He looked around: some fleeting midday sun shone between the fair-weather cumulus clouds lighting the scene, the butterflies exulting in the glare and dazzle. He heard children shouting in the playground of a nearby school and some sort of motorcycle testing or rally seemed to be going on somewhere close, the air suddenly loud with the throaty rip of powerful engines. He had a final look and then casually kicked the box into the canal. It fell with a heavy splash and bobbed there for a while, buoyantly, before the water began to fill it, flowing in through the flaps and slits he had cut. Slowly it semi-righted itself and then settled lower and lower before, with some erupting bubbles, it slipped beneath the surface.
He thought he should say something — something for Vladimir. “Rest in peace’ seemed a bit crass so he contented himself with a sotto voce ‘Goodbye, Vlad — and many thanks,” before tossing his new long-toed, folding sack-truck into the water also, letting it join the crowded debris on the canal floor, the rubber tyres and supermarket trolleys, the cast-iron bedsteads and the defunct cookers, the burnt-out chassis of joyriders’ cars.
As he walked away, he wondered how long it would be before Vladimir’s body would be discovered. The new box would hold for a good while, he reckoned, before the cardboard began to deliquesce and shred. A week? A month? It didn’t really matter, he knew. The final, generous benefaction that Vladimir had bestowed on him was his total anonymity. Vladimir who? Even Adam didn’t know his last name or what part of the former Soviet Union he had come from. And even if they found him and were able to identify him — oh, yes, that’s him: the missing cardiac patient who had gone on the run from his village’s mercy mission — no one was ever going to connect this sad drug addict’s fatal overdose with Primo Belem, hospital porter at Bethnal & Bow, alive and well.
Adam walked back to Oystergate Buildings, feeling more calm and confident than he had since this whole crazy affair had begun. Now he had a name, he had a flat, he had a job, he had a passport, he had money, he had a credit card — soon he could acquire a mobile phone…It struck him that now he really could say that Adam Kindred didn’t exist any more — Adam Kindred was redundant, superseded, obsolete. Adam Kindred had truly disappeared, truly gone underground, deep underground. He had a new life and new opportunities before him, now — the future really did belong to Primo Belem.
37
CANDY’S FACE WAS A parodic mask, a bad caricature of shock, eyes wide, mouth formed in an ‘O’.
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes, ‘fraid so.”
“The Dog? Never.”
“I can’t explain it either, Candy-babe,”Jonjo said, trying to look both mystified and hurt. “I bent down to put his bowl of Bowser Chunks in front of him and he just snapped — caught me.” Jonjo was extemporising, attempting to provide a convincing reason as to why his left cheek was covered by a three-inch square of gauze held in place by strips of sticking plaster. He felt a bit guilty blaming The Dog — there was no more placid creature on earth — but it was all he could think of on the spur of the moment. Candy had wandered into the garage as he was loading his golf clubs into the back of the taxi and, on seeing him, had gone into her oh-my-god-what-happened routine.
“He’s never snapped before,” she said. “I mean, I kiss him—”
“Shouldn’t kiss a dog, Cand.”
“Just a little peck on the nose. No, no — something must have triggered it, something must have spooked him. Poor old Jonjo.” She reached out and ran her hand over his cropped hair and nuzzled up against him, kissing his unplastered cheek. “You come round to me tonight — I’ll make you a nice bowl of soup.”
She kissed him again on the lips and Jonjo flinched, as though in pain. Everything had changed since their intimacy the other night — since their supper a deux and the sex that had followed, as predictable as the postprandial brandy and box of chocolates. She had moved into his life with all the tact of a suspicious social worker, he thought: calling, texting, popping over without warning, buying him presents he didn’t want — clothes, food, drinks, little ornaments.
“Busy tonight, love. Sorry.” Don’t have it off with your neighbour — he’d remember that in his next life.
“Shall I take The Dog? Where is he? I’ll take him for a walk, give him a right talking to — biting his daddy, well I never.”
He delivered The Dog to her and drove off to Roding Valley golf course for a calming round. He took a nine at the first hole, five-putted the short par-three second and then shanked his drive off the third tee into the Chigwell sewage works. He walked straight back to the club house, abandoning his round, tense and angry, wondering what had made him think golf was the palliative to the swarming can of worms that was currently masquerading as his life.
He sat in the members’ bar with a gin and orange, trying to calm down and take stock. His scratched cheek was throbbing as if it were infected. Bitch. Bitching whore bitch. He would have just left her lying there and walked away but he knew she had four fingernails crammed with his skin, blood and DNA — so she had to go in the river.
He ordered another gin. He should have just stayed at home today, drinking medicinally, that would have helped. But then Candy would still have come round…He took out his score card and wrote down the words ‘KINDRED = JOHN’ in the hope that this might get his brain working. He hadn’t meant to kill the little tart — she would have told him everything in the end — but he’d overreacted, following Sgt. Snell’s rules, when she’d punched and scratched him like that. He just hadn’t thought — it was a reflex — and had given her the old backhanded haymaker (they never see it coming) and she went flying, head first into the brick wall. He thought he’d even heard her neck snap but, whether he did or not, there was no doubt from the funny way she fell limp to the ground and lay there that she was dead, or as good as.
He had paced about cursing for a while, staunching the blood from the scratches with a tissue, and then strolled casually out to check what was going on riverside — nothing. So he picked her up and held her as if she were an unconscious drunk and walked with her to the embankment wall. He leant her up against it and slapped her face gently, talking to her, making it seem as if he were trying to revive her in case anyone was looking, all the while searching for CCTV. No sign — and there was no one about. The tide was high and ebbing fast, he saw, so he just threw her over the wall into the water and she was gone in a second.
♦
Jonjo sat on a park bench with Bozzy and a tall thin man he had been introduced to as Mr Quality. They were in a small public square not far from The Shaft — Bozzy had brought Mr Quality there and Jonjo had been obliged to pay him £50 for this ‘consultation’. A few tired young mothers and their wailing toddlers were gathered at the far end and an old bloke was methodically searching the rubbish bins.