Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

‘Max, anything’s better than Tiger Solutions. What sort of solutions does a tiger offer anyway?’

‘I don’t know. Fearsome ones?’

She continued laughing and I chucked one of the pillows at her. It bounced off her head and landed on the other side of the room. ‘If you ever meet Joe, you have a go at him about it. I swear it had nothing to do with me.’

We were silent for a few moments, and even though I didn’t want to have to say it, I knew there was no point putting it off. ‘Look, Joe gave me some money so that I could get out of town for a while, enough to keep me going for the foreseeable future. So I can be out of your hair by tomorrow.’

She smiled at me. ‘You don’t have to go yet, Max. I like the company.’

‘I appreciate it, but you’ve done enough for me already, and we can’t carry on like this for ever. I’ve got to go out and get some fresh air fairly soon otherwise I’ll go stir crazy.’

She put her hand on my arm. ‘You go when you want, but not before. Not on my account. It’s no problem for me, you being here. Honest.’

Well, there was no way I was going to argue. Not with the sort of accommodation I was getting. So I gave her my best smile and said that, OK, maybe I’d stay a couple of days longer. At that moment, the phone rang out in the hall and she jumped off the bed. I watched as she went out the door, her rear waggling seductively. There was a little red devil complete with trident tattooed on the right cheek. He was grinning. So was I.

When she came back a few minutes later, she told me that it had been the club on the phone. ‘I’ve got to work tonight,’ she said, getting back on the bed. She lit two more cigarettes and passed one over. You get my drift about the standard of accommodation. Naked women even firing up your smokes for you.

‘Again? Haven’t they heard of workers’ rights down there? You need a night off occasionally. Can’t you throw a sickie?’ I remembered how bored I’d been the previous night. For some reason, Elaine didn’t have Sky, which had severely limited my options. The high point had been Celebrity Stars in their Eyes , if you can call some bird who used to be on EastEnders massacring my mum’s favourite Patsy Kline song a high point. It wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat.

‘You know as well as I do that it’s a difficult time at the moment, Max. Perhaps in a couple of days.’

‘What’s going to happen at Arcadia? Now that Fowler’s not coming back.’

‘It’s all pretty much up in the air at the moment, especially as everyone thinks he is coming back, except me, you, and the people who had him killed.’

‘Is there any sign of the Holtzes yet?’

‘No. I don’t think we’ll see them for a bit. Not with the police still sniffing around asking questions about the doorman who got poisoned.’

‘Well, they’re going to start coming out of the woodwork pretty soon. Blokes like them aren’t the sort to be hands-off about a big investment like the Arcadia. So when they do, make sure you watch yourself.’

She sat up and eyed me coolly, like it was me who ought to be watching myself. ‘It’s nice to know you care, Max, it really is. But you don’t need to worry about me. I know what I’m doing.’

Elaine was a feisty lady and definitely not someone to be messed with, but at the same time her words didn’t do much to reassure me. I remember the American commander of another mercenary unit in Sierra Leone saying exactly the same thing just before he disappeared into the jungle on a one-man reconnaissance near the diamond fields of Bo.

The next day an RUF patrol ate him.

In the end the weather was too decent to be indoors, especially as I hadn’t set foot outside Elaine’s apartment for getting on for forty-eight hours. Joe was right: I probably wasn’t the Old Bill’s top priority. Yes, I’d slapped a couple of them, plus got one inadvertently pissed on, but people do that to them all the time. It’s all part of being a copper, getting slapped in the line of duty. It’s like soldiers — it’s what they join up for. The action and all that shit. Granted, they were probably looking for me, but I didn’t think my crime was so heinous that they’d be scrambling the helicopters and plastering up the Wanted: Dead or Alive posters just yet, so that afternoon we went out for a stroll round Clerkenwell, arm in arm like true romantics, taking in the sun and the warmth, enjoying it the way the tourists do.

On the way back to the apartment we stopped at an Italian deli and I bought some ingredients: anchovies, black olives, fresh oregano, canned Italian tomatoes and, most important of all, a six-pack of bottled Peroni. I found some spaghetti in Elaine’s food cupboard and, after a bit of exercise of the bedroom variety, cooked us both a pasta dish my ex-wife had taught me to make years back on one of the few occasions we’d been talking. Puttanesca. Whore’s spaghetti, the fiery sauce unfaithful Latin wives would make for their husbands because it tasted like it had taken hours to prepare when in reality you could knock it together in twenty minutes, leaving yourself ample time for an afternoon’s shagging. Perhaps she’d been trying to tell me something.

Elaine had to be at the club at nine-thirty, and before she went I told her I’d feel happier if she left the place, which I know was a bit cheeky, given the fact I hardly knew her, but to be honest with you I was beginning to think that maybe something could come of this.

‘You’re a talented woman,’ I told her, assuming that she was. ‘You know how to run a place. Why don’t you look for a job somewhere else?’

She stopped in front of me and gave me a look which said: Don’t push your luck, sonny. In the heels of her black court shoes, she was only an inch below me in height. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Max, and I will leave. But it’ll be in my own time. Understand? I’m a big girl now, I can look after myself. Thanks for the concern, but save it for people who really need it.’

Which was telling me.

After she’d gone, I sat demolishing the Peroni and trying desperately to find something decent to watch on the TV, which, not for the first time, turned out to be a fruitless task. I ended up watching a programme about a family of chimpanzees living in the African jungle. It all started off quite nicely as well. The chimps were messing about, grooming one another and generally acting all cute like they do in the zoo, and I was even musing about what a nice, laid-back life it would be being a member of the ape fraternity when all of a sudden everything went a bit mental. A friendly-looking gibbon appeared up in the trees near the chimps’ camp, and one of them spotted him. Well, the next second the whole lot of them were howling and shrieking like a bunch of Millwall fans on angel dust, and before I had a chance to even work out what was going on, they were charging after him through the undergrowth, much to the excitement of the breathless narrator.

After a dramatic five-minute chase they cornered him up on one of the branches, and then, to my horror, ripped the poor little sod apart, disembowelling him with their bare hands while he stared mournfully up at them. They then began to eat him alive, as casually as you like, which to my mind was really quite disgusting. Especially as it was on TV when kids could be watching. And to think these beasts are meant to be our closest relatives.

One of the chimps was staring cockily at the camera while he munched on a hefty piece of gibbon offal, and I got a nasty sense of deja vu because he really reminded me of that treacherous toe-rag Tony, sitting up there like he owned the place with what looked suspiciously like a smile on his face.