After Hours (29 page)

When she heard of it, Amy sparked like a firework. The idea that Charlie had been badly used lit her anger and sent her running in all directions: to the Gem where she demanded but failed to get a confrontation with Maurice Leigh, down Paradise Court to her own house, where Dolly sat grim-faced, Arthur fumed helplessly, and Charlie himself was nowhere to be seen. Then Amy went down to Annie's house, muffled in her fur collar and black wrapover coat, hammering at their door to see if Duke could be persuaded to reason with Maurice on the phone.

Annie came to the door. ‘Duke ain't well,' she reported. ‘I sent him to bed with a hot-water bottle and a close of cough mixture.'

Amy was near the end of her tether. ‘I'm sorry he ain't well, Annie. But have you heard what they done to Charlie?' She got rid of some of her frustration by taking Annie through events step by step. ‘It ain't right, you gotta admit. Maurice is getting as bad
as them bosses in the mines and in the mills up north. He's playing God; ain't nobody gonna stop him?'

Annie shook her head in embarrassment. She'd asked Amy into the front room. ‘I ain't got the full story,' she reminded her. ‘I'd have to talk to Maurice.'

Amy seized on this. ‘You're a pal, Annie. You do that, and I'll nip across to the depot and see if I can get Rob on our side. I tell you what, by the time we're finished, Maurice will be sorry he started any of this.'

Annie saw her out and watched her go, running up the court between pools of gaslight, disappearing round the strangely quiet corner where the new electric lights glared from the walls of the pub. Quickly she shut her door and went to think over this latest event.

‘Rob?' Amy dashed into the taxi depot. He was sitting by the telephone, feet up on the desk, catching forty winks. He awoke with a start.

‘Where's the bleeding fire?'

‘Ain't no fire, Rob, but I'll light one under Maurice Leigh's backside if he ain't careful!' Once more she recounted the full story. ‘You have to tell Maurice to give Charlie his job back, right this minute. Get on the phone to him, why don't you?' She thrust the telephone towards him.

‘He'll be at work.' Rob sniffed. ‘Anyhow, I can't go barging in. It's his affair, ain't it?'

Amy snorted. ‘You bosses, you're all the bleeding same!' She recalled how quick Rob and Walter had been to get rid of Richie Palmer the minute the mechanic crossed them over Sadie.

Rob was stung. ‘No, we ain't. Ours was different.' He stared back at her. ‘From what you say, Charlie ain't done nothing wrong.'

‘Not a blind thing. It's that Maurice. He's too big for his boots these days. Well, if there was a union Charlie could join to look after his rights, he'd sign up like a flash.'

‘Steady on, Amy.' Rob stood up. He found himself torn two ways. His instinctive sympathy in any situation was still for the underdog, even though he respected Maurice's business sense and
strong ambition. ‘Listen, I'll have a word with Maurice as soon as I can. That'll have to do for the time being.'

Amy subsided into Rob's vacant chair. ‘That's something, at any rate.' At last she'd run out of anger over Charlie.

‘You're your mother's daughter all right.' Rob perched on the desk and smiled down at her. ‘I like it when you get mad,' he said suavely.

‘Yes, and you've been watching too many Douglas Fairbanks pictures,' she grumbled, already melting under his flattery.

‘Ain't I told you, you're the splitting image of Gloria Swanson?'

‘Only when you want something out of me, Robert Parsons.'

Rob's expression was one of pained innocence. ‘Me? How could you?' He leaned forward to kiss her on the mouth. ‘See, all I wanted was to give you a kiss.'

Amy tilted back her head, closed her eyes and sighed. ‘And here I have to go and spoil a good thing.'

‘Why, you don't have to get straight off, do you? Can't you stay a bit longer?'

She nodded, opening her eyelids. ‘It ain't that. But now I'm here, there's something I gotta tell you.'

Rob leaned back, took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘Fire away.' He expected another of the little melodramas that Amy went in for.

She decided not to beat about the bush. ‘I ain't sure yet, Rob, but I think I'm having a kid.' She said it straight out.

She'd known for weeks, but only just got around to having it confirmed.

Rob looked as if he'd been shot. He sat rigid, ready to keel over at the news. ‘How?' When he did find his voice, out came this childish question.

‘How do you think, Rob?' She arched her eyebrows. There: she'd gone and spoiled anything they might have had going for them. She had sense enough to realize that by dropping this hot potato in his lap, Rob would want to run a mile. That was the end of their little jaunts and nights together. ‘I thought you ought to know, that's all.' She stood up and gathered her coat about her.

But Rob threw down his cigarette and caught hold of her arm.
‘Amy, have I got this right? Are you saying this kid's mine?' He knew he wasn't her only boyfriend, far from it.

Amy, apparently so blasé, seemed wounded by this. ‘I wouldn't be telling you if it wasn't yours, now would I? I'd be dropping the bad news on some other poor bleeder.' Her voice was dry, edging towards a break. She tried to pull free and walk away. ‘It's all right, Rob. I ain't gonna hold you to nothing. I know we been playing a dangerous game and breaking a few rules here and there if we wanted to stay out of serious trouble. In the end, I only got myself to blame.'

But he stood in her way, still trying to take in the news. ‘What you gonna do now?' he whispered.

‘Leave it to me,' she sighed. ‘A friend of a friend . . . You know the rest.'

‘You gonna get rid of it? Is that what you want?' Rob was confused. But he stood in her way, barring her exit.

‘Look here, Rob, forget it. Forget I ever said it. I'll deal with it by myself. I won't be the first girl who's had to, and I'm bleeding sure I won't be the last.'

‘And you say he's mine?'

‘
It
,' she insisted. ‘Yes, yes! Got it? Come on, Rob, let go of me. I gotta go.'

Her determination seemed to set him on his own course. Never in his wildest dreams did he think this would happen. At the same time he knew his precautions weren't thorough, but so far they had been without any consequences. Now it had happened, and something told him this wasn't a life you could just throw away. Perhaps he'd seen too much of that in the trenches – human life trampled in the mud and barbed wire – ever to contemplate wasting it himself. But there was a more positive idea too; a flickering notion that he might be a father, a good one at that. No one had planned it this way. He didn't think Amy had trapped him; she was too smart to risk it. No, it was one of those things. Looking at her now, he saw her struggling for control, wanting to walk clean away. ‘Don't,' he said, pulling her close. ‘I want you to stay.'

‘I can't, Rob. I ain't in the mood.' Tears had begun. She was ashamed of her weakness.

‘No, I mean I want you to stay with me.' He held her. ‘I want us to keep this kid, Amy. And if you like we'll get married beforehand, just to make it all legal and above board for him when he's born.'

Duke was ailing, Annie realized. Bronchitis had settled on to his chest, worsened by thick smog; that combination of wet mist, factory and traffic fumes that they called the London particular. It sank on the lungs like an acrid, cold blanket; filthy, bitter-tasting and thick.

It held up the traffic and clogged up both mind and body. No one felt like venturing out, and if they had to, they muffled up behind thick woollen scarves wrapped two or three times around the face. Other figures would emerge out of the yellow mist, insubstantial as ghosts. Sensible folk stayed in and waited all through late October for the fog to lift.

Duke sat indoors, struggling for breath. Annie tried him with poultices and inhalations, to ease the congestion. Frances brought flowers of sulphur, friars' balsam, various pick-me-ups, all to no avail.

‘It ain't the same down this end of the court,' he confided to Frances. ‘Don't say nothing to Annie, but up at the Duke I could catch my breath, even in the worst of these pea-soupers.' He drew breath through a crackle, of congested phlegm and fluid, shaking his head in helpless frustration.

Frances knew it was a state of mind as much as anything. Duke was pining for the beer barrels and pumps, the routine, the company of the old way of life. Down here he felt useless, his life's work valued as nothing by the brewers. It was a bitterness that found no expression, and dragged him into a decline, like the murky fog all around. She patted his hand, shook her head sadly at Annie and trailed off home.

But Annie refused to let Duke sink into apathy. She walked him about the house, wrapped in thick layers of vests, cardigans and scarves folded tight across his chest. She got people to visit and keep him cheerful; he was fond of Walter popping in for a chat, and Arthur Ogden needed no encouragement to come on an evening and put his feet up by their hearth for a game of dominoes and a steady supply of malt whisky. ‘Purely medicinal,' he assured Annie, who kept a critical eye on the bottle. ‘It helps clear the chest.'

But there was one visit, far from welcome, that occurred as the month drew to a close. There was a knock on the door, and Annie opened it to the uniformed figure of Constable Grigg.

Her smile turned to a frown. ‘You come to tell us the name of the one what done Wiggin in?' she barked; a terrier on her home ground.

Grigg stepped over the threshold, shaking out his cape and spying the row of hooks in the hall to hang it from. Reluctantly Annie led him through to the kitchen, where Duke sat, pale and drawn, wheezing heavily. The policeman took in the tidy scene; Annie's copper kettle singing on the old-fashioned hob, the polished steel knobs, the blacked grate. A tub of coloured wooden spills sat on the mantelpiece, next to a fat biscuit barrel and a framed photograph of the whole Parsons clan. Grigg spotted Rob in the back row, recognizable by the black moustache and the jaunty set of his hat. Duke and Annie sat on the front row, bang in the middle, staring proudly out. ‘I'm sorry you ain't feeling too good,' he said, thrown off his investigative stride. ‘This won't take long, I hope.' He sat, on the wooden chair offered by Annie, then cleared his throat.

‘It ain't the time it takes I'm worried about.' Duke regarded him with suspicion. ‘So long as you get the right man in the end.' It was the first they'd seen of the police since Annie and he had gone up to Union Street with Rob and Amy, and they'd begun to hope that the trail had gone elsewhere. The reappearance of the keen young bobby was by no means good news. ‘You seen Rob's statement, I take it?'

The policeman nodded. ‘And I went to see him too. There's some things that don't add up, though.' He was feeling, increasingly
uncomfortable as he pulled out his notebook and pencil. It was his idea alone to pursue the case. His sergeant had put him on to other cases, but at the end of the day he kept coming back to this one, and it was Rob's fault, he told himself. Rob should never have tried to make a fool of him during that first interview at the garage; that's when Grigg had dug in his heels, and never really let go since.

‘Like what?' Annie tried to deflect attention from Duke. ‘Rob's made it plain where he was, ain't he? What more do you want? It cost Amy Ogden plenty to come clean over that, so I hope you ain't bothered the girl by going up Regent Street and pestering her.'

‘No. I've been following other leads. Wiggin knew some of the old dossers and I been asking around, but they ain't giving me nothing new so far. That's why I'm here, see. We're back to square one in some ways.'

Annie sighed and looked at Duke. ‘Trust Wiggin.' Even though he was dead, he was still heaping trouble on their heads. ‘Look,' she said, ‘we already told you all we know. Wiggin went missing more than twenty years since. When he showed up again, I put a roof over his head and I paid his rent. No one knows what he got up to while he was away, except to say he was in prison some of the time, and for the rest he had a bleeding good go at drinking himself to death. By the time he holed up in Bertie Hill's tenement, his mind was unhinged. He weren't easy to look after, I can tell you. All he knew was how to get hold of the next drink.' She told the story quietly, with painful resignation.

Constable Grigg nodded. ‘I got all that.' He finished scribbling a few notes. ‘Now, what I want to know is exactly what happened when you went and found him missing on the fourth of August.' He sat, pencil poised.

Duke coughed and shifted in his armchair. ‘Ain't nothing to tell. She goes in the room with Ernie, finds it turned upside-down, sends for help.'

‘Hang on. When did you last see him alive?' Grigg concentrated on Annie.

‘Saturday tea-time. I took his tray.'

‘How did he seem?'

‘Quiet. No trouble.'

‘Any drink in the room?'

‘Not that I saw. But he'd hide it, see. He was cunning in that direction.' Annie told it without emotion.

‘But there
was
drink in the room on Sunday, when you finally got in?'

Annie nodded. ‘Broken bottles, spilt liquor; you could smell it from outside the door. No sign of Wiggin, though.'

‘So who brought him the drink?' Grigg sucked the end of his pencil. He imagined a session of hard drinking in the fetid cell they called a room, a drunken fight, a lunge with a broken bottle, then the messy business of clearing away the corpse. But how had the murderer got the body up to the river? It was too far to drag it, and too obvious. You'd need a car to hide it in. This brought him back full circle to Rob Parsons. ‘Look,' he said, turning to Duke, ‘I ain't clear what your son, Rob, was up to. First off, he refuses to give an alibi. Then, when he comes up with one, it's all cobbled together over a girl he's supposed to have spent the night with, only she ain't with him, she's tucked up in her own bed, according to another version. Then there's the business of getting rid of the evidence.'