Zembla-4…
Adam went to an internet café. He typed ‘Zembla-4’ into a search engine and all the other relevant information came up, swiftly, obligingly, on the screen. Zembla-4. Calenture-Deutz pic. The Calenture-Deutz website had not yet been updated — there was a photograph of a beaming Philip Wang, Head of Research and Development, with no news or date of his sudden demise. Adam looked at the picture feeling very strange, thinking of their last encounter. There too was an image of the Chairman and CEO of Calenture-Deutz, one Ingram Fryzer, even-featured, grey-haired, above a tendentious declaration on behalf of the board and the team detailing his company’s ambitions and overall integrity. There was a list of other board members and a series of high-minded texts — with modern graphics superimposed (test tubes, computers, clean-cut men in white coats, laughing children in meadows) and mood music over — a major-key electronic ostinato
— about the high ideals espoused by Calenture-Deutz as they searched for ever more efficient pharmaceutical products.
Adam exited the site theoretically wiser, he supposed, initially
— but, really, after some reflection, none the wiser. He decided to concentrate on the five deaths at St Botolph’s. What he needed now was access to some of the hospital’s computers.
♦
He walked into the pub in Battersea, The White Duchess, and saw Rita sitting at the bar with a bottle of beer in her hand. He kissed her on the cheek — they could kiss each other on the cheek now, having ended their first date (after a Chinese meal) with this polite embrace. She was wearing jeans and, seemingly, three loose T — shirts one on top of the other and her hair was tied casually back in a pony-tail. Out of uniform she seemed to dress with studied unconcern — almost like one of his students on the McVay campus, Adam thought. Adam found the style alluring — he did not think anyone would guess that she was a policewoman.
In the corner a small band were setting up for their next session — this was the ‘LIVE MUSIC’ advertised on the pub windows.
“Been to a meeting?” she said. “Very smart.” Adam was wearing his other suit. He only had two suits, he realised, he would have to vary his wardrobe now he was seeing Rita.
“They want to promote me,” he said. “I’m resisting.”
What was the difference about a second date? Adam asked himself. The difference was that all bets were off, he supposed…The first date was always exploratory, cautious, uncertain — however much you might seem to be enjoying yourself that was its essential purpose: exit doors were left ajar at every turn in case some terrible miscalculation had been made. On their first date they had talked vaguely about their jobs. Adam had alluded to a period of mental instability, a sustained period of hospitalisation, in order to explain his current lowly status in the medical food-chain. “Finding himself,” he said. Rita had been equally vague about her own background, skilfully avoiding certain questions — Adam had no idea where she lived, for example. But, once the second date had been mooted (by Adam) and agreed upon, all the prudence and tentativeness fell away. Now as they sat at the bar talking, listening to the jazz trio strike up, Adam could sense the change in mood, palpably. The subtext was clear to them both: full-on sexual attraction. As he ordered more drinks, swivelling to gain the attention of the barman, his knee connected with her thigh and stayed there. They clinked their bottles of beer.
“Primo,” she said. “I like that name. But you don’t have an Italian accent.”
“Because I was born and brought up in Bristol,” he said. “I can’t speak a word of Italian. OK — I can speak a word or two.” He shrugged. “I’m a third-generation immigrant.”
“So where are your family originally from, then?” she asked, and Adam thought — this had better be the last question about my background, for both our sakes.
“Brescia,” he said, plucking the name from the map of Italy in his head. “And before you ask, I’ve never been there.”
“Do you want to eat something?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m starving.”
♦
They stepped out of the pub into the soft night — it was dark, but not dark, some lingering luminescence in the sky making everything strangely though nebulously visible.
“Hang on a sec,” Rita said, and rummaged in her bag for her mobile phone, on which, once retrieved, she quickly sent a text. Adam stepped away, listening to the band finish their set with a roll of drums and a shivering bash of cymbals. He felt slightly drunk, but was aware of another layer of light-headedness, of excitement, that had more to do with emotion than alcohol — he sensed the evening had longer to run.
“Do you want to come home and have a coffee or something?” she said.
“That would be great.”
“I live two minutes away,” she said. “Which is why I lured you to sunny Battersea.”
Adam said nothing.
“We go along here,” she said, gesturing down river, and they headed off. After a few paces she slipped her hand in his.
“That was nice,” she said.
“It was.”
“Better than our Chinese.”
“That’s the problem with a first date, you see — too much at stake, too many unknowns. Everything changes on the second…At least that’s my experience — my theory.”
She glanced at him. “You must tell me about your theory some time.”
He wondered if this was the moment to kiss her, but she was leading him across the road towards the river.
“I live on a houseboat,” she said.
“Amazing,” Adam said, now acknowledging that he was definitely drunkish and thinking: a houseboat, sex on a houseboat.
“I live on a houseboat with my dad.”
Adam said nothing.
“He said nothing.”
“No, good. I think that…You know, cool.”
“I’d like you to meet him, which was why I texted him.”
“Ah-ha. Excellent.”
She unlocked a metal gate and they walked down a sloping metal bridge to a substantial mooring area. There seemed many different types of vessel berthed here in the dark, some with lights shining from their windows, and Adam supposed this was a sort of floating village. They walked along shifting metal gangplanks between the boats.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Nine Elms Pier,” she said. “Apparently there used to be a row of nine elms round about here in the middle of the seventeenth century.”
“Really? Amazing…”
“Hence the name.”
“I think I got that.”
“Not just a pretty face, then.”
Adam said nothing. He could tell she was a bit tense.
They were heading towards a small inlet at the end where some larger vessels were berthed. He saw what looked like a deep-sea trawler and a modified barge and, at the end, what appeared to be a reconditioned naval vessel, still with its battleship-grey paint.