William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

“Congratulations,” Adam said. “But what’s this got to do with me?”

“I need an executive, a right-hand man, someone who knows the church, knows its doctrinal inclination.” Bishop Yemi smiled modestly.

“No crucifixes,” Adam said.

“Precisely. Our Lord did not die on a wooden cross. The radiant sun of Patmos is our new logo.”

“I’m afraid I—”

“I cannot forsake my pastoral duties entirely.” Bishop Yemi ignored him. “I need someone to represent the church — my proxy — to all these new administrative bodies. And I have chosen you, John 1603.”

Adam repeated that he was very sorry indeed — hugely flattered, honoured, even — but the answer had to be a reluctant no. He blamed his fragile mental health, the numerous recent breakdowns, and so on. It would be impossible: he would hate to let down the church.

“Never rush to judgement, John,” Bishop Yemi said, “I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer — it’s my guiding principle in life. Think about it, take your time, my brother. We could be a great team and the rewards — spiritual and financial — will be considerable.” He hugged Adam at the door, warmly.

“I need intelligence, John, and this you have in copious supply. I have searched among the other brothers and I know you are the one. The starting salary is £25,000 a year. Plus car and expenses, of course.” He smiled. “Use your sickle, John.”

“Sorry?”

“Use your sickle and reap because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.”

♦

That night, when he returned to the flat, Mhouse was waiting up for him. She kissed him on the lips — just a smack — but she never kissed him any more, since that first time she had slid into bed beside him.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Fancy an all-nighter?”

After they had made love they both felt hungry; Mhouse found some prawn-cocktail-flavoured crisps and Adam opened one of his bottles of wine — a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon. Mhouse sat on the mattress, cross-legged, facing him, munching crisps and drinking wine from the bottle. It was like a midnight feast, Adam thought — then, a second later, the school analogy seemed absurd. There were no naked midnight feasts at school, Adam realised: young women did not sit opposite you, naked, cross-legged, during school midnight feasts.

He placed his finger on her ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’ tattoo.

“When did you do that?” he asked.

She had other, more conventional tattoos: a jagged, two-pronged, lightning bolt on her coccyx; a multi-petalled flower on her left shoulder; a constellation of stars (Orion) on the instep of her right foot. They had been done professionally in tattoo-parlours: ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’ was all her own work.

“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.

LUIGI 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.