Painkillers (13 page)

'I was wondering,' said Money, 'whether you'd feel able to go and take care of his things for me.'

I balked slightly at that. 'Well, I'm not sure I'm really the person - '

The sun beat in through the dust-bleared sash window. The back of my neck was burning. The air in the office was unbearably close now, but the heat had warped the window shut and besides, there were too many wasps in the room as it was. While I watched, one crept drowsily in through the ventilator grille in the ceiling.

'I don't know the family - '

'It's simply impossible for me to get away at the moment, Adam. I really need you to take care of this for me.'

The wasp swung drunkenly towards the window. I levered myself out the way. The office chair dropped an inch or two under me as I rose.

'Adam?'

Yau Zhenshu. I wondered how on earth I was going to explain this one to Eva. Physicist; informant; traitor; radio engineer; spy. Over the years, provoked by Eva's framed photograph of her grandfather, I had collected snippets about the man they said had caused his death. Zhenshu's life pieced together out of scraps and hints from Jimmy, Money, Hamley, Victor and the Hong Kong grapevine - belonged to the darker, Dashiel Hammett end of a Thirties serial.

'His affairs may take some time to sort out,' Money warned me. 'He has property in Hong Kong.'

I had to admit, I was curious. Money was unwittingly pressing all the police-paperchaser buttons in me. There would not come another opportunity like this, to test Zhenshu's heinous reputation against reality. I said, 'You won't want to sell anything.' Property prices there had fallen to a third of their Handover levels.

'I'm always very grateful for your advice, Adam.'

I thought about it some more. 'Where did he live?' I asked.

'Wye, in Kent.'

It was just about commutable. Maybe I wouldn't have to say anything to Eva. The wasp, frustrated, turned and dive-bombed my head. I dodged, tugging the phone across the desk on a toboggan of loose papers.

'There's no immediate family. I can give you the number of his carer - '

The wasp landed on the armrest of the broken-down chair and caught its leg in the burst foam. It wrestled and fizzed, uselessly. If I had to spend another day in here I would surely melt into the lino. I took a biro from out my shirt pocket. 'Sure,' I said. 'Go ahead.'

Outside, a scaffolding pipe struck the pavement. It rang like a bell. If you have to lie, lie in detail. The last time I visited Money I told Eva that Richard Kitney had invited me to Imperial College's new medical school for a demonstration of Dicom 3. Today, I told Eva I was attending a symposium on emotional interfacing chaired by Kevin Leicester at Reading University. Eva was so impressed she offered me the car. The mileage discrepancy between Reading and Wye was too great, so I chose the train instead, and was punished for my deceit by getting trapped in a window seat on the sunny side of a carriage that had probably carried my grandfather to the Great War. By the time I arrived my skin was rendered to glue. I tried straightening my shirt and the back of it was soaking.

The town was far too small for taxis: I was walking up the street to where the shops seemed to be antiques, antiques, and, yes, no doubt about it, antiques - when a silver MX5 flew round the bend and slid to a halt, impossibly fast, like a CGI effect, against the opposite pavement. That car - there was probably a button to shoot knives out of the hubcaps. Of course, I could guess who it was.

'Hop in.'

'You should have got a 5-series,' I told her. 'Then you could kill yourself in real comfort.' I strapped myself in. It felt like I was sitting on the road.

Zoe sniffed and reached down to scratch her ankle. She was barefoot. 'You know who buys them?'

'Who?'

She gunned the engine, paddled the wheel, and car leapt round like a cat to face the way it had come.

'Restaurateurs.'

'What the fuck are you doing here, Zoe?'

She took my mood in her stride. 'Mother sent me.'

'Yeah, sure.'

'She figured I'd know who to invite to the cremation.'

'For that you needed to come all this way?'

'It didn't take long.'

She slewed the car around a couple of back streets to show me how little time it would have taken her.

'Christ's sakes.'

She laughed. She was nowhere near as good as she thought she was. 'Nearly there.' She turned down a narrow lane between old high walls and hit the brakes so hard, I could feel my guts being strained out through the seat-belt webbing.

I looked around, dazed. Zoe had teleported us out of town entirely. I could see nothing but trees. A dirt driveway led left.

'Down there?'

'Peaceful, isn't it?'

Suddenly we were doing barely ten miles an hour, over the dirt and onto a poorly-maintained drive. Zoe wanted to show the place off to me. The avenue was old, untended for years, and the chestnut trees had bust up the tarmac; roots rippled the surface. The MX5's rock-hard suspension jounced us about as we approached the house.

It was old, rebuilt and refitted so many times, it had lost all memory of itself. Zoe shod herself and climbed out of the car. She didn't bother with the door. The heel of her Miu Miu sandal left an oval dent in the seat leather. Her outfit today was by her standards pretty restrained: a kitsch floral summer dress, probably Sogo. She picked her way across the crazed tarmac. She was so small, so childishly thin - the girl in the Hello Kitty comic strip. You will see her sort any fine day on Shaftesbury Avenue, slumped, bored as a supermodel, in the trophy seat of a yacht-white Audi. I tried not to think of the time she had sat there for me.

She fanned through the keys Zhenshu's nurse had given us, looking for a Yale among the heavy, eccentric shapes. I sat waiting on the low brick wall which framed the portico. The gardens were all overgrown. Roses, long-since outgrowing their pyramidal frames, threw off a faint perfume from scant, sickly flower heads. The dominant scent was of loam and damp.

'Here we are.'

'I thought Zhenshu was supposed to be the money-man of the family,' I said, following her into the front room. The furniture was cheap and old-fashioned, unworthy of these high-ceilinged rooms with their painted dado rails and elegant ceiling roses. Zhenshu hadn't so much lived here as camped out.

'He didn't want much for himself.'

In the kitchen, the fridge and the cooker were old models - an Electrolux, a Belling - kept spotlessly clean. The table was a nasty wood-effect laminate effort that folded up against the wall when not in use. There were net curtains over the windows, and nasty china figurines gathering dust on the window-sills. It reminded me of Arnos Grove, and of the house where I grew up when mother was still alive, dusting every day.

Upstairs, the rooms smelled of glue. Out in the hall, damp had got into the plaster, and a corner of the ceiling had fallen in.

'Nice to see he was being looked after properly.' I toed through the pile of plaster and Artex beneath the hole.

'He never used the rooms upstairs.'

I looked up into the hole, where the attic had to be: a wire crate had fallen onto the unsupported part of the ceiling and cracked it open. There were papers poking through the mesh of the crate. I stood on tiptoe and pulled one free.

'Adam! You'll have it down on top of you.'

I stepped smartly away: my Indiana Jones moment. Nothing happened.

'I'm hungry,' said Zoe, already bored with this.

'We can go grab some lunch in a minute.' The letter was full of technical details: an argument about tolerances, too involved to make any immediate sense. 'If you like.' It carried the Nabeshima letterhead. I showed it to her.

'Oh,' she said, unsurprised, 'yes, there'll be tons of that here.'

I looked at her, blank. 'I thought he was a teacher.'

'He worked at the University of Hong Kong, but he invented stuff, didn't you know?'

'No.'

'That's what caused all the nastiness in Hong Kong. He was forced to work for Nabeshima during the occupation. That's when the rumours got started about him being a traitor.'

I looked at the letter again. 'This is dated '55.'

'He rejoined the company when he moved to Japan.'

'Your dad told me they lived on the bread-line in Abashiri.'

'Oh, that was only to start with.'

I remember thinking, just how complicated were Zhenshu's affairs going to be? I wondered how many more crates were waiting for us in the loft.

We drove to Dover for lunch. Zoe wanted to rediscover a tea shop she remembered from when she was little - a pig-tailed, six-year-old tourist armed with a Nikon camera Jimmy had bought her for her birthday. 'It was a proper camera, lenses and everything. It weighed a ton.'

'A strange sort of present for a little girl,' I said.

'You know that's how he was with me,' she said, without rancour. I felt petty. We were walking along the top of the sea wall. The sun was so bright, the sea was full of shattered mirrors. I thought about Jimmy, the Praya, the car swerving and falling. 'How were you two getting along? Before he died?'

'He gave me money for my car.'

I looked at her. She shrugged.

Poor Jimmy: the third time around, he finally got a child worthy of him, and it was a girl. She had nowhere he could make his scars.

'No,' she said, 'things were fine. I thought maybe when I went to study in London it might have got easier between us, but whenever I answered the phone all he ever said was, "Can I talk to your mother?"'

'That's not Jimmy,' I said, 'that's men, period.'

'Really?'

'Well, my dad - '

I stopped myself.

'Were you often here as a child?'

'Only once,' she said. 'Zhenshu took me to the Isle of Wight.' She swung her sandals in her hand. I had forgotten that about her: how she was always dancing. 'There's a castle there, and a lighthouse. It was open, and the lighthouse keeper showed me round. I don't suppose he was real - aren't they all operated by machine now?'

'I suppose' I said, watching her dance.

'I ate sugared almonds,' she said. It was strange, hearing her account of these ordinary places; even now, they had a kind of foreign glamour for her. 'I remember he took me sailing once,' she said. 'It was very rough. You wouldn't think it, would you? It's such a pretty stretch of water.'

'Yes.' I was thinking about my father: his collections of things; his tiny, meticulous handwriting. The formal gestures he used with people to hide his fear.

The concrete had weathered and crumbled here, and there was a big puddle in front of us. I jumped across it and offered Zoe my hands. 'Jump,' I said.

She jumped, and snatched my hands. I overbalanced and stumbled into the puddle. She leaned into me, struggling to regain her balance. Her hair smelled of salt water and seaweed. Her breasts brushed me. She looked up at me; her eyes were blind eyes, the pupils pin-point small in grey irises. They expressed nothing.

I tried to smile. My mouth gave way. 'I - '

She laughed. 'I'm soaking.'

Water glistened on her ankles.

17.

My feet were wet through and my socks were balling around my toes as we wandered from street to street in search of Zoe's cafe. Every road seemed to lead us further away from the sea-front, into closes lined with four-wheel drive cars and ornamental conifer hedges and ruched blinds in every window.

'There's nothing here,' she said, turning a full circle as she walked. 'What do people do? Where do they shop? It's like an episode of Sliders.'

'They all have cars,' I said. 'It's like this everywhere now.'

We went back to the coast road and entered a greasy spoon we had passed earlier. It wanted to be a Fifties diner, with American number plates screwed to the walls and Jimmy Dean on the front of every plasticated menu.

'Egg and chips.'

If Money could have heard us, she would have approved. Zoe, missing her studies at the LSE, wanted me to recall my days with KPMG. I gave her the usual milk-round pep talk about pension funds, ethical investments, and the rest. It was strange, seeing her on the threshold of that world, taking it all on board, drinking it in.

She said, 'I did an ethics paper last year on affinity cards.'

It was a strange conversation.

I can't remember at what point I started not to believe in it. It just snuck up on me somehow: the anger, the desire to confront whatever it was I thought was really going on behind these niceties.

'Why did Money kill my dog?'

'What?'

'I guess it was Brian and Eddie got their hands dirty. It seems their style.'

'What dog?'

'You mean they're working through a list?'

'Adam - '

'Eva's dog. Eva's Yorkshire terrier.'

Her fork was loaded with ham. She let it fall back on her plate. 'What are you talking about?' She knew it was something bad. Her face had paled already. But it was too late now. 'Eva's dog was crucified against our garage wall.'

Zoe swallowed.

'It was the day after the meal. It was the day I called your mum and said I'd work for you, after all.'

'You didn't say anything about a dog.'

I shrugged. 'Never show a hit,' I said.

'You know,' I said, 'she didn't have to do that. It's fucking crude, apart from anything else. Jimmy would never have done anything like that.'

'She didn't do it!' It was almost a shout.

'Come on, Zoe...'

'She didn't.' There were tears in her eyes.

It was no good. I couldn't stop. 'She has Hamley killed, because he was dumb enough to let the inquiry catch up with him. And when it looked to her like I might get out of line - '

'It's not true.'

I smiled. She had so much to learn. 'Eat your chips,' I said.

She was crying openly now. 'It's not,' she kept saying.

'She more or less told me, Zoe. She's been waving Hamley's accident in my face every time we've spoken.'

'She told you she didn't do it.'

I wiped a scrap of bread round my plate.

'I was there when she phoned to invite you round. She said, "I wasn't the one who ran - who ran over ".' Her jaw trembled.