2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  By coincidence, Bishop Yemi’s sermon that night took as its starting point a text from ‘The Book of John’, Revelation chapter 14, verse 14—‘Use your sickle and reap because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe’—one that he employed as a vehicle for exploring, at great length, some of the merits of globalisation.

  Mrs Darling was serving the food that evening—a surprisingly good Lancashire hot pot—and she greeted him with particular warmth.

  “Lovely to see you, John,” she said. “Bishop Yemi would like a word after supper.”

  What did this mean? Adam wondered, suspiciously, as he took his plate over to the table to join Vladimir, Thrale and Turpin. Turpin had been absent for over a week and was very vague with his replies. He’d been ‘out west’ to see a wife of his in Bristol. It hadn’t been an enjoyable experience—one of his daughters had gone to the bad—and his mood was correspondingly morose and taciturn.

  In strong contrast to Vladimir, who was in a state of high excitement, having finally been provided with his passport, an object that was passed discreetly round the table. Turpin wasn’t interested. It was Italian, Adam saw, and noted that Vladimir’s new name was to be ‘Primo Belem’. The photograph, over-lit, slightly blurry, did look remarkably like Vladimir: the original Primo Belem—the late Primo Belem—also had a shaven head and a goatee, a fact that made them generically identical. All men with shaven heads and goatees look vaguely related, even like brothers, Adam realised.

  Thrale was particularly interested, however, asking if such passports could be had for less than 1,000 euros—Adam could see a plan forming—and Vladimir promised to ask his contact. There was something valedictory and unsettling about this last meal together. Vladimir⁄Primo was about to leave and re-enter the real world as a legitimate member of society. He had found a small one-bedroomed flat on an estate in Stepney; he had been interviewed for a job as a hospital porter; he had opened a bank account and applied for a credit card. He shook hands with everyone as he left, accepting their empty wishes of good luck and responding with equally empty promises that he’d stay in touch.

  But he drew Adam aside before he left and handed him a slip of paper—on it was written his mobile phone number. Adam found this depressing: he wondered if his own circumstances would ever allow him to own and operate a mobile phone again—it was a pang-inducing reminder of how basic and circumscribed his life was.

  “Call me, please, Adam,” Vladimir insisted. “You come to my flat, we smoke some monkey, yeah?”

  “That would be great,” Adam said. “Take care.”

  Their farewells were interrupted by Mrs Darling, who led Adam away up a staircase at the back of the hall to Bishop Yemi’s offices. There, Adam found the bishop wearing a dark three–piece suit and bright amber silk tie, his cornflower-blue shirt sporting a contrasting white collar—the effect was detabilising: he looked like a prosperous, if slightly flash, businessman. In his lapel buttonhole Adam saw a tiny gold pin that said ‘John 2’—the pastor had kept his badge of office.

  “John 1603,” Bishop Yemi said, clasping Adam’s hand in both his. “Sit down, my brother.” Adam sat, noting the river view from the office windows, the tide flowing in and, across the brown water, the prospect of the expensive apartments on Wapping High Street.

  “I have chosen you, John,” Bishop Yemi said. “You are my chosen one.”

  “Me?” Adam said. “What for?”

  Bishop Yemi explained. The Church ofjohn Christ had recently been endowed with charitable status—they were now a registered charity with all the tax benefits that ensued from that. Moreover, they had been awarded a large grant from City Hall’s ‘Outreach for Kids’ programme, sponsored by the Mayor of London himself. The Church ofjohn was opening a creche, a pre-nursery infant school, an office to provide free legal and medical counsel, an agency for fostering the disadvantaged young and, the jewel in the crown, an orphanage in Eltharn for under-twelves.

  “Congratulations,” Adam said. “But what’s this got to do with me?”

  “I need an executive, a right-hand man, someone who knows the church, knows its doctrinal inclination.” Bishop Yemi smiled modestly.

  “No crucifixes,” Adam said.

  “Precisely. Our Lord did not die on a wooden cross. The radiant sun of Patmos is our new logo.”

  “I’m afraid I—”

  “I cannot forsake my pastoral duties entirely.” Bishop Yemi ignored him. “I need someone to represent the church—my proxy—to all these new administrative bodies. And I have chosen you, John 1603.”

  Adam repeated that he was very sorry indeed—hugely flattered, honoured, even—but the answer had to be a reluctant no. He blamed his fragile mental health, the numerous recent breakdowns, and so on. It would be impossible: he would hate to let down the church.

  “Never rush to judgement, John,” Bishop Yemi said, “I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer—it’s my guiding principle in life. Think about it, take your time, my brother. We could be a great team and the rewards—spiritual and financial—will be considerable.” He hugged Adam at the door, warmly.

  “I need intelligence, John, and this you have in copious supply. I have searched among the other brothers and I know you are the one. The starting salary is £25,000 a year. Plus car and expenses, of course.” He smiled. “Use your sickle, John.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Use your sickle and reap because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.”

  That night, when he returned to the flat, Mhouse was waiting up for him. She kissed him on the lips—just a smack—but she never kissed him any more, since that first time she had slid into bed beside him.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Fancy an all-nighter?”

  After they had made love they both felt hungry; Mhouse found some prawn-cocktail-flavoured crisps and Adam opened one of his bottles of wine—a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon. Mhouse sat on the mattress, cross-legged, facing him, munching crisps and drinking wine from the bottle. It was like a midnight feast, Adam thought—then, a second later, the school analogy seemed absurd. There were no naked midnight feasts at school, Adam realised: young women did not sit opposite you, naked, cross-legged, during school midnight feasts.

  He placed his finger on her ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’ tattoo.

  “When did you do that?” he asked.

  She had other, more conventional tattoos: a jagged, two-pronged, lightning bolt on her coccyx; a multi-petalled flower on her left shoulder; a constellation of stars (Orion) on the instep of her right foot. They had been done professionally in tattoo-parlours: ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’ was all her own work.

  “It was when Ly-on was born. Like to show we one person, you know…I did small one on him, on his leg when he was baby. Boy, did he crying. But,” she smiled, radiantly, she believed it, “no one can separate us, now. Never.”

  “Why are you called Mhouse?”

  “My real name is Suri,” she said, spelling it for him slowly. “But I never like being Suri—so many bad things happen to Suri. So I change it.”

  “To Mhouse.”

  “Suri means ‘mouse’ in French language—someone told me.”

  “Of course. But why do you write it like that?”

  “I can write a bit. I can write ‘house’, yeah? I learn that. So,” she smiled. “House—Mhouse. Easy.”

  Adam touched her breasts, kissed them, dragged his knuckles across her nipples, let his fingers trail down her flat stomach.

  “Somebody offered me a job today,” he said. “£25,000 a year, and a car.”

  Mhouse’s laughter was loud and genuine.

  “You a funny one, John,” she said. “You know how to make me laugh.” She put the wine bottle down and pushed him gently, rolling him over on to his back so she could straddle him. She leant forward, twisting her body, letting her breasts touch his lips, his chin, a nipple grazing it, one then the other, and she kissed him, taking his bottom lip between her teeth and biting gently.
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  “I kiss you for free,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Adam said.

  Adam ran his hands down her lean back to cup her tensed buttocks. One hundred pounds to Mhouse, he thought, and a hundred to Mr Quality—worth every begging penny.

  27

  LUIGI HIMSELF PUT THE thick envelope on his desk.

  “Thank you, Luigi,” Ingram said. “I’ll see you at six, as usual.” He was about to open the envelope when he experienced one of these new virulent itches again—this time on the sole of his left foot. He kicked his shoe off. Removed his sock and scratched vigorously. ‘Itch’ was far too inert a word to describe these potent irritations: it was as if someone had inserted a red-hot acupuncture needle beneath the skin and had wiggled it around. Moreover, they seemed to occur anywhere on his body—armpit, neck, finger-joint, buttock—and yet there was no sign of a bite or an incipient rash. Some sort of nerve-ending playing up, he supposed—though he was beginning to worry that they might have some strange connection with his nightly blood-spotting: every two or three mornings his pillow was imprinted with these tiny blood spots coming from somewhere on his face and head. Anyway, the itches had started a week or two after the blood spots—perhaps there was no connection (perhaps this was a natural consequence of ageing—he was no spring chicken, he reminded himself- and, once scratched, these itches went away immediately) but when they fired up they were unignorable.

  He replaced his sock and shoe and returned his attention to Luigi’s package. It contained Philip Wang’s appointment diary. Ingram, acting on a hunch—acting on a need to outflank Keegan and de Freitas—had sent Luigi down to the Oxford Calenture-Deutz laboratory to retrieve it from Wang’s PA. He opened it and started at the beginning of the year, working forward. Nothing very dramatic, the usual daily round of a busy head of a drug development programme, boring meeting after boring meeting, only some of which were directly to do with Zembla-4. Then, as he drew closer to Wang’s last day on earth, the pattern begins to change: a sudden concentration of trips in the last week or ten days—“out of office”—trips made to all four de Vere wings where the clinical trials were taking place, in Aberdeen, Manchester, Southampton and, finally, St Botolph’s in London, the day before he was killed. Turning the page to the last day, Wang’s ultimate day, Ingram saw there was only one appointment: “Burton Keegan, C-D, 3.00 a.m.”

  Ingram closed the diary, thinking hard.

  None of this was out of the ordinary—which was why the police had given it no thought, he supposed—a research immunologist going about his business in an entirely typical way. Unless, that is, you looked at it from a different angle—the Ingram Fryzer angle.

  He asked Mrs Prendergast to connect him with Burton Keegan.

  “Burton, it’s Ingram. Do you have a moment?”

  Burton had.

  “I’ve just been called by the police about Philip Wang, trying to pin down his movements in his last day or two. They seem to think he came into the office the day he was killed. I told them that wasn’t possible—I never saw him in the building, did you?”

  “No…” Keegan kept his voice expressionless.

  “Exactly. Philip always popped in when he was here…So you never saw him, either.”

  “Ah, no. No, I didn’t.”

  “Must be some mistake, then. I’ll let them know. Thanks, Burton.”

  He hung up and went straight to the lift and down to the lobby, trying to seem casual, unhurried. He had the daily security manager bring him the signing-in book for the previous month and flicked back through the pages to the day in question. There it was: the shadowy carbon copy revealing that Philip Wang had signed in at 2.45 and signed out again at 3.53. A few hours later he was brutally murdered.

  Ingram rode the lift back to his office in deep thought. Why had Keegan lied? Of course, Wang could have come to the office and cancelled his Keegan meeting—but then Keegan would have said so, surely? No, everything pointed incontrovertibly to an afternoon meeting with Keegan at three o’clock on the day of Wang’s murder. What had it been about? What had been said? Why hadn’t Philip Wang come to see him?

  “What the hell’s it got to do with me?” Colonel Fryzer said impatiently, as he rearranged—ever so slightly—the vase of peonies, subject of his current still life.

  “Nothing, Pa,” Ingram said, suppressing his own impatience, “I’m just using you as a kind of sounding board…” He decided to try flattery. “Get the benefit of your vast experience of the world.”

  “Flattery doesn’t work on me, Ingram—you should know that by now. I detest it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your number two—what’s-his-name—”

  “Keegan.”

  “Keegan has lied to you. Ergo: he has something to hide. What could your Doctor Wang have said to him in that meeting? What would scare the shit out of Keegan?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What was this Wang chappie working on?”

  “He’d spent the previous four days visiting the various hospitals where the clinical trials for a new drug we’re developing are taking place. Nothing unusual in that. The drug’s about to go for validation—here and in the US.”

  “Is this Keegan involved in this validation process?”

  “Absolutely. Very involved.”

  The Colonel looked balefully at Ingram, then spread his hands. “This is your ghastly world, Ingram, not mine. Think. What could your Wang have said to Keegan that would upset him? There’s your answer.”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  There was a rap on the door and Fortunatus came in. Ingram felt almost shocked to see him.

  “Dad, what’re you doing here?”

  “Came to pick Pa’s brains. What about you?” Ingram kissed his son, who was wearing his usual infantryman-just-returned-from-combat outfit and, he noticed, had shaved his thinning hair to the shortest stubble.

  “I’m taking Gramps to lunch.”

  “I’ll be two seconds,” the Colonel said and disappeared into his bedroom.

  The unoffered invitation hovered in the air, like a rebuke, Ingram thought, wondering if he should boldly suggest that he join them. He felt a strange emotion: three generations of Fryzers in the one small room but he realised neither his son nor his father wanted his company. He felt one of his burning itches start up on the crown of his head. He pressed hard on it with a forefinger.

  “I’d love to join you,” he said, managing a rueful smile. “But I’ve got an exhibition.”

  “You’re going to an exhibition?”

  “No. I mean I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Oh, right.”

  The Colonel reappeared. “You still here, Ingram?”

  28

  SERGEANT DUKE PAUSED AT the door.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do this, Rita. Believe me—”

  “I’ve got no choice, Sarge. Nobody will tell me anything. I can’t just walk away.”

  “That’s exactly what you should do. Things are going on here you don’t understand.”

  “Do you understand?” She confronted him, hands on hips, looking him in the eye, and he seemed to quail slightly.

  “What would you do if you were in my position?” she said, forcefully, not letting him off the hook.

  “It’s not my problem. I’m not meant to understand.”

  He pushed the door to the meeting room open and Rita sensed she had won a small victory. She stepped in and Duke closed the door behind her. She exhaled, thinking—Chief Inspector Lockridge wouldn’t see me in his office. OK. He’s confining me to the meanest meeting room in Chelsea police station. Why?

  The room was almost worthy of some paradigmatic status as ‘ROOM’ in a typological dictionary: a table, two chairs, a battered plastic Venetian blind, a blazing strip light in the ceiling, bare walls. She sat down and waited.

  Lockridge bustled in, after a couple of minutes, some sort of cardboard file in h
is hand that, she knew, had nothing to do with her complaint, but was an indication of the business he had waiting after he had peremptorily dealt with her. They shook hands.

  “Good to see you again,” he said, sitting down, not mentioning her name, then raised his hand as if she was about to interrupt (which she wasn’t). “This is off the record, by the way. I’m only doing this because of your good service here.”

  “I don’t want any favours, sir,” Rita said, bravely. “I’m just looking for some answers.”

  “Fire away,” Lockridge said with his uneven smile. His face looked as though it had been kicked askew in his youth by a horse or a bull, his jaw bent right, making him talk out of the side of his mouth. He was known in the station as ‘Twisted Kisser’. Rita banished this nickname from her mind as she detailed the events of her arrest of the unnamed man at Chelsea Bridge, and outlined the reasons behind her asking for this interview.

  Lockridge sighed: “This was a matter of the highest security. Word came down to us. You stumbled in on something—something even I know nothing about. I was told that this man should go free. These things happen. Particularly in the current climate. Terrorism, insurgency, etcetera.”

  “We’re all on the same side,” Rita said. “Fighting the same fight. Why can’t we share information—even of the most basic sort? If this man had shown me some ID, we might have been able to assist him. Even if he had told me, in so many words, what he was doing, what he was up to—then you and I wouldn’t be sitting in this room, sir.”