2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  5

  OIL OF CLOVES, JONJO CASE reflected: who would ever have guessed, who figured that one out? Picking up the small bottle, he dripped a few beads of oil on to his forefinger and massaged it on and around his damaged tooth—he felt the sharp pain dull, almost instantly. The big filling had fallen out when that cunt, Kindred, had hit him in the side of the head with the briefcase. The other tooth had shot out clean, as if a dentist had pulled it. When he came round fully he saw it there on the cobbles and picked it up and put it in his pocket—evidence.

  Jonjo looked at his face in the mirror. He’d never liked his looks, as such, but Kindred’s briefcase had given them a turn for the worse. His nose wasn’t broken, at least, but it was swollen and he was going to have ear-to-jaw contusions. But what most upset him was the weal caused by some hinge or strengthening bracket of the briefcase that had stamped itself, in the course of the blow, on his right temple. He turned to find a better angle in the mirror. There it was, in the clear shape of an ‘L’, an angry blood-red weal. “L for Loser,” Jonjo thought. It was bound to scab and he would probably be left with a white L-shaped scar there. No. No, that was not on, well out of order: he’d muck it up with a knifepoint, later—disguise it. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life walking around with an L-shaped scar on his forehead—no fucking way, mate.

  He strode to his drinks table, pushing The Dog gently out of his way with his foot. The Dog looked at him, plaintively, as Jonjo searched the crowded bottles for his favourite malt whisky. What had possessed him to take a basset hound puppy off of his sister, he asked himself—taking a slug of whisky straight from the bottle—those big brown eyes, full of accusations? That face in a permanent anxious frown, the preposterously long velvet ears…It wasn’t an animal, it was a toy, something to put on your bedspread, or block draughts coming in under the door. He grimaced as the malt mingled unpleasantly with the powerful taste of cloves in his mouth. Nasty.

  He sighed and looked round his small house—the pain was definitely easing. He had to clear this place up—a week’s dishwashing in the sink and four years’-worth of Yachting Monthly stacked behind the telly. He wondered what Sergeant-Major Snell would say if he could see the Jonjo Case abode. Air turned blue—air turned black, more like. I used to be the smartest soldier in the regiment, Jonjo reminded himself—what went wrong?

  He scooped some clothes off the armchair and sat down. The Dog wandered over and stood there looking at him. He’s hungry, of course, Jonjo realised: what with last night’s shenanigans he hadn’t fed the poor bastard in twenty-four hours. He searched and found, under a sofa cushion, half a pack of digestive biscuits which he scattered on the carpet. The Dog began to munch them up, his big pink tongue slapping them into his mouth.

  Jonjo thought about last night, going backwards and forwards randomly in his mind. Thank Christ he’d found the tooth and the gun quickly, the police were everywhere. Then he thought about Wang, how he’d knocked him about a bit, then got him on the bed, choking him purple with the left hand, breadknife going in deep with the right. Must have missed the heart, somehow—Snell would have tortured him to near-death for that error. Then someone fucking coming in. Out on to the balcony in a jiff, but, all the same, knowing Wang wasn’t dead…Bad, bad, bad. What had gone on while he was out there? he wondered, sadly. Sadly, because he knew he was losing it—two years ago he’d have simply taken out the other guy. Brutal but easy—way more efficient.

  Now this Kindred was alive, not arrested and somewhere out there, in London, according to the newspaper. He gave The Dog a Mars Bar. Jonjo helped himself to a slug of whisky and a few more drops of oil of cloves.

  Kill Wang, make it messy and bring us every file in the place, they had said. He had done that, messed up Wang and his flat and he had all the files in a bin liner in the back of his taxi. They would know by now that things had gone wrong—well wrong—all he had to do was wait for the call.

  Jonjo thought on, diligently: Kindred had gone out the emergency stairs at the back. Jonjo had followed, as soon as he’d stuffed all the files he could find into his bin liner, and the two smoking chefs had confirmed that a young guy in a raincoat, carrying a briefcase, had just left, couple of minutes ago. Long gone then, Jonjo thought, going to his taxi and dumping the bin liner in the back. Then he had pondered for a minute before strolling round to the front of Anne Boleyn House. He took a book of matches out of his pocket—he always carried half a dozen on him, from different venues—and then folded out one match that he lit with his lighter and then dropped the whole matchbook in the half-full litter bin by the entryway. He heard the small hissing whoomph as the matches ignited and when the first waftings of smoke appeared he wandered casually into the lobby. The porter looked up with a false smile.

  “Sorry to bother you, mate,” Jonjo said, “but some kids just set fire to your litter bin.”

  “Bastards!”

  After the porter ran outside, Jonjo swivelled the guest-ledger round. There it was: G 14, visited by Adam Kindred, Grafton Lodge, SW1.

  Outside, the porter had tipped the burning rubbish on to the roadway and was trying to stamp it out.

  “Cheers,”Jonjo said, leaving. “Little rascals, eh?”

  “I’d castrate ‘em.”

  “Gas ‘em.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  Jonjo then drove his taxi to the Grafton Lodge Hotel in Pimlico and parked across the street, directly opposite. A young man in a raincoat with a briefcase…It was a fine evening and there were few raincoat-clad men out and about. However, he had to wait longer than he thought—a couple of hours—before the person he assumed was Kindred appeared. Young, dark-haired, tall, wearing a tie, raincoat, briefcase—but he didn’t go into the hotel, that’s what threw him. The real, authentic Kindred would have gone straight into the hotel, surely? But this man turned down the narrow street that led to the mews behind. Jonjo eased himself out of his cab and followed him discreetly, turning the corner into the mews to see the man staring up at the back windows of the hotel. Was he lost? Was he an estate agent? Was it in fact Kindred at all? There was one easy way to find out so he asked the obvious question.

  His tooth was throbbing again. With the palp of his forefinger he traced the L-shaped weal on his forehead. He hoped they’d ask him to kill Kindred. My pleasure, squire. The phone rang—three times. Then it stopped and rang again. Jonjo picked it up—it was them.

  6

  INGRAM SPREAD THE NEWSPAPER flat as Maria-Rosa hovered with the coffee pot.

  “Just a drop,” Ingram said, his eyes not leaving the page. He was reading about the man who had killed Philip Wang and was both highly intrigued and somewhat astonished. Ingram read on.

  Adam Kindred, 31 (pictured right), was educated at Bristol Cathedral School where he was deputy head boy. He won a scholarship to Bristol University where he studied engineering. Mother died when he was fourteen, one older sister, Emma-Jane, father—Francis Kindred—a long-serving senior aeronautical engineer on the Concorde project…

  Ingram looked again at the picture of the smiling young man. A wedding photo. How did someone like this become a killer? This Kindred then won another scholarship to America—the Clifton-Garth scholarship—to Cal-Tech where he studied for a PhD in applied engineering. Was this a clue? Ingram wondered, suddenly suspicious—the US of A…At Cal-Tech Kindred became part of a team developing minute gyroscopes for NASA. Nothing there about drugs or pharmaceuticals, no apparent involvement in the world of medicine, Ingram reasoned, nothing to suggest an interest in Calenture-Deutz and its business. He read on.

  So, this Kindred fellow acquires his PhD and takes up a post as associate professor at the Marshall McVay University, in Phoenix, Arizona, where he helped design and build the world’s largest cloud chamber at Painted Rock, the Western Campus of Marshall McVay University, in the Mohawk Mountains near Yuma. (What in god’s name was a cloud chamber? he wondered. Ah, something to do with climatology.) Kindred became an associate profe
ssor and received tenure at the Faculty of Climatology and Ecology, Marshall McVay University…

  He skimmed a few lines. MMU was a private institution, 2,000 rich students, over half of them graduates, with a student—faculty ratio of 6:1, founded and endowed by a multi-billionaire who had made his fortune mining bauxite around the world. Ingram sipped the coffee Maria-Rosa had poured, calculating. So, Kindred had been away, living and working in America for eight, nine years, time enough for anyone to suborn him. He listed the four or five obvious rivals in his head, the big drug companies, the ones with vast amounts of money, time and, above all, patience. He should check to see if any of them were involved in this Marshall McVay University—an endowed professorship, a research programme. But it made no sense: why go for an engineer⁄climatologist? They would have wanted a doctor, somebody in the medical world. Why would they recruit an engineer turned climatologist to kill Philip Wang and thereby try to destroy Calenture-Deutz? Ingram read on.

  Kindred married—one Alexa Maybury, 34 (pictured left), a realtor with Maybury-Weiss in Phoenix, Arizona. The marriage ended in divorce some months ago. Kindred resigned his position at the university and returned to London where, on the very day after he had committed the murder, he had been offered the job of senior research fellow in climatology at Imperial College’ (an offer that had been hastily withdrawn, apparently).

  Ingram pushed Maria-Rosa’s cooling coffee away. There was no sense in this—it must be blind chance. Why would this young, successful academic kill Philip Wang and ransack his flat? Was it sexual, perhaps? Drug-fuelled? (Ingram was still vaguely impressed at how many drugs young people consumed today, far more and far more effective than those of his youth.) What clues to the dark, vicious side of Adam Kindred’s personality lay buried in this laudatory, blameless curriculum vitae?

  He looked up. Maria-Rosa was hovering again.

  “Yes, Maria-Rosa?”

  “Luigi, he here. With car.”

  On the way in to Calenture-Deutz, Ingram called Pippa Deere, head of public relations, and asked for the Adam Kindred profile in the newspaper to be copied and circulated to all board members prior to the extraordinary board meeting. Everyone had to know whom they were dealing with—the whole conspiracy clearly had huge and complex ramifications.

  He rode the lift to the Calenture-Deutz floors of the glass tower, feeling—and he was happy to acknowledge the feeling—unusually important and strong. He had summoned all the board members to this extraordinary meeting because he had formulated a plan and wanted to make an important announcement that would have a bearing on the reputation of the company. He bustled around his office for a while making numerous enquiries of his personal assistant, Mrs Prendergast, on the whereabouts and presence of the other board members. Mrs Prendergast was an unsmiling, fifty-something, wholly professional woman. Ingram, after a couple of years, realised he could barely function—in a business sense—without her and consequently she was munificently rewarded with free holidays, stock options, unilateral salary rises. He knew her first name was Edith and thought she had two grown-up male children (photos on desk) but that was about all—and they were ineluctably Mr Fryzer and Mrs Prendergast to each other.

  When she finally told him that everyone was present in the boardroom he slipped down the back stairway to the ‘Chairman’s dining set’ as he fancifully called the small dining room off the boardroom (he had furnished it himself: a decent oak table and ten chairs, a long walnut dresser-base, some nice paintings—a Craxton, a Sutherland, a big vibrant Hoyland) where he planned to have a quick, covert brandy before he addressed the board, just to get his juices flowing. He felt a strange attack of nerves, as if there were some evil premonition about what was happening, what was in the air, not like him at all—a little Dutch Courage was called for—though he excused himself, simultaneously, by the knowledge that it was not every day that one of your closest colleagues is viciously murdered.

  So he was more than a little annoyed to find his brother-in-law already there in the room, in the ‘set’, casually helping himself to a large whisky from the bottles grouped on a silver tray on the walnut dresser-base (under the vibrant Hoyland).

  “Ivo,” Ingram said with a wide false smile. “A little early, no?”

  Ivo Redcastle turned. “No, actually—I’ve been up all night, in a recording studio. I got your message at three a.m. Thanks, Ingram.” He took a large gulp of whisky and topped his glass up again. “If you want me to stay awake this will have to do.”

  It was impossible now for Ingram to pour himself a proper drink so he helped himself, with bad grace, to an apple juice. He glanced at his brother-in-law—downing his second whisky—and noted for the thousandth time that Ivo, for all his silly debaucheries and pretensions, was still an absurdly handsome man. In fact, Ingram thought, there was something faintly creepy about how handsome he was: the thick, longish black hair swept off his forehead to one side, forever flopping down, the straight nose, the full lips, his height, his leanness—he was almost like a cartoon of a handsome man. Thank god he wasn’t intelligent, Ingram thought, gratefully. And at least he had shaved and was wearing a suit and a tie. Everyone had to have a ‘Lord on the Board’—so he’d been advised when starting out in business—and acquiring a brother-in-law that fitted the category seemed both ideal and simple but, as everything with Ivo, Lord Redcastle, there were endless complications. Ingram looked at his watch as Ivo set his glass down—it was not quite 9.30 a.m.

  “I see the dyer’s hand has been at work,” Ingram said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The new lustrous blue-black sheen to your copious hair, Ivo.”

  “Are you implying—insinuating—that I dye my hair?”

  “I’m not ‘implying’ or ‘insinuating’ anything,” Ingram said evenly, “I’m stating. You might as well hang a sign around your neck saying, ‘I DYE MY HAIR’. Men who dye their hair can be spotted at a hundred yards. You, of all people, should know that.”

  Ivo went into what Ingram could only describe as a brief sulk.

  “If you weren’t family,” Ivo said, his voice trembling, “I’d actually punch you in the face. This is my natural hair colour.”

  “You’re forty-seven years old and you’re going grey, just like me. Own up.”

  “Fuck you, Ingram.”

  Mrs Prendergast opened the door to the set.

  “Everyone is ready, Mr Fry⁄er.”

  The meeting went well, initially. The full board was there, executive and non-executive members: Keegan, de Freitas, Vintage, Beastone, Pippa Deere, the three Oxbridge professors, the ex-Tory cabinet minister, the retired senior civil servant, a former director of the Bank of England. They sat soberly and seriously as Ingram made his short speech about the tragedy of Philip Wang’s death and the debt that everyone at Calenture-Deutz owed him. It was only as he moved on to speculate about the future and the new drug that Philip had been working on that the first interruption took place.

  “Zembla-4 is unaffected, Ingram,” Burton Keegan said, raising his hand as an afterthought. “I think everyone should know: nothing of Philip’s work will have gone to waste. The programme continues—full force.”

  Ingram paused, irritated: Keegan should have sensed he wasn’t finished.

  “Well, I’m delighted to hear that, of course. Still, Philip Wang’s contribution to the success—”

  “Actually, Philip had pretty much signed off on phase three, isn’t that correct, Paul?”

  De Freitas responded to Keegan’s cue.

  “Yeah…Effectively. I spoke with Philip two days before the tragedy. We were at the end of the third stage of clinical trials—and he was more than happy with everything. ‘Full steam ahead’, were his precise words, if I recall. He was a happy man.”

  “But he hadn’t actually signed off, as far as I’m aware,” Ingram said.

  One of the professors chipped in (Ingram couldn’t remember his name). “Philip was more than happy—the data wa
s really superb. He told me himself just last week—superb.”

  Now that Ingram had been interrupted so comprehensively a general buzz of conversation grew around the long, glossy table. Ingram leant towards Mrs Prendergast.

  “Remind me of that man’s name, Mrs P.”

  “Professor Goodforth—Green College, Oxford.” She looked at her list. “Professor Sam M. Goodforth.”

  Ingram remembered him now, another new appointee to the board, simultaneous with the arrival of Keegan and de Freitas. Ingram cleared his throat, loudly.

  “Good news, excellent news,” he said, aware of how bland he sounded. “At least Philip’s work will survive.”

  Keegan had the grace to hold his hand up this time.

  “Burton, do go ahead.”

  “Thank you,” Keegan said, smiling politely, “I’d like the board to know that we’re flying Professor Costas Zaphonopolous in to take over the day-to-day supervision of the final stage of the trials before we submit our NDA to the PDA. Our New Drug Application,” he added politely for the benefit of any uncomprehending nonexecutive directors, “to the Food and Drug Administration.” He turned to Ingram. “Costas is Emeritus Professor of Immunology at Baker-Field.”