by William Boyd
These moods passed and when they did so, late at night, when it was dark and the tide was low, he climbed down the wall-chains on to his small beach and retrieved what bounty the river brought him: three rubber tyres that he stacked on top of each other and used as a seat, a battered wooden fruit box, in which he kept his cooking utensils, and a traffic cone – somehow he thought it better that it wasn’t on the beach where it might draw attention to itself. When he was hungry he went out and, with his dwindling supply of money, bought sandwiches and hot drinks in cheap cafés and fast-food franchises where his shabby, dingy appearance attracted no surprised looks. With the aid of his small street-map paperback he familiarised himself with his neighbourhood in south-west London. He followed the progress of the Wang murder investigation in discarded newspapers and he sensed, even after a few days, how it was quickly ceasing to be a long-running story. The advent of the reward-announcement had changed all that, however, provoking another surge of interest in him and wild speculation on the uncanny ‘disappearance’ of the prime suspect: had he committed suicide, had he fled abroad, was he being sheltered by some misguided friend or family member? …
He had read of his father’s emotional televised plea that he surrender himself to the police, hugely grateful that he hadn’t actually seen it. ‘Give yourself up, son, you’re only making things worse. We know you’re innocent. Let’s sort out this horrible mistake.’ He read that his ex-wife Alexa Maybury Kindred had declined to comment, though the details of his divorce (and its adulterous catalyst) were surprisingly accurate. As he read, and as each day went by, Adam was alarmed to note that no other suspect was listed, no other scenario of Wang’s death mooted, and he began to ask himself if, by deciding to go underground, he had made not only the most important decision of his life but also the biggest mistake – a life defined, he now thought in his depressed state, by a catalogue of errors that had led him inexorably to this one. Only he, he realised, knew about the man on the balcony; only he could testify to the fact that Philip Wang had had a breadknife in his chest when Adam opened the bedroom door; only he had confronted the man with the gun at the rear of Grafton Lodge …
He had to do something, he thought glumly, looking at his watch. Crouching, he scurried over to a nearby laburnum bush and peeled back a rectangle of turf. This was where he had buried his cash-box, a dry, secure hiding place where he could leave his few precious possessions – his wallet, credit cards, his A–Z street map, mobile phone and the file he had tried to return to Wang. It was this dossier he was interested in now – an interest triggered and heightened by the announcement of the reward. He had looked at it before a couple of times, trying vainly to decipher what its importance was, but now the advertisement had appeared it seemed even more crucial, somehow. What was this firm Calenture-Deutz and why was Philip Wang so important to them? Why were they prepared to pay so much money to find Adam Kindred?
Adam sat and sifted through the few pages in the file, trying to muster up some real forensic or analytical intent. It was a simple list of names and ages (all young children, clearly) and beside each name, in small neat handwriting – Wang’s? – was some form of shorthand that looked like the record of some kind of dose: ‘25ml i/v × 4 – 75ml b/m × 6’. Beside each name was the name of a hospital: one in Aberdeen, one in Manchester, one in Southampton and one in London – St Botolph’s in Rotherhithe. Wang had told him he was an ‘immunologist’ – so perhaps some sort of clue might be found in St Botolph’s Hospital.
Adam now leapt over the fence of the triangle on to the Embankment pavement as if it were the most natural, unconcerned thing in the world. Conscious of the new reward advertisements, he was not wearing his raincoat nor carrying his briefcase. He was wearing his tie, however – in an effort to look presentable – and he had his wallet, credit cards and mobile phone on him. His dense, growing beard made him look vaguely disreputable but he hoped the suit and the tie would counterbalance this. He had a strange confidence in his invisibility in the city – he was already a long way from the man pictured in that wedding photo, so widely disseminated: nobody was going to connect this new version of Adam Kindred with that one. He was also aware that he had £18.78 on him – all his cash.
He had thought about using his card to extract more cash from the many cash machines he passed but he had sensed instinctively that the only way to avoid detection in a modern twenty-first-century city was to take no advantage of the services it offered – telephonic, financial, social, transportational, welfare-related and so on. If you made no calls, paid no bills, had no address, never voted, walked everywhere, made no credit card transactions or used cash-point machines, never fell ill or asked for state support, then you slipped beneath the modern world’s cognizance. You became invisible or at least transparent, your anonymity so secure you could move through the city – uncomfortably, yes, enviously, prudently, yes – like an urban ghost. The city was full of people like him, Adam recognised. He saw them huddled in doorways or passed-out in public parks, begging outside shops, sitting slumped and wordless on benches. He had read somewhere that every week in Britain some 600 people were reported as missing – almost 100 people a day – that there was a population of over 200,000 missing people in this country, enough to fill a sizeable provincial city. This lost, vanished population of Great Britain had just gained a new member. Nobody appeared able to find these missing people unless they themselves wanted to be found and gave themselves up or returned home – they just seemed to disappear, swallowed up – and Adam thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to join their number, as long as he didn’t make any foolish mistakes. He tried not to think how he was going to survive when his money ran out tomorrow or the next day.
He Tubed to Rotherhithe and, emerging from the Underground station, asked a mother with two young children where he could find St Botolph’s Hospital.
‘St Bot’s?’ She pointed. ‘Just head down to the river. Can’t miss it.’
And indeed it was unmissable, sitting like a great lucent cruise ship – like several, lucent cruise ships – on the Bermondsey/ Rotherhithe shore, across the river from Wapping. At the centre of this modernist conglomeration of buildings was the small redbrick Victorian hospital – ‘St Botolph’s Hospital for Women and Children’ proudly emblazoned in blue and cream tiles across its ornate façade. On either side the glass and steel stacked floors of the new NHS Foundation Trust Hospital’s buildings spread through its car parks and newly landscaped gardens, some of the blocks linked by transparent aerial walkways lit by red or green lights – like arteries or veins, Adam thought – no doubt this was the ‘wit’ that had won the architect his gold medal or his knighthood.
Adam followed signs to the reception atrium and stepped into a space that reminded him more of a huge convention hotel in Miami or an airport terminal. Great primary-coloured abstract banners hung from the cantilevered glass ceiling sixty feet above his head and fully grown trees – bamboo, weeping fig, palms – grew from small, walled islands here and there. He could hear the sound of plashing water (piped or genuine? – he couldn’t tell).
People wandered to and fro in this vast transit lounge – in transit from health to ill health, Adam supposed, or vice versa – some, in dressing gowns, were clearly patients, others, in multi-zipped overalls in differing pastel shades, with name-badges on their breasts and dangling ID photos hung around their necks, were orderlies or administrators of various kinds. There were also people like him in civilian clothes that must have been either visitors or else putative patients seeking entry into this self-contained, health-city. The mood was calm and unhurried – like an ante-room to heaven, Adam thought, as he wandered deeper into the atrium, his ear now picking up some inoffensive jazzy muzac. Nobody asked him who he was or what he was doing here; he imagined he could live in this building for days, unnoticed, as long as he drew no attention to himself. But then he saw the CCTV cameras everywhere – small and discreet, barely moving this way and that – nothing was
that simple any more.
He went to a desk set beneath a superimposed blue neon ‘i’ where a girl in an apricot overall smiled welcome at him. The name badge on her breast read ‘Fatima’.
‘I’m looking for Dr Philip Wang,’ he said, and she typed Wang’s name into her computer. He watched carefully to see if any alarm or curiosity registered on her face but there was none. He might as well have asked for Dr John Smith.
‘Felicity de Vere Wing, level six,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Fatima.’
Following Fatima’s directions, Adam headed towards a cluster of glass and steel columns that contained the scenic elevators serving the nine floors of St Botolph’s. As he rode upward, Adam felt he was in some kind of human hive, a hive dominated by signs and acronyms: everywhere there were signs, signs that made sense and others that didn’t; signs that were welcoming and vaguely reassuring, others that provoked sudden dark fears – A&E, Radiology, Pathology, Cafeteria, GUM (what was that?), Neuroscience Centre, Teenage Pregnancy Clinic, Sigmoidoscopy Dept., car park 7, IBD clinic, Medicine Management Services, ENT and Audiology – signs that directed him to segments of buildings on this campus where every potential health need could be catered for – it seemed – in every functioning part of the human body and its glossary of maladies, from birth to death.
Emerging at level six he looked over the balustrade to the swarming life on the atrium floor below and marvelled, dizzily. He felt like a modern Dante in an antiseptic inferno – all he needed was his guide.
And his guide duly came to him in the form of a man in a pistachio overall and matching turban who asked if he could help. Adam said ‘The Felicity de Vere Wing’ and he was sent down a wide corridor that led to one of the vertiginous, aerial green-lit tubes linking him with another of St Botolph’s many modules. As he walked along the tube Adam could see, through the smeared plexi-glass, the river to his left curving gently round Wapping. The first lights were coming on in the city as dusk set in but Adam sensed that in St Botolph’s it was forever a fluorescent twenty-four-hour day, 365 days a year. Nothing stopped here: darkness and light, summer and winter solstices, heat and cold, the changing seasons meant nothing. People arrived, they were admitted, they were healed and sent on their way – or they were not and they died.
Arriving at the Felicity de Vere Wing – the sign writ bold above double doors, and some sort of ornamental, curtained plaque on the wall – Adam encountered a recognisable reception desk manned by a crisply uniformed nurse, not an overalled apparatchik. He saw a doctor with a stethoscope round his neck, he saw porters with a trolley – this was familiar. The atmosphere was hushed, as if people were whispering, ‘illness’, ‘sickness’ – and for the first time Adam felt he was in a hospital and recognised the need for some caution. Not a good idea to mention the name of the recently murdered Dr Wang here, he concluded.
‘Hi,’ he said to the nurse, improvising, I’m looking for Dr Femi Olundemi.’
She frowned. ‘Olundemi?’
‘Olundemi. Femi Olundemi.’
‘We’ve no Dr Olundemi in this wing.’
She went and asked another nurse and they both came back shaking their heads.
‘I must have the wrong information,’ Adam said. ‘This is the immunology department, isn’t it?’
‘No, no,’ said his first nurse, smiling now that the error was confirmed as his, and whose name, he noticed, was Seorcha. ‘Immunology’s on level three – I think. This wing’s for children with chronic asthma. Only children.’
‘My mistake,’ Adam said. ‘Thanks for your help.’
Adam wandered out of St Botolph’s wondering if he was any wiser – if this trip and the expenditure of a few valuable pounds had been worth it. He supposed so: Wang was on the main-frame computer but his death had yet to be registered, and the wing with which he was associated dealt exclusively with children suffering from chronic asthma. That Wang’s death was so far unremarked in this vast sickness factory seemed to indicate he was not a familiar or regular presence. But chronic asthma? … What was the name of the company Wang worked for – the eager reward-givers? Calenture-Deutz – yes. Adam repeated the name as he walked away from the luminescent strata of the hospital buildings: Calenture-Deutz, children with chronic asthma … How had Wang described himself? An ‘allergist’ – maybe there was something there …
Adam had come out of a different lift and had left through a different door and, quitting the grounds of St Botolph’s, he turned and walked along a street wondering where Rotherhithe Tube station was. Outside a kebab shop he asked directions from a young guy sitting on a small-wheeled bike, eating a kebab.
‘You what?’
‘Tube station,’ Adam repeated. ‘Rotherhithe.’
‘You got Canada Water, mate. Close. Go up there, then down there.’
‘What? Straight on, then right?’
The young guy looked blank. ‘Yeah. Whatever.’
Adam set off thinking hard, thinking that maybe he had proved his point, that maybe it was time to turn himself in. He was dirty, bearded, almost penniless, sleeping under a bush on waste ground at night, living off baked beans and cheap sandwiches, defecating and washing in public lavatories. And yet, something at the back of his mind kept saying insistently – no, no, stay free at all costs. Only this way can you retain any vestige of control over your life. The minute he re-entered society all freedoms would be curtailed. Who was the man with the gun in the mews behind Grafton Lodge? And who was to say that he, Adam, would be any safer in police custody than he was on his own in London, living underground? That man had come to kill him and had doubtless killed Wang. Only while he was free and undiscovered was he safe – as soon as he was corralled, penned-in, then anyone could find him. Something very big was at stake here, something he had blundered in on – something currently unknowable, unimaginable. Adam Kindred standing up in open court protesting his innocence, testifying about a man on a balcony, a man with a gun, might draw down other fatal dangers on himself. And what, if anything, did it have to do with the Felicity de Vere Wing of St Botolph’s Hospital and chronic asthma in children? It was all hideously complex and worrying – perhaps a few more days in the triangle wouldn’t make any more difference now. He stopped …
He was lost. He hadn’t been paying attention.
He looked about him. Tall, crude blocks of apartment buildings, concrete stairs, walkways. A few lights on. He walked up to a sign badly defaced with graffiti: ‘THE SHAFTESBURY ESTATE – UNITS 14–20.’ He peered around again: 1950s public housing – a few trees, a few functioning street lights, a few clapped-out cars and, fifty yards off, a group of kids sitting on the low wall around a playground – a slide upended, some rubber tyres hanging from chains, a roundabout. Looking up, he saw some people leaning on their elbows, gazing out from the zig-zag stairways that gave access to the higher terraces.
He turned and walked back the way he had come, purposefully but not with any sense of panic. Suddenly his three bushes in the triangle by Chelsea Bridge seemed like home to him – he wanted to be there, settling down in his sleeping bag under the inverted V of his groundsheet – and he felt tears well in his eyes as he realised how pathetic, how abject, this yearning was. No, it was becoming impossible: he had to go to the police, he had to go through whatever ordeal was waiting for him, there was no altern—
All Adam felt was a massive blow to his back – as if he’d been hit by a sledgehammer or a silent car – dropping him to his hands and knees, and then, almost immediately, another blow, to his head this time, provoking a spiralling supernova of light. And then everything went black.
9
HE WAS A REGULAR that one guy, yeah, anyway said he was – she remembered. Then she thought, maybe not: fat, white, small moustache … One them guys just want tugging but no handkerchief no tissue nothing don’t mind the mess. Mhouse was muttering to herself, goading her reluctant memory as she walked along the river from her usual beat. She couldn’t remember:
they all blurred into one generic punter – male. He was the one keep saying he was a regular, she continued to herself. What he wanting, discount? Fuck.
She breathed deeply, smelling the strange river smell. She liked working by the river, plenty of dark corners, very few passers-by at night. She didn’t like getting into cars – not after that last time, no fucking way – plenty of quiet places by the river and there was always Margo’s room – extra fiver to Margo – no problem. You get in a car they can lock the door – like that last time. Fucking hell. She paused and lit a cigarette, looking across the river to Wapping on the other side. A boat had gone by and the lights were dancing on the diminishing wake. Lights were pretty, she thought, like someone pulling them on rubber strings, always bouncing back … She unzipped her boot and slid her money in under her instep, zipped it up again, and headed up Southwark Park Road towards The Shaft.