2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  “That was her, was it?” Rita asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Known her long?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you know her name? Where she lived?”

  “Yes, she was called Mhouse.” He spelt it out and gave her address. “Her son is called Ly-on. A seven-year-old. That explains the tattoo: their names.”

  “Right. Mhouse what?”

  “Actually, I don’t know…I don’t know what her last name was.” This admission seemed to trouble him, she saw.

  “We’ll get all this to the duty officer. He’ll take all the details. Just leave the cup there.”

  She walked back with him to main reception where she handed him over for more form-filling and statement-giving. While the duty officer searched for the right documents she held out her hand and he shook it.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Belem.”

  “Thanks for your help, you’ve been most kind. I really appreciate it,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Then he asked her what her name was—she thought he might do that. It was one of her tests.

  “Rita Nashe,” she said, smiling at him, thinking: he’s a fit-looking guy—tall, slim, nice eyes. Obviously intelligent. Usually she didn’t like that buzz-cut, close-bearded look, but it sort of suited him.

  “I’m Primo,” he said, “Primo Belem.”

  “Nice meeting you, Primo,” she said. “I’m off duty now—better run.”

  “Just one second, Miss Nashe—” He looked troubled again.

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Do they think she was killed?”

  Rita paused. “Killed? You’re asking if she was killed—murdered? It could have been a fall. She could have been drunk—”

  “I don’t know,” Primo Belem said. “I just don’t see how she could have wound up dead in the river. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She could have killed herself. We get dozens of suicides—”

  “She would never have killed herself…”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because of her son. She would never have left Ly-on alone. Never.”

  Rita and Joey walked into The Shaft, heading for Unit 14, Level 3, Flat L, caution informing their every step. Rita had never felt so self-conscious. It was three o’clock in the afternoon but the few people they passed either took off in a different direction or else stopped and stared at them as if they had never seen uniformed police officers before.

  “Wow,” she said to Joey. “What country are we in?”

  “We don’t want to hang around, Rita.” He looked nervously over his shoulder. “We should call in the Rotherhithe boys.”

  “It’s still an MSU case.”

  “We’re river police, Rita. What’re we doing here?”

  “Thanks, Joe. I owe you. It’s a hunch—just have to check something out, for my own satisfaction.”

  They had reached the bottom of the stairs. She looked around her—boarded-up flats, a strew of filth, rubbish, graffiti everywhere. Apparently, Rita had learnt, the Shaftesbury Estate was due to be demolished in a year or two—despite its listed status, its twentieth-century architectural heritage. As a little septic, ulcerous dystopia in rapidly gentrifying Rotherhithe its days were numbered. A naked child came round the corner, a little girl, completely naked. She saw the two policemen, screamed and ran off.

  “You stay down here, Joey,” she said. “Let me check the flat.”

  “I’ll come running,” he said. “Don’t be too long.”

  She climbed the stairs to the third floor walkway, looked over the balustrade, saw Joey and gave him a wave.

  She knocked on the door of Flat L. Knocked again.

  “Who dey be?” came a voice.

  “Police.”

  The door was unlocked and a tall thin guy in a maroon tracksuit stood in the doorway, smiling broadly. She noticed he had silver rings on all his fingers and his two thumbs.

  “Praise the good lord. At last the police. We never see police for here. Welcome, welcome.”

  She said she’d like to ask him a few questions. He said, no problem. In the dark flat beyond she could see women and children moving about, and heard a baby crying. Two men appeared in white ankle-length dishdashas and quickly went into another room. The conversation was going to take place on the doorstep: clearly he was not going to invite her inside.

  “I’m making enquiries about a woman called Mhouse. This was her flat.”

  “She rent it from me. Then she run away. She owe me five month rent. Lot of money.”

  “You’re the landlord?”

  “Yes, madam. I am also chairman of the Shaftesbury Estate Residents’ Association—SERA.”

  “And your name is?”

  “Mr Quality. Abdul-latif Quality. This is my apartment.”

  “Who is living here now?”

  “They are asylums. I am registered for the council. You can check me.”

  “Do you know where this Mhouse went?”

  “No. If I know, I go find her. I want my money.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Mr Quality’s expression did not change. He shrugged.

  “God is great. Now I never get my money.”

  “We believe that her death may not have been accidental. Do you know anyone who might have threatened her, might have wanted to cause her harm?” Rita drew her palm across her brow, finding it damp. Why was she sweating so much? “Do you know any person who might have had a grudge against her? Anybody loitering, watching her?”

  Mr Quality thought, pursed his lips, exhaled. “I never see anybody like this.”

  Rita frowned. When she had told Primo Belem that she was planning on going to The Shaft he had also asked her to find out about the boy, Ly-on.

  “Do you know where her son is?”

  “I think she take him when she run away.”

  Rita looked about her. An old woman came up the stairs to the walkway, saw her, smiled nervously but broadly enough to show that she had no front teeth, immediately turned and hurried down the stairs again.

  “Who’s that woman?”

  “I never see her before.” He smiled. “In The Shaft people dey come and they dey go. Are you finished with me, officer?”

  “I may want to speak to you again.”

  “Very happy to speak to police. Plenty, plenty.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I live for here.” He gestured at the dark interior of the flat. “You can always find me here.”

  Rita felt a strange impotence run through her; everything, good and bad, that she routinely expected that her role as a police officer and her uniform would confer—status, respect, disrespect, disdain, suspicion, lazy assumption, knee-jerk reaction—simply did not apply here, here in The Shaft. She was the alien, not the ‘asylums’. She was out of kilter—they were in kilter. She wanted to run away from Mr Quality and that was not the sort of attitude, the state of mind, she should be experiencing, she knew: she was a public servant, paid to uphold law and order. She had never felt so redundant in her life.

  “Thank you, Mr Quality.”

  “My pleasure.”

  He shut the door and she went down the stairs to rejoin Joey.

  “Let’s get out of here, Joe.”

  Rita and Primo Belem sat in a coffee shop cum French delicatessen called Jem-Bo-Coo not far from MSU in Wapping High Street. She was out of uniform and her hair was down. He had been waiting at a table at the back by the ranked wine bottles for sale, already there when she arrived, and she had seen his almost comic double-take at her ‘civilian’ persona. He was wearing his pinstripe suit and she noticed for the first time that the jacket and the trousers didn’t quite match. She’d checked the contact details he’d provided to the duty officer and knew where he lived—a flat in the Oystergate Buildings, Stepney—and she knew that he worked as a porter at the Bethnal & Bow hospital, a job he’d only been in for a few weeks. Everything
about his demeanour, accent and vocabulary, however, spoke of someone unused to menial, manual work. There was some mystery here—she looked forward to attempting to solve it.

  She ordered her coffee, sat down and told him about her visit to The Shaft and what she had found when she’d gone to Mhouse’s flat.

  “There was a man there, said he was living in it—Mr Abdul-latif Q’Alitti.”

  Primo nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard about Mr Quality. Mr Fixit.”

  “Chairman of the Shaftesbury Estate Residents’ Association. I checked him out—they know all about him at the council. Nothing gets done in The Shaft without Mr Quality.”

  “Any sign of the boy?”

  “No. I’m afraid not. Mr Quality said he knew nothing.”

  This seemed to perturb him. “I wonder—” he began and then stopped. “Are you hungry?” he said. “Can I get you a muffin?” She was hungry, in fact, so they went back to the counter and agreed to share a blueberry muffin. They took their seats again.

  “Why do you think,” she said, picking the fruit out of her half of the bun, “that this Mhouse may have been murdered?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, vaguely. “The Shaft is a dangerous place. I lived there for a while,” he added, “which is how I got to know Mhouse…”

  “Do you think Mr Quality might have had something to do with it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not him.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No…No. It just seems suspicious to me.”

  “We need something to go on.”

  “I know…I’m sorry…”

  She smiled and leant back in her chair, taking a bite from her half-muffin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I think I’m still a bit in shock, you know. The other day, getting the news, seeing the body…”

  She leant forward now and pointed the remains of her muffin at him. “Explain this to me: what motive could anyone have to kill this Mhouse person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Odd jobs.”

  “Sex industry? Drugs?”

  Primo pursed his lips and exhaled. “I don’t know.”

  “If she was a prostitute she might have a record.”

  “Why do you think she was a prostitute?”

  “Are you telling me she wasn’t?”

  He gave her a baffled, weak smile. “I’ll leave all that stuff to you,” he said. “I can’t figure it out.”

  “Primo,” she said, her voice changing, a little sterner, smiling then frowning. “Are you telling me everything you know?”

  “Yes, of course. God—look at the time. I’d better go, my shift starts in forty minutes.”

  They both stood up and dumped their paper cups and the remains of the muffin in the bin.

  “You’ve been a fantastic help,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll see if I can track down the boy.”

  “There’ll be a post mortem and an inquest,” she said. “We might learn something more.”

  “I doubt it,” he said with some bitterness, then added, apologetically, “of course, you never know.” He held out his hand. “Thanks a million, Rita.”

  She took his hand and held on to it for two or three seconds longer than she should.

  “Listen, Primo,” she said, a little astonished at her own audacity, but she didn’t want their new association to end there and then: she wanted it to have a little more life, see where it might lead. “Do you fancy meeting up for a drink? We could have supper—curry or a Chinese or something. I could give you a progress report.” She sensed him thinking fast—she let his hand go—could see him mentally running through implications, complications, problems, possibilities.

  “It’s not compulsory,” she said.

  “No, I’d like that,” he said with a grateful smile. “Very much. That would be great.”

  42

  THE ITALIAN RESTAURANT WAS still there—why wouldn’t it be?—sitting in its Chelsea side street with its yellow awnings. A man in an apron—a waiter—was hosing down the pavement outside as Adam walked past and inside other waiters were setting up the tables for lunch. Adam goaded his memory, thinking back to that evening. It seemed to him as if it had taken place in another century, or in a parallel universe. But everything had started then—the fact that he was standing here now was all to do with that encounter with Philip Wang, his fellow diner. He had seemed preoccupied, ill at ease; he remembered him dropping things, at one stage dabbing his perspiring forehead with a napkin. And of course he left his file, hidden under the adjacent table. He had looked like a man with a lot on his mind. But what kind of stress—how acute? Had he done something wrong? Stolen something, perhaps? And yet when he’d called up to say he had the file and was bringing it round Wang had sounded relieved but relatively calm, had even asked him up for a drink…

  Adam turned away and walked through the back streets towards the river. If it all began with Wang then he needed to find out more about the man and what he did. Did he work for the government? Was he some ministry whistle-blower? Perhaps he was linked to the secret services himself and had found out something he shouldn’t? Was he selling state secrets? Adam shook his head: conspiracy theories multiplied incrementally. Start with the facts: Philip Wang was a consultant at St Botolph’s Hospital—perhaps the trail began there.

  Adam took a seat on the bench on the wide section of the pavement at the beginning of Chelsea Bridge, checking to see if there was any activity in or around the triangle. He wandered past the gate a couple of times, waiting for a gap in the traffic. All seemed quiet. A power-walking couple engaged in intense conversation marched by, and when they were well past, he climbed over the gate and pushed his way through the bushes to the clearing.

  He felt strange being back, acknowledging the huge changes his life had undergone since he had first camped out there. So much had happened to him: it was as if he were packing years of living into fraught, dense weeks; determinedly racing through a whole life’s catalogue of experiences as fast as possible, as if time were running out. He stood for a while, hands on hips, taking things in, slowly, deliberately. There was more litter scattered around and he felt a sense of proprietorial outrage, picking up a piece of blown newspaper before crumpling it up and letting it fall. He knelt down and ripped back the turf that covered his cash-box and removed £,200 and the Wang dossier. He paused for a moment, looking at the list of names and the incomprehensible jottings beside them. There was no doubt in his mind—this was where he should start next.

  Sitting on the Tube heading back to Stepney, he found himself thinking about the policewoman, Rita Nashe. She was tall and rangy with a lean face—pretty, but one that looked almost mannishly strong when her hair was up. When her hair was down she seemed quite different—he remembered the frisson he’d felt when she came into the coffee shop—she didn’t look like a policewoman at all. And at this he rebuked himself: as if there were a generic template of looks that applied to policewomen. You might as well say he looked like a typical hospital porter. No, he realised, it was because he had seen her in a uniform first, that day at the MSU morgue—he had to remove the uniformed Rita from his memory bank and replace it with the image of the pretty, tall young woman in jeans and a fleece, with her brown hair down on her shoulders, sitting opposite him in the coffee shop, picking the beads of fruit from her muffin, leaning back and smiling. It had all seemed very normal and easy—being Primo Belem changed everything, the risks that he had worried about never materialised. He brought her face back into his mind—Rita’s face. Hard to tell what her figure was like under the fleece…He was glad she’d been the one to ask him for a drink—he wouldn’t have had the nerve, however much he might have liked the idea.

  43

  CITY AIRPORT DID NOT improve on further acquaintance, Jonjo reckoned, as he took his seat as close to the stairs down from the cafeteria as possible, had a sip of his cappuccino and began to do the puzzle in the newspap
er. SREIBGMAR. Four-letter words, and longer, all with an ‘R’ in them; GRIM, GRAB, RAGE…He looked up to see Darren approaching. Jonjo’s smile of welcome was not warm and he noticed that Darren ventured no smile in return—more of a wince, a frown—the bearer of bad news, Jonjo guessed.

  “Better make it quick, Dar, I got a lot on. I’m getting close.”

  “This has nothing to do with me, Jonjo, you have to know that.”

  “Yeah, of course. Spit it out.”

  “You’re off the Kindred case.”

  This was a real shock—he hadn’t been expecting this—just more bollocking, more pressure. He kept his face still, somehow, though he felt his guts loosen. This was serious: no way he could go to the toilet now.

  “You must be fucking joking me.”

  “No, Jonjo. I told you: the heat on this one is massive. They can’t understand how some poxy university bloke is still out there. Why can’t you find him?”

  “Because he’s clever, precisely because he’s a poxy university bloke and not some wanking loser,” Jonjo said with controlled vehemence. Then he added: “Who’s ‘they’, by the way?”

  “I don’t know,” Darren said, pleadingly. “I never know—haven’t a fucking clue.”Jonjo believed him, but Darren went on, “There’s layer upon layer upon layer above me. I don’t know who’s sending me these messages, these instructions. I get paid—I just do what I’m told.”

  “OK, OK. Cool.”

  Jonjo sat for a while, thinking, letting his anger build. Then he said, “Well, the upshot is you’ll let Kindred go. I told that Rupert-arsehole, ‘Bob’, that I was close. Now, I’m even closer. You take me off of this and Kindred walks free. You tell ‘them’ that.”

  “There’s another plan. Hold on.” Darren took out his mobile phone and made a quick sotto voce call.

  “I told him to wait outside,” Darren said, apologetically. “I wanted to see you myself, first.”

  A minute later Jonjo watched as a big bloke came up the escalator to the cafeteria: dark hair shaved close and a big drooping moustache, like he was in a ipyos western.