Bait Page 4

  Yellowfin had neither. Such was the parlous state of Britannia Fishing Trips Ltd’s finances, they didn’t even have credit for a mobile-phone contract. Jake stared at the dead radio and cursed it. Two weeks for replacement parts from Nairobi. Two fucking weeks! It was all very well for Harry to deal with the vicissitudes of life with a wisecrack and a dismissive swipe of his hand, but without a radio Yellowfin shouldn’t even have been on the water. If anything went wrong, all Jake had was a box of flares. And, if the disgruntled Germans knew that, it would certainly take their minds off the lack of fishing.

  Harry’s argument, of course, was that what the Ernies didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and that in any case they simply could not afford to take Yellowfin out of circulation. But that was the kind of logic that got people killed. And it turned Jake’s blood to ice that, despite everything he knew about the actions of desperate men, he should find himself complicit in just such an act of desperation.

  He adjusted the bearing slightly then watched as Sammy once again reeled in each individual line from the booms and diligently rebaited them with slivers of pinky-white flesh. It was a fruitless task because they were now approaching the reef, but it gave the impression that at least one member of Yellowfin’s crew knew what they were doing.

  Sammy. Christ, Jake thought, the kid was incredible. His brother was missing presumed dead less than twenty-four hours, but when Jake had gone in person to the boy’s house at Jalawi that morning Sammy had insisted on working as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Tigi will come back,’ was all he would say on the matter as he sharpened his filleting knives on a leather strop nailed to the door.

  Inside, his mother filled a canvas musette with dates and slivers of dried meat for his lunch, busying herself the way only parents can when the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

  They were on the outskirts of the city now, stalled in traffic a quarter of a mile from the Nyali Bridge, which connected Mombasa island to the north mainland. Ahead was a cacophonic lottery of carts, cars, trucks, matatu taxis, motorcycles, pedestrians and animals, all competing for the same inch of empty road at the same time. Harry’s left hand maintained a steady rhythm on the horn, as if that would make a blind bit of difference. After five years in Kenya, Jake knew all about Mombasa traffic jams. All it took was some rickety old pick-up to shed its load of goats and the city could be gridlocked for hours.

  Five years. Was it really that long since he’d arrived at Moi Airport with nothing more than a suitcase and the Kenyan guidebook he’d bought at Heathrow? Even now he marvelled at how wonderfully naive he had been that day, striding out into the sapping Mombasa heat like some latter-day colonial adventurer straight off the steamer.

  His old man would have laughed his head off if he could have seen it.

  ‘Look at him!’ Albie Moore would have said, leaning forward on his bar stool in the taproom of the Low Lights Tavern in North Shields. ‘He used to think he was Dixon of Dock Green. Now he’s Gordon of Khartoum!’

  And that low bronchitic laugh would have rumbled out again until it was doused with a mouthful of Pusser’s Rum, his fifth since stepping off the trawler at four that morning.

  But of course Albie Moore never saw the day his son arrived in Kenya. The old man was long dead, killed by too much drink and too many hand-rolled cigarettes, but mostly by the crushing realisation that his life, which had been so unimaginably hard, should have ended up meaning nothing at all.

  Jake stared through the grimy window at the clutter of rundown shacks and jerrybuilt stalls constructed from corrugated iron, chicken wire, salvaged wood and knitted palm leaves that hugged the verges on either side of the road, selling everything from hand-stitched kanga shawls to 100 per cent hooch. The ingenuity never failed to amaze him. Nor did the grinding poverty that made it necessary. He wondered what his old man would have made of it all. Albie, he knew, would have understood it more than he ever understood his son.

  ‘There is, of course, another solution to all this,’ Harry said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  He waved two hundred dollars under Jake’s nose. ‘I know a bar not half a mile from here.’

  ‘I thought that money was for the Arab.’

  ‘You heard what he said: he considers it an insult.’

  Jake rubbed his face wearily. Through his fingers he saw the traffic jam stretching to infinity, and the thought of getting drunk again was suddenly hugely appealing. Then something - a sudden blur of movement - caught his attention.

  ‘Maggie’s Den is the name,’ Harry was saying. ‘Overlooks the dhow harbour. A bit rough, perhaps, but not without character.’

  ‘Stop the car,’ Jake said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop the car. Now.’

  Harry swerved abruptly across the road and all hell erupted behind him as the traffic slowed from a crawl to a dead halt - but the passenger door was already swinging open and the seat was empty. Jake was visible only for a moment, slaloming through the nose-to-tail vehicles in order to get to the far side of the road. Then he was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  The girl was perhaps sixteen years old. She was slumped against the hand-painted raffia frame of a fruit kiosk, legs splayed across the pavement, blood seeping from a wound to the side of her head. She was wailing, her eyes rolling wildly in their sockets, her hands fluttering on either side of her face. A crowd of curious onlookers were gathered around, staring down at her but seemingly unwilling to help in case she was possessed by a demon. Jake surmised she was in shock, which did not surprise him. Less than thirty seconds earlier, he had watched from the Land Rover as a tall man, his face hidden by a hooded sweat top, had run up behind her, snatched the baby she had been carrying in a cotton sling around her neck and pushed her roughly to the ground.

  He knelt and quickly assessed the injury. It was superficial, despite the blood.

  ‘You,’ he snapped at the stall owner, a spindly man with tobacco-stained teeth and alcohol-induced shakes. ‘Get this woman a bandage.’

  The man looked at him blankly.

  Jake pointed at the wound. ‘Gango!’

  The man nodded frantically, repeating the Swahili word over and over as if to ensure he did not forget it. But Jake did not wait to see if he understood.

  The abductor had sprinted from the main highway and on to a narrower adjacent road that looped down towards the vast concrete supports of Nyali Bridge. Jake followed until the road abruptly stopped. Ahead of him was a breaker’s yard, situated on scrubland beneath the span of the bridge itself. It was filled with teetering piles of rusting vehicles, most of them mangled out of all recognition by the collisions that had ended their useful lives. Over the angry blare of stalled traffic on the carriageway high above him, Jake could hear the urgent keening of a child as he approached. It was coming from a tar-paper cabin on the far side of the compound. He moved forwards, grabbing the nearest weapon to hand, a foot-long piece of virtually carbonised exhaust pipe. He hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to use it because it felt like it would crumble in his fingers at the slightest impact.

  Jake waited outside the cabin, listening. The crying was relentless, like a buzz saw. There was a window. He peered in and saw the baby, still wrapped in its cotton sling. It had been dumped in an in-tray on a metal desk in one corner of the room. The abductor sat with his back against the opposite wall near the door. Jake could see now that he was no older than the girl he had left bleeding on the street. Just a kid. His head was between his knees, his hands clamped to his ears. His foot was jiggling nervously. Suddenly, he sprang to his feet and opened the door. Jake flattened himself against the flimsy wall of the cabin until the door slammed shut again.

  Waiting for someone?

  He placed the pipe on the ground, wiped the shit off his hands and knocked on the door.

  The door flew open.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Jake said pleasantly, then rammed his fist into the abductor’s solar plex
us.

  The kid’s eyes bulged, and with a retch of pain and surprise he crumpled first on to his knees and then on to his side in the foetal position. Jake stepped over him and went to the desk. He picked up the baby, saw that it was unharmed and replaced it in the in-tray.

  ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do, son,’ he said.

  The kid had dragged himself into a corner of the cabin like a wounded animal on the highway. His dark skin had turned grey, and his face was full of fear.

  ‘You are the police?’

  ‘No. I’m not the police. What’s your name?’

  Total confusion now.

  ‘I won’t ask you again.’

  ‘Adan. Adan Mohammed.’

  ‘You want to tell me what’s going on, Adan?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Why did you take the baby?’

  The kid’s stupefied expression hardened. ‘I am his father!’

  Oh shit, Jake thought.

  ‘And the girl you just knocked for six is the mother?’

  ‘She told me I could not see him again,’ the kid protested. ‘She said I am a bad father.’

  ‘Seems to me that she’s got a point.’

  Adan shook his head. ‘Shahira’s father never liked me. He has poisoned her against me.’

  Jake sighed. By now the traffic on the approach to Nyali Bridge might have unglued itself. He and Harry could have been home free. To hell with Maggie’s Den, in a little over an hour they would have been ensconced in Suki Lo’s.

  ‘So what’s the plan, Adan? Tell me you’ve got a plan. Who are you waiting for?’

  ‘My friend Lucas has a truck. He will drive us to Nairobi. Then I will write to Shahira instructing her to join us. Once she is free of her father, I am convinced we will be happy. I will find a job. I will provide for my family.’

  ‘You’re meeting Lucas here?’

  Adan nodded.

  ‘Forget it. He’s not coming.’

  ‘Lucas will come.’

  ‘No, he won’t, Adan. Because any minute now this place will be crawling with police. It tends to happen when you kidnap a child in broad daylight on the busiest fucking road in Mombasa.’

  At that moment, a look of utter despair crossed Adan Mohammed’s thin face.

  ‘But Oki is my son,’ he whispered.

  Jake looked at him, and any anger he felt towards the boy evaporated. ‘How old are you, Adan?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘OK. Get up.’

  Adan gingerly levered himself to his feet. Jake passed over the baby. The boy held his son with an unmistakable tenderness. No - he wasn’t a bad father, Jake thought. He was just a stupid, head-strong teenager. He deserved a clip round the ear. Him and his flaky girlfriend.

  Whether Mombasa police would share Jake’s opinion was a different matter, however.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re going to hand ourselves in, Adan.’

  Chapter Eight

  After his abortive meeting with Michael Kili, Jouma had returned to Mama Ngina Drive, his headache building. He was fifty-one years old, and on days like these he felt every one of those years. How much easier life would be if he shared Sergeant Nyami’s attitude to policework, he reflected. What had he hoped to achieve by investigating the disappearance of a lowlife undesirable like George Malewe anyway? Some sort of professional satisfaction? The eternal gratitude of a young wife and a small boy who had just celebrated his third birthday? No, Nyami was right: if Malewe was indeed dead, then it was probably nothing more than he deserved. There was an old saying that, if you swam with sharks, sooner or later you were going to get eaten by them.

  Yet, almost as soon as the thought entered his head, Jouma felt ashamed. Was this what he had been reduced to? Thirty-three years a serving police officer, only to end up turning his back on everything he had sworn to protect? He thought about the riots in the Nairobi slums and in the Rift Valley, about the violence and bloodshed that had stained his country in recent months. How he, like everyone else who was a proud Kenyan, had stared with disbelief at the television images that were being beamed around the world. He’d watched young men, many barely older than boys, descend into unspeakable savagery with breathtaking ease, in the blink of an eye almost; and it made him realise that the barrier that held back such raging bestial instincts in a man must be so paper-thin as to be almost invisible. As churches burned and mothers wept for their dead children, Jouma had concluded that, if all that was good was not to be consumed by all that was evil, this flimsy barrier had to be protected at all costs.

  How quickly you forget, Daniel.

  ‘Put the kettle on, Nyami,’ he said wearily. ‘I will show you how a cup of tea should be made.’

  It was five minutes past three. In two hours he could go home and forget about this day. Then the telephone rang, and even before he answered it Jouma knew that another test awaited him.

  The Englishman from Flamingo Creek was sitting quietly in the interview room, his left wrist manacled to a metal loop on the table in front of him. Jouma knew the creek. It was situated between Mombasa and Kilifi, and was well known as a habitat for that most peculiar of species - the fishing boat skipper.

  He had never heard of Jake Moore, however.

  For a moment the two men sized each other up across the room.

  ‘Mr Moore?’

  ‘Inspector Jouma?’

  Jouma gestured irritably, and a uniformed officer standing by the door moved sharply across the room to unlock the cuffs from Jake’s wrist.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said, sitting down on a plastic chair that was bolted to the floor on the other side of the table. ‘Standard procedure, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Then you will understand that, if there is one thing that we frown upon most severely, Mr Moore, it is vigilantism. We simply cannot have members of the public taking the law into their own hands. Mombasa is a dangerous place. The consequences do not bear thinking about.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jake said. ‘How is the boy? Adan?’

  ‘He is downstairs in the cells, considering the error of his ways. I intend to let him consider them for the rest of the day.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It depends whether the girl wishes to press charges. I will be strongly urging her not to.’

  ‘A compassionate copper?’ Jake smiled. ‘Now there’s a rarity.’

  ‘Compassion has nothing to do with it,’ Jouma said. ‘Paperwork does. And so do lawyers. By the time this case reaches any sort of fruition, the baby you rescued will be in long trousers. But then I suspect you know that anyway, Mr Moore.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It takes a policeman to know the many pitfalls of the judicial system, does it not?’

  Jake looked at him across the table and nodded admiringly. ‘You’ve done your homework, Inspector.’

  ‘It is standard procedure to run background checks on foreign nationals held in custody. All it took was a telephone call to your Consulate here in Mombasa.’

  ‘Then I hope they told you that I haven’t been a policeman for quite some time.’

  Now it was Jouma’s turn to smile. ‘Indeed they did, Mr Moore. Six years, to be exact. But it would appear that living in Kenya hasn’t dulled your instincts.’

  ‘Old habits die hard, Inspector,’ Jake said.

  Jouma stood, and the interview room echoed to the sound of cracking knees.

  ‘This has been a long and tortuous day for me, Mr Moore,’ he said, looking at a clock on the wall. The time was now four o’clock. ‘I don’t think we need to take this matter further.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Just remember that we too have laws here, and we employ officers to enforce them.’

  Jake extended his hand and Jouma took it. The inspector was a small man, but his grip was surprisingly firm.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Moore. Constable Walu will show y
ou out.’

  Day Three

  Chapter Nine

  In Baghdad, a motorcade had been ambushed as it made its way from the airport to an anti-terrorist summit at the headquarters of the latest ruling council, and the Iraqi security minister and six UN officials were dead. Two thousand miles away in Amsterdam, the man who had supplied the four Russian-made SA-7 missile launchers used by insurgents in the ambush emerged from the bedroom of a two-thousand-euro-a-night hotel suite and lit a Turkish cigarette.

  The room had been conscientiously furnished with every imaginable accoutrement of eighteenth-century French period ware: intricate walnut fauteuils, bergère armchairs, cabriole-legged commodes and bureaux, Quimper earthenware and gilt wood mirrors - but, in one corner of the room, an ultra-modern plasma TV screen showed CNN footage of bodies being extricated from the twisted and burning wreckage and placed into waiting ambulances.

  ‘Happy, Mr Dzasokhov?’ Whitestone said from a tan leather sofa on the other side of the room.

  The man with the cigarette puffed contentedly. ‘Extremely.’