“You’ve heard he’s standing for parliament. Rotherhithe East. As a Conservative.”
“He is a remarkable man,” Adam said.
“My friends call me Kazio,” Thrale said.
“I’m Primo.”
“What about meeting up one day, Primo? Have a drink. Talk things over.”
“I’m not so sure that would be a good idea, Kazio.”
“Yes…You’re probably right. Funny old life, eh?” Thrale said, standing up.
They walked down the corridor to the hall where Ly-on was waiting, wearing the same jeans and emerald-green fleece uniform of the other boys.
“John!” he shouted when he saw Adam, and ran towards him. Adam fell to his knees and they hugged.
“I know you come for Ly-on,” he said, smiling broadly. “Green, green peas, man.”
Adam stood up, a little overwhelmed, as Ly-on went to fetch his bag.
“You knew his mother, I believe.”
“Yes. She used to serve the food sometimes, at the church. You probably remember her,” Adam said.
“It’s all a bit of a blur, those times, I have to confess,” Thrale said, as Ly-on came back. “Enjoy your day, Mr Belem.”
“Thank you, Mr Bednarczyk.”
And so Adam, Rita and Ly-on had driven east towards Rochester and Chatham until Adam saw a sign for the Hoo Peninsula and he said, “Let’s go to Hoo. Sounds interesting.”
“Hoo,” Ly-on repeated. “Hoo, hoo, hoo.”
They followed the signs until they saw one that said ‘Allhallows-on-Sea’ and ‘Beach’, driving through the village until they came to a dead end by the caravan site. They skirted the holiday park with its rows of static caravans and its covered swimming pool and leisure centre, and parked the car where the metalled road turned into a track. Then they discovered that the various games they had bought — the Frisbee, the fat-paddled tennis bats and ball, the diabolo (or Chinese yo-yo) were missing. Rita remembered putting the bags down in the shop but thought that Adam had picked them up and stowed them in the boot. Perhaps they were still in the shop, Adam ventured — they could call back on the way home, it didn’t matter — they could improvise. So, carrying the plastic bags that contained their picnic, they walked along the coastal path heading for Egypt Bay.
They found a spot on the edge of the bay, spread their rug and ate their sandwiches and pies and drank their fizzy drinks. Adam felt he was in a kind of time warp — the flat marshlands behind him, the refulgent estuary in front, and beyond the hazy mass of the Essex shore, Canvey Island, the Maplin Sands, Foulness. Ly-on took his jeans off and changed into his swimming trunks behind a towel held out by Adam. He went paddling in the shallows, shouting out, “Remember you promised to teach me to swim, John!”
Adam looked up and down the river’s coastline. There was an empty tanker temporarily moored offshore, riding high in the water, and it reminded Adam that this was where, after the Napoleonic Wars, all the prison hulks were berthed, old, rotting, mastless three-deckers full of convicts destined for Australia…Australia — where his father and sister and nephews were living. Don’t think about it. So Adam wondered what it must have been like for the convicts in the hulks, looking out at this, their last sight of England, the flat Kent shore and the dark Cooling Marshes, their minds full of desperate thoughts of escape—
“He seems all right,” Rita said, gesturing at Ly-on. “Doesn’t talk about his mum.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “I hope so.”
Rita put on her sunglasses and lay back to enjoy the weak but warming sunshine. Adam felt in a turmoil of emotions as he sat watching Ly-on, his arms hugging his knees, and, triggered by the thoughts of escaping convicts and prison hulks, found himself wondering if Turpin’s body had made it this far downstream.
He had thought very little about Turpin since their last encounter, and suffered no guilty conscience. Sometimes he wondered if there was something wrong with him that would explain this unfeelingness he experienced about what he had done, as if his new life and everything that had happened to him over the last few months had changed him in some crucial way, hardened him. Perhaps it had — perhaps he was a different person, to some significant extent, from the man he had been. But there was nothing to grieve about as far as Turpin was concerned — he couldn’t imagine Turpin’s wives and children missing him, speculating amongst themselves as to why Vince had disappeared from their lives all of a sudden. Anyway — all he had done was tip him into the river, after all. He just hoped, somehow, that Turpin’s was one of those bodies that the river took with it, along with the rest of its rubbish, and that Turpin’s corpse had made it through the dangling southern loop of the Isle of Dogs, with its reverse currents and collecting pools, and that the ebb tide that night had carried him past Greenwich and Woolwich and Thamesmead and Gravesend, spewing him out eventually into the fathomless cold waters of the North Sea. He would bob up at some stage, bloated and decomposed, be washed up on a shingle bank somewhere, on Foulness Island or the Medway estuary, or perhaps even more further afield, on the beaches of Northern France, Belgium or Holland — but nobody would make much of a fuss about the drowning of Vincent Turpin.
He turned and lay down beside Rita and gently kissed her on the lips.
“You’re very quiet,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, and sat up. “Do you remember that murder I told you about? That one I found in Chelsea?”
Adam said he did — they had talked about it a couple of times, Adam not saying much, just listening. It just proved to him what he had always suspected: that the myriad connections between two discrete lives — close, distant, overlapping, tangential — lie there almost entirely unknown, unobserved, a great unseen network of the nearly, the almost, the might-have-been. From time to time, in everybody’s life, the network is glimpsed for a moment or two and the occasion acknowledged with a gasp of happy astonishment or a shiver of supernatural discomfort. The complex interrelatedness of human existence could reassure or disturb in equal measure. When Adam had realised that Philip Wang had played a part both in Rita’s life and his own it had stunned him at first but, as time had gone by, it began to seem almost commonplace. Who knew what other invisible couplings, affinities, links and bonds between them lay out there? Who could ever precisely locate our respective positions on the great mesh that unites us?
“What about it?” Adam said.
“Have you seen this?” She took a newspaper clipping out of her handbag and showed it to him.
It was a picture of a man, a soldier in combat gear, and the caption said his name was John-Joseph Case and he was wanted by the police to aid their enquiries into the murder, in Chelsea, of Dr Philip Wang.
Adam looked at the photograph, trying to keep his face still. This was an image of a younger man than the one he had encountered — the one he’d seen unconscious on the cobbles of the mews behind the Grafton Lodge Hotel — but the aggressive stare, the weak chin and the cleft in the chin were unmistakably those of the man who had been hunting him all these weeks and months. Ugly Bugger, Turpin had called him.
“What about it?” Adam said again, carefully.
“This was the man I arrested,” Rita said. “The one with two automatic pistols. The one who was let go.”
“Right…” Adam said, feeling the nape of his neck tighten.
“And now they want him for murder. That particular murder. Don’t you think it’s an amazing coincidence?”
“You should tell them,” Adam said. “They had him, thanks to you, and then they let him go. Outrageous. Sounds like a conspiracy to me.”
“You’re very gung-ho,” Rita said. “Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie. I told you what happened when I tried to push it.”