“Internet porn.”
“Sorry?”
“Internet porn unites all men.”
Ingram accepted another refill of his wine glass from a patrolling waiter.
“I think your average Kalahari bushman might disagree,” he said.
“All right. All Western men with computers.”
“But what if you don’t have a computer? Your ‘unites all men’ claim has already lost some of its universal force. You might as well say…” he thought for a second. “What unites all men who own golf clubs? Love of golf? I don’t think so. Some men who own golf clubs find golf boring.”
Gill John lit her fifth cigarette. “Get a life,” she said.
“Or,” Ingram persisted with his analogy, rather pleased with it. “You could say: what unites all men who own umbrellas — fear of rain?”
“Fuck off,” Gill John said.
“In fact pornography is boring — that’s its fundamental, default problem. Women should take comfort from that.”
Gill John slapped him — not hard — just a little sharp slap with her fingers that caught his chin and lower lip. She turned away. Ingram sat still for a moment, his lower lip stinging. Amazingly, no one seemed to have noticed. Ivo had just left the table to see what was going on in the kitchen and all hungry eyes were on him. Ingram turned to his other partner. She smiled broadly at him — what could go wrong here, Ingram wondered?
“O Rio de Janeiro me encanta,” he said, unconfidently. Then Ivo’s mobile phone began to ring, with an annoying ring-tone taken from some heavy-metal guitar riff, and at that moment he reappeared.
“Sorry, guys,” he said to the assembled company, “but the tagine has cracked. We’ll only be another ten minutes or so.” He picked up the phone. “Ivo Redcastle…” He listened. “Yeah. OK.” He looked at Ingram with irritation. “It’s for you.”
Ingram left his seat and walked round the table thinking: who the fuck is calling me on Ivo’s phone? Meredith looked at him in hazy, tipsy surprise. Everyone else was talking, indifferent.
Ivo handed his phone over. “Don’t make a habit of this, right, Ingram?”
Ingram put the phone to his ear. “This is Ingram Fryxer.”
“Ingram. It’s Alfredo Rilke.”
Ingram suddenly felt chilly. He stepped quickly out of the dining room and into the hall.
“Alfredo. How did you get this number?”
“I called you on your own cell. The man who answered said you were with your brother-in-law.”
“Of course.” Ingram’s own phone was in his briefcase in the car outside with Luigi.
“I’m coming to London,” Rilke said.
“Excellent. Good. We—”
“No, not good. We have a serious problem, Ingram.”
“I know. Philip Wang’s death has set us—”
“Did you find this Adam Kindred?”
“No. Not yet. The police haven’t been able—”
“We have to find him. I’ll call when I arrive.”
They said goodbye and Ingram clicked Ivo’s phone shut. He felt small, suddenly, felt small and worried as he used to when a child, when events were too big and too adult to comprehend. That Alfredo Rilke should call him here at Ivo’s party only betokened serious problems. That Alfredo Rilke should come to London only underscored how serious those problems were. His brain worked furiously but no explanation came — only other worries, coagulating. He felt for the first time that he was no longer fully in control of his life — it was as if events were being ordered by an outside force he couldn’t master. Nonsense, get a grip, he told himself. Life is full of crises — it’s normal — this is just another. He looked through the open door to the kitchen and, as if to confirm his analysis, considered Ivo’s current crisis as the chef spooned stew from a shattered tagine into an orange casserole dish. He strode back into the dining room and returned Ivo’s phone to him.
“Any time, mate,” Ivo said, gracelessly.
“Meredith, we have to go,” Ingram said quietly and Meredith stood up at once.
“Aw, the party-poopers,” Ivo said in a bad American accent.
“Don’t say another word, Ivo,” Ingram said, squeezing his shoulder very hard. “You just carry on enjoying your lovely evening.”
13
THE ‘NEW ANNEXE’ OF the Marine Support Unit in Wapping, as it was rather grandly termed, consisted of four large Portakabins on a patch of waste ground off Wapping High Street, at Phoenix Stairs, where there was now a gleaming steel jetty, recently constructed. The Phoenix Stairs jetty was situated some 100 yards downstream from the MSU police station at Wapping New Stairs, almost equidistant from Wapping High Street’s two pubs, the Captain Kidd and the Prospect of Whitby. The MSU had recently acquired four new launches, Targa 505, slightly smaller, slightly faster but with the same custom-built roomy wheelhouse as the current fleet of older Targas. Hence this expansion to new premises and a new jetty, and hence, Rita supposed, her fast-track into the division. There was no point in having a bigger budget and the fleet increased by four new boats if there was nobody to man them.
She still felt something of the new girl at school — the MSU was small and close-knit, there was hardly any turnover of personnel (once you arrived at MSU you were there until retirement, more often than not) — and there were very few women police constables. So far in her few days at Wapping Rita had only met two other WPCs.
She stood at the end of the new jetty, pausing before she headed back along it to the Phoenix Stairs passage, and looked down river to the clustered towers of Canary Wharf, watching a jet soaring up from City Airport, and then turned her gaze across the river — it was high tide — to the vast modern blocks of St Botolph’s Hospital. It was like a small, complete city, she thought, everything you needed — heating, food, transport, sewage, life-support systems, morgue, funeral home — was there: no need ever to leave…
Morbid thoughts, Rita thought — ban them. She wasn’t in the best of moods, she knew. Her father had been aggressive over the breakfast cornflakes this morning and she’d snapped back at him. Then he had counter-accused her of sulking…They were beginning to argue like an old married couple, she thought, and she realised she wasn’t happy being on her own — she’d always had boyfriends and lovers and being single didn’t suit her. She hadn’t enjoyed her party either, her mood had soured when — retouching her make-up in the ladies’ lavatory — she had heard two men in the corridor outside talking about her. She had recognised Gary’s voice but couldn’t place the other’s — the music from the public bar was warming up, half obscuring it.
She heard Gary say: “—No, no. We, you know, broke up.”
Then the other man: “Shame, yeah…(something inaudible) lovely girl, Rita. Just my type.”
“Yeah? What type would that be?” Gary said.
Rita was now at the door, ear to the jamb.
“Full breasts, thin frame,” the man said. “You can’t beat it. What a fool you are, Boland.”
They laughed and she heard them wander off. Rita came straight out of the ladies and went into the bar to see that Gary was standing on his own. She looked around: the place was full. Had it been Duke? She just couldn’t be sure. But it aggrieved her and it cast a cloud over her farewell. Every man she greeted, chatted to, let buy her drinks, said goodbye to, swore to stay in touch with and kissed on the cheek might have been Gary’s interlocutor. It made her wary and awkwardly self-conscious of the tightness of the T — shirt she’d chosen to wear. She’d drunk too much to little effect and woken up crapulous with a mighty day-long hangover.