A Good day to die

5

Asif Malik. He'd been a colleague of mine in Islington CID for more than a year during my last days in London. Originally I was his boss, and then, just before my ignominious departure, he'd got promoted to the same level as me, which hadn't been much of a surprise. He'd always struck me as a man who was going places. He was hardworking, bright and, most importantly of all, decent. Most coppers are decent people underneath it all, but some — myself included — get more cynical as the years go by and the crime rate keeps rising. I'd once believed in what I was doing, in my ability, as a police officer working within the strict frameworks the law sets, to change things and deliver justice to the people who needed it. But time, and the growing realization that what I was delivering was nothing more than a sticking plaster for a gaping wound, had corrupted me to the point where both my reputation and my conscience were now well beyond repair.

It was possible that Malik had changed too. After all, I hadn't seen him in three years. But somehow I doubted it. He'd always been unflinching in his view that what he was doing was right, and what the people he was trying to catch were doing was wrong. To Malik, life had been relatively simple. There was good and there was evil, and it was the duty of all right-thinking people to try to promote the former and stamp out the latter. That was why it had upset me more than I would have expected when I'd read about his death on the Net three weeks earlier. Because he was one of the good guys, and God knows there aren't very many of them left these days.

Since leaving home, I'd followed his career on its upward trajectory, in the expat papers and on the Net, from detective sergeant in Islington CID to detective inspector in Scotland Yard's SO7 Organized Crime Unit, and then to his final, brief role as a DCI in the National Crime Squad. It had pleased me to see him doing well. First and foremost, because I'd always liked him. I think he reminded me a little of what I'd been like when I'd started out, before the rot had set in. But there was more to it than that. For some reason, the evidence of his progress helped to ease the guilt I felt periodically over the fate of the only three innocent men I've ever killed — the two customs officers and the accountant whose deaths had led to the disintegration of my old life, and my subsequent exile. I guess I saw Malik as an extension of me: my good side. The young copper I'd mentored, and sent on to greater things. If I was capable of helping him, then I couldn't have been that bad a man. That's how I'd rationalized it on those occasions when the guilt had begun to get a grip. And it helped, because like a lot of things, there was a degree of truth in it. He had learned a lot from me, and before the secret of my other life had come out, most of it had been good.

Billy West hadn't even known who Malik was when he'd snuffed out his life along with that of the man who'd been sitting next to him in the Clerkenwell cafe that night. The job had just been an easy way to make some decent money. Nothing more, nothing less. And now there was a wife who was a widow, and two young kids who were going to grow up without a dad. I don't suppose Slippery had given them a second thought. He'd now paid the price, but Les Pope? At the moment, Les Pope slept soundly in his bed six thousand miles away, unaware and unworried that he'd made a new enemy. Someone like him probably had plenty anyway.

I had lunch in the open-fronted clubhouse at the Ponderosa, overlooking the sea and the islands beyond, but didn't see anyone I knew. Puerta Galera's a small place and the expats tend to stick together. When you're on the run for murder it's a lot safer to keep yourself to yourself, but isolation was next to impossible in a community this size. It wasn't a problem, though. They knew me as Mick here and, as far as I was aware, they accepted my cover story that I'd lived and worked in the Philippines tourist trade for years. Most of them had been out here a long time themselves and wouldn't have known who I was anyway; and those who had come in the last three years wouldn't have been able to pick me out unless they knew who they were looking for or, like Slippery, were already acquainted with me. My appearance had changed considerably since the days when my photo had been plastered all over Britain's newspapers. I'd had two very professional bouts of plastic surgery — one in Davao City when I'd first arrived, one in Manila a year later — that had changed the shape of my nose and chin and removed the dark lines beneath my eyes. My skin was a much darker hue thanks to its prolonged contact with the sun, and my hair, thinner now that I'd hit forty and tinged for the first time with grey, had lightened for the same reason. I also wore a small, neatly trimmed beard that fitted my long thin face comfortably, and which had never been there during my time as a copper. Despite all that, however, I was still a little disconcerted by the speed with which a man I hadn't set eyes on in ten years had known who I was. Maybe it was time to think about going under the knife again.

I'd taken the day off and was in no mood to hurry back to our place, so when I'd paid the bill and driven back into Puerta Galera, I turned south instead of taking the road north to Sabang, and drove along the winding and potholed cliff-top coast road in the direction of Calapan.

And all the time I was thinking.