Bite by Nick Louth Read Free Book Online Page A

brickwork and gasping.
    The alley was a short cut through to a main street, and deserted. On one side of the alley a row of quaint restaurants and bars, with overhanging upper floors, bubbled medieval glass, old metal signs and worn staircases leading to cellars. The other side was a series of boarded up buildings, covered in sprayed graffiti. The alley was dotted with dog turds. A couple of battered bicycles were chained to railings at the far end. Neither was pink.
    He walked along the alley and emerged into a main street just as a yellow tram scraped past. It was a shopping street by the looks of it, but on a Sunday morning there were only a few people around and all the stores were closed. Max scrutinised the steady stream of cyclists heading up towards the central station on the left. The thief wasn’t among them.
    Max walked back to the Polo. The trunk was unlocked. He opened it and found Erica’s black laptop case. It was empty. He couldn’t understand why Erica had put the laptop here with her precious paper stored on it. It would have been safer leaving it in the hotel room. He could only pray she had a back up copy hidden somewhere. Max looked over the rest of the car. Nothing else looked to have been taken. Even the CD player was untouched.
    He sat in the driving seat and tried to think. No-one could see into the trunk from outside. Yet the thief, working in broad daylight, preferred to go for that rather than the more obvious target. There was only one answer. She knew exactly what she was looking for. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

    We parked the Land Rover above Sophie to keep her body cool and the flies away until we could get a cotton shroud or plastic sheeting. Many children and a few adults gathered around to pay their respects. A local craftsman brought us a plywood casket that he had decorated himself. He refused to take any money.
    An aircraft eventually arrived at noon, but it wasn’t the Cessna that Tetro-Meyer had chartered. It belonged to a South African mining company. The pilot had flown from Kisangani and he had seen two mondeles, white men, get into Tetro-Meyer’s Cessna. He thought they were flying off in the other direction, to Kinshasa. Jarman was speechless. While he wandered away, head in hands, Georg took the pilot aside. I saw the pilot pocket a wad of money and heard him agree to fly Jarman and his dead wife all the way to Kinshasa. At least Jarman wouldn’t have to bury poor Sophie in the bush.
    The plane lifted off through the heat haze and dwindled to a droning dot over the endless unforgiving forest. If I was Jarman, up there with my dead wife and broken dreams, I would not come back to look after a bunch of monkeys. But everyone says he will. They say he’s the kind of person to say ‘this is what she would have wanted me to do.’
    (Erica’s Diary 1992)

Chapter Eight
    Jack Erskine treated a Sunday like any working day: Penny knocked on his door at five, he’d jogged two miles, taken a shower, eaten a breakfast of fresh fruit and plenty of coffee, ahead of his meeting with the Dutch health minister.
    Originally he had hoped to be in and out of Amsterdam in two days. Pharmstar had agreed to buy Utrecht Laboratories NV for three billion dollars in stock, heads of agreement were signed, the deal announced, everyone was happy. Then the minister, Betsy Dijkstra, had asked to see him. Erskine was philosophical about such things. Ministers liked personal assurances about jobs, and in this case Erskine was happy to wait around to give them. After all, Mrs Dijkstra was tipped to be the next Competition Commissioner for the whole European Union. Anyone who could hold the whip hand over Pharmstar’s future takeover plans needed to be given the full benefit of his charm.
    â€˜You got everything there?’ Erskine looked at Quiggan as he flicked through Mazzio’s files. They were in a conference suite at the Krasnapolsky Hotel and