2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (7 page)

“RITA! For god’s sake, I need you!”

She carried on watering her plants.

“£100,000 REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARREST OF Adam Kindred.” Adam regarded the full-page advertisement in the newspaper with frank astonishment and an obscure, though fleeting, sense of pride. Never had he seen his name written so large—and to be worth a £100,000 reward. Who would have thought it? There was his picture, also, and details of his height, weight and race. Adam Kindred, 31, white male, English, dark hair. His raincoat and briefcase were also specified as if he never wore or carried anything else. Then the reality of the situation struck him and he felt shame creep over him, imagining his family seeing this, imagining people who had known him, speculating. Adam Kindred, a murderer?…

He was sitting in his small clearing at the sharp end of the Chelsea Bridge triangle. The grass was well flattened now and the three thick bushes that protected him from the gaze of passers-by were like the familiar walls of his secret room. It was five days since his grotesque, brief encounter with Dr Philip Wang in Anne Boleyn House—five days that had allowed his beard to grow, dense and dark and, he hoped, all-disguising. He had never grown a beard before but was grateful for the speed with which his facial hair sprouted, however much it itched. The key thing was he looked nothing like the man in the newspaper’s favourite photograph.

The itch around his jaw, throat and lips was just one amongst the many itches that dominated his waking life. He hadn’t stepped under a shower or into a bath since he had prepared himself for his interview at Imperial College. And here was another admixture of pride and regret: to learn from the newspapers that it had been decided to offer him the job of senior research fellow was gratifying (he was the perfect, well-qualified candidate) but then only to have the offer withdrawn hours later—once he was a publicised murder-suspect—was a blow, however predictable. He had kept his phone switched off but wondered if anyone had called: Imperial College, offering the job, then withdrawing it? The police—urging him to give himself up? He was unwilling to use his phone in the triangle—uncertain whether it might give his position away and keen to conserve whatever juice was left in the battery—he was down to one bar. It had all gone quiet for the last forty-eight hours, however. But he found he didn’t care as much as he thought he would about the job, such were the incremental complexities and disasters of his strange new life underground. He would rather have a thirty-minute soak in a hot bath, currently, than be a senior research fellow at Imperial College—it was some measure of the waking nightmare his life had become.

He washed as well and as much as he could in public lavatories—he could just about manage hands, face and neck—but his hair was now heavy and dull with grease (in his other life he had washed his hair every day—what a preposterous luxury that seemed) and his clothes were taking on that encrusted, creased look of the homeless, adhering loosely to the body-shape like a fabric integument, another skin. He slept and lived in the same shirt, underpants and trousers and he knew he was beginning to smell as he steadily acquired that unmistakable look—of poverty, of self-neglect.

As he roved around his triangle at night—easily avoiding the occasional drug-takers and the lovers who took advantage of its dark undergrowth for some moments of privacy—he had become aware that, at low tide, a long, thin sand and shingle beach appeared below the sheer embankment wall. Three looped rows of chains had been attached, one above the other, to this wall, as a safety aid, he supposed, something to grab on to if you found yourself in the river being washed up- or downstream, depending on the powerful tides. These chains also allowed him to descend easily to his beach, a thing he had done twice now, and the first time he had done so, at about two in the morning, he had felt an overpowering temptation to strip off, immerse himself in the river and wash himself clean. But the tide was still ebbing and he could sense its tremendous flow and strength: he didn’t yet know the river well enough, he realised. Perhaps the only minutes he could safely wade in would be when the tide was turning and the rush of water slowed or slackened for a few moments. As he clambered back up to the triangle, hauling himself up the chains, he was pleased to think that he would have a beach now, twice every twenty-four hours—the river was becoming a feature of his tiny triangular world.

He lay low in the day, stretched on his groundsheet in the shade of the bush, listening to the traffic grind by on the four lanes of tarmac just a few feet away, thinking endlessly about what had happened to him and making plan after plan for any number of potential futures. He watched the clouds travel above the Thames, idly noting their types and transformations. One day he saw the sky cover steadily with a thin layer of altostratus translucidus, the sun a shrouded, nacreous disc, and, as the cloud-layer inevitably thickened to altostratus opacus, he sensed the rising moisture gathering ahead of an advancing warm front and, two hours before the inevitable rain began to fall, he prepared and waterproofed his sleeping quarters under his bush as best he could. He lay in his makeshift tent hearing the tapping patter of rain and felt, not pride at his expertise and manifest foreknowledge, but sadness. Clouds were his business—he was a cloud-man who made clouds in his giant laboratory and stimulated them to deliver their moisture in the form of raindrops or hailstones…So what was he doing lying, filthy and alone, in this small triangle of ground on the bank of the Thames? Not for the first time the life that he had once so recently led seemed some kind of taunting chimera—the contrasts between his two existences, before and after, appeared too acute to seem real—as if the Adam Kindred he had been was a fantasy figure, a vagrant’s dream, the fond imaginings of a desperate down-and-out.

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 cafes 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 × x 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 Dot’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 facade. 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 T where a girl in an apricot overall smiled welcome at him. The name badge on her breast read ‘Fatima’.