Ordinary Thunderstorms

42

THE ITALIAN RESTAURANT WAS still there — why wouldn’t it be? — sitting in its Chelsea side street with its yellow awnings. A man in an apron — a waiter — was hosing down the pavement outside as Adam walked past and inside other waiters were setting up the tables for lunch. Adam goaded his memory, thinking back to that evening. It seemed to him as if it had taken place in another century, or in a parallel universe. But everything had started then — the fact that he was standing here now was all to do with that encounter with Philip Wang, his fellow diner. He had seemed preoccupied, ill at ease; he remembered him dropping things, at one stage dabbing his perspiring forehead with a napkin. And of course he left his file, hidden under the adjacent table. He had looked like a man with a lot on his mind. But what kind of stress — how acute? Had he done something wrong? Stolen something, perhaps? And yet when he’d called up to say he had the file and was bringing it round Wang had sounded relieved but relatively calm, had even asked him up for a drink…

Adam turned away and walked through the back streets towards the river. If it all began with Wang then he needed to find out more about the man and what he did. Did he work for the government? Was he some ministry whistle-blower? Perhaps he was linked to the secret services himself and had found out something he shouldn’t? Was he selling state secrets? Adam shook his head: conspiracy theories multiplied incrementally. Start with the facts: Philip Wang was a consultant at St Botolph’s Hospital — perhaps the trail began there.

Adam took a seat on the bench on the wide section of the pavement at the beginning of Chelsea Bridge, checking to see if there was any activity in or around the triangle. He wandered past the gate a couple of times, waiting for a gap in the traffic. All seemed quiet. A power-walking couple engaged in intense conversation marched by, and when they were well past, he climbed over the gate and pushed his way through the bushes to the clearing.

He felt strange being back, acknowledging the huge changes his life had undergone since he had first camped out there. So much had happened to him: it was as if he were packing years of living into fraught, dense weeks; determinedly racing through a whole life’s catalogue of experiences as fast as possible, as if time were running out. He stood for a while, hands on hips, taking things in, slowly, deliberately. There was more litter scattered around and he felt a sense of proprietorial outrage, picking up a piece of blown newspaper before crumpling it up and letting it fall. He knelt down and ripped back the turf that covered his cash-box and removed £,200 and the Wang dossier. He paused for a moment, looking at the list of names and the incomprehensible jottings beside them. There was no doubt in his mind — this was where he should start next.

Sitting on the Tube heading back to Stepney, he found himself thinking about the policewoman, Rita Nashe. She was tall and rangy with a lean face — pretty, but one that looked almost mannishly strong when her hair was up. When her hair was down she seemed quite different — he remembered the frisson he’d felt when she came into the coffee shop — she didn’t look like a policewoman at all. And at this he rebuked himself: as if there were a generic template of looks that applied to policewomen. You might as well say he looked like a typical hospital porter. No, he realised, it was because he had seen her in a uniform first, that day at the MSU morgue — he had to remove the uniformed Rita from his memory bank and replace it with the image of the pretty, tall young woman in jeans and a fleece, with her brown hair down on her shoulders, sitting opposite him in the coffee shop, picking the beads of fruit from her muffin, leaning back and smiling. It had all seemed very normal and easy — being Primo Belem changed everything, the risks that he had worried about never materialised. He brought her face back into his mind — Rita’s face. Hard to tell what her figure was like under the fleece…He was glad she’d been the one to ask him for a drink — he wouldn’t have had the nerve, however much he might have liked the idea.