2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (24 page)

“It was when Ly-on was born. Like to show we one person, you know…I did small one on him, on his leg when he was baby. Boy, did he crying. But,” she smiled, radiantly, she believed it, “no one can separate us, now. Never.”

“Why are you called Mhouse?”

“My real name is Suri,” she said, spelling it for him slowly. “But I never like being Suri—so many bad things happen to Suri. So I change it.”

“To Mhouse.”

“Suri means ‘mouse’ in French language—someone told me.”

“Of course. But why do you write it like that?”

“I can write a bit. I can write ‘house’, yeah? I learn that. So,” she smiled. “House—Mhouse. Easy.”

Adam touched her breasts, kissed them, dragged his knuckles across her nipples, let his fingers trail down her flat stomach.

“Somebody offered me a job today,” he said. “£25,000 a year, and a car.”

Mhouse’s laughter was loud and genuine.

“You a funny one, John,” she said. “You know how to make me laugh.” She put the wine bottle down and pushed him gently, rolling him over on to his back so she could straddle him. She leant forward, twisting her body, letting her breasts touch his lips, his chin, a nipple grazing it, one then the other, and she kissed him, taking his bottom lip between her teeth and biting gently.

“I kiss you for free,” she said.

“Thank you,” Adam said.

Adam ran his hands down her lean back to cup her tensed buttocks. One hundred pounds to Mhouse, he thought, and a hundred to Mr Quality—worth every begging penny.

L
UIGI HIMSELF PUT THE thick envelope on his desk.

“Thank you, Luigi,” Ingram said. “I’ll see you at six, as usual.” He was about to open the envelope when he experienced one of these new virulent itches again—this time on the sole of his left foot. He kicked his shoe off. Removed his sock and scratched vigorously. ‘Itch’ was far too inert a word to describe these potent irritations: it was as if someone had inserted a red-hot acupuncture needle beneath the skin and had wiggled it around. Moreover, they seemed to occur anywhere on his body—armpit, neck, finger-joint, buttock—and yet there was no sign of a bite or an incipient rash. Some sort of nerve-ending playing up, he supposed—though he was beginning to worry that they might have some strange connection with his nightly blood-spotting: every two or three mornings his pillow was imprinted with these tiny blood spots coming from somewhere on his face and head. Anyway, the itches had started a week or two after the blood spots—perhaps there was no connection (perhaps this was a natural consequence of ageing—he was no spring chicken, he reminded himself- and, once scratched, these itches went away immediately) but when they fired up they were unignorable.

He replaced his sock and shoe and returned his attention to Luigi’s package. It contained Philip Wang’s appointment diary. Ingram, acting on a hunch—acting on a need to outflank Keegan and de Freitas—had sent Luigi down to the Oxford Calenture-Deutz laboratory to retrieve it from Wang’s PA. He opened it and started at the beginning of the year, working forward. Nothing very dramatic, the usual daily round of a busy head of a drug development programme, boring meeting after boring meeting, only some of which were directly to do with Zembla-4. Then, as he drew closer to Wang’s last day on earth, the pattern begins to change: a sudden concentration of trips in the last week or ten days—“out of office”—trips made to all four de Vere wings where the clinical trials were taking place, in Aberdeen, Manchester, Southampton and, finally, St Botolph’s in London, the day before he was killed. Turning the page to the last day, Wang’s ultimate day, Ingram saw there was only one appointment: “Burton Keegan, C-D, 3.00 a.m.”

Ingram closed the diary, thinking hard.

None of this was out of the ordinary—which was why the police had given it no thought, he supposed—a research immunologist going about his business in an entirely typical way. Unless, that is, you looked at it from a different angle—the Ingram Fryzer angle.

He asked Mrs Prendergast to connect him with Burton Keegan.

“Burton, it’s Ingram. Do you have a moment?”

Burton had.

“I’ve just been called by the police about Philip Wang, trying to pin down his movements in his last day or two. They seem to think he came into the office the day he was killed. I told them that wasn’t possible—I never saw him in the building, did you?”

“No…” Keegan kept his voice expressionless.

“Exactly. Philip always popped in when he was here…So you never saw him, either.”

“Ah, no. No, I didn’t.”

“Must be some mistake, then. I’ll let them know. Thanks, Burton.”

He hung up and went straight to the lift and down to the lobby, trying to seem casual, unhurried. He had the daily security manager bring him the signing-in book for the previous month and flicked back through the pages to the day in question. There it was: the shadowy carbon copy revealing that Philip Wang had signed in at 2.45 and signed out again at 3.53. A few hours later he was brutally murdered.

Ingram rode the lift back to his office in deep thought. Why had Keegan lied? Of course, Wang could have come to the office and cancelled his Keegan meeting—but then Keegan would have said so, surely? No, everything pointed incontrovertibly to an afternoon meeting with Keegan at three o’clock on the day of Wang’s murder. What had it been about? What had been said? Why hadn’t Philip Wang come to see him?

“What the hell’s it got to do with me?” Colonel Fryzer said impatiently, as he rearranged—ever so slightly—the vase of peonies, subject of his current still life.

“Nothing, Pa,” Ingram said, suppressing his own impatience, “I’m just using you as a kind of sounding board…” He decided to try flattery. “Get the benefit of your vast experience of the world.”

“Flattery doesn’t work on me, Ingram—you should know that by now. I detest it.”

“Sorry.”

“Your number two—what’s-his-name—”

“Keegan.”

“Keegan has lied to you. Ergo: he has something to hide. What could your Doctor Wang have said to him in that meeting? What would scare the shit out of Keegan?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What was this Wang chappie working on?”

“He’d spent the previous four days visiting the various hospitals where the clinical trials for a new drug we’re developing are taking place. Nothing unusual in that. The drug’s about to go for validation—here and in the US.”

“Is this Keegan involved in this validation process?”

“Absolutely. Very involved.”

The Colonel looked balefully at Ingram, then spread his hands. “This is your ghastly world, Ingram, not mine. Think. What could your Wang have said to Keegan that would upset him? There’s your answer.”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“At least you’re honest.”

There was a rap on the door and Fortunatus came in. Ingram felt almost shocked to see him.

“Dad, what’re you doing here?”

“Came to pick Pa’s brains. What about you?” Ingram kissed his son, who was wearing his usual infantryman-just-returned-from-combat outfit and, he noticed, had shaved his thinning hair to the shortest stubble.

“I’m taking Gramps to lunch.”

“I’ll be two seconds,” the Colonel said and disappeared into his bedroom.

The unoffered invitation hovered in the air, like a rebuke, Ingram thought, wondering if he should boldly suggest that he join them. He felt a strange emotion: three generations of Fryzers in the one small room but he realised neither his son nor his father wanted his company. He felt one of his burning itches start up on the crown of his head. He pressed hard on it with a forefinger.

“I’d love to join you,” he said, managing a rueful smile. “But I’ve got an exhibition.”

“You’re going to an exhibition?”

“No. I mean I’ve got an appointment.”

“Oh, right.”

The Colonel reappeared. “You still here, Ingram?”

S
ERGEANT DUKE PAUSED AT the door.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this, Rita. Believe me—”

“I’ve got no choice, Sarge. Nobody will tell me anything. I can’t just walk away.”

“That’s exactly what you should do. Things are going on here you don’t understand.”

“Do
you
understand?” She confronted him, hands on hips, looking him in the eye, and he seemed to quail slightly.

“What would you do if you were in my position?” she said, forcefully, not letting him off the hook.

“It’s not my problem. I’m not meant to understand.”

He pushed the door to the meeting room open and Rita sensed she had won a small victory. She stepped in and Duke closed the door behind her. She exhaled, thinking—Chief Inspector Lockridge wouldn’t see me in his office. OK. He’s confining me to the meanest meeting room in Chelsea police station. Why?

The room was almost worthy of some paradigmatic status as ‘ROOM’ in a typological dictionary: a table, two chairs, a battered plastic Venetian blind, a blazing strip light in the ceiling, bare walls. She sat down and waited.

Lockridge bustled in, after a couple of minutes, some sort of cardboard file in his hand that, she knew, had nothing to do with her complaint, but was an indication of the business he had waiting after he had peremptorily dealt with her. They shook hands.

“Good to see you again,” he said, sitting down, not mentioning her name, then raised his hand as if she was about to interrupt (which she wasn’t). “This is off the record, by the way. I’m only doing this because of your good service here.”

“I don’t want any favours, sir,” Rita said, bravely. “I’m just looking for some answers.”

“Fire away,” Lockridge said with his uneven smile. His face looked as though it had been kicked askew in his youth by a horse or a bull, his jaw bent right, making him talk out of the side of his mouth. He was known in the station as ‘Twisted Kisser’. Rita banished this nickname from her mind as she detailed the events of her arrest of the unnamed man at Chelsea Bridge, and outlined the reasons behind her asking for this interview.

Lockridge sighed: “This was a matter of the highest security. Word came down to us. You stumbled in on something—something even I know nothing about. I was told that this man should go free. These things happen. Particularly in the current climate. Terrorism, insurgency, etcetera.”

“We’re all on the same side,” Rita said. “Fighting the same fight. Why can’t we share information—even of the most basic sort? If this man had shown me some ID, we might have been able to assist him. Even if he had told me, in so many words, what he was doing, what he was up to—then you and I wouldn’t be sitting in this room, sir.”

Lockridge smiled, patronisingly, Rita thought. “There are some operations that are so secret that…” he said, shrugged, and then left his sentence unfinished.

“So that’s your answer, sir?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an ultra-secret security operation. This man I arrested was some kind of security operative.”

“So to speak, as it were.”

Rita drew a breath, inwardly, summoning her reserves of self-confidence, trying to quell her nervousness and keep any tremor out of her voice. “Because I’ll have to report this to the Borough Commander,” she said, unaggressively, she hoped. “And if he won’t help me I’ll have to go to the DPS. I arrested a man with two handguns on him. He was freed within twelve hours—no records, no statements, no prints, no DNA samples, as far as I can tell. The DPS will need to know where you stand.”

Lockridge’s twisted face seemed to contort further. Rage, she presumed.

“Our meeting is completely off the record,” he said.

“But I’m afraid you may have to speak to the DPS—
on
the record. Once I make my complaint.”

Lockridge stood up and picked up his prop-file. Mr Busy, trying to keep his rage under control.

“That would be extremely unwise, Constable.” There was a tremor in his voice now as he emphasised her rank.

“What happened to the weapons, sir?” She didn’t know what made her ask this. It was the first time she had thought about them.

Lockridge looked at her—suddenly very uncomfortable.

“What are you talking about?”

“Did they go to Forensics? They might help us.”

“We’re not looking for help. You don’t seem to have grasped that fact.”

He hadn’t answered her question. She knew she was beginning to anger him beyond countenance.

“Did they go to Amelia Street, sir? His two automatic pistols? Or did we let him take his guns away when we released him?” This was her killer blow, she knew. “We didn’t just give them back to him, did we, sir?…”

“Where are you now, Constable Nashe? Since you left us?”

“The MSU, sir.”

“Lucky for you. And I’m sure they’ll be the first to tell you—don’t rock the boat. Excellent advice—I would take it.”

He left the room at the same brisk pace that he had entered.

Rita stood across the road from the triangle of waste ground on the west side of Chelsea Bridge, wondering what answers to her many questions this forgotten, tiny corner of London might have offered up. Two hundred square yards of overgrown river bank, she reckoned, yet a place that she had visited twice in a week. How unusual was that? And what could possibly be the connection between a man killing a seagull at dawn and eating it and that big ugly bastard hiding in the bushes with his two handguns? Was she going too far? Was it just strange, bizarre coincidence? Was she simply making life difficult for herself, as Sergeant Duke had implied? What had happened to those guns? But she knew the answer from Lockridge’s shifty evasions—they’d just been handed back, like personal effects, a watch, a wallet. Surely that was inexcusable? She had no other clues to follow, no way of making any link other than her own vaporous, woolly intuition…

She walked slowly across Chelsea Bridge towards the Battersea shore, wondering what she should do next. She could try and set up an audit trail on the guns…And what did the custody record say about the disposal of the prisoner? She laughed at her naivety: dream on, girl. She knew a firewall when she saw one—and this was being built higher and thicker as each hour went by—and she thought hard about what she should do, whether she
could
do anything. Maybe it was all pointless, maybe it was something ‘bigger’, security-related…She flipped open her mobile and called her father.