‘I didn’t even know he spoke English,’ said Martin.
‘He speaks enough. Which one of them was it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’ve spent the last few days with the Three Musketeers over there. If you had to take a punt, which one would you say has the benevolent heart?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Martin without even thinking about it. Because how could he know?
But then he glanced at Riquinho, the tallest of the three bodyguards, a loose-limbed Brazilian. (A lot of the Lacebark security corps were Brazilian, Ecuadorian, Fijian, Nigerian, Jordanian, Serbian. If they came from countries like that you didn’t have to pay them so much.) On the plane, Riquinho had carried on watching the sun rise over the mountains long after the other two had lost interest; and in the van, he’d welded himself to the window as soon as the driver mentioned the dolphins; and in the square, he’d flinched as if he’d wanted to rush over to help the donkey, though it wasn’t even hurt. He seemed far more porous than the other two, more open to the surge of the world. In 2006 there had been a damaging leak to a journalist from the American Harper’s about some bribes that Lacebark had supposedly attempted to pass to government officials in Bolivia (which had millions of tons of lithium under the salt flats). Martin’s boss, ruling him out straight away, had asked him to write short loyalty evaluations on all his colleagues in the department. He enjoyed the task enormously, and he felt more powerful around the office for months afterwards, as if he had a dagger at his hip, even though no one else knew he was writing the reports and the culprit was never actually identified. That was how he felt now, thinking about Riquinho.
‘Come on,’ said Bezant. ‘I can tell you’ve got an opinion. Spit it out. Which one?’
But it was also possible, thought Martin, that the recent vindication of his suspicions about Dylan’s criminality had made him overconfident. His ‘evidence’ here was ineffable even compared to a trickle of light under a bedroom door. Who wouldn’t want to see some dolphins? In any case, he didn’t know quite what use Bezant would make of his answer, but he assumed it would be unpleasant. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know,’ he said.
Now Bezant and all three of the bodyguards were staring at Martin and he could feel a cold sweat kissing the back of his neck. When his phone vibrated in his pocket it made his whole leg spasm. His wife was calling. As he fumbled to turn it off Bezant screamed, ‘Which fucking one?’
The phone slipped from Martin’s hands. ‘Riquinho,’ he blurted, pointing.
Bezant walked right up to Riquinho and stared him in the face for a while. Then he said, ‘I think you might be right.’
‘I didn’t say a word to the cuzão!’ said Riquinho.
‘Fair enough,’ said Bezant. ‘We’ll establish that one way or another. You two: cuff him.’
The other two bodyguards didn’t hesitate. ‘No! Fuck this!’ shouted Riquinho.
‘Wait — it was just a guess,’ said Martin, who didn’t want to be responsible for trapping a second human being in the back of that van.
‘You should learn to trust your judgement, mate,’ said Bezant. As Riquinho was hauled inside the van the heels of his boots knocked half a dozen tin stars from the rim of the number plate.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ said Martin.
‘Not your problem. Anyway, you can take my car back to the airport. The plane’s waiting.’
This was enough to distract Martin from the fate of Riquinho for a moment, although at this point he felt as if he couldn’t even bend down to pick up his phone without asking for permission. ‘You mean I can go back to London?’ he said.
Bezant smiled. ‘Probably better. You’ll want to be seeing your kid, eh? Big time in a boy’s life. First visit from the blue heelers.’
7.03 p.m.
‘How did he know about your stepson and the police?’ says Raf.
‘Bezant always seems to know everything,’ says Martin. ‘Anyway, I think he stayed in Pakistan for a while after that to see if he could track down the Burmese guy we lost. And I don’t know whether he caught him in Karachi or whether the trail went cold or what, but when he got back to London, he called me. He said Riquinho had confessed to slipping the Burmese guy a pin or something so he could pick his handcuffs. I’d been right, and I think Bezant was impressed. And somehow he’d got hold of those reports I wrote about the leak in 2006. He told me they were some of the most detailed he’d ever seen and I had an aptitude for sniffing people out and I was wasted in lithium and he had a gap on his team here. He didn’t really give me a choice. And at least this job keeps me in London — well, not that they ever would’ve sent me back to Khairpur, most of it’s underwater at the moment. So my wife’s happy, even though I have to lie to her about what I’m doing.’
By now the climbing gym is starting to empty out, although there are still quite a few parents and nannies watching kids who move over the walls like spiders because of their weight-to-muscle ratios. Martin has been talking for so long that Fourpetal has bought him a box of apple juice from the vending machine. Nearby is a vacuum unit with a sign that says ‘please do not block the chalk eater’, thick foam filters worn away to raggedness like aeolian caves.
‘And what are you doing really?’ says Raf.
‘Technically I’m in personnel. But it’s a kind of counter-intelligence. Bezant has me looking for security leaks.’
‘Isn’t that ironic?’ says Fourpetal.
‘And what were you up to just now?’
‘Mostly I work with Lacebark security men. But also sometimes with the Burmese who Bezant is paying. Those two guys from earlier — they think I’m just another liaison from Lacebark — but actually I’m supposed to tell Bezant whether he can trust them.’
‘What about Cherish?’ says Raf.
‘The girl? Oh, she’s solid,’ says Martin, and Raf’s heart sinks. He’d still been holding out some hope that they might have got everything backwards. If Cherish was working for Lacebark, maybe that was the real reason she didn’t take that nasty fake glow he gave her. If only Raf had been so careful about what he was willing to swallow from a stranger he met in a club. On Friday, after Cherish vanished, he had felt so sure that she was under guard in a white van or a warehouse somewhere, and he realises now that he was probably right about that. He was just wrong about the details.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ says Fourpetal, ‘I hoped you might be candid but I never expected you to be this candid.’
Martin kneads his cheek with the heel of his hand. ‘A few weeks ago, Bezant said he wanted to try me on something new. He said I could be good at interrogations. They do a lot of those. I went to a warehouse and inside they had a guy in a cell with a hood over his head. They had all these different ways of disorienting him. They’d keep the lights on for thirty-six hours and then turn them off for four hours and feed him in the dark and then feed him again forty minutes later and then put the lights on for ten hours and then leave them off again for twenty hours without feeding him and then finally feed him again and so on and so on, so he never had any idea how much time had passed or when he was supposed to sleep. And they had the floor of the cell on springs and they blasted him with all these low-frequency sound waves to make him feel sick.’ Raf remembers the speaker cable on the floor of that warehouse. ‘I had to watch while they questioned him. I can’t even make myself talk about what I saw them do. And I don’t know what they wanted from him but I think he’s probably dead now. I never asked to be part of that. I had to tell Bezant I didn’t have the constitution for it. He laughed at me. You know, I’ve heard stories about him from the soldiers. In the Niger Delta there’s a cult called the Egbesu Boys. They fight the oil companies in the name of the local god of war. They say Egbesu gives them special powers. In particular, they like to brag that they can drink battery acid. Well, when Bezant was still down there working for Cantabrian, he once caught this kid who’d shot a few of his men in the swamp. The kid was defiant. He told Bezant all about Egbesu. And apparently Bezant told the kid to “prove it”. He made him drink battery acid. Made him do shots of it like tequila. With lemon and salt.’