Chapter 9

Thursday 26th September

    By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.

    I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat's cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I'd done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I'd got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.

    On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.

    'Morning,' said Jack.

    'Should be,' I said.

    Jack opened one eye and found me with it.

    'What happened to you?'

    'Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.'

    'Did he get ugly?'

    'He's never been pretty.'

    I sipped the coffee. It was that robusta again. It rippled through my system as if I'd mainlined it.

    'They found twenty-one dead bodies in the lagoon this morning,' said Jack.

    The black and white images of last night played themselves through my head.

    'There's a taxi strike. We're going to have trouble,' he said.

    'Who did it?'

    'Nobody knows.'

    'That's what the guy said to me last night.'

    'Which guy?'

    I told Jack what I had seen.

    'Did they say whether they came from the north or south?' I asked.

    'Both.'

    . 'A mixture?'

    'No. Some people say all northerners, others all southerners.'

    'Who's trying to scare who?'

    'I'd say the army were scaring the southerners.'

    'And the army says the southerners are trying to discredit the army and are killing their own people.'

    'Dead people make everybody think about what's going on. Everybody's thinking twice about changing their nice, boring stable lives. Trotsky's bloody omelette; just give me fried eggs sunny side up any time,' said Jack, with a full stomach and an empty head.

    'Don't talk to me about fried eggs.'

    'Restraint…'

    'Don't talk to me about that either. You are no authority.'

    'I myself had an evening of ecstasy and restraint.'

    'Acid house comes to Lomé?'

    'I spent an evening in the company of…'

    Jack who was already supine managed to sink even further back into the lounger.

    'Elizabeth Harvey. You don't waste your time.'

    'It's my challenge.'

    'What are you doing on your lounger then?'

    'I didn't restrain myself all night.'

    'I'd hate to think you were slacking.'

    I finished my coffee and called the US Embassy and arranged to meet Nina Sorvino at the German Restaurant for lunch. She said she knew who I was from Charlie, so I didn't need a carnation and a copy of The Times. Her accent was from the wrong side of the tracks. I called Dama, the friend of B.B.'s who had introduced Kershaw. We arranged to meet after lunch in his house up the Kpalimé road.

    I drove to the house where Kershaw was supposed to stay at the weekends. Lomé was very quiet, the taxi strike had taken hold. The house was a big place near the Grand Marche, not far from the US Embassy. It was smart, but not so smart that it didn't have a mud road outside full of puddles with kids playing in them. I pulled up outside the front door and a solid- looking iron gate that needed a new coat of paint.

    The house was colonial French with long shuttered windows and wrought iron balconies. The front door had a tiled porch with creeper growing over it and the door a large knocker of two brass ducks hanging upside down with a bar in their beaks. Hanging from the bar was a tortoise. I identified with that tortoise. The gate was locked. To the left, in a small courtyard to the side of the house, was Kershaw's Nissan Sunny.

    There was another house over a high wall on the other side of the car. It was crumbling badly, and the roof was several hundred tiles short of a full head. The windows were boarded up and the visible part of the front door had a plank nailed across it. To the right, a couple of hundred yards away, a smaller crowd than usual waited to file into the Grande Marche. On that side of the house there was only a wasteland which should have been filled with people selling what they'd grown, but was empty because of the strike.

    In front of Kershaw's car were some large wooden gates. There was a boy lying face down on a bench like the abandoned child he probably was. I gave him a 'Bonjour' and he snapped to attention, holding his bench under his arm. I asked him if anyone was in, but he didn't seem to understand. The wooden gates to the courtyard of the house were locked, so I climbed the iron gate and used the knocker on the front door. It made an impressive noise in what sounded like a hollow house. There was an alleyway at the corner of the courtyard which led to the garden at the back, and down this was a side door to the house. An aviary stood at the far end of the garden. I crossed an overgrown lawn through a smell of bad drainage and found, hanging upside down from the ceiling, a single grey parrot. He looked at me and slowly showed me his grey tongue as if encouraging me to show him mine. He wouldn't have wanted to see it.

    By the garden wall which butted on to the wasteland was a ten-metre long swimming pool which was covered with a scum of green algae and next to it, against the wall, a stone bench with a Small patio and stone urns at each corner except one. There were some very tall palm trees around the garden.

    The back of the house had the single twisted trunk of something dead crawling up the middle of it, like a subsidence crack. It was a secluded garden, quite dark even on a day like this and, like the house, melancholy.

    By the wall that gave on to the abandoned house was the garage and maid's quarters. The maid's door led out on to the garden. There was nobody in the maid's room, but the door opened. In the room was a bed with a Bible on it. There was a dent in the pillow and the bedclothes were pulled back and hanging off the end of the floor.

    A set of keys hung out of the lock of the side door to the main house and the door was open an inch, which made me wary. I walked down a corridor between the large kitchen and the staircase into a living room with a wooden floor like a squash court. To the left, was a set of french windows to the garden, two sofas, an armchair next to a table with a phone/fax on it and, in a gloomy corner, a wood carving. The living room occupied most of the ground floor, and the ceiling was made by the wooden beams of the roof of the house.

    A floorboard creaked in the long and unrestrained way that puts five years on a burglar's life. Standing at the top of the stairs was a man in the office worker's uniform of a worsted short-sleeved suit, buttoned up to short, sharp lapels above the sternum with no shirt or tie. A handbag hung from a loop around his wrist so that he didn't have to carry anything in the four pockets of his suit and ruin the cut, which wasn't one that Chanel would have been proud of.

    'Who are you?' I asked in French.

    'Yao,' he said, as if he'd just barked his shins on a low table.

    'What are you doing here, M. Yao?'

    'And you are?'

    'Bruce Medway.'

    'Doing what, M. Medway?'

    'I thought I just asked you that question.'

    'That's true.'

    'And?'

    'I'm looking for M. Kershaw.'

    'So am I.'

    'He's not here,' he said, walking down the stairs and turning into the corridor.

    'Any reason why you're looking for him, M. Medway?'

    'His patron wants to speak to him.'

    'So does mine. Bonjour,' he said, and was gone.

    I ran up the stairs into the master bedroom which overlooked the street and watched from the window as Yao climbed over the gate, straightened his suit, opened his bag and took a pen and paper out; he then wrote down my registration number. This shouldn't have concerned me too much, except that on one of Yao's lapels I'd noticed a small badge of the Togolese flag, which meant that he was a civil servant and that his patron was likely to be a grand fromage - a whole gruyere to my little crottin.

    I paced out of the bedroom with a thumbnail between my teeth and looked at the gallery which ran along the alley side of the house. The walls along the gallery were completely covered in a primitive jungle painting. The green rainforest flashed with exotic flowers was the background for leopard, monkey, antelope, a variety of punky tropical birds and a large life-size baboon. The walls were ten-foot high and ran for forty feet. It looked like something Henri Rousseau would have done.

    There were figures in the forest, smaller than the animals. Some were standing amongst the trees, some moving with spears in their hands and over their shoulders, others drinking at a pool into which a waterfall cascaded down one of the door jambs of the bedrooms. I saw something in the corner about a foot above the floor which stirred. It was a lizard and it moved to reveal the signature painted in tiny letters. It said, simply, 'Kershaw'. B.B. had said he sketched, which made him sound like a street caricaturist, but the man was an artist.

    In the bedrooms, the walls were dedicated to people, mainly women, some naked with fruit, others wearing wraps of African print. In one room, two women occupied a wall each and looked across a third wall where two young boys played catch on a beach with a lemon.

    Most of the wall was an aching blue sky with only the yellow fruit sailing through it to the wild outstretched arms of the catcher. In the back room, overlooking the garden, was an unfinished painting of a fisherman hauling on a boat line.

    I went back into the master bedroom whose walls, I'd noticed before, were bare. A double bed with a carved wooden headboard was positioned in the centre of the room. The ceiling had been painted like a break in the clouds. Grey at the edges turning to gunsmoke, then yellow becoming an intense white light at the centre of the room where the single, bare light bulb hanging from a thin flex became a joke.

    On the stretched white counterpane of the bed was an overnight bag. There was a Ghana Airways tag with Kershaw's name on it. I opened the bag and took out two white shirts, a pair of khaki chinos and a washbag. Underneath, was a pair of black lycra cycling shorts. Under them, what felt like a bunch of shoelaces. They stuck to my hand and fell through my fingers, They were strips of black leather encrusted with dried blood. I tipped the bag out on the bed. There was a horse whip, stained with dried blood, two lengths of insulated wire with crocodile clips. One of the clips had a flake of something caught in its teeth. There was also a piece of wood with two holes in it; a two-foot length of cord had been passed through the two holes and knotted. It was the kind of device where if you slipped the loop over someone's head and then twisted the wood, it would allow you a controlled strangulation of your victim.

    I looked up at the ceiling and down at the bed. I walked out of the room, on to the gallery, and found the leopard staring at me from the painted forest with eyes that had already eaten. I was trying to square what I'd found in the bag with what was up on these walls and I couldn't. I went back to the case and the mess of equipment on the bed and repacked the contents as I had found them. I gave the house a cursory search. There was hardly any furniture in it apart from a wardrobe and a chest in the bedroom with a few clothes in the top drawers.

    Yao had said Kershaw wasn't here, but I'd found that his bag was, and I had no idea why someone would want to leave a bag full of that kind of stuff out in the open. It hadn't passed me by that Yao was keen to get away. It could have been because he'd found what was in the bag, or because he'd left the bag there himself. Either reason was a good one for getting out of there.

    I was feeling hot and sick by the time I got back in the car. I had tried talking to the young boy again, who was forthcoming but spoke nonsense. At one point, he had let out a noise like a far off cry (not uncommon from Africans of all ages) and I thought we might be getting somewhere, but he followed it by blubbering his lips. He saw that it was a response that puzzled me so he raised his eyebrows, opened out his palms and smiled. He was the lemon catcher in Kershaw's painting.

    I went to see a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the Surete to see if any dead bodies had washed up on his desk. He told me there were lots of bodies found in the lagoon that morning, but no white bodies had been found anywhere in Lomé yet. He grinned at the word 'yet'. When I asked who was responsible for the bodies in the lagoon, he drew a finger over his lips and told me not to ask that question anywhere in Togo.