The Murder Exchange

by Simon Kernick

  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.’

  ‘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 déjà 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.

  Maybe the bastard had been reincarnated.

  I switched over at this point, having no desire to get into a staring match with a familiar-looking monkey, and cracked open another Peroni. It made me wonder what I’d have been doing that night if I’d never agreed to take on the Fowler contract. Probably sitting alone at home watching something a lot better. Life would have been a lot easier, that was for sure, but then again it would also have been a lot more boring. And sometimes that’s worse.

  What I didn’t know then, though, and what I do now, is that my troubles were only just beginning.

  Monday, thirteen days ago

  Iversson

  I was woken up by a faint sobbing, almost like a kid’s. My eyes snapped to attention and surveyed the room. It was dark, but the light from the street shimmered through the window, providing a murky orange glow, and I could make out a figure at the end of the bed. It was Elaine. The clock on the bedside table said 1.25.

  I sat up, fumbling for the switch on the bedside lamp. ‘Elaine? What’s happened?’ The light came on and I inhaled sharply, squinting against the brightness. Her make-up had run where she’d been crying and there were the beginnings of a bruise on her right cheek, just below the eye. The low-cut black blouse she was wearing had a tear in it that exposed the top of her bra, and it looked like an attempt had been made to rip it off which hadn’t fallen too far short of success.

  She looked at me, trying to maintain some sort of dignity, but the effort was too much and she began to cry again. ‘Oh, Max …’

  Confused and worried, I jumped out of the bed and took her in my arms. ‘Elaine, what’s happened?’

  For a while she didn’t say anything, just sobbed quietly against my chest, and I let her get it out, not wanting to hurry her. Finally, she lifted her head and turned away. ‘Leave it, Max. Please. I’ll be OK.’ She took her top off with her back to me – the first time she’d done that – and threw it in the corner before unclipping her bra.

  ‘Elaine, tell me, please. You can’t just come in like this and not let me k
now what’s up. Has someone hurt you?’ I went over and put my hands on her shoulders, rubbing them gently as I tried to relax her. ‘Come on, tell me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, still keeping her back to me. ‘I don’t want you to do anything stupid.’

  It was a bit late for that. The last four days had been one stupid thing after another. But I didn’t say this, knowing that patience alone would get it out of her. ‘Do you want a drink? A brandy or something?’

  She nodded. ‘That’d be nice.’

  I went through to the kitchen, found a bottle of brandy, and poured her a generous slug. I poured myself a glass of water.

  When I returned to the bedroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bed in her dressing gown. She’d stopped crying and appeared to have calmed down a little. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said, and thanked me as I gave her the drink.

  I sat down on her dressing-table chair so that we were facing each other. ‘There’s no need to apologize,’ I said quietly, ‘but I want to know what’s happened. Please.’

  ‘Why? It won’t do you any good.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

  She stared at me for a long moment, and I thought then that even upset and humiliated she looked beautiful. And vulnerable. For all her tough exterior, she bled just the same as anyone else. ‘Just tell me, Elaine,’ I said again.

  She exhaled for what seemed like a long time, then looked up at the ceiling. ‘Krys Holtz came to the club tonight.’ I felt something strong in the pit of my stomach, unsure whether it was fear or anger, thinking that it was probably both. ‘He asked to see me in the office that Roy used to use. When I got in there he started questioning me about the accounts, about how much we were taking, where the money was going, and all that. He seemed to think I knew all about the dealing that went on there. I told him that that side of it was nothing to do with me, and gave him all the paperwork. I didn’t like his attitude. He was treating me like some sort of third-class citizen. I’d heard he was a real bastard but I didn’t expect him to be quite so fucking out of order. He kept calling me “hired help”, and then, when I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know about the dealing, he told me I was a lying bitch. He said that we’d all been cooking the books down there. Roy, me, and Warren Case, the bloke who supplied the doormen.’ She was fiddling intently with a ring on her index finger as she spoke, and shaking her head. Finally, she looked me right in the eye. ‘You know me, Max, I don’t like being insulted, whoever it is doing the insulting. I told him I was telling the truth and if he didn’t believe me that was his fucking lookout. Then I told him I was leaving.’