‘Which is?’
‘They have good taste.’
Toby blew him a kiss.
As steam started to rise from the pan, Toby’s phone pinged with a text. Almost simultaneously, the laptop pinged, signalling an email. The text was from Suzy Driver.
Sent it!
He took the pan off the heat, hurried to the table and clicked to open the attachment. Both of them watched the screen. An image appeared.
Toby.
With his handsome, tanned features and short, salt-and-pepper hair he looked every inch the charmer. Then they heard a cultured, very correct female voice that Toby recognized instantly as Suzy Driver.
‘Hello, Norbert, very nice to talk to you face to face, finally!’
The image of his face became a spider’s web of cracks, then froze. Toby watched, fascinated, as in a staccato voice that was very definitely not his own, with an accent he couldn’t place, the man replied, ‘My darling, you look even more beautiful than in all your photographs. Wow, I must be the luckiest man on the planet!’
‘You look very nice, too,’ she replied.
Animated again, his head moving, his lips formed a smile. Then the screen froze, once more breaking into cracked, jagged segments.
‘I apologize, my love. There seems to be a problem with the internet, I’m having to connect through my mobile phone.’
‘That’s OK, it’s been nice to meet at last!’
Paul stabbed the pause button and turned to Toby. ‘This is not your voice — it’s not you speaking.’
Toby was staring in shock. ‘No, it isn’t.’
For the next twenty minutes, riveted, they watched the conversation, which became increasingly personal and fruity. Throughout, with the image constantly freezing or fragmenting, there had only been a couple of moments of actual lip-sync. In both, Toby Seward — or rather his avatar — had said, very sincerely, ‘I love you’.
The same words he had used to the other ten women he was also flirting with, Suzy added in the accompanying text. Except, she explained, he wasn’t a Norwegian geologist. He was a nineteen-year-old student in Ghana. A ‘Sakawa Boy’. She urged Toby to look up ‘Sakawa Boys’ on the internet.
He googled the name and the two of them spent the next half-hour in complete astonishment.
‘Well,’ Paul said. ‘I’ve heard of conmen, but this is like nothing, ever!’
What they were watching was little short of a university in Ghana for internet scammers. One pupil said, to camera, ‘We are just taking back from the West what belongs to us.’
The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals — which included animal sacrifice — to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud, of which there was a wide variety.
The majority involved preying on vulnerable, unsuspecting targets in the Western world, such as those placing lonely-hearts ads, as well as bank scams on the elderly and just about anyone else. The money they were making was beyond what would have once been these young men’s wildest dreams. Now, on the financial and emotional ruins of lives in the Western world, they were buying mansions for their families, the latest designer clothes, and driving around in flash new Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedes and Ferraris.
‘Unbelievable!’ Toby said.
‘But can you blame them?’ Paul replied.
‘What do you mean? You think it’s OK what they are doing?’
‘I do, actually.’ He lit another cigarette.
‘How can you say that? It’s outrageous.’
‘It’s outrageous how successive European countries raped their nation from the fifteenth century onwards, with England ultimately being the worst offender. This is their payback and good for them!’
‘I can’t believe what you’re saying.’
‘Read your history, darling.’
‘That was governments, not innocent members of the public. How can that possibly justify these horrible scams today?’
‘The British Empire spent five hundred years plundering the world. Is it any wonder it’s such a mess today? Get real. I’m actually finding it quite amusing.’
Toby looked at him. ‘I’m not sure someone who’s just been conned out of their life savings would agree.’
‘Mmmm, maybe not. Some of them are quite fit, though,’ his husband said. ‘Maybe we should have a holiday there?’
‘Do you want a nice dinner tonight?’ Toby said, then pointed at the saucepan. ‘Or do you want me to tip that over your head?’
20
Thursday 27 September
Electric gates opened in front of the Range Rover. Wrought iron, black, with gold spikes, between two pillars topped with stone acorns. The car drove through and up a long tree-lined avenue of a drive designed to impress. It didn’t impress Tooth.
The incline increased sharply as they approached a turreted granite mansion in the style of a French chateau. A vista opened up to the left of the Atlantic Ocean and a lighthouse on a rock at the end of a causeway.
‘Some view!’ the driver said. ‘Got great views everywhere on this island.’
Tooth said nothing.
Mr Barrey, who was his current employer, had summoned him. This was Mr Barrey’s place. Good for him. Mr Barrey was a rich man, with the same kind of taste in showy grandeur as many rich men who had hired him in the past. One day Mr Barrey would have the honour of being one of the richest men in the graveyard of his choice. The showiest mausoleum. Black marble, carved angels and cherubs, that kind of shit. If Mr Barrey annoyed him, he could help speed up that process.
A shaven-headed bodyguard, all in black, with the physique of a walk-in safe and the charm of a mortuary slab, led them inside, followed by the driver. Tooth didn’t care for the suits of armour in the hallway, nor the fine art on the walls, as he was led through the house.
Another bodyguard stood outside double doors, with a bulge in the left breast of his collarless jacket where his piece was. Tooth could have taken it off him in seconds, leaving both this one and his driver lying on the floor with broken spines, but he reminded himself that he needed the shitty money this job was paying — and the temporary refuge Mr Barrey had provided for him in Munich.
The one with the piece spoke to him in a foreign accent he couldn’t place. ‘When I take you inside, you do not look at Mr Barrey. Understand? No one is permitted to look at Mr Barrey. Nor do you look at the men in there with him. You do not look their faces. None of them. Yes?’
‘Kind of them to spare me the sight because they’re all so ugly, is that what you’re saying?’ Tooth retorted.
The man did not react.
But Tooth was only half jesting. He had done his research on his employer, which had not been hard — it never was. Steve Barrey had a badly disfigured face, despite two decades of regular plastic reconstructive surgery. His press release was that it had happened in a helicopter crash, but Tooth knew the truth. It was a revenge sulphuric acid attack by a Romanian lover who had found him in bed with her best friend.
‘So where do I look?’ he questioned.
‘At the floor. If you look up, you dead.’
Tooth bristled. He allowed himself to be frisked by the gorilla guarding the doors, then led through into a room which was dimly lit, with blinds drawn. He heard the doors close behind him. The room smelled of smoke and all he could see, from his peripheral vision, was the tiny red glow of a cigarette in the far distance. He continued looking down, as he was bidden. Anger festered inside him. He thought about lighting up himself, but he needed to keep his hands free.