Harry sat out on the sundeck of his houseboat taking the neck off the third beer. It had been a bloody day. He couldn’t help but reflect that at one time, and not so long ago, he’d been a soldier, an officer in the British Army and part of the finest support group he could ever hope to find. Even after that, when he’d been a politician, people had queued up to persuade him he was important, special, wouldn’t leave him alone. Presidents and prime ministers had competed for his company. Now the world treated him like an open sewer. It would take more than a few bottles of beer to wash away the taste of failure.
The fierce orange sun had sunk lower in the sky and was bouncing off the water, dazzling him even through the sunshades, so he closed his eyes and allowed the warmth of the evening to massage away the weariness he was feeling inside, yet no sooner had he settled back in his chair than his ear began screaming at him, as painful as if it had just been ripped from his skull once more, telling him that he’d screwed up. Again. In the farthest corner of Hell, Johnnie would be laughing.
Harry wanted Jemma, badly, but even more than that he needed to settle with Johnnie. Ever since men had picked up sticks and started using them as tools and weapons, they’d found a need to know their origins, to understand where they came from, what made them different. Harry needed to know his father in order to know himself. Only then could he go back to Jemma, if she was still around. He’d lost too many women in his life to give up on her but because he’d lost so many women he knew he ran a huge risk. She might not still be there. He growled at the sun, sipped his beer, and hurt.
The wail of a police siren from Battersea Bridge away to his left brought back memories of his morning interview with Hughie Edwards. Harry had misjudged him, thought him a friend, but the man had gone sour, and that had made him sloppy. He’d lost control of the interview, told Harry more about Susannah Ranelagh than Harry had been able to tell him, of her constant visits back to Britain. What was that about? And Findlay Francis. That made five of the seven in the photo either dead or mysteriously missing, so screw coincidence. He beat at the cast on his arm in frustration. With his good arm he reached for another beer.
The bishop was still around, of course, or so he’d been told, yet although Harry had gone about it like a ferret down a rabbit warren he’d still been unable to trace him. Crockford’s Clerical Directory offered no contact details, only that he’d retired from the episcopate two years previously. Harry had Googled and Wiki-ed but had found nothing of use, he’d called the Bishop’s House in Burton, where a secretary had patiently explained that it was strictly forbidden to give out Bishop Randall’s private details, although she offered to forward any letter that Harry might care to send. He’d even tried Helen in the Steward’s Office in Christ Church and got a fulsome expression of regret, but much the same answer. In the end he had no choice. In a mood of deep frustration Harry had written the letters and asked for them to be forwarded.
His mood grew darker as the beer evaporated and a helicopter flew overhead, jarring the air as it made for the heliport upriver. Just a couple of miles on the other side Jemma would be fixing a solitary supper – or would she? There were no agreed rules for their separation, nothing more than the understanding that Jemma needed space and time ‘to make sure that what we’re about to do is the right thing’. It had sounded almost reasonable, particularly after she’d finished shagging his brains out on the sofa, but, as the days passed and he became all too familiar with the eccentricities of living on the water, his world began to grow ever more lonely. How much longer? he’d asked on the phone. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, say. He’d suggested a drink at their favourite pub but she’d turned him down. It wouldn’t help, she’d said. Would they end the evening with a chaste goodbye or making up for lost time behind some park bush? ‘This is the biggest step I’ll ever take in my life, Harry. Just give me time.’
Time to rip off the top of a fifth bottle, or was it the seventh?
He tried to banish thoughts of Jemma from his mind. Instead, he latched on to the memory of Delicious standing in her shower, but, even as the memory inspired that special sensation of warmth inside, the image changed to the wrinkled face of Susannah Ranelagh. Why had she kept coming back, year after year? Not to celebrate any parent’s birthday: they were both probably long gone from this world. And not simply for a holiday, not during the encroaching greyness of October. Harry felt more than a little lost. He sat back, closed his eyes, tried to empty his mind and listen to the music of the old river while its current carried his cares away downstream.
Suddenly and with considerable violence, he launched himself from his chair and clattered backwards down the narrow steps from the sundeck in so much haste that he almost lost his footing. Even before he’d taken breath he was rifling through his bag, pulling out his father’s battered file and tipping the contents onto the bed. There it was, the passport. Filled with a chaos of stamps from border-control points around the globe that marked Johnnie’s journey through the last dozen or so years of his life. The trading capitals of the world, the powerhouses of global prosperity, set out alongside a clutch of sandy islands that did excellent trade in turtle soup and tax havens. There were no immigration stamps to disclose when he’d come back to Britain – for a British passport holder that wasn’t necessary – but Harry remembered the intermittent contact he’d had with his father in those last years, an occasional telephone call to say he was back in the country, a hastily scribbled postcard, a letter on the notepaper of some London hotel, all discarded into the nearest bin. And every one of them, he seemed now to remember, during the dismal months of autumn. Between the stiff covers of the passport he found the evidence – stamps from other jurisdictions that gave date and location for his wandering. His thumbs fumbled in their haste as they picked out visas marking immigration and exit from Belize, Morocco, the United States, Vietnam, Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Norway, Cyprus, Panama, Malaysia, Canada, Russia. Never seeming to settle. And, as he held open the pages and tried to reconcile the markings, he found a hole in every year of the record that could only be explained by one thing. He had come home. In October.
Whatever Susannah Ranelagh had been up to, Johnnie had been there, too.
‘What bloody secret are you hiding?’ Harry shouted, throwing the passport down in anger. He glared in pain out of the window. The sun was glowering in the evening sky; the waters turned a shade of volcanic red. That was the trouble with rivers like the Thames. No sooner had they shifted all the crap in your life downstream than the tide turned and shoved it straight back at you.
A backstreet in Tottenham, north London. An old Victorian pub with dark tiles and sticky varnish and pies that protested, perhaps too vehemently, that they were a hundred per cent beef. Not a pub that attracted passing trade. Hughie Edwards was sitting in a booth nursing a large whisky, turning the rim of the glass slowly with the tips of his fingers, inspecting it carefully as though hoping to find a part of the glass that held more alcohol than another. He was alone. He stayed staring at his glass until the pub door opened and four men sauntered in; it was darts night. Edwards looked up, nodded. One of the men, a small black guy with nervous eyes and greying curly hair, scowled and muttered to his friends before making his way over.
‘Evening, Billy.’
‘Hello, Mr Edwards. What a surprise.’ The other man’s voice with its Trinidadian roots was stripped of any trace of enthusiasm.
‘Mine’s a whisky. Get yourself whatever you want.’
The scowl came back. ‘You can get yourself all sorts of things on a dark night in these parts, Chief Inspector. Like totally fucked. You should be careful.’
‘Even on a dark night I would know it was you, Billy-boy, from the smell of all that black bullshit. Make sure mine’s a large one.’
Billy swallowed his contempt and trundled across to the bar, returning with a whisky and a pint of lager with the head already taken off. ‘As I was saying, it’s a great pleasure to see you again, Mr Edwards,’ he declared, setting himself down on the opposite bench of the booth. ‘What brings you to these parts?’
‘Old times.’
Billy sniffed and stared at his glass.
Many years before, when Edwards had been no more than a trainee detective constable at the start of his career, he had nicked Billy under the old sus laws for door handling – being found trying car doors with intent to steal either the contents or the car itself. Billy served only a short period of ‘bird’, a couple of months, but when, a little later, he’d been discovered to be a minor part of a high-value car-ringing scam and faced a much longer stretch inside, Edwards had given him a break. The policeman’s sights had been set on those much higher up the food chain and he’d decided Billy would be more useful to him outside than in. As Billy had discovered on repeated occasions in the years since, ambitious policemen have a need for the sort of support team that never appears on the payroll. He had also discovered that Edwards had a very long memory.
So they sat and they chatted, of times past and times that were to come, both for themselves and for Harry Jones. Totally screwed up Billy’s game of darts.
It was late, almost touching midnight. The insistent burble of the phone cut through the peace of the hour, echoing through the elegant rooms and tiled corridors of the old house.
‘Yes?’ an irritated voice responded, although the strains of a Beethoven piano sonata in the background betrayed that he hadn’t been asleep.
‘It’s me.’
There was no need for any further introduction: the caller’s voice had always adopted a pronounced sibilance when he was drunk, even when he was young.
The other man didn’t respond immediately, wanting to collect his wits, making it clear that the interruption was unwelcome. ‘What do you want?’ he said eventually.
‘Johnnie’s son. He’s written. Wants to meet.’
‘So?’
‘But I can’t. What do I tell him?’ Alarm battled with alcohol for mastery of the caller’s voice.
‘You tell him nothing. You and Johnnie were university friends and it was all a long time ago. You can manage that, can’t you?’
The sound of slurping trickled down the line. College port. He’d never got out of the habit. ‘But what if he asks questions?’
‘Of course he will ask questions. He will ask questions because he doesn’t know. Keep it that way.’
‘But—’
‘You have to meet with him. Otherwise he will become suspicious. Don’t do that. Harry Jones is a hunter, he will track you down like a wolf.’
‘I don’t think I can do it.’
‘You must do it. You have no choice. And there is one other thing you have to do.’
‘Tell me,’ the caller pleaded.
‘You will do it sober. We all know that when you drink it brings out the more . . . vulnerable side of you.’ The word came loaded with meaning they both understood but had never discussed, not in all the years. It was the nature of groups such as theirs that they didn’t waste their time discussing the finer points of morality. ‘Anyway, Harry’s doing you a favour, giving you warning. It means he doesn’t suspect.’
‘I’m just not sure what to say.’
‘Praise the Lord and quote some scripture – you can manage that, can’t you? For pity’s sake, you’ve had enough practice dodging questions. After all, that’s what’s kept you one step ahead of your accusers all these years,’ he said, not bothering to hide his contempt as he put the phone down.