Ned Beauman - Glow

Finally, as the bodyguards were starting their sixth uneventful shift, he got a call from his boss. ‘Bezant’s landing in Sukkur in half an hour. Drive back up there and meet him for the handover.’

Before they left, Martin opened the back of the van to check on the Burmese guy, which he regretted at once: the prisoner lay there on his side in the shadows, warm debris, twitching a little, smelling of piss, and Martin knew he’d never be able to tell his wife what had happened on this trip. But what would a good man, that notional creature, have done? Or an upright stepfather? Just let the guy walk free — limp free — having no idea who he was? Even if he’d tried, the Lacebark bodyguards wouldn’t have let him, and if he’d defied them he would have been imperilling not only his job but also his only means of safe transport back to Europe. Perhaps in other circumstances he might still have been capable of taking a moral stand. But not submerged in his jet lag. So instead he just told the bodyguards to put the handcuffs back on the prisoner and lock up the back of the van.

They met Bezant at a dusty margin of vacant land between the Airport Road and the canal, shaded on one side by palm trees. Above, the sky was lithium white; the naked sun hadn’t shown itself since Martin landed in Sukkur. The Australian arrived in a dented tan rental car but he showed no bemusement at the lurid van. Even compared to the three big bodyguards this man was a pillar of tungsten and steaks, and he would have made any normal product of the human genotype feel like a fiddly new model that had been miniaturised by some clever Japanese company to fit better into the handbags of teenage girls.

‘Let’s have a look, then.’

Martin took the keys from one of the bodyguards. He unlocked the van, swung open the doors, and braced himself for his third sight of the prisoner.

But there was no one in the back of the van. The prisoner was gone.

‘Right, so where have you put him?’ said Bezant. Then he saw the horrified expression on Martin’s face. ‘Are you telling me he was in here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this a joke?’

‘No.’

A puff of small pinkish pigeons leaped up from a telephone wire beside the canal. ‘When did you last set eyes on the cunt?’ said Bezant.

‘Before we set off from Khairpur.’

‘Have you stopped since?’

‘No. Not even in traffic.’

‘There was nothing in the back of the van? No tools? No handy set of screwdrivers?’

‘No,’ said Martin. He’d seen that for himself.

‘I assume someone had the common dog fuck to give him a cavity search?’

One of the bodyguards nodded. ‘They tell us they give him one at the police station. We give him another one anyhow.’

Bezant turned back to Martin. ‘How long were they alone with him at a stretch?’

‘Eight hours.’

‘I was looking for something along the lines of “six minutes”. Eight hours at a stretch? Whose brilliant idea was that?’

‘He looked so frail, I didn’t think. .’

‘Didn’t anyone bother to warn you who this wanker was?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Of course they didn’t.’ Bezant ran a hand over his shaven scalp and spat contemplatively on the ground. ‘What has happened here, to the best of my estimation, is that our man in the van talked one of these oxygen thieves into slipping him some sort of widget, and on your drive over here he used it to get out of his handcuffs and then out of the door. The reason I say this is because it’s happened before. He’s got a very special tongue on him.’

‘I didn’t even know he spoke English,’ said Martin.

‘He speaks enough. Which one of them was it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve spent the last few days with the Three Musketeers over there. If you had to take a punt, which one would you say has the benevolent heart?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Martin without even thinking about it. Because how could he know?

But then he glanced at Riquinho, the tallest of the three bodyguards, a loose-limbed Brazilian. (A lot of the Lacebark security corps were Brazilian, Ecuadorian, Fijian, Nigerian, Jordanian, Serbian. If they came from countries like that you didn’t have to pay them so much.) On the plane, Riquinho had carried on watching the sun rise over the mountains long after the other two had lost interest; and in the van, he’d welded himself to the window as soon as the driver mentioned the dolphins; and in the square, he’d flinched as if he’d wanted to rush over to help the donkey, though it wasn’t even hurt. He seemed far more porous than the other two, more open to the surge of the world. In 2006 there had been a damaging leak to a journalist from the American Harper’s about some bribes that Lacebark had supposedly attempted to pass to government officials in Bolivia (which had millions of tons of lithium under the salt flats). Martin’s boss, ruling him out straight away, had asked him to write short loyalty evaluations on all his colleagues in the department. He enjoyed the task enormously, and he felt more powerful around the office for months afterwards, as if he had a dagger at his hip, even though no one else knew he was writing the reports and the culprit was never actually identified. That was how he felt now, thinking about Riquinho.

‘Come on,’ said Bezant. ‘I can tell you’ve got an opinion. Spit it out. Which one?’

But it was also possible, thought Martin, that the recent vindication of his suspicions about Dylan’s criminality had made him overconfident. His ‘evidence’ here was ineffable even compared to a trickle of light under a bedroom door. Who wouldn’t want to see some dolphins? In any case, he didn’t know quite what use Bezant would make of his answer, but he assumed it would be unpleasant. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know,’ he said.

Now Bezant and all three of the bodyguards were staring at Martin and he could feel a cold sweat kissing the back of his neck. When his phone vibrated in his pocket it made his whole leg spasm. His wife was calling. As he fumbled to turn it off Bezant screamed, ‘Which fucking one?’

The phone slipped from Martin’s hands. ‘Riquinho,’ he blurted, pointing.

Bezant walked right up to Riquinho and stared him in the face for a while. Then he said, ‘I think you might be right.’

‘I didn’t say a word to the cuzão !’ said Riquinho.

‘Fair enough,’ said Bezant. ‘We’ll establish that one way or another. You two: cuff him.’

The other two bodyguards didn’t hesitate. ‘No! Fuck this!’ shouted Riquinho.

‘Wait — it was just a guess,’ said Martin, who didn’t want to be responsible for trapping a second human being in the back of that van.

‘You should learn to trust your judgement, mate,’ said Bezant. As Riquinho was hauled inside the van the heels of his boots knocked half a dozen tin stars from the rim of the number plate.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ said Martin.

‘Not your problem. Anyway, you can take my car back to the airport. The plane’s waiting.’

This was enough to distract Martin from the fate of Riquinho for a moment, although at this point he felt as if he couldn’t even bend down to pick up his phone without asking for permission. ‘You mean I can go back to London?’ he said.

Bezant smiled. ‘Probably better. You’ll want to be seeing your kid, eh? Big time in a boy’s life. First visit from the blue heelers.’

7.03 p.m.

‘How did he know about your stepson and the police?’ says Raf.

‘Bezant always seems to know everything,’ says Martin. ‘Anyway, I think he stayed in Pakistan for a while after that to see if he could track down the Burmese guy we lost. And I don’t know whether he caught him in Karachi or whether the trail went cold or what, but when he got back to London, he called me. He said Riquinho had confessed to slipping the Burmese guy a pin or something so he could pick his handcuffs. I’d been right, and I think Bezant was impressed. And somehow he’d got hold of those reports I wrote about the leak in 2006. He told me they were some of the most detailed he’d ever seen and I had an aptitude for sniffing people out and I was wasted in lithium and he had a gap on his team here. He didn’t really give me a choice. And at least this job keeps me in London — well, not that they ever would’ve sent me back to Khairpur, most of it’s underwater at the moment. So my wife’s happy, even though I have to lie to her about what I’m doing.’