A Good Man in Africa

1

Fanshawe and Morgan looked down at Innocence’s body. Morgan replaced the cloth. He felt tired, dirty, hungry and suddenly very sad. He couldn’t understand why Fanshawe had asked him to remove the cloth and looked scathingly at him as he stood there, his hands clasped behind his back, thoughtfully chewing his lower lip.

‘Mmm. Uh-uh,’ he said after a while. ‘So she’s still there.’ Morgan gazed up at the clear morning sky in wonder at the man’s astonishing grasp of the facts. ‘Nasty business,’ Fanshawe went on. ‘Very nasty business.’ He turned away, making little whistling noises between his teeth. The small crowd of onlookers was reduced to mainly women and children; nearby a mammy was setting up her stall in blithe unconcern. On the ground by the body were little juju tokens: a pile of stones, two feathers and a leaf, an upended tin with a stone on top.

Morgan moved away and joined Fanshawe.

‘What do you suggest we do?’ Fanshawe asked.

‘Me?’ Morgan said, astonished to be still singled out.

‘Yes, Morgan, you,’ Fanshawe said firmly. ‘I’m putting you in charge of sorting out this whole unfortunate affair. I’m completely tied up with the Duchess’s visit and besides,’ he waved his hand disdainfully at the body, the onlookers, the tokens, ‘All this is a mystery to me. Never could have happened out East,’ he said shaking his head in sorrow at the folly of African ways.

Morgan swayed on his feet from tiredness. He glared at a naked child who had been staring at him and Fanshawe as they conversed. The child backed off but didn’t go away, obviously intensely curious to see what these two white men would get up to next. Morgan looked about him. People strolled to and fro: labourers bought food from the traders’ stalls, mammies weaved by with brimming water buckets on their heads, children gambolled about on the verandah. It was quieter than usual, as if out of respect for Innocence, but, Morgan saw, that was the only concession they were making. In fact the mood was more one of indifference, resigned imperturbability, in strong contrast to the brain-racking that he and Fanshawe were going through.

‘Damn it,’ Fanshawe said abruptly. ‘I’ve just thought. It can’t be here when the Duchess arrives.’

‘Don’t worry, she’s not going to see it anyway,’ Morgan said. He noticed the gender change. ‘See her,’ he added defiantly.

‘No,’ Fanshawe agreed. ‘But that’s beside the point. It just won’t be right, if you see what I mean, knowing that there’s a dead body somewhere in the grounds. Not good enough I’m afraid. You’ll just have to get rid of it. That’s all, Morgan. I’m relying on you.’

Morgan felt the retort form in his mouth but clenched his teeth to keep it back. He looked at Fanshawe’s thin face with its preposterous moustache, and if he could have arranged for a second thunderbolt would have directed it at him there and then.

‘The problem is,’ Morgan said reasonably, ‘that no one will remove the body until certain rites have been performed. Lightning strikes are very expensive, apparently, because it’s a rare sign of Shango’s displeasure. It costs, so I’m told, about sixty pounds but then there’s the special funeral after that — which is extra.’

‘I see,’ said Fanshawe. ‘What about her family?’

‘There’s only Maria.’

‘Hasn’t she got the money?’

Morgan was amazed at the thick-headedness of the man. ‘She has fifteen pounds,’ he said flatly.

‘Oh,’ Fanshawe said, as if it were the result of a deliberate policy of spendthriftness on Maria’s part.

Morgan rubbed his forehead. ‘I asked Murray to help last might. But he wouldn’t lift a finger.’ He looked to Fanshawe for support. ‘Very bad show I thought.’

‘You can’t blame Murray,’ Fanshawe said at once.

‘Why on earth not?’ Morgan asked belligerently.

‘He’s not allowed to set foot outside the university gates, that’s why. Kicks up no end of trouble apparently with the Nkongsamban health authorities. Seems there’s a lot of friction between the municipal workers and those at the health service. I believe it’s some sort of jealousy over their pay and conditions.’

‘He never told me this,’ Morgan protested.

‘It’s common knowledge, old chap. Probably thought you knew all about it.’

Morgan sighed: that bit of information didn’t exactly help. ‘Well,’ he went on doggedly, ‘the Ademola clinic say they’ll take her body if only we can get it down to them.’

Fanshawe looked at his watch, and then glanced finally at Innocence. ‘I’ll leave it all in your capable hands, Morgan. I must dash off now. Great shame,’ he said, ‘great shame.’ Morgan wondered if he was referring to Innocence’s horrible death or the way it was inconveniencing him.

‘By the way, did the poet chappie ever turn up?’ Fanshawe asked.

‘What!?!’

‘Priscilla said something about a poet gone missing.’

Morgan reminded himself of his spontaneous excuse of the previous night. He cursed silently, remembering that it wasn’t entirely fiction. There was a poet and he had invited him to stay at the Commission. He wondered when precisely he was due — he couldn’t recall the exact dates. The last thing he needed now was a poet turning up out of the blue looking for a bed. He’d check later; meanwhile he played for time.

‘Oh yes. British Council man. Don’t worry Arthur, everything’s under control.’

‘Good,’ Fanshawe said, taking a final look at Innocence.

‘Let me know how you get on.’ He turned away and walked briskly back to the house.

That evening Morgan came back to stare at Innocence’s shrouded body. He shooed away a sniffing dog and tried to imagine the lump as a large cheery woman, but his tired brain saw only its lumpiness. It was half past nine. He had driven up to the Commission on an impulse, with a mad hope that something might have occurred in his absence to spirit Innocence away, but her stolid materiality rebuked him as he stood there, effectively dispersing his wild fancies. During the afternoon he had telephoned two other firms of undertakers who had readily agreed to remove the body, but both had evidently been repulsed, or more likely had been persuaded of the extreme consequences of getting on the wrong side of Shango.

He had sat on by the phone for a further half hour deliberating whether to ring Adekunle and inform him of the disastrous turn his ‘friendship’ with Murray had taken. In the end, he had decided it would be safer for him to play a waiting game. Events were so totally beyond his control now that there was no telling what might happen next.

Today was Tuesday. He had intended playing golf with Murray on Thursday and Adekunle had requested a meeting before then. Morgan shuddered at the maze of complexities ahead of him and again cursed his irresoluteness, his shillyshallying, the protracted moral dithering he indulged in. He made Hamlet look rash and hot-headed. He turned away from Innocence and walked dejectedly back across the laterite square towards the Commission, followed as ever by a small squad of curious children. Around about him hens pecked and goats chewed in the darkness, pungent cooking smells filled his nostrils from the charcoal braziers that glowed on the verandahs on either side. The night was hot and sultry, the constellations clear in the black sky above his head.

‘Good evenin’, sah,’ a voice called from one side. Morgan turned in its direction. Sitting on packing cases around a lantern were Isaac, Ezekiel and Joseph. They were wearing cloth wraps and were bare-chested with the exception of Isaac who wore a ragged vest. They were drinking what Morgan took to be palm wine.

‘Evening,’ Morgan said, approaching the verandah. There was a pause as if they were expecting him to say something. He thought for a few seconds and then added lamely, ‘She is still there.’

‘Dat’s correct,’ Isaac said. ‘Please, sah, save your time. Don’t send undertaking man for here again. Dey nevah go take her. Dis he be Shango killing. Dey no fit totch ‘im.’

There were grunts of agreement from Ezekiel and Joseph. There was no animosity in Isaac’s tone; he was a patient teacher instructing a particularly backward child.

‘But I have to try,’ Morgan protested. ‘Mr Fanshawe is not happy. The Duchess is coming.’ There were tut-tuts of commiseration at his plight. Morgan looked at the three men sitting in front of their houses with their palm wine and confidence and suddenly felt lost in this sense of apartness.

‘Don’t you mind?’ he asked them suddenly. ‘That Innocence is lying out there?’ He pointed in her general direction. ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

The three looked at each other as if they found it hard to understand him. ‘There is no problem,’ Ezekiel said finally. ‘Make you bring one fetish priest, then you can take her.’ There were amused chuckles at this. Things will take whatever course Shango has assigned, they seemed to be implying.

Morgan bade them good night and made his way back to his car.

2

The next morning Morgan drove to work earlier than usual and found to his surprise a small demonstration outside the Commission gates, which were firmly closed. There were about thirty or forty young men who looked like students, a few of them carrying hastily made-up placards. Morgan tooted his horn and they cleared the road obligingly with a few jeering cries and a brief chant of’UK out. UK out.’ As the gate was being opened a head appeared at his window and Morgan recognized the serious unsmiling features of Femi Robinson, the Mid-West representative of the Marxist-Leninist People’s Party of Kinjanja.

‘Mr Leafy,’ Robinson said. ‘We wish to protest with sincere vigour.’ Robinson had a permanently worried expression which had furrowed deep inverted-v creases in his brow, and of course the thin sprinkling of pubic beard and swelling afro hair-style favoured by black American radicals. Morgan wondered how Robinson knew his name, as he took in the flimsy banners and placards. UK STAY OUT OF KINJANJAN POLITICS, they read, NO UK IMPERIALISM IN KINJANJA.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Morgan asked in astonishment.

‘We are protesting against the, ah, destabilizatory tactics of the British Gov’ment in the internal politics of Kinjanja.’

Morgan tried to work a species of mystified smile onto his face that would suggest he hadn’t the slightest idea what Robinson was talking about, even though his brain was twinkling with warning lights like the console of a crashing airliner. Robinson flourished a copy of the Daily Graphic. Morgan saw a large picture of Adekunle at the foot of some aeroplane steps shaking hands with a morning-suited Foreign Office representative. The banner headline read: ADEKUNLE VISITS UK. Morgan felt his stomach swirl and tilt.

‘Doesn’t mean a thing,’ he asserted quickly and firmly. ‘Pure nonsense. KNP propaganda obviously. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’ He set his car in motion and swept through the gates hearing Robinson’s final shout of ‘Is that official?’ dying away behind him.

Dry-mouthed he raced up the stairs into his office and snatched all three copies of the Kinjanjan daily papers off a startled Kojo’s desk. Each front page told the same story. Adekunle on official visit…invited to attend…greeted by Under-Secretary of State…Consultations with Foreign Office…Morgan sat down, his head reeling. The elections were less than two weeks away; the whole tone of the reports emphasized the tightness of the KNP to rule Kinjanja in the considered opinion of the British Government.

Morgan urgently took stock of this frightful new development, contemplated the ramifications of this breach of confidence, tried to work out Adekunle’s motives. Clearly it gave the KNP a vital boost of status and responsibility — equated them, no less, with the UPKP — the resident government. Such official feting would be vastly impressive to the average undecided and literate Kinjanjan voter — but no doubt word would be swiftly conveyed to the grass roots. Nobody, after all, was consulting any other political party. It would also, of course, offend the others, especially the vocal minority — Femi Robinson and his ilk — but Morgan assumed that Adekunle would hold this a negligible price to pay for this coup in pre-election publicity.

He himself felt curiously distanced from it all: it could either be a catastrophic turn in events or quite insignificant. Project Kingpin was out in the open, but who cared? He realized too that he and Fanshawe had been successfully duped by Adekunle — manipulated and exploited with consummate ease. It didn’t surprise him that much: Project Kingpin had been bumbling and amateurish from the start, blown up out of all proportion by Fanshawe’s extravagant dreams. It seemed somehow fitting it should now be exposed for what it was. But his heart was still racing from the unprecedented suddenness of its dissolution. He wondered how Fanshawe would react. His thoughts were interrupted by Kojo appearing in the doorway.

‘Excuse, sah,’ the little man said. ‘The porter says there is a Mr Robinson at the front door requestin’ an urgent meeting.’

‘No no no!’ Morgan shouted. ‘Tell him to see Mr Fanshawe.’

‘Mr Fanshawe is not here.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Morgan theatrically smote his brow. ‘All right, send him up.’

Robinson soon arrived. Morgan noticed that he was wearing a black woollen polo-neck, black leather gloves and had put on a pair of cheap wire-framed sunglasses, every inch the black power activist. Morgan could see the sweat beading his nose and forehead.

‘Mr Robinson,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We demand an explanation,’ Robinson began officiously, rapping Morgan’s desk with a gloved finger. ‘By what or whose rights has the British Gov’ment the power to summon Mnelected political leaders to London for consultatory po’poses?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Morgan, genially passing the buck. ‘It’s as big a surprise to me. I’m afraid you’ll need to talk to Mr Fanshawe on that one. But then,’ he added fairly, ‘he may know nothing about it either.’

Robinson seemed to be preparing himself for a mighty explosion of scoffing disbelief but his fervour visibly collapsed before Morgan’s eyes, as if he’d been punched in the belly. ‘Mr Leafy,’ he said resignedly, taking off his gloves and wiping his dripping hands on his trousers, ‘whatever you are doing you are playing a very dangerous game. We have a saying here: ‘If you are cleaning a room you don’t sweep the det under the carpet…’

’

‘Sorry. The debt?’

‘Yes, the det, the rubbish, the dust.’

‘I see. Go on.’

‘As I was saying: ‘you don’t sweep the det under the carpet because somebody can easily come and lift it up and find the det beneath.’ This is what has been going on in Kinjanja for these last five or six years. The carpet is now raised from the floor!’ The old passion returned for an instant.

Morgan nodded sagely, as if considering the gnomic trench-ancy of Kinjanjan folklore. ‘Well that’s all very interesting, Mr Robinson, but there’s nothing I, or even the British Government can do about…about the shoddy housework, if you see what I mean. It’s a Kinjanjan problem.’

‘If it is a Kinjanjan problem why are you consulting with theKNP?’

‘Are we, Mr Robinson? Are you absolutely sure of that?’ Morgan said, diplomatically avoiding the question by asking another.

Robinson practically erupted with frustration. ‘It is written here!’ he shouted, jabbing at the newspapers covering Morgan’s desk. ‘Here, here and here!’

‘Ah, but you don’t want to believe everything you read in the newspapers, especially at election time.’

‘In that case issue a denial.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Deny it. Expose the KNP if they are lying as you say.’

Morgan felt a flutter of worry. He smiled, ‘No, we can’t do that. We don’t issue denials, as a matter of policy. We find it has the habit of conferring a certain dignity on accusations and, um, inaccuracies which only deserve to be ignored.’

‘Jargon!’ Robinson asserted fiercely, his arms windmilling around in exasperation. ‘This is diplomatic jargon. If one man says you killed his wife,’ he pointed at Morgan, ‘do you keep your silence? If they accuse you of thieving, do you not deny it?’

‘Mr Robinson, please,’ Morgan said, rattled by the cogency of the man’s argument. ‘Those are quite spurious examples. Really, I think you need to get this newspaper thing in perspective. It’s an electioneering ploy — vote-catching.’

Robinson slumped in his chair. ‘From a British perspective it may be nothing. From a Kinjanjan perspective it is very serious indeed.’ He paused. ‘I will tell you why. If the KNP win because of this, or even if the UPKP are returned, there will be very serious problems.’

‘I don’t quite follow,’ Morgan said.

‘Do you know,’ the finger prodded at his chest again, ‘that Kinjanja is the seventh largest importer of champagne in the world? Do you know that last year over two hundred Mercedes Benzes were purchased for government officials?’ He sat back. ‘They will not allow such corruption to continue. Then we are in dangerous trouble.’

‘Who?’ Morgan asked. ‘Who won’t allow it?’

‘The Army of course,’ Robinson said, flinging his arms wide. ‘There have been mutinies in the North already. All troops have been recalled to barracks. They will take over.’

Morgan frowned sceptically. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Everybody knows it,’ Robinson declaimed scathingly.

‘But what about the voters? What if they vote a party in?’

‘You go to one village. You pay the chief. You say vote for me and you get your votes.’

‘But in the towns, surely…’

‘Even in the towns it is the same.’

Morgan shrugged helplessly. ‘But I don’t quite see what I can do about any of this.’

‘Expose the lie,’ Robinson said with ardour. ‘It is simple. If the KNP are lying you must say so.’

Morgan gulped. He thought he should change the course of the questioning. ‘But why here? Why Nkongsamba? We’re not important. You should go to the High Commission in the capital.’

‘We have gone,’ Robinson said. ‘We are there at the gates at this very moment. But, as you know, Adekunle is a chief in Nkongsamba; there is a strong connection with the town.’

‘Well, look I’m sorry,’ Morgan apologized. ‘But there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I’ll tell you what though, I’ll pass your message on to higher echelons — I’m sure they’ll pay close attention to it.’ He rose to his feet to signify the meeting was at an end. Robinson smiled sarcastically.

‘That is no good,’ he said. ‘You must act now. There is very little time.’

♦

As soon as Robinson had gone Morgan raced out of his office and bumped into Mrs Bryce on the landing. She was carrying a bundle of sheets in her hands.

‘Ah Mrs Bryce,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Just the person. Where’s Mr Fanshawe?’

‘He’s away,’ she said simply.

‘I know that,’ Morgan said slowly, with forced reasonableness. ‘But where?’

‘The capital, meeting the Duchess of Ripon. She arrives today. Weren’t you informed of all this?’

Of course, Morgan remembered now: the wretched visit.

‘He’ll be back tomorrow,’ Mrs Bryce continued. ‘Anything urgent?’

‘Ah no. No. It can wait. Keep until tomorrow I suppose.’ He looked at Mrs Bryce again. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, Mrs Bryce, but what are those sheets for?’

‘Making up the beds in the guest suite,’ she said, marching off towards it across the landing. ‘The Duchess is spending Christmas night here.’

Morgan wished grievous septic inflammation on her mosquito-bitten legs and thoughtfully retraced his steps back into the office. Kojo sat at his desk, one hand covering the mouthpiece of his telephone.

‘Mr Fanshawe on the line, sah,’ he said. ‘From the High Commission.’

‘Oh Christ, no,’ Morgan muttered. He picked up the phone in his office. He took a deep breath.

‘Arthur?’ he said breezily. ‘Hello. How’s everything with you?’

‘Seen the papers?’ Fanshawe squeaked in fury down the phone. ‘It’s a disaster, man. Grade A disaster!’

‘Sorry Arthur…I don’t quite…I mean…’ his stomach hollowed. He felt the blood drain from his face.

‘There are about two thousand demonstrators outside the High Commission here raising merry hell. Phones’ve been going all day. H.E. ‘s been summoned to Government House. The UPKP are hopping mad. Hopping. It’s dreadful, Morgan. Dreadful.’

‘God,’ was all Morgan could find to say.

‘And. And the Duchess is due to arrive here this afternoon. What’s she going to think when she finds the High Commission surrounded by rioters?’

There was a silence. It seemed to Morgan that Fanshawe was expecting an answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he began. ‘I suppose…’

‘She’ll think it’s quite disgraceful, that’s what,’ Fanshawe told him. ‘I mean, really Morgan, what’s Adekunle playing at?’

Morgan thought quickly. ‘It might not be that bad — in the long term. What if he wins?’

‘Well there has been talk of that,’ Fanshawe conceded, his voice calming down. ‘That would make a difference. Our pundit-chappies here think the prestige he’s bought with this visit will outweigh any damage. But, and this is the main thing, Project Kingpin wasn’t meant to work out this way at all. The whole thing’s been handled very badly. Very badly.’

Morgan felt anger flare up inside him as he sensed the gun barrels of blame swinging ponderously around to point at him. ‘We could have had no idea he was going to do this though, could we, Arthur? It is a breach of trust on Adekunle’s part, not ours. What do you suggest we do?’

‘Yes, well…’ Fanshawe said, obviously taken aback. ‘The official line is say nothing, do nothing. The elections are not far off, everything may work out for the best, if the KNP emerge as victors. But, if the UPKP get back in, Anglo-Kinjanjan relations are going to be decidedly rocky.’

For a moment Morgan wondered whether he ought to pass on Robinson’s dire warnings, but then thought better of it: Fanshawe had enough on his plate as it was — as did they all. ‘It’s been fairly quiet up here. We had a small demo but nothing to write home about: the PPK mob.’

‘And who in God’s name are the PPK?’ Fanshawe demanded impatiently. ‘I can never get these initials straight.’

‘The Marxists: People’s Party of Kinjanja, Femi Robinson and his merry band.’ He craned his neck to get a view down the drive. ‘But they’ve all gone home now, more or less.’

‘That’s something at least,’ Fanshawe said ungraciously. ‘But how about our other problem?’

‘Innocence? Ah. Yes. I’m afraid not much progress there. I had a couple more undertakers out, but they wouldn’t touch her.’

‘Damnation,’ Fanshawe swore angrily. ‘Everything’s going wrong. Listen, Morgan, I want two things from you: some sort of denial or apology from Adekunle, and Innocence out of the way before the Duchess arrives.’ He spoke of her as though she were a tree that had fallen down and blocked his drive.

Morgan cursed at him under his breath. ‘You won’t get a peep out of Adekunle, I can tell you that right now,’ he said harshly. Then, ‘Sorry Arthur, lot on my mind. I’ll see what I can do.’ He thought: you horrible, revolting little shit.

‘Very well,’ Fanshawe said in a hurt offended voice. ‘Try and come up with some results for once.’

He hung up, swore at Fanshawe again, and thought grimly how fragile loyalty was. He gazed emptily at his desk top. Disaster was mounting on disaster. What was he going to do?

There was a cocky rat-a-tat-tat on his door and Dalmire came in. He looked smart and fresh and annoyingly cheerful.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Dalmire said. ‘Got held up by a demonstration at the university. Then I arrive here and guess what? We’ve got one of our own. What’s it all about?’ Morgan sullenly indicated the newspapers. Dalmire glanced at them. ‘God,’ he said. ‘He’s got some cheek, hasn’t he?’

‘Well, yes and no,’ Morgan said ambiguously. He didn’t feel like explaining the intricacies of Project Kingpin to Dalmire at the moment. ‘Were they demonstrating about this,’ he indicated the newspapers, ‘at the university as well?’

Dalmire had moved away to the window. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Something quite separate. Apparently there’s some threat to close down the university by the government. They say they won’t reopen after the Christmas holidays because of general student bolshiness,’ he smiled, as if his mind was on other matters. ‘I’ve no idea what it’s all about, but there were hundreds of students all round the admin block. It seems they intend staying up, occupying the rooms over the holidays. One of these sit-in things or whatever they’re called.’

‘Christ, typical,’ Morgan said in disgust, but thankful at least it had nothing to do with Kingpin.

‘Ever been skiing?’ Dalmire asked out of the blue.

‘What? No, doesn’t appeal. Why?’

‘We were thinking about skiing — me and Pris — for our hols.’ A dreamy look lit up Dalmire’s eyes.

‘Honeymoon, don’t you mean?’ Morgan said, trying to keep the resentment and impatience out of his voice.

‘No, no. That comes later.’ Dalmire paused, he seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘Didn’t I tell you? We’re going on holiday. Leaving after Christmas. I thought it might be fun to go skiing. New Year on the slopes, a welcome in the mountains, that sort of thing.’

‘HOLIDAY?’ Morgan exclaimed, appalled. ‘But you’ve only been out here for a couple of months. Christ, my last leave was in March.’

‘I’m taking it off my leave, don’t worry,’ Dalmire said hastily. ‘It was Priscilla’s idea actually. Arthur said it would be fine.’

Morgan felt he was about to splutter inarticulately with rage like some gouty brigadier, but with an effort he composed himself. The lucky bastard, he thought, envy mixed with outrage at the gross injustice. That was what came of marrying the boss’s daughter. Dalmire, however, appeared quite oblivious of his resentment.

‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘About skiing?’

‘Sounds great,’ Morgan said, thinking: maybe he’ll break his leg. Maybe he’ll break his back. An evil idea edged its way into his mind. ‘By the way, Richard,’ he asked, ‘did you hear what happened to Innocence?’

♦

Three little boys watched as Dalmire sat down heavily on the verandah. He had turned quite pale. ‘Oh my God,’ he said dully, holding the back of his hand up to his mouth. Morgan blanched himself and threw the cloth back over Innocence’s body, disturbing the cloud of flies that hovered above it.

‘Pretty gruesome, isn’t it?’ Morgan said.

Dalmire swallowed and puffed out his cheeks, ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘That’s repulsive. Revolting. To think…’ he paused and then added in explanation. ‘It’s the first dead body I’ve seen.’

A small fire had been lit near Innocence in a little charcoal brazier onto which leaves and green twigs were occasionally flung. A smudge of bluey smoke hung about this end of the compound, meant, Morgan assumed, to drive away flies and overlay any smell.

Dalmire got to his feet and walked unsteadily away. Morgan felt a little sorry for him: it was a mean sort of revenge but it was intensely satisfying nonetheless to see him so shaken up.

‘Oyibo, oyibo,’ a little naked girl shouted in delight, dancing on the verandah and pointing a stubby plump finger at the trembling Dalmire.

‘The kids,’ Dalmire said. ‘What about these kidsjust running about? It’s unreal.’

‘Yes,’ Morgan agreed, walking over to join him and looking back at the scene: Innocence’s covered body, the wash-place, the juju spells, the smoking fire, the wandering semi-nude children, hens pecking in the dust. He didn’t feel as mature and dispassionate as he was trying to sound. ‘But it’s Africa.’

They were walking slowly back to the Commission in thoughtful silence, when a shrill call came across the lawn.

‘Morgan. Oh, Morgan.’ It was Mrs Fanshawe. She was standing by the edge of her drive beckoning him over.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said crossly. ‘What does she want?’ Then, remembering she was Dalmire’s future mother-in-law, added apologetically ‘Sorry, Richard. Bit unsettled.’ Dalmire, however, was too preoccupied with intimations of mortality to take offence and waved his excuses away.

‘Morning, Chloe,’ Morgan said as he approached. Mrs Fanshawe was wearing a tight-waisted, sleeveless dress in a brilliant ultramarine that contrasted strongly with her almost ethereally pale skin and raven hair. It also made her look twice her normal size, somehow.

‘Just been over to see Innocence,’ he said, like some charitable WRVS helper. ‘Unfortunately no one’ll move her.’

‘She’s still there?’ exclaimed Mrs Fanshawe raising her hands to her temples. ‘Oh it’s too ghastly.’

‘Yes, it’s been quite a day so far,’ he said ruefully, ‘what with our demonstration. Did you see it?’

‘It’s still going on,’ she said scornfully, ‘if you can call it a demonstration. I’ve just come back from town and there are still three of them loitering by the gate. This funny little man with some sort of beard and a huge head of hair shouted at me as I drove in.’ They walked towards the house. ‘He was wearing a black polo neck and leather gloves. Looked miserably hot.’

Morgan was wary about the friendly chatter: she wanted something. ‘That’ll be Femi Robinson, urban guerrilla,’ he said. ‘Got to wear the authentic anarchist gear you know.’ They chortled together patronizingly over this as they entered the sitting room.

‘Drink?’ Mrs Fanshawe asked. ‘You must need one. Surely you’re not still on orange juice.’

‘No no,’ he laughed falsely. ‘I’ll have a gin and tonic if I may.’ Anything Dalmire can do, he thought.

Mrs Fanshawe looked at him appraisingly. ‘Always thought G and T was more your drink, you know? Could never understand your lust for sherry.’

Morgan was startled. What had come over the woman? he wondered, she’d never been so familiar. He was asking himself what could be behind it all when he was served a gin and tonic by a red-eyed Maria. He thought suddenly of her mother cooking slowly in the hot sun.

‘She insisted on working,’ Mrs Fanshawe whispered guiltily as Maria left the room. ‘Wouldn’t take any more time off.’

‘Priscilla home?’ Morgan asked unconcernedly, trying to alter the images in his mind.

‘No,’ said Mrs Fanshawe. ‘She’s at the club. Consolidating her tan. She and Dickie are off on holiday, you know.’ He did know. Mrs Fanshawe paused to screw a cigarette into its holder. ‘I want you to come upstairs, Morgan,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

Morgan warily followed the large turquoise globes of her buttocks up the stairs wondering again what was going on. The ubiquitous chinoiserie of the house was more muted on the first floor, confined to pictures and curtain material. Mrs Fanshawe led him into a small room with a low divan, and a table, upon which stood a sewing machine. In the corner was a dressmaker’s dummy. Morgan took a spine-bracing gulp of the gin which he’d brought up the stairs with him. Mrs Fanshawe deposited her cigarette and holder in an ashtray and unhooked something from the back of the door. It was red. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Looks suspiciously like a boiler suit to me,’ he ventured.

‘It is, or rather was. It’s an ordinary white one I dyed red. I’ve made the sleeves short too. I thought that would make a nice tropical Santa. Mmm? What do you say?’

‘Mmnng…sorry. I…’

‘Of course I’m going to put some spangly stuff on it. I picked some up in town.’ She beamed at him. ‘Thought I’d get you to try it on first though,’ she frowned, looking him up and down. ‘I didn’t know your size. We may have to let it out a bit here and there.’

‘Looks OK to me,’ Morgan said, offended at this casual reference to his bulk.

‘No,’ Mrs Fanshawe said firmly. ‘Try it on now, let’s make sure.’

‘Now?’ Morgan yelped. ‘Can’t I take it away? And tell you later?’

‘Of course not,’ Mrs Fanshawe said professionally. ‘Just step into it now.’

Morgan felt suddenly light-headed and giddy. With numb fingers he accepted the horrible red garment from Mrs Fanshawe. He took off his shoes and was about to insert his left foot into the appropriate leg hole when Mrs Fanshawe uttered a bright trill of laughter.

‘Don’t be so prim,’ she mocked. ‘You won’t be wearing shirt and trousers on the day. How on earth am I meant to get a proper fit?’

Unable to speak Morgan hesitantly removed his tie, shirt and trousers and stood motionless in his boxer shorts and socks, slightly bent over, his shoulders unnaturally rounded as though he had a bad back.

‘Come on then,’ Mrs Fanshawe ordered, like a hearty games mistress encouraging a flagging hockey team.

Inflating his chest Morgan stepped into the overalls, pulled them up, slipped his arms into the sleeves. He was trying not to think what he had looked like standing there in his loose baggy underwear and brown socks, trying to ignore the acid smell of fresh sweat that seemed to billow noxiously from his armpits. Mrs Fanshawe busied around him tugging and pulling as he slowly did up the buttons on the front.

‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Not too bad at all. Might have to let it out around the tummy a little, that’s all. Want to see yourself in a mirror?’

Morgan shook his head emphatically.

‘Super,’ she enthused. ‘I’ll make a beard out of some cotton wool, I’ll attach a hood and that’ll be that. The kiddies’ll love it.’

Morgan thought he was going to be sick as he struggled to get out of the tight overalls. His nervousness, discomfort and profound embarrassment had caused sweat to pour forth and he had to wriggle and squirm his shoulders and hips free of the clinging material. Mrs Fanshawe was humming to herself as she rummaged through her sewing basket. Morgan bent down, picked up the boiler suit and handed it back to her. He avoided her eye but as she turned to take the suit from him her humming ceased abruptly and she said, ‘Oh!’ in a tone of perplexed surprise.

‘What about gum boots?’ Morgan said as though in a trance, his eyes fixed on a crack in the wall. ‘I suppose I’ll need those too.’ He groped for his shirt on the divan.

‘Oh…yes. Yes.’ Mrs Fanshawe said, suddenly confused, gathering the red suit up into a bundle and hugging it to her chest. ‘Um. Look…I’ll, erm, see to that. Yes yes. That’s what I’ll do.’ Morgan shot a glance at her. She’d suddenly gone most peculiar, he thought, seeing her gazing intently out of the window.

‘I’ve just remembered something,’ she blurted. ‘Something I must do at once,’ she said, scrambling for the door. ‘Let yourself out, won’t you?’ She was gone.

A very, very strange woman, Morgan thought, his churning addled brain beginning to return to normal. What an odd family the Fanshawes were, he considered, but what had got into her? He sat down on the divan. It was covered in a coarsely woven bedspread. He felt the rough tickle of the material on the back of his thighs and, he suddenly realized, on a portion of his anatomy that should have been unexposed. He mouthed a silent horror-struck ‘Oh no!’ and slowly looked down at his lap. From the simple slit in his boxer shorts that passed for a fly, his penis protruded, long, pale and flaccid. It must have popped out during his struggles to remove the boiler suit. Now he knew.

3

Morgan drove down to the club. There was a curious fixed smile on his face as though he was under deep hypnosis or, like some cartoon character, had been hit very hard on the head. With all the skill of a Zen master he had emptied his mind of thought. He was a bundle of reflexes driving down the road, a dazed refugee mindlessly fleeing the mushroom cloud of shame and embarrassment that towered over the Commission.

It was lunchtime and the pool was quiet. He changed, stepped out onto the rough concrete surround and with the zeal of a born-again baptist on the banks of the river Jordan hurled himself into the pool. He swam powerfully below the surface, thrusting himself through the cool blue water, his eyes mistily focused on the shifting dappled light patterns on the pool-bottom. He imagined the sweat, the dirt and disgrace sliding from his body like a slick of sun-tan oil.

He hauled himself from the pool, sat down in the shade of an umbrella and drank two icy bottles of beer in quick succession. Gently, patiently, he began to come round. After an hour of careful self-counselling and analysis, and a thorough survey and methodological setting-out of his problems, the jumbled perspectives of his life slowly reformed and sanity resumed something like its rightful place in the order of things.

Calmer and pleased with this massive act of self-discipline he changed back into his clothes and walked through the club on the way to his car. As he was passing the noticeboard in the vestibule his eye was caught by the red lettering of the GRAND BOXING DAY GOLF TOURNAMENT and he noticed — as instinctively as if it had been his own — Murray’s name among the list of those who wished to compete. Morgan was forcibly reminded of his aborted golf-match and he felt the millstone of his worries resettle itself comfortably around his neck.

♦

The childish idea came to Morgan that if he just sat still for long enough, if he didn’t trouble anyone, didn’t draw any attention to himself, all the hideous traumas currently rampaging through his life would get bored and rumble on past him like a marauding army off to lay waste to the next village up the road. Accordingly, he crept into his office and sat quietly at his desk for three quarters of an hour filling his blotting pad with tiny doodles of spirals and concentric circles. But then a wide jaw-cracking yawn made him realize that total quiescence, utter passivity, held out no hope and precious few charms. Besides, he just wasn’t that sort of person: he had to do something, even if it was only to cock things up further. He looked quizzically at his ink-darkened blotting pad, and wondered if, for the last couple of hours, he’d been having a minor nervous breakdown, if this was what it was like when you started to go mad.

‘Hey man,’ he said in a fruity drawl, ‘when the going gets tough the tough gets going. Right?’ He thumped his desk with his fist, his face breaking out into a piratical leer. ‘Damn right,’ he told himself. ‘It’s not the size of the man in the fight, it’s the size of fight in the man.’ His gung-ho homilies elated him for a moment but then his spirits collapsed with the suddenness of a fountain being switched off. He picked up his pen and fitted a minute spiral into a gap at the corner of his blotting pad.

Kojo’s face appeared round the door.

‘It’s all right, Kojo,’ Morgan said sadly. ‘I was talking to myself…’

‘Excuse, sah. There is a man on the phone. He will not give his name and he is abusin’ me because I will not connect him to you. He says to tell Mr Leafy it is Sam.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Morgan said gloomily. There was no respite. ‘Put him through.’

Adekunle came on the line. ‘Good afternoon, my friend. I thought, as the saying goes, discretion was better than valour, under the circumstances.’

Morgan was getting tired of Adekunle’s bloody sayings. ‘We’re all very annoyed with you here,’ he said boldly. ‘To put it mildly, as the saying goes.’

Adekunle’s hearty laugh echoed tinnily in his ear. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Leafy, all is fair in love and politics. But,’ he said, the levity gone from his voice, ‘I’ve not called to discuss these matters. You have your ‘meeting’ with Dr Murray tomorrow. I must speak with you about it before then.’

‘Ah well,’ Morgan said, suddenly not caring. ‘There’s a bit of a problem there. I’m afraid…’

‘There is no problem,’ Adekunle said harshly. ‘For your own sake, I hope not.’ Morgan swallowed, his mouth dry. ‘Do you know the fish-pond on the university campus?’ Adekunle asked. Morgan said he did. ‘Then let us meet there at half past five this afternoon. Yes?’

♦

The fish-pond was another example of Kinjanjan literalness, but this time so extreme that it almost returned to metaphor. There were doubtless fish in it and it was, just, in the general class of ponds, but, more truthfully, it was a large and impressive artificial lake at the south-western edge of the university campus. Morgan sat in his car looking at it, waiting for Adekunle. Normally a tranquil scene of great beauty, today Morgan’s half-creating mind saw only stark primitive nature, hostile and unwelcoming, feral and unsafe.

The fish-pond formed an attenuated oval, roughly half a mile long and three hundred yards wide in the middle. A large stream poured sluggishly into it at one end but there was no obvious channel for the waters to escape. Perhaps the earth just seeped it up, Morgan thought, for the pond had the solid unnatural stillness of stagnancy and the huge pale-trunked trees that bordered it on the far bank were perfectly reflected in its mirror-like surface.

The beige-grey light of approaching dusk softened edges and blurred contours. Over to his right Morgan could see the white roof of a senior staff house, but apart from the tarmac road his car rested on, everything else was untouched and unchanged. He would not have been surprised if a pterodactyl had hunched itself into the air from the darkening trees, or if some squamous prehistoric beast had plodded out of the tall rushes onto the mud beach below the road. He felt his depression icily grip his brain as he stared moodily across the neutral uncomplaining lake.

His gloomy reverie was interrupted by the sound of Adekunle’s Mercedes. Morgan got out of his car as Adekunle drew up behind him. Adekunle was smoking a large cigar but Morgan sensed that his normal mood of cynical joviality was absent.

‘Mr Leafy,’ he said at once. ‘You have made me a worried man with your talk of problems and difficulties. What has gone wrong?’

Morgan kicked a pebble off the road. ‘I had an argument with Murray,’ he said flatly. ‘Under the circumstances there’s no way we can play a friendly round of golf tomorrow.’

‘No, this will not do,’ Adekunle said sharply. ‘You cannot slip out of this so easily, my friend. You must put our…offer to Dr Murray before the twenty-ninth of this month. I have decided that I must know my position before then.’

‘I’m telling you we had a blazing row,’ Morgan protested. ‘I shouted at him. I insulted him. Honestly, he must hate my guts.’

‘A very poor joke, my friend. I see how you are trying,’ Adekunle wiggled his hand, ‘to snake your way out of our agreement. It will not succeed, I warn you. You will only force me to take my complaints to Mr Fanshawe.’

Morgan was almost sobbing with frustration. ‘It’s true I tell you. It happened on Monday night…Oh, never mind.’ He picked up a twig and flung it savagely at the glimmering fish-pond. It was nearly dark. The crickets sawed away, the bats dipped above their heads. Something in his tone must have made Adekunle realize that he wasn’t joking.

‘All right,’ Adekunle said grudgingly. ‘OK. You have a set-back. But it must be overcome at some point before the election. I don’t care how. It is mandatory that this business with Dr Murray is secured before then. You must arrange it,’ he waved his cigar aggressively at Morgan.

‘But why me?’ Morgan complained. ‘Why don’t you just ring him up? Put it to him straight?’

‘My good friend Mr Leafy,’ Adekunle chuckled. ‘How very naive you are. Is it not better to be offered a…a financial inducement by one of your own people? By one who you would normally ‘assume to be above this sort of transaction. A representative of the British Crown furthermore.’ He took a satisfied puffat his cigar. ‘Believe me it is very hard to remain honest when the standards of the highest are in question.’

Morgan reluctantly conceded the acuteness of his logic. If, by implication, the Commission staff were on the make, why should anyone else worry about soiling their hands? Quis custodiet and all that. He wondered again how Murray would respond.

‘Would you like to see what we are going to all this trouble about?’ Adekunle asked.

Morgan said he might as well, and followed Adekunle up the road, away from the senior staff house and along the side of the fish-pond. At the end of the lake the road ascended a small hill and then curved round to rejoin the campus. Up at this slightly higher altitude Morgan could see behind him the lights of more staff houses.

‘There you are,’ Adekunle said. The ground in front of them dipped down into a shallow marshy river valley then rose suddenly on the other side to meet a small plateau. In the gathering darkness Morgan could make out a line of trees.

‘This is the land I own,’ Adekunle said. ‘Up as far as those trees. This is where they want to build the hall and cafeteria. As you can see it is ideally placed.’

‘Where’s the dump gojng to be?’ Morgan asked unfeelingly.

‘Beyond those trees. Far beyond them. I sold all that land several years ago. The refuse lorries and the night-soil transporters are already bringing the rubbish out here,’ he added sadly. He paused. ‘Here we are ten minutes away from the lecture theatres, ten minutes’ walk from the university centre.’ He looked at Morgan and then at the end of his cigar. ‘If not for Dr Murray,’ he said bitterly, ‘they would write me the cheque today!’ He almost shouted the last word. ‘He has postponed the Building Committee three times already while he pursued his investigations. I know he intends to give a negative report. And so now I am driven to these desperate measures.’

Morgan didn’t try too hard to sympathize with him. ‘How much are you selling the land for?’ he asked.

‘Two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds,’

Adekunle said with feeling. ‘For a ten-thousand pound investment,’ Morgan said. ‘Not bad.’

Adekunle came up to him and seized his arm. Morgan could smell his cigar smoke. ‘This is why, Mr Leafy, you are going to help me, otherwise I take my complaints about your behaviour to the High Commissioner,’ he threatened. ‘I will not need to go to Mr Fanshawe: I will go to the top man.’ He released his grip. ‘Your kind offer of a visit to London was most useful. I have some’ good friends there now. Believe me, Mr Leafy, if I so wish I can make serious trouble for you. Find your own way to approach Murray. That is all. And before the twenty-ninth.’ His voice was harsh and angry again.

Morgan tried to coax some saliva into his dry mouth. ‘But how?’ he wailed. ‘Jesus Christ, I told you I…’

‘I don’t care!’ Adekunle spat out suddenly, trembling with rage. ‘I certainly won’t give one bloody damn shit for the career of a junior diplomat!’

‘All right,’ Morgan said weakly. ‘Alright. I’ll think of something.’ He felt very tired, overcome with weariness. He turned and set off back down the road to his car. Adekunle caught up with him.

‘Forgive me for losing my temper,’ he said quietly, ‘but as I told you the financial costs of an election campaign are high.’ He added in a surprisingly meek tone, ‘You don’t know what this…this obstruction by Murray means. I have my own concerns.’ Morgan said nothing. ‘There is no reason,’ Adekunle went on, ‘Why we should not both benefit from this, ah, how shall we say it? partnership.’

‘Thanks,’ Morgan said hollowly. He would do it, he knew: primarily to save his own tattered skin and secure his piddling job. But there was another reason. Something in him made him feel that Murray would accept the bribe this time, and he desperately wanted to be there the day his feet turned to clay and his pedestal was kicked out from under him. And he wanted to be the one to apply the boot.

He stopped in his tracks. He had an idea.

‘Do you know the golf professional at the club?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Adekunle said. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Bernard something. Bernard Odemu I think.’

‘Is he a Kinjanjan?’

‘Yes.’ Morgan paused. ‘Do you think you could ‘persuade’ him somehow to partner me with Murray in the Boxing Day golf tournament? I should think he’s the man responsible for the draw. Would that be possible, do you think?’

‘Is that all?’ Adekunle asked, amused. ‘Then of course.’

Power, Morgan thought, an amazing thing.

4

There was, Morgan decided, a distinct smell now coming from Innocence’s body: a sort of sour-sweet smell. Which wasn’t surprising, he admitted, as she had been lying out in the sun for nearly four days. It was the morning of 24 December — Christmas Eve — clear, bright, the sun shining, the temperature in the high eighties. He was waiting for Fanshawe.

Fanshawe had summoned him to the servants’ quarters to, as he put it, ‘sort out this Innocence-problem once and for all.’ The Innocence-problem lay — as it had always done, unmovingly, stoically — beneath its garish shroud. As each day had gone by so the juju tokens had multiplied and now there were twenty or so little cairns or assemblies of leaf, twig and pebble clustered around the body.

He saw Fanshawe stride into the compound. He could tell from the quick no-nonsense pace that his superior was not in the best of moods. He sighed quietly to himself.

‘Morning,’ Fanshawe said brusquely. ‘How are things going?’

Morgan felt strangely composed and lethargically in control for some reason. His meeting with Adekunle seemed to have jolted him out of his incipient crack-up, shaped the random nature of his various problems, given him a direction to follow. At least he had to act now; however unsavoury those acts might be. He also had the feeling that things couldn’t get much worse — but that, he knew, was a dangerous assumption to make.

‘Well,’ he said with a shrug in response to Fanshawe’s question, indicating at the same time Innocence’s body. ‘Not much change as you can see.’ He was quite pleased with his insouciance; he decided it was a pose he should strive to adopt more often in future.

‘Damnation!’ Fanshawe swore, his brows knotting fiercely. ‘Intolerable bloody country,’ he seethed. ‘They just go about their business — without a care in the world, as if it was an ordinary day — stepping over dead bodies without a second thought…Savage, unfeeling brutes.’

‘Well,’ Morgan said thoughtfully. He liked beginning his sentences with ‘well’: it gave them a pondered, considered tone. ‘That’s only from our point of view you know, Arthur. Shango’s a fairly top-notch deity out here and we have to respect…’

‘I’m not interested in this hocus-pocus rubbish, Leafy,’ Fanshawe hissed through clenched teeth. A drop of spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on Morgan’s sleeve, but he charitably decided not to draw attention to it by dabbing it away with his handkerchief. He was cool. He had also noticed the pointed use of his surname: Fanshawe was really heating up, he thought, it was all getting on top of him.

‘This bloody juju claptrap gets right up my…For Christ’s sake, man, the Duchess of Ripon is coming here tomorrow. The Queen’s personal representative! It’s impossible.’ Fanshawe shook his head vigorously. ‘It can’t be here.’

‘Well…’ Morgan began.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep beginning all your remarks with ‘well’, Leafy, it’s most irritating,’ Fanshawe burst out temperamentally.

‘Sorry I’m sure,’ Morgan said, his eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘I was just going to say that the Duchess is hardly likely to wander over to the servants’ quarters.’

‘That doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference,’ Fanshawe expostulated. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. For heaven’s sake, this is Commission property, you just can’t have it littered with decomposing bodies. And,’ he added contemptuously, ‘if you can’t see that then I’m sorry for you. Very sorry indeed.’

A strained silence ensued. With his thumb-nail Morgan pushed back some encroaching cuticles.

‘I suppose we’d better get it over with,’ Fanshawe said suddenly and marched towards the body. ‘Come on,’ he called to Morgan. Morgan joined him, wondering what he planned on doing.

‘What are you going to do?’ Morgan asked, looking round apprehensively at the audience of children and mothers that had gathered.

‘I’m going to have a look of course,’ Fanshawe said, the points of a blush appearing on his cheek-bones.

‘Why?’

‘Ah, to see for myself,’ he said, smoothing his moustache, adding vaguely, ‘check up, you know.’ Morgan realized that Fanshawe was fascinated: he felt the cloth was keeping something from him.

‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ Morgan cautioned.

‘Please, masta,’ a voice called from the crowd. They looked round, it was Isaac. He advanced a few paces. ‘I beg you, sah, nevah totch ‘im one time. Make you go leff am, sah. Dis no respec’.’

‘I am only going to look,’ Fanshawe declaimed pompously. ‘Now don’t worry, Isaac.’ He whispered to Morgan, ‘Pull back the cloth.’ Morgan felt like saying pull it back yourself. He was beginning to resent the assumption that he was some kind of mortuary assistant. However, he obeyed the order.

Fanshawe lurched back as if he’d been punched in the chest. His eyes bulged. ‘God,’ he said hoarsely. Morgan breathed through his mouth. The crowd edged forward to catch a glimpse. Morgan threw the cloth back over Innocence’s body. He stepped away carefully.

‘Phew,’ he said to Fanshawe, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. ‘It’s amazing how quickly…you know, how fast everything…’

Fanshawe was pale and obviously shocked. He led Morgan unsteadily a little way down the compound.

‘That does it,’ he said vehemently. ‘She’s got to go. She has to. It’s…It’s obscene, that’s what it is. I’d no idea that sort of effect…well, happened. Get rid of her. That’s all. Away from here. Get rid of her, Morgan. Any way you can.’

Morgan felt the anger of the subordinate who always gets the dirty jobs. ‘But how Arthur?’ he protested. ‘Just tell me how and I’ll do it. Be reasonable for God’s sake. You can see how impossible…’

‘I don’t care!’ Fanshawe almost shrieked. ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours. It’s been days now since I asked you to take care of everything. If you hadjust handled things properly the first night we wouldn’t be in this frightful mess now. Get an armed guard, anything. Just get rid of that body before the Duchess arrives.’ He stared furiously at Morgan for an instant, his jaw clenched, the muscles and tendons standing out on his neck. Then he turned abruptly on his heel and marched off back to the Commission.

Morgan stood in the compound, rigid with bile-churning rage. Fuck you! you stinking little shit! he mouthed at Fan-shawe’s retreating back. He made twisted vampire claws with his hands and savaged the air in front of his face. He turned and glared at the crowd, slowly dispersing now. They might have been waxworks, moon-men or zombies for all the understanding their minds shared with his. But there again, he thought, the same could be said about the gulf that existed between him and Fanshawe.

♦

Morgan had to confess that the Innocence-problem seemed insoluble. His one good idea was swiftly quashed by Fanshawe. Morgan had gone down to the Commission’s front door and consulted Isaac about the juju ceremony. If he had the money now, Morgan asked, how long would it take to pacify Shango? Isaac thought about it. If the fetish priest could come this evening, if the goat, the beer and the other accessories were purchased forthwith then the whole ceremony might possibly be contracted into two days. But, he warned, tomorrow being Christmas Day the fetish priest might demand extra money for working on a public holiday. Fine, Morgan said, thanks.

Back in his office he had phoned Fanshawe.

‘I think I’ve found a way out of it, Arthur,’ he said.

‘Yes. Go on,’ Fanshawe snapped.

‘What we do is do it their way. We’ve been swimming against the tide so far. So, now we get the juju man, slaughter the goat and get him to exorcize the demon or whatever. I can’t see any other alternative.’

‘I thought there was some kind of money problem.’

‘Yes, there is. But only as far as Maria is concerned. But I thought we could pay for it.’

‘Out of the question,’ Fanshawe said immediately. ‘We don’t want to establish that precedent.’

‘Hold on,’ Morgan said, losing patience. ‘Give it some thought. Couldn’t we lend it to her at least?’ Mean bastard, he said under his breath.

‘Well, perhaps. We could consider it. But tell me, how long will this ‘exorcism’ take?’

‘Couple of days. I can get on to…’

‘No! No!’ Fanshawejammered. ‘Impossible. Don’t you listen to anything I say? It’s got to be away by tomorrow. The Duchess…’ Morgan let him rant on. His scalp crawled with hatred at the man’s intransigence.’…and remember, Morgan. I’m making this top priority. Forget Kingpin, forget the elections. I just want that body away. I’m making it your sole responsibility.’

And very handy for you too, Morgan thought bitterly, replacing the phone on the receiver, but where did that leave him?

At four that afternoon he decided to go home. At the gate stood Femi Robinson on his own, holding up a placard that read, NO SUEZ IN KINJANJA.

Morgan stopped his car and leant out of the window. ‘Isn’t that a little extreme?’ he called. Robinson approached the car. He was still in his polo-neck and gloves. Somehow he’d managed to pull a beret down over his afro. His BO preceded him like a cloud of mustard gas. His worried face shone with moisture, rivulets of sweat slid down his jaw-bone. A bleb hung from his chin.

‘Don’t you think,’ Morgan indicated the placard, ‘that it’s also, well, a bit subtle?’

‘The message is directed at you British,’ Robinson said belligerently. ‘Not at my own supporters.’

‘And where are they, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘They are both buying beer from the trader down the road.’ Robinson scowled when he saw Morgan laughing. ‘You can laugh,’ he accused, ‘but soon it will be on the other side of your face.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Morgan, suppressing his grin. ‘But what you said…it’s a joke, quite well known.’

Robinson suddenly relaxed. He smiled. ‘I admit their fervour is not so great today, but there will be more soon. You must beware. I believe your High Commissioner has apologized. But it is not sufficient. The diplomaticization of the problem is a smoke-screen. And,’ he banged his fist on the window sill, ‘if the KNP win?’ He sucked air in through his teeth and shook his head sadly.

‘Thanks for the warning,’ Morgan said. He put the car in gear. Robinson took a pace back and brandished his placard.

‘I shall remain,’ he said, ‘to ensure you are not forgettin’.’

♦

As soon as he returned home Morgan showered and crawled into bed for a siesta. He shut his eyes and told himself to relax, ordered every sinew and tendon in his body to ease off, advised his heart to slow its pace. But Fanshawe’s hysterical commands seemed to bounce around the inside of his head like a series of powerfully struck squash balls: ‘You’re responsible…top priority…twenty-four hours…’ He supposed it was some form of indirect punishment for the embarrassment he had suffered over Adekunle’s effective PR job for the KNP. Morgan wondered if Adekunle had fixed the draw yet. He felt suddenly weak and helpless: an impotent Sisyphus who’s just been informed there’ll be two rocks from tomorrow — a fagged-out Hercules with a gross of labours to complete. He wanted to weep and blub. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair…

There was a ring at the doorbell. Dispiritedly, remembering Friday and Moses didn’t come in until later, he pulled on his dressing-gown and shuffled grumbling down the passageway to see who it was.

Standing there was Kojo, his wife and their three children. Kojo was wearing a shiny black suit, gleaming shoes and a bright red tie. He was carrying a large enamelbasin containing something covered by a cloth. His wife, a tiny smiling woman with a creamy caramel skin and huge dangling earrings, was in a lacy blouse, luxuriant black velvet wrap-around and head-tie. The three boys were miniature replicas of their father with small black short-trousered suits and red ties, closely shaven hair and serious-nervous faces. Confronted by such daunting spic-and-spanness Morgan was suddenly aware of his exposed hairy shanks and bare feet, his shabby dressing-gown and tousled hair.

‘Kojo,’ he said. ‘Hello…yes, what um…hello.’ He was very surprised to see them.

Kojo smiled at his confusion. ‘Good afternoon, sah, how are you? I have brought my family to greet you.’ He paused, waiting to see if comprehension would dawn on Morgan’s face. ‘For Christmas,’ he added finally. Morgan understood. Such courtesy visits were annually paid by employees and servants. Tomorrow he was expecting the nightwatchman, the gardener and the man who cleaned his car once a week, but Kojo had never been before.

‘Of course,’ Morgan said. ‘Go inside, please. Sit down. I’ll go and put some clothes on.’

Cursing with irritation he went back to his bedroom and pulled on his clothes. He returned to his sitting room to find the tiny family occupying the edges of two chairs and a settee.

‘Yes,’ he said stupidly, rubbing his hands together in a bad imitation of a genial host. ‘I don’t think I’ve met your wife and sons before.’

Kojo stood up. ‘This is my wife Elizabeth.’ Elizabeth half rose to her feet as Morgan shook her hand and she gave a demure curtsey. ‘Yes, sah,’ she said.

Kojo led him on to the three boys. ‘And these are my sons: Anthony, Gerald and Arthur.’

‘Named after Mr Fanshawe?’ Morgan asked curiously.

‘Yes, sah. I requested his permission.’

‘Good,’ Morgan said, his mind empty of conversational gambits. ‘Good good good. Yes,’ he said abruptly. ‘I know. What’ll you have to drink? Gin, whisky, some beer?’

‘Please, a soft drink. But before, please, I have this gift for you.’ Kojo pushed forward the enamel basin on the carpet. Morgan scrutinized the dark cloth covering its contents. For some reason he was reminded of Innocence’s shroud. He thought his eyes must have been playing tricks on him because he was sure he could detect a tremor of movement below it. Then, from underneath the cloth, came a faintly musical croak. Morgan leapt back in alarm, causing Kojo’s boys to giggle softly to themselves.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Morgan exclaimed, then wished he hadn’t used the profanity. ‘It’s alive!’

Kojo drew back the cloth to reveal a large turkey, its legs securely trussed. With an effort he lifted it up by its roped legs and held the bird out, upside down, to Morgan. ‘Merry Christmas, sah,’ Kojo said. The turkey’s stumpy wings were also tied together and it vainly tried to flap them. Its pink wattles hung over its startled face. Between the dangling combs its glaring maddened eye seemed to stare in accusation at Morgan. Feeling slightly queasy he reached out and grasped its scaly stick-like ankles. As he took the weight, the turkey twitched its head, parted its beak and gave a sotto voce ‘gobble-gobble’. Morgan promptly released his hold and the terrified bird dropped heavily to the floor where it gave a great gobbling shriek and shat greenily on his carpet. Kojo’s family fell about in delighted mirth at his feebleness, Mrs Kojo with her arms folded across her stomach, politely bent over to hide her face, the three boys laughing and slapping each other on the shoulders.

Kojo picked up the panicking bird. ‘Sah,’ he said considerately. ‘If you don’t like it I can remove it.’

Morgan grinned sheepishly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better handle things.’

Kojo took the turkey out to the garden and tied one of its legs to a bush with a long piece of string while Mrs Kojo expertly cleaned up the mess and Morgan served up the soft drinks. They chatted politely for five minutes or so but soon Kojo rose to his feet and announced their departure. Morgan rushed into his study and wrote out a cheque for ten pounds which he sealed in an envelope and slipped into Kojo’s hand at the front door.

Kojo tucked it away in his suit pocket. Tank you, sah,’ he said simply.

Morgan watched the little family wander away up his garden path in the soft late-afternoon light, the small boys looking curiously back at him. He heard them chattering excitedly. He wondered what they would be saying about him, what they thought of the stupid fat white man who was too frightened to hold a turkey. He walked out into his garden and strolled round to the back near the kitchen. The turkey stood at the extremity of its bit of string tugging futilely with one foot while it tried to peck at the ground just beyond its reach, it was a big bird, in good condition. He wondered how much it had cost: not ten pounds anyway, he told himself unkindly; at least Kojo got what he came for.

Dusk was advancing and he heard the insect and animal orchestra begin to strike up. He went morosely back into the house. It seemed huge and empty and he felt its vacant rooms and dark corners whisper with melancholy and depression.

‘Come on,’ he said out loud to himself, striding to his hi-fi to select Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, ‘you’re not a bloody Romantic poet.’ As the music boomed out he heard the turkey gobble outside in the garden and he looked at the dents and hollows Kojo’s family had made in the cushions of his armchairs and settee. Their absence seemed more absolute despite the evidence of these shallow templates of their bodies. He felt suddenly angry at his mean-minded interpretation of their motives in visiting him. Kojo had never come before and now Morgan felt obscurely pleased and nattered that he had brought along his family. He thought that, in fact, Kojo probably liked him for some reason. This cheered him up and he began to hum along with Frank. He smiled to himself remembering how he’d dropped the turkey and the bird’s reaction as it had hit the floor. What had Kojo said? Typical Kojo: tact itself — ‘If you don’t like it I can remove it.’

‘If you don’t like it I can remove it…’

Friday bounced into the sitting room. ‘Bon soir, masta,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Dis na fine bed for garden. Extra.’

Morgan looked at him, a mad idea taking shape in his head. He would show them. Yes. He would show the bastards.

‘Tell me, Friday,’ he asked ingenuously. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

5

‘There she is,’ Morgan whispered, crouching behind the trunk of a dwarf palm. He pointed fifteen yards in front of him to the dark bundle that was Innocence’s body, just distinguishable in the moonlight. Friday squatted beside him.

‘Ah-ah-ah,’ he croaked. ‘I go see ‘im.’

They were hiding in the small grove of trees and ill-tended yam and cassava allotments that stood behind the wash-place at the northern end of the servants’ quarters. It was half past three in the morning. To his left Morgan could see the straggling line of tall nim trees that bordered the Commission grounds — and separated the servants’ quarters from the garden — and beyond them the unlit mass of the Fanshawes’ house. There was a clear three-quarter moon in the sky which palely illuminated everything and caused the buildings, trees and bushes to cast dagger-edged impenetrable shadows. Twenty yards behind them the Peugeot was parked on a dusty track, its boot gaping in expectation. With some effort he and Friday had pushed it up from the main road to a point as close as possible to the servants’ quarters.

Beside him Morgan could sense Friday’s fear coming off him like perfume.

‘I thought you weren’t frightened of Shango,’ he whispered angrily.

‘Comment?’

Christ almighty, Morgan swore to himself, wondering what sort of an accomplice he’d chosen. He tried again. ‘You say me you nevah fright for Shango. Tu n’as pas peur de Shango,’ he translated as an afterthought.

‘Is true, masta. But I dey fear for os if dis people livin’ for here catch os one time.’ He gestured at the dark lines of the housing blocks. He had a point there, Morgan had to admit. Up to now it had been the dogs that he was most concerned about but so far they hadn’t met any. There had been the odd bleat from a tethered goat and a heart-stoppingly strident cock-a-doodle-doo from an irate rooster, but as everyone knew Kinjanjan cocks crowed at any time except dawn no one, apparently, had deemed it anything out of the ordinary.

Morgan had cajoled, threatened, bullied and finally bribed Friday to come along on this escapade. First, he had established that Friday, being a Dahomey man, didn’t even know about Shango, far less worry about offending him. Religious objections out of the way it had only taken some earnest pleading, followed by threats of instant dismissal and⁄or GBH and finally a promise of a five-pound bonus to secure his participation in operation body-snatch.

Morgan felt himself tingle with uneasy excitement. Admittedly, he was very nearly drunk, but he didn’t feel as nervous as he’d expected. This was the marvellous thing about action, he thought; at least he was doing something about his problems instead of sitting at home and fretting about them. He planned simply to bundle Innocence’s body into the boot and drive her down to the morgue at Ademola clinic. He didn’t really care who he upset: as far as he was concerned he was merely following Fanshawe’s explicit instruction. ‘Get rid of it,’ he had said. ‘Use an armed guard if you have to.’ Well, Morgan thought, there was no need to be quite so dramatic as that.

‘Allons-y,’ he hissed at Friday, and they scurried closer, hunched like two commandos behind enemy lines. They slid into the moon-shadow cast by the gable end of the block nearest the Commission, pressing their backs against the wall. Innocence’s body lay a few yards away from them across the gap between the block’s verandah and the raised concrete floor of the wash-place. The moonlight coming through the leaves of the towering cotton tree dappled the ground with shade. Not far off the smudge fire gave out lingering wreaths of smoke from the pile of greenery that had been placed on top of the charcoal. But the smell of the smoke wasn’t sufficient.

‘Oh la la,’ Friday whispered, ‘Ça pue.’

Morgan smelt the rotting sweetness flow through his nose and down into his lungs like water. He felt his stomach heave and saliva pump into his mouth. He leant his head against the rough wall behind him. Suddenly he wished he wasn’t there. What had possessed him to do such a thing? How could he…

‘Ça va, masta?’ Friday asked in concern.

‘Oui, I mean yes.’ He swallowed. Now or never. ‘Come on,’ he said. They crept out to the body. The laterite square was deserted and everything was quiet, bathed in the grey-blue of moonglow. Quickly Morgan flicked back the cloth from the now familiar body. The smell seemed to billow out like an explosion. Friday gave a little whimper when he saw Innocence. Dappled moonlight lay across her face; a patch of light on her mouth made her teeth gleam. Morgan dry-retched and gagged.

‘Vite,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Prends la main et…’ he couldn’t remember the French for pull,’…pull’im!’Without thinking he gripped Innocence’s bloated forearm with both hands and he saw a recoiling Friday hesitatingly do the same. The skin was like no skin he had ever touched before — like thick rubber. He thought it bitterly ironic and singularly peculiar of him that this very afternoon he had been unable to bring himself to hold a turkey’s legs. He tugged and Innocence shifted. Despite the illusion of balloon-lightness she was alarmingly heavy. And stiff. He saw that the arm which he was pulling remained unnaturally bent. He gave a little sob.

‘‘Pull, Friday,’ he whispered, ‘Pull!’

They pulled and with a scrape of dust and gravel dragged her back into the secure shadow cast by the gable end of the block. Morgan found he was panting loudly. Friday looked as if he were facing a firing squad. Morgan didn’t dare let go of Innocence’s wrist in case he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to grip it again. Over the rasping sound of his breathing he heard the horrible buzzing of disturbed flies. With a shudder he locked away his imagination for the night. He looked back at the spot where Innocence had been. The cloth lay like a dark puddle of water, surrounded by the small piles of votive juju-tokens. He wondered what the Commission servants would think when they woke up in the morning. Was this what it had been like when they found the stone had been rolled away? he asked himself in a bizarre impulse of heuristic theology. But his speculations were interrupted by a thin chant of fear coming from Friday’s lips.

‘Shut up!’ Morgan hissed. ‘Come on!’

With difficulty they dragged Innocence up the path a few yards into the allotment grove. Morgan was amazed at the rigidity of her joints and wondered how long they could withstand the strain. He didn’t like to think what might happen if they gave. They paused for a few seconds to get their breath back, their chests heaving, without talking. Was this what it was like with Burke and Hare? he wondered: silence, guilt and horror? Why, he asked himself, was his mind insisting on working in this exegetical and pedantic way? Friday looked straight ahead of him, his hands on his knees, his eyes half-focused on the Commission garden.

Suddenly his mouth dropped open and his eyes widened in terror.

‘Masta,’ he stuttered, a shaking arm pointing towards the Commission, ‘Mais non…!’

Morgan snapped his head round, his heart jumping somewhere at the back of his throat. Beyond the nim trees the wide expanse of the Commission garden lay illuminated in the calm moonlight. And there Morgan clearly saw a tall white shape moving slowly to and fro. He heard a faint noise carry across the garden, ‘…oooh…owe…’

‘Mmnngrllggrrk,’ was the only sound that issued from his petrified vocal chords.

Friday had leapt to his feet, stark terror written across his incredulous features. ‘Shango!’ he gasped. ‘Shango ‘e done come,’ he bleated helplessly, stepping back from the body as if controlled by an alien force. ‘Je m’en vais.’

Ghastly calamities spontaneously reared up in Morgan’s mind. He jumped up and fiercely grabbed hold of Friday’s shirt-front, hauling the little man up on his tiptoes. ‘You bloody stay here,’ he whispered brutally, ‘or I’ll kill you.’ Friday’s eyes rolled at the savagery of this threat. Morgan pushed him back down onto his knees by Innocence’s body.

Friday covered his face with his hands. ‘Masta,’ he whimpered. ‘I go beg you don’t leaf me wit dis dead woman…’ He pointed suddenly again. ‘Ah-ah! Shango is comin’.’

Morgan’s scrambled brain registered the presence of the pale spectre roaming about the garden once more. Without thinking he dashed towards the line of nim trees. Pressing himself to a thick trunk he peered out across the moonlit lawn.

It seemed to be a person; tall and dressed in white, holding something in one hand. He strained his ears to try and make out the noises it was uttering.

‘Hello-oo,’ he heard. ‘Anyone at ho-ome?’

In a sudden blind boiling rage, incoherent with terror, relief and fuming anger he charged off in a wild arm-flailing sprint across the lawn towards the figure. The man — as Morgan swiftly approached he recognized the person as such — looked round when he heard the sound of Morgan’s thundering footsteps, paused for an instant, and then, patently transfigured by shocked alarm himself, began to run away — a difficult operation this, for he was encumbered by a suitcase. Morgan’s hell-for-leather momentum soon brought him within range of the lumbering lanky Shango-impersonator and like a plucky full-back bringing down a try-scoring three-quarter, he launched himself at the man’s knees.

The man in white came crashing to the ground with a shrill cry of pain and surprise. Morgan bit his lip to prevent his own pain — two badly bruised knees from the concrete-hard lawn — expressing itself in a whoop of anguish. He leapt to his feet still spitting with anger. The man remained groggily on all fours, searching the ground for something.

‘Who…the fuck…are you?’ Morgan demanded breathlessly in a stage scream-whisper. ‘What the hell…do you think you’re doing…prowling around at this time of night disturbing…making a bloody nuisance of yourself?’

The man found and put on a pair of round gold-rimmed spectacles and rose unsteadily to his feet. He was very tall and thin. In the moonlight Morgan could make out longish fair hair, a middle parting, prominent nose and shadow-hollowed cheeks. Morgan flashed a glance back over his shoulder at the servants’ quarters. No lights were showing; he only prayed Friday was still with Innocence. He looked back. The man was muttering something about a dildo.

‘Dildo?’ Morgan repeated in furious incomprehension, anger still coursing through his body. ‘What have bloody dildos got to do with this?’ He saw the man’s suitcase on the ground and for a crazed unreal moment thought he’d felled a travelling salesman for a sexual-aids firm who was trying to whip up some West African business.

‘No,’ the man said in a whimper. ‘Bilbow. My name. My name’s Greg Bilbow.’ He had a weedy Yorkshire accent.

‘I don’t give a damn what your name is. What are you doing prowling around here in the dead of night? That’s what I want to know.’

The man seemed on the point of breaking down but Morgan was unrelenting. He had more important things to worry about than the sentiments of some nomadic York-shireman.

‘I’ve had a nightmare trip,’ his victim continued dolefully. ‘A nightmare. I’ve just paid out forty-five pounds on a taxi fare. Forty-five pounds! I think I’ve been to Timbuctoo and back.’ He sniffed. ‘I got off the train at Nkongsamba at seven-thirty this evening. I found a taxi and asked to be taken to the British Deputy High Commission.’ He peered at his watch. ‘We’ve been driving around for over eight hours,’ there was a barely suppressed sob in his voice.

‘Well, you’ve arrived,’ Morgan said harshly, thinking that they really shouldn’t let such innocents out in the world. ‘You’ve been conned. The station’s about twenty minutes away.’

‘Thank God,’ the man said, seemingly happy only to have made it. ‘Oh thank God!’

‘But you’ll have to come back tomorrow,’ Morgan said unsparingly, agonizingly conscious of the time he was wasting. ‘Everything’s closed up until the morning. There’s a hotel half a mile down the road. They’ll put you up.’

‘But I’ve got no money,’ the man whined. ‘I spent it all on the taxi.’

‘That’s your problem, old son,’ Morgan laughed cruelly, drained of human kindness. ‘Now push off.’

The man was flapping a piece of paper about. ‘But I’ve got a letter here from someone called Morgan Leafy who says I can stay at the Commission.’ His shoulders slumped in desperation. ‘Please,’ he added feebly.

Cogs began to click and spin in Morgan’s brain. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Bilbow. Greg Bilbow.’

‘What is it you do exactly?’

‘Me? I’m a poet.’

♦

It was surprisingly easy for Morgan and Friday to drag Innocence the remaining few yards and then, with the strength of desperate men, heave her into the boot. Morgan closed the lid and locked it. He felt like the driver of a runaway car hurtling down a mountain road: nominally in control, but only just. Ruthlessly suppressing the urge to fall to the ground, scream and beat the earth with his fists, he quietly explained the true nature of the ghostly apparition to Friday in demotic pidgin French. Friday stood there taking it in, nodding his head and muttering to himself, ‘Jamais…jamais de ma vie…non, non…jamais.’ Normally Morgan would have commiserated with him: his solitary vigil in the dark over Innocence’s body, the stink, the flies, Shango, a disappearing accomplice who threatened him with violent death all must have tested his mettle considerably.

They pushed the car back down the track to the road and then drove down to the Commission entrance where Bilbow stood waiting as he had been instructed to. Morgan had offered to put him up for the night. He climbed into the front seat.

‘I’m tremendously grateful,’ he began. ‘Amazing coincidence that you should be out and about at this time.’

‘Yes, isn’t it,’ Morgan said, thinking quickly. ‘I’m just driving my houseboy back from taking his wife to hospital,’ he jerked his thumb at Friday in the back. ‘I was going past the Commission when I thought I saw somebody wandering around in the garden.’

‘You gave me a right turn,’ Bilbow said cheerfully. He seemed to have settled down. ‘The way you charged out of those trees, your arms all waving, the look on your face — I almost died…’ the Yorkshire accent drew the vowels out interminably. Morgan felt an extreme tiredness descend on him, then they drove over a pot-hole and Innocence’s body thumped in the boot. Friday gave a squeak of alarm.

‘He’s very upset,’ Morgan explained in response to Bilbow’s surprised face. ‘Just married.’ Bilbow nodded understanding and turned to an uncomprehending Friday.

‘Sorry to hear about your wife,’ he said. ‘Hope she gets better soon.’

Morgan drove on. There was no point in taking the body to Ademola morgue tonight, he thought. It would just have to wait until tomorrow.

‘Hey,’Bilbowsaidjovially.’I’vejoost realized. It’s Christmas Day. Merry Christmas everyone!’

6

Bilbow wore an old green towelling shirt with short sleeves and his white cotton jeans which still displayed the dirt scuffs from his encounter with Morgan the night before. At first glance he looked ridiculously young with his tall lean body, blue eyes behind the round spectacle frames and the overall blandness of his near albino colouring — longjsh straight platinum hair, invisible eyebrows and lashes, pink starlet lips. But a closer inspection revealed the graininess of his skin, the thin lines stretching down from the corners ofhis nostrils, and others forming brackets round his mouth. His voice, which his panic and distress had made whiny last night, had settled into its normal deeper timbre, and for all its comic book Yorkshire tones it had a genuinely friendly and quietly relaxed quality.

‘Merry Christmas,’ he said as Morgan shambled through the screen door onto the verandah. He was sitting at the verandah table with the remains of his breakfast in front of him. He gestured at the sunlit garden. ‘Quite bizarre,’ he said. ‘Here I am in a short-sleeved shirt eating — what’s it called? — paw-paw in a temperature of eighty degrees while everyone at home’s wrapped up warm watching the telly.’

‘Yeah well,’ Morgan said surlily through his hangover, thinking of last night’s events, ‘that’s what it’s like in Africa: out of the ordinary.’

‘I’ve got a present for you,’ Bilbow said. ‘Well not so much a present, more of a thank you for last night. Saved me life.’ He held out a slim book. Morgan took it. The Small Carafe and Other Poems by Greg Bilbow.

‘Thanks,’ Morgan said gruffly. Til, ah, have a look at it later.’ He sat down in front of his bowl of cornflakes. He rubbed his eyes. Merry bloody Christmas. He felt hellish, like the survivor of some week-long battle. Surely things would calm down now? He looked across the table at Bilbow — the fine, centrally-parted blond hair, the pinched bespectacled face. He didn’t seem to suspect anything about last night, seemed quite happy to accept Morgan’s version of events. That, at least, was something.

Morgan pushed his uneaten cornflakes to one side and thought about his Christmas Day ahead. First he had to get rid of the decomposing body in his car boot, then dress up as Santa Claus and hand out presents to kids: the contrast seemed ghoulishly obscene.

‘Here,’ Bilbow interrupted his thoughts, ‘talking about presents, there’s a cracking big ‘un arrived for you. It’s in t’sitting room. Bloody heavy it was too.’

Lying on the sitting-room carpet was indeed a huge brightly wrapped present about five feet long. Falling to his knees beside it Morgan savagely tore away the wrapping paper.

‘Christ,’ Bilbow said admiringly.

Morgan looked on aghast. It was a massive mustard and black golf bag, the sort carried by champion American golfers, or rather by their tottering caddies. Fumbling at the buckles and catches Morgan unzipped the hood. A complete set of gleaming golf clubs was revealed, newly minted, like lethal weapons.

‘Here’s a note,’ said Bilbow, picking a card from the torn and shredded pile of wrapping paper.’

‘Have a good game. Sam.’ Jesus, who’s Sam?’

‘My uncle,’ Morgan lied, his throat dry. ‘He’s an eccentric millionaire.’

‘You’re not kidding,’ Bilbow observed ‘There’s about four hundred quid’s worth there.’

‘Is there?’ Morgan replied blankly. He’d forgotten about Murray. This was Adekunle’s way of telling him the draw had been rigged. Morgan sat cross-legged on his sitting-room floor, his head in his hands.

‘Here,’ Bilbow asked. ‘Are you all right, Morgan?’

The phone rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Bilbow said agreeably. He went over to the phone. ‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘Someone called Fanshawe.’

Morgan shuffled over.

‘Leafy!’ Fanshawe screamed down the phone. ‘Get over here. Now!’

♦

Femi Robinson gave a clenched fist salute as Morgan swept past him into the Commission drive. He noted there were no guards at the gate but thought nothing of it. It was Christmas Day after all: a holiday for everyone — except for Robinson. You had to admire the man’s stamina, Morgan thought as he stepped out of his car, he could do with a dose of it himself.

Fanshawe was pacing up and down on the Commission steps, his face white and drawn with anger.

‘Merry Christmas, Arth…’

‘It’s gone!’ Fanshawe exclaimed shrilly. ‘Gone. Disappeared in the night. Vanished!’

‘Of course she has,’ Morgan said calmly. What was the little cretin so upset about? he wondered to himself impatiently. Wasn’t that exactly what he wanted?

‘What do you mean ‘of course’?’ Fanshawe’s face was very close to his own. Morgan backed down the steps.

‘For God’s sake, Arthur,’ he protested. ‘You told me — no, you ordered me to get rid of Innocence’s body. Top priority, sole responsibility, remember? Well I’ve simply followed my instructions that’s all.’ He folded his arms across his chest and looked hurt and offended.

‘Oh no,’ Fanshawe groaned. ‘Oh God no! Don’t tell me she’s in the morgue. Disaster. Utter, utter disaster.’

‘Well no,’ Morgan said, surprised at his vehement chagrin. ‘She’s not in the morgue, she’s in the boot of my car.’

Fanshawe stared very hard at him — as if his face had suddenly turned bright green or smoke was belching from his ears.

‘What?’ Fanshawe demanded hoarsely.

‘In my car.’

‘That one?’

‘It’s the only car I’ve got.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Morgan asked, quickly losing such small reserves of patience as he had left.

‘You’ve got to put her back.’

♦

Morgan gazed out of his office window at the lone defiant figure of Femi Robinson. Surely there was some sort of lesson for him in the man’s stupid perseverance, his stubborn isolation? He looked down at his Peugeot standing in the empty car park full in the glare of the afternoon sun. He winced. The boot would be like a pressure cooker: Christ alone knew what was happening to Innocence in there. He turned away, stoking up the fires of hatred for Fanshawe. If only the stupid bastard had followed his advice, he thought angrily, but oh no, you couldn’t have a decomposing corpse anywhere near the Duchess. So flunky Leafy had removed the body as instructed and what had happened? Every Commission servant had gone on instant strike, had refused to stir from their quarters except to announce their action to a startled Fanshawe over his Christmas breakfast.

Fanshawe had sniffed round the boot of Morgan’s car like a suspicious customs officer searching for drugs, stopping every now and then to stare at Morgan in disbelief. The smell and the hovering flies soon convinced him that the body was indeed there.

‘You’ve got to put it back,’ he said weakly. ‘I almost had a revolt on my hands this morning. A riot. It was frightful.’ He leant against the boot of the car and then leapt back as if the metal was boiling hot. ‘How can you drive around,’ he said with distasteful curiosity, ‘with…that in your car?’ He looked uncomprehendingly at Morgan. ‘Doesn’t it upset you?’ Morgan ignored him. ‘Put it back! he said incredulously. ‘What are you talking about? How, for God’s sake, how?’

‘I don’t care,’ Fanshawe insisted stridently. ‘This strike you’ve landed us in is an absolute catastrophe. The Duchess is arriving here after lunch and there’s not a single Commission servant on duty anywhere.’ He looked wildly round the garden as if he expected to see them crouching defiantly behind the trees and bushes. ‘And tomorrow,’ he went on, ‘tomorrow there are two hundred people coming here for a buffet-lunch reception. It’ll be a farce. A total disgrace!’ He rubbed his forehead vigorously as if to disperse the images of milling, unfed and unwatered dignitaries. ‘At least,’ he said, ‘you haven’t delivered her to the morgue. That is something in your favour. We have a chance of salvaging some shreds of our reputation. You’ve got to have Innocence back where she was by tomorrow, that’s all: it’s the only way the servants will come back to work. That’s all there is to it. We can just cope today, but tomorrow we simply must have everyone back at their posts. It’s quite impossible otherwise — we’d never live it down.’

‘Hold on a sec,’ Morgan said, controlling the urge to seize Fanshawe by his scrawny throat. ‘I can’t just drive up to the servants’ quarters and tip her out of the boot. They’ll lynch me, for Christ’s sake! What exactly do you expect me to do?’

‘I’m having absolutely nothing more to do with it,’ Fanshawe exclaimed, his voice getting higher as he grew more excited, waving his hands about in front of his face. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s all your doing: you sort the wretched mess out. Get her back, that’s all I care. That strike’s got to be over by tomorrow.’ He flinched visibly at the memory. ‘It was positively horrific this morning,’ he said. ‘There we were sitting happily at breakfast, exchanging presents, when this mob turns up outside. Isaac, Joseph, all these men normally quite agreeable pleasant types. They were most aggressive and insulting. Chloe was terribly upset, really distraught. She had to go and lie down and…’

‘They don’t think I did it, do they?’ Morgan asked, suddenly worried.

‘No. At least I don’t think so. But they’re convinced we had something to do with it. That’s why they’re going on strike, until we return the body. Those were the conditions.’ Fanshawe scuffed at the gravel with his feet. For a moment Morgan saw him as a perplexed and worried man, not sure if he could cope. Then before his eyes he saw him change: the shoulders stiffened, the jaw was set, the pompous light gleamed in his eye.

‘Things have got themselves into a pretty fair mess all round,’ he stated accusingly to Morgan. ‘The Kingpin Project’s a shambles, we’re having to kow-tow to the present government in apology which is the last thing we wanted. Then there’s this appalling death: bodies littering the compound. And now you’ve landed us with a total strike just when the Duchess is arriving. The whole Nkongsamba part of her visit is going to be one long saga of inefficiency and shoddiness. How do you think our record’s going to look after this, eh? I’ll tell you: absolutely fifth-rate, totally and unacceptably non-British. Now,’ he continued, ‘I’m leaving it up to you to rectify things as best as you can. There’s nothing we can do to salvage Kingpin at this late stage but we can at the very least make sure the Duchess leaves Nkongsamba with happy memories and no horror-stories to tell the High Commissioner when she gets down to the capital.’ His voice dropped a register. ‘I’m deeply disappointed in you, Morgan. Deeply. I thought you were a man of experience and ability. Someone I could rely on. But I’m sorry to say you’ve let me down shockingly on every count, so, let’s see what you can do to make amends.’

Morgan had watched him walk away. The black splenetic fury that would normally have erupted had been replaced this time by bleak cynical resignation. The injustice was so towering, so out of proportion that no rage could hope to match it. Fanshawe was scum, he had decided, not worthy even of his most scathing contempt.

He turned away from the window and went back to his desk. There, folded on his chair, were his Santa Claus overalls and a large cotton-wool beard. Beneath the seat were shiny black gumboots. On his desk was a note from Mrs Fanshawe outlining his duties and itinerary.

His stomach rumbled with hunger. He had not returned home but had stayed on at the Commission and moped. Around lunchtime he had telephoned his house and spoken to Bilbow.

‘Shame you’re tied up,’ Bilbow had said. ‘Your boys have given me a great loonch. Whopping roast turkey, all the trimmings.’

Morgan’s saliva glands surged into action, but ‘leave some for me’ was all he said. Bilbow was due to take part in some festival of poetry and dance at the university arts theatre on Boxing Day, co-sponsored by the Kinjanjan Ministry of Culture and the British Council as part of the nationwide Independence anniversary celebrations. Morgan vaguely remembered the letter he had signed several days previously telling him the Commission could provide accommodation. Under the circumstances, he thought, it was scarcely surprising it had slipped his mind. He told Bilbow he could stay on with him if he wanted, and to his relief the poet accepted. Morgan thought it as well to keep him away from the Fanshawes.

He looked at his watch: 3.45. According to the timetable he had to be at the club at 4.00, where a Land-Rover would be waiting, laden with the presents he was to distribute. Weighed down with self-pity he began to change into his Santa outfit. He took off his shirt and trousers and put on the red overalls. Mrs Fanshawe had added gold tinsel trimmings and a hood. He put on the gumboots and hooked the beard over his ears. For a second or two he thought he might pass out. There was no let-up, he bitterly reflected, no relief from the succession of Job-like torments he was inflicted with. He wondered what on earth he looked like and went through to the landing bathroom to find a mirror.

Mrs Bryce had clearly been at work. A scrap of carpet had been laid on the scuffed parquet of the landing and flower-filled vases were placed on every window ledge. Morgan peered into the guest suite. All was clean and fresh in readiness for her Grace. In the bathroom the porcelain gleamed from energetic Vimming; small tablets of soap and neatly folded towels were laid out as if for kit inspection. The only tawdry element was the plastic shower curtain with its’ faded aquatic motifs; obviously Fanshawe’s budget didn’t stretch to replacing that.

Morgan regarded his reflection in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. He did look suitably Christmassy he thought, though the too-short sleeves seemed an absurdly rakish note, his broad shoulders and thick arms making him appear an aggressively youthful and somehow faintly yobbish Santa. He sighed, causing his spade-like beard to flutter: the things he did for his country.

Passing through the hall on the way out to his car he heard the buzz of an incoming call on the untended switchboard. He hesitated for a moment and then decided to answer it.

‘Deputy High Commission.’

‘Morgan?’ It was Celia. His heart sank. She was crying. ‘Thank God it’s you.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, trying to keep the resignation out of his voice.

‘I tried to ring you at home, someone told me you were here.’ She sniffed. ‘I have to see you. It’s urgent. I’m so unhappy, so miserable.’

Join the club, he thought ungraciously. ‘Celia,’ he said in a despairing tone, ‘look, I don’t know. I’ve got a hell of a lot on. Christ, I’m even dressed up as Santa bloody Claus at the moment.’

‘Please,’ she wailed. ‘It’s terribly important. You’ve got to help me.’

No! he screamed inwardly. No. He couldn’t help anybody else, not now, not any more; he was fully employed helping himself. No, no, a thousand times no. But all he said was, ‘I can’t talk now, Celia. Give me a ring tomorrow sometime, OK?’

♦

‘Gareth Jones…There you are, Merry Christmas…Bronwyn Jones. Hello Bronwyn, Merry Christmas…Funsho Akinremi? Merry Christmas Funsho…Trampus McKrindle. Ah, Trampus? Where’s Trampus?…There you are, Merry Christmas…What have we here? I can’t read this…Yes, Yvonne and Tracy Patten. Merry Christmas, girls…’

It took him almost an hour to distribute the presents from the two immense sacks that were sitting in the open back of the Land-Rover. It was parked on the lawn in front of the club. On the grass below the terrace were long tables where the scores of children had eaten their Christmas tea and which were now covered with the incredible detritus all children’s parties seemed to leave behind them. The tables reminded Morgan of unscrubbed surgical trestles from some Crimean War dressing-station, covered in blobs and shreds of multicoloured jelly, flattened cakes, vivid spilt drinks, oozing trifle mush, deliquescent ice-cream. Morgan had called each child out to receive two presents — one donated by their parents expressly for this purpose, the other a tin of sweets ostensibly provided by the Duchess — reading their names out from the cards in a booming ho-ho-ho Santa voice. His cheeks and jaw-bones ached from the effort of smiling. Despite the disguise of his beard he had found it impossible to convey an impression of geniality with a straight face. On the terrace overlooking the children, the parents and other interested onlookers stood clutching drinks. Morgan could see the Joneses and Dalmire and Priscilla. On a low podium to the right of the Land-Rover sat the Duchess of Ripon herself, flanked by the Fanshawes.

After all the presents had been handed out Dalmire strode onto the lawn, clapped his hands for silence and without the least trace of anxiety gave a short speech thanking the Duchess for hosting the party, honouring the Nkongsamba club with her presence and called on everyone to give three cheers.

As the last hurrah died away Morgan clambered down from the back of the Land-Rover, snatched off his beard and made’ for the bar at a brisk trot. He saw Fanshawe, however, imperiously beckon him over to their group. Reluctantly he changed course.

‘This is Mr Leafy, our First Secretary,’ Fanshawe introduced him to the Duchess.

‘You made a splendid Santa, Mr Leafy, I’m most grateful.’ Morgan looked into the hooded, deeply bored eyes of a stumpy middle-aged woman. She had frosted blond-grey hair curling from beneath her straw turban and lumpy unpleasant features that shone with decades of insincerity, arrogance and bad manners. As he shook her damp soft hand he noticed the way the loose flesh on her upper arm jiggled to and fro.

‘Not at all, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘My pleasure entirely.’

Mrs Fanshawe led her off to the official car while Fanshawe lingered behind. He clutched at Morgan’s wrist.

‘Luckily, we’re dining with the Governor tonight,’ he hissed, unyielding still in his displeasure. ‘But what’s happening with Innocence?’

‘Ah, I’m working on that, Arthur.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Ooh, about fifty yards away.’

‘Not in your…?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid the car’s the safest place until I can work out a plan.’

Fanshawe had gone pale again. ‘I’ll never understand you,’ he said hollowly, shaking his head. ‘Never. Just get her back. That’s all. Get her back in place tonight.’ Morgan said nothing, all he could think about was the drink that was waiting for him at the bar.

‘Nothing else must go wrong, Leafy,’ Fanshawe threatened. ‘Everything must be settled by tomorrow. I’m warning you,’ he added grimly. ‘Your future depends on it.’

♦

Morgan watched the last lights go out in the servants’ quarters. He sat in his car hugging the gallon-can of petrol to his chest trying to stop the car’s interior tilting and swaying like a boat on a rough sea, attempting to get his eyes to focus on objects for more than two seconds at a time. He had stood at the club bar and had drunk steadily all evening, still clad in his Santa costume, looking like some cheap dictator from a banana republic with his rubber jack-boots and tinsel epaulettes. He had been the butt of much good-humoured ribbing and had smiled emptily through it all, happily allowing people to buy him drinks. Around eleven o’clock his pickled brain had finally come up with an idea, a way of replacing Innocence’s body, and he was now waiting to put the first phase into effect.

At ten past twelve he finally grew tired of sitting around so he left his car and stumbled across the road, correcting his course several times, and made his way in a series of diagonals towards the servants’ quarters. He was approaching them from the main road side. Between the road and the first block of the quarters lay a ditch, a patch of scrub waste-land and the sizeable mound of the quarters’ rubbish heap. Morgan fell into the ditch, hauled himself out and crossed through the scrub patch as quietly as he could, holding the petrol can in both hands. He was glad he was wearing gumboots as they would protect him from any snake or scorpion he might encounter. He awkwardly scaled the crumbling gamey slope of the dump. He heard things scuttling away from his feet but he tried not to think about them. When he reached the first of the old car-hulks that rested on the top he stopped and crouched down beside it to get his breath back. He was about thirty or forty feet away from the first block of the servants’ quarters. All the windows facing him were shuttered. To his left he could just make out the tin roof of the wash-place. The moon obligingly cast the same light as it had done just twenty-four hours or so before. Morgan thought wryly that he had not expected to be back quite so soon. He sat down carefully and listened for any noises. He suspected that Isaac, Joseph and Ezekiel would be far more vigilant tonight, hence the need for the diversion he’d planned. He heard nothing unusual. The moon shone down on the corrugated-iron roofs of the quarters, the smell of rotting vegetables and stale shite rose up sluggishly all about him. Unthinkingly, he unscrewed the cap from the petrol can and poured its contents over the floor of the rusty chassis and across the torn and gaping upholstery of the seats. Stepping back he struck a match and tossed it into the car. Nothing happened. He inched closer, struck another, threw. Nothing happened. Tiring of this game he went up to the car and dropped a match directly onto the remains of the back seat. With a soft whoomph the car seemed to explode in a ball of fire before his face. He felt the flames scald his eyeballs and he fell back in fearful horror. The car blazed away furiously, touching everything with orange. Morgan forgot about his face.

‘FAYAH!’ he yelled with hoarse abandon at the servants’ quarters. ‘YOU GET FAYAH FOR HEAH!’

As he scramble-sprinted back to his car he could hear doors slamming and the first shrill screams of alarm. He jumped into his car and drove speedily up the road a hundred yards before flinging it round in a sharp right-hand turn onto the laterite track up which he and Friday had laboriously pushed it the previous night. He roared up to the end of the track, throwing caution to the winds, assuming that everyone’s attention would by now be fully concentrated on the fire. Switching off the lights and crashing the gears, he reversed as far as he could into the allotment grove. Through the trees he could see a tall column of flame shooting up from the blazing car and see dark shapes of rushing figures silhouetted against the glow. Fumbling with his keys he opened the boot and flung it open.

The smell leapt out and hit him with almost palpable force, as if it were some powerful genie suddenly released from the dark recesses of his car. Morgan thought he was going to faint: he gagged and spat several times on the ground. Then with the strength and singlemindedness of a drunk and demonically-inspired man he levered and hauled Innocence’s body from the boot. The cloying smells seemed to seize his throat like boney fingers as she thumped heavily to the ground. He grabbed her rigid arms and dragged her along the path. He felt his face tense and contort into a twisted sobbing grimace as he heaved and strained at his ghastly burden. He stopped for a moment behind a tree to wipe his sweating hands on his overalls, sour vomit in his throat, his heart thumping timpanically in his ears. He darted into the gable-shadow of the nearest block. People wailed and ran across the laterite square, some carrying buckets of water but most seemed to be around at the back of the far building fighting or observing the blaze. Morgan dashed back to Innocence’s body, seized it for the last time and dragged it down the path and into the shadow, leaving it only a few yards from where she had originally been struck down. He glanced at her inflated shapeless corpse.

‘Here we are again,’ he said with a mad note in his voice, then, like some nameless fiend or apprentice devil, he scurried back from tree to tree to his car.

♦

Morgan stopped the Peugeot some distance up the road and watched the wreck quickly burn itself out. He felt tears trickling from his eyes but put that down to the searing they had received when the car went up. His hands were caked with dust from the verge where he’d rubbed them in a demented Lady-Macbethian attempt to drive the clinging feel of Innocence’s skin from his palms. He felt very odd indeed, he decided: a freakish macedoine of moods and sensations, still high from the alcohol, his nostrils reeking with the smell of putrefaction, a fist of outraged sadness lodged somewhere in the back of his head, his body quivering from the massive adrenalin dose that had flooded its muscles and tissues. He resolved not to move an inch until everything had calmed down.

A short while later he heard the astonished shout and clamour of excited voices as the body was discovered. And when he drove by after a further ten minutes he saw briefly a cluster of lanterns beyond the wash-place. He drove a couple of hundred yards past the Commission gate then parked his car at the side of the road and walked cautiously back. He wanted to change out of his ridiculously festive Santa uniform and he was also desperately keen to wash his hands. He was glad to see the Commission itself was completely dark, though he noticed Fanshawe’s house was brightly lit. He assumed the Duchess was being entertained there as he saw several cars parked in its drive. He wondered if they had been aware of the blaze on the dump.

He quietly let himself into the Commission and crept through the hall and up the stairs. On the landing he decided to clean up first before he changed back into his clothes. He tiptoed into the guest bathroom and softly closed the door behind him. He switched on the light and gave a gasp of horror-struck astonishment when he saw his reflection in the mirror. His face was black with dirt and smoke and scored by tear-tracks. One eyebrow had been singed away leaving a shiny rose stripe and the sparse hair of his widow’s peak had been heat-blasted into a frizzy blond quiff, like an atrocious candy-floss perm. His startled eyes stared blearily back at him in angry albino pinkness.

‘Oh Sweet bloody Jesus,’ he wailed in dismay. ‘You poor bloody idiot.’ Was it worth it, he asked himself, was it worth it?

He had only begun to wash his hands when he heard the voices in the hall. He heard Chloe Fanshawe’s loudly yodelled goodnights and the sound of two people coming up the stairs. He felt panic clench his heart into a tiny pounding ball. He switched off the light in the bathroom and stood nailed to the middle of the floor wondering what to do until some faint instinct of self-preservation steered him towards the bath. He stepped in and drew the shower curtain around him, seeking some form of safety however flimsy.

He heard modulated English voices. Someone said, ‘Did you unpack everything, Sylvia?’ and Sylvia replied, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Ma’am would be the Duchess, he reasoned, wondering who Sylvia might be: probably a lady-in-waiting, chaperone or first companion of the bedchamber or whatever it was, he decided. He thought hopelessly that perhaps no one would need to use the bathroom…

The light went on. Morgan froze behind his shower curtain.

‘…Ghastly little man I thought,’ he heard the Duchess say. ‘And his wife! Good Lord, what an extraordinary…oh I don’t know, the people they send out here.’ Morgan’s instinctive dislike was strengthened by this general slur. The door was shut and he smelt cigarette smoke. He tried not to breathe. Through the semi-transparent plastic of the curtain he could make out a dim grey shape. He heard a zip being run down, the rustle of a dress being lowered. He saw the shape sit down on the WC, heard the straining grunts, the farts, the splashes. Ah, he thought to himself, a manic giggle chattering in his head, so they do go to the toilet like everyone else. There was the noise of paper crumpling, the flush, clothes being readjusted, the running of water from the taps. He heard the Duchess mutter ‘bloody filthy’, at the state he’d left the basin in, then the water stopped. The door was opened.

‘Sylvia?’ came the voice more distantly from the passageway. ‘When exactly are we leaving tomorrow?’

Morgan breathed again, perhaps he might make it after all. He wondered ifhe had the time to clamber out of the bathroom window and make his escape across the back lawn. Maybe Sylvia would only have a pee as well and that would be it. He felt so tense he thought his spine might snap. But he had no time to dwell on the state of his body as there were more steps on the landing outside. Christ, Sylvia arriving, he thought. Some obscure need for disguise made him reach into his pocket for his cotton-wool beard which he quickly put on. He heard the door click shut, smelt cigarette smoke and he knew the Duchess had returned. Please God, he prayed with all the intensity he could muster, please just let her clean her teeth. I’ll do anything God, he promised, anything. He held his breath in agonized anticipation. He heard a rustle, a snap of elastic, the sound of something soft hit the floor.

He saw a shadow-hand reach for the shower curtain. With a rusty click of metal castors the curtain was twitched back. Morgan and the Duchess stared at each other eye to eye. He had never seen dumbfounded surprise and shock registered on anyone’s face quite so distinctly before. After all, the thought flashed through his brain, it’s not every day you find Father Christmas in your bath. The Duchess stood there slack and squat, quite naked apart from a pale-blue shower cap and a half smoked cigarette in one hand. Morgan saw breasts like empty socks, floppy-jersey fat folds, a grey Brillo pad, turkey thighs. Her mouth hung open in paralysed disbelief.

‘Evening, Duchess,’ Morgan squeaked from behind his beard, stepping from the bath with the falsetto audacity of a Raffles. He flung open the bathroom window, lowered the lid of the WC, stepped up and slung his legs over the window-sill. He glanced back over his shoulder. He didn’t care anymore. Her mouth was still open but an arm was across her breasts and a hand pressed into her lap.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I promise I won’t tell if you won’t.’ He dropped down six feet onto the tar-paper roof of the rear verandah, crawled to the edge and hung down, falling onto the back lawn. As he tore across the dark grass towards the gate he felt curiously exultant and carefree as he waited for the Duchess’s screams to rend the night air. But nothing disturbed the impartial gaze of the stars and the convivial silence of the scene.

♦

Bilbow stuck his head out of the spare bedroom when Morgan let himself into the house twenty minutes later.

‘Bloody hell,’ Bilbow said, looking at Morgan’s face. ‘What happened to you, Santa? Reindeers crash? Sledge get shot down in flames?’

Morgan didn’t bother to reply — he was too busy pouring himself a huge drink.

‘By the way,’ Bilbow said, wandering into the sitting room. ‘Some chap called Adekunle’s been ringing all day. Says you must phone him as soon as you get in, doesn’t matter what time it is. Make any sense?’

It didn’t. So he went to bed.

7

Morgan stood next to the caddie cage — a kind of miniature POW camp where the caddies lounged — waiting for the caddie master to select him a boy. A Boxing Day sun shone in the clear pale-blue sky and it was already hot for ten o’clock. He was due on the first tee by 10.30 but had come down early as he wasn’t keen to remain in the house. He had not phoned Adekunle as requested, neither had he made contact with Fanshawe to see what the reaction had been to the miraculous reappearance of Innocence. The phone had gone twice while he was eating his breakfast but he had ignored it. On his way to the club he had been held up by a big election march on behalf of the UPKP weaving its way through Nkongsamba’s twisted streets en route for a rally at the football stadium. So eventful had his life become of late that he had forgotten that voting commenced tomorrow.

A young boy in a grubby Hawaiian shirt hefted Morgan’s clubs onto his shoulder. He had transferred some of Adekunle’s gleaming beauties into his own well-worn plastic and canvas golf-bag as he had been unwilling to attract amused comment on speculation over Adekunle’s monstrosity, which was of such generous proportions that it could have functioned happily as a great-dane’s kennel or motorbike garage when it wasn’t being transported round a golf-course. Besides, he was sure it would have taken at least two caddies to lift it anyway, and he wanted as little company as possible today. He moved slowly over towards the first tee. Many golfers had made an early start as the tournament was intended to wind up around lunchtime. In fact, he and Murray were driving off third from the end. Morgan nodded and smiled at those he knew, and he received many curious glances in return. He was aware that he looked a little peculiar, what with his frizzy teddyboy quiff (flattened for two minutes with a water-loaded comb, springing perkily back up as it dried), one eyebrow replaced by an oblong of elastoplast, red eyes and a shiny pink nose. He slipped on a transparent green sun-visor to protect his tingling sensitive face from the increasingly hot glare. Halfheartedly he rehearsed his bribe speech like a nervous best man at a wedding, but the words refused to form themselves into any convincing order, and when they did he thought he sounded like some oily dockside pimp: ‘hey meester, you want feelthy peectures.’ That sort of approach would never work with Murray. Generally speaking he was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on what he had to do later in the course of the morning. The trauma of Innocence’s death, the body snatch, the…whatever the opposite of body snatch was — the body drop, the mind-blowing confrontation with the Duchess, had robbed him of any satisfaction he had planned to derive from this symbolic act of corruption. It had now become a simple exercise in self-defence, in skin saving, because he knew — more than ever now — that in order not to lose control irretrievably of his life he had to hold on to his job.

Also he felt terrible. The tensions of the last two nights plus the strenuous drinking had combined to produce a hangover of mythic proportions. It seemed as if his entire body had been tenderized by one of those jagged wooden mallets used for bashing steaks. His tongue felt twice as large as normal, as though it was striving to loll out of the side of his mouth like a dog’s and he had a neuralgic headache that loosened every tooth in its socket and made his sinus passages hum like tuning forks.

He swished a golf-club around experimentally. He hadn’t played golf for three months or more and he heard his back and shoulders creaking and clicking under the unfamiliar strain. Checking up on his backswing he suddenly saw Murray walking past the caddie cage towards him and felt his heart lurch with nerves and panic. Then he saw Murray’s son and the sickness turned to irrational anger. Why had he brought his wretched kid along with him?

Murray came up. He smiled evenly.

‘Merry Xmas, Mr Leafy. I see we’ve been drawn together.’

‘Yes, quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’ There was a pause. ‘Ah…look, by the way, I wanted to apologize about the other night…the phone call. I was a bit upset. You know, the dead body and, well, everything, generally. I didn’t realize your position exactly.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Murray said. ‘I haven’t been.’

‘Good. No hard feelings then.’

‘No feelings at all, Mr Leafy.’ He looked closely at Morgan. ‘Your face all right?’

Morgan laughed. ‘Slight accident with my gas cooker. Blowback I think they call it. Ha-ha.’

‘I see.’ Murray looked closer. ‘Gives you a curious expression.’ He paused. ‘I hope you don’t mind my son coming along — playing some of the shorter holes?’

‘Not at all,’ Morgan forced a smile in the boy’s direction. ‘Have a good Christmas?’ he asked.

♦

Morgan played very badly. The fairways were burnt almost white from the sun and were as hard as a road. He developed out of nowhere a curling fading slice on almost every shot including his putts. The small greens, known as ‘browns’ because of their tar and sand surfacing — proved elusively hard to hit, the balls skittering over them again and again, refusing to slow down on the baked ground. Murray agreed to call him Morgan, chatted amiably enough and coached his son with a professional brevity and acuteness. Because of the boy playing some of the shorter holes they waved through the twosomes that were coming behind and soon they were at the tail-end of the tournament, which, Morgan thought, actually suited him quite well.

They completed the first nine holes by midday and paused at a fairway drink-shack to slake their thirst. Morgan had scored a dire 63 on the outward nine — Murray a useful 37—and it was shaping up to be his all-time worst-ever round of golf in more ways than one. He had imagined that, after everything he had been through, bribing Murray would turn out to be a piece of cake, but as ever the physical presence of the man unsetded him. He felt nervous, adolescent and drained of self-confidence.

The first nine holes had sent them up one side of a river valley and back down the other. The second nine branched out into the thick forest that surrounded Nkongsamba. There was a sharp dog-leg after the eleventh, and they wouldn’t see the clubhouse or the outskirts of the town again until the sixteenth. Morgan watched Murray drive off easily and fluently. The ball sailed a straight two hundred yards and bounced another fifty leaving him within easy range of the brown. Morgan squared up to his ball. He decided to give it everything he’d got, show this old man how to hit a golf-ball, pretend it was Fanshawe’s head he was striking. He took a prodigious swing and cracked the ball with all his force: it shot off and out in a steady curve to his right, plunging into dense and thorny rough.

‘Shit!’ he swore, then apologized for the boy’s sake.

‘You shouldn’t try to hit it so hard,’ Murray advised. ‘Relaxation’s the key to this game.’

‘That’s the fiendishly annoying thing about golf,’ Morgan complained, knowing relaxation was just about the last state he could achieve at the moment. ‘It’s such a, you know, controlled game. Everything’s held back, sort of restrained. You can’t thrash away at things, soak up the aggression, tire yourself out like you can in other sports. Every time I wind myself up for a massive effort I know it’s going to be disastrous.’

Murray looked at him quizzically, as if this admission held the key to his character. ‘But that’s what it’s all about though, isn’t it? Knowing when to hold back. Staying in control. Using the head and other wooden clubs.’

Morgan laughed uncomfortably: he didn’t welcome the implied criticism. ‘I suppose I’m just the wrong personality for the game,’ he said ruefully.

‘Don’t give up so easily,’ Murray said as he walked over to the rough with him. ‘Keep at it. It may come right one day.’

They poked around in the tangled thorny bushes looking for Morgan’s ball. They threw up thick clouds of dust, flies, tics, grasshoppers, uncovered a calcined coil of human faeces, but no ball.

‘Do you like it out here?’ Morgan asked Murray as he hacked at the undergrowth with his club head. ‘Dust, heat, stink…impenetrable jungle.’

‘Well enough,’ Murray said. ‘I probably like it as much as I’d like anywhere. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.’

‘You’re quite content then,’ Morgan established a little belligerently.

Murray released the bush he was pulling back. He smiled. ‘Is anybody quite content?’

‘Well I know for a fact I’m not,’ Morgan confessed. ‘But you seem to be — of all the people I’ve met.’

Murray pointed his club at him. ‘There you go,’ he said, ‘telling me how I feel. A piece of advice: don’t confuse seeming with being. You can never know anything for sure, ofcourse, but it’s a pretty safe maxim.’

‘Goodness. Quite a philosopher. So you’re not happy then?’

Murray laughed. ‘This has taken rather a serious turn for a harmless game of golf, hasn’t it? I think we’d better give your ball up. Play another?’

‘No thanks. I’ll just walk this one through.’ He watched Murray play his ball up to just short of the brown.

‘Are you going to stay here all your life?’ Morgan asked conversationally as they strolled after it.

‘No,’ Murray said. ‘I shall leave when I can.’

‘Aha,’ Morgan said in triumph. ‘So you don’t like it here.’

‘What exactly are you trying to prove?’ Murray asked with an amused smile. ‘It’s got nothing to do with liking the place, it’s just that there are other things I want to do with my life apart from working in Africa.’ He eyed his chip shot, played, and ran the ball onto the brown five feet from the hole.

‘Such as what?’ Morgan inquired. ‘What do you want to do next? Go back to Scotland?’

‘No,’ Murray said, sighting along his putter. ‘I’ve not planned anything really.’ He putted the ball into the hole. ‘What I’d like to do is go somewhere warm — I don’t think I could survive another British winter — Portugal maybe. Go swimming, sailing, play a bit of golf, read a bit more, watch my family grow up…that sort of thing. Fairly average and unremarkable ambitions, I’m afraid.’

‘And that’s it?’ For some reason Morgan felt a sense of disappointment.

‘What did you expect,’ Murray rebuked himjokingly, ‘that I wanted to be President of the World Health Organization? I’ll be ‘content’ enough, thank you, if I can manage the other things.’

♦

They played the next two holes. Morgan’s nerves returned and the sun shone down with uncomfortable force as they hit their way further into the forest. The fairways became enclosed on both sides by tall trees and dense undergrowth. Thin paths broke out from one green wall, meandered across the golf-course and disappeared into narrow openings in the jungle on the other side. If your shot was inaccurate there was virtually no hope of ever finding your ball. Morgan lost another three, Murray kept to par, even the boy played better than he did. Morgan knew that if he didn’t approach Murray soon it would be too late and he grew progressively more unhappy about the task ahead. The game of golf, he now saw, had been a bad idea. Perhaps if Murray had shown resentment at his rudeness the other night, if he’d been sniffy and stand-offish, made it clear that he didn’t like him that much, found the idea of a round of golf in his company distasteful, it would have been less of a problem. He had been expecting something like that, he supposed: the Calvinistic cold shoulder. But Murray had been amicable and considerate, and he realized that his dreams of destroying him held no appeal, were non-existent really because, he saw, the Murray he detested lived on only in his mind — had little or nothing to do with the man walking by his side. There would be no satisfaction in watching this Murray crumble now: he just didn’t hate the man enough; in fact, surprised as he was at the admission, he almost liked him. Murray was right, he thought: he had confused seeming with being. He’d established an idea about the man in his head on the basis of a couple of incidents and had never really bothered to check its veracity. With a depressingly acute flash of insight he realized that he did the same with almost everyone he met…But all these speculations were academic: Murray still had to be bribed and that was that — his own survival depended on it. He was only sorry that this new-found knowledge about his victim made the success of his venture almost inevitable: Murray was as human and fallible as he was.

He allowed his thoughts to switch to Fanshawe and the reception for the Duchess that would be going on at this very moment. He hadn’t troubled to inform anyone that he wouldn’t be present. It was just as well, he considered. He was sure Duchess wouldn’t object — he knew with a strange certainty that no one would hear about their meeting in the bathroom. Shivering slightly at the memory, he recalled the stark unappealing nudity. Another example, he suddenly realized, of the old seeming⁄being gulf: just another middle-aged lady-nothing regal, nothing remotely special or different there.

♦

They walked down the fairway of the fourteenth hole. It was a long one, par 5, and represented the extremity of the golf-course’s thrust out into the jungle. They turned back towards the town after this. Morgan felt an unfamiliar weakness in his knees, a quiet roaring in his ears, his heart beating strongly in his head. He checked that Murray’s son was out of earshot.

‘How…’ he cleared the squeak from his throat. ‘How would you fancy ten thousand pounds?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Pardon?’ Murray looked round in surprise.

‘Ten thousand pounds. How would you like it?’ he repeated with leering cupidity.

‘You offering?’ Murray said with a smile.

‘No, I mean…You could do a lot with ten thousand. I mean one could…’ He back-pedalled a little. ‘You know, I was just thinking it’s a…sort of handy sum. Not like winning the pools but…useful just the same.’

‘Yes,’ Murray said non-committally. ‘I suppose you’re right. Very useful. Why?’

Morgan’s fortitude seemed to collapse in upon itself like a dying star. ‘You can have it if you want,’ he said quietly.

Murray stopped in his tracks. ‘Sorry?’ he said frowning. ‘I can have what?’

‘Ten thousand pounds. You can have it.’

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ He waved away his son who was walking back towards them to see why they’d stopped. ‘What do you mean, I can have ten thousand pounds?’

Morgan swallowed. He felt the heat hammering down on his head. His singe marks stung with sweat. ‘I will give you ten thousand pounds,’ he said slowly. ‘If…if you do something.’

‘Come on, Dad,’ the boy shouted.

‘I see,’ Murray said. He looked serious and saddened. ‘If I do something. And what is this something?’

‘You have to put in a positive report on the new hall of residence and cafeteria site,’ Morgan said in a rush.

Murray’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. He fixed his penetrating gaze on Morgan’s sweating face. ‘The hall site? You want me to change my mind. How do you know…? Wait, wait a second…What has the University of Nkongsamba’s building programme got to do with you, for Christ’s sake?’

Morgan removed his sun-visor and wiped his brow. He felt he was about to die. Desperation mounted in his body like flood-waters behind a flimsy dam. He tried to keep calm.

‘Well, not me so much. I’m acting for someone.’

‘Who?’

‘I…I can’t tell you that, obviously.’

Murray gripped Morgan’s arm. ‘What the hell have you got into? You stupid bloody fool.’ Morgan felt his head spin. Everything was going wrong. Why was Murray interrogating him like this? He saw Murray thinking hard.

‘Who’s behind it?’ he said again.

Morgan tried to pull himself together.’I’m not at liberty…’ he began pompously, but Murray interrupted him with an upraised palm.

‘Let me guess,’ Murray said. ‘It’s Adekunle isn’t it?’

‘No!’ Morgan said hastily, realized he’d countered with give-away swiftness, said ‘Who?’ in a futile attempt to regain lost ground. He saw there was no point in denying it. ‘Yes,’ he admitted in a low voice.

Murray released his grip. ‘I thought so,’ he said as though to himself, ‘I’d been suspicious,…’ He returned his attention to Morgan who stood there looking at the ground. ‘I’m sorry, Morgan,’ he said feelingly. ‘Very sorry. But I just can’t let this one go. You can understand my position. I have to report it.’

That was it. The weight was too much for the hurriedly assembled collection of twigs and branches. The flood-waters burst through, sweeping everything away. Morgan felt the prickle of tears on his eyelids, brimming behind his lashes. Too late he closed his eyes, squeezed them tight shut but the tears seeped through, fat and hot, trickling down his fat hot cheeks as his legs gave way beneath him.

♦

Murray’s son stood aimlessly with the two caddies some dozen yards off. He looked puzzled and angry, Morgan thought, watching the boy throw stones into the bush. Morgan was sitting propped up against a tree at the edge of the fairway. He wondered if he’d passed out or if his brain had simply refused to record events, so embarrassing had they been — a kind of merciful amnesia to spare him further torments.

Murray stood beside him looking down. ‘All right now?’ he asked considerately.

Morgan scrambled to his feet rubbing his eyes. ‘Christ,’ he said shakily. ‘Sorry I fell to pieces.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But if you knew what I’d been through the last few days you’d be amazed that I can still function normally at all.’

‘Adekunle?’

‘No. Not entirely. Other things as well. I’ll tell you about them some day: they’ll make your hair curl.’ Morgan dusted the grass off his trousers. ‘All things considered, Adekunle’s been quite reasonable under the circumstances.’

Murray handed him his sun-visor. ‘I think we’d better call it a day,’ he said. ‘Head back to the clubhouse.’ Morgan agreed, and they walked off in silence back up the fairway, Murray’s son and the caddies remaining a discreet ten yards behind. Morgan shot a glance at Murray’s face. It was set firm in concentration, his brow lowered in a frown. Morgan rubbed the back of his neck, massaging the knots of tension his muscles had twisted themselves into. Paradoxically, he felt better: one problem at least was over — resolved — however unsatisfactorily. He wouldn’t have to bribe Murray again.

‘Look,’ Morgan said, keen to break the silence. ‘I’m sorry. I…I was acting under instructions.’

‘I take it he’s threatening you with something?’

‘God yes. You don’t think I’m his partner, do you?’ Morgan looked offended.

Murray apologized. ‘What has he got on you?’ he asked.

Morgan let out a long breath. ‘I think it’s probably better if I keep that to myself. Let’s just say he knows something that I’d rather my boss didn’t. Nothing criminal,’ he added hastily. ‘More in the scandal line — if you know what I mean.’

‘I see.’ Murray ran a hand through his hair. ‘It sounds like a real mess to me.’ He paused. ‘What would happen to you if Mr Fanshawe found out about whatever this scandal is?’

Morgan shrugged. He told himself it didn’t matter so much now. ‘Oh I don’t know. Disgrace. Sent home. I’ll lose my job for sure. Fanshawe and I aren’t exactly best buddies anyway at the moment.’

Murray didn’t say anything to this and they continued their walk in silence. Back at the clubhouse they paid off the caddies and put their clubs in their cars. Morgan slung his in the back seat. He wasn’t ever going to use his boot again.

He suddenly felt the familiar panic seize his heart as he contemplated the results of Murray reporting him. He had been lying to himself earlier: losing his job did matter — more than anything, and the thought of an ignominious return to Britain made him feel sick. Somehow he had to persuade Murray to go easy; the man seemed to like him, perhaps he’d agree to help if he knew how he really felt. He walked over to Murray’s car and overheard his son ask, ‘Dad, why was that man crying like that?’ and he wished the poisonous little brat would clear off.

‘Alex,’ Morgan called. ‘Can I…can I have a word?’ Murray came over.

‘This is incredibly embarrassing for me,’ Morgan said, ‘But I have to ask. Please don’t report this to anyone.’

‘But I’ve told…’

‘I’m begging you,’ Morgan said earnestly. ‘Please, I will lose my job, you see, and it’s the only thing in my life that means anything to me, that’s any good at all. Please.’

‘What are you asking me to do?’ Murray said. ‘Pretend all this never happened?’

Morgan squirmed. ‘Well…yes.’ But he saw immediately that it wouldn’t be enough. ‘Couldn’t you just forget about making that negative report on the site? You see, if you do veto the project Adekunle will go to Fanshawe anyway. That was the deal: I had to stop you from doing that.’

Murray lowered his voice. ‘So in fact you want me to give the all-clear for the hall project. But why should I?’

‘For me,’ Morgan pleaded. ‘Otherwise I’m finished. I mean that. Not just my job. Everything.’

‘Why is this project so important to Adekunle? Is he bidding for the contract through Ussman Danda?’

‘No,’ Morgan said quietly. ‘He owns the land.’

Murray looked up at the sky. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he laughed sardonically, ‘no wonder he’ll pay ten thousand pounds.’

‘That’s still available, by the way,’ Morgan interjected.

‘I’ll forget you said that,’ Murray responded harshly. He paused. ‘You’re asking me to let that hall project go through for your sake alone — so that you can keep your job.’

Morgan looked at the ground. ‘Yes,’ he said ashamedly. ‘I know I’m a bloody fool, that I got myself in this mess but…’

‘No,’ Murray said flatly. ‘I’m sorry, Morgan, but no. I just can’t — won’t — go that far.’

‘But why not?’ Morgan beseeched unreasonably, ‘Why not? What’s so important about the University of Nkongsamba, Adekunle, this country? What does it matter to us — people like us? In the end there’s absolutely nothing we can do; the Adekunles of this world’ll win through eventually. Let them build the bloody hall there.’ He felt like a man seeing the end of his tether twitch beyond his grasp.

‘It’s got absolutely nothing to do with the University of Nkongsamba,’ Murray said patiently.

‘Then why won’t you do this one little thing?’ Morgan asked despairingly. ‘I’ll go down on my knees if you like.’ He felt the familiar sensations of intense Murray-hatred returning. ‘Is it because it’s ‘wrong’?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘You don’t want to do the ‘wrong’ thing, is that it? Can’t you see that life’s just not that simple? Good⁄bad, right⁄wrong. It just doesn’t work that way any more.’ He spread his hands. ‘You’re way out of touch Alex, out on a limb: nobody else is playing by those rules, so why you? Why is it so important for me to lose my job?’

Morgan saw Murray’s jaw muscles tighten. ‘Frankly I don’t give a damn about your job,’ he said in his steely Scottish voice. ‘If you’re a big enough bloody fool to get entangled with people like Adekunle then that’s your problem. As for your simple reading of how my mind works, that’s off-target too. I’m not concerned about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you put it either; if I’m interested in anything it’s in seeing a bit of fairness in the world, and I just don’t think it’s fair that some greedy bastard like Adekunle should cheat his way into several hundred thousand pounds at other people’s expense. And I’m afraid for your sake that I can’t just sit back and let him get away with it. And now that I’m in a position to see that he doesn’t, nothing’s going to stop me. I won’t worry too much about whether it’s right or wrong but at least I’ll be secure in the knowledge that some justice has been done, that one fat bastard hasn’t had it all his own way. I’m sorry, but I can’t see my letting you keep your job, and thereby allowing the University of Nkongsamba to build a hall of residence on a rubbish dump and provide Adekunle with a small fortune, as being remotely just or fair. It may sound stupid but I couldn’t forgive myself.’

Morgan’s shoulders slumped. He felt exhausted. He felt angry because there was no response he could make: he agreed with everything Murray had said.

‘Look,’ Murray continued in a less passionate tone. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I won’t make any report until January the third which is the day my committee meets again. Adekunle’s had it now. I’m not naive enough to believe I can ever prove he owns the land, but nothing he can do can stop my negative report. That gives you time to sort things out yourself — and I promise I won’t mention your name in connection with this.’

‘But Adekunle will, don’t you see?’

‘That’s why I’m giving you the time. Pre-empt him. Go to Fanshawe yourself: tell him everything before Adekunle can.’

Morgan groaned. ‘No, it won’t work. I could never tell Fanshawe these things. You don’t know him, don’t know his expectations. He’d go raving mad.’

‘It’s your only option,’ Murray said. ‘You never can tell about people, what they’ll think, what they’ll do. You may be surprised.’ He waved at his son. ‘See Fanshawe,’ he advised, ‘lay things on the line. But remember: January the third and I make my report to the Buildings, Works and Sites Committee.’ He paused and touched Morgan fleetingly on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to do it.’

Morgan watched him go to join his son.

8

Morgan lay on Hazel’s bed staring up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. Hazel had gone out to buy him more beer as he had drunk his way through the six bottles in the fridge during the course of the afternoon. He had come to the flat straight after his catastrophic round of golf with Murray, gone into hiding like a fugitive, lying low. Before he’d left the club he’d phoned Bilbow, told him to make himself at home and said that he didn’t know when he’d be back.

‘That Adekunle chap came round this morning just after you’d left,’ Bilbow had said. ‘Seemed very keen to see you. Oh yes, and if that Fanshawe character rings up once more I think I’ll blow me top. He’s phoned half a dozen times today already. What’ve you done to him?’

Morgan’s heart sagged. What were Fanshawe and Adekunle after? ‘Never mind,’ he’d told Bilbow. ‘Just keep telling them you don’t know where I am.’

‘As you wish, squire,’ Bilbow cheerily acknowledged.

Morgan had passed the day in a perplexing succession of moods: deep Stygian gloom, devil-may-care indifference, throat-tightening self-pity and his usual apocalyptic universe-hating rages. The sole alteration in the pattern was that Murray did not appear as major target of his vengeful fury. It was no longer the same between him and Murray now, he realized; the old clear-cut division had been replaced by something more complex and puzzling. The front-line had disappeared. This was a turn in events that he found distinctly off-putting, for it seemed to take no account of the fact that Murray had bluntly told him that he was not going to change his mind about the negative site report — the pivot upon which the future hinged as far as he was concerned. He just couldn’t understand why he was letting the man off so lightly.

♦

The next morning he lay contentedly in bed watching Hazel get dressed. The sun shone through the slats in the shutters. The traffic sounds came up fuzzily from the street below.

‘Where are you going, by the way?’ he asked her.

‘To vote of course,’ she said.

‘Christ yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s right, it’s election day today. God. Do you know I’d completely forgotten. Who are you going to vote for?’

Hazel picked up her handbag and adjusted her wig. He wished he hadn’t asked: he knew what she was going to say. She looked round. ‘KNP,’ she said simply. ‘For a united Kinjanja.’

Morgan’s benign morning mood disappeared. He thought suddenly of his fate and the grim alternatives in front of him — either he told Fanshawe or Adekunle would. He sat up in bed, a serious look on his face.

‘I think there is something you should know, Hazel,’ he said. Hazel stopped at the door. ‘I’m afraid things may be changing soon.’

‘In what way?’

‘I think I might be leaving. Going back to the UK.’ He scrutinized Hazel’s face for her reaction. She appeared to be considering the news, her bottom lip thrust out, her almond eyes narrowed.

‘For why?’

‘Well…I’m in a bit of trouble you see, and they’ll send me back home as a punishment,’ he said. Hazel shrugged. ‘How…How do you feel about that?’ he asked, beckoning her over to the bed. She sat down beside him. He put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Will you be sorry?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go.’ But he couldn’t see any tears in her eyes.

♦

Morgan stayed in Hazel’s flat for the duration of polling day — the twenty-seventh. On the morning of the twenty-eighth he drove back to his house and found Greg Bilbow packing his bags.

‘You off already?’ Morgan asked.

‘Yes,’ Bilbow said. ‘I’m getting a plane back down to the capital in a couple of hours. Where the hell have you been anyway?’ Bilbow inquired with amusement. ‘I’ve never known anyone so in demand. Phone going like the clappers. Your pals Adekunle and Fanshawe as per, and also some female called Celia.’

‘Oh Gawd,’ Morgan groaned, exaggeratedly rolling his eyeballs. He’d forgotten about Celia’s frantic message on Christmas Day.

‘You in some kind of trouble?’ Bilbow asked sympathetically.

‘To put it mildly.’

‘Sorry. Anything I can do?’

‘No, no. You’ve been great anyway, acting as my answering service.’

Bilbow smiled. ‘No problem. Except for that Fanshawe. I think he thought I was you, you know, putting on a Yorkshire accent. He kept saying ‘Come on, Leafy, I know it’s you.’

‘Stop playing these childish games, Leafy.’

‘Bilbow had Fan-shawe’s pompous accusations off to a tee.

Morgan laughed uneasily. ‘Bloody typical,’ he said. He looked at Bilbow’s thin face. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you a lift to the airport. Don’t want you getting in any more taxis.’

To his amazement Morgan managed to purchase two bottles ofbeer from the sulky girl at the Nkongsamba airport bar. They were unchilled, but you couldn’t have everything. Morgan and Bilbow sat down at a table to wait for the plane which was reputed to be fifty minutes late. They drank their beers and chatted. To his surprise Morgan found he warmed to Bilbow, and discovered him to be a loquacious, wry character and wished he had been able to spend more time in his company. He bought two more beers and told him this.

‘Yes, I’m sorry I’ve been behaving so mysteriously since you came,’ Morgan said. ‘I could have shown you around a bit. Anyway I thought you were due to stay on a while longer. Wasn’t your Anglo-Kinjanjan do meant to last a couple more days?’

‘It was,’ Bilbow said. ‘But the whole thing’s been stopped because of the student unrest at the university. There were big demonstrations yesterday. The riot police were called in. Had all the signs of turning out very nasty indeed. I thought it was something to do with the elections but I was told it’s because of some threat to shut down the university next term.’

Morgan punched his palm. ‘God, the elections,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting about them.’ Vote-counting would be going on today; they should know the result by late afternoon. He wondered if a KNP victory could possibly help him now.

There was the crackle of a loudspeaker announcing the imminent arrival of Bilbow’s plane.

‘Only an hour and ten minutes behind schedule,’ Morgan observed brightly. ‘Things are looking up.’

♦

Morgan had just got out of the bath when the phone went later that afternoon. Pulling his dressing-gown around him he padded wetly down the corridor to the sitting room.

‘Hello,’ he said tentatively. ‘Leafy here.’

‘Ah, my good friend, you have returned from your travels.’ It was Adekunle. Morgan leant weakly against the wall.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was going to ring you. I…’

‘To congratulate me I hope.’

‘Sorry?’

‘My dear Mr Leafy. Are you not listening to the election returns? We have won, my friend. Victory is ours!’ Geniality and good-fellowship oozed from Adekunle’s voice.

‘Oh.’ Morgan felt no excitement. He was unsure whether this was good or bad news. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Such enthusiasm,’ Adekunle said cynically. ‘Still. It looks like being a small majority but a majority nonetheless.’ He paused. ‘I have been trying to phone you. I assume you went ahead with the other matter. Dr Murray and our agreement.’

‘Ah. Now, yes. That was something I…’

‘Did you or didn’t you?’

Morgan thought fast. ‘I didn’t,’ he said, instinctively seeking safety in a lie. ‘I…I was assessing his mood and, um, the conditions just weren’t suitable.’

‘Good,’ Adekunle said. ‘Good.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said good. You have put my mind at ease. This was what I was trying to contact you about but you were nowhere to be found. I was going to tell you not to do anything on this occasion.’

Morgan sat down on the floor. ‘Why?’ he said in a shocked whisper.

‘I have made other plans. I will tell you about them tonight.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes. At my house. A little victory celebration before I take up my new duties with the government. Shall we say eight o’clock?’

‘Well it’s very kind of you to ask but I…’

‘My good friend,’ Adekunle said. ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry, as the saying goes. I count on seeing you. Goodbye.’

9

Innocence had been dragged back to her original position. The juju spells had multiplied around her, the same cloth shrouded her body. Morgan thought it was as though nothing had ever happened, as if those two dreadful nights had never taken place. He returned the torch to Ezekiel. The warm African night enclosed them: to the west a thin gash of livid orange, some greys, rose pinks and metallic blues lingered on, edging the rain clouds on the horizon.

‘So,’ Morgan said to no one in particular. ‘She is still there.’ Isaac, Joseph and Ezekiel nodded in agreement.

‘Some person done move her tree days ago,’ Isaac informed him in a deeply suspicious voice.

‘I know,’ Morgan said. ‘Mr Fanshawe told me. Bad business that. However I’m very glad to see she was brought back.’

‘Dis ‘e no respec’,’ Ezekiel affirmed.

‘Well,’ Morgan said, suddenly making up his mind, ‘you can tell Maria to bring the fetish priest tomorrow. I will pay,’ he announced. There were mutters of astonishment.

‘You will pay, sah?’ Isaac confirmed.

‘That is what I said. I will pay. Everything.’

‘Fun’ral as well?’ Joseph asked.

‘Yes yes. Let’s get the whole thing sorted out. Over. Finished.’

‘Dis ‘e very good ting,’ Ezekiel declared. ‘Very very good.’

‘Isaac,’ Morgan said, ‘if I give you money tomorrow will you buy the beer and goat et cetera for Maria? Is that OK?’

‘Orighti,’ Isaac agreed. They made their arrangements. Morgan noticed how the cost had jumped to eighty pounds now he was footing the bill. It would be an especially large celebration they assured him, to which he was cordially invited. He didn’t begrudge it. If anyone deserved a decent send-off, he thought, it was poor Innocence. He’d get it all back out of petty cash, somehow, before he left.

They strolled to the edge of the compound. Cooking smells came from the charcoal braziers. A toothless mammy passed in the dark, her flat black breasts swinging in the light of the lantern she balanced on her head. The child she was leading by one hand pointed at Morgan and called out ‘Oyibo, oyibo.’ White man. Morgan wondered if they ever stopped noticing.

He sniffed the air. ‘Is it going to rain tonight?’ he asked.

‘I think we get small rain tonight, sah,’ Isaac said. Morgan was about to make a remark about lightning never striking twice but thought better of it. He said he would see them in the morning and walked across the lawn to his car.

He drove home to change for Adekunle’s party. As he was pulling on his shirt he shouted for Friday to bring him a whisky and soda. Friday brought the drink and established that he would not be requiring any supper. Morgan decided against his dinner jacket and put on a pale grey suit. As he reached into the wardrobe for it he noticed Friday still lingering by the door.

‘Yes, Friday? What is it?’

‘Please, sah. Let me warn you something.’

‘Warn me? About what?’

‘Nevah go for Nkongsamba tomorrow. I beg you, sah.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘The soldiers will be there.’

‘Soldiers? What are you talking about? A coup? Do you mean a coup d’etat?

‘Ah oui. C’est ça. Un coup d’etat. Demain.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Everybody is knowing.’

‘OK, Friday, thank you.’ The little man left. What nonsense, Morgan thought, as he knotted his tie. That night with Innocence must have addled his brain.

As he set off for Adekunle’s house at ten to eight he felt he was like a man living on borrowed time. The news that he need not have bothered to bribe Murray after all had been a particularly cruel and ironic blow. All that humiliation, all that soul-searching need never have occurred — at that point anyway. Adekunle had seemed only to speak of a postponement, a temporary change of plan. In any event it was over now, and he thought that wasn’t necessarily bad. For the first time in several weeks he sensed a modicum of composure entering his life, probably due to the fact that there was little he could do now to alter or influence events. He decided, there and then, to take Murray’s advice and tell Fanshawe of his indiscretions and thereby deprive Adekunle of the satisfaction of fulfilling his threat. Fanshawe of course would still sack him — or recommend his dismissal — but it would be far better than allowing Adekunle to breathe slanders in his ear. In fact, he made up his mind, he wasn’t going to allow Fanshawe to derive any pleasure from firing him either. He would resign — tell Fanshawe everything, then hand in his resignation. He smiled at the thought: yes, that would be best. He was setting his house in order at last, and now Innocence too was tidied up, so to speak — everything set in motion for the wake. The only small unresolved cloud on his horizon was Celia. He felt a glow of affection spread through his body as he ran through the memories. Celia, the one true love affair of his life, he realized with astonishment, or at least the relationship that came closest to it. Now that he didn’t care about Adekunle he must try to see more of her, he told himself, before he booked his passage home.

Driving up a hill on the way to the university his headlight beams picked out a familiar black-clad figure. It was Femi Robinson, trudging up the slope with a bundle of placards under his arm. Morgan pulled into the verge. Robinson trotted up.

‘Can I give you a lift?’ Morgan asked. He felt generous and he had nothing against Robinson: in fact he sympathized with him. ‘I’m going as far as the university,’ he added. Robinson gladly accepted, flung his placards in the back seat and got in beside him. Morgan caught a glimpse of one that read PEDAGOGY YES! DEMAGOGY NO! He pulled the car back on to the road and set off on his way once again. They obviously shared the same destination.

‘You’ve abandoned us then?’ Morgan said, indicating the placards and winding down the window as far as it would go. Robinson could have ideally played Sweat in some allegorical deodorant ad.

Robinson scowled. ‘Since the election has been won according to your plans there is no point in warning the people. So tonight we are protesting at the presence of riot police on the university campus and the planned closure next semester.’

‘But won’t the new government make any difference?’ Morgan asked.

Robinson laughed scornfully at this display of naivety. ‘I assume you are making the joke. I told you: UPKP, KNP — they are just the same. They don’t like students making them trouble.’

‘So you are off to lend your support.’

‘It is my duty, while I can. I expect the PPK to be banned very soon.’

Morgan looked at Robinson with some admiration. He seemed always to be searching for a new set of hopeless odds he could pit himself against. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll put in a good word for you with the new Foreign Minister.’

Robinson looked round sharply. ‘You are going to meet Adekunle already?’

Morgan laughed. ‘Don’t worry. It’s unofficial — a victory celebration I believe.’

‘Fanshawe will be there I suppose,’ Robinson sneered, ‘to congratulate his puppet.’ He spat out the last word with some venom.

Morgan hadn’t considered this possibility. He hoped Robinson was wrong. ‘Adekunle Fanshawe’s puppet?’ he scoffed. ‘That’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?’

Robinson folded his arms across his chest. ‘This is how we see the Anglo-KNP collusion prior to the election. How do you want us to interpret it otherwise?’

Morgan couldn’t think of anything to say. He hoped he hadn’t blundered in telling him of Adekunle’s victory celebration.

He stopped the car outside the university’s main gate. ‘I’ll let you out here, Femi, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if it would be wise for me to be seen delivering revolutionaries to their demonstrations.’

Robinson collected his placards. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed our conversation. It was most interesting.’

♦

As Morgan drew near Adekunle’s house he was waved down by a uniformed guard and told to park his car some distance away. The roads nearby were lined with vehicles but as he approached he saw that the area immediately in front of the house had been left clear and the building itself was lit up with floodlights. He saw loudspeakers rigged up on the first-floor balcony and a dozen or so KNP supporters standing outside the gate. It looked as if Adekunle was planning to deliver a post-election victory address to the party faithful at some point in the evening. The front gate was opened once Morgan had established his credentials and he stepped through and walked down the drive. At the bottom down by the garages were several official-looking limousines and it was with a sinking feeling that he recognized Fanshawe’s black Austin Princess parked alongside Muller’s rather dirty Mercedes. Both cars were also sporting their national flags on the bonnets.

Peter, the Commission driver, snapped out an extravagant salute as Morgan came by. ‘Evenin’, sah,’ he called. Morgan went over.

‘Hello Peter. Mr Fanshawe here?’

‘Yes, sah. I go bring them all.’

♦

‘Yes, sah. Mrs Fanshawe, Mr Dalmire and Miss Fanshawe also.’

Morgan looked towards the house. The downstairs rooms seemed crowded with people. A little victory celebration, Adekunle had said.

‘Are there many people here?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ Peter said. ‘Plenty plenty, sah.’

Morgan edged his way through the crowded sitting room towards the bar. The atmosphere was hot and frenetic and there was a mood of euphoria in the air rather like a New Year party. He kept his head down. He didn’t want to see anyone, he was only here because Adekunle had ordered him to attend. He fought his way to the bar.

‘Large whisky please. And soda.’

‘Hello you’ he heard, and looked round. It was Priscilla. ‘Good Lord!’ she said. ‘What’s happened to your face? And your hair?’

‘Christmas pud,’ he explained. ‘Too much brandy. Never realized the stuff was so combustible.’ He thought she looked breathtakingly desirable, from the neck down: tanned and glowing with health in a creamy scoop-necked dress.

‘So that’s why we haven’t seen you,’ she said, popping an olive into her mouth. ‘I think Daddy’s been trying to get hold of you for days.’

‘Really?’ Morgan said, touching his elastoplast eyebrow with one hand and trying to control the featherlight cilia of his quiff with the other. ‘I’ve been convalescing,’ he added in explanation. He changed the subject. ‘I thought you and Dickie were going on holiday after Christmas. Skiing, wasn’t it?’

‘We are,’ she said. ‘In fact we shall have to be off soon as we’re driving down overnight to the capital. Plane leaves at some ungodly hour in the morning. Peter’s taking us in the big car. Oh look, there’s Dickie.’

Dalmire approached looking young and clean-cut in a white dinner jacket. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘The prodigal returns. What on earth have you been doing to your face?’ He bent over and whispered in Morgan’s ear. ‘Arthur wants to see you, Morgan. I think he’s in a bit of a bate.’

‘What about?’ Morgan asked.

‘Innocence mainly, I think.’

‘That’s all taken care of now.’

‘And something to do with the Duchess too.’

‘Oh Christ. I suppose I’d better get it over with. Where is he?’

‘Over on the other side of the room. Under that mask thing on the wall.’

Morgan began to ease and weave his way through the packed bodies across the room in the direction Dalmire had indicated. He was halfway there, wedged between an enormous Kinjanjan lady and a gesticulating KNP official when he felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Denzil Jones.

‘Hello, Denzil. Some other time. I’ve got to see Arthur.’

‘Just a word, Morgan,’ Jones wriggled himself closer. He looked downcast and serious. Perspiration gleamed on his blue jowls. He shot a nervous glance around the room. ‘Do you know anything about this?’ he asked, shoving a piece of paper into Morgan’s hand. It was a bill from the Ademola clinic for Hazel’s treatment which it clearly specified along with the penicillin dosage.

‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Morgan said innocently. ‘Have you been overcharged?’ He cursed under his breath: he’d given Hazel money to pay that bill.

‘It’s not bloody true, man!’Jones yelped. ‘It’s not your idea of a joke, is it? Because if it is, it’s not very funny. Not funny at all.’ He looked miserable. ‘Geraldine went mad. She refused to come here tonight.’

‘Sorry, Denzil. Probably some of the buggers at the club.’ He patted Jones’s shoulder. ‘Gheer up, old son.’ He’d always wanted to say that to Jones. He pushed his way on through the crowd.

‘Hello, Arthur,’ he said. Fanshawe was in full regalia: bum-freezer DJ, cummerbund, medal ribbons.

‘Morgan! Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded. ‘And what in God’s name have you done to your face?’

‘A slight accident. I’ve been, ah, convalescing. Needed a bit of peace and quiet.’

‘Oh marvellous,’ Fanshawe said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Marvellous. And what about Innocence eh? Just leave her to rot.’

‘I got her back, didn’t I?’ Morgan said petulantly. He explained the new arrangements he’d made and Fanshawe seemed to calm down somewhat. ‘All the servants came back on time, I assume?’ Morgan said. ‘Did the function go all right?’

Fanshawe put his hands on his hips. ‘Good question. It did actually. But why weren’t you there?’

‘I wasn’t well, I told you. Listen Arthur…’

‘You were missed you know,’ Fanshawe said. ‘Particularly by the Duchess. For some reason she kept asking where you were. Got in a very bad mood when you never appeared.’

Fanshawe thought some more about this. ‘Curious woman…very pleasant though, mind you. Seemed especially put out by your absence.’ He looked suspiciously at Morgan. ‘Make any sense?’

‘Beats me,’ Morgan said. ‘Look, Arthur, I want to talk to you about something important.’

‘Still,’ Fanshawe said, completely ignoring him and clapping him on the shoulder, ‘water under the bridge and all that.’ He gestured at the party. ‘All’s well et cetera.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Kingpin looks like paying off. Lucky for all of us.’

‘That’s actually what I want to talk about, Arthur, I…’

‘Good grief.’ It was Chloe Fanshawe, brushing aside a couple of guests to intrude upon their dialogue. ‘What’s happened to your face? Your hair?’ She was wearing a shocking pink dress encrusted with silvery threadwork and had a triple rope of pearls around the soft folds of her neck. She must have re-dyed her hair, Morgan thought, its blackness was so dense, giving her skin the edible texture and whiteness of marshrnallow.

‘My Christmas present,’ Morgan improvised. ‘Cigarette lighter. Turned the flame adjuster the wrong way. Lit a cigarette and whoomph.’

‘Dear me. Shame…Arthur, come along. I want you to meet…’

Morgan clawed his way back to the bar. Obviously he wasn’t going to be able to break the news of his resignation to Fanshawe tonight. He replenished his drink. He noticed Dalmire and Priscilla chatting cosily and the old envy returned to him for a minute. He turned away and saw Georg Muller and his daughter Liesl coming over. Morgan raised his hand in salutation. He knew her well, she came out every year for Xmas.

‘I want to give you a kiss,’ Liesl said flirtatiously, ‘But I don’t want to cause you pain.’

‘Haha,’ Morgan said. He was getting tired of explaining about his face.

‘What happened?’ Muller asked, looking as smart as he ever did in a rumpled green safari suit.

‘Well there was this baby trapped in a burning house and…oh never mind. How are you, Liesl? You look fit.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. On her high heels she was at least three inches taller than him. ‘I wish I could return the compliment. Kinjanja seems not to be agreeing with you.’

‘You’re telling me,’ Morgan said with feeling.

‘The British are out in force tonight,’ Muller observed wryly. ‘You must all be very pleased about the election.’

Morgan shrugged. ‘It all depends on your point of view.’

Muller laughed. ‘You are a sly fellow, Morgan. I haven’t forgotten the last time we met.’ There was an uncomfortable pause. It suddenly struck Morgan that Muller somehow resented him, thought he’d done something clever and underhand with Adekunle and the KNP.

Liesl broke the ice. ‘The new government has its first crisis anyway. I hear the students have occupied the administration block. The riot squad have been called in again.’

‘I was just talking to the Vice-Chancellor,’ Muller said. ‘It has quite spoiled his Christmas.’

‘I know how he feels,’ Morgan said. Just then he saw Adekunle approaching, the guests parting obediently in front of him like the Red Sea before Moses. Morgan felt a tremble start up in his right leg.

‘Georg, my friend,’ Adekunle boomed. ‘Can I steal our bruised and battered Mr Leafy for a moment?’ Muller bowed his acquiescence and Morgan followed Adekunle’s flowing robes across the room and into the hush of his study.

Adekunle carefully placed his bulk on the edge of the desk. ‘Wdl?’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ Morgan found it hard to concentrate. ‘Congratulations on your victory.’

‘Thank you,’ Adekunle said graciously. ‘But I was thinking more about our own agreement. You said that you decided in the end not to put our proposition to Dr Murray.’

‘That’s right,’ Morgan lied, deciding to pacify Adekunle until he’d had a chance to speak to Fanshawe. ‘It was just all wrong. His mood…he just wouldn’t have been amenable. I could sense it instantly.’

Adekunle lit a cigarette. ‘You are sure of that? You said nothing to him? Because we have other plans now. To have to pay Murray would be most inconvenient.’

‘He still intends to give a negative report on the site,’ Morgan said, telling the truth for once. ‘I assume,’ he added.

‘Good.’

Morgan was perplexed. ‘Why good?’

Adekunle looked at him. ‘Let us just say that I have discovered a…a ‘cousin’ in the Senate office. It now becomes simply a matter of misplacing the minutes of the Buildings Works and Sites Committee meeting when Murray vetoes the site.’ He puffed smoke into the air, a smile of satisfaction on his face. ‘A simple, effective, and, as it turns out, a far cheaper method. I am only sorry I could not have arranged it earlier. Saved you some, what shall we say?…heartsearching, some worries perhaps.’ Adekunle tapped ash into a thick-bottomed glass ashtray. Morgan felt like burying it in his head. So Murray’s report would be intercepted. And now Adekunle was Foreign Minister he couldn’t see Murray pressing any effective charges either. A bit of dirt might be stirred up but knowing Kinjanjan politics it wouldn’t make any difference. He felt suddenly sorry for Murray and his lone struggle for ‘fairness’. He was just too small a man. The Adekunles of his world always came out on top.

‘Ah, what about me then?’ he asked in a feebler voice than he had meant.

‘Yes, what about you, Mr Leafy. I think we shall let you, as the saying goes, lie doggo for a while. You are still under a considerable ‘obligation’ to me as I’m sure you will acknowledge. I can foresee some time in the future when you might be able to repay that debt.’

Morgan knew then that his job was finally gone. There had been some faint hope that Adekunle might have let him off, in a post-victory amnesty now that everything had turned out so well for him. He was glad then that he’d decided to resign. He couldn’t linger on as Adekunle’s man in the Commission, not any more. He felt an odd sensation of relief mingle with his general despair. In a way he’d be glad to get the whole farce over and done with — extricate himself from the enfolding net of lies and complicity. You’d better get a move on, you fat bastard, he swore at Adekunle under his breath, because I won’t be around much longer.

The phone on Adekunle’s desk rang. He picked it up. ‘Yes,’ he said sharply. ‘What?…These damn fools!..OK, OK, send them in…This has to be finished tonight, you understand.’ He put the phone down.

‘These students,’ he said. ‘Setting fire to cars, destroying documents. It can’t be permitted.’

‘No, quite,’ Morgan agreed. ‘Disgraceful.’

♦

Morgan looked blearily out of the bathroom window on the first floor trying to see beyond the glare of the floodlights. He had just been sick in the toilet bowl — the result of the two gins, a buck’s fizz, a whisky and a drambuie he had drunk, one after another, on emerging from Adekunle’s study, snatching drinks from passing stewards as if he were challenging some inebriate’s world record. Celebrating the end of his life, he had told himself.

As usually happened after a drink-induced vomit he felt both better and worse. He borrowed a toothbrush and cleaned his teeth. The crowd outside had scarcely grown at all and was still quiet and docile. Hardly a sweeping popular victory, he thought, wondering when Adekunle would be giving his speech. He opened the window and strained his ears: he thought he could make out a distant chanting that seemed to be getting louder — the grass roots support arriving, he assumed.

He left the bathroom and shakily advanced towards the stairhead. He had to go and drink some more, try to blot out the dismal future that lay inevitably ahead of him. Priscilla, Adekunle, Fanshawe, Kingpin, Innocence and Murray: it had all been too much. He had tried, he had fought, but he couldn’t stand the pace any longer. The odds had always been too great: it was time to surrender.

‘Psst, Morgan.’

He looked round in surprise. Celia appeared for an instant in a doorway. She beckoned him into the room. Celia! She closed the door behind him and they kissed. He was glad he’d cleaned his teeth. They stood in a guest bedroom as far as he could make out. Celia had left the light off.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked a little slurringly. ‘I didn’t see you downstairs.’

‘That was what I was going to ask you. You told me to phone you, remember?’ she said in wounded accusation. ‘I kept getting this Yorkshireman who said he didn’t know where you were.’

‘I…I was out of town,’ Morgan said. He stroked her hair and kissed her cheeks. ‘I had something to clear up.’ He pulled her to him. ‘I’ve missed you, Celia,’ he began, but she pushed him away.

‘It’s Sam,’ she said despairingly. ‘I’ve decided. I’m leaving him. You’ve got to help me.’

‘Celia, Celia,’ he complained gently. ‘Don’t start that again. I know he’s a bastard but how can you leave him? What about the boys?’ She had raised this topic of conversation on a couple of occasions before, but he had always managed to stop it before it had gone any further.

‘No, I mean it!’ she said in a shrill whisper. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

He peered nervously at her, a little alarmed at her vehemence: she seemed to be on the verge of cracking up.

‘But I can’t help you, Celia,’ he said patiently. ‘Not any more. I’m not in a position to. I won’t be…’

‘What are you talking about?’ she said irritably. ‘You’re the only person who can. You’re the only one with the authority.’

He felt vaguely flattered at this reference to his masculine resourcefulness. He tried to put his arm round her again but she shrugged it off. ‘Celia, darling,’ he said. ‘You have all my support and my…affection.’ He had almost said love’, but not while she was in this mood. ‘And you’re a very special person to me.’ He gave a bitter chuckle. ‘You’re the best thing that ever happened to me in this bloody country. No,’ he held up his hand with drunken insistence as she tried to interrupt. ‘No. I mean it. I’ve felt closer to you than to anybody. Honestly,’ he said sincerely. ‘That’s what’s so hellish. That’s the only thing that upsets me about leaving, my darling. I don’t want to leave you.’

‘Leaving?’ she gasped. ‘What do you mean, ‘leaving’?’

He tried to smooth down his candy-floss forelock. ‘I’ve got myself into serious trouble,’ he said, still thinking it wise to keep Adekunle out of it. ‘My fault. My stupidity, but it’s very serious. I’d lose my job. So I’m resigning. Tomorrow. I’m going back home.’

Celia gave a stifled cry. ‘But you can’t.’

‘Can’t what my darling?’

‘You can’t resign your job.’

He smiled at her tenderly. ‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I’m in a terrible fix. If you knew, you’d see it was the only way. There’s no alternative.’ In the dark of the room he saw her cheeks streaming with tears. He felt his heart swell. She was loyal: she cared for him.

‘No!’ she said in a mad tearful croak. ‘No. You can’t resign. You can’t,’ she repeated. ‘You can’t, not yet. I need you. I need you for the visa. You’re the only one who can get me the visa.’

‘Visa? What visa?’

She beat at his chest with her small fists. ‘You’ve got to get me a visa for Britain,’ she sobbed, her face contorted with grief and dismay. ‘I’m a Kinjanjan. I have a Kinjanjan passport. I can’t fly home without a visa. You’ve got to get me one. I need a visa to get home and only you can get me one.’ Slowly she fell to her knees on the floor.

Morgan stood there. It was as if everything in his body had stopped moving for a second. Brief suspended animation. His mind flashed back to his early meetings with her. He recalled now, how almost from the first there had been innocent inquiries about his job and responsibilities: the momentary alarm when Dalmire arrived, relief when she found out he was still in control. He let out a long quivering breath as the truth hit him with agonizing force: he had just been a part of her escape plan — an important one, but a part nonetheless. She couldn’t get free access to Britain with her Kinjanjan passport: she needed a visa. So she found somebody who could supply one without her husband knowing.

Morgan looked down at her crying on the floor. Used again Leafy, he said to himself. You bloody fool. He felt angry at his conceit, bitterly furious for convincing himself that there was something special here, something different. It was just like everything else, he said to himself with sad cynicism, exactly the same. But what did it matter to him, really? He was an aristocrat of pain and frustration, a prince of anguish and embarrassment. He moved to the door.

‘I’m sorry, Celia,’ he said. ‘But it’s too late now.’

Out on the landing he wiped his eyes, took a few deep breaths and flung wild knockout punches at some invisible opponent. Funnily enough, he found he didn’t hate or resent Celia. He just felt angry with himself for failing to see the facts. Murray was right: it was the old seeming⁄being trap again, and he fell into it every time. Where was that penetrating insight he prided himself on? he asked. Where’s the gimlet eye that strips away duplicity and pretension, that uncompromising assessor of human motives? He heard a dull roaring in his ears. He leant against the wall and shut his eyes but it didn’t go away. He opened his eyes and it dawned on him that it was coming from outside. He ran to a window and looked out. The crowd seemed suddenly enormous. A dark mass beyond the floodlit garden pressing up against the barbed wire fence and filling the road. They were chanting something rhythmically. He saw a small figure in black leading the shouts with a loudhailer. He listened. He couldn’t believe his ears. ‘FAN-SHAWE,’ the crowd roared. ‘FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE.’

Morgan dashed down the stairs. The guests had spontaneously backed up against the wall furthest away from the demonstration. There was a hum of uneasy discussion, but people were more occupied casting wary glances about them searching for emergency exits, as if in a basement night-club with a notoriously fallible sprinkler-system. The Commission staff stood to one side looking increasingly uncomfortable. Morgan joined them.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘We were just about to go,’ Fanshawe spoke up nervously. ‘Dickie and Pris had to drive down to the capital for their plane.’ He gulped. ‘Peter had brought round the car to the front door. We saw this huge crowd had turned up. We thought they were KNP supporters, but as soon as I stepped out they went mad. Shouting and jeering.’

‘Yer,’Jones chipped in. ‘Like some kind of signal. FAN-SHAWE,FAN-SHAWE.’

‘Thank you, Denzil,’ Fanshawe snapped. ‘We know what they’re saying.’ He turned to Morgan. ‘What’s it all about, Morgan?’ Everybody looked at him.

‘Why are you asking me?’ he protested. ‘I don’t know anything.’ But before another word could be said there was a crash of breaking glass from upstairs and screams from the women guests. There then followed a hail of stones directed at the house. The party broke up in confusion, people running, screaming, crawling under tables, huddling in terrified groups as stones and rocks came flying through the open French windows, thudding and skittering onto the carpet. Chairs and sofas were upturned to form flimsy barricades behind which terrified guests crouched.

Morgan rushed to the front door and opened it an inch. He was in time to see Peter abandon the Commission car and take to his heels. At the top of the drive some thirty yards away Morgan saw a line of Adekunle’s uniformed servants manning the firmly closed gates. And beyond them, clutching a megaphone, the small dark figure of Femi Robinson.

‘UK OUT,’he bellowed verbosely. ‘NO EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE WITH KINJANJAN AUTONOMY.’

Unable to chant this the crowd satisfied themselves with shouts of ‘FAN-SHAWE,FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE.’

A stone thudded into the door. Oh my Christ, Morgan thought, I told him we’d be here. Robinson must have convinced a good few of the demonstrating students that their protests would be more effectively directed at Fanshawe than at the university authorities. It must have seemed a golden opportunity: the conspirators caught celebrating. Morgan felt sick. He looked round and saw the object of the mob’s abuse equally whitefaced with fear.

‘How did they know I was coming here tonight?’ Fanshawe whimpered. ‘Morgan, this is ghastly. You’ve got to do something.’

‘Me?’ There were more wails and screams from the guests as another volley of missiles spattered against the house’s façade. Morgan saw Adekunle and Muller striding towards them.

‘Is this your doing, my friend?’ Adekunle hissed at Morgan.

‘Me?’ Morgan repeated, dumbfounded that he should be so singled out in this way. ‘For God’s sake no!’

‘ADEKUNLE IS A PUPPET OF UK,’ Robinson screamed outside.

‘FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE,’ agreed the crowd.

‘Students,’ Adekunle spat out the word. ‘Phone for the police,’ he ordered an aide.

Muller peered out of the door. ‘That gate is going to go soon,’ he observed calmly. ‘Look. They are burning a Union Jack now.’ Morgan looked over his shoulder and confirmed it.

‘FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE,’ the crowd chanted tirelessly. It was a very chantable name, Morgan thought.

‘My God, what if they break through?’ Fanshawe squeaked in terror to his wife, Jones, Dalmire and Priscilla, who had joined the group in the hall. They all ducked as another window shattered somewhere above them.

‘KNP IS A BRITISH POLITICAL PARTY,’ boomed Robinson’s amplified voice.

‘This is disgraceful, intolerable,’ Adekunle ranted. ‘My house is being destroyed. My reputation ruined. I am meant to be giving a victory speech. There will be journalists and TV here in an hour.’ His words were almost drowned by the thumping beat of FAN-SHAWE, FAN-SHAWE from hundreds of straining throats.

‘It seems to me that it’s only you British they want,’ Muller stated coldly. ‘They’ve no argument with the rest of us here. If you go maybe they’ll leave us alone.’

‘Well!’ Mrs Fanshawe expostulated, her eyes roasting Muller’s thin body.

‘Typical bloody Hun remark,’ yipped Fanshawe from her side.

‘Yer,’ Jones added patriotically. ‘Who won the war boyo, eh? Answer me that if you damn well please.’

‘Daddy, Daddy, what’ll we do?’ Priscilla whined. Dalmire hugged her to him reassuringly.

‘FANSHAWE IS A FASCIST IMPERIALIST CRIMINAL,’ Robinson trumpeted, setting up a blood-curdling yell of accord from the mob.

‘You have to get out!’ Adekunle shouted suddenly. ‘Get out! Get out of my house. I’m ordering you.’ His eyes were wide with panicky alarm.

‘Hold on,’ Morgan countered angrily. ‘We can’tjust wander off. They’ll stone us to death.’ As if to illustrate this point forcefully more stones clattered against the door.

‘I don’t care!’ Adekunle proclaimed. ‘Muller is right. They only want you. Go to your own houses. Fight your battles on your own ground.’

As the saying goes, Morgan thought sarcastically. He thought he’d never seen a more pathetic craven bunch. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’ All heads turned to face him. ‘They want Arthur, right? So let’s give them Arthur.’

‘Leafy!’ Fanshawe squawked, swaying back on his heels. ‘Are you out of your mind? What are you saying, man?’

‘Not you, Arthur,’ he said, a surge of confidence flooding through his body, ‘Me. I’ll go in your place as a decoy. I’ll lead the crowd away and then the rest of you can make your escape.’ There was a sudden silence in the hall as they considered this idea. Morgan wondered what had made him suggest this course of action. Drink, yes. Guilt too. But above all a desire to get out, do something.

‘But how will they know it’s me and not you?’ Fanshawe asked, hope flickering in his eyes.

‘I’ll take the car,’ Morgan said. ‘You lot can take mine, it’s parked back up the road. Head straight for the capital and the High Commission. Dickie and Priscilla can even catch their plane.’ He thrust his car keys into Fanshawe’s hand. ‘And,’ he said in a flash of inspiration, ‘let me change into your suit.

Tell the guards to fling open the gates and I’ll drive out hell-for-leather.’

‘It might work,’ Muller said.

‘Do it!’ Adekunle commanded.

As quickly as they could Morgan and Fanshawe swapped clothes, the females present modestly turning away. Fanshawe’s jacket and trousers fitted Morgan like a second skin; bracing his shoulders back, forcing his chest out, the sleeves stopping in mid-forearm, a two-inch gap of leg visible between his turn-ups and socks.

‘It’s a bit small, isn’t it?’ Mrs Fanshawe said, raising her voice to be heard above the relentless swell and crash of her husband’s name being shouted outside.

‘I’m only after the effect,’ Morgan panted, hastily knotting the bow-tie. ‘They’ll just see someone in black and white dash into the car.’ Adekunle meanwhile gave orders to a servant to inform the guards at the gate of the plan and the man slipped unwillingly out of the front door and sprinted up the drive to pass on the instructions.

‘OK?’ Morgan asked, wanting to be off before second thoughts could catch up with him.

‘We need a moustache,’ Dalmire suggested and Priscilla rummaged in her handbag for an eyebrow pencil. She drew a thin moustache on Morgan’s upper lip.

‘How do I look?’ he asked, and everyone laughed nervously. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. As soon as the crowd break away, get into my car and head off. They may besiege the Commission tomorrow for all we know.’ He stood poised by the door. He felt surprisingly calm. He was glad to be getting out of the house. He was fed up pissing about in this country.

‘Wait,’ Mrs Fanshawe suddenly announced. ‘I’m coming with you. It’ll be far more convincing if we both go. Arthur’s hardly likely to make a dash for it without me.’

‘No, Mummy,’ Priscilla cried.

‘Chloe. I can’t allow it,’ Fanshawe piped up.

‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Fanshawe exclaimed. ‘When you leave here go to the Commission and we’ll try and meet you there. Don’t wait long. If we’re held up go on down to the capital. There are plenty of people I can stay with until things calm down. I’ll be in no danger.’ She would hear of no arguments in opposition. ‘Don’t you agree, Morgan?’ she asked.

‘A brilliant idea,’ Adekunle contributed.

‘Well it’ll certainly be more realistic,’ Morgan admitted. ‘But are you sure…?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’ She said goodbye to her family: Fanshawe like some woebegone derelict in an outsize Salvation Army suit; Dalmire and Priscilla proud and young (Priscilla sniffling a bit but probably glad she wouldn’t miss her ski holiday, Morgan thought). Adekunle and Muller stood behind them — Adekunle fierce and outraged, Muller looking quite unconcerned. Beyond them Morgan saw Celia hunched miserably on the stairs.

Jones slapped him on the back. ‘Good man, Morgan,’ he said. ‘You give ‘em ‘ell.’

With a nod to each other Morgan and Mrs Fanshawe paused briefly at the door then flung it open and dashed down the steps to the car. There was a great shout from the multitudes behind the fence as the objects of their venom appeared and a fresh salvo of stones was launched. Morgan leapt into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, Mrs Fanshawe doing the same beside him almost simultaneously. Peter, thankfully, had left the key in the ignition and Morgan started the engine. Stones pinged off the bodywork of the car. The crowd surged forward against the fence screaming and shouting.

‘Get down,’ Morgan yelled. ‘Here we go!’ He put the car in gear and accelerated up the drive, hunched over the wheel, his hand jammed down on the horn. Taken aback at this sudden blaring charge the crowd at the gate recoiled in terror, unwilling to be mown down. The guards dragged wide the gates and in seconds the large black car thundered through, people flinging themselves madly out of the way. Morgan swung the car fiercely onto the road, all the windows simultaneously shattering as a barrage of sticks, bottles and stones was hurled at this new target. He glimpsed Femi Robinson extricating himself from a bush, brandishing his megaphone in frustrated rage. Elbowing a hole in the fragmented windscreen, Morgan gunned the motor and sped down the road away from Adekunle’s house. On both sides the massed demonstrators pelted the car as it flashed by. A small stone came in through the right window and glanced off Morgan’s head. Reflexively, he swerved the car and it ploughed off the road lurching into the shadowy ditch. Morgan snatched a look back out of the window and saw the mob streaming after him in hot bellowing pursuit, the leaders a mere twenty or thirty yards away. Frantically he changed down, rammed the accelerator to the floor and the car leapt out of the ditch, its rear wheels spinning furiously, sending up great gouts of dust and gravel. Without thinking of where he was going Morgan took the first turning that presented itself, drove until another road branched off, turned down it, took a left, a right, another right. Very soon all sounds of pursuit died away. He motored steadily along the narrow tree-lined campus roads, the panic seeping from his body, bungalows lying sedately on either side, the wind whistling through the shattered windows, cool on his face.

‘I think we made it,’ he said huskily to Mrs Fanshawe.

‘Yes,’ she said in a quiet voice, sitting upright again. ‘Do you…do you think the others will have got away?’

‘I should think so, we caused enough of a distraction. And anyway I think it was clear that their argument was with us…that is, with Arthur.’

‘Poor Arthur,’ Mrs Fanshawe said, putting her hand up to her mouth. ‘He’ll be so terribly upset about all this.’

Morgan made no reply to that. He peered ahead of him.

He had no idea where he was. The residential areas of the campus were a maze of these quiet dark roads. He looked quickly at Mrs Fanshawe. She had hardly spoken, hadn’t screamed or made any kind of a fuss, just sat clinging to her seat. He was impressed. They came to a crossroads and he stopped the car.

‘Any clue which way?’ he asked, turning to face her.

‘Oh Lord, you’ve got blood on your face,’ she said. Morgan touched his forehead above his right eye. His fingertips came away dark and wet.

‘I was hit by a stone,’ he said. ‘Probably looks worse than it is. Just a scratch,’ he added bravely.

‘I think if you turn left here it should take us to the main gate.’

Morgan did as she advised. He noticed the roads were strangely empty. They had seen no other cars and many of the staff houses showed no lights. Everyone battening down the hatches with a campus revolution on their hands, he thought. He heard a heavy rumble of thunder. The promised rain was approaching.

‘Thunder,’ he commented, just wanting to say something. ‘That should damp their spirits a bit.’

They drove round a sharp bend. As they did so the headlights picked out the lone figure of a man standing at the corner of a road junction. Morgan drove past and then slammed his foot on the brakes.

‘Why have you stopped?’ Mrs Fanshawe asked, surprised.

‘That was Murray.’

‘Who?’

‘Murray. Dr Murray. That man standing by the road there.’

‘So what?’

‘I…I’ve got something to tell him. Won’t be a sec.’ Morgan got out of the car and jogged back up the road.

‘Dr Murray,’ he called. ‘Alex. It’s me, Morgan Leafy.’ Murray was standing at the roadside in his usual outfit of grey flannels, white short-sleeved shirt and tie. He looked closely at Morgan in the dark.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ he asked in tones of real astonishment. Morgan realized suddenly what kind of outlandish figure he must cut in his shrunken formal clothes, his scrawled moustache, elastoplast eyebrow and bloodied forehead. He told Murray about the riot outside Adekunle’s house.

‘Mrs Fanshawe and I made our escape,’ he concluded. ‘Drew the mob away, I think.’

‘Quite the hero,’ Murray said drily. ‘I wouldn’t carry on much further up this road though if I were you,’ he went on. ‘There’s a pitched battle going on between the riot police and the students occupying the administrative offices. You’ll run right into the middle of it. Listen.’ Morgan heard above the shrill of the crickets in the grass and hedges a distant shouting and a kind of firework-popping effect.

‘I’m told the riot police are blazing away at anything that moves and there’s tear gas everywhere.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Morgan said. ‘What do we do now?’

‘There’s only one other road out of the campus but it’s miles back in the other direction. I doubt you’ll be able to find it.’

‘What are you doing out anyway?’ Morgan inquired. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Murray said. ‘I’m waiting for my ambulance to come and pick me up. Apparently my clinic’s full of injured students. Broken heads and broken bones. And some gunshot wounds.’

‘Oh.’

‘If you want to stay at my house you’re very welcome. It’s just up the road there.’

‘Thanks,’ Morgan said. ‘But we’ve got to try and reunite Mrs Fanshawe with her family and get them down, to the High Commission. I think we’ll try and skirt round the riot, sneak out of the main gate.’

‘Well, be carefal,’ Murray warned. ‘Those riot squad boys are not the most amenable characters.’

‘We will,’ Morgan said. There was a pause. ‘Look,’ he said a little awkwardly, ‘the reason I stopped was that I wanted to tell you that I’ve decided to resign my job tomorrow. I’ll be leaving soon — so you don’t need to worry about me when you make your report. Just as well,’ he shrugged. ‘You were right. It’s better to face up to it.’ He tried to grin in the darkness but it didn’t really come off. ‘I feel it’s the right thing, you know. This place and me…well, never really got on. I think in a way I’ll actually be quite glad to be shot of it all. So,’ he spread his arms, ‘give Adekunle the works. There’s nothing he can do…you know, that’s going to foul things up for me. I’ve, ah, beaten him to it. Ha ha.’ The hollow laugh died away.

‘I shall,’ Murray said. ‘Don’t worry.’

There was a silence. It seemed to form like a wall between them. There was so much that he suddenly wanted to say to Murray: vaguely articulated ideas, half thought-out notions, old apologies, explanations.

‘One more thing,’ Morgan said. ‘I almost forgot. I found out tonight that Adekunle’s got some chum in the Senate who plans to ‘lose’ your committee’s minutes. I’d take a few copies if I were you.’

‘I will,’ Murray said. ‘Many thanks. They’ll never buy that land from him, don’t worry.’

‘Great,’ Morgan said, patting his pockets like a man searching for matches. ‘Good,’ he noted. ‘Sure we can’t give you a lift somewhere?’

‘No thanks. The ambulance will be here any minute.’

‘Right.’ He looked round. ‘Well,’ he breathed out loudly. How could he say what he felt to Murray? ‘I just wanted to see you…tell you about things.’ He let his eyes rest on Murray’s face but it was too dark for him to distinguish his features clearly. He held out his hand and Murray shook it briefly. He held the dry cool hand for a second. ‘Well, I’ll, ah, see you, Alex. Maybe next week? Perhaps I could look by…before I go. I just wanted to put you in the picture now.’

‘Fine,’ Murray said. ‘Thanks, Morgan. It was good of you.’

Morgan gave a half wave, muttered something indistinct and walked away. Thunder mumbled in the sky overhead. In the car he looked back and saw Murray standing there, saw the faint gleam of his white shirt.

10

‘What shall we do?’ Mrs Fanshawe asked, looking at the line of riot police that effectively cut them off from the main gate and safety. Morgan could think of no reply at the moment so he kept his mouth shut. They were hiding behind a dense bush some fifty yards away from the administration block which looked as if it had been the target for an air strike. Three cars blazed furiously in front of it casting a flickering orange glow over the white walls of the arts theatre, the bookshop and the senate offices. Every visible window had been smashed, makeshift barricades of office furniture blocked walkways and entrances and thousands of sheets of paper blew across the piazza and around the foot of the clock tower. Ahead of them stretched the dual carriageway that led to the main gate and across which now stood a three-deep line of fully equipped riot police who were slowly advancing towards the occupied administrative offices. From the darkness came screams, shouts and cat calls from marauding students who occasionally crept close enough to the regrouping riot police to pelt them with stones and any other missiles that came to hand. The air tingled with dispersing tear gas, making their eyes water and their skin itchy. From time to time an edgy policeman loosed off a warning round into the air.

Morgan thought the atmosphere reminded him of the fateful lull before a battle. Like melodramatic stage effects the thunder grumbled distantly and lightning flickered along the western horizon. It looked as though the centre of the storm was passing Nkongsamba by, but a few fat drops of rain had fallen to add to their discomfort.

After leaving Murray they had driven on up the road going slower and slower as the noise of the tumult ahead increased. They thought about retracing their steps and looking for the back gate, but their ignorance of the route and the prospect ofbumping into frustrated rioters made them decide eventually to abandon the battered car and try to skirt round the trouble, leaving the roads and cutting through several gardens to reach their present position behind the bush. Morgan looked at Mrs Fanshawe. Her pink dress was torn at the hem and looked grubby, the pearls round her neck individually trapped the flames of the burning cars. She showed no signs of flagging yet.

Morgan, however, felt exhausted, the tensions of the drive knotting and cramping every muscle in his body. He felt morose and uncaring too, troubled by his strange meeting with Murray…

‘Morgan,’ Mrs Fanshawe hissed. ‘If those men keep walking in this direction they’re going to stumble right over us.’

‘Oh God. Christ yes, you’re right. What do you want to do, Chloe? Shall we go back to the car? Perhaps we could hide in one of the houses?’

‘Let’s just get out of this lunatic asylum,’ she said. ‘If we cut back into the gardens again,’ she pointed to the gardens of the houses that lined the dual carriageway, ‘surely we can work our way round to the main gate.’

‘Yes,’ he said, complimenting her on her presence of mind. ‘Good idea.’ He felt a sudden compulsion to lie down and go to sleep. He watched the advancing riot police fire half a dozen canisters of tear gas at the besieged administrative offices. Two of them exploded prettily on the piazza sending thick orange-tinted ‘clouds of gas spreading among the trampled flower-beds and ornamental fish-ponds.

‘Morgan!’ Mrs Fanshawe rebuked him. ‘Let’s go, for heaven’s sake!’ He looked up and saw the line of police about thirty yards in front of him, some with round shields, gas masks and long truncheons, some with rifles carried at port arms. An icy douche of raw terror sluicing through his veins, he seized Mrs Fanshawe’s hand and, keeping in a low crouch, they scurried from the shelter of their bush and dashed across a patch of open ground making for the high hedge of the nearest garden.

An immediate shout went up from the police, and from the corner of his eye he caught the muzzle flash of rifles as they were fired. He didn’t hear the sound of the shots, just a curious slapping noise in the air around his head which he half-registered as the effect of bullets passing close by. He gave a heaving sob, straightened up and dragged Mrs Fanshawe on behind him. He heard the pounding of heavy boots as some of the riot squad decided to give chase.

‘Hurry!’ he yelped in panic. ‘They’re coming after us!’

The hedge loomed up in the dark. He didn’t check his pace, merely bent his head down, raised a forearm and charged through. A branch caught him a winding thwack in the chest, but he burst clear and stumbled into the tranquil space of a large garden. Ahead of them lay a dark and securely shuttered house. He heard the noise of more guns firing, a flat undramatic retort and heard bullets thunk into the boles of trees, shred leaves and twigs from the branches. They’re mad, he thought wildly, they’ll shoot at anything, they don’t care.

‘Come on,’ Mrs Fanshawe gasped, already halfway across the garden tottering along awkwardly in her elegant shoes. Morgan started after her, spurred on by the cries of the riot police clubbing their way through the hedge.

They ran through into the next-door garden, past a chicken coop that erupted with startled caws and duckings, on through another hedge, tripping and falling over roots and undulations in the ground. Morgan seized Mrs Fanshawe’s hand again and dragged her on, his heart punching its way through his ribcage, the blood roaring in his ears, stitches buckling both sides, his legs crude instruments of torture.

‘Stop,’ wheezed Mrs Fanshawe. He stopped. They fell to the ground behind a tree, coughing and gasping from the effort. No one seemed to be following them any more. There was a dull explosion and a barrage balloon of flame sailed into the night sky above the administration offices. Another car gone up, Morgan thought; the petrol tank. Or perhaps the riot squad have called in the artillery, he suggested to himself. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

♦

By the time they reached the campus perimeter fence it had started to rain. Not a downpour, just a steady drizzle. Morgan held the barbed wire strands as wide apart as he could but Mrs Fanshawe still tore her dress badly squeezing her bulk through. They crawled up a slope onto the main road. It was like another world. Opposite them was a small village, lantern lights gleaming peacefully in doorways, blue neon over a roadside drinks bar. They sank down on the verge. Mrs Fanshawe removed her shoes. Both heels had snapped off. In the distance behind them came the shouts and poppings as the riot police pressed home their attack.

‘Thank Christ we got out of that,’ Morgan said. A quarter of a mile down the road he saw the lights of the university’s main gate. Several lorries and what looked like an armoured car were parked outside.

‘They were shooting at us, weren’t they?’ Mrs Fanshawe confirmed in an awed voice, massaging her feet.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Morgan admitted, sensing delayed shock about to pounce on him like a wild beast. He got to his feet. He had to keep moving.

‘Let’s get you to the Commission,’ he said, helping Mrs Fanshawe up. They limped across the warm tarmacadam to the roadside kiosk. Behind it stood a youth in a baseball cap, his face bizarrely tinted from the fizzing blue fluorescent strip above his head. On the front of the kiosk was written SISSY’S GO-WELL DRINKOTHEQUE. The boy in the cap looked up in astonishment as Morgan and Mrs Fanshawe appeared out of the darkness.

‘Ow!’ he exclaimed, rubbing his face. ‘Wetin go wrong here? Jesos Chrise!’ He shook his head. Morgan looked at Mrs Fanshawe. The rip in her hem had split up to her thigh, her pink dress was tattered and filthy, and her negotiation of the barbed wire fence had somehow torn a triangular flap from her bodice exposing several square inches of her reinforced nylon long-line bra. Even her normally immovable hair hung in damp tangles over her forehead. She carried a heelless shoe in each hand. Morgan knew all too well what he looked like in his soiled circus-clown outfit. Self-consciously he tried to rub away the pencilled moustache on his upper lip. From the mud huts beyond the roadside bar a few curious faces peered. A small boy ran round the corner of a house and said ‘Oyibo’ but the sound died on his lips as he looked at these strange white people.

‘Good evening,’ Morgan said to the youth. ‘You get car for this village?’

‘You want car?’

‘Yes. I go pay you ten pound if you take us to UK Commission.’

‘Ten poun’?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make you give me money now.’

‘No,’ Morgan said firmly. ‘First you drive us, before I pay.’

The youth left his kiosk and went back to one of the mud huts where a shouted argument ensued. After a few minutes an older man appeared in ragged shorts and a singlet.

‘Good evening, sah,’ he said. ‘My name is Pious. I have a car. I can take you.’ He led them down a muddy stinking lane to where an old black Vauxhall Velox was parked. Morgan got into the back with Mrs Fanshawe. The interior smelt vaguely of animals, as if it had been used for transporting sheep or goats, but he didn’t care any longer.

After several attempts the bronchitic engine finally started and they set out on the journey to the Commission. Again Morgan noted the untypical quietness of the roads.

‘Why are there no cars tonight?’ he asked their driver.

‘Ammy comin’,’ Pious said simply.

‘Army? What do you mean? For the riot at the university?’

Pious shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Plenty Ammy lorries passing tonight. Plenty.’ Morgan sat back. He remembered Robinson’s hints and Friday’s warning about a coup. He gave up. It was conceivable that the population knew something that the politicians didn’t. Anything could happen here, he now realized.

The Commission was dark and unbesieged. The Fanshawes’ house was locked up and empty. There was a note from Fanshawe saying they had seen Morgan and Mrs Fanshawe evade the mob, safely escaped themselves from Adekunle’s house, had left the campus by the back gate and after waiting for an hour had gone on down to the capital. The Joneses, it appeared, were going to put up Mrs Fanshawe in her family’s temporary absence.

‘Well,’ Morgan said, on hearing this, ‘we’d better get you to the Joneses. It seems as though everything went OK.’ He paused. ‘You could stay here if you want. I can go and get the servants…’

‘No,’ Mrs Fanshawe said, re-reading the note. ‘I don’t feel like staying here on my own. But do you think I could clean up a bit at your place first? Perhaps Denzil could come over and collect me.’

‘Sure,’ Morgan said. ‘Fine.’

Pious dropped them at Morgan’s house. Morgan ran in to get the money to pay him off. It was worth every penny. He looked at his watch. Half past eleven. He felt like he’d been on the run for weeks. But, he reasoned with a wry smile, in a way that was true enough. Pious drove off noisily and for a moment or two Morgan stood alone in his driveway, the light rain falling on his head. Small rain, Isaac had called it. For a second he thought he could hear the pop-gun effect of distant shooting. He wondered what was going on: everybody shooting at everybody else tonight. He shivered at the memory. Thunder mumbled and lightning flashed away to the southwest. He smelt the musty attic odour of damp earth and listened to the bats and toads, the creek-creek of the crickets starting up again.

He went back into his house. Mrs Fanshawe stood in the middle of the carpet examining the rents in her dress. She gave a tired laugh when he came in.

‘My God, Morgan,’ she said. ‘What on earth must we look like?’ Morgan smiled. She looked very strange with her small bare feet, her thigh gaping from the slit in the dress, her hair tousled, half her underwear on show; like a survivor from a plane crash. Only the three strings of pearls belonged to the Mrs Fanshawe of earlier in the evening.

‘I feel I should thank you, Morgan,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘For everything you did tonight. You were splendid.’

Morgan bowed his head. ‘Thanks,’ he said, adding awkwardly, ‘you did all right yourself.’

This mutual congratulation made them feel embarrassed and they both scrutinized the weave of the carpet. Morgan moved to the drinks table.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked. ‘Or would you rather have a bath first?’

‘Oh a bath I think,’ she said. ‘Lovely.’ Morgan led her up the corridor and into his bedroom. He showed her the bathroom.

‘There are plenty of towels,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid we can’t rise to a new dress.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she reassured him.

He went back into the sitting room and poured himself a whisky. He sat down in an armchair and took a sip. Outside in the dark the rain pattered gently on the leaves of the trees and dripped into the gutters. He felt tired. He knew the recriminations and problems ahead of him: the resignation, Adekunle’s wrath, the exposure of Celia. Her name made his features tighten as he remembered the scene at the house. What the hell, he thought with sudden generosity. She could have her visa: it didn’t matter to him really. She was just desperate, in a jam: he’d have done the same in her circumstances — or worse. He’d see she got one tomorrow.

He got up and poured himself another whisky. He felt let down and demoralized. Everything he’d done had been in vain, he considered. He hadn’t even held on to his job. He heard the creak of the swing door and Mrs Fanshawe came in. She was wearing his blue towelling dressing-gown and was carrying her dress.

‘Have you got a needle and thread?’ she asked innocently. ‘I’ll try and patch up these tears before I call Denzil.’

Morgan rummaged around in a few drawers and found what she wanted. Mrs Fanshawe sat down and began to sew up the dress. Morgan found the domestic scene strangely unsettling. It reminded him uncomfortably of that hot afternoon in her house, fitting the Father Christmas costume, the day he’d…He excused himself saying he was going to have a shower.

In the bathroom he stripped off his clothes and washed his dusty sweaty body clean beneath the cool water. He bent to pick up the soap from the side of the bath and found it wet and slippy. As he worked up a lather he thought it strange to consider that minutes earlier the soap had followed a similar course over Mrs Fanshawe’s considerable frame. He noticed a sprinkle of talcum powder on the bathroom floor, he saw some black hairs stark against the white enamel of the bath. For some reason he felt a little apprehensive, a ball of air seemed to lodge itself in his throat. He and Mrs Fanshawe had been through a lot together tonight, he told himself. They had shared considerable danger, been shot at…

He pulled on a fresh shirt and a pair of trousers and padded back through to the sitting room. Mrs Fanshawe sat on the sofa, the repaired dress beside her. Her face looked clean, her black hair was combed back from her white forehead, still slightly damp.

‘Have you phoned Denzil yet?’ Morgan asked, an unfamiliar catch in his voice.

‘No,’ she said deliberately, allowing a silence to fall before adding, ‘I’ve decided I’d rather stay here tonight, if that’s fine with you.’

♦

Oh my God, Morgan thought as he unbuttoned his shirt. No God, no. What was he doing? he asked himself hysterically. What did he think he was playing at? Across on the other side of the bed from him Mrs Fanshawe removed her dressing-gown, her eyes never leaving his face, a strange relaxed smile on her lips. Morgan’s gaze was locked on to hers, and he was only dimly aware of the large white body in its sensible underwear, caught an unfocused glimpse of the white breasts tumbling free of the nylon cuirass that supported them, sensed vaguely the stooping pant-removing gesture that revealed momentarily the patch of dark amidst the creamy plains of her thighs, before she slipped into his bed pulling the sheet up to her neck.

Morgan lowered his trousers. After she’d asked if he’d mind her staying, she had risen to her feet and walked over to him.

‘Let’s have a look at that cut on your forehead,’ she commanded, and obediently he lowered his head so she could examine it better, bringing their faces to within a close six inches of each other. Morgan gulped. Suddenly they were kissing, her thin lips pressed to his, her hands running up and down his back. And now she was lying naked in his bed. He eased off his underpants and slid under the sheet to join her. She pulled him close. Hesitantly he allowed his hand to rest on her side, somewhere safe. Her skin felt unbelievably soft and pampered.

She edged closer. He felt the cushiony weight of her breasts flatten between them. She cupped his face with her hands.

‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘We’ve been through too much tonight not to…not to be with each other now.’

He nodded wordlessly. He felt his fear and surprise slowly yielding to arousal. He trickled his fingers across her wide thighs. He remembered suddenly that Priscilla’s pants lay in the drawer of the bedside table. What a peculiar world it was, he thought helplessly, where this sort of fateful irony could occur.

‘Do you remember that day you came to try on the Santa Claus outfit?’ she asked softly.

He nodded again.

‘I’ve been thinking about you since then,’ she said. ‘A lot.’

Surely, Morgan asked himself indignantly, she didn’t think he let it happen on purpose? She must credit him with a seductive technique marginally more refined than…that? As if to prove his point he nuzzled her breasts, touching his lips to a nipple, while she gave an appreciative sigh into his ear.

The phone rang beside the bed.

Morgan looked up. ‘I’d better answer it,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it in the sitting room. It might be…’ They both knew who it might be. He pulled on his dressing-gown and ran down the corridor.

‘Yes?’ he said, picking up the phone.

‘Mr Leafy?’

‘Yes. Speaking.’

‘First Secretary at the Commission?’

‘That’s right.’

‘This is Inspector Gbeho here. Nkongsamba police headquarters.’

‘Hello, Inspector,’ Morgan knotted his dressing-gown cord. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I phoned Mr Fanshawe at the Commission but there was no reply. You are the next senior British official in Nkongsamba according to my records.’

‘That’s correct,’ Morgan said a little impatiently. ‘What’s the trouble exactly?’

‘It’s just a routine call, sir, whenever there is a death. To pass on the information.’

‘A death?’

‘Of a British subject.’

Morgan felt his heart begin to beat faster. He took a deep breath. He shut his eyes, a tremor passing through his body.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

‘A man. A Dr Murray. Dr Alexander Murray. From the university…Hello Mr Leafy. Are you still there?’

‘He’s dead?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How…What happened?’

‘I believe he was transporting injured students to the Ade-mola clinic in the university ambulance. The ambulance skidded and crashed. From the rain on the roads. Dr Murray was killed in the crash.’

‘Anybody else?’

‘No. Some cuts and bruises. Oh yes, the driver broke his leg.’

‘Have you told Murray’s family?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thank you for phoning, Inspector. I’ll be in touch in the morning.’

Morgan gently replaced the phone. Murray was dead. He tried to come to terms with the fact. It was hard. He walked out onto the verandah. Dead. Like Innocence. All sorts of ideas and images crowded into his mind. He covered his face with his hands.

‘Who was it, Morgan?’ Mrs Fanshawe called from the bedroom door. She had wrapped the sheet around her. ‘Was it Arthur?’

‘No. It was the police. Murray’s dead.’ He controlled his voice. ‘Dr Murray.’

‘Dead? That chap we saw tonight?’

‘Yes, that’s the one.’

‘What happened?’

‘Crash. In his ambulance of all things. Something damn bloody silly anyway.’

‘Oh…Are you coming to bed?’

‘Yes. Just give me a second.’

It was still raining, pattering softly on the roof. He stood on the edge of the verandah and looked out into the night. The thunder passed on towards the coast. The sheet lightning flashed over the jungle to the south. Shango was angry. He thought vaguely that he’d have to see Murray’s family and as he did so he felt his throat contract and thicken and tears press for a moment in his eyes. Why Murray? he asked himself in despair. A good man like that: there weren’t many of them around — Kojo, Friday, Murray. Why not Dalmire, why not Fanshawe? Why not me?

‘Morgan,’ Mrs Fanshawe called. ‘Come on, Morgan.’

He turned to go. Adekunle wouldn’t weep, for one. His land was as good as sold now. Murray wouldn’t like that at all, he thought. In fact Murray would expect him to do something about it. And perhaps he would too, now that he had nothing to lose. Perhaps. He thought about it. Innocence could get buried. Celia could have her visa. Maybe Murray deserved his fairness. But what was Morgan Leafy left with?

Very little, he answered himself. Very little. No job and no future. Mrs Fanshawe in the bedroom. And Hazel. Hazel who told him she didn’t want him to leave…but no, he wasn’t sure about Hazel.

He opened the screen door and walked slowly up the passage towards the bedroom and Chloe Fanshawe. He wondered what Murray would think of this. Not much, he was certain. Alive or dead Murray somehow managed to barge his way into his life as persistently as ever. And suddenly he didn’t want particularly to go on with it: two large white bodies heaving and grunting in an absurd parody of love.

He paused at the bedroom door. Chloe Fanshawe lay on the bed, resting on one elbow, the sheet twisted around her large body. She flung it aside.

‘Here you are at last,’ she said. ‘What kept you?’

‘Listen, Chloe,’ Morgan began haltingly. ‘I’ve been…giving things some thought, and I’m not so sure…’

♦

Outside the rain fell softly in the dark, the toads and crickets made their noises and all sorts of insects began to test and spread their wings in anticipation of the rain stopping. The riot was over, the piazza deserted, smoke wisps curled from the burnt-out cars. Elsewhere in the country units of the Kinjanjan army surrounded Government House, took over the radio and TV stations, and began arresting prominent political leaders. Innocence lay in the muddy compound of the servants’ quarters, and Murray lay on a marble slab in the Ademola morgue. The thunder passed on towards the coast and, somewhere, Shango, that mysterious and incomprehensible god, flashed and capered happily above the silent dripping jungle.

EOF