Mr. Alice likes to own things. And, as I’ve told you, one of the things he owns is me. He’s the father I didn’t have. It was him that got me the medical files on my mum and the information on the various candidates for my dad.
When I graduated （first class degrees in business studies and international law）， as my graduation present to myself, I went and found my-grandfather-the-doctor. I’d held off on seeing him until then. It had been a sort of incentive.
He was a year away from retirement, a hatchet-faced old man with a tweed jacket. This was in 1978, and a few doctors still made house calls. I followed him to a tower block in Maida Vale. Waited while he dispensed his medical wisdom, and stopped him as he came out, black bag swinging by his side.
“Hullo Grandpa,” I said. Not much point in trying to pretend to be someone else, really. Not with my looks. He was me, forty years on. Same fucking ugly face, but with his hair thinning and sandy gray, not thick and mousy brown like mine. He asked what I wanted.
“Locking Mum away like that,” I told him. “It wasn’t very nice, was it?”
He told me to get away from him, or something like that.
“I’ve just got my degree.” I told him. “You should be proud of me.”
He said that he knew who I was, and I had better be off at once, or he would have the police down on me, and have me locked away.
I put the knife through his left eye and back into his brain, and while he made little choking noises I took his old calfskin wallet—as a keepsake, really, and to make it look more like a robbery. That was where I found the photo of my mum, in black-and-white, smiling and flirting with the camera, twenty-five years before. I wonder who owned the Morgan.
I had someone who didn’t know me pawn the wallet. I bought it from the pawnshop when it wasn’t redeemed. Nice clean trail. There’s many a smart man who’s been brought down by a keepsake. Sometimes I wonder if I killed my father that day, as well as my grandfather. I don’t expect he’d have told me, even if I’d asked. And it doesn’t really matter, does it?
After that I went to work full-time for Mr. Alice. I ran the Sri Lanka end of things for a couple of years, then spent a year in Bogotá on import-export, working as a glorified travel agent. I came back home to London as soon as I could. For the last fifteen years I’ve been working mainly as a troubleshooter, and as a smoother-over of problem areas. Troubleshooter. That’s rich.
Like I said, it takes real money to make sure nobody’s ever heard of you. None of that Rupert Murdoch cap-in-hand-to-the-merchant-bankers rubbish. You’ll never see Mr. Alice in a glossy magazine, showing a photographer around his glossy new house.
Outside of business, Mr. Alice’s main interest is sex, which is why I was standing outside Earl’s Court station with forty million U.S. dollars’ worth of blue-white diamonds in the inside pockets of my macintosh. Specifically, and to be exact, Mr. Alice’s interest in sex is confined to relations with attractive young men. Now don’t get me wrong, here: I don’t want you thinking Mr. Alice is some kind of woofter. He’s not a nancy or anything. He’s a proper man, Mr. Alice. He’s just a proper man who likes to fuck other men, that’s all. Takes all sorts to make a world, I say, and leaves a lot more of what I like for me. Like at restaurants, where everyone gets to order something different from the menu. Chacun à son go?t, if you’ll pardon my French. So everybody’s happy.
This was a couple of years ago, in July. I remember that I was standing in the Earls Court Road, in Earls Court, looking up at the Earl’s Court Tube Station sign and wondering why the apostrophe was there in the station when it wasn’t in the place, and then staring at the junkies and the winos who hang around on the pavement, and all the time keeping an eye out for Mr. Alice’s Jag.
I wasn’t worried about having the diamonds in my inside pocket. I don’t look like the sort of bloke who’s got anything you’d want to mug him for, and I can take care of myself. So I stared at the junkies and winos, killing time till the Jag arrived （stuck behind the road works in Kensington High Street, at a guess） and wondering why junkies and winos congregate on the pavement outside Earl’s Court station.
I suppose I can sort of understand the junkies: they’re waiting for a fix. But what the fuck are the winos doing there? Nobody has to slip you a pint of Guinness or a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a plain brown bag. It’s not comfortable, sitting on the paving stones or leaning against the wall. If I were a wino, on a lovely day like this, I decided, I’d go down to the park.