2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Jonjo bellowed—and everyone calmed down.

  Jonjo approached Mohammed, who flinched away from him.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Jonjo said. “Not yet, anyway…How did you get that coat?”

  “Like I tell Boz,” Mohammed said. “Three, four weeks ago—I got minicab, right? I minicab driver, yeah?—it was late, I was just going down to the clubs, yeah? Then I sees this geezer, I thought he was pranged—but I see he got cut on his head, yeah?” Mohammed went on to tell his story: how this geezer said he lived in Chelsea and he needed to get back there, and Mohammed, liking the idea of a long journey and a big fare, told this geezer to step aboard. But, when they got to Chelsea, the geezer said he had no money, so he offered his raincoat instead as payment. Mohammed had been very happy to accept it.

  “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. But he come back with it and I could see, like, it was a Blueberry raincoat. Class, man, no worries. One hundred quid, easy.”

  Bozzy stepped forward and pointed his finger at the small space between Mohammed’s lush eyebrows.

  “Lying cunt.” He turned to Jonjo. “We stripped the mim. He don’t have nothing left but a shirt and his knickers.”

  “He had cloves on, man. I don’t take no naked man in my cab.”

  “Lying cunt!”

  Jonjo punched Bozzy extremely hard on his shoulder. Bozzy gave a sharp wheeze of pain and backed off, his arm dangling limp, dead.

  “So you dropped him in Chelsea,” Jonjo said to Mohammed. “At a house?”

  “Nah. He was sleeping rabbit, next by a bridge.”

  Now Jonjo grabbed Mohammed by his throat and lifted him off the ground, his toes just able to touch the stained concrete. Mohammed’s hands gripped Jonjo’s iron wrist, desperately seeking purchase.

  “Don’t lie to me, Mo.”

  “I swear, boss,” he whispered, eyes bulging.

  “Torture him,” Bozzy said.

  Jonjo let Mohammed down. He coughed, raked his throat and spat.

  “I drop him off. He go into this bit of like waste ground. He come out with coat and give it me.”

  Jonjo felt a warmth spread through him. A patch of waste ground by a Thames-side bridge in Chelsea: Battersea Bridge, Albert Bridge or Chelsea Bridge—had to be one of those. Living rough, hiding out—no wonder Kindred had been so hard to find. He looked at Mohamnied, still spitting as if he had a fish bone in his throat.

  “So he was sleeping rough by a bridge, was he?…” Jonjo said, benevolence making his voice go ever so slightly husky. He wasn’t going to hurt Mohammed any more. He didn’t need to. “Now, you tell me exactly what bridge you’re talking about.”

  Jonjo parked his cab in a small square and walked the half-mile back to Chelsea Bridge. He stood for a while at the railings surrounding the thin triangle of overgrown waste ground, checking to see if there was any movement, any sign of somebody hiding. When he was sure there was no one there he waited for the traffic on the Embankment to slacken and then vaulted over the iron railings. He roved through the triangle quickly—it was bigger than it appeared from the road, and along the bridge side there was a huge old fig tree, of all things. Approaching the triangle’s apex, moving away from the bridge, Jonjo found the undergrowth grew even thicker. He ducked under low branches and pushed through dense bushes and shrubs to find a small clearing. Three tyres were set on top of each other forming a rudimentary seat; under a bush he found a sleeping bag and a groundsheet; under another an orange box with a gas stove, saucepan, a bar of soap and three empty baked bean tins.

  Jonjo prowled around a little further. Good cover from the road and the traffic on the bridge. The grass was bruised and trampled flat—someone had been living here for quite a while. He found an entrenching tool: there was no litter, faeces were presumably buried—quite impressive. He looked skywards, nearly dark, the light bulbs on Chelsea Bridge were glowing brightly against the purple-blue of the evening sky.

  He checked the clips in both his guns and found himself a snug hiding place, a few yards from Kindred’s clearing. Kindred would be coming back in an hour or so—or whenever. He didn’t care how long he had to wait: sometimes in the regiment he’d hidden up for two weeks to slot someone. Kindred could take as long as he liked: now that he had found his secret home the Kindred chapter in Jonjo Case’s life was about to be concluded—with extreme prejudice.

  21

  LONDON’S VAST SIZE ALWAYS surprised him—cowed him, almost—Adam realised, even though he’d tramped its streets endlessly these past weeks. To walk from the Church ofjohn Christ in Rotherhithe to Chelsea Bridge took him well over an hour and a half, and yet on a map he would have covered no distance at all of the city’s great sprawling mass—a tiny, meandering trajectory, crossing the boundaries of a few boroughs: Bermondsey, Southwark, Lambeth, Pimlico, Chelsea. True, he’d stopped to buy himself a cup of coffee and a bottle of water and an apple for his breakfast but he was feeling footsore as he arrived at the Battersea end of Chelsea Bridge, glad to see its glowing chains of light bulbs, noting that the tide was ebbing, traces of his beach beginning to appear. Perhaps he might have a midnight bathe, he wondered: shirt off, sluice a bit of chill Thames water over the upper torso—maybe even heat up a saucepan of water and wash his hair.

  He crossed the bridge and turned left just in time to see four policemen, all wearing stab-vests, unlock the main gate to the triangle and go inside. He ran across the Embankment and waited, half hidden by the war memorial on the corner of Chelsea Bridge Road, watching and waiting—nerves on edge, suddenly alarmed, very alarmed. Nothing seemed to be happening. He looked at a non-existent watch on his wrist and paced to and fro a bit, as if he were killing time, for the benefit of anyone who might have been interested in his presence there—he could have been waiting for someone to come out of the Lister Hospital opposite—and needlessly re-tied both his shoelaces. Then, about ten minutes after the police had gone into the triangle, he saw the four of them emerge with a fifth man, a big guy, handcuffed.

  He saw one of the policemen calling for support on his personal radio and about two minutes later two police cars—sirens going, blue lights flashing—pulled up outside the triangle and the fifth man was pushed inside one of them. Conveniently, the police car was under a street light and Adam was no more than fifty feet away so could see quite clearly. Just before he was bent into the back seat of the police car, the big guy paused and seemed to say something to one of the policemen.

  With a spasm of pure surprise Adam recognised him. He felt his body lurch as the shock of familiarity hit him. The weak, cleft chin, the crew cut, the blunt features—this was the man he had knocked unconscious with his briefcase the night of Wang’s murder.

  The police car whooped off, one of the policemen stepped into the other car and it sped away, following. The three policemen left behind high-fived each other and clapped each other on the back before walking away down the Embankment. Adam watched them saunter off, following them discreetly a little way and saw them go through a gate in the Embankment wall and down some steps on to the river. Minutes later a patrol boat pulled away and sped downstream.

  Questions yammered in Adam’s brain. What was the big guy doing in the triangle? Waiting for him to come back? Jesus Christ…How had he known about the triangle? What were the police doing there? Why had the police arrested him? Had there been some new lead in the Wang case? Was this arrest going to vindicate him, finally? Question tumbled after question, a small slithering avalanche of questions. He felt quite weak, all of a sudden, and he realised at once that he couldn’t stay in the triangle any more—the triangle days were over. He had to find somewhere else to hide.

  Adam knocked on Mhouse’s door: it was very late, about 3.00 a.m. and this was the seventh or eighth time he’d called back to see if she had returned from her boat-pa
rty on the river. He’d kept to the shadows, avoiding the few people around: The Shaft at night, as he knew all too well, was not a welcoming place. He saw a light go on behind the door.

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  “Mhouse? It’s me—John 1603. I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to stay in the spare room.”

  22

  THE TARGA CRUISED INTO the new steel jetty at Phoenix Stairs and Rita sprang ashore and figure-eighted the mooring rope around the big cleat on the jetty edge. Joey threw her the stern rope and she secured it. It had been a quiet day on the river. They had taken a diver from the Underwater Search Team down to a wharf in Deptford to investigate a potential submerged dead body—but it turned out to be three weighted sacks of rubbish. Then they’d intercepted a barge coming down river from Twickenham with inadequate paper work and passed on the details to the Thames Harbourmaster’s office. Finally they had checked in with the RNLI station at Lifeboat Pier on the Victoria Embankment, collected the inflatable pathway they had borrowed and had a cup of tea. Almost a pleasure cruise, she thought: sunny day, out on the water, what could be nicer? She asked Joey if he could go to the end-of-day debriefing as she wanted an urgent word with Sergeant Rollins.

  “Any news, Sarge?” she said, when she found him in his tiny office in Portakabin 3, next to the humming, refrigerated mortuary in Portakabin 4. You could hear the unit through the wall: she wouldn’t like her office next to a morgue, that’s for sure. She was trying to seem merely casually interested, trying to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

  “Yeah. They let him go.”

  “What? ”

  Rollins shrugged, spread his hands. “That’s all I know. Kept him in overnight. Home free in the morning.”

  “Let him go? No charge?” Rita felt a strange shock in her, an emptiness: this was the last thing she expected.

  “You’ll have to go up Chelsea, Nashe. Find out what happened. You’re no longer required as arresting officer. There is no case.”

  “He was carrying, for god’s sake. Two weapons and a six-inch blade. No ID. What’s going on?”

  “An open-and-shut, I’d’ve thought, but there you go. There must be a reason.” He smiled fondly at her. “You’ll just have to arrest somebody else now, darling.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘darling’, sergeant.”

  When she went off duty, Rita took the Tube up to Chelsea police station to find out if she could discover any answers. Sergeant Duke wasn’t on that night but she saw Gary going down a corridor, called and went after him.

  “Hey, Rita,” he said, looking her up and down. “You all right? Looking lovely, as per. Great party, by the way.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Just popped up from Belgravia. Paper work.”

  She looked around, making sure no one could overhear. “We called in last night. Guy we arrested at Chelsea Bridge—two guns on him, no ident, wouldn’t talk, not a word. I came up here with him myself, filled in the IRB, then we handed him over to CID. Job done. Now, I just heard they let him go. What the fuck’s going on? Any idea?”

  Gary looked up and down the corridor. “Yeah, I heard…” He tapped the side of his nose. “It was one of those calls, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  He lowered his voice. “Someone very high up in the Met rings up: “Let this bloke go now—I take full responsibility.” That kind of number.”

  “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “Some sort of covert surveillance thing you surprised. MI5. Anti-terrorist. I don’t know. He’s obviously well connected, your Chelsea Bridge bloke.”

  “I’m not going to let this go.”

  “OK—See that wall there? Just bash your head against it for an hour or two. You’ll get the picture. Leave it, Rita—it’s way, way over our pay-scale.”

  She paced up and down the corridor, thinking.

  “I miss you, Rita.”

  “Tough.”

  “I was a fool. Tosser. I admit it.”

  “Too late, Gary.”

  “We could have a drink, couldn’t we?”

  They went to a bar near the station—a pseudo-Spanish tapas place but with nice music. Gary continued his pleas to be forgiven and she half listened, still troubled by what had taken place, still angry in an unfocussed way, thinking back to what had happened the night before in that patch of waste ground by the bridge.

  She’d gone straight to the clearing and had started searching, Joey and the other two shining torches here and there, when this man had reared up from behind a bush, giving her a shock, his hands raised above his head. “You got me,” was all he said. She searched him, found the weapons, arrested him and officially cautioned him, cuffed him and called the Chelsea boys for a couple of area cars. The man never said anything more, had no ID on him, wouldn’t give his name, was very calm. When she had pushed him into the back of the car he had turned to her suddenly as if he was about to say something before clearly stopping himself. Their faces had been close. Big, ugly bloke, weak chin with a deep cleft in it. Gary was still talking.

  “Sorry, I was miles away,” she said. “So, what’s new? Any more Chelsea murders?”

  “Not since your last rumble.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “About to close it down, I reckon—nothing, nada. Still got a murder room in Belgravia. Just a couple of DCs, a file and a phone line. For form’s sake, you know.”

  “No sign of Kindred?”

  He shrugged. “Kindred is either dead or being sheltered by friends and family.”

  “I thought he had no friends or family in this country.”

  “I reckon he topped himself.” Gary reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette, then put the box back in his pocket, remembering he couldn’t smoke in pubs any more.

  “You put out a reward like that,” he said, “that big—a hundred grand—you get a thousand calls. I think we got twenty-seven—all nutters. Then it dried up completely—he must be dead.”

  “Or gone abroad,” she said. “Fled the country.”

  He wasn’t interested, she could see. He reached for her hand. “I’d like to see you again, Rita. I miss you.”

  Rita climbed up the gangway to the Bellerophon, deliberately stamping her feet, and saw the glowing end of her father’s joint arc out from the stern into the water. He had a can of Speyhawk in his hand.

  “Hi, Dad—nice and mellow?”

  “I’ve been mellower, but I’m not complaining. Ernesto’s down below—you’re late.”

  They had supper together—pizza, salad, apple pie—a monthly date that Rita insisted on and that they mostly kept. Once a month, she said, they should meet as a family and have a meal, share food and wine. She and Ernesto never talked about their mother, Jayne—Jeffs ex-wife—now living, as far as any of them knew, in Saskatchewan, Canada, re-married, to an unknown man, but Rita liked to think that the very fact that the rest of the Nashe family gathered together like this meant she was a ghostly presence—their pointed not-mentioning her making her all the more there, somehow. Rita wrote her a letter from time to time but she never replied—but she knew that Ernesto always received a card on his birthday and an occasional telephone call. But nothing for Rita, though, because Rita had chosen Jeff—Ernesto had been too young so he was forgiven. It was all misunderstandings and bad feelings and it made her sad if she thought about it too much: still, at least here the three of them were, having a meal.

  “Busy, Ernesto?”Jeff Nashe asked his son.

  “I could work fourteen days a week,” Ernesto said. He was a small, burly young man, two years younger than Rita. He looked like Jayne, Rita thought. He disguised his intense shyness under a badly assumed air of untroubled placidity.

  “How’s the crane business going?” Jeff asked. “Soaring? Overarching?”

  “When they’re building they need cranes. When they stop building we’re in trouble.”

  Rita could see her father’s effort to fei
gn interest. Ernesto was a tower-crane operator—he earned three times her salary.

  “I arrested a man last night,” she said, keen to change the subject. “Down by Chelsea Bridge. He had two automatic pistols on him and a knife.”

  Jeff Nashe turned his semi-befuddled gaze on her, eyes widening. “Are you armed-police, now?” he asked, accusingly. “The day you carry a weapon is the day you leave the Bellerophon.”

  She ignored his idle threat. “He surrendered to me,” she said. “Me and my fellow officers.”

  “You want to be careful,” Ernesto said. “Bloody hell, what’s it all coming to, eh? Jesus.”

  “London’s been a violent city since it was founded,” Jeff said. “Why should we be surprised that anything’s changed.”

  Fair enough, Rita thought, but, today, when we arrest a man carrying two unlicensed weapons on him we don’t let him go twenty-four hours later. She thought she shouldn’t just turn a blind eye and walk away—she really ought to do something about this.

  23

  DARREN BROUGHT THEIR PINTS over and set them down on the table. They were in a large, loud bar off Leicester Square—the place was full of foreigners, all chatting away in their incomprehensible foreign languages, Jonjo thought, looking around him. Even the bar staff were foreign. He, Darren and this other bloke who’d been introduced as ‘Bob’ seemed to be the only true-blue English present. This Bob was another soldier, Jonjo had recognised instantly, though of higher rank—an officer, a ‘Rupert’—but a Rupert who had seen some nasty business: two fingers were missing on his left hand and he had a fairly recent, wealed, crescent-shaped scar four inches long on his jaw.

  “Cheers, dears,” Jonjo said and glugged three big mouthfuls of fizzy beer. He was in for a bollocking, or worse—might as well enjoy the free drink.

  “You fucked up, Jonjo,” Bob said quietly, when he’d set his glass down. “Big time. Do you know what we had to do to get you out? Any idea who we had to call? The special favours we had to ask of very important people? What favours we now owe?”