A Darkening Stain Read Online Free

hours’ work plus expenses. There was also the other item. A newspaper cutting from the
Guardian
in Lagos. This is what it said:
    Â 
Yesterday a police autopsy revealed that Gale Strudwick, who was discovered dead in the swimming pool at her home on Victoria Island three days ago, had died of drowning. A police spokesman said: ‘There was a large quantity of alcohol in her system and she had recently eaten a heavy meal. We do not suspect any foul play.’ Friends had described her as ‘severely depressed’ after her husband, Graydon Strudwick, died of renal failure in Akimbola Awoliyi Memorial Hospital in March.
    Â 
    I sank the whisky in my glass and poured another good two inches and socked it back. Then I poured another inch and in the spirit calm thought that must have been one hell of a meal to sink her to the bottom of the pool, and Gale was not a big eater. She wasn’t a depressive either, not about Graydon, anyway.
    Gale Strudwick had been a friend, someone I’d known from my London days who, before she’d confused herself with money, sex and power, I’d liked as well. We’d got ourselves knotted up together in some bad business with Roberto Franconelli and her husband three or four months back. We’d both
witnessed some example-setting from the Italian one night which had left me feeling like never talking again in my life, especially about football. Gale was a drinker and more lippy, more provocative, more aggressive about the money she needed to maintain the five-mile-high lifestyle she craved and which she wasn’t going to get from her dead husband’s estate. The cutting was a warning: Be sweet and you shall continue, be sour and you shall be sucking the mud from the bottom of the lagoon.
    I rammed the money and clipping into my pocket and stared into my glass thinking about Gale—tough, sexy Gale—who’d talked herself a yard too far over the edge.
    Heike breezed in trailing health and efficiency, and I had that feeling of looking up from the complexities of my life to see an aeroplane leaving a chalk mark on a clear blue sky and wanting to be there and out of this.
    â€˜You look whipped,’ she said, dumping her bag on her way into the kitchen. How do women know your mental state just by walking into a room? She came back sipping a beading bottle of Possotomé mineral water, holding a glass of ice cubes.
    â€˜I
was
feeling bullish,’ I said.
    â€˜I like bullish,’ she said, kneeling down, straddling my lap and giving me a big, cool kiss. ‘What happened?’
    â€˜You first. Yours looks better.’
    â€˜I pulled in six hundred thousand marks from that company Wasserklammer today and they only attached strings to half of it so our little Nongovernmental Organization can expand the AIDS project in Porto Novo.’
    â€˜You must be the boss’s blue-eyed girl.’
    â€˜I’ve always been Gerhard’s blue-eyed girl,’ she said, exuding stuff from glands to make stallions whinny.
    â€˜True,’ I said, damping my bitterness.
    â€˜Now he thinks I’m a star.’
    â€˜You don’t want him thinking you’re going to take over. I don’t think his ego could handle it.’
    â€˜The agency’s not
so
far advanced that they think a woman could cut it as a boss in Africa.’
    â€˜But we know they’re wrong.’
    â€˜Are you trying to get round me?’
    â€˜Why would I want to do that?’
    She kissed me again and let me know through some un-crackable eye semaphore that the long empty African evening was going to be full. I asked after Moses, my driver, who was being treated for HIV by Heike’s agency. It was one of our evening rituals, and not a bad one because he was always improving, getting stronger. This time she said I might even have him back behind the wheel in a week’s time.
    I put my hands up underneath her skirt and stroked her thighs. She ran a