Michael pushes off the windowsill. He starts for the door, anger stiffening his frame.
“Michael . . .” I stand up and try to catch his arm, but he shakes me off. I’m about to go after him, but Mr. G says, “Let him go. He needs time.” He watches his son’s angry back disappear through the door as I sink slowly back into my chair. “We’ve never talked about Anju . . . but we will. Later.” He closes his eyes. “I thought she would be safe in my home, Tina. I thought all of you would be. I truly did.”
I grip my hands in my lap. “I thought you killed her. I saw you, both of you, in the garden the night before she died. You told her you’d kill her. You were trying to strangle her.”
Greyhill seems to deflate. He rubs a hand across his face. “I thought that might have been you. I-I don’t have an adequate excuse, Christina. She had every right to be angry with me. I’d told her I would stop working with the militia, but I hadn’t. It was too hard to reverse by that time. So when she threatened me, I got angry with her. I didn’t know how to . . .” He sighs.
“So you were trying to hurt her.”
“I would never have done it . . .” he says, his voice full, nearly cracking. “I was angry. I didn’t know how to deal with your mother sometimes. I loved her, but what happened to her out here—it was beyond what any person could possibly be expected to bear. I don’t think she ever really recovered from it. She told me once that dying would have been so much easier. Sometimes she wasn’t herself. She would rave and scream, threaten me, or drift away. That night I became frustrated.”
I have to dig my nails into my palms to keep myself together. I knew those dark places she would retreat to. “That’s no excuse for what you said to her.”
“I know.” He looks at me, his eyes glassy. “I’m not proud of what I said, or how I treated her. Sometimes it feels like it was me who killed her.”
I feel, more than hear, his words, like a tiny knife, cutting away the last abscess of anger I have for him. I feel it slip free from where it’s been lodged inside me. I realize that maybe this was what I had always wanted: not so much Mr. Greyhill’s money or his blood, but an admission of his guilt. Something that would let me put her to rest peacefully. “But it wasn’t you,” I say.
Greyhill’s face darkens. “I should have killed Omoko the day your mother started working for me. But we had been friends once, Omoko and I, and I let him go. At that point I didn’t . . . care for her so much. By the time I understood what he had done to your mother, he was gone. Disappeared. We thought he might have left the continent. He killed her in my home because he wanted to let me know he could still get to me. He hadn’t been seen in years at that point. And all the while he was underground, growing stronger, just biding his time.” He snorts. “He paid off my head of security to get in, the bastard. That guy I did have killed.”
“David Mwika?”
“Waste of bone and breath.”
I wonder if that’s what the payments to First Solutions that Boyboy found were all about. Not payments to Mwika, but payments to have him killed, maybe even by one of his coworkers.
“He opened the mokele-mbembe door for Mr. Omoko,” I say.
Mr. Greyhill frowns. “The what?”
“The secret tunnel that goes to your office.”
“Know about that, do you?”
I lean forward. “But you must have known that’s how he got in and out. How could you not catch him?”
“I didn’t figure that out until it was too late,” Mr. Greyhill says, his face pained. “I was in shock.”
The look on his face says he’s thought long and hard about this, how it all must have happened. Suddenly I see the murderer underneath the polished exterior, the man who realized he’d been betrayed and hired someone to hunt Mwika down in a dirty bar in Congo and kill him. Someone who probably instructed the killer to whisper regards from Mr. Greyhill into Mwika’s dying ear.
“How did you know it was Mr. Omoko who killed Mama?”
“The gun he shot her with—he left it for me. I had given it to him years earlier. It was engraved to him with a Roman numeral two. He hated that name, Number Two. The engraving was supposed to be a little joke.” He chuckles mirthlessly. “No one would have noticed it. It was subtle. It was a message just for me.”
“Number Two,” I say quietly. I can picture the gun in Greyhill’s drawer, the engraving like he said, next to PIETRO BERETTA MADE IN ITALY: a little NO. II in the same script. I slump back. “Why didn’t you kill him after that?”
“I tried. Several times. But by then he had become much more powerful. He had surrounded himself with a small army. Your Goonda friends. He was anticipating it. He was never off guard.”
Greyhill’s right. Mr. Omoko’s bodyguards were always there, like shadows. But I could have got to him if I’d known. The image of his dead face, eyes open wide to the sky, ripples through me, and I shudder. He’s gone, Tina, he’s gone.