William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

He sighed and looked round his small house — the pain was definitely easing. He had to clear this place up — a week’s dishwashing in the sink and four years’-worth of Yachting Monthly stacked behind the telly. He wondered what Sergeant-Major Snell would say if he could see the Jonjo Case abode. Air turned blue — air turned black, more like. I used to be the smartest soldier in the regiment, Jonjo reminded himself — what went wrong?

He scooped some clothes off the armchair and sat down. The Dog wandered over and stood there looking at him. He’s hungry, of course, Jonjo realised: what with last night’s shenanigans he hadn’t fed the poor bastard in twenty-four hours. He searched and found, under a sofa cushion, half a pack of digestive biscuits which he scattered on the carpet. The Dog began to munch them up, his big pink tongue slapping them into his mouth.

Jonjo thought about last night, going backwards and forwards randomly in his mind. Thank Christ he’d found the tooth and the gun quickly, the police were everywhere. Then he thought about Wang, how he’d knocked him about a bit, then got him on the bed, choking him purple with the left hand, breadknife going in deep with the right. Must have missed the heart, somehow — Snell would have tortured him to near-death for that error. Then someone fucking coming in . Out on to the balcony in a jiff, but, all the same, knowing Wang wasn’t dead…Bad, bad, bad. What had gone on while he was out there? he wondered, sadly. Sadly, because he knew he was losing it — two years ago he’d have simply taken out the other guy. Brutal but easy — way more efficient.

Now this Kindred was alive, not arrested and somewhere out there, in London, according to the newspaper. He gave The Dog a Mars Bar. Jonjo helped himself to a slug of whisky and a few more drops of oil of cloves.

Kill Wang, make it messy and bring us every file in the place, they had said. He had done that, messed up Wang and his flat and he had all the files in a bin liner in the back of his taxi. They would know by now that things had gone wrong — well wrong — all he had to do was wait for the call.

Jonjo thought on, diligently: Kindred had gone out the emergency stairs at the back. Jonjo had followed, as soon as he’d stuffed all the files he could find into his bin liner, and the two smoking chefs had confirmed that a young guy in a raincoat, carrying a briefcase, had just left, couple of minutes ago. Long gone then, Jonjo thought, going to his taxi and dumping the bin liner in the back. Then he had pondered for a minute before strolling round to the front of Anne Boleyn House. He took a book of matches out of his pocket — he always carried half a dozen on him, from different venues — and then folded out one match that he lit with his lighter and then dropped the whole matchbook in the half-full litter bin by the entryway. He heard the small hissing whoomph as the matches ignited and when the first waftings of smoke appeared he wandered casually into the lobby. The porter looked up with a false smile.

“Sorry to bother you, mate,” Jonjo said, “but some kids just set fire to your litter bin.”

“Bastards!”

After the porter ran outside, Jonjo swivelled the guest-ledger round. There it was: G 14, visited by Adam Kindred, Grafton Lodge, SW1.

Outside, the porter had tipped the burning rubbish on to the roadway and was trying to stamp it out.

“Cheers,”Jonjo said, leaving. “Little rascals, eh?”

“I’d castrate ‘em.”

“Gas ‘em.”

“Thanks, mate.”

Jonjo then drove his taxi to the Grafton Lodge Hotel in Pimlico and parked across the street, directly opposite. A young man in a raincoat with a briefcase…It was a fine evening and there were few raincoat-clad men out and about. However, he had to wait longer than he thought — a couple of hours — before the person he assumed was Kindred appeared. Young, dark-haired, tall, wearing a tie, raincoat, briefcase — but he didn’t go into the hotel, that’s what threw him. The real, authentic Kindred would have gone straight into the hotel, surely? But this man turned down the narrow street that led to the mews behind. Jonjo eased himself out of his cab and followed him discreetly, turning the corner into the mews to see the man staring up at the back windows of the hotel. Was he lost? Was he an estate agent? Was it in fact Kindred at all? There was one easy way to find out so he asked the obvious question.

His tooth was throbbing again. With the palp of his forefinger he traced the L-shaped weal on his forehead. He hoped they’d ask him to kill Kindred. My pleasure, squire. The phone rang — three times. Then it stopped and rang again. Jonjo picked it up — it was them.

INGRAM SPREAD THE NEWSPAPER flat as Maria-Rosa hovered with the coffee pot.

“Just a drop,” Ingram said, his eyes not leaving the page. He was reading about the man who had killed Philip Wang and was both highly intrigued and somewhat astonished. Ingram read on.

Adam Kindred, 31 (pictured right), was educated at Bristol Cathedral School where he was deputy head boy. He won a scholarship to Bristol University where he studied engineering. Mother died when he was fourteen, one older sister, Emma-Jane, father — Francis Kindred — a long-serving senior aeronautical engineer on the Concorde project…

Ingram looked again at the picture of the smiling young man. A wedding photo. How did someone like this become a killer? This Kindred then won another scholarship to America — the Clifton-Garth scholarship — to Cal-Tech where he studied for a PhD in applied engineering. Was this a clue? Ingram wondered, suddenly suspicious — the US of A…At Cal-Tech Kindred became part of a team developing minute gyroscopes for NASA. Nothing there about drugs or pharmaceuticals, no apparent involvement in the world of medicine, Ingram reasoned, nothing to suggest an interest in Calenture-Deutz and its business. He read on.

So, this Kindred fellow acquires his PhD and takes up a post as associate professor at the Marshall McVay University, in Phoenix, Arizona, where he helped design and build the world’s largest cloud chamber at Painted Rock, the Western Campus of Marshall McVay University, in the Mohawk Mountains near Yuma. (What in god’s name was a cloud chamber? he wondered. Ah, something to do with climatology.) Kindred became an associate professor and received tenure at the Faculty of Climatology and Ecology, Marshall McVay University…

He skimmed a few lines. MMU was a private institution, 2,000 rich students, over half of them graduates, with a student — faculty ratio of 6:1, founded and endowed by a multi-billionaire who had made his fortune mining bauxite around the world. Ingram sipped the coffee Maria-Rosa had poured, calculating. So, Kindred had been away, living and working in America for eight, nine years, time enough for anyone to suborn him. He listed the four or five obvious rivals in his head, the big drug companies, the ones with vast amounts of money, time and, above all, patience. He should check to see if any of them were involved in this Marshall McVay University — an endowed professorship, a research programme. But it made no sense: why go for an engineer⁄climatologist? They would have wanted a doctor, somebody in the medical world. Why would they recruit an engineer turned climatologist to kill Philip Wang and thereby try to destroy Calenture-Deutz? Ingram read on.

Kindred married — one Alexa Maybury, 34 (pictured left), a realtor with Maybury-Weiss in Phoenix, Arizona. The marriage ended in divorce some months ago. Kindred resigned his position at the university and returned to London where, on the very day after he had committed the murder, he had been offered the job of senior research fellow in climatology at Imperial College’ (an offer that had been hastily withdrawn, apparently).