“I have it.”
“Whatever you do, don’t—” Wang died then, with a short gasp of what seemed like exasperation.
Adam stepped away, appalled, horrified, stumbled against a pile of Wang’s jackets and trousers, and went back into the living room, looking for a phone. He saw it sitting on a neat, purpose-built shelf by the door and as he reached for the receiver saw that there was still some blood on his hand, still dripping from an unwiped finger. Some drops fell on the telephone.
“Shit…” he said, realising this was his first articulated expression of shock. What in the name of fuck was going on?
Then he heard the window in Wang’s bedroom open and somebody step heavily inside. And the terror he was feeling left in an instant. Or at least he thought it was the window — maybe it was from the bathroom — but he had heard the clunking sound of a catch being released, one of those brass handles that secured the mass-produced steel-framed and many-paned glass windows that gave Anne Boleyn House its slightly depressed, institutional air.
Adam grabbed his briefcase and Wang’s file and left the flat rapidly, closing the door behind him with a bang. He looked towards the lifts and then decided against them, turning the corner and striding normally, not running, not unduly fast, towards the green exit light and the fire stairs.
He descended seven floors of the dimly lit stone stairs without seeing anyone and emerged on to a side street behind Anne Boleyn House beside four towering grey rubbish bins on sturdy rubber wheels. There was a powerful smell of decomposing food that made Adam gag and he spat, squatting down to open his briefcase and slip Wang’s file inside. He looked up to see two young chefs in their white jackets and blue checkerboard trousers lighting up cigarettes in a doorway a few yards off.
“Stinks, dunnit?” one of them called over with a grin on his face.
Adam gave them a thumbs-up and headed off, still at what he imagined was an easy saunter, in the opposite direction.
He wandered Chelsea’s streets for a while, aimlessly, trying to sort things out in his mind, trying to make some sense of what he had witnessed and what had taken place. His head was jangled, a shocking, fractured mosaic of recent images — Wang’s battered face, the hilt of the breadknife, his twitching, tapping hand gesture — but he was not too jangled to realise what he had just done and the consequences of his importunate, natural reactions. He should never have obeyed Wang’s instruction, he now realised. He should never have pulled the knife out, never — he should have simply gone to the telephone and dialled 911–999, rather. Now he had traces of Wang’s blood on his hands and under his fingernails and, even worse, his fingerprints were on the fucking knife itself. But what else could anyone have done in such a situation? another side of his brain yelled at him, in frustrated rage. You had no choice: it was a dying, agonised man’s last request. Wang had practically fitted his fingers around the knife’s hilt, begging him to pull it out, begging him—
He stopped walking for a second, telling himself to calm down. His face was covered in sweat, his chest was heaving as if he’d just run a mile. He exhaled, noisily, slow down, slow down. Think, think back…He set off again. Had he interrupted Wang’s actual murder? Or was it just some robbery gone hideously wrong? He thought: the door he had heard close as he came in to the flat must have been the perpetrator leaving the bedroom — and the sound of the person re-entering must have been the perpetrator, again — the murderer, again. He must have come in from a balcony, he realised, as he now remembered noting that some of the Boleyn’s higher service flats had narrow balconies. So the man had slipped out when he heard Adam come in and had waited on the balcony and then when he heard Adam leave the bedroom to phone Yes, the police, must call, Adam reminded himself. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, it had been a terrible, foolish mistake to have left, to have run away down the stairs…But if that man had caught him, what then? No — completely understandable, had to get out, had to, fast, or he might be dead himself, now, Jesus…He reached into his jacket for his mobile and saw Wang’s blood now dry on his knuckles. Wash that off, first.
He wandered into an open space, a kind of wide square giving on to a sports ground and an art gallery, oddly, where small grouped fountains spouted from holes in the paving stones, couples sat around on low walls and a few kids whizzed to and fro on their expensive metal scooters.
He crouched by a fountain and washed his right hand in the cold water, a wobbling vertical column flowing upward, defying gravity. His right hand was now clean — and now trembling, he saw — he needed a drink, he needed to calm down, give his thoughts some order, then he would call the police: something was nagging at him at the back of his mind, something he had done or not done, and he just needed a little time to think.
Adam asked directions to Pimlico and set off, once sure of where he should be heading. On his way there he found a pub, reassuringly mediocre — indeed, as if ‘average’ subsumed all its ambitions: an averagely stained patterned carpet, middle-of-the-road muzak playing, three gaming machines pinging and gonging away not too loudly, a shabby-looking blue-collar clientele, a perfectly acceptable number of beers available and unexceptionable pub food on offer — pies, sandwiches and a dish of the day (smearily erased). Adam felt oddly reassured by this pointed decision to settle for the acceptable norm, to strive for nothing higher than the tolerable median. He would remember this place. He ordered a large whisky with ice and a packet of peanuts, took his drink to a table in the corner and began to reflect.
He felt guilt. Why did he feel guilty — he’d done nothing wrong? Was it because he had run away?…But anyone would have run in his situation, he told himself: the shock, the presence of a killer in the next room…It was an atavistic fear, a sense of illogical responsibility — something every innocent child knows when confronted by serious trouble. It had been the obvious, natural course of action to run out quickly and safely and take stock. He needed a little time, a little space…
He sipped at his whisky, relishing the alcohol burn in his throat. He chomped peanuts, licking the residual salt from his palm, picking the impacted shards from his teeth with a fingernail. What was bothering him? Was it what Wang had said, his last words? “Whatever you do, don’t—” Don’t what? Don’t take the file? Don’t leave the file? And then he thought of Wang dead and the delayed shock hit him again and he shivered. He went to the bar and ordered more whisky and another bag of peanuts.
♦
Adam drank his whisky and consumed his peanuts with a velocity and hunger that surprised him, emptying the packet into his cupped palm and tipping the nuts carelessly into his mouth in an almost ape-like way (stray peanuts bouncing off the table top in front of him). The packet was emptied in seconds, crumpled and placed on the table where it cracklingly tried to uncrumple itself for a further few seconds, while Adam picked up and ate the individual peanuts that had escaped his immediate furious appetite. He wondered, as he savoured the salty, waxy peanut taste, if there were a more nutritious or satisfying foodstuff on the planet — sometimes salted peanuts were all that man required.
He went to the gents’ lavatory, stooping down a narrow, bendy staircase — as though it had aspired to be spiral once but had given up halfway through the transformation — to a pungent basement where beer and urine competed on the olfactory level. As he washed his hands again beneath the unsparing glare of the light above the sinks he saw that his shirt and tie were freckled with tiny dark polka-dots — polka-dots of blood he assumed, Dr Wang’s blood…Adam felt suddenly faint, remembering the scene in Wang’s flat, remembering the withdrawal of the breadknife and the bloody surge that followed it. The delayed shock at what he had done and witnessed returned to him — he would go back to his hotel, he resolved suddenly, change his shirt (keeping this one for evidence) and then call the police. No one would blame him for leaving the crime scene — what with the man, the murderer on the balcony, re-entering. Impossible to remain calm and lucid under these circumstances — no, no, no — no blame attaching, at all.