Beirut

The smell of death was everywhere. Lynch wrinkled his nose as he adjusted to the darkness inside the house, cautiously picking his way through the rubbish on the floor. He could hear Palmer outside, shaking his head at the man’s clumsiness. The small washroom off the entrance hall had overflowed.
Shit and death.    He walked across the hallway and gingerly opened the door, a black cloud of flies rising. Lynch hurriedly pulled it shut against their buzzing. The next door led to the kitchen: empty cans and water bottles, plastic cups, rotting food and, oddly, a number of dried teabags stuck to the ceiling, flicked up there when they had still been wet, their little yellow and red tags dangling down from the tea-stained strings.
Lynch heard Palmer entering the house, wincing at his raised voice: “Lynch?”
He moved fast, back into the hallway. Palmer stood smoking in his white, open-necked shirt, his jacket slung over his shoulder and a look of disgust on his reddened, sweating face. Lynch grabbed Palmer's fat arm furiously, digging his fingers hard into the younger man’s soft flesh. ‘Shut up, would you?’
Palmer laughed nervously. ‘What, you think they’re still here, do you? You reckon they’re hiding in the bog waiting for us? We wouldn’t have got within a mile of this place if they were still around.’
Lynch let him go and glared at him. ‘Just shut up. And don’t touch anything.’
Palmer, shaken at Lynch’s ferocity, whinnied. ‘Okay. Anything for a quiet life.’
Lynch turned and walked into the living room. The furniture was scattered; the terrazzo-tiled floor was a spattered mess and the sofa’s stuffing had been pulled out in clumps. He searched briefly for the TV remote, gave up and walked over to the set, switching it on with a tissue wrapped around his finger. The sound was almost deafening in the hot, gloomy silence of the villa: urgent Arabic, Hezbollah’s Al Manar channel. He switched it off again. He turned to speak to Palmer, but the Embassy man wasn’t there. Cursing softly, Lynch left the room, following Palmer through the open door from the hallway and catching up with him standing in the bedroom doorway.
‘Christ.’ Said Palmer.
Lynch pushed past him. The stench was richly appalling. The overturned bucket in the corner of the room spilled its solid waste onto the burn-pocked carpet. There were streaks of blood on the walls and something darker, probably more shit, smeared there too. Two eyehooks were set into the wall at the opposite corner to the bucket, a long tangle of dayglo yellow rope coiled on the floor below them. The bed was filthy, the twisted, bloodstained sheets tumbled onto the floor. Lynch noticed a garish melamine plate on a tray, swirls of food dried onto it. No cutlery. The polystyrene cup of water was still half-full.
Lynch flicked the newspaper near the hooks over with his foot: The Beirut Times, 22nd March. Five days old. There was a piece of expensive-looking paper folded on the bed. He grunted, reaching for it, before wheeling around, fury on his face as the sound of Palmer being violently sick filled the room.
The rebuke died on Lynch’s lips as he saw Palmer had opened the cupboard door. Something that had once been human was slumped there. Pulling the paper tissue over his nose and mouth, Lynch pushed past the retching Embassy man and peered into the cupboard. The corpse stank, even through the tissue, its sightless eyes crawling with fat bluebottles. There was blood all over its scalp, dried rivulets across its marble white face. The slashed throat was an obscene second mouth grinning blackly at them.
Palmer left the room and Lynch stood alone, looking down at the body, his mind and heart racing. He felt his stomach rebel and tensed against the impulse. Unlike young Palmer, Lynch had done this before. He bent, patting down the pockets, pushing his fingers against the distended corpse to check for papers. Nothing. He straightened, then went back to the bed and picked up the folded piece of crisp, hand-made laid parchment. Opening it showed the name ‘Paul Stokes’ written carefully in ink on the textured surface.
Lynch had seen those careful notes before, a piece of parchment placed by every murder personally ordered by the great Christian Warlord Raymond Freij. The old man had written hundreds of those notes before cancer had written its own note in delicate tendrils that crushed his wracked body until he could breathe no more.
‘I’m sorry, Lynch. Truly.’ Palmer was standing in the doorway, his face turned away from the cupboard. His voice faltered. ‘I liked Paul. He was a good bloke.’
Gerald Lynch looked down at the corpse of Paul Stokes, journalist and latterly spy and smiled. At least Paul was reunited with Aisha, he thought. At least his suffering finally led him to her. If he were being honest, he didn’t truly believe that for one second. But it was a nice thought for a time like this.
Anger came to Lynch. Mickey must have done this. Michel Freij, the joint head of the biggest defence technology company in the Arab world and Raymond Freij’s son and heir. Like father, like son.
Lynch turned and led the way outside, stooping to breathe in the clean air. Palmer burst out of the house a few seconds later, red-faced and gasping. He spoke between shuddering breaths. ‘So that’s. It is it Lynch? You just walk...walk away now?’
Lynch looked up into the hills around them, the sky above an innocent bright blue above the brown land dotted with gnarled trees, the vegetation greening the dusty foothills. The air smelled of heat, an unseasonably warm Mediterranean spring day.
Breathing easier now, Palmer moved around to face Lynch. ‘Job done, Gerald? Write off your joe and piss off back to your nice, comfy flat in Beirut? What was there to smile about back there? Paul was a fucking human being. He was a good man.’
Lynch looked impassively at Palmer, gauging the younger man’s state of shock. He was mildly surprised to find he didn’t want to punch the idiot. Palmer was crying, the tears welling up in his washed-out cornflower blue eyes as he shook his head. The dark rings and puffiness around them were at odds with his otherwise youthful countenance. Every man has the face he deserves by forty, thought Lynch. Oscar Wilde. At this rate, Palmer will look like a Vietnamese pig.
Lynch handed Palmer a paper handkerchief and watched, contemptuous, as the boy blew his nose.
‘Thanks.’
‘Come on. Time to head back home. The Lebboes can clear this lot up.’
Palmer was wide eyed. ‘Does Paul’s death truly mean nothing to you, Lynch?’
‘Palmer, listen to me. You hearing me?’ Palmer nodded. ‘Good. You’re a fucking idiot.’
Palmer watched Lynch’s departing back, refusing to move. He swayed, supporting himself with a hand against the concrete wall, great dark patches under the arms and down the spine of his linen suit. He pushed away and walked towards the car as he heard the engine starting. He knew that Lynch would quite happily leave without him.
In the dark quiet of the villa, a mouse started to move at the very moment when Gerald Lynch, racing grimly up the dusty track to the Sida Road with Palmer sitting damply beside him, decided to pay Michel Freij a personal visit.

(I finished Beirut last night.)