Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

‘I’m surprised you do.’

‘Well, it might be bullshit, I don’t know, but it’s got a ring of truth to it.’

‘Go on.’

‘You ever wonder where all those thousands of maggots you get in fishbait come from?’

‘No. I can safely say it’s never crossed my mind once.’

‘Well, they come from maggot farms, places where they breed millions of the bastards in these big stinking rooms. One of the Holtz businesses is a maggot farm out in Essex. They chucked the body parts in there and then let the maggots eat them down to the bones. Then they ground down what was left into dust, and scattered it to the four winds. And that was that. No trace. Gone.’

‘If they’re so secretive, how come you heard about it?’

‘I heard it from a bloke who used to know people attached to them. A while back. I never thought about it too much at the time, not until now.’

‘And this bloke, isn’t it possible to ask him what all this stuff with Fowler’s about?’

Joe managed a humourless smile. ‘Not really. The bloke was Tony.’

‘Great.’

‘The point is, let’s just leave it.’

‘Don’t worry. I think you’ve convinced me.’

‘You’re going to need to get out of town for a bit,Max. Probably a couple of months at least. Until everything dies down.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced two thick rolls of notes, which he put down on the table. ‘There’s six grand there. The money from the job the other night. Use it to rent a place down by the coast or something.’

‘I can’t take it all, Joe. Three grand of it’s yours.’

‘And half of Tiger Solutions is yours. Forget it. It’s the least I can do. Let’s see how things go and then, if you need any more, I’ll try and pull some out of the business somehow.’

‘Shit, Joe, I don’t know what to say.’ I leant forward and picked up the money. ‘Thanks, mate. Thanks a lot.’

‘That’s what friends are for, Max. Remember it.’

And I did remember it. Would always remember it. Me and Joe went back a long, long way. We were like that, you know. We’d been in the paras together and, even though Joe had been an officer while I’d never risen above the level of colour sergeant, we’d always been mates in a way that rarely travels across the ranks of the British army. I owed him now — but then, to be honest with you, I’d always owed him. You see, a long time back I’d done something to him that to this day he didn’t even know about, but which meant that one way or another I was always in his debt.

Joe was two years older than me, and towards the end of his military career he got married to a German girl he’d met while we were stationed out there. Elsa, her name was; twenty-one, far too good-looking, and with an attitude to sex that you’d have to say was slap bang on the liberal end of liberal. Why she got married, I’ll never know. She just wasn’t cut out for making do with a one-dick-and-two-ball escort. But the problem with Joe was the same problem you get with a lot of blokes: he was just too smitten to notice. I’d heard stories about her knocking around with other squaddies all through the engagement, but decided it was best to keep quiet about it. In the end, it was none of my business. Joe had made his choice and that was that. I know that might sound a bit harsh, but in my experience no one ever thanks the bearer of bad news, especially when the bad news is about his missus and her shenanigans.

Then, a few weeks after the wedding, I ran into her in a local bar. She was on her own as well, which was unusual for her. She was quite a looker, was Elsa. We got talking and she told me that she and Joe had had an argument. I didn’t mean for anything to happen, you know, but I offered to walk her home and one thing just led to another. We did it in a field full of bored-looking sheep (twice as well) and I knew I should have just left it at that and hoped nothing was ever said, but the thing was, Elsa had a way about her that could really reel a man in. She was addictive, that was the best way to describe her. We started to see each other regularly behind Joe’s back, doing it whenever and wherever, including in their marital bed, which I know was a terrible liberty. I felt guilty about it, I really did, and jealous, too, because I knew I wasn’t the only one of her lovers. But I just couldn’t stop myself. That’s my only defence, if you can call it that. I just couldn’t help myself.

Then one day, no more than a couple of months after that fateful night in the sheep field, Elsa’s partly clothed body was discovered in the grounds of a local high school. Her head had been smashed to a pulp with a blunt instrument. There was a police investigation that initially focused on the army base and its occupants, particularly the husband, but quickly spread into the local community as other lovers came out of the woodwork. After only three days, an arrest was made. A nineteen-year-old local bloke, Dietrich Fenzer, had been seen arguing with her on the night she’d died, not far from where the body was found, and it was known that he was one of her lovers. He also had two prior convictions for crimes of violence. A search of his home revealed the murder weapon, a small lead-filled cosh, and he was promptly charged. Six months later he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison, which I’d always thought was a bit lenient, especially as he’d probably be out in ten.

The whole thing was extremely hard on Joe, as you can imagine, but he held up well considering the humiliation of having your new wife’s numerous affairs aired in public. Thankfully for me, the police never did dig deep enough to find out about our little fling, so my friendship with him remained intact. But the reality was that it was the end of Joe’s army career. He felt that he couldn’t continue to command the respect of his men after what had happened, and he was probably right, especially since half of them had shagged her. Within a few months he’d left the military for good to begin a new career as a security consultant, or, more accurately in those early days, a gun for hire. For me, though, the guilt never completely disappeared, and from then on I always felt that I had a lot to do to make it up to Joe for betraying him in such an underhand way. And here he was doing all this for me. It fair choked me up, to tell you the truth.

‘Are you all right, Max?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. Just dreaming, that’s all. All this humidity’s sending me into a trance.’ I pulled from my pocket a pack of cigarettes Elaine had bought me that morning.

Joe gave me a dirty look. He was like that, always wanting to make sure I stayed on the straight and narrow. ‘When did you get back on them?’ he asked, not worrying, however, about taking one off me.

‘Well, getting shot at by one of my best employees started to break my resolve, but then, after spending most of yesterday running away from various members of the local law enforcement, I thought, fuck it, lung cancer’s the least of my worries.’

We both laughed and drained our beers. ‘Are you in a hurry,’ I asked him, ‘or have you got time for another one?’ It was rare these days that we sat and socialized, and now I had the feeling that we might not get the chance for a long time to come. It seemed important to make the best of things.

He nodded. ‘Yeah, course I’ve got time.’

So I poured the other two beers and we sat back and smoked and talked about the old days: people we’d known, experiences we’d shared, places we’d served. Only once did things go quiet, when Joe mentioned Elsa and his eyes clouded over as he thought back to what could have been. And I felt guilty again and hurried on to the next subject, maybe just a little bit too quickly.