Dark Places

Part V: The Old World 23. Tribal Council

When the plane lifted off my plan consisted of a vague image of myself and the sixteen other truckers sitting around a green baize table, where I told them what had happened and gave a fiery speech in Laura's memory, and we got up and went en masse to the door, shoulder to shoulder, ready to revenge ourselves on Morgan. Fortunately by the time I landed in Heathrow I had thought things through with greater clarity. For one thing some of us did not live in London. For another I remembered well how impossible it was to get the group of us to agree on something as small as a lunch hour. We were a tribe, not a hive mind. And when you want a tribe to take military action, you don't convene a meeting of every single member. You talk to the hunters.
   I decided on Hallam, Nicole, Steve, and Lawrence. I knew that Hallam and Nicole, as the driver-and-courier couple, had felt responsible for Laura's death. They wouldn't want to be left out. They were also two of the most all-around capable people I knew. Steve was a lovable Australian, but he had a very checkered background: he'd learned his mechanics in prison. He was big and tough and useful, and no stranger to violence, and he and Laura had been great pals. As for Lawrence — well, we'd never been the best of friends, but that was primarily because he and Laura had had that fling early on in the trip. It had ended amicably enough, but I think inside he had taken it hard, and I think that like me he had felt a piece of his heart die with her. And while a great guy he could be a mean, intimidating sonofabitch when it suited him. We had called him "The Terminator" on the truck. Just the man you want on your side.
   None of them got any advance warning. I was in sporadic e-mail contact with all of them, I knew they were all working in London, but I didn't call them in advance to tell them what was going on, or even to tell them that I was coming. It would have felt inappropriate. Something like this had to be told face-to-face. And I didn't want to make up some reason for visiting when the truth was that I wanted to recruit them into hunting down Morgan.
   I got to Heathrow at 9 AM. I'd slept just enough to be dazed and confused and irritable. I took the Tube in to Earl's Court, and read the Guardian on the way. Thankfully it was Saturday and therefore not too crowded. After checking into the nearest hostel I called Hallam and Nicole. It took me three tries as London had once again changed its entire telephone numbering system.
   "Hello," Nicole answered.
   "Nicole," I said. "Hi. It's Paul Wood."
   "Paul! How are you! Where are you? It must be five in the morning over there."
   "I'm in London. Earl's Court tube."
   "Oh, fabulous! When did you get in?"
   "An hour ago."
   "What are you doing here?" She must have heard something in my voice, her tone had dropped from excited to worried.
   "I need to talk to you and Hallam. I was hoping I could come over."
   "Of course. When?"
   "Now. And I'd like you to call Steve and Lawrence and have them come over to your flat today too. Tell them it's important."
   "Steve and Lawrence. All right, I'll sort them out. Can you tell me what this about over the phone?"
   That was Nicole; no surprise, no demurral, just calm acceptance moving straight into action. It was her husband as well. They were one of those perfect couples who must never break up because they give hope to the rest of us in this imperfect world.
   "It's about Laura," I said.
   "Laura," she repeated. "I see. I'll see to it that they're here as soon as they're able. Do you have our address?"
   "I do. I'll be there soon."
   When I arrived Nicole kissed me hello and sat me down in their living room with a cup of tea and a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. She was petite but ferociously fit, with a runner's build and one of the world's warmest smiles.
   "Get you anything else?" she asked.
   "That's good, Nic, thanks."
   "Good flight?"
   "All right."
   She nodded, sat down across from me, and scanned through the morning's Times as I ate and drank. Hallam was in the shower. I looked around their apartment. Decorated with attractive bric-a-brac from around the world, and postered with countless shots of The World's Most Beautiful Places, many of which had Hallam or Nicole or both in the foreground. I recognized some of the backdrops. Hallam playing Spiderman halfway up an overhanging karst spire that jutted from the ocean somewhere near Krabi on the west coast of Thailand. Hallam and Nicole at Tilicho Tal, the world's highest lake, a side trip from the Annapurna Circuit. Nicole in front of the grave of Cecil Rhodes, in Zimbabwe's Matopos Park.
   Hallam came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around him, a bulldog of a man, and he grinned ear-to-ear when he saw me. "Paul mate. Been too long." We shook hands, our tribe's secret handshake, ending with a fingersnap the way the Ghanaians do it.
   "I rang Steve and Lawrence," Nicole said. "they should be here in about an hour. Do you want to wait until we're all assembled?"
   "Probably easier that way," I said.
   "Fair enough," Hallam said. "Watch the telly then? Should be some Champions League highlights from last night."
   I turned on the television as he disappeared into their bedroom to get dressed. Nic and I made small talk to pass the time. I told her about my layoff and she made sympathetic noises. She was working as a travel agent and enjoying it, and they were planning their next trip already, rock climbing in Tunisia. Hallam's contract ended in a couple of months. He had served two years in the Paratroopers before a medical discharge for a detached retina that couldn't be trusted to take the shock of another opened parachute, and now he made a good living as a contract security consultant.
   One of the strong impressions Africa had made on me was that I was completely useless. As were most of the people I knew. Computer programmers, lawyers, accountants, publicists, graphic designers, copywriters — these abstract jobs counted for absolutely nothing in a place where you actually had to fight for your existence. Hallam was quite the opposite. Driver, soldier, mechanic, carpenter, welder, ditch digger, bridge builder, expert rock climber, you name it, he was Mr. Useful. Nicole was more of an abstract thinker and people person, but I remembered days she'd spent covered with grease, helping Steve and Hallam fix the old, fragile truck engine for the umpteenth time.
   We watched Man United rout Anderlecht until finally the doorbell rang and Steve and Lawrence came in together.
   "Bastard found me on the Tube," Lawrence explained. "I'm standing next to this drop-dead blonde, just about to chat her up, and all of a sudden there's this great human mountain in front of me, saying," and he gave us a sarcastic rendition of Steve's thick country Australian accent, "'Lawrence you bloody auld cunt, how are yae?' She couldn't get away from us fast enough."
   Human mountain was a pretty good description. Big, blond, and thickly muscled, with a cheerful grin perpetually spraypainted on his face, Steve McPhee looked like the walking model for some neo-Nazi definition of The Master Race. He was the lead mechanic for some type of car racing team a few notches below Formula One. Lawrence, thin and wiry, with twitchy mannerisms, disapprovingly pursed lips, and the look of a bird of prey, seemed a scrawny refugee next to Steve. He was a loans officer for a bank and claimed to take great pleasure in turning down mortgage applications.
   "And how are you, you bloody old cunt?" Steve asked, shaking my hand, Ghana-style. He kissed Nicole on the cheek and waved hello to Hallam and sat down. Lawrence followed, performing the same greetings.
   "Now what's this all about, a reunion of the Old Colonials Brigade?" Lawrence asked, sitting down. "This room is like a bad joke. Two Kiwis, an Aussie, a Zimbabwean and a Canadian walk into a pub… "
   "It's about Laura," Nicole said quietly, and all the good cheer and bonhomie fled from the room like somebody had turned off a light. They all turned to me.
   "Right," I said, and I felt nervous. Not about what I was going to say, or about talking to them — this didn't count as public speaking, these were my homeys I was talking to — but about what I was going to start. I wished I could feel more confident that there would be a happy ending.
   "Right," I repeated. "Well, there's a long version and a short version. I'll give you the long version in a moment, I've got papers and pictures and, do you have a Net connection here?" I asked, and Nicole nodded yes, "but the short version is this. I found out who murdered Laura. I found out for a fact. It wasn't any Cameroonian. It was Morgan."
   They didn't say anything. I studied their faces. They looked worried, surprised, appalled… but not shocked. No, none of them were shocked to hear the proposition that Morgan Jackson was her killer. I guessed he'd been in the back of everyone's mind all along.
   "You better give us the long version of that now," Hallam said gently.
   "This all started not even a month ago," I said, and didn't really believe it. It felt as if a lifetime had passed since that day. "I was off trekking in Nepal, on the Annapurna Circuit, with this South African guy named Gavin, and we were exploring this abandoned village called Gunsang… "

* * *

   After I finished there was a long silence. My folderful of evidence, pictures and Web printouts and my timeline, was scattered around the table, much-thumbed and read. My audience of four wore stone-serious faces. Only a couple of hours had passed, but I felt as if I had gone on all day, felt as if night had fallen despite the most un-London-esque sunshine that streamed in through the windows.
   "Just a moment," Nicole said, and disappeared into the bedroom.
   "He's back in Leeds," Hallam said thoughtfully. "Morgan is. Got an e-mail from him just yesterday, saying he was back from the trail."
   "I can't believe it," Steve said. "I mean, I believe every word, Paul, never you worry about that, but I just can't believe it, if you get me. He always seemed like a bit of a hard lad, bit of a harder-than-thou chip on his shoulder, eh, but all this shite? He's bloody mentally demented, is what he is."
   Nicole reappeared, a postcard in her hand.
   "Sent us a card from Nepal," she explained. "Where's that picture of that ledger entry… ? Here we go." She compared the two, nodded sadly, passed them around. It didn't take a handwriting expert to see that the same person had written both. I was glad of that extra bit of evidence.
   Nobody said anything for some time.
   "Feel like I'm at a funeral," Hallam said. "What say we continue this conversation down the pub? Don't know about the rest of you but I could do with a pint, and our local just opened."
   Lawrence, who normally loudly seconded any motion that involved beer, didn't say a thing. His face was as set as an iron sculpture.
   "Sensible plan," Steven said.
   We went down the pub. The Pig & Whistle, a genuine old English pub, none of your new well-lit chain pubs serving Thai lunches for this crowd, thank you very much. Hallam bought a packet of Marlboro Lights along with the round and all of us lit up except for Lawrence.
   "Don't usually smoke in England," Nicole said. "Only when we travel."
   "Same," I said.
   "That so? Same for me," Steven said. "Birds of a feather, hey?"
   Hallam cut through the banter and said to me: "What do you have in mind?"
   I didn't want to say it. It sounded so melodramatic, so over-the-top. I hesitated, trying to find the right phrasing.
   Lawrence made it easy for me: "I say we find the bastard and kill him."
   "Easy there," Nicole said, "let's not jump to any conclusions just yet… "
   "Fuck that," Lawrence said. "Sorry, Nic, but no one else is going to do fuck-all, and that son of a whore needs killing. Wish there was something worse. Killing's too good for him."
   "What did you have in mind?" Hallam asked me.
   "Pretty much that," I said quietly.
   "Vigilante justice," Nicole said, skeptically.
   "Tribal justice," I said. "Only kind of justice he might get."
   "Bloody dangerous game to play," Steven said.
   "The most dangerous game," Hallam said, and I half-smiled at the joke.
   "It's no fucking game," Nicole objected. "Let's try and keep a fifty-fifty mix of brains and testosterone here. I don't want to see you lot downing a few too many and going off on some mad mission to Leeds tonight."
   "And what do you want to do, Nic?" Lawrence demanded. "Cut him off your Christmas-card list and wait for Interpol to grow itself some testicles? You want to fucking sit back and do nothing?"
   "Easy, Lawrence," Hallam said gently.
   "It's okay, Hal," Nicole said. "Lawrence. That's not what I'm saying. She was my friend too. I was there when we found her. I'm just saying, whatever we do, we have to be careful and we have to be patient."
   "But the long and the short of it is that he needs killing," Lawrence said. "Do you agree or not?"
   "Lawrence… " Hallam said.
   He had a warning note in his voice that normally would have shut any of the rest of us up in a microsecond but this time Lawrence kept on. "Just let her answer, Hallam. Do you agree he needs killing?"
   "You worried I've turned into some kind of vegetarian pacifist, Lawrence?" She sounded darkly amused. "You needn't worry. But what's done is done and we're not going to get her back. I don't want revenge so much as I want to make sure he doesn't ever do it to anyone else. And if the only way to do that is what you're suggesting… " She shrugged casually. "Then so be it."
   "I can't think of any other way," I said. "And I've tried hard."
   "It's not an easy thing you're proposing," Steven said. "A man like Morgan, he'll be hard to hunt down. Nic's right, we daren't go off half-cocked here. I'm as bloody maddened as you, Lawrence, I reckon we all are. But keep yourself on a leash."
   "I'm doing just that," Lawrence said. "I'm not halfway to Leeds already, am I? I just want to make sure we don't satisfy ourselves with some mealy-mouthed can't-be-arsed compromise like 'let's just alert the media' or some such."
   "Hallam?" I asked. "What do you think?"
   Our de facto leader, always. Would have been from day one even if he wasn't the driver.
   "I'd like to know how we're supposed to get at him," he said. "It's not worth getting one or all of us killed or locked up."
   Nicole nodded her agreement.
   "I reckon Mr. Wood here came with a plan," Steve said. "Didn't you, Woodsie?"
   They all looked at me.
   "As a matter of fact I did," I said. "It's a pretty basic one. Bring him to us. Lure him to Africa. Hoist him on his own modus operandi."
   "Africa?" Nicole asked. "And what makes you think he'll want to go there?"
   "He's a traveler, isn't he?" I asked. "He's gone home because he's out of money, but he doesn't start work up until January. My idea is that we get someone to give him a call and tell him they've got a last-minute cancellation for a week in Morocco, and the whole shebang is prepaid, and it's all his for fifty pounds but he has to leave in three days' time or something. Tell him that they got his name off the Truck Africa mailing list or some such. Only room for one person, so he can't bring a friend. If he has any."
   "That'd work," Steve said. "He'd be on that like bloody flies on Marmite. He'd take out an overdraft if he had to. He loved Morocco."
   "We all did," Nicole said.
   "Laura especially," Lawrence added quietly.
   "Of course I'll pay for his trip," I said. "I've got the almighty American dollar on my side."
   "The mighty British pound is no weak sister," Lawrence said. "I'll split it with you."
   "If we decide to do this," Nicole said, "we'll all split the cost."
   "If?" Lawrence asked, with an edge in his voice again.
   "I'm no weak sister either, Lawrence," she said. "But I'm suggesting, no, I'm telling you that we'll all sleep on this. We'll all go home, get some sleep, and give it some hard fucking thought. And if I sleep on it and the answer is yes, I'll arrange all the travel plans and get a mate of mine at the agency to make the call. That satisfy you?"
   "It does," Lawrence said, apologetic.
   We all drank deeply from our pints and, except for Lawrence, lit up new cigarettes.
   "Tomorrow?" I suggested. "Right here in the pub? Six PM?"
   It was agreed.
   The conversation died down to nothing after that. Hallam and Nicole and Lawrence looked grim. Steve looked his usual cherubic self, but even he was staring off into space, thinking hard. We emptied our pints in silence.
   "Do you want to stay at our place?" Nicole asked me as we got up to leave. "That couch is more comfortable than it looks."
   "That's all right," I said. "I've already checked into a hostel."
   I didn't want my presence to disturb their deliberations. It would be easier for them to think and talk about it if I wasn't there. I didn't want to push them into joining me. On the contrary, I was already beginning to wonder if I had done the right thing by dragging my friends into my vendetta. Steve was right, it was a bloody dangerous game, and any of those who decided to join me could very easily wind up hurt or dead.

* * *

   Laura and I had our first and only fight in the Mount Afi monkey sanctuary near the Nigerian border. And if I'd handled it a little better, if I hadn't kept picking at it like a scab, it all would have been different. She wouldn't have been murdered. People tell you not to blame yourself, but what do you do when it actually was your fault? When you know for a fact that, if you had acted a little bit better, if you had been a little less petty and self-righteous, then a terrible thing would never have happened?
   The monkey sanctuary was a wonderful place. A good thing, too, because the one-hour journey we were promised turned into an all-day marathon. Typical for Africa, and especially Nigeria, which at the time would have made anyone's shortlist of the ten worst countries in the world. Ruled by a brutal kleptocracy, unanimously voted the most corrupt place on earth, hot, dusty, polluted, ugly, overcrowded, a place where nothing worked, where nobody wanted to help anyone else, where even the food was bad. At that time, in Nigeria, one of the world's largest oil producers, you could only buy gasoline on the black market, because the country's entire domestic gasoline output was stolen on its way out of the refineries. It was potentially a rich country but it had been systematically looted for decades and was now rotten to the core.
   The only point in its defense was that most of the roads were marvellous by African standards — other than the checkpoints every few miles where ragged men with guns requested a "dash" before allowing vehicles to pass — but the road to Mount Afi was an exception, a muddy track that forded several thigh-deep rivers on its way up. This was a good thing; it was only because the road was nearly impassable that the Mount Afi rainforest had not yet been destroyed; but it made for a long and difficult day.
   The truck punctured a tire and bogged down on the muddy approach to the second river. At first we weren't too concerned. During our three months of travel the truck we had lost a half-dozen tires and gotten stuck at least fifty times, and we had become experts at getting it on its way again. Dig the tires free, fix the one that was punctured, unhook the sand mats — imagine a pair of flat cheese graters about ten feet long, twice as wide as a truck tire, with holes two inches in diameter — thrust them under the tires to give them traction, and stand back as Steve or Hallam coaxed the truck forward along the sand mats to stability. By now our group formed a well-oiled excavating machine and we could usually get ourselves out of a quagmire within half an hour. But not this time.
   It was fun at first. We had at least gotten stuck at a picturesque site. The river, maybe twenty feet wide and four deep, burbled through thick jungle rich with butterflies, flowers, and brightly coloured birds, where if you stopped and listened you could hear animals rustle through the distant bush. A little trail ran into the jungle and Claude found a pineapple bush just two minutes' walk away. It was rainy season but the sky was blue flecked with harmless little clouds. The best day we'd had in weeks.
   While Lawrence and Morgan and I dug, Michelle slipped and acrobatically fell face-first into the mud while bringing us water, and everyone burst into laughter at her horrified mud-masked expression when she realized Nicole had videotaped the moment. When Rick and Michael and Robbie took over, Chong and Mischtel started an impromptu mud-wrestling match that grew to include a half-dozen of us. Emma and Carmel and Kristin went swimming in the river after their stint of digging. We were relaxed, joking, glad to be out of the thick cloud of smog that chokes every Nigerian city.
   But the deeper we dug, the softer and stickier the mud got. We lowered the tire pressure and tried sand-matting out, but the wheels spun uselessly, serving only to drive the sand mats deeper. It took another ten minutes of digging to extricate them. Morgan and Lawrence and I took over from Chong and Steve and Hallam. Tempers began to fray. A mudfight had developed among the non-diggers, and when Michelle ran from Claude to hide behind Morgan, she got in his way and he snarled "Will you just fuck off and die?"
   "We're trying to fucking work here," Lawrence added, "in case you hadn't fucking noticed."
   Michelle fled. I wanted to say something too. My mood was growing increasingly foul. The people who weren't digging didn't realize how badly the truck was bogged down. My guess was that we would have to winch the truck across the river, which would take all day and leave us groaning with exhaustion, and then on the way back we would somehow have to cross this swamp again.
   Michelle and Claude apologized. We paid them no notice and kept digging. I began to wonder if we were doing any good at all or just helping the truck sink into the mud. The mudfight continued, and Laura threw a big handful that hit me right in the face. A little got into my eye, which began to tear up painfully, and I would only worsen it by rubbing with my mud-soaked hands, so I dropped the shovel and staggered towards the river to wash my eye out. Laura rushed towards me, wearing an expression of abject guilt, apologizing.
   "You want to look where you're fucking throwing?" I said angrily. The first harsh words I had ever sent her way. She reached for my eye but I shrugged her aside and ducked into the river. The water was thick with dirt and it took me some time before I could blink my eye clear of grit.
   "I'm sorry," Laura said. "I'm really sorry. I wasn't aiming at you. I slipped."
   "How about you guys try not throwing mud around at all?" I asked, directing my anger at everyone. I was going to storm back to continue digging, burn my angry energy that way, but Chong had already taken up the shovel I discarded.
   "Relax," Laura soothed. "We'll make lunch. You'll feel better when you eat."
   "I'm sick of this fucking truck," I said. It was a common sentiment. Truck life was draining and often difficult. But I had never meant it more.
   "Come on," Laura said. "Help me get the table out."
   "I'm serious," I said. "I'm not just saying it. I've had enough of this shit."
   I was serious, and she realized it. She looked at me, concerned, obviously trying to work out what to say, how to improve my mood and change my mind back.
   I wasn't in the mood to be placated. I approached Hallam, Nicole and Steve, who had just finished repairing the perforated tire. "This is bullshit," I complained. "We're just digging ourselves deeper. We'll have to fucking winch our way out."
   "It's not looking good," Hallam admitted. "I'm going to give it one more try and then we'll break out the winch."
   "This poor old sheila wasn't meant for hard living," Steve said fondly, patting the side of the truck.
   "We should have traded this piece of shit in for a few Land Rovers three months ago," I muttered.
   Nicole opened her mouth to say something, closed it, and then looked at Laura. "Shall we get lunch going?" she suggested brightly.
   Laura nodded, and they began the routine: unlocking the cages that held fresh water beneath the sides of the truck, extricating canned foods and bread and vegetables from the stores beneath the floorboards, easing the table out from its slot between the cab and body of the truck, and constructing lunch for nineteen, in this case tuna salad and leftover rice from last night. After a little while I started to help. My anger had faded. But my resolve to leave the truck remained strong.
   Rescue came a little later, in the form of the monkey sanctuary's Land Rover followed by a gaggle  of Nigerians on "machines", or motorcycle taxis. We decided to leave the truck where it was, guarded by Hallam and Steve and Nicole, and negotiated rides up the road with our saviours. Half of us got rides on the Land Rover. I got stuck on the back of a "machine." My driver was all of seventeen years old, and first he crossed the river on a bridge made of a single four-by-four, then revved the engine and attacked the steep, rutted, uneven, stony road at terrifying speed. For parts of the journey I had my eyes closed, but in the end we made it alive. And the monkey sanctuary, run by an American woman who had come to Nigeria on a ten-day visa fourteen years ago and had not yet left, was a fantastic place, verdant paradise beneath a deep canopy of rainforest, shockingly and wonderfully green after the crumbling gray concrete and smog of the rest of the country.
   The next morning, after breakfast, I sat in the tent watching Laura pack her toothbrush away, and said: "I meant what I said yesterday."
   "Which thing was that?" she asked without turning around.
   "I want to leave the truck."
   She stopped and turned around. "Paul. I know you were upset. But let it go."
   "It wasn't yesterday's digging," I said. "I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of our lives revolving around food. I'm sick of being the circus everywhere we go. I'm sick of sleeping in tents, I'm sick of cooking for nineteen people every five days, I'm sick of having zero privacy, and I'm sick of having to keep going whenever we go someplace I want to stay and having to stay every time we go somewhere I want to leave. And yeah, I'm sick of digging that fucking truck out of the mud, too."
   "I thought you wanted to cross the Congo. The truck's the only way."
   "I don't think we'll make it. But even if we could…I'd love to cross the Congo, but not on this truck."
   After a pause she said "Are you talking about leaving alone?"
   "What?" I asked, shocked. "No! Definitely not. Together. I want us both to leave. We can fly to Zimbabwe and visit my aunt and uncle. Or to Kenya if you'd rather go there."
   "I'm not going."
   I hadn't expected so flat a rejection.
   After a moment I asked "As simple as that?"
   She looked at me defiantly. "These are our people. You know that. And I'm not leaving them. If you want to go, you can go on your own. But I'm staying. And if you want to stay with me, you're staying too."
   "That's…that's…this is…" I spluttered.
   "What?"
   I didn't know what I was trying to say, so I just looked at her.
   "Is it the lifestyle you hate?" she asked. "Or the people? I know you're not a people person. But I thought you liked everyone."
   "I do," I said. "I know. I mean, you're right, I agree, these are our people. I just can't handle truck life any more."
   "You're going to have to."
I finally worked out what I wanted to say. "I thought our being together was more important than staying with the people around us."
   "They're just as important," she said, very seriously, looking me straight in the eyes. "I'm not saying you're unimportant. You're not. That should be obvious. You're the world to me, Paul. You know that. But these are our people. They matter just as much. To both of us. I just wish you could see that. But until you can I'm not going to let you make this mistake."
   I wish I had listened to her, really listened to her, to what she was trying to say. But I was angry, and I was upset, and I was eager to wallow in self-pity, and what I heard instead was: they're more important to me than you are; and I know you won't leave me; and I'm going to use that to get my way and make you stay.
   ""Fuck this," I said. "I'm going for a walk."
   I stalked out of the tent before she could stop me.