A Personal History of Thirst Read online

  John Burdett

  A Personal History of Thirst

  John Burdett was brought up in North London and worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong. He is the author of eight novels, including the Royal Thai Detective series, the most recent of which is The Bangkok Asset.

  www.​john-​burdett.​com

  ALSO BY JOHN BURDETT

  The Last Six Million Seconds

  THE ROYAL THAI DETECTIVE SERIES

  Bangkok 8

  Bangkok Tattoo

  Bangkok Haunts

  The Godfather of Kathmandu

  Vulture Peak

  The Bangkok Asset

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, MAY 2016

  Copyright © 1996 by John Burdett

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eBook ISBN 9781101973066

  www.​weeklylizard.​com

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Burdett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Three

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  For Laura

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The bar of England and Wales being a relatively small profession, it is important to emphasize that this is a work of fiction and that every character portrayed herein is fictional. For the record, in fourteen years of busy legal practice I did not knowingly come across a dishonest barrister, solicitor or policeman.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without the great patience and resourcefulness of Sam Vaughan this book would never have seen the light of day. Without the friendship and persistence of Alison Whyte it would never have reached Sam Vaughan. My eternal thanks to both of them.

  Ruled by no laws of logic, indifferent to the demands of expediency, unconstrained by the existence of external reality, the id is ruled by what Freud called the primary process directly expressing somatically generated instincts.

  THE NEW ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

  PROLOGUE

  The thief liked to walk around the back streets of Knightsbridge late at night. It gave him a vicarious feeling of wealth and security. Other places and other people aspired; here, ever since anyone could remember, dwelt the people who had arrived or had been born, so to speak, in a state of arrival. He had nothing against them, no political ax to grind, having long since passed through that stage. These days his sense of social order was almost Hindu: they belonged to the wealth-owning caste just as he belonged, when the whole story of his life was told, to the caste of thieves. If it was a system without salvation, it was also a system of fixed identities: No one was obliged to be upwardly mobile, with all the agony that entailed.

  He loved big windows, high ceilings, the wealth of generous spaces. It untied a knot in his guts to walk around Montpelier Gardens, or Beauchamp Place, or Egerton Terrace, at one or two o’clock on a Saturday morning, looking up into flats still lit, glimpsing the luxury within, speculating on the relationships that required illumination at such an hour. Somehow he doubted that anyone was solitary in that area at that time; he knew those parts of London where solitude and misery were endemic, which was one reason why he came to Knightsbridge, where he was sure they were not.

  He was a professional. He stood in an ancient perpetual relationship to those who put up bars and set alarms against him. He was part of them. Though they might disown him by day, by night he was an archetype of their dreams, a staple of their conversation, a provision in their annual budgets. He added the light, chill brush of risk to their walks around the block at night. His was the shadow that forced them to walk faster, his the footsteps in the alley, the eyes gazing from a dark corner. Though they would never admit it and were hardly aware of it, he was their last hold on poetry, the last segment of the unknown that was not susceptible to control, the last factor that saved them from the fate of the bland.

  He was a specialist—a curiously modern phenomenon: a connoisseur of the art of the joyride, who had studied his subject in depth. He read manuals for the latest cars and, though not of a scientific inclination, studied the circuits of alarm systems. And he was cool. Despite the bad nerves that tormented him at other times, on a job he possessed a glacial control. He needed it, for he never picked the kind of nondescript vehicle that cannot be distinguished from the ten thousand others of its kind. His forte was the elegant, the luxurious, the exotic car most other thieves dared not touch because they would be recognized by police within minutes of the calls going out to radio cars and motorcycles. He stalked a chosen car, kept records sometimes for weeks of the comings and goings of its owner. It was a time-consuming system, but it worked. So far he had never been caught.

  Outside Grosvenor Mansions, for example, a Porsche 944S2 the color of a chile pepper appeared at about midnight on a Friday. The owner looked to be a professional in his early forties, a doctor or a dentist. Not a lawyer. The thief knew lawyers and doubted that a lawyer of that age could still be so eager, naive almost. A doctor perhaps, who had spent his youth struggling and studying, had married the wrong woman too early and now felt cheated. Probably it was the feeling of being cheated that made him believe he was justified in deceiving his wife. Did he still live with her? Did he tell her he was out on a call every Friday night? The Porsche, too, would be something the doctor felt life owed him. The thief could understand that. And the girl? Younger, certainly, but not very much younger. The look on the doctor’s face was intelligent as well as passionate, discerning as well as eager. Not a man to fall for just a child or a terrific body. The thief envied him the freshness of his passion and decided to steal the Porsche.

  He waited under an archway while a light went on, on the thi
rd floor. In the gloom of the London evening the couple were illuminated for a moment, she standing motionless, he walking toward her, hands aimed at her waist. Then the woman remembered and released a blind. Cut off from their intimacy, the thief smiled. Theirs was not the kind of tryst that has drinks first. Perhaps five minutes for “How was your day?,” another five to undress, ten to fifteen for foreplay; the doctor looked like a man who would take pride in his foreplay.

  The thief looked at his watch. The doctor was surely a romantic. Even if the car alarm did go off, what could he do about it—dash downstairs in his underwear? She would never forgive him—for she must be a romantic, too, waiting up until twelve every Friday night when she could have been at a party, or with an unattached man. She must never be allowed to say, “Your Porsche is more important to you than I am.” He crossed the road to the low fast car. There was something wrong with him, he knew, that he felt more a part of the lives of those two people, for whom he was less than a shadow, than of his own life. But he was too busy now to think about that.

  He expected the Porsche to be a challenge: perhaps a sophisticated alarm trigger using microwave and ultraviolet, with a central locking system. But there’s not much room under the hood of the Porsche 944 for the alarm unit, only one place, in fact, to put it, and the thief knew where that would be. A simple task to open the hood, gently so as not to activate the sensors, then cut the lead to the battery. There was an optional backup battery system, but most people didn’t bother to have it installed. If the doctor had bothered and the alarm went off, the thief would run.

  But the thief was lucky. As he passed by the door on the driver’s side, he noticed that the doctor in his haste had only half locked it. It was caught on the first catch but not the second. The alarm could not have been armed.

  From his pocket he took a skeleton key, moved it expertly in the door, and, forty-five seconds later, opened it. The same key would work for the ignition. The thief was excited now, excited yet cool. The cool side of his brain clamped over the hot excited side, giving him a feeling of intense controlled energy such as athletes and addicts know. He held his breath, counted to five, slipped the key into the ignition, jiggled it so that its imperfect shape caught the levers and the engine fired. Seconds later he put the car in gear, eased slowly out of the parking spot, slipped into second gear at the corner, and sped off.

  1

  The Sunday after Oliver Thirst died, two policemen came to see me at my house in Hampstead. I knew them both well. They were too senior to be making routine calls, and theirs could not be a social visit. I concluded that they intended to charge me with murder and made arrangements accordingly.

  George Holmes, the older of the two, had telephoned earlier in the morning to ask in his most diffident voice if it would be convenient to come by. He sounded tired; I remembered that he was due to retire that year. I had known him in his younger days, when he seemed to have the energy of ten men; now, evidently, the burden of countless crimes had exhausted even his great strength. The other, Vincent Purves, I didn’t know so well, but I’d spent a decade in more or less the same line of business, so that he, too, had become familiar to me. I knew their quirks, their weaknesses, the nature of the talent that had propelled them ever forward in their careers. I knew, for example, how sly George could be and was a little nervous in consequence.

  Through a window I watched them drive up and down my street a couple of times looking for a place to park, although they seemed to keep missing one in front of the building immediately opposite. Eventually George found a spot to the liking of his dented and dirty old Rover. Vincent, still slim and wiry at fifty, was the first out. George took his time, dipping his head back in to reach for his trilby and tobacco. I remembered that he was equally deliberate and unhurried in the witness box. His brown leather brogues crunched up the short yard to my house, and I was there to open the door as he rang the bell.

  “Told you, no chance with this bloke.” George pushed the trilby back on his head. “He’s always ten steps ahead.”

  “That right?” Vincent said.

  “Not half. The number of times he cut me up in the witness box in the old days, after ten minutes I didn’t know if I was the co-accused or the tea lady. How are you, James, my lad—can I still call you that? It’s good to see you.”

  We exchanged handshakes and smiles as I showed them into the study that I had made grand by knocking down a wall between two rooms. George whistled.

  “Well, well, you have come a long way since Billericay Magistrates Court.”

  There was an expensive van Gogh copy by an ex-convict who had become famous, some leather furniture, an antique desk I was proud of…but I doubted that these items had the power to impress George, any more than the litter of documents and open books. As usual, it was a working Sunday for me. I turned off the desktop computer, watched the screen die.

  “Drink, chaps? Scotch, beer, cognac, sherry?”

  George nudged Vincent. “Clever, eh? Very subtle. He wants to find out if we’re on duty or not.” George winked at me. “I’d say that in the circumstances, Vincent, you’re more or less bound to have a drink—otherwise you’ll give the game away.”

  “No, no, I won’t, thanks all the same.”

  George settled for a stiff Scotch and water. I poured myself a large Armagnac and watched them over the rim of the glass. Suddenly the words were out.

  “Actually, I’m glad you chaps showed up. I want to confess to the murder of Oliver Thirst.”

  Vincent blinked, and a face George normally kept hidden was suddenly glaring at me. It was an ugly face. He recovered himself in seconds and started fumbling in his pocket.

  “What’s up, George?” I asked.

  “Bugger.”

  He fumbled some more. “Forgot to bring any handcuffs—you bring any handcuffs, Vincent?”

  Vincent looked sickened and refused to play.

  “That’s it, then. Can’t arrest you, old son, no handcuffs. But tell us, how did you kill Oliver Thirst?”

  “Slowly, every day for the past eleven years.”

  George’s body sagged with relief.

  I said: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I know you’re here to ask me about Thirst, you’re only doing your jobs—I do appreciate that it’s you chaps I have to deal with and not some smart-arsed kid trying to score points—but the memory is still painful to me. Very painful. Anyway, after George rang me this morning I prepared a short written statement. I calculated the approximate time of death from the newspaper reports, and you’ll find appended to the statement the full names, addresses, telephone numbers, of all the people I was with during the relevant period. There’s one name I haven’t written down, because it’s confidential. During the latter part of the evening I was with an ex-client who wanted to complain about a lifelong relationship of manipulation and corruption with a senior police officer. Naturally I advised him to go to the Complaints Against Police unit. I’ve had a copy of my statement sent by post to my solicitor.”

  I took two copies of typed script from the desk, slipped them into clear plastic folders, and gave them one each.

  George avoided my eyes as I handed it over. “Mind if I read it now?”

  I shrugged. He carefully took out a pair of spectacles and started to read. Concentration and the spectacles made him look grim.

  “ ‘First met Thirst fifteenth June 1976 at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court,’ ” he read out, then fell into silence.

  To me the dry data contained in that single sentence was as evocative as incense; from it expanded an overpowering perfume as if my thin script had been one of those trick greeting cards you rub until they release some fragrant odor. There floated past me a hot morning when I crossed the Thames from north to south on that famous bridge, my heart singing because I was off to my fifth court appearance in one week.

  Tower Bridge is an ancient tribunal, the underground cells genuine dungeons carved out of rock and enclosed with ste
el bars. He was sitting reading The Guinness Book of Records and didn’t bother to look up when the sergeant on duty unlocked the gaol door to let me in.

  “Your barrister’s here, Oliver,” said the sergeant, who seemed to know him.

  Still he did not look up. “ ‘The largest object stolen by a single person was the SS Orient Trader, a 10,640-ton ship. Stolen by N. William Kennedy armed with only a sharp ax. On fifth June 1966,’ ” he read. His accent was a gruff, unadulterated cockney. Finally he raised his head, stared into my eyes for a long contemplative moment.

  His was an unforgettable face: beautiful, naive, crooked, electric with anger. A criminal’s face: the innocence and the guile remained quarantined from each other, either one likely to take over from one minute to the next.

  “That’s what I call taking and driving away. Can’t compete with that,” he said at last.

  “I thought you were pleading ‘not guilty,’ ” I said.

  He pretended to think about it. “Oh yeah, I forgot.” His features distorted for a moment, for some unfathomable reason. Then he smiled.

  —

  My account was exactly two pages long, but George took seven minutes to read it. He must have memorized every word. Vincent had long finished by the time he looked up.

  He took off his glasses, folded them carefully, put them back in their sheath.

  “Looks watertight, James. Very professional.”

  “You realize I couldn’t afford…”

  “Course not, old son. Man in your position, you’ve got to take preemptive action when the likes of us come visiting. Everyone will understand—everyone.”

  “It’s just that I’m taking silk this year, if all goes well.”

  George let his mouth hang open. “You hear that, Vince? We’re practically in the presence of royalty.”

  “Don’t, George,” Vincent said.

  George ignored him. “D’you know what ‘taking silk’ means, Vince?”

  “Course I know. Means he’ll be a Q.C. and get to wear a silk gown.”