2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  Lockridge smiled, patronisingly, Rita thought. “There are some operations that are so secret that…” he said, shrugged, and then left his sentence unfinished.

  “So that’s your answer, sir?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was an ultra-secret security operation. This man I arrested was some kind of security operative.”

  “So to speak, as it were.”

  Rita drew a breath, inwardly, summoning her reserves of self-confidence, trying to quell her nervousness and keep any tremor out of her voice. “Because I’ll have to report this to the Borough Commander,” she said, unaggressively, she hoped. “And if he won’t help me I’ll have to go to the DPS. I arrested a man with two handguns on him. He was freed within twelve hours—no records, no statements, no prints, no DNA samples, as far as I can tell. The DPS will need to know where you stand.”

  Lockridge’s twisted face seemed to contort further. Rage, she presumed.

  “Our meeting is completely off the record,” he said.

  “But I’m afraid you may have to speak to the DPS—on the record. Once I make my complaint.”

  Lockridge stood up and picked up his prop-file. Mr Busy, trying to keep his rage under control.

  “That would be extremely unwise, Constable.” There was a tremor in his voice now as he emphasised her rank.

  “What happened to the weapons, sir?” She didn’t know what made her ask this. It was the first time she had thought about them.

  Lockridge looked at her—suddenly very uncomfortable.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did they go to Forensics? They might help us.”

  “We’re not looking for help. You don’t seem to have grasped that fact.”

  He hadn’t answered her question. She knew she was beginning to anger him beyond countenance.

  “Did they go to Amelia Street, sir? His two automatic pistols? Or did we let him take his guns away when we released him?” This was her killer blow, she knew. “We didn’t just give them back to him, did we, sir?…”

  “Where are you now, Constable Nashe? Since you left us?”

  “The MSU, sir.”

  “Lucky for you. And I’m sure they’ll be the first to tell you—don’t rock the boat. Excellent advice—I would take it.”

  He left the room at the same brisk pace that he had entered.

  Rita stood across the road from the triangle of waste ground on the west side of Chelsea Bridge, wondering what answers to her many questions this forgotten, tiny corner of London might have offered up. Two hundred square yards of overgrown river bank, she reckoned, yet a place that she had visited twice in a week. How unusual was that? And what could possibly be the connection between a man killing a seagull at dawn and eating it and that big ugly bastard hiding in the bushes with his two handguns? Was she going too far? Was it just strange, bizarre coincidence? Was she simply making life difficult for herself, as Sergeant Duke had implied? What had happened to those guns? But she knew the answer from Lockridge’s shifty evasions—they’d just been handed back, like personal effects, a watch, a wallet. Surely that was inexcusable? She had no other clues to follow, no way of making any link other than her own vaporous, woolly intuition…

  She walked slowly across Chelsea Bridge towards the Battersea shore, wondering what she should do next. She could try and set up an audit trail on the guns…And what did the custody record say about the disposal of the prisoner? She laughed at her naivety: dream on, girl. She knew a firewall when she saw one—and this was being built higher and thicker as each hour went by—and she thought hard about what she should do, whether she could do anything. Maybe it was all pointless, maybe it was something ‘bigger’, security-related…She flipped open her mobile and called her father.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Daddy-O, it’s me. What do you want for supper?”

  29

  THE DOG SHAT EASILY and copiously, then did his little, funny, paw-scratching jig on the pavement before stepping away. He looked up at Jonjo—tongue out, panting—seeking approval.

  “Good lad,” Jonjo said, patting his back. “Good boy. That’s my boy. Who’s a clever boy?” He was pleased to note the firm consistency of this morning’s deposit. The new diet was working like a charm, clearly. Beautiful.

  “Disgusting.”

  Jonjo looked round to see a woman staring at him, contempt and fury on her face.

  “You got a problem, lady?” he said, pulling himself up to his full height.

  “Yeah. That’s disgusting, that is,” she said. “You should pick it up and take it away with you. Absolutely disgusting.”

  “You pick it up, darling,” he said. “Be my guest.”

  She glared at him, said ‘disgusting’ again and stomped off.

  Jonjo twitched The Dog’s lead and they walked away. He would rather rot in hell than follow his dog around with a plastic bag, picking up dog shit. Come off it, Jonjo said to himself, humans—Homo sapiens—did not crawl out of the primeval swamp and evolve, after millennia and millennia, into sentient beings that went around following their pet dogs and picking up their excrement. That was anti-Darwinian and, anyway, it was more a medicinal thing as far as he and The Dog were concerned—he needed a clean patch of pavement so he could verify how the new foodstuffs were being processed. Anybody who didn’t like it was, of course, free to express their opinion. He was more than happy to argue his side of the matter—more than happy. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

  He walked The Dog down to the river, turning under the high elevation of the Dockland Light Railway and into the neat precincts of Thames Barrier Park. The grass had been recently mown, the saplings were coming along, in full healthy leaf, and a few people sat out on the decking of the small café, mums with their strollers, the usual joggers panting by. A few other dog-walkers were out and about and they nodded to each other and civilly said ‘good morning’. For a brief moment Jonjo felt he was part of a community of sorts—decent people united in their affection for and care of a dumb animal. It gave him a comforting glow inside, Jonjo admitted, as he looked out over the wide river and saw the sun flashing off the huge, burnished silver humps of the Thames Flood Barrier. Like thick gleaming shark’s fins: they were a symbol of the river’s end, he supposed—beyond the barrier the river widened into the estuary and beyond that was the sea. He had always liked living close to the river but now the Thames brought with it unwelcome associations of Adam Kindred and his own arrest and humiliation. Now he came to think of it, Kindred had spoilt the river for him—another reason for violent retribution—and he turned his back on the Thames and headed for home, his benevolent mood dissipating fast.

  It had all gone annoyingly, frustratingly, worryingly quiet. Nothing, not a sign, not a peep—as if Kindred had vanished, somehow disappeared off the face of the earth. And there were other troubling signs. After two weeks of silence Jonjo had contacted the Risk Averse Group, not because he was short of money—he had plenty of money—but because he didn’t enjoy sitting at home on his arse doing nothing. He’d asked specifically to have an appointment with Major Tim Delaporte, the top man himself. He knew Major Tim—he had briefly been adjutant of 3

  Para before he left the army and set up the RAG. A good man, Major Tim—tough but fair.

  The appointment had been confirmed and Jonjo had travelled into the City, to the new RAG offices in a shiny glass and steel block off Lower Thames Street with a view of the Tower of London. Jonjo had suited up, polished his shoes to parade-ground brilliance and had a savage haircut. He felt both at home and out of place in the RAG offices—it was full of soldiers—men he had worked with or fought beside—but there were also many middle–class young women executives and secretaries with clipped accents that made him feel self-conscious and gauche.

  He took a seat in the lobby, sitting upright on the edge of the hardest chair, keeping the creases out of his jacket. There was greenery everywhere—miniature trees and bushes and palms�
��and abstract paintings on the wall. Girls with long hair and high heels walked briskly across the lobby from time to time to fetch cappuccinos and espressos from the coffee machine and music—classical-lite—played softly from hidden speakers. The magazines on offer while you waited were all concerned with luxury resorts or foreign properties, full of advertisements for watches and speedboats. This was what felt wrong to Jonjo: most of the men in this part of the building were professional soldiers—between them they were responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands, of violent deaths. He thought the place should reflect this, somehow—be honest about the nature of the business transacted here—not dressed up like the office of some travel agent or poncy stockbroker or high-class dentist.

  And they kept him waiting nearly an hour. The young woman on reception didn’t know who he was, either. Then he was told that Major Tim had been called away and he was to see someone called Emma Enright-Gunn. As he was led to her office his mood worsened with every step: his collar seemed suddenly to be chafing his neck, he felt uncomfortably hot, his shirt sticking to his back, his armpits flowing with sweat.

  The Enright-Gunn woman was brisk and professional—she looked like the headmistress of a smart school or one of those lady politicians. Her accent sounded brittle and alien to Jonjo’s ears and he began to feel absurdly nervous, his saliva drying up in his mouth, his normal articulacy leaving him.

  “Yeah—no—it’s, ah, more a question of, you know, what’s”—he’d forgotten the bloody word!—“um, on offer, like.” Available, he remembered instantly. “What’s available,” he added more meekly than he meant.

  “We’re over-subscribed, Mr Case. Too many soldiers leaving the army. Everyone wants to be a private security consultant.”

  “Maybe, but there’s no way I’m going back to fucking Iraq. Apologies, excuse me.”

  She smiled. Coldly, Jonjo thought.

  “There’s a CP bodyguard role available in Bogota, Colombia.”

  “No, no thanks, no. Not South America.”

  She flicked through the folder on the desk in front of her. “Small-arms training in Abu Dhabi—a sheik’s private security team.”

  “I don’t do training, Miss—”

  “Mrs—”

  “Mrs Enright-Gunn. Major Tim will tell you what I—”

  “I’ve all the information on you, Mr Case, all of it.”

  He left with nothing, only the promise he’d be on the top of the list for anything ‘exciting’. He paused in the lobby and drank three paper cupfuls of water in quick succession. As he tossed the cup in the waste-paper basket he saw Major Tim himself amble down the corridor; jacketless, lime-green braces on show, some papers in his hand. Jonjo reflexively came to attention, then stood at ease, thinking—what the fuck is going on here?

  “Jonjo. How’re you?”

  “In the pink, thank you, sir.”

  Tim Delaporte was tall and lean, taller than Jonjo. He had Scandinavian blond hair, oiled back from his forehead, like a blond slick cap set above a sharp-featured, alert face with pale-grey eyes. When he spoke his lips hardly moved.

  “Sorry I couldn’t see you. Emma’s handling placements these days.”

  “No worries, sir.”

  “Keeping busy?”

  “Getting itchy feet. Looking for something interesting. That’s why I came in.”

  “As long as you’re behaving yourself, Jonjo.” Major Tim wagged his finger at him and sauntered away.

  “Good as gold, sir,”Jonjo said to his back.

  Everything had been wrong about that meeting, Jonjo was thinking as he walked back home from Barrier Park with The Dog, everything. All the various subtexts he could discern were troubling. First, being fobbed off to that posh bint; second, being offered those piss-poor jobs—fourteen years in the SAS: who did they think he was? And then, third, that encounter with Major Tim, having been told he wasn’t even in the building. And what was this ‘behave yourself stuff?…Not for the first time he wondered what the Risk Averse Group knew of his freelance work; not for the first time he wondered if they were in fact his secret facilitators. If you wanted somebody discreetly slotted wouldn’t you go to an organisation that employed exclusively ex-special forces professionals, highly trained in lethal mayhem?…

  If only he could find fucking Kindred, Jonjo thought angrily, approaching his house, then we’d be fine, home and dry. He searched his pockets for his keys. His house was only four years old, part of a row of detached and semi-detached ‘executive homes’ built on a landscaped tract of once derelict ground in Silvertown, close to Barrier Park. Every house had a garden and a garage built in to the ground floor. Jonjo had knocked through a door from the hall so he could access the garage from inside—it was where he kept his taxi-cab—as he often needed to move stuff in and out of his vehicle without his neighbours seeing him.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said out loud to The Dog.

  He froze. The banal pronoun had unlocked something in his memory. ‘We’…Who had said ‘we’ in such a way that it could trigger this memory twitch?…He thought back, and his mind returned quickly to his interrogation of Mohammed—he’d been distracted by that tosspot Bozzy and hadn’t picked up on it at the time. What had he said? “We drove to Chelsea, like. When he says he has to get his raincoat we was a bit suspicious—him being in the waste ground—thought he might be jerking us, thought he might do a runner.” We was a bit suspicious. Might be jerking us. But according to Mohammed it was just him and Kindred in the car. Why say ‘we’, then? The royal ‘we’? No fucking way. Somebody else had been in that car apart from Mohammed and Kindred. Time for another visit to our friend Mo, Jonjo thought, his mood lifting—he had always reckoned the answer lay in that sink, that stew that was The Shaft.

  He heard his name called and looked up. It was Candy, his next-door neighbour. She crossed the lawn and knelt and fussed over The Dog and they talked about how well he was looking and the new diet.

  “Day off, Candy?”

  “Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I got a few days’ holiday owing.” She smiled. “All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl.”

  “Too right.”

  She was a fair-looking woman, Jonjo thought, nose a bit too lumpy, bit on the chunky side as well, you had to admit, but she had nice streaky blonde hair, clean nails.

  “Fancy a bite of supper tonight?” she said. “I’m doing a moussaka, profiteroles. Got some DVDs in.”

  “No war movies, I hope.” They laughed—she knew a little about his military past. “Yeah,” he said, “that would be smashing, Candy, love. Smashing.”

  “Don’t forget to bring The Dog.”

  Jonjo smiled, but he wasn’t thinking about the bite of supper or what was bound to happen afterwards. He was thinking about his next visit to The Shaft and what methods he would employ to make sure Mohammed told him everything that he wanted to know.

  30

  THE STEAM WAS AMAZINGLY opaque, like watery milk, almost, like slowly shifting watery milk, stirred by currents of air as people walked to and fro. A real pea-souper fog of steam, Adam thought.

  “This is buzzing,” Ly-on said.

  Adam turned. He could see Ly-on because he was sitting right beside him. His little pot belly swagged over the edge of his towel, his curly hair damp with moisture, flattening against his skull.

  “I never be in a place like this,” he said.

  “Tell me when you get too hot.”

  Mhouse had gone out early that morning, for some reason, and Adam had been alone with Ly-on in the flat. He had washed up the dishes in the sink (boiling a kettle for hot water) and had taken a bucket through to the lavatory to flush and then refill the cistern. Living with one cold water tap to provide for a household had its disadvantages—very Third World, he thought. When he returned to the kitchenette Ly-on was cleaning his teeth in the sink. Adam felt suddenly unwashed, smirched—and consequently began to itch—he needed, he realised, a hot bath. A Turkish bath. Someone had handed
him a flyer for the Purlin Nail Lane Baths when he’d been begging at London Bridge Station—this was what had set the notion in his head: words like ‘Sudatorium’ and ‘Tepidarium’ made the simple process of cleaning yourself seem both timeless and exotic. He slipped out, found a functioning pay phone on Level 1 and called Mhouse.

  “You taking him where?” she said.

  “To the baths in Deptfbrd. The Purlin Nail Lane Baths.”

  “He can’t swim, you know.”

  “We’re not going for a swim.”

  It was surprisingly expensive at the baths—£10 for an adult, £5 for a child—but he supposed you could be there from morning to night if you had a mind to. It was a men-only day and, it being a Thursday morning, the place was tranquil. He showed Ly-on the swimming pool.

  “It’s a lake, man,” he said, intrigued. “Buzzing.”

  “Would you like to swim in it?”

  “You bet, John. You teach me? I like that, John.”

  “Yeah—one day.”

  They changed out of their clothes in the Frigidarium and, wearing their towels round their waists, went into the steam room. From the odd cough and creak of wooden benches, they knew they weren’t alone. He and Ly-on took their seats and waited for the sweat to flow.

  When Ly-on said he was well roasted they went out to the plunge pool. They hung up their towels and Adam lifted Ly-on into his arms: he was surprisingly light. Ly-on put an arm around Adam’s neck as they stepped down the tiled steps into the icy water.

  “Cor,” Ly-on said as the cold water hit his flushed body. “I’m dreaming this. Peas, man—green, green peas.”

  Adam let him float away from him a little, holding his hands.

  “How old are you, Ly-on?” Adam asked.

  “I’m two, I think,” he said.

  “No, you’re older than that.”

  “Maybe seven. Mummy don’t tell me. Maybe I’m four.”

  “I think you’re probably about seven. Where’s your dad?”

  “I never had no dad. Just Mum.”