2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  Adam grabbed his briefcase and Wang’s file and left the flat rapidly, closing the door behind him with a bang. He looked towards the lifts and then decided against them, turning the corner and striding normally, not running, not unduly fast, towards the green exit light and the fire stairs.

  He descended seven floors of the dimly lit stone stairs without seeing anyone and emerged on to a side street behind Anne Boleyn House beside four towering grey rubbish bins on sturdy rubber wheels. There was a powerful smell of decomposing food that made Adam gag and he spat, squatting down to open his briefcase and slip Wang’s file inside. He looked up to see two young chefs in their white jackets and blue checkerboard trousers lighting up cigarettes in a doorway a few yards off.

  “Stinks, dunnit?” one of them called over with a grin on his face.

  Adam gave them a thumbs-up and headed off, still at what he imagined was an easy saunter, in the opposite direction.

  He wandered Chelsea’s streets for a while, aimlessly, trying to sort things out in his mind, trying to make some sense of what he had witnessed and what had taken place. His head was jangled, a shocking, fractured mosaic of recent images—Wang’s battered face, the hilt of the breadknife, his twitching, tapping hand gesture—but he was not too jangled to realise what he had just done and the consequences of his importunate, natural reactions. He should never have obeyed Wang’s instruction, he now realised. He should never have pulled the knife out, never—he should have simply gone to the telephone and dialled 911—999, rather. Now he had traces of Wang’s blood on his hands and under his fingernails and, even worse, his fingerprints were on the fucking knife itself. But what else could anyone have done in such a situation? another side of his brain yelled at him, in frustrated rage. You had no choice: it was a dying, agonised man’s last request. Wang had practically fitted his fingers around the knife’s hilt, begging him to pull it out, begging him—

  He stopped walking for a second, telling himself to calm down. His face was covered in sweat, his chest was heaving as if he’d just run a mile. He exhaled, noisily, slow down, slow down. Think, think back…He set off again. Had he interrupted Wang’s actual murder? Or was it just some robbery gone hideously wrong? He thought: the door he had heard close as he came in to the flat must have been the perpetrator leaving the bedroom—and the sound of the person re-entering must have been the perpetrator, again—the murderer, again. He must have come in from a balcony, he realised, as he now remembered noting that some of the Boleyn’s higher service flats had narrow balconies. So the man had slipped out when he heard Adam come in and had waited on the balcony and then when he heard Adam leave the bedroom to phone Yes, the police, must call, Adam reminded himself. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, it had been a terrible, foolish mistake to have left, to have run away down the stairs…But if that man had caught him, what then? No—completely understandable, had to get out, had to, fast, or he might be dead himself, now, Jesus…He reached into his jacket for his mobile and saw Wang’s blood now dry on his knuckles. Wash that off, first.

  He wandered into an open space, a kind of wide square giving on to a sports ground and an art gallery, oddly, where small grouped fountains spouted from holes in the paving stones, couples sat around on low walls and a few kids whizzed to and fro on their expensive metal scooters.

  He crouched by a fountain and washed his right hand in the cold water, a wobbling vertical column flowing upward, defying gravity. His right hand was now clean—and now trembling, he saw—he needed a drink, he needed to calm down, give his thoughts some order, then he would call the police: something was nagging at him at the back of his mind, something he had done or not done, and he just needed a little time to think.

  Adam asked directions to Pimlico and set off, once sure of where he should be heading. On his way there he found a pub, reassuringly mediocre—indeed, as if ‘average’ subsumed all its ambitions: an averagely stained patterned carpet, middle-of-the-road muzak playing, three gaming machines pinging and gonging away not too loudly, a shabby-looking blue-collar clientele, a perfectly acceptable number of beers available and unexceptionable pub food on offer—pies, sandwiches and a dish of the day (smearily erased). Adam felt oddly reassured by this pointed decision to settle for the acceptable norm, to strive for nothing higher than the tolerable median. He would remember this place. He ordered a large whisky with ice and a packet of peanuts, took his drink to a table in the corner and began to reflect.

  He felt guilt. Why did he feel guilty—he’d done nothing wrong? Was it because he had run away?…But anyone would have run in his situation, he told himself: the shock, the presence of a killer in the next room…It was an atavistic fear, a sense of illogical responsibility—something every innocent child knows when confronted by serious trouble. It had been the obvious, natural course of action to run out quickly and safely and take stock. He needed a little time, a little space…

  He sipped at his whisky, relishing the alcohol burn in his throat. He chomped peanuts, licking the residual salt from his palm, picking the impacted shards from his teeth with a fingernail. What was bothering him? Was it what Wang had said, his last words? “Whatever you do, don’t—” Don’t what? Don’t take the file? Don’t leave the file? And then he thought of Wang dead and the delayed shock hit him again and he shivered. He went to the bar and ordered more whisky and another bag of peanuts.

  Adam drank his whisky and consumed his peanuts with a velocity and hunger that surprised him, emptying the packet into his cupped palm and tipping the nuts carelessly into his mouth in an almost ape-like way (stray peanuts bouncing off the table top in front of him). The packet was emptied in seconds, crumpled and placed on the table where it cracklingly tried to uncrumple itself for a further few seconds, while Adam picked up and ate the individual peanuts that had escaped his immediate furious appetite. He wondered, as he savoured the salty, waxy peanut taste, if there were a more nutritious or satisfying foodstuff on the planet—sometimes salted peanuts were all that man required.

  He went to the gents’ lavatory, stooping down a narrow, bendy staircase—as though it had aspired to be spiral once but had given up halfway through the transformation—to a pungent basement where beer and urine competed on the olfactory level. As he washed his hands again beneath the unsparing glare of the light above the sinks he saw that his shirt and tie were freckled with tiny dark polka-dots—polka-dots of blood he assumed, Dr Wang’s blood…Adam felt suddenly faint, remembering the scene in Wang’s flat, remembering the withdrawal of the breadknife and the bloody surge that followed it. The delayed shock at what he had done and witnessed returned to him—he would go back to his hotel, he resolved suddenly, change his shirt (keeping this one for evidence) and then call the police. No one would blame him for leaving the crime scene—what with the man, the murderer on the balcony, re-entering. Impossible to remain calm and lucid under these circumstances—no, no, no—no blame attaching, at all.

  He rehearsed his story as he walked back to Pimlico and Grafton Lodge—his modest hotel—pausing a couple of times to check his bearings in these near identical streets of terraced, white-stuccoed houses, and then, once he was sure he was going in the right direction, setting off again with new confidence, happy in the certitude of his decision-making process, pleased that this awful night—the terrible things he had witnessed—would have their proper judicial closure.

  Grafton Lodge consisted of two of these terraced houses knocked together to form a small eighteen-bedroom hotel. Despite the overt pretensions of its name, the owners—Seamus and Donal—had a cursive pink neon sign in a ground-floor window that flashed ‘VACANCIES’ in best B-movie fashion and the front door was badged with logos of international travel agencies, tour groups and hotel guides—a shiny collage of decals, transfers and plastic honoraria. From Vancouver to Osaka, apparently, Grafton Lodge was a home from home.

  To be fair, Adam had no complaints about his small clean room overlooking the mews lane at the back. Everything worked: the T
easmade, the shower, the mini bar, the TV with its ninety-eight channels. Seamus and Donal were charming and helpful and solicitous about his every need, yet, as he turned up the street towards the hotel and saw its pink neon ‘VACANCIES’ sign flashing, he felt a small shudder of dread vibrate through him. He stopped and forced himself to think: it was now well over an hour, nearly two hours, in fact, since he had fled from Anne Boleyn House. However, he had signed his name in the visitors’ register that the porter had proffered to him—Adam Kindred—and had written down Grafton Lodge, SW1, as his home address. That was the huge, catastrophic mistake he had been worried about, that was what had been nagging at him…The last person to visit Philip Wang before his death had obligingly left his name and address in the guest ledger. He felt a sudden nausea, considering the implications of this guileless self-identification as he approached Grafton Lodge. All seemed well—through the decal-encrusted glass door he saw Seamus at the reception desk talking to one of the chambermaids—Branca, he thought she was called—and he could see a few customers in the residents-only lounge bar. Across the street a black cab was parked, its ‘for hire’ light off, its driver dozing at the wheel—no doubt waiting for one of the revelling businessmen in the lounge bar to eventually emerge.

  Adam urged himself onward: go in, go to your room, change your bloodied clothes, call the police and go to a police station—bring the whole horrible business to a proper, decent conclusion. It seemed the only sensible way forward, the only completely normal course of action, so he wondered why he decided to walk down the access lane at the end of the street and try to look up at his window from the mews behind. Something else was nagging at him now, something else he had or had not done, and that act, or non-act, was spooking him. If he could remember what it was and could rationalise about it perhaps he’d feel calmer.

  He stood in the dark mews at the back of Grafton Lodge and looked at the back of the hotel for the window of his room and duly found it: dark, the curtains half-drawn as he had left them that morning for his interview at Imperial College. What world was that, he thought? Everything was still in order, nothing out of the ordinary, at all. He was a fool to be acting so suspic—

  “Adam Kindred?”

  Later, Adam found it hard to explain to himself why he had reacted so violently to hearing his name. Perhaps he was more traumatised than he thought; perhaps the levels of recent stress he had been experiencing had made him a creature of reflex rather than ratiocination. In the event, on hearing this man’s voice so close, uttering his name, he had gripped the handle of his new, solid briefcase and had swung it in a backhanded arc, full force, behind him. The immediate, unseen impact had jarred his entire arm and shoulder. The man made a noise halfway between a sigh and a moan and Adam heard him fall to the ground with a thud and a clatter.

  Adam swivelled round—he now felt a surge of absurd concern: Jesus Christ, what had he done?—and he crouched by the man’s semi-conscious body. The man was moving—just—and blood was flowing from his mouth and nose. The right-angled, heavy brass trim at the bottom corner of Adam’s briefcase had connected with the man’s right temple and in the dim glow of the mews’ streetlighting he could see a clear, red, L-shaped welt already forming there as if placed by a branding iron. The man groaned and stirred and his hands stretched out as if reaching for something. Adam, following the gesture, saw he was trying to take hold of an automatic pistol (with silencer, he realised, a milli-second later) lying on the cobbles beside him.

  Adam stood, fear and alarm now replacing his guilty concern, and then, almost immediately, he heard the approaching yips and yelps of a police car’s siren. But this man, he knew, lying at his feet, was no policeman. The police, as far as he was aware, didn’t issue automatic pistols with silencers to their plain-clothes officers. He tried to stay calm as the logical thought processes made themselves plain—somebody else was also after him, now: this man had been sent to find and kill him. Adam felt a bolus of nausea rise in his throat. He was experiencing pure fear, he realised, like an animal, like a trapped animal. He looked down to see that the man had groggily hauled himself up into a sitting position and was managing to hold himself upright there, swaying uncertainly like a baby, before he spat out a tooth. Adam kicked his gun away, sending it sliding and clattering across the cobbled roadway of the mews and stepped back a few paces. This man wasn’t a policeman but the real police were coming closer—he could hear another siren some streets away in clamorous dissonance with the first. The man was now beginning to crawl erratically across the cobbles towards his gun. All right: this man was looking for him and so were the police—he heard the first car stop outside the hotel and the urgent slam of doors—the night had clearly gone wrong in ways even he couldn’t imagine. He looked round to see that the crawling man had nearly reached his gun and was stretching out an uncertain hand to grab it, as if his vision was defective in some crucial way and he could barely focus. The man keeled over and laboriously righted himself. Adam knew he had to make a decision now, in the next second or two, and with that knowledge came the unwelcome realisation that it would probably be one of the most important decisions of his life. Should he surrender himself to the police—or not? But some unspecified fear in him screamed—NO! NO! RUN! And he knew that his life was about to take a turning he could never reverse—he couldn’t surrender himself, now, he wouldn’t surrender himself: he needed some time. He was terrified, he realised, of how bad circumstances looked for him, terrified of what complicated, disastrous trouble the baleful, awful implications of the story he would tell—the true story—would land him in. So, time was key, time was his only possible friend and ally at this moment. If he had a little time then things could be sorted out in an orderly way. So he made his decision, one of the most important decisions in his life. It wasn’t a question of whether he had chosen the right course of action or the wrong one. He simply had to follow his instincts—he had to be true to himself. He turned and ran away, at a steady pace, up the mews and into the anonymous streets of Pimlico.

  What drew him back to Chelsea, he wondered? Was it the fig tree and his momentary dream of expensive riverside apartments that made him think that this attenuated triangle of waste ground by Chelsea Bridge would provide him with safe haven for twenty-four hours until this crazy night was over? He waited until there were no visible cars on the Embankment and climbed swiftly over the spear-railings and into the triangle. He pushed through the bushes and shrubs away from the bridge and its swooping beads of light outlining its suspension cables. He found a patch of ground between three dense bushes and spread his raincoat flat. He sat on it for a while, arms hugging his knees, emptying his mind, and feeling an irresistible urge to sleep grow through him. He switched off his mobile and lay down, resting his head on his briefcase for a pillow and folded his arms around himself. He didn’t think, for once, didn’t try to analyse and understand, simply letting the images of his day and night flash through his head like a demented slide show. Rest, his body was saying, you’re safe, you’ve bought yourself some precious time, but now you need rest—stop thinking. So he did and he fell asleep.

  2

  RITA NASHE WAS TRYING to explain to Vikram why she so hated cricket, why cricket in any form, ancient or contemporary, was anathema to her, when the call came through. They were parked just off the King’s Road round the corner from a Starbucks where they had managed to grab a couple of coffees before it closed. Rita acknowledged the call—they were on their way to a ‘cocktail party’ in Anne Boleyn House, Sloane Avenue. She jotted down the details in her notebook, then started the car.

  “Cocktail party,” she said to Vikram.

  “Sorry?”

  “Domestic. That’s what we call them in Chelsea.”

  “Cool. I’ll remember that: ‘cocktail party’.”

  She drove easily to Sloane Avenue—no need for lights or siren. A woman had called the station complaining about loud thuds and hangings in the flat above and then small stains appea
ring in her ceiling. She pulled up opposite the entryway and headed for the front lobby, Vikram following some way behind—he seemed to have become stuck in his seat belt—not the most agile of young men. Her mobile rang.

  “Rita, I can’t find my specs.”

  “Dad, I’m working. What about your spares?”

  “I don’t have a fucking spare set, that’s the point. I wouldn’t be calling you if I had.”

  She paused at the front door to let Vikram catch up with her.

  “Have you looked,” she asked her father, her voice full of impromptu speculation, “in the front bulkhead cupboard where we keep the tins?” She could practically hear his brain churning faster.

  “Why,” he said, angrily, “why would they be in the bulkhead cupboard with the tins?…”

  “You left them there once before, I remember.”

  “Did I? Oh…OK, I’ll check.”

  She closed her phone, smiling: she had hidden his spectacles in the front bulkhead cupboard, herself, to punish him for his general rudeness and selfish behaviour. Ninety per cent of the nagging irritants in his life were her responsibility—he had no idea—and he had never noticed how these irritants diminished as his moods became sunnier. He was an intelligent man, she told herself as she and Vikram pushed through the glass doors into the lobby, he really should have figured it out by now.

  At the wide marble counter the porter looked surprised to see two police—a policewoman and a policeman—confronting him and, when told the trivial reason for their presence, couldn’t understand why the complainant (difficult old woman) hadn’t simply called down to the front desk—that’s what he was there for, after all. Rita said there was some mention of stains appearing on the ceiling—she checked her notebook. Flat F 14.

  “What flat’s above F 14?”