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 hospitaclass="underline" 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 façade. 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’.