by William Boyd
“That’s for me to know and your allergies to find out.”
Ingram chose a purple drink and followed Ivo into the reverberating room, seeing, and immediately changing course towards, his wife, Meredith, somehow absurdly, ridiculously pleased to see her—he was already hating this evening with unusual intensity—though as he approached her he noticed a roseate glow on her cheeks, always a give-away about her alcohol consumption.
“Hello, Pumpkin,” he said, kissing her. “We can’t stay long, remember?”
“Don’t be silly, it’s Ivo’s birthday.” She squeezed his bum and winked at him and Ingram thought, a little wearily, thank the gods for PRO-Vyril, one of Calenture-Deutz’s more successful drugs. It treated erectile dysfunction—slogan: “unmatched act duration”—not up there with Cialis or Viagra or Foldynon but a nice steady earner for the firm all the same. It worked very well for him, also, Ingram acknowledged, some sort of individual metabolic conformity with the chemicals occurring, he supposed. After a couple of PRO-Vyrils he felt he could take on anyone, or indeed anything, for an hour or so. He and Meredith made love fairly regularly for an old married couple with a grown-up family, he reckoned, though it was always at her behest. He had never figured out what made her randy—there was no discernible pattern, but she always contrived to give him a few hours’ warning when the mood came upon her—like the phases of the moon, he thought: something, somewhere, triggered her off. They slept in separate bedrooms divided by their dressing rooms and bathrooms, but all with connecting doors. Ingram actually quite enjoyed the sessions—though it was more a matter of mechanics, thanks to PRO-Vyril, than passion, and was a distant world away from his Phyllis encounters.
He held Meredith’s hand for a few seconds, reassured. She was a petite, slim woman with well-cut white-blonde hair and a slightly too large head for her body. This and her snub nose and widely spaced eyes made her seem, from some angles, a doll-like creature and, as if as a result of such a perception, she tended to affect, in company, a bubbly, nothing-gets-me-down, climb-every-mountain demeanour. But Ingram knew that she was a tougher and shrewder individual than the image she presented to the world. At moments like these—in the braying hell of Ivo’s party—he felt very glad that he was married to her.
“It’s been a long and trying day, my darling girl,” he said, in a low voice. “So the sooner we leave, the sooner we can—”
“Message received, over and out,” she said, smiling warmly.
“Lady Meredith Fryzer!” a man in a black T–shirt (with the same inane message as Ivo’s) shrieked at her, and took her in his arms. Ingram turned away, set his untouched purple drink down on a table and sought out the young waiter at the door and repeated his request for a glass of white wine, if that were possible, thank you so much.
He surveyed the room—no one was interested in him, a grey-haired, soon-to-be fifty-nine-year-old man in a dark suit and tie—and wondered who all these friends of Ivo were. Some of the men were clearly older than he (grizzled, bald, with patches of beard) but were dressed as adolescent boys in faded, ripped T–shirts, baggy low-pocketed trousers and unlaced trainers—he wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been carrying skateboards under their arms—still, as his gaze swung here and there, he saw there were also quite a lot of slim pretty women in the room, but all with slumped and sullen faces, or with watchful, guarded expressions, as if they expected a cruel joke was about to be played on them and they were going to be mocked in some way.
His white wine was brought to him and he sipped it with unusual gratitude, standing against a wall by the door, feeling the fatigue leave him a little. He thought he recognised an actor and someone else who was on TV as the people milled around—and there was a clothes designer. Yes? No?…He had no idea. He hardly watched television or read magazines, these days. Idly, he picked up a little bronze maquette from a table and thought it might be a Henry Moore—quite pleased that the name came to mind—and wondered again how Ivo managed to live so well for someone with no visible means of support apart from the £80,000 a year Ingram paid him as a non-executive member of the Calenture-Deutz board. Ivo and Meredith’s father, the Earl—the Earl of Concannon—had no money left and lived in a large modern bungalow outside Dublin. The family seat, Cloonlaghan Castle, was derelict and millions would be required to make it habitable. He suspected that Meredith gave Ivo money, on the sly, thinking he wouldn’t know—she was very fond of her younger brother, for some reason, forgiving him every trespass and humiliation. Smika, Ivo’s wife number three, had no money either (unless there was some trade in her erotic drawings). What had happened to Ludovine, the second, French wife? Tiny, feisty, with spiky orange-yellow hair—Yes, Ludovine, Ingram had liked her (he had paid for the costly French divorce, he now remembered). Ah, here was Ivo, heading towards him.
Ivo loomed up and Ingram dutifully registered his brother-in-law’s preposterous good looks, once again. His blue-black hair was lightly gelled, and his stupid T–shirt was tight enough to demonstrate how lean his forty-something torso was.
“Having a good time?” Ivo asked. “Chilling?”
“Fabulous,” Ingram said. “Any chance of a bite to eat? I’m starving.”
“What do you think of my T–shirt?”
“I think it’s hilariously funny. You should wear it all the time. People will fall over laughing.”
“You don’t get it, old man.”
“It’s as old as I am, you fool. I saw one of those at the Isle of Wight festival in 1968. It’s so passe.”
“Liar.”
“Why are you wearing it, anyway?” Ingram said. “Aren’t you a bit past it yourself?”
“I’ve had 100,000 printed up. We’re going to sell them outside every club in the Mediterranean this summer. From Lisbon to Tel Aviv. Ten euros each.”
“Don’t ever let anyone stop you dreaming, Ivo.”
Ivo’s look was one of pure hatred for a second, then he laughed in a fake, hollow manner, Ingram thought, clapped him on the shoulder and walked away. Ingram found some hard, shiny, shardy crackers in a bowl and munched on them for a while until a chef in white kitchen regalia and a toque announced that dinner was served.
There were twenty-four around the large dining table at the front of the house on the ground floor. Tightly squeezed in, Ingram thought, but by now he was past caring, having quickly consumed his fourth glass of white wine as they waited interminably for the main course. This ghastly evening was finite, he told himself, it would end, he would leave and he would never accept an invitation to dine at Ivo’s again for the rest of his life. This thought consoled and sustained him as he waited for the food with the rest of the guests, noticing he was as far away from Ivo as possible (Meredith was on Ivo’s right), placed between a woman who spoke hardly any English and one of the sullen-faced, pretty girls. She had smoked three cigarettes since sitting down and they’d only been served an insufficiently chilled, over-garlicked gazpacho, thus far. Ingram glanced at his watch—ten past eleven—there must be a serious crisis in the kitchen. He was the only man at the table wearing a tie, he realised. Then he saw to his astonishment that Ivo had his mobile phone on the table beside his pack of cigarettes. In his own home, Ingram thought: that is sad. Tragic. He turned to the sullen faced, pretty girl—who was lighting her fourth cigarette.
“Are you a friend of Smika?” he asked.
“No.”
“Ah, a friend of Ivo, then.”
“Ivo and I went out for a while…”
Ingram saw she was growing annoyed at his failure to recall her.
“Ivo and I stayed with you and Meredith at your house in Deya.”
“Really? Right…Yes…”
“I’m Gill John.”
“Of course you are. Gill John, yes, yes, yes.”
“We’ve met…A dozen times?”
Ingram heaped his apologies on her, blaming his age, encroaching Alzheimer’s, fatigue, hideous work crises. He remembered her now, vaguely: Gill Jo
hn, of course, one of Ivo’s old girlfriends, between Ludovine and Smika. He always went out with pretty girls, did Ivo—Ingram realising that it was one of the automatic benefits accruing to a preposterously good-looking man. And Gill John was indeed pretty, though her expression, posture and demeanour seemed to exude bitterness in some way, as if life had consistently let her down and she was expecting nothing to change.
“Oh, yes, good old Ivo,” Ingram said, not having a clue what to say to this young woman, simmering in her anger and bitterness. “Great lad, good fellow, Ivo.”
“Ivo’s a cunt,” she said. “Not a ‘great lad’ or a ‘good fellow’. You know that as well as I do.”
Ingram wanted to say: then why are you here at his birthday party? But he contented himself with: “Well, not a grade-A cunt. Grade-C, perhaps. Though as his brother-in-law I might be biased.”
She turned to look at him, squarely. Pale eyes, high forehead, lips a little thin, perhaps.
“You just prove my point,” she said.
“I don’t follow.”
“About what unites all men.” She laughed to herself, cynically, knowingly.
“I can think of a few common factors,” Ingram said, wondering how the conversation had suddenly taken this abrupt swerve. “But I suspect not the one you have in mind.”
“Internet porn.”
“Sorry?”
“Internet porn unites all men.”
Ingram accepted another refill of his wine glass from a patrolling waiter.
“I think your average Kalahari bushman might disagree,” he said.
“All right. All Western men with computers.”
“But what if you don’t have a computer? Your ‘unites all men’ claim has already lost some of its universal force. You might as well say…” he thought for a second. “What unites all men who own golf clubs? Love of golf? I don’t think so. Some men who own golf clubs find golf boring.”
Gill John lit her fifth cigarette. “Get a life,” she said.
“Or,” Ingram persisted with his analogy, rather pleased with it. “You could say: what unites all men who own umbrellas—fear of rain?”
“Fuck off,” Gill John said.
“In fact pornography is boring—that’s its fundamental, default problem. Women should take comfort from that.”
Gill John slapped him—not hard—just a little sharp slap with her fingers that caught his chin and lower lip. She turned away. Ingram sat still for a moment, his lower lip stinging. Amazingly, no one seemed to have noticed. Ivo had just left the table to see what was going on in the kitchen and all hungry eyes were on him. Ingram turned to his other partner. She smiled broadly at him—what could go wrong here, Ingram wondered?
“O Rio de Janeiro me encanta,” he said, unconfidently. Then Ivo’s mobile phone began to ring, with an annoying ring-tone taken from some heavy-metal guitar riff, and at that moment he reappeared.
“Sorry, guys,” he said to the assembled company, “but the tagine has cracked. We’ll only be another ten minutes or so.” He picked up the phone. “Ivo Redcastle…” He listened. “Yeah. OK.” He looked at Ingram with irritation. “It’s for you.”
Ingram left his seat and walked round the table thinking: who the fuck is calling me on Ivo’s phone? Meredith looked at him in hazy, tipsy surprise. Everyone else was talking, indifferent.
Ivo handed his phone over. “Don’t make a habit of this, right, Ingram?”
Ingram put the phone to his ear. “This is Ingram Fryxer.”
“Ingram. It’s Alfredo Rilke.”
Ingram suddenly felt chilly. He stepped quickly out of the dining room and into the hall.
“Alfredo. How did you get this number?”
“I called you on your own cell. The man who answered said you were with your brother-in-law.”
“Of course.” Ingram’s own phone was in his briefcase in the car outside with Luigi.
“I’m coming to London,” Rilke said.
“Excellent. Good. We—”
“No, not good. We have a serious problem, Ingram.”
“I know. Philip Wang’s death has set us—”
“Did you find this Adam Kindred?”
“No. Not yet. The police haven’t been able—”
“We have to find him. I’ll call when I arrive.”
They said goodbye and Ingram clicked Ivo’s phone shut. He felt small, suddenly, felt small and worried as he used to when a child, when events were too big and too adult to comprehend. That Alfredo Rilke should call him here at Ivo’s party only betokened serious problems. That Alfredo Rilke should come to London only underscored how serious those problems were. His brain worked furiously but no explanation came—only other worries, coagulating. He felt for the first time that he was no longer fully in control of his life—it was as if events were being ordered by an outside force he couldn’t master. Nonsense, get a grip, he told himself. Life is full of crises—it’s normal—this is just another. He looked through the open door to the kitchen and, as if to confirm his analysis, considered Ivo’s current crisis as the chef spooned stew from a shattered tagine into an orange casserole dish. He strode back into the dining room and returned Ivo’s phone to him.
“Any time, mate,” Ivo said, gracelessly.
“Meredith, we have to go,” Ingram said quietly and Meredith stood up at once.
“Aw, the party-poopers,” Ivo said in a bad American accent.
“Don’t say another word, Ivo,” Ingram said, squeezing his shoulder very hard. “You just carry on enjoying your lovely evening.”
13
THE ‘NEW ANNEXE’ OF the Marine Support Unit in Wapping, as it was rather grandly termed, consisted of four large Portakabins on a patch of waste ground off Wapping High Street, at Phoenix Stairs, where there was now a gleaming steel jetty, recently constructed. The Phoenix Stairs jetty was situated some 100 yards downstream from the MSU police station at Wapping New Stairs, almost equidistant from Wapping High Street’s two pubs, the Captain Kidd and the Prospect of Whitby. The MSU had recently acquired four new launches, Targa 505, slightly smaller, slightly faster but with the same custom-built roomy wheelhouse as the current fleet of older Targas. Hence this expansion to new premises and a new jetty, and hence, Rita supposed, her fast-track into the division. There was no point in having a bigger budget and the fleet increased by four new boats if there was nobody to man them.
She still felt something of the new girl at school—the MSU was small and close-knit, there was hardly any turnover of personnel (once you arrived at MSU you were there until retirement, more often than not)—and there were very few women police constables. So far in her few days at Wapping Rita had only met two other WPCs.
She stood at the end of the new jetty, pausing before she headed back along it to the Phoenix Stairs passage, and looked down river to the clustered towers of Canary Wharf, watching a jet soaring up from City Airport, and then turned her gaze across the river—it was high tide—to the vast modern blocks of St Botolph’s Hospital. It was like a small, complete city, she thought, everything you needed—heating, food, transport, sewage, life-support systems, morgue, funeral home—was there: no need ever to leave…
Morbid thoughts, Rita thought—ban them. She wasn’t in the best of moods, she knew. Her father had been aggressive over the breakfast cornflakes this morning and she’d snapped back at him. Then he had counter-accused her of sulking…They were beginning to argue like an old married couple, she thought, and she realised she wasn’t happy being on her own—she’d always had boyfriends and lovers and being single didn’t suit her. She hadn’t enjoyed her party either, her mood had soured when—retouching her make–up in the ladies’ lavatory—she had heard two men in the corridor outside talking about her. She had recognised Gary’s voice but couldn’t place the other’s—the music from the public bar was warming up, half obscuring it.
She heard Gary say: “—No, no. We, you know, broke up.”
Then the other man: “Shame,
yeah…(something inaudible) lovely girl, Rita. Just my type.”
“Yeah? What type would that be?” Gary said.
Rita was now at the door, ear to the jamb.
“Full breasts, thin frame,” the man said. “You can’t beat it. What a fool you are, Boland.”
They laughed and she heard them wander off. Rita came straight out of the ladies and went into the bar to see that Gary was standing on his own. She looked around: the place was full. Had it been Duke? She just couldn’t be sure. But it aggrieved her and it cast a cloud over her farewell. Every man she greeted, chatted to, let buy her drinks, said goodbye to, swore to stay in touch with and kissed on the cheek might have been Gary’s interlocutor. It made her wary and awkwardly self-conscious of the tightness of the T–shirt she’d chosen to wear. She’d drunk too much to little effect and woken up crapulous with a mighty day-long hangover.
Get a grip, she said to herself, disgusted with her self-pity, it’s hardly the end of the world, girl. For god’s sake—just blokes talking, nothing new there. Still, it was never nice to eavesdrop on conversations about yourself. Just as well she hadn’t been able to see their faces or any gestures they had made…
Routinely, she checked that the mooring ropes were made fast on her boat, a brand new Targa 50, re-tightened one, and turned her back on the river and went briskly along the jetty through the passage, across the narrow cobbled roadway that was Wapping High Street and into the operations Portakabin. Joey Raymouth was already there, still diligently writing up his notes from that morning’s intelligence briefing, and they greeted each other, perfunctorily but warmly—she liked Joey. He was assigned to her, seeing her through her first month on the river, ‘mentoring’ her. His father was a fisherman in Fowey, in Cornwall, and he had a West Country burr to his voice.
“You all right, Rita? Look a bit under the weather.”
She forced her face into a wide smile. “No, no probs at all.”
He rose to his feet and together they went to receive their instructions from Sergeant Denton Rollins—ex-Royal Navy, as he constantly reminded his charges—with the heavy implication that he still could not understand how he had come down so low in the world.