Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

But the opportunity had passed, and a couple of minutes later she stubbed her cigarette out and said that she ought to be getting back. We split the bill fifty-fifty and headed outside. Night was falling and the lowlifes who inhabit King’s Cross after dark were coming out of the cracks in the pavement and looking round for customers and victims. I suggested we share a cab back but she told me she was perfectly capable of getting herself back on the Tube. ‘I am a police officer, you know, John,’ she said dismissively.

‘Don’t say that too loudly round here.’

‘And don’t keep going on.’ Her face broke into a smile. ‘Look, I had a good time tonight. We’ll have to do it again sometime.’

I nodded. ‘Definitely.’

We had an awkward moment when we thought about shaking hands, but didn’t quite go through with it, and then she said goodbye and headed off towards the Underground, while I looked around for a cab that would take me back to Tufnell Park.

Part of me thought that maybe I should have tried to kiss her, or at least shown that I was interested, but the other part kept telling me that by taking a little pain now I was avoiding a lot more down the line.

Iversson

‘So how did you meet your ex-missus, then?’ asked Elaine.

It was Sunday morning and we were sitting up in her bed, naked and drinking coffee. The clock on the bedside table said half eleven and her right hand was on my thigh, which made me think she probably wasn’t going to kick me out just yet.

‘I was a double-glazing salesman.’

Elaine laughed. ‘You? Now that I would have liked to see.’

‘It was just after I’d left the army. I was pretty shit at it, to be honest with you. I mean, they taught you all these ways to get the customer to sign on the dotted line, get him fired up and interested and all that, but in the end, as far as I could see, all I was doing was shifting windows. You know, people either wanted them or they didn’t. Anyway, my ex was a secretary there and for some reason she took a fancy to me.’

‘Well, you’re not bad, Max.’

‘Thanks. You’re too kind.’

‘I know.’

‘So we started going out, one thing led to another, and somehow we ended up getting wed. Christ knows how it happened. I still don’t think either of us cared that much about each other — it was just one of those things. Anyway, it didn’t last. We went to Majorca on the honeymoon, it rained nearly every day, she went on sex strike after I said something about her mum she took offence to, and it went downhill from there. I think we managed about four months, no more than that. I got sacked from the company and she took it worse than me. I was quite pleased, but with her it was a pride thing. It made her look bad in front of her mates in the office that her husband wasn’t good enough to flog double-glazing, and she really let me know it. In the end I just thought, fuck it, we’re never going to work it out so I might as well make the break. So one day, while she was at work, I packed up all my stuff, which wasn’t a lot, and walked out. I only saw her once after that, and that was in the divorce courts. She got half of everything I owned, which was nothing. I got my freedom back. It was a fair swap, I thought.’

‘How did you get into the mercenary game?’

‘My partner, Joe, he’d been doing it for a couple of years. He was working for an outfit who were always on the look-out for people with good military backgrounds to send out to all these places. I put a call into him, he put me in touch with his boss, and three days later I was on the plane to Sierra Leone.’

‘Where the hell’s that?’

‘Somewhere you don’t ever want to go. A back-water shithole in Africa. And I’ll tell you this, you have to see the place to believe it. I was there four months altogether, but I reckon I lost count of the number of mutilated corpses I saw within four days. We were working for the government, or what passed for the government. To be honest, it was just a bunch of young NCOs who’d overthrown the last bloke, and most of them couldn’t run a bath, let alone a country. We were meant to be helping the Sierra Leonean army secure the area around the capital city and capture the diamond mines in the interior from the rebels, the RUF.’

‘So who were they rebelling against, the RUF?’

That made me chuckle. ‘Anyone who wanted to take the diamonds off them. That was about as radical as they got. They might have said it was all about creating freedom and democracy and all that shit but, like most politicians, all they really cared about was lining their own pockets. It’s what most of those wars are about. Some people have got the diamonds and the money, some others want it. Instead of sitting round the table and carving up the proceeds, like they do over here, they get the guns out and start shooting.’

‘Did you ever kill anyone?’ she asked evenly, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and offering me one.

I took one and let her light it for me. ‘Would it matter if I had?’ I answered, hoping that she wasn’t the sort of girl to get offended by her new lover’s tales of mayhem and murder.

She shrugged, and looked me in the eye. ‘It was your job, wasn’t it? That’s what you’re trained for. No, it wouldn’t matter.’ It seemed she wasn’t, then.

I leant back on the pillow and took a drag on the cigarette as her fingers drifted across the hairs on my belly. I got the impression she was horny again. This girl had an incredible appetite.

‘I shot at a lot of people,’ I told her, ‘and quite a few of them fell down, but I couldn’t ever say for sure that it was me who killed them. There were always other people fighting alongside me. But I suppose, probability wise, I must have taken out a couple. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of.’

‘But you shouldn’t be ashamed either. Sometimes it’s just a case of you or them, isn’t it?’ Out of the corner of my eye, I was conscious of her watching me as she spoke.

‘That’s right. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done. I shot at people who were shooting at me. I never killed anyone in cold blood, and I suppose you could argue that one way or another they all deserved it. They were no angels. None of them. Not the RUF, nor any of the others I ran into on my travels.’

‘Where else did you go, then?’

‘I did six months in the Congo, three months in Colombia, and a few weeks in Liberia.’

‘What was it like? Was it fun?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. Most of the time we were boiling alive in the jungle, getting constantly attacked by all kinds of horrible insects and never knowing what kind of tropical disease we might pick up. The most exciting part was when we actually saw some action, but it didn’t happen very often.’

‘It still sounds better than what a lot of people do to earn their living.’

‘It was better than selling double-glazing, I’ll give you that, and I suppose it was a bit of an adventure getting the chance to finally use all my training in a real-life situation, but the reality was a lot more boring than the expectation.’

‘It always is, Max. Haven’t you noticed that yet?’

‘I suppose so, but the money wasn’t that much good either. Everyone thinks mercenaries earn an arm and a leg, but it’s nothing really. Especially when you think how much you’ve got to risk. Joe felt the same way, so we decided to set up the company.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘It’s not my name, honestly. It’s his.’

She smiled. ‘Go on, what is it?’

‘Tiger Solutions.’

Her laughter bounced off the walls of the bedroom. ‘What the fuck sort of a name is that?’

‘A bad one, but Joe wanted it and I couldn’t think of anything better, so I didn’t bother to argue.’