Quintin Jardine - As Easy as Murder

‘No,’ Mark contradicted. ‘They’ll have come straight here from the airport, and I don’t imagine they’ve just nipped out for an early lunch. Someone else. . unless of course this is a through road; that we don’t know for sure.’

‘It isn’t,’ Alex volunteered from the back.

‘Then wait. Roll down the windows and listen.’

I did as I was told. Funny thing, but even although we were in the middle of a wood, there was no birdsong, only the sound of a high-revving engine in the middle distance. And then there was nothing. ‘He’s stopped,’ I whispered. Why did I whisper? No idea.

I reached out to turn the engine on once more, but Mark stopped me. ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We could hear him, so. . We’re on foot from here.’

‘Are you okay with that?’ I asked.

‘As long as it’s not too far. If I start to struggle you two go on.’

We climbed out of the jeep and set out up the track. In truth we travelled almost as fast as we had on wheels, sticking to the side of the road and avoiding the deepest ruts; some of them looked like small ravines. We’d gone a couple of hundred metres when we reached the other vehicle, the one we’d been following. It was a mid-range Volkswagen saloon, new, metallic blue beneath the dust, totally unsuited to the terrain, as out of place as Rudolf Nureyev in a Wild West saloon. Incongruous also because there were two kid seats in the back.

I looked ahead and I could see why the driver had stopped. The nose of another vehicle was sticking out from a gap between two trees that might have been intended as a passing place. It hadn’t been new for some years. It was a crappy old off-white Seat, the kind that a car hire company will only keep in the hope that a renter might write it off, or steal it.

Mark had fallen a few metres behind. ‘Careful,’ he murmured as he caught us up. ‘Let’s go steadily. This changes things.’

We walked on, but slowly, taking care not to kick any loose rocks and send them clattering. We’d only gone for another fifty metres when the forest on our right track opened out into a clearing, in the middle of which was an old stone building, but not so derelict that it didn’t have a front door, through which a man was stepping. We had the briefest glimpse of him, but it was enough to tell us that he was very large, and that he was carrying something in his right hand, an object with a polished wooden stock.

Before any of us could react, he was inside the old house. ‘That’s a sawn-off shotgun,’ Alex exclaimed. ‘This is where I send for back-up.’

Neither Mark nor I tried to stop him as he reached for his phone. Then, from inside the house, there came a crash and a yell, then another. . We waited for the blast of a firearm, but after that there was only silence.

‘Hold off on that, Alex,’ Mark murmured. ‘We may not need the heavy squad.’

‘If not, then what do we do?’ he asked.

‘I’m going in.’

‘You can’t,’ I protested. ‘You don’t know what’s happening in there.’

‘I can guess, though, and so can you. Somebody’s about to be killed. What’s the worst that can happen to me? I might die ahead of schedule, but not by that much.’

He set off for the house, walking briskly, using his stick. ‘Bugger,’ I muttered, and went after him. ‘Shit,’ Alex hissed and fell into step alongside me, drawing his service pistol from its holder.

There was no shotgun fire as Mark threw the door wide and stepped into a big open area. In fact the weapon was on the floor, not far from its wielder, who lay face down, with an egg-sized lump on his right temple, and with his hands secured behind his back with a plastic tie. The egg had been laid, I realised, by the bloodstained object that dangled from the fingers of Uche Wigwe’s left hand as he stood over his captive. It was one of Jonny’s lob wedges, a match for the club that had won him the championship three days before.

In his right hand my nephew’s caddie held a revolver. It was pointed at the head of the fallen assassin; at the head of Lars Martinsson.

Alex raised his own gun, but Mark waved to him to lower it, as he stepped up behind Uche, and patted him gently on the shoulder. ‘You’re not going to use that, mate,’ he whispered, and took the pistol from him. ‘You’re not the type.’

‘That man killed my mother,’ the Nigerian told him, in a voice as hard as the stone of the walls, ‘and that man there, my father, ordered it.’

He stared across the room in the direction of an old wooden chair, under a window. Kalu Wigwe was tied to it. He was alive but he’d been beaten about the head, and beaten bloody, for there were streaks of gore all over his flight suit.

Robert Palmer, the man I’d known as Patterson, was standing beside him; he met my gaze as I looked at him.

‘She was your witness?’ I asked him. ‘Kalu’s wife?’

‘She was more than my witness,’ he replied, ‘much, much more.’ His voice seemed to have changed with his name; it was hard, strained, and not all that far from hysteria. ‘Kalu took me to Nigeria, four years ago,’ he continued, ‘to show off, no doubt, to impress me, to let me see that he really is a prince out there. Sure,’ he snorted, ‘and he’s also a fucking criminal, who isn’t just into designer drugs. He’s involved in money laundering, international fraud, slavery, and he even finances Somali pirates for a cut of their ransom money. He thought he was sure of me, and financially he was. I’d left my scruples behind a long time before. Oh yes, Kalu and I got on great. Then on that trip, he introduced me to his wife, to Sonya.’

He shrugged. ‘As I explained to Uche when I went to see him on Monday night, things happen that you can’t control. That’s how it was with Sonya and me. It might sound corny to you, but we fell in love. We saw each other whenever we could; we used to meet in a different city every time, Rome, Miami, London, always when Kalu was off screwing around, and that’s something he did a lot. Didn’t you, you fucking monster. Flashy, cheap women everywhere, but you treated Sonya, who was pure gold, like. .’ He punched the bound man, harder than I’d thought he ever could, hard enough to produce a small scream even in his semi-conscious state.

‘Enough,’ Kalu moaned.

‘Enough!’ Alex ordered, sharply.

‘No. Not nearly enough,’ Palmer shouted back.

‘Hey,’ I intervened. ‘Robert. Didn’t you tell me a few days ago, when you were someone else, that humanity is essential, and that needless cruelty is inexcusable?’

‘This was necessary. It was justice,’ he protested, but I knew I’d got to him, and in the same moment I knew too that the naturally kind person with whom I’d had that discussion was the real whoever-he-was.

‘How the hell did you find us?’ he asked, more quietly.

‘With help,’ I replied, then took him back to the story. ‘How long did it take Kalu to catch on?’

‘He got suspicious of Sonya about two years ago, but he didn’t know it was me she was seeing, until we set up her escape through Malaga.’ He sighed, and I could hear the despair in it. ‘It turned out that setting it up through Facebook wasn’t as clever as we thought. Sonya made a mistake. She used her home computer, and by that time Kalu was checking everything. So when Sonya went into room 106 in the Silken Puerta, he and Lars were waiting for her. They thought they’d be killing me as well; they were disappointed when only Beau Lucas, my American minder, showed up. Poor Beau; nice guy.’ He winced. ‘They got her body out of there in a cart, then put it in a big suitcase and took it back on board the plane. Those fucking Kiwi pilots!’ he hissed. ‘He made them fly low over the Atlantic, so he could chuck her out. They’ll deny it, but they knew what he was up to. They’re lucky, those guys, that all they got was tied up for a few hours. I’d have wasted them, but Uche said no.’