“Let’s get out of here, Joe.”
♦
Rita and Primo Belem sat in a coffee shop cum French delicatessen called Jem-Bo-Coo not far from MSU in Wapping High Street. She was out of uniform and her hair was down. He had been waiting at a table at the back by the ranked wine bottles for sale, already there when she arrived, and she had seen his almost comic double-take at her ‘civilian’ persona. He was wearing his pinstripe suit and she noticed for the first time that the jacket and the trousers didn’t quite match. She’d checked the contact details he’d provided to the duty officer and knew where he lived — a flat in the Oystergate Buildings, Stepney — and she knew that he worked as a porter at the Bethnal & Bow hospital, a job he’d only been in for a few weeks. Everything about his demeanour, accent and vocabulary, however, spoke of someone unused to menial, manual work. There was some mystery here — she looked forward to attempting to solve it.
She ordered her coffee, sat down and told him about her visit to The Shaft and what she had found when she’d gone to Mhouse’s flat.
“There was a man there, said he was living in it — Mr Abdul-latif Q’Alitti.”
Primo nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard about Mr Quality. Mr Fixit.”
“Chairman of the Shaftesbury Estate Residents’ Association. I checked him out — they know all about him at the council. Nothing gets done in The Shaft without Mr Quality.”
“Any sign of the boy?”
“No. I’m afraid not. Mr Quality said he knew nothing.”
This seemed to perturb him. “I wonder—” he began and then stopped. “Are you hungry?” he said. “Can I get you a muffin?” She was hungry, in fact, so they went back to the counter and agreed to share a blueberry muffin. They took their seats again.
“Why do you think,” she said, picking the fruit out of her half of the bun, “that this Mhouse may have been murdered?”
“I don’t know,” he said, vaguely. “The Shaft is a dangerous place. I lived there for a while,” he added, “which is how I got to know Mhouse…”
“Do you think Mr Quality might have had something to do with it?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not him.”
“Anyone else?”
“No…No. It just seems suspicious to me.”
“We need something to go on.”
“I know…I’m sorry…”
She smiled and leant back in her chair, taking a bite from her half-muffin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I think I’m still a bit in shock, you know. The other day, getting the news, seeing the body…”
She leant forward now and pointed the remains of her muffin at him. “Explain this to me: what motive could anyone have to kill this Mhouse person?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did she do?”
“Odd jobs.”
“Sex industry? Drugs?”
Primo pursed his lips and exhaled. “I don’t know.”
“If she was a prostitute she might have a record.”
“Why do you think she was a prostitute?”
“Are you telling me she wasn’t?”
He gave her a baffled, weak smile. “I’ll leave all that stuff to you,” he said. “I can’t figure it out.”
“Primo,” she said, her voice changing, a little sterner, smiling then frowning. “Are you telling me everything you know?”
“Yes, of course. God — look at the time. I’d better go, my shift starts in forty minutes.”
They both stood up and dumped their paper cups and the remains of the muffin in the bin.
“You’ve been a fantastic help,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll see if I can track down the boy.”
“There’ll be a post mortem and an inquest,” she said. “We might learn something more.”
“I doubt it,” he said with some bitterness, then added, apologetically, “of course, you never know.” He held out his hand. “Thanks a million, Rita.”
She took his hand and held on to it for two or three seconds longer than she should.
“Listen, Primo,” she said, a little astonished at her own audacity, but she didn’t want their new association to end there and then: she wanted it to have a little more life, see where it might lead. “Do you fancy meeting up for a drink? We could have supper — curry or a Chinese or something. I could give you a progress report.” She sensed him thinking fast — she let his hand go — could see him mentally running through implications, complications, problems, possibilities.
“It’s not compulsory,” she said.
“No, I’d like that,” he said with a grateful smile. “Very much. That would be great.”
42
THE ITALIAN RESTAURANT WAS still there — why wouldn’t it be? — sitting in its Chelsea side street with its yellow awnings. A man in an apron — a waiter — was hosing down the pavement outside as Adam walked past and inside other waiters were setting up the tables for lunch. Adam goaded his memory, thinking back to that evening. It seemed to him as if it had taken place in another century, or in a parallel universe. But everything had started then — the fact that he was standing here now was all to do with that encounter with Philip Wang, his fellow diner. He had seemed preoccupied, ill at ease; he remembered him dropping things, at one stage dabbing his perspiring forehead with a napkin. And of course he left his file, hidden under the adjacent table. He had looked like a man with a lot on his mind. But what kind of stress — how acute? Had he done something wrong? Stolen something, perhaps? And yet when he’d called up to say he had the file and was bringing it round Wang had sounded relieved but relatively calm, had even asked him up for a drink…
Adam turned away and walked through the back streets towards the river. If it all began with Wang then he needed to find out more about the man and what he did. Did he work for the government? Was he some ministry whistle-blower? Perhaps he was linked to the secret services himself and had found out something he shouldn’t? Was he selling state secrets? Adam shook his head: conspiracy theories multiplied incrementally. Start with the facts: Philip Wang was a consultant at St Botolph’s Hospital — perhaps the trail began there.
Adam took a seat on the bench on the wide section of the pavement at the beginning of Chelsea Bridge, checking to see if there was any activity in or around the triangle. He wandered past the gate a couple of times, waiting for a gap in the traffic. All seemed quiet. A power-walking couple engaged in intense conversation marched by, and when they were well past, he climbed over the gate and pushed his way through the bushes to the clearing.
He felt strange being back, acknowledging the huge changes his life had undergone since he had first camped out there. So much had happened to him: it was as if he were packing years of living into fraught, dense weeks; determinedly racing through a whole life’s catalogue of experiences as fast as possible, as if time were running out. He stood for a while, hands on hips, taking things in, slowly, deliberately. There was more litter scattered around and he felt a sense of proprietorial outrage, picking up a piece of blown newspaper before crumpling it up and letting it fall. He knelt down and ripped back the turf that covered his cash-box and removed £,200 and the Wang dossier. He paused for a moment, looking at the list of names and the incomprehensible jottings beside them. There was no doubt in his mind — this was where he should start next.
Sitting on the Tube heading back to Stepney, he found himself thinking about the policewoman, Rita Nashe. She was tall and rangy with a lean face — pretty, but one that looked almost mannishly strong when her hair was up. When her hair was down she seemed quite different — he remembered the frisson he’d felt when she came into the coffee shop — she didn’t look like a policewoman at all. And at this he rebuked himself: as if there were a generic template of looks that applied to policewomen. You might as well say he looked like a typical hospital porter. No, he realised, it was because he had seen her in a uniform first, that day at the MSU morgue — he had to remove the uniformed Rita from his memory bank and replace it with the image of the pretty, tall young woman in jeans and a fleece, with her brown hair down on her shoulders, sitting opposite him in the coffee shop, picking the beads of fruit from her muffin, leaning back and smiling. It had all seemed very normal and easy — being Primo Belem changed everything, the risks that he had worried about never materialised. He brought her face back into his mind — Rita’s face. Hard to tell what her figure was like under the fleece…He was glad she’d been the one to ask him for a drink — he wouldn’t have had the nerve, however much he might have liked the idea.