The Payback

by Simon Kernick

  And he hadn’t let me down, either. Tomboy had helped me when I’d needed him. He knew what I’d done and could easily have turned me in to the authorities in the Philippines, probably gaining a sizeable financial reward for doing so, but he hadn’t. Instead we’d gone into business together running a dive operation, first on the southern island of Siquijor, then after that in the resort of Puerto Galera, a few hours south of where I was now. It had been a lot of fun, too. We’d got drunk together, laughed at each other’s jokes, been almost like brothers, even if, now and again, he’d wanted me to kill the occasional bad guy to help raise funds for the business.

  But then, six years ago, something had happened, something that had changed my opinion of him for ever. The last words I’d ever spoken to him, made in a phone call from England after I’d gone back there to sort out some unfinished business, were a coldly uttered threat: ‘Just pray I never come looking for you.’

  We hadn’t spoken since, and in the interim I’d tried to forget about him and the terrible thing he’d done. But, standing on that hot, polluted street, I thought about him now, and wondered whether he was even still alive.

  Somehow I reckoned he would be. Tomboy had always been a survivor.

  A wiry little guy in a scraggy T-shirt weaved through the traffic on a moped. As he saw me, he nodded and, without slowing down, pulled a satchel from his shoulder and held it out with an outstretched arm.

  I took it in one casual movement and put it over my own shoulder, then I was walking one way and he was riding the other.

  And that was it. A two-second exchange, and once again I was ready to commit murder.

  I’d changed hotels, not wanting to stay too close to where I’d killed O’Riordan and his lover the previous night, and had booked myself into the Hilton on Roxas Avenue – the main thoroughfare through the upmarket bay area of the city. It was costing me a lot of money, but I figured that I’d be able to claim it back from Schagel as a justified business expense. After all, I was doing him a favour by hanging around a place where I’d just committed two murders.

  On the way back to the Hilton, I stopped off at an internet café that promised fast broadband connections and air conditioning, and bought an hour of time from a kid with a funky haircut who didn’t even look up from the bowl of noodles he was vacuuming up. I found a spot in the corner, away from the two other surfers, and logged into the hotmail account I shared with Schagel.

  As promised, there was an email in the drafts section with a single jpeg attachment. I opened it and found myself looking at a photo of the head and shoulders of an attractive white woman in her early thirties. Her bleached-blonde hair was cut very short and gave her a confident, almost aggressive look that made me wonder, inappropriately, what she’d be like in bed. She was partly turned away from the camera, an expression of concentration on her face, and it was clear that she wasn’t aware the shot was being taken. It was still a good one, though, and I knew I’d have no trouble recognizing her again – especially with that hair.

  I closed the attachment and returned to the body of the email, reading it through quickly. According to Schagel, the woman’s name was Tina Boyd and she was expected in Manila the following day on an as yet unspecified flight. As soon as he had the flight number and time, he would contact me. My instructions were to be at the airport when she arrived and to follow her to her destination. ON NO ACCOUNT (Schagel’s capitals, not mine) was I to lose her. I would then receive further instructions. He signed off the mail by telling me to delete both it and the attachment.

  I did as I was told, but remained seated at the PC. Tina Boyd. The photograph wasn’t familiar but the name was. I’d definitely heard it before, a long time ago.

  And then I frowned, because I remembered where. A cold winter’s night just over six years ago, back in London. The last time I’d been there. And I recalled all too well what it had been in connection with.

  So a London-based police officer – a DS, if I remembered rightly – was coming to Manila, and her arrival had clearly ruffled the feathers of the wrong kinds of people. I Googled her name and rank – which was when I learned she was now a DI – and skim-read the slew of articles about her that immediately came up.

  My hour had almost run out when I finally got up, having found out plenty about Tina Boyd’s controversial, on occasions death-defying, career, but still no nearer to knowing why she had to die, or even whether she had any connection to Patrick O’Riordan.

  But I was suddenly very curious to find out.

  Nineteen

  Omar Salic needed the reward money the Manila Post man, Pat O’Riordan, had promised him. He needed it badly. It meant he could leave Manila with Soraya and set up the carpentry business he’d been dreaming of back home in Mindanao. It meant escaping the malign influence of the men he’d been working with – men he’d thought initially were his friends, but who were now turning into devils. If he carried on with them, he’d be dead soon, there was no question about it, and Soraya – his beautiful Soraya – would be left all alone to bring up their unborn child. A child Omar would never see.

  O’Riordan was the man who’d promised to help Omar escape, yet he hadn’t turned up at the meeting, and nor had the other guy he was supposed to bring with him, the American, Cheeseman. Omar had obeyed O’Riordan’s instructions and not written anything down but he’d memorized every last detail, and had waited for him and Cheeseman at the agreed location for more than two hours before finally, and reluctantly, leaving.

  The walk back home had been one of the most painful of his life. Every five minutes he’d tried O’Riordan’s mobile – a number the reporter had told him he could be reached on any time of day or night – and every time it had gone straight to voicemail. Omar hadn’t left any messages. He hadn’t seen much point. O’Riordan, the man who was going to change things for him and Soraya, had given up on him, even though Omar was sure that the information he had was worth thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars. The problem was, he was running out of time to find someone else willing to pay for it, and if this opportunity slipped through his fingers, as it now looked like it would, then there would almost certainly not be another like it again.

  It was a quarter to six and the sun was beginning to go down amid the smog as Omar reached the grim apartment block in Manila’s Tondo district where he and Soraya had lived for the past three years while he scraped a living in this city they both despised. On the ride up in the elevator he told himself that he would find someone else to sell the information to, that he shouldn’t give up just yet. He also forced himself to cheer up. He didn’t want to worry Soraya, not in her current condition. She knew nothing of his double life, nor of the meeting with O’Riordan. As far as she knew, he’d been out with friends that afternoon, and that was how he wanted it to stay.

  But the moment he stepped into the apartment he could see that it was too late for that.

  Soraya was sitting in her favourite chair, but there was something terribly wrong. Her mouth was gagged and her arms and legs bound. Above the gag, her eyes were wide and terrified.

  Omar gasped, unable to comprehend for a moment what was happening, but even in her terror, Soraya was gesturing behind him with her eyes.

  Before he could turn round, he was grabbed from behind by firm hands, and felt a knife being pushed hard against his throat. ‘On your knees, traitor,’ hissed a voice he recognized in his ear, and he was shoved roughly to the ground so that he was lying on his front. From the position he was in, only a few feet away from the chair, he could see, with a growing sense of dread, that Soraya’s black dress was wet with blood.

  At least two men were holding Omar down, and though he felt a terrible rage at what was being done to his beloved wife, he knew there was no point resisting, not with the knife against his throat. ‘What’s going on?’ he gasped, trying to regain some control of the situation, even though he could feel his bowels turning to water. Because he knew what these people were capable of.
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  ‘You know what’s going on,’ hissed the voice. ‘What have you said to the journalist?’

  ‘Nothing, I swear it,’ replied Omar, just about managing to make eye contact with Soraya, and giving her a look that said he would sort this out and stop these men from doing any further harm to her. ‘Please. Let my wife go. She’s pregnant.’

  But as he spoke he saw a third man come out of the tiny kitchen, a nail gun in one hand and a butcher’s knife in the other. It was Anil, and he looked perfectly calm. But then he always did. Even when he was killing.

  ‘Please Anil,’ whispered Omar, feeling the knife cut his skin as he spoke. ‘Let Soraya go. She has done nothing.’

  ‘But you have, haven’t you, Omar,’ said Anil slyly. ‘Who have you told?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘What about the journalist?’

  Omar had no idea how they’d found out about O’Riordan. He’d covered his tracks with extreme care, and the only reason he’d approached O’Riordan was because he thought that a journalist with his experience would have done the same. But in the end none of this mattered. Because the point was, they knew. Which meant that Omar was going to have to tell the truth. He was finished, he knew this. But if there was any chance of getting Soraya out of this alive, he had to take it.

  ‘Look, we just arranged to meet. That’s all. But the journalist didn’t show up.’ He pushed his head up from the floor, ignoring the pain from the knife, so that he was looking at Anil man to man. ‘I know I’ve done wrong—’

  ‘You have, Omar. You have.’

  ‘But Soraya has done nothing, and she’s pregnant.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt her, Anil. I swear no one knows the details. No one.’

  Anil looked at Omar with distaste, then signalled to the men holding him.

  Suddenly, Omar gasped as he felt a knife being inserted deep into his side. At the same time the knife at his throat was removed and a piece of duct tape was slapped roughly against his mouth. He felt no pain, just shock as his blood dripped down on to the dirty tiles of the floor, and he thought that if this was dying, it was a great deal less painful than he’d imagined.

  Except it wasn’t death. It was just the beginning.

  Because after that they made him watch as Anil went to work on his wife.

  And by the time he’d finished, the anguish Omar was experiencing was so great that he would have rather died a thousand times over.

  Twenty

  After I left England at the end of 2004, having burned my bridges with Tomboy in the Philippines, I headed back to the Far East, unsure of what I was going to do next. Although my relationship with him was finished, Tomboy still owed me money – more than twenty thousand dollars to be exact – and I needed it to start over again somewhere else.

  That somewhere else turned out to be Thailand.

  Stopping in Bangkok, I’d bought a tourist book, read through it and decided to head down south to the island of Ko Lanta in the Andaman Sea. I chose Ko Lanta because it was comparatively underdeveloped, with no airport, and could only be reached by ferry. It was also less popular with Brits, who tended to congregate in the more touristy destinations like Phuket and Ko Samui, so I was less likely to be recognized. What swayed it for me was the quality of the diving, which was supposed to be some of the best in the country.

  As a qualified instructor with more than fifteen hundred dives under my belt, I quickly found work at a small operation, the owners of which were also in need of some investment to buy new equipment. I emailed Tomboy and, luckily for him, he didn’t kick up much of a fuss when I asked him for the money he owed me. I got it transferred over, pumped it into the business, and immediately became a part-owner.

  And so, within a few months, I’d settled down once again, put the past behind me, and was enjoying life under the assumed identity I’d been using for the previous three years, that of Marcus ‘Mick’ Baxter. No one questioned my past. In the Ko Lanta diving community, people were only interested in the here and now. It suited me perfectly, and I could probably have lived like that for the rest of my days.

  But life has a way of throwing up surprises, and the surprise for me was that I fell in love.

  I met Emma Pettit when she came down from Bangkok with a female friend for a long weekend to do some diving, and chose our outfit to go out with. The boat rides from Ko Lanta to the best dive sites were typically between two and four hours, which left plenty of time for the dive staff and their guests to get talking, and Emma and I just seemed to gravitate to each other. She was a real livewire, with twinkling eyes, a huge smile, and a host of tales to tell. Although originally from Somerset, she’d been living overseas for most of the previous five years, teaching English as a foreign language in various locations in Africa and Asia, and was now based in Bangkok, where she taught at a private school. She loved to travel and sample other cultures, and she talked of all the places she wanted to see both in Asia and beyond. She was also interested in me, wanting to know my background and how I’d ended up where I was.

  ‘You don’t seem the type to be a dive instructor in a place like this,’ she said as we sat together on the side decking of the boat, our feet dangling over the edge.

  ‘What’s the type?’

  ‘I don’t know. More shallow.’

  I laughed. ‘How do you know I’m not shallow?’

  ‘I can tell. You’ve got sad eyes.’ She grinned. ‘A lot of dark secrets in there.’

  ‘I wish,’ I said, and proceeded to give her my revised background – the one I’d learned off by heart for just this kind of eventuality. How I’d grown bored in my job as an IT software salesman and had one day pooled together all my savings and simply taken off round the world, settling first in the Philippines, then here.

  Emma bought the story. In the end, there was no reason for her not to. I’m a good liar, and it was a plausible enough tale. I was mildly concerned that she might twig who I was because she would have been in the UK when my face was splashed across the front pages there, but I trusted in the effects of time and the plastic surgery I’d had in the Philippines, and found myself relaxing in her company, enjoying the fact that for once I was having a non-diving conversation.

  At the end of the day, as the boat pulled up in the harbour, with the sun setting behind us, Emma asked if I’d like to join her and her friend for a drink. I should have said no – it would have been safer that way – but life in paradise can be very unfulfilling, and I felt a real yearning for good company. So I told her I’d love to, and offered to bring a couple of the dive staff along too, thinking that I didn’t want Emma’s friend to feel too left out.

  We met up at a beach bar near where they were staying, and as the evening progressed it became more and more obvious that Emma was interested in me. I was interested in her too. At thirty-six, she was only six years younger than me, and she had a hell of a lot going for her. She was fun; she was interesting; she was attractive. She was, I realized to my surprise, everything that I’d been missing over the years, and I ignored my innate instinct for caution and let the moment take me.

  After we’d walked Emma’s friend back to the beach bungalow they were sharing, the two of us went for a walk along the beach, hand in hand. We kissed, we touched, we carried on talking, and it was three a.m. when I finally dropped her back.

  The next day they didn’t come diving. The friend wanted to hire a car and drive round the island, but we met up again in the evening, and again we managed to slip away alone and wander down the beach, enjoying the warm breeze and the silence. By the time I dropped Emma off again that night, I knew that this was something special.

  A week later I was in Bangkok with a week’s leave and staying at her tiny apartment in the heart of the city.

  It was, without doubt, the happiest week of my life. We ate, we drank, we made love. We were the only two people in the world. In forty-two years on the planet, I’d never been truly in lov
e. Until that point. Now I was absolutely smitten. I’d finally discovered the swirling, intense, gut-wrenching feeling that encompassed excitement, passion, helplessness and sheer terror all in one go, and it was unstoppable.

  I started seeing Emma whenever I could. It wasn’t that easy, because being a dive instructor can often be a seven-day-a-week job, but I had the advantage of being a part-owner in the place and, although money was tight, I got to Bangkok at least once a month, while Emma got down to see me at similar intervals, often for no more than a couple of days at a time. One time we even managed to get ten days off together and took off to Borneo to go diving and trekking.

  Everything was rosy. The world, finally, offered a future of hope and contentment.

  Which should have been a warning to me. Life can never be rosy for too long, at least not for a man like me – a man for whom freedom has always been a fragile, desperate gift. But I’d become complacent, so when the end came I still couldn’t quite believe it. In fact, I still can’t quite believe it now, three years later.

  It all started when Emma fell pregnant a little over a year into our relationship. It was a complete accident. At least I thought it was. Perhaps she’d been secretly planning it. After all, she was well into her thirties and her biological clock would have been ticking pretty fast. But the fact was, when I found out I was happy. Nervous too, because it meant a huge commitment, but I also felt that it would bring Emma and me together and move our relationship up to a new level.

  And at first it did. She was incredibly excited and we talked of our plans for the future.

  Unfortunately, it seemed that our plans were very different. I wanted her to move down to Ko Lanta and have the baby there, because with my stake in the business I had enough money to support us all. But Emma wanted us to return to England. Her family were all still there, as were a few of her close friends, and she felt that it would be a better place to bring up a baby. She even suggested that I could get a job back in software sales.