2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (46 page)

They found a spot on the edge of the bay, spread their rug and ate their sandwiches and pies and drank their fizzy drinks. Adam felt he was in a kind of time warp—the flat marshlands behind him, the refulgent estuary in front, and beyond the hazy mass of the Essex shore, Canvey Island, the Maplin Sands, Foulness. Ly-on took his jeans off and changed into his swimming trunks behind a towel held out by Adam. He went paddling in the shallows, shouting out, “Remember you promised to teach me to swim, John!”

Adam looked up and down the river’s coastline. There was an empty tanker temporarily moored offshore, riding high in the water, and it reminded Adam that this was where, after the Napoleonic Wars, all the prison hulks were berthed, old, rotting, mastless three-deckers full of convicts destined for Australia…Australia—where his father and sister and nephews were living. Don’t think about it. So Adam wondered what it must have been like for the convicts in the hulks, looking out at this, their last sight of England, the flat Kent shore and the dark Cooling Marshes, their minds full of desperate thoughts of escape—

“He seems all right,” Rita said, gesturing at Ly-on. “Doesn’t talk about his mum.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “I hope so.”

Rita put on her sunglasses and lay back to enjoy the weak but warming sunshine. Adam felt in a turmoil of emotions as he sat watching Ly-on, his arms hugging his knees, and, triggered by the thoughts of escaping convicts and prison hulks, found himself wondering if Turpin’s body had made it this far downstream.

He had thought very little about Turpin since their last encounter, and suffered no guilty conscience. Sometimes he wondered if there was something wrong with him that would explain this unfeelingness he experienced about what he had done, as if his new life and everything that had happened to him over the last few months had changed him in some crucial way, hardened him. Perhaps it had—perhaps he
was
a different person, to some significant extent, from the man he had been. But there was nothing to grieve about as far as Turpin was concerned—he couldn’t imagine Turpin’s wives and children missing him, speculating amongst themselves as to why Vince had disappeared from their lives all of a sudden. Anyway—all he had done was tip him into the river, after all. He just hoped, somehow, that Turpin’s was one of those bodies that the river took with it, along with the rest of its rubbish, and that Turpin’s corpse had made it through the dangling southern loop of the Isle of Dogs, with its reverse currents and collecting pools, and that the ebb tide that night had carried him past Greenwich and Woolwich and Thamesmead and Gravesend, spewing him out eventually into the fathomless cold waters of the North Sea. He would bob up at some stage, bloated and decomposed, be washed up on a shingle bank somewhere, on Foulness Island or the Medway estuary, or perhaps even more further afield, on the beaches of Northern France, Belgium or Holland—but nobody would make much of a fuss about the drowning of Vincent Turpin.

He turned and lay down beside Rita and gently kissed her on the lips.

“You’re very quiet,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, and sat up. “Do you remember that murder I told you about? That one I found in Chelsea?”

Adam said he did—they had talked about it a couple of times, Adam not saying much, just listening. It just proved to him what he had always suspected: that the myriad connections between two discrete lives—close, distant, overlapping, tangential—lie there almost entirely unknown, unobserved, a great unseen network of the nearly, the almost, the might-have-been. From time to time, in everybody’s life, the network is glimpsed for a moment or two and the occasion acknowledged with a gasp of happy astonishment or a shiver of supernatural discomfort. The complex interrelatedness of human existence could reassure or disturb in equal measure. When Adam had realised that Philip Wang had played a part both in Rita’s life and his own it had stunned him at first but, as time had gone by, it began to seem almost commonplace. Who knew what other invisible couplings, affinities, links and bonds between them lay out there? Who could ever precisely locate our respective positions on the great mesh that unites us?

“What about it?” Adam said.

“Have you seen this?” She took a newspaper clipping out of her handbag and showed it to him.

It was a picture of a man, a soldier in combat gear, and the caption said his name was John-Joseph Case and he was wanted by the police to aid their enquiries into the murder, in Chelsea, of Dr Philip Wang.

Adam looked at the photograph, trying to keep his face still. This was an image of a younger man than the one he had encountered—the one he’d seen unconscious on the cobbles of the mews behind the Grafton Lodge Hotel—but the aggressive stare, the weak chin and the cleft in the chin were unmistakably those of the man who had been hunting him all these weeks and months. Ugly Bugger, Turpin had called him.

“What about it?” Adam said again, carefully.

“This was the man I arrested,” Rita said. “The one with two automatic pistols. The one who was let go.”

“Right…” Adam said, feeling the nape of his neck tighten.

“And now they want him for murder. That particular murder. Don’t you think it’s an amazing coincidence?”

“You should tell them,” Adam said. “They had him, thanks to you, and then they let him go. Outrageous. Sounds like a conspiracy to me.”

“You’re very gung-ho,” Rita said. “Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie. I told you what happened when I tried to push it.”

“So what?” Adam said quickly, then qualified his certainty. “Listen, it’s up to you. But it seems to me people shouldn’t get away with disgraceful mistakes like that. If he’s guilty he should be prosecuted.”

“Mistakes? I thought you said it was a conspiracy.” She thought for a second, frowning. “Maybe it explains what he was doing in Chelsea. Maybe this Wang was involved in some secret top-security thing…”

“Maybe.”

Ly-on came up from the beach at that moment with his fist clenched around something. He half opened his palm to reveal a small semi-transparent crab.

“It’s a sea-spider,” he said. “I catched it.”

Adam and Rita congratulated him and suggested he put it back in the water. He agreed and wandered back down to the shore.

Adam was thinking fast—if this John-Joseph Case man is the one they’re looking for then perhaps I might be free again. Perhaps I really am free—already, now—he thought. I could be Adam Kindred again…He looked up at the slowly gathering clouds.

“Primo?” Rita said. “Are you all right?”

“I was just thinking, dreaming, imagining something…”

Rita put the photo away in her bag, stood up, stretched, and sighed, “I just don’t understand,” she said, plaintively.

“Who can predict life’s course?” Adam said. Then suddenly he looked over his shoulder at the marshes.

Rita laughed at him. “Easy, boy.”

“I don’t know. I thought someone was watching us.”

“Oh, yeah. Some monster’s going to rear up out of the ooze and seize you—turn your life upside down.”

“It has happened before, you know.” He reached for her hands and made her sit beside him again. She lay back.

“What?” she said. “Your life turned upside down?”

“Hey, John!” Ly-on shouted from the beach. “I found another.”

“Why does he call you John?” Rita asked, kissing his neck.

“It’s just a nickname we had.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Now he kissed her on the lips, his tongue touched her teeth, his hand on her breast. She moved her thigh against his.

“Do you think we might live out here?” he said quietly, his lips on her throat. “What do you think?”

“Here?…It would be a nightmare commute, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so. But there’s something about this place…”

“Do you want to live in a caravan?”

“No. No, no. In a house. I was thinking: we could buy a little house in Allhallows. A cottage. Pool our incomes, get a mortgage and live out here, on the estuary.”

“Pool our incomes, get a mortgage, buy a house…” Rita drew herself back a few inches so she could look him in the eye. “Is that a proposal?”

“I suppose it is,” Adam said. “What do you say?”

She kissed him. “Anything is possible,” she said. “Who can predict life’s course?”

“Good point.”

They lay silent, side by side, on their backs, silent for a while on the turf of the Kent shore of the Thames estuary, the wide flat marshes behind them. He reached for her hand and their fingers interlocked.

“I love you, Rita,” he said quietly, feeling his enormous weakness in the face of his enormous need for her.

“And I love you,” Rita said, evenly.

He felt an inward sigh of relief and release within him. It had been said so calmly, so straightforwardly, as if what they felt for each other were part of nature, as obvious as the marshes at their back, the wide river at their feet and the clouds in the sky above their heads.

“And I know for sure your name is Adam.”

Now it was Adam’s turn to draw back and look at her.

“What did you say?”

“What?”

“What did you just say?”

She thought, puzzled at the need to repeat herself.

“I said: ‘I know for sure I had those games, I had them’.”

“Right, yes, those games—”

“The Frisbee, that tennis paddle game, the diabolo, I can’t believe I left them in the shop. Someone must have stolen them.”

“No, no, no. We were in a bit of a rush,” Adam said, reassuringly, playing for time, allowing himself to calm down. “All the stuff we’d bought. Food, drink, flasks, paper cups, travelling rug. We had masses of bags. We must have left them…”

“We’ll check on the way home.”

“Yes.”

Adam sat slowly upright, realising. She was bound to find out, he thought, not letting go of her hand. The network was revealing itself. And she was a clever young woman, a police officer, too smart and shrewd not to find out one day, one day soon, and now that they were living together there would be, inevitably, too many unsuspecting clues revealed in their casual conversation, too many candid talks, too much circumstantial evidence of another, previous life for a clever young woman not to notice, not to draw conclusions, not to deduce. Perhaps he should just tell her one day, confess…

He felt light and weightless all of a sudden, as if he might float away if he let go of her hand. He would welcome that day, he thought, it would bring an ending, a conclusion of a rather miraculous kind…He experienced a few seconds of breathless, blinding exhilaration: perhaps, with Rita’s help, he might reclaim his old life, become Adam Kindred again, whatever dangers lurked out there in the world, become Adam Kindred and make clouds yield up their rain. He had a strong sense that everything would be all right now, even though he admitted to himself, simultaneously, that he knew full well that it was impossible for everything to be all right in this complicated, difficult, mortal life we lead. But at least he had Rita, and that was all that really mattered: he had Rita, now. There was always that, Adam supposed, that and the sunshine and the blue sea beyond.

THE END