‘You have by chance searched the bodies on board the boat?’ Hari asked.
Coburn shook his head.
‘Then you will not have seen these.’ Hari produced four small photographs which he slid across the table.
Two were charred around the edges, the other two were smeared in blood, and all of them were photographs of Coburn.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ He sat down.
‘They are interesting, are they not?’ Hari picked up one. ‘Together with cheap cameras of the kind you can throw away, the men who die in the swamp carry these pictures of you in their pockets.’
Coburn knew where they’d come from. So did Heather.
‘They’re copies from your IMB job application file,’ she said. ‘Look at the back of the one that’s burnt the most.’
Coburn read out what was scrawled across it in ballpoint pen. ‘Twenty thousand ringgit,’ he said.
‘It’s a bounty.’ She took the photo from him. ‘Don’t you see? It’s the Pishan all over again. We weren’t attacked by local pirates who wanted to take over the village; we were attacked by men who thought they could get a big reward for killing you.’
‘Twenty thousand ringgit in exchange for a photo of me with a hole in my head?’
Hari was grinning. ‘For such money I myself would deliver your head with a hole in it,’ he said. ‘You are lucky to be so valuable.’
Coburn felt more bewildered than lucky, unable to comprehend how he could have become such a threat that, twice in the space of a single week, an attempt had been made to kill him — the latest not during a raid far out at sea, but by launching an attack on a whole village in which women and children lived.
‘The IMB,’ Heather said. ‘It’s them. It has to be.’
‘No it doesn’t.’ In the back of his mind something was warning Coburn to be cautious, something so fleeting that it was gone before he could figure out what it was, dispelled in part by Hari ripping open the end of his envelope and removing a sheet of paper.
‘So.’ The Frenchman read through what appeared to be a note then emptied the contents of the envelope on to the table. ‘Please to look,’ he said.
Spread out in front of Coburn now was another set of photographs. But these weren’t of him. They were of the Pishan tied up at a wharf against a background of cranes and warehouses. The photos were also much larger; half the size of an A4 sheet and taken by someone who’d used a powerful telescopic lens.
Except for one, they’d been shot from the same vantage point in bright daylight, a dozen or more high-definition colour prints, each showing a different man in the process of disembarking from the freighter.
‘How the hell did you get these?’ Coburn was astonished.
‘After we fail in our raid on the Pishan I tell you to leave the matter in my hands. That is why I telephone a business associate in Singapore and ask him for this favour. Two months ago I help him recover a small quantity of cocaine for which he was not paid, so he has been happy to do what he can for me when the freighter berths in Singapore. Please to tell me which of these pictures shows the man who drives his truck in Bangladesh.’
Coburn was trying to find him. The Pishan’s captain was easy to recognize, and a few members of the crew had faces that seemed familiar, but there were other faces he knew he’d never seen before — the gunmen who’d been lying in wait in the lighter, he realized.
‘He is there?’ Hari sounded anxious.
‘Hang on.’ Coburn was still looking, wanting to be absolutely sure. ‘This guy with his collar up.’ He pointed. ‘That’s the bastard right there.’
‘Then we are fortunate. He thinks he is clever by obtaining a picture of you, but now we also have a picture of him.’
‘So what?’
‘So it seems he is not so clever after all.’ Hari finished his coffee and lit up a cigarette. ‘You see, according to the note that comes with these photographs, my associate believed he could have obtained more pictures by going to the building where all arrivals must show their passports before they are permitted to enter Singapore. But he discovers many closed circuit television cameras inside, so he decided it was not wise for him to try. Instead, he says he waited and watched.’
‘And?’
‘Of all the men who come off the ship, only one was careful to shield his face with his hand so that the CCTV cameras could not get good photos of him.’
‘Our friend with his collar up?’
‘Indeed.’ Hari thumbed through the prints until he found the one he wanted. ‘The man makes only this small mistake, but my associate was suspicious enough to follow him by taxi to the cheap hotel you see here.’ He gave the photo to Coburn. ‘Now we know where he stays in the city, and now our boats have fuel again, I shall make arrangements for us to visit him tomorrow.’
‘I’ve told you once,’ Coburn said, ‘it’s not your business. I’ll do it.’
Hari shook his head. ‘You are wrong. For last night, and for what this man does to us on the Pishan, he has made it my business. Please do not interfere.’
Too worn out to press the point, and knowing that if Hari hadn’t chosen to become involved the breakthrough would have never happened, Coburn wanted to believe this was at last a lead that was going to provide some answers. It damn well better, he thought, because if it didn’t he had no idea of where else to look, and even less idea of what the hell he was supposed to be looking for.
CHAPTER 8
Hari’s business associate was a Chinese gentleman called Lin, a giant of a man with such heavily tattooed arms that it looked as though the black singlet he was wearing had multi-coloured sleeves, yet who was as softly spoken as he was well mannered.
From the moment he’d picked them up in a dinghy after their trip across the Strait in the Selina, he’d been particularly polite to Heather, and had twice apologized unnecessarily for his less than faultless English.
After a delayed start from the village to allow the Selina’s machinegun to be removed, the crossing back to Singapore had been uneventful, marked only by the disposal of the bodies which Hari had heaved overboard unceremoniously in mid-Strait until a long line of them had been left bobbing up and down in the Selina’s wake.
They would sink later, he’d explained, although he’d also said he couldn’t see it mattering if they didn’t — a remark that Coburn had thought might have elicited a reply from Heather. But she’d kept her opinions to herself, appearing to accept the need to dump the bodies with the same peculiar equanimity that she’d accepted the violence of last night.
This morning she hadn’t said much about anything and refusing to let Coburn help her disembark when they’d dropped anchor off a coastal promontory some thirty miles east of the city — a suitably remote location that, according to Hari, would guarantee them privacy if they were later forced to bring their prisoner on board for the purposes of interrogation.
Even after they’d reached the shore she’d remained in one of her quieter moods and had spent the last three-quarters of an hour sitting beside Coburn in the back seat of the car with her mouth shut as though she had no intention of opening a conversation.
Quite what he’d done to fall out of favour, he wasn’t sure. In recent days, having discovered that the harder he tried not to think about her the more he tended to do so, he’d been making a conscious effort to treat her as he had done when he’d first met her, telling himself that she was no more interested in him than she was in anyone else.