed into the cab. The only light now came from the vent above his head, a narrow sliver of brightness in what was otherwise pitch dark. The metal panels of the vehicle shuddered as the engine kicked into life, and Jake’s brief moment of relief that he had not been caught was now consumed by the realisation that he was locked in.