Jake & Jouma 02; Burn Page 2

  Dutch Alice rolled her eyes. “Well, I didn’t push him!”

  “No – but you saw him fall.”

  “Well, I now wish I’d turned the other cheek. So much for being public spirited. I feel like a criminal.”

  “Please, madam. Tell me again what you saw.”

  The whore snorted and sucked on her cigarette, and Jouma wondered precisely how much of a handout she had been expecting for her public spiritedness.

  “I looked up and he was just up there. On the top of the wall, I mean. I don’t know where he came from.”

  “Did you mention this to your…client?”

  Dutch Alice smiled lasciviously. “My mouth was full, Inspector.”

  Jouma tried not to picture the scene. “You said earlier that Mr Quarrie appeared to be unsteady on his feet.”

  “Quarrie? That’s the stiff, yeah?”

  Jouma nodded.

  “What sort of name is that? Jewish?”

  “If you could answer the question, please, madam.”

  “If you ask me he was drunk. Staggering about. Talking to himself – you know, like drunks do.”

  “Did you hear what he said?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone acting suspiciously in the area?”

  “Where – in the Old Town?” Dutch Alice looked at him as if he was a simpleton. “The Old Town is full of men looking to get laid. They all act suspiciously.”

  “The man you were with – have you seen him before today?”

  “Abdelbassir?” A harsh laugh. “I know every kink in his filthy Moroccan cock.”

  “Why did he run away?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Telling lies to his wife, I expect.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Why should I care where he lives? I don’t send him Christmas cards. But don’t worry, Inspector. He’ll be back. They always come back.” A flickering, rattlesnake tongue darted from her mouth, and the whore cackled again as Jouma recoiled in his chair. “Sensitive soul, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m surprised. After everything I’ve heard about you, I mean. The Man Who Cleaned Up Mombasa! That’s what they call you in the newspapers, isn’t it?”

  Jouma looked at her expression and felt his heart sinking fast. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, madam,” he said.

  ∨ Burn ∧

  5

  Quarrie’s body lay on a metal autopsy table in the basement mortuary of Mombasa Hospital.

  “Neat, wouldn’t you say?” said Christie, the pathologist, running one latex-encased finger along a raw, foot-long scar that ran vertically down the cadaver’s chest. “Straight as a die. And recent too, which saves me a job.” With a sweep of his scalpel blade, Christie opened the wound. A sharp tug and the flesh parted like curtains, exposing the white bone beneath.

  From his customary autopsy viewing position – pressed against the tiled wall with his fingers clenched around the nearest bench for support – Jouma watched aghast as Christie began unravelling the stainless-steel wires that secured the two halves of the dead man’s sternum. As he worked he hummed a tuneless dirge that seemed entirely in keeping with his bodysnatcher’s demeanour. All it needed was a swirl of mist licking around his feet and a vulture perched on his shoulder and the macabre image would be complete.

  “I always think it’s a shame to undo someone else’s handiwork, especially so soon after it was completed,” the pathologist remarked. “And especially when the surgeon was clearly an expert in his field. Who did you say this fellow was again, Jouma?”

  “A retired officer with the Royal Ulster Constabulary.”

  Christie nodded approvingly. “You can say what you like about the British Police, but they look after their own. If he’d been on your healthcare policy, Jouma, they would have rammed him full of pig valves and sent him out to drop dead before his pension kicked in. This, on the other hand – ” he pointed at something in the exposed chest cavity at which Jouma had no intention of looking “ – is pure craftsmanship. Made to last. And such a pity.”

  His outstretched finger moved upwards, beyond the chest, to where the top of Lol Quarrie’s skull was flattened just above his eyebrows.

  “If it hadn’t been for this,” he said sadly, “our friend here would have lived another twenty years.”

  ♦

  Superintendent Elizabeth Simba extended a red-painted fingernail and used it to press a button on the intercom console in front of her.

  “Wendy – could you bring me a glass of mineral water, please?” She looked across her desk at Jouma. “Tea, Daniel? English breakfast, am I correct?”

  They were in Simba’s office in the compound of Coast Province Police Headquarters on Mama Ngina Drive, the sweeping thoroughfare of municipal buildings and state-owned mansions on the south shore of Mombasa island. Behind her a large window overlooking the Indian Ocean rattled in time to the late-evening breeze that ruffled the palm trees on the headland. Simba, a well-built woman in her early fifties, sat back in her chair and put on a pair of narrow-framed spectacles.

  “So what do we have?” she said presently.

  Jouma cleared his throat and looked at his shoes, uncertain how to begin. Simba had been in her post for a month now, and in that time she had been nothing less than civil to him – but still he felt apprehensive in her presence. Was it because she was the disgraced Superintendent Teshete’s replacement from Nairobi? Was it because he, Jouma, was directly responsible for his former superior officer’s current incarceration in prison awaiting trial for corruption? Surely she would appreciate that he was only doing his job, and that if Teshete had grown rich on bribes from the Mombasa underworld then it was his duty to bring him to justice.

  But Jouma knew all too well that certain high-ranking officials in both the police and government, while publicly praising him for what he had done, privately hated his guts for holding Kenya’s dirty laundry up to the light. They wanted him pensioned off, or at the very least dispatched to some anonymous backwater where he couldn’t cause any more trouble. The fact that he was still at Mama Ngina Drive, that he had steadfastly refused every promotion or lucrative transfer he had been offered, must have irritated them beyond measure.

  “The dead man is Lawrence Quarrie, aged fifty-nine years,” he said. He gave an address in Nyali, a genteel suburb on the north coast, and Simba, who had obviously heard of the neighbourhood, looked surprised. “Mr Quarrie was a uniformed sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Belfast until his retirement nine years ago.”

  “Married?”

  “His wife died in June 2000. He moved to Kenya soon afterwards. I understand the couple regularly came here on safari holidays.”

  “What was he doing in Mombasa yesterday?”

  “He was having lunch at the Constabulary Club.” Jouma noted Simba’s narrowed eyes. “It is a private club, ma’am, for retired police officers. Mostly ex-pat British, although there are a few Kenyan members.”

  Simba sipped her water carefully. “None of them African, I expect,” she said without looking up. “So did he jump? Was there any reason he wanted to kill himself?”

  “Mr Quarrie had recently undergone heart surgery,” Jouma said. “Depression is a recognised side effect of such a traumatic operation.”

  “What about the whore? According to her statement the victim appeared to be drunk.”

  “I am awaiting a blood analysis report from the pathologist, ma’am. But Mr Quarrie was drinking mineral water at lunch.”

  “And after lunch?”

  Jouma could only shrug. “We are still trying to ascertain his movements between three and seven o’clock yesterday, ma’am.”

  Simba exhaled thoughtfully and ran her fingers across her short-cropped hair. Rather than risk eye contact, Jouma gazed around the room. His new boss had made a few superficial changes – a vase of flowers in the corner, the leather sofa moved ag
ainst a different wall, a new picture by the metal filing cabinet – but in essence the office was much as Teshete had kept it. The main difference was the smell: instead of acrid cigarette smoke, the room was filled with the anodyne aroma of air freshener. Jouma wasn’t sure which he preferred. It was almost a relief when Simba’s secretary entered the room with a tray of refreshments. The bone china teacup gave him something to look at.

  “Have you found the Moroccan dockhand?” Simba said. “The one that ran away?”

  “His name is Abdelbassir Hossain. We brought him in for questioning an hour ago.”

  “And?”

  Jouma cleared his throat. “He was most concerned that his wife did not find out what he had been up to.”

  “You do not think he is involved?”

  “No ma’am. Of that I am very certain.”

  “So what do you think, Daniel?”

  The question was without apparent menace or hidden meaning, but still Simba did not look up and Jouma had the uneasy sensation that he was somehow being tested.

  “At this time suicide would seem to be the most feasible explanation. Although I am still at a loss as to how he gained access to the fort, and indeed why his clothes were covered in mud.”

  Simba looked up with a weary expression. “Trust me, Daniel, when retired British policemen fall to their deaths in mysterious circumstances the answer is never as simple as suicide.”

  “I am aware of that,” Jouma said. The prospect of his every move being scrutinised by a bunch of ex-cops whose opinion of Kenyan policing was non-existent had already filled him with foreboding. “I will know more once I have the blood analysis.”

  “Good. Until every line of inquiry has been exhausted, I want you to treat Mr Quarrie’s death as suspicious.”

  Jouma nodded. “As you wish, ma’am. And the missing nun from Jalawi village?”

  She waved a hand. “Detective Constable Mwangi will take over. I want your full attention on this case.”

  “With respect, ma’am, Mwangi is very inexperienced.”

  “We were all inexperienced once, Daniel,” Simba said.

  It took Jouma a moment to realise that the meeting was at an end.

  ∨ Burn ∧

  6

  Five miles off the coast of Africa the air was warm and the sea was benign, and on the flying bridge of the game-fishing boat Yellowfin Jake had now gone almost two whole minutes without thinking about Lol Quarrie’s skull exploding at his feet.

  In the scheme of things this was a big improvement, because the image and the sound had kept him awake all the previous night. And while it would take a lot longer to erase the memory than it had taken to swab Lol’s brains off his clothes, Jake knew that eventually it would fade away, because even the worst experiences subsided after a while.

  Like getting shot.

  There was a time when he thought a night would not pass without the white, frightened face of an eighteen-year-old east London hoodlum named Ronnie Cavanagh haunting his dreams. On those nights he saw the loaded pistol just as clearly as that day five years ago, and heard the explosion as Cavanagh pulled the trigger. But now it was almost as if the bullet had torn into someone else. Sometimes Jake had to run his fingers over the puckered scar on his abdomen to prove to himself that it had really happened.

  Days like this helped, of course. The ocean was therapy and Yelloufin a confidante. It was why he had quit the Flying Squad and jumped on a plane to Kenya after reading Harry Philliskirk’s appeal for a like-minded business partner in the classifieds.

  And, if all else failed, there was always the Ernie strapped to the fighting chair to keep him occupied.

  “Excuse me,” a plaintive voice called up from the cockpit, “but I think I’ve caught a shark.”

  “OK.”

  Lighting a cigarette, Jake reflected that if he had a dollar for every time he’d heard that line he’d never have a financial worry again. To pasty-skinned Europeans, who spent their lives surrounded by freezing oceans of cod and haddock, even the tug of a sailfish was like that of a Great White. Harry had christened them Ernies. “Every one of them thinks they’re Ernest Hemingway,” he would say, “and every sprat they pull out of the sea will be a three-hundred-pound marlin by the time they get back to the office on Monday morning.”

  “Ah – excuse me…”

  “Yeah, I’m coming.”

  Jake consoled himself with the thought that at least this would be the last Ernie he’d have to chap-erone for a while. Tomorrow he was taking Yellowfin to Missy Meredith’s yard to see what new life a complete overhaul could breathe into an old crate with fifteen years’ hard labour under her belt. With two new turbo diesel engines, rewired electrics, purged hydraulics and a flying bridge bristling with VHF radio, GPS navigation and sonar fish-finding equipment – not to mention several hundred dollars’ worth of gleaming new tackle in the cockpit – he suspected it would be like being the skipper of a new boat.

  Thank you, Martha.

  He drew hard on his cigarette, and as he did so he could almost hear Martha Bentley scolding him for smoking. He chuckled to himself as he imagined her face screwed up with self-righteousness. There was no doubt about it: he missed her – and not only because she had agreed to save their bacon by injecting her murdered father’s insurance money into their dying charter business.

  Not for the first time he wondered what might happen in a few weeks’ time when she returned to Africa from New York to supervise her investment. In the short time they had known each other he had felt a definite chemistry between them, and it was true that he had rarely felt as comfortable in the presence of a woman. But did that mean they could ever be anything more than business partners?

  “Excuse me – but I really think you need to come and look at this.”

  “On my way, pal.”

  Dah – who was he kidding? At thirty-five Jake was more than ten years older than her, a knuckleheaded Geordie ex-copper with even more than the usual number of failings and fuck-ups to his name. Martha was smart and sassy and beautiful; the kind of girl he only ever saw in the kind of movies about smart, sassy women he always tried to avoid. Some things were best left to the imagination.

  “Mr Jake – I think the boss needs help.”

  The shout from Sammy the bait boy brought him back from his reverie and he looked down from his perch on the flying bridge. The Ernie was a balding, middle-aged schoolteacher from England. His wife and daughter had booked him a half-day’s fishing with his prospective son-in-law as a bonding exercise. Landing a tuna or a wahoo together might well have done the trick – except the prospective son-in-law had been prostrate in the cabin with acute seasickness ever since they’d left the calm waters of the inner reef.

  “OK, Sammy, I’m coming down.”

  Jake slammed the throttles into neutral and climbed down the ladder to the cockpit.

  “You must be getting tired,” he said to the Ernie, patting him on the shoulder. “You want me to take over for a while?”

  “Like I’ve been trying to tell you,” the Ernie grimaced through a torrent of sweat pouring down his face, “I think I’ve hooked a shark.”

  Jake followed the direction of the line and, behind his Ray-Bans, his eyes widened. Fifty yards off the stern rail a huge grey-white shape was twisting and rolling in the swell, the triangular line of its dorsal fin like a calling card.

  Jesus –

  “I think you’re right, mate,” he told the Ernie. “You’ve hooked yourself a zambi.”

  “A what?”

  “Bull shark.”

  And it was a big bastard as well. There wouldn’t be much change out of 500lbs from this one. That was damn near half a ton of pure muscle and bad attitude on a rod set up to land a 200lb tuna. How the line hadn’t snapped was a mystery. And how this scrawny schoolteacher had kept reeling without being ripped out of the flying chair and into the shark’s maw was little short of miraculous. He didn’t look as if he had the strength to pull the skin o
ff a rice pudding.

  “Sammy – pass me the rod belt.”

  The boy ran to one of the tackle boxes and returned with a leather harness which Jake pulled over his shoulders and belted firmly around his waist.

  “OK. Now get up to the bridge.”

  As Sammy shinned up the ladder, Jake carefully lifted the butt of the rod from its gimbal cup at the base of the fighting chair and jammed it into the holder in his midriff. As he did so the huge shark shot down beneath the surface. The rod bent almost double as Jake took the strain, bending forward to allow the run-on, then heaving backwards and winding with all his might.

  “Come on, Sammy!”

  Yellowfin’s ageing diesels spluttered to life as the bait boy opened up the throttles. Eyes never leaving the fish, he expertly controlled the boat so that it kept pace.

  Down in the cockpit sweat was already pouring off Jake and his arms and thighs were burning. Sure, he’d used the rod belt to help an Ernie in distress many times. But even landing a marlin was nothing compared to tackling this monster.

  And yet…

  Fifteen minutes passed. Then thirty. In the broiling heat of the cockpit, Jake realised that the shark’s resistance was waning. Was the bastard getting tired? It hardly seemed possible. But then its dorsal fin burst out of the water and he saw to his astonishment that the great fish was now less than ten feet off the stern.

  “My God,” the Ernie said. “Look at the size of it.” He backed away towards the cabin, determined to raise his son-in-law from his deathbed.

  It was a big one all right, probably fifteen feet from nose to tail and three feet wide. What Jake hadn’t told the Ernie – indeed what he didn’t like to think about too much himself – was that of all the species of shark, Great Whites included, Bulls were generally considered to be the most dangerous to humans. You read about a swimmer being attacked a few feet from the shore? Most likely it was a zambi. This particular species even liked fresh water, which was why it had a reputation for swimming up rivers and grabbing small children from the shallows.