“How’re you doing, Dad?”
“I’ve decided to adopt your hairstyle. Trying to look like you.”
Fortunatus laughed nervously.
“They shaved all my hair off and then hoiked out half my brain.”
“No need to go that far,” Forty said.
They both laughed at that. Ingram laughed harder and felt his body heave in response.
“I love you, Forty,” he said. “That’s why I want to look like you.”
“Dad,” Forty said, awkward. “Please don’t cry.”
60
IT WAS STRANGE SEEING YOUR PICTURE IN THE NEWSPAPER, JONJO thought, particularly if you’d never had your picture in any newspaper before. It was a photograph taken some fifteen years earlier, he calculated, when he’d been in the British Army, and was captioned: “John-Joseph Case, wanted by police to assist in their enquiries into the murder of Dr Philip Wang.” He crumpled the newspaper into a ball and hurled it at the rear window of his camper-van. It bounced off the angled Perspex on to the carpeted floor — where The Dog immediately pounced on it, picked it up and brought it back, dropping it at his feet and stood there waiting, tail wagging, for this new game to continue.
Jonjo picked The Dog up and heaved him into his arms, turning him on his back like a baby. The Dog enjoyed being held like this and he licked Jonjo’s face with his big wet tongue. Jonjo hugged The Dog to him, confused by the emotions he was experiencing and said out loud, “Sorry, mate, but there’s no other way,” and dropped him carefully on the floor again. It was two hours to high tide, no point in hanging around.
Disturbed by this personal publicity, Jonjo went into the camper-van’s tiny toilet and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. The beard was coming on pretty well — the black still intense, though he might need to re-dye it in a couple of days if it kept growing at this rate and in a funny sort of way he thought that he suited being dark: he looked better than he usually did with his normal gingery-brown crew cut and it was an added bonus that his most recognisable feature, the cleft in his chin, was now obscured by the facial hair. Perhaps he should have grown a beard ages ago, he wondered, but at least he now looked nothing like the picture in the paper, he was glad to say. Following Kindred’s lead, he thought to himself, uncomfortably, taking a leaf out of Adam Kindred’s book of disappearance and evasion. Everything in his life had been running fairly smoothly — no complaints, thanks — until Kindred had arrived. He had survived the Falklands War, Northern Ireland, Gulf War I, Bosnia, Gulf War II, Iraq and Afghanistan — and only when the Kindred element intruded had everything gone arse-over-tit. He told himself to calm down.
He put his Clock in his pocket and picked up the spade.
“Come on, boy,” he said. “Walkies.”
He stepped out of the camper-van and inhaled. It was a fine afternoon — sunshine and thin high clouds invading the sky from the South — east — an English summer’s day with a cool breeze coming off the estuary. He had found himself a berth in a new caravan⁄campsite — not far from the seafront — on Canvey Island, Essex, a curious, sunken sea-walled enclave on the Thames between Basildon and Southend-on-Sea, a strange backwater of abandoned oil refineries with grassed-over concrete roads and rusting street lights, and huge functioning oil refineries and storage depots, gleamingly lit at night, venting steam and orange flares behind their diamond-mesh perimeter fencing, serving the vast tankers that docked at great steel jetties that poked out into the river estuary. Dotted along the Canvey sea wall were occasional neat art deco cafes that recalled the island’s past as a Londoners’ convenient holiday resort but that now, as far as he could tell from the few days he had been living here, kept their own bizarrely sporadic hours of opening and closing: sometimes you were lucky, sometimes you weren’t.
During his Canvey Island sojourn Jonjo had kept himself to himself, going for walks with The Dog, circumnavigating the island by way of the sea wall path twice, clockwise and anti-clockwise, deliberately not becoming over-acquainted with his camper-van and caravanning neighbours on either side, ensuring that any conversations were brief but friendly enough, all the same.
The problem was The Dog. Basset hounds, that was the problem — he couldn’t go ten paces without some kiddie stopping to pet The Dog; some mother saying, aw, what a lovely doggie; some bloke wanting to pontificate about breeds and breeding. He thought he might as well be carrying a placard: ‘WANTED MAN ON THE RUN WITH INTERESTING LOVEABLE DOG’. The Dog was exactly what you didn’t need when the fucking police were searching the country for you. He swore at himself for his sentiment: he should have left The Dog with Candy. Popped a note through the door asking her to look after him, saying he ‘had to go abroad’ or something for a few months. Candy would have been thrilled — it would have been so easy.
He and The Dog left the campsite, with no encounters, and headed east, walking through the town towards Smallgains Creek, where the marina and the yacht club were to be found. He walked up and over the sea wall, past the yacht club building and behind the boat yard, looking for the path that led through the tidal salt marsh — the saltings, as they were called — to Canvey Point, the flat easternmost promontory of the island.
Thinking back, he understood now what the plan would have been. They would have come for him, as Darren had warned. Having removed his weaponry earlier, they would have simply taken him away and quietly slotted him, then hidden his body, never to be found or seen again — end of problem, Plan A. However, because he wasn’t there when they came, because he’d done a runner (thanks, Darren) they had resorted to Plan B. The newspaper article had told him everything: in his house, when the police searched it, acting on an ‘anonymous tip-off, they had found a photograph of Dr Philip Wang and blueprints of Anne Boleyn House, Chelsea. A gold watch that had belonged to Dr Wang had also been retrieved. DNA samples in the house had been matched with fibres found in Dr Wang’s flat.
You’re not stupid, Jonjo had told himself as he plodded along the path away from the boat yard, and that was why he knew he was well and truly reamed, royally shafted. Even if, supposing he was caught and arrested, he told them the truth, everything he knew, he would still take the murder rap. There was no connection that could be made between his freelance jobs and the Risk Averse Group — and whoever it was who had employed Risk Averse to employ him. Everything he said would be interpreted as wild, desperate accusations. Perhaps there might be a bit of embarrassment for Risk Averse (he could see Major Tim making a rueful face, expressing his total shock and surprise) but a disgraced ex-soldier, recently dismissed — who could say what paranoia might build? What fantastical plots might form in a traumatised brain?
No — there was nothing for it, he had to run and hide, that was all. Like Kindred — Jonjo acknowledged the irony again but did not savour it. Luckily he had been well trained; luckily he had concocted plans for unforeseen eventualities and worst-case scenarios. He had made one telephone call on his unused mobile phone to his friend Giel Hoekstra, who lived near Rotterdam. He and Giel had met during the Bosnian tour, found themselves in a few scrapes together, rubbed along and, in the way you do, in the way all the special forces guys did, fully recognising the risky and dangerous nature of the post-army lives they would be living, they had made plans for mutual help and emergency aid should it be required: parachutes provided, potential exit doors left ajar, safe houses identified, friendly ports available in stormy seas. He could have telephoned Norton in St Paul, Minnesota, Aled in Aberystwyth, Wales, Campbell in Glasgow, Scotland, or Jean-Claude in Nantes, France or half a dozen others — but he had decided Giel was the handiest man of the moment and had called that marker in.