by William Boyd
“Make your mind up. Your call, Johnnie.”
“All right,” Adam said, turning towards Chelsea. “There’s a cash machine at Sloane Square.”
“I’m not that fucking stupid,” Turpin said, belligerently. “No, I know another one. You might have friends waiting for old Vince at Sloane Square. No, we’ll go to Battersea, mate.”
They headed off across the bridge, Turpin trying to hold on to Adam’s arm to steady himself. His drunken instability seemed to have accelerated. Adam shook him off.
“Don’t touch me,” he said.
Turpin stopped, angry. He put one hand on the balustrade.
“Don’t you talk to me like that. What am I? Filth?…Anyway, you’re the one going to fall over, you stupid cunt. Your shoelace is undone.” Turpin found this fact very funny all of a sudden and doubled up in a wheezy laugh.
Adam looked down to see that his right shoelaces were trailing on the wet pavement. Turpin, still laughing to himself, leant back against the purple and white, thick cast-iron balustrade of the bridge, resting on his elbows—like a drinker resting, at his ease, Adam thought, leaning back against a bar. A late-night bus rumbled by, the light from its upper deck flashing across Turpin’s seamed and folded face.
“I heard a funny joke today,” Turpin said. “Didn’t half laugh. It’s good to laugh, clears out the system. Doctors will tell you that. A tonic.”
Adam stooped to tie his shoelace.
“There’s this woman social worker, see?” Turpin began. “And she’s talking to a little girl, pretty little chicken. And she says: do you know when your mummy has her period?—You heard this one before?”
“No,” Adam said, beginning to re-tie his other shoelace for good measure.
“It’s bloody good. Hilarious. So the little girl says to the social worker”—now Turpin put on a piping falsetto—“Yes, miss, I know when my mummy has her period. Social worker: how can you tell?…And the little girl says: because daddy’s cock tastes funny.” Turpin shook with laughter again.
It all became clear to Adam at once, in a flash of insight, what he could do, here and now, and how easy it would be. At the very least it would be some recompense, some rough justice, for all the grief Turpin had visited on his various wives and his little children. Adam quickly reached out, while Turpin was still rocking drunkenly with mirth at his joke, and slipped two fingers under the cuff of Turpin’s right trouser leg. He gripped it, holding it firmly, and rose suddenly to his feet from his crouching position. Turpin went up and over the balustrade so fast and fluently he had time only to utter a short bark of surprise, his hands grabbing vainly at thin air. And then he was gone, falling into the dark beyond the bridge’s lights. Adam heard the splash of his body hitting the water. He thought for a second about running across to see if there was any sign of him downstream, but Chelsea Bridge was awkward to traverse—he would have to vault two sizeable structural barriers on either side of the roadway—and anyway, it was dark and the tide was strong and surging and would carry Turpin away so quickly, he knew. Adam didn’t pause any longer, he turned and walked on towards Battersea. The whole moment had been so fast—a mere second—no cars had passed by, no one else was on the bridge. At one moment there had been two men; the next moment there was only one. So easy. Turpin was gone, Adam thought, as he walked away, and he didn’t feel anything, to his vague surprise, he didn’t feel changed in any way and he didn’t feel guilty. It was a simple act, a decision that had occurred to him spontaneously—bringing about an end to Turpin as if a roof tile had fallen on his head or as if he had been hit by a speeding car. A fatal accident. Adam strode calmly, steadily, on to Battersea and bussed home to Rita.
59
LIFE’S JOURNEY WAS VERY strange, Ingram decided, and it had recently taken him to places he never thought he would have visited on his personal itinerary from cradle to grave. He sat upright, now, in his hospital bed, leaning back against a fat pile of pillows, with his shaven, massively scarred head wrapped in a neat, tight turban of bandages. He had a drip in his arm and his left eye was covered with a black pirate’s patch—something he’d requested himself, to see if it would subdue the firework display that glittered and sparkled against the shifting grey mica dust that was all his left retina was currently supplying as vision. With light not coming in, the darkness seemed to quell the pyrotechnics. Only the occasional supernova or atom bomb blast made him flinch—otherwise he felt pretty well, if 3 out of 10 could be regarded as a norm: nausea, parched throat, out-of-body trances not being included in the audit. He could speak, he could read (out of one eye), he could think, he could eat—though he was never hungry—he could defecate (effortfully, meagrely), he could drink. He craved sweet, cold drinks—he asked all visitors to bring chilled colas—Pepsi, Coke, supermarket ‘own’ brands—he did not discriminate.
It was three days since his operation—the urgent ‘debulking’ of his brain—and he had been informed that his tumour had been removed along with the other tissue. His chemotherapy was underway and he could receive visitors. His wife, Meredith, had left five minutes before—trying to hide her tears but failing.
Currently, Lachlan McTurk sat heavily on his bed, helping himself to a toothglass of the malt whisky he had brought as a present.
“You’ll like this, Ingram,” McTurk said. “Speyside. Aberlour. I know you don’t enjoy West Coast.”
“Thank you, Lachlan. I look forward to it.”
McTurk topped himself up again.
“Who was your surgeon?” he asked.
“Mr Gulzar Shah,” Ingram said. He had popped in an hour previously, a tall, gaunt, softly spoken man with dark eye sockets, as if he had applied eye-shadow to them.
“Oh, very good man. Top man. Did he give you a final diagnosis?”
“Glioblastoma multiforme,” Ingram pronounced the words carefully. “I think that’s what he said.”
“Ah…yes…Hmmm. Oh, dear…Yes…”
“You’re wonderfully reassuring, Lachlan. Mr Shah said he wanted to wait for more biopsy results before he confirmed. But that was his provisional judgement.”
“It’s definitely something you don’t want to get, old son, is all I’ll say. Very nasty.”
“Well, I seem to have got it, by all accounts. I don’t have much choice.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You’re my doctor, Lachlan—what’s your prognosis?”
Lachlan sipped his whisky, thinking, sucking his teeth.
“Well…If you follow the usual pattern you’ll probably be dead in three months. Don’t give up all hope, though. Ten per cent of glioblastoma multiforme sufferers experience remission—some have lived five years. Who can say? You might be the exception. You might prove medical science wrong: live a long, fulfilled life. It is a rare and virulent cancer, though.” Lachlan reached forward and patted his hand. “Exceptionally. Still, I’ll put my money on you, Ingram. At least five years.”
“Many thanks.”
There was a knock on the door.
“I’ll haste awa’, laddie,” Lachlan said in his best Rabbie Burns mode. He pushed the whisky bottle towards Ingram. “Do have a wee dram of this. No point in holding back, eh? Chin up.”
As he left he passed Ingram’s accountant, Chandrakant Das, coming in. Chandrakant was in an evident state of shock—he couldn’t speak for a while, his face pinched, his eyes moist, he gripped Ingram’s hand with both his hands, looking down and breathing deeply for a minute, composing himself.
“I feel surprisingly well, Chandra,” Ingram said, trying to put him at his ease. “I know everything is collapsing around me but I feel in sufficiently good health to want to enquire about the state of my finances. That’s why I asked you here. I do apologise.”
Chandra was finally able to speak. “It’s not good, Ingram. Not good, not good, not good, not good.”
Chandra explained. Calenture-Deutz shares were currently trading at 37 pence and heading south. Rilke Pharma had made a buy-o
ut offer to the other shareholders of 50 pence a share but were reconsidering as the company rapidly devalued. Ingram had been voted off the board as chairman and CEO and it was only his ‘health crisis’ that was keeping the Serious Fraud Office at bay.
“But I didn’t make a penny from this fiasco,” Ingram said. “I’ve lost a fortune. So why are they after me?”
“Because your brother-in-law has absconded with £1.8 million,” Chandra said, anguished. “They can’t touch him in Spain so they’re after you. You obviously advised him to sell, they say. Clear case of insider dealing.”
“On the contrary. I explicitly advised him not to sell.”
“Can you prove it?”
Ingram fell silent.
“I don’t want you to worry, Ingram. Burton Keegan is holding everything together, keeping the police at bay. It would look very bad to arrest and prosecute a man so close to—so seriously ill.”
“Good old Burton.”
Chandra took his hand again and said with real feeling, “I’m so pleased to see you, Ingram. And I’m so sorry this has happened.”
Ingram frowned, gently releasing his hand from Chandra’s grip. “That’s the thing: I really don’t understand how it happened. That’s what bothers me: everything seemed on course, all was fine and dandy.”
Chandra shrugged, spread his hands. “Who are we to speak? To seek neat answers? Who can predict what life will bring us?”
“Very true.”
Ingram asked Chandra to pour him half an inch of Lachlan’s whisky. He sipped it—throat burning. He smelt burnt barley, peat, clear Scottish rivers. It emboldened him.
“I want to know where I stand, Chandra. Bottom line. Don’t spare me—now that everything’s gone pear-shaped.”
“I did some quick analysis before I came,” Chandra said, retrospective disbelief distorting his features for a moment. “It’s not good…Last month you were worth more than £200 million. Now…” He took out his phone and punched numbers into it. Ingram wondered for a moment if he was calling someone but he remembered you could do everything on a mobile phone now, everything.
Chandra held the phone away from him as if he were dubious of the reading he was receiving. “Now I would say your assets were worth £10 million—give or take £100,000 here or there. Baseball park figure.” Chandra smiled. “Of course, I’m not including your properties.”
“So there is some light in this darkness.”
“A gleam of light, Ingram. You can still live reasonably well. You are not a poor man. But you must be prudent.”
He handed Ingram a few documents for signature. Ingram might have well been signing his remaining assets away, for all he knew, but he trusted Chandra. And you couldn’t live in a world without trusting people, as he had so recently and callously discovered. Chandra would make sure he was all right, that Meredith and his family were all right with what remained. There might have to be some down-sizing, some belt-tightening, but, as Chandra said, he was not a poor man. Or so he hoped, he thought, suddenly less sanguine. Who could predict what life would bring us?—as Chandra had just reminded him.
Chandra gathered up his documents, shook Ingram’s hand and reassured him all would be well. As he left, a nurse poked her head around the door.
“Are you up for any more visitors, Mr Fryzer? Mr Shah said not to tire you out.”
“It depends who it is,” Ingram said, thinking that if it’s the Serious Fraud Office, I’m comatose.
“It’s your son.”
“Oh, well, that’s fine.” He called out: “Guy, come on in.”
Fortunatus stepped into the room.
“‘Fraid it’s me, Dad.”
He had a bunch of flowers in his dirty hand, dark purple flowers with waxy leaves that were already giving off a powerful scent, filling the room. Forty handed them over.
“What’re these?” Ingram asked, immeasurably touched.
“Freesias. My favourites. I just cut them for you. We do a garden not far from here.”
Forty looked as though he’d just come out of the front line—the usual filthy combat jacket over baggy, greasy jeans, his head now shaved egg-smooth. Ingram looked at him in wonder.
“How’re you doing, Dad?”
“I’ve decided to adopt your hairstyle. Trying to look like you.”
Fortunatus laughed nervously.
“They shaved all my hair off and then hoiked out half my brain.”
“No need to go that far,” Forty said.
They both laughed at that. Ingram laughed harder and felt his body heave in response.
“I love you, Forty,” he said. “That’s why I want to look like you.”
“Dad,” Forty said, awkward. “Please don’t cry.”
60
IT WAS STRANGE SEEING YOUR PICTURE IN THE NEWSPAPER, JONJO thought, particularly if you’d never had your picture in any newspaper before. It was a photograph taken some fifteen years earlier, he calculated, when he’d been in the British Army, and was captioned: “John-Joseph Case, wanted by police to assist in their enquiries into the murder of Dr Philip Wang.” He crumpled the newspaper into a ball and hurled it at the rear window of his camper-van. It bounced off the angled Perspex on to the carpeted floor—where The Dog immediately pounced on it, picked it up and brought it back, dropping it at his feet and stood there waiting, tail wagging, for this new game to continue.
Jonjo picked The Dog up and heaved him into his arms, turning him on his back like a baby. The Dog enjoyed being held like this and he licked Jonjo’s face with his big wet tongue. Jonjo hugged The Dog to him, confused by the emotions he was experiencing and said out loud, “Sorry, mate, but there’s no other way,” and dropped him carefully on the floor again. It was two hours to high tide, no point in hanging around.
Disturbed by this personal publicity, Jonjo went into the camper-van’s tiny toilet and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. The beard was coming on pretty well—the black still intense, though he might need to re-dye it in a couple of days if it kept growing at this rate and in a funny sort of way he thought that he suited being dark: he looked better than he usually did with his normal gingery-brown crew cut and it was an added bonus that his most recognisable feature, the cleft in his chin, was now obscured by the facial hair. Perhaps he should have grown a beard ages ago, he wondered, but at least he now looked nothing like the picture in the paper, he was glad to say. Following Kindred’s lead, he thought to himself, uncomfortably, taking a leaf out of Adam Kindred’s book of disappearance and evasion. Everything in his life had been running fairly smoothly—no complaints, thanks—until Kindred had arrived. He had survived the Falklands War, Northern Ireland, Gulf War I, Bosnia, Gulf War II, Iraq and Afghanistan—and only when the Kindred element intruded had everything gone arse-over-tit. He told himself to calm down.
He put his Clock in his pocket and picked up the spade.
“Come on, boy,” he said. “Walkies.”
He stepped out of the camper-van and inhaled. It was a fine afternoon—sunshine and thin high clouds invading the sky from the South–east—an English summer’s day with a cool breeze coming off the estuary. He had found himself a berth in a new caravan⁄campsite—not far from the seafront—on Canvey Island, Essex, a curious, sunken sea-walled enclave on the Thames between Basildon and Southend-on-Sea, a strange backwater of abandoned oil refineries with grassed-over concrete roads and rusting street lights, and huge functioning oil refineries and storage depots, gleamingly lit at night, venting steam and orange flares behind their diamond-mesh perimeter fencing, serving the vast tankers that docked at great steel jetties that poked out into the river estuary. Dotted along the Canvey sea wall were occasional neat art deco cafes that recalled the island’s past as a Londoners’ convenient holiday resort but that now, as far as he could tell from the few days he had been living here, kept their own bizarrely sporadic hours of opening and closing: sometimes you were lucky, sometimes you weren’t.
During his Canve
y Island sojourn Jonjo had kept himself to himself, going for walks with The Dog, circumnavigating the island by way of the sea wall path twice, clockwise and anti-clockwise, deliberately not becoming over-acquainted with his camper-van and caravanning neighbours on either side, ensuring that any conversations were brief but friendly enough, all the same.
The problem was The Dog. Basset hounds, that was the problem—he couldn’t go ten paces without some kiddie stopping to pet The Dog; some mother saying, aw, what a lovely doggie; some bloke wanting to pontificate about breeds and breeding. He thought he might as well be carrying a placard: ‘WANTED MAN ON THE RUN WITH INTERESTING LOVEABLE DOG’. The Dog was exactly what you didn’t need when the fucking police were searching the country for you. He swore at himself for his sentiment: he should have left The Dog with Candy. Popped a note through the door asking her to look after him, saying he ‘had to go abroad’ or something for a few months. Candy would have been thrilled—it would have been so easy.
He and The Dog left the campsite, with no encounters, and headed east, walking through the town towards Smallgains Creek, where the marina and the yacht club were to be found. He walked up and over the sea wall, past the yacht club building and behind the boat yard, looking for the path that led through the tidal salt marsh—the saltings, as they were called—to Canvey Point, the flat easternmost promontory of the island.
Thinking back, he understood now what the plan would have been. They would have come for him, as Darren had warned. Having removed his weaponry earlier, they would have simply taken him away and quietly slotted him, then hidden his body, never to be found or seen again—end of problem, Plan A. However, because he wasn’t there when they came, because he’d done a runner (thanks, Darren) they had resorted to Plan B. The newspaper article had told him everything: in his house, when the police searched it, acting on an ‘anonymous tip-off, they had found a photograph of Dr Philip Wang and blueprints of Anne Boleyn House, Chelsea. A gold watch that had belonged to Dr Wang had also been retrieved. DNA samples in the house had been matched with fibres found in Dr Wang’s flat.