Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  As he walked away, he wondered how long it would be before Vladimir’s body would be discovered. The new box would hold for a good while, he reckoned, before the cardboard began to deliquesce and shred. A week? A month? It didn’t really matter, he knew. The final, generous benefaction that Vladimir had bestowed on him was his total anonymity. Vladimir who? Even Adam didn’t know his last name or what part of the former Soviet Union he had come from. And even if they found him and were able to identify him – oh, yes, that’s him: the missing cardiac patient who had gone on the run from his village’s mercy mission – no one was ever going to connect this sad drug addict’s fatal overdose with Primo Belem, hospital porter at Bethnal & Bow, alive and well.

  Adam walked back to Oystergate Buildings, feeling more calm and confident than he had since this whole crazy affair had begun. Now he had a name, he had a flat, he had a job, he had a passport, he had money, he had a credit card – soon he could acquire a mobile phone … It struck him that now he really could say that Adam Kindred didn’t exist any more – Adam Kindred was redundant, superseded, obsolete. Adam Kindred had truly disappeared, truly gone underground, deep underground. He had a new life and new opportunities before him, now – the future really did belong to Primo Belem.

  37

  CANDY’S FACE WAS A parodic mask, a bad caricature of shock, eyes wide, mouth formed in an ‘O’.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, ’fraid so.’

  ‘The Dog? Never.’

  ‘I can’t explain it either, Candy-babe,’ Jonjo said, trying to look both mystified and hurt. ‘I bent down to put his bowl of Bowser Chunks in front of him and he just snapped – caught me.’ Jonjo was extemporising, attempting to provide a convincing reason as to why his left cheek was covered by a three-inch square of gauze held in place by strips of sticking plaster. He felt a bit guilty blaming The Dog – there was no more placid creature on earth – but it was all he could think of on the spur of the moment. Candy had wandered into the garage as he was loading his golf clubs into the back of the taxi and, on seeing him, had gone into her oh-my-god-what-happened routine.

  ‘He’s never snapped before,’ she said. ‘I mean, I kiss him—’

  ‘Shouldn’t kiss a dog, Cand.’

  ‘Just a little peck on the nose. No, no – something must have triggered it, something must have spooked him. Poor old Jonjo.’ She reached out and ran her hand over his cropped hair and nuzzled up against him, kissing his unplastered cheek. ‘You come round to me tonight – I’ll make you a nice bowl of soup.’

  She kissed him again on the lips and Jonjo flinched, as though in pain. Everything had changed since their intimacy the other night – since their supper à deux and the sex that had followed, as predictable as the postprandial brandy and box of chocolates. She had moved into his life with all the tact of a suspicious social worker, he thought: calling, texting, popping over without warning, buying him presents he didn’t want – clothes, food, drinks, little ornaments.

  ‘Busy tonight, love. Sorry.’ Don’t have it off with your neighbour – he’d remember that in his next life.

  ‘Shall I take The Dog? Where is he? I’ll take him for a walk, give him a right talking to – biting his daddy, well I never.’

  He delivered The Dog to her and drove off to Roding Valley golf course for a calming round. He took a nine at the first hole, five-putted the short par-three second and then shanked his drive off the third tee into the Chigwell sewage works. He walked straight back to the club house, abandoning his round, tense and angry, wondering what had made him think golf was the palliative to the swarming can of worms that was currently masquerading as his life.

  He sat in the members’ bar with a gin and orange, trying to calm down and take stock. His scratched cheek was throbbing as if it were infected. Bitch. Bitching whore bitch. He would have just left her lying there and walked away but he knew she had four fingernails crammed with his skin, blood and DNA – so she had to go in the river.

  He ordered another gin. He should have just stayed at home today, drinking medicinally, that would have helped. But then Candy would still have come round … He took out his score card and wrote down the words ‘KINDRED = JOHN’ in the hope that this might get his brain working. He hadn’t meant to kill the little tart – she would have told him everything in the end – but he’d overreacted, following Sgt. Snell’s rules, when she’d punched and scratched him like that. He just hadn’t thought – it was a reflex – and had given her the old backhanded haymaker (they never see it coming) and she went flying, head first into the brick wall. He thought he’d even heard her neck snap but, whether he did or not, there was no doubt from the funny way she fell limp to the ground and lay there that she was dead, or as good as.

  He had paced about cursing for a while, staunching the blood from the scratches with a tissue, and then strolled casually out to check what was going on riverside – nothing. So he picked her up and held her as if she were an unconscious drunk and walked with her to the embankment wall. He leant her up against it and slapped her face gently, talking to her, making it seem as if he were trying to revive her in case anyone was looking, all the while searching for CCTV. No sign – and there was no one about. The tide was high and ebbing fast, he saw, so he just threw her over the wall into the water and she was gone in a second.

  Jonjo sat on a park bench with Bozzy and a tall thin man he had been introduced to as Mr Quality. They were in a small public square not far from The Shaft – Bozzy had brought Mr Quality there and Jonjo had been obliged to pay him £50 for this ‘consultation’. A few tired young mothers and their wailing toddlers were gathered at the far end and an old bloke was methodically searching the rubbish bins.

  ‘I no go charge you VAT,’ Mr Quality said, pocketing the notes and then he laughed wheezingly to himself as if at a private joke.

  ‘I’m looking for a man named John,’ Jonjo said, keeping his temper. ‘He was staying with a hooker called Mhouse in a flat that belongs to you, I believe. Stayed with her for some weeks.’

  ‘I know Mhouse,’ Mr Quality said. ‘We are good friend.’

  ‘Wonderful – so who is this bloke, John, then?’

  ‘John 1603.’

  ‘Say again?’

  Mr Quality did.

  ‘What does that mean? 1603 is not a surname. It’s a date. A number.’

  ‘This is how Mhouse introduce him me: John 1603.’

  Jonjo looked over at Bozzy for confirmation that Mr Quality was one sandwich short of a picnic.

  Bozzy shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing, man.’

  ‘Then you might as well fuck off’

  Bozzy left as haughtily as he could, offended.

  Jonjo turned back to Mr Quality, who was lighting, as far as Jonjo could tell, a very thin spliff This country had gone to the dogs, and the dogs were welcome to it. He kept his temper.

  ‘What did he look like, this John 1603?’

  ‘A white man like you. Thirty years. Long black hair. Thick black beard.’

  Ah, thick black beard, Jonjo thought – that explained a lot.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘If he no be for Mhouse – I don’t know.’

  Mr Quality ambled off, £50 richer. He deserved a good kicking that one, Jonjo thought, arrogant bastard, laughing at him, smoking weed like that, middle of the day, public park, little kiddies playing on the lawn. Jesus. This place needed hosing out, pest control. He told himself to calm down. John 1603, he said to himself, what does that mean? There must be a clue here somewhere … Why would Kindred choose such a weird name? But as he thought on, he began to feel better and thoughts of local Armageddon receded: he was getting somewhere, he had one more piece of information – bland ‘John’ had turned into intriguing ‘John 1603’. He had a description now, he had met someone who had known Kindred, had seen him very recently, spoken with him. So much for the Metropolitan Police. He felt
he was getting closer, drawing nearer.

  He went back to The Shaft and wandered around the muddy square that Mhouse’s flat overlooked, watching The Shaft’s inhabitants come and go. He climbed the stairs to Flat L and knocked on the door, for form’s sake. He thought he might have another sniff around, see if he’d missed anything, but the door had been fixed: it was locked and firm again. Maybe Mr Quality had a new tenant—

  ‘She’s not there. She’s gone.’

  Jonjo turned to see an old woman in an apron leaning out of the front door of the next flat along. She had no front teeth.

  ‘Sorry, Madam,’ Jonjo said, smiling politely. ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine called John. I believe he lived here.’

  ‘He’s gone too. I think the two of them run off – she’s gone off with him and left the little boy. Disgusting. Immoral.’

  Jonjo approached. ‘Did you know John?’

  The woman bridled. ‘Not “know” exactly. I was what you might say acquainted with him.’

  ‘Somebody told me he called himself John 1603.’

  ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Why would anyone call themselves that?’

  ‘Because he was a member of the church,’ she said with some defiance. ‘Though they’ve both gone and let us down something shocking.’

  Jonjo smiled: he couldn’t believe his luck. What had seemed like a pig of a day was turning into a peach.

  ‘And what church would that be? If I might ask.’

  ‘The Church of John Christ, of course.’

  38

  TYPING ‘ITCH’ INTO HALF a dozen search engines, as he had surfed the Web that morning, had been no help at all. In fact it had been the very opposite of helpful, Ingram thought. Extremely unhelpful was a more accurate description, not to say creepily terrifying. A simple search for a piece of information, for an answer, had swamped him with massive over-information, provided tens of thousands of potential answers. He wished he’d kept away from the infernal computer and simply called Lachlan again and asked his advice – one human being to another. Now he was aware of having, maybe, one of a hundred nasty diseases – some of them flinchingly unpleasant, especially the sexually transmitted ones. He had had no notion that illustrations were so readily available online, either – it was appalling what could become of the diseased human body. He had no idea there were people wandering around with these degrees of purulence, pustulence, rash, swelling, decomposition …

  Too much information – it was the curse of our modern times, most disturbing. But his itches seemed to be increasing – half a dozen biting, burning points of brief excruciation on his body per day, he now reckoned. Easily soothed with a bit of pressure, a quick and vigorous scratch, but with no discernible pattern at all. Head and foot, abdomen and elbow, earlobe and testicle. What was wrong with him? Could this be simple stress – could stress be tormenting him in this way?

  Ingram tried to banish these unpleasant reflections as he prepared himself for his meeting with Burton Keegan. He had asked him to be in his office at 10 o’clock – at 10 past 10 Mrs Prendergast buzzed to say that Mr Keegan had phoned and was running a little late. He finally arrived at 10.40, full of apologies – something to do with his son and the special needs school he was at, the boy having had a hysterical reaction to a new teacher. Ingram was surprised to discover that Keegan had a handicapped child with severe Asperger’s Syndrome and his simmering anger at being kept waiting quickly disappeared.

  Keegan took a seat, coffee and water were ordered and served, chit-chat ensued about the company, the weather, Keegan’s forthcoming trip home to the US, then Ingram moved into attack mode.

  ‘Something’s bothering me, Burton, that’s why I wanted to see you, face to face.’

  ‘I thought there might be an issue.’

  ‘It’s not an “issue”, it’s a simple question and it is this: did you have a meeting with Philip Wang at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of the day he was murdered?’

  Keegan almost managed to disguise his surprise and shock. ‘Yes. I did,’ he said.

  ‘Yet you never told the police or me or anyone. Why?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t important – the meeting was completely routine.’

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’

  Keegan looked at him. ‘I’d forgotten about it.’

  Ingram could see him regaining his composure after the initial stumble. ‘What was the meeting about?’ Ingram asked.

  Keegan cleared his throat. ‘As far as I remember, Philip had been on a tour of all the UK hospitals we’re using for our third-phase clinical trials of Zembla-4. He was delighted with our progress and he just wanted to urge me to bring forward the FDA and MHRA submissions.’

  In every good lie, Ingram thought, there must be an element of truth. That was what they taught spies, wasn’t it? His knowledge of Philip Wang’s visits to the hospitals was no longer ammunition, now that Keegan had referred to them.

  ‘How curious,’ Ingram said. ‘That’s the complete opposite of what Philip told me two days previously.’

  Keegan smiled. ‘I guess he must have changed his mind. He was very upbeat, very adamant that we move quickly.’

  ‘We’ll never know, now, will we?’ Ingram said, thinking that at least he had learnt what all this was about, finally. Keegan and Wang had obviously totally disagreed with each other, diametrically opposed. ‘Strange to think you were the last person to see him hungry.’

  ‘What do you mean – “hungry”?’

  ‘I said “alive”.’

  ‘You said: “the last person to see him hungry”. I’m sorry but I heard you.’

  ‘All right. Slip of the tongue. You were the last person to see him alive.’

  ‘Not so – his killer, Adam Kindred, was the last person to see him alive,’ Keegan said with quiet logic and looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry to break this up, Ingram, but I really have to go.’ He stood.

  ‘The meeting’s not over, Burton. I have more questions.’

  ‘Send me an email. We have very important business today. All this talk about Philip advances nothing.’

  Now Ingram stood up. ‘This isn’t going to be brushed aside—’

  ‘If you’re not happy with anything I suggest you call Alfredo. Thanks for the coffee.’ He walked out of the office.

  Ingram felt a burning itch spring up on his left calf that he banished by rubbing his leg against the sharp glass edge of the coffee table. It must be stress after all.

  39

  BURTON KEEGAN POURED SOME more Scotch into Paul de Freitas’s glass.

  ‘I really shouldn’t,’ de Freitas said, ‘but I think I should.’

  ‘You ready?’

  ‘Let’s go for it.’

  They were in Burton’s office on the top floor of his Notting Hill town house, under the eaves with a good view down dusky Ladbroke Grove. This was where he kept the scrambled phone line. Both men’s wives were downstairs in the kitchen clearing up the remains of supper.

  Burton dialled Alfredo Rilke’s private number, feeling his mouth go dry, and his shoulders tighten. It never became any easier – there was always that element of apprehension, of the unforeseen, when you talked to Alfredo – even after ten years of experience of working with him, working with him closely. He was twenty seconds early from the appointed time to call.

  ‘Burton,’ Rilke said, ‘good to talk to you. How’s the weather in London?’

  ‘Surprisingly good.’ Burton felt his hands begin to sweat – banter was always a bad sign. ‘I’ve got Paul here with me. Can I put you on speaker?’

  ‘Sure. Hi, Paul. How’s the beautiful Mrs de Freitas?’

  ‘She’s excellent. How are you, Alfredo?’

  Too familiar, thought Burton, anxiously.

  ‘I’m still waiting, actually – waiting for news from you guys,’ Rilke said, the tone of his voice changing. Burton made a zip-your-lip sign to de Freitas.

  ‘We have a slight problem with Ingram,�
�� Burton said. ‘He knows about my meeting with Philip Wang on that last day. I think he thinks he’s on to something.’

  There was a long pause from Rilke and Burton began to massage his neck.

  ‘Does he have any idea what was discussed at that meeting?’ Rilke asked.

  ‘No. I told him Philip was delighted, was pressing for accelerated approval from both agencies, US and UK.’

  ‘I want you to be extremely nice to Ingram until this is all over. Got that?’ There was real edge in his voice now. ‘What made him suspicious? Is it something you did?’

  ‘I’m always extremely nice to him,’ Burton said, not answering the question. ‘I just don’t think he likes me.’

  ‘Then make him like you. Apologise, keep him sweet. What’s happening your end?’

  ‘Things are good,’ Burton said. ‘We have our guys talking up Zembla-4 to all the important people. We’re arguing compassionate use.’

  ‘We’re confident we’ll get priority status,’ de Freitas chipped in. ‘Did you see the latest WHO report on asthma? People need Zembla-4. Couldn’t be better timing.’

  Burton was regretting pouring him that extra Scotch – you just didn’t become garrulous with Alfredo Rilke.

  Burton jumped in. ‘We think the compassionate use, accelerated approval principle is unanswerable. Some of those AIDS drugs were approved in months, weeks.’

  ‘What about post-marketing studies?’ Rilke said. ‘Funded by us. You should have all that in place.’

  ‘We have,’ Burton lied. He forgot, very rarely, that Rilke knew more than anyone when it came to pharmaceuticals. He made a note on a pad: ‘post-marketing studies’. He should have thought of that himself. It was obvious – compassionate use, accelerated approval, licensee-funded post-marketing studies. It all fell into place – in theory.