GBH (7 page)

“Morning, Eddie. How’s it going?” asks Jackie, because Eddie wants him to.

“Oh, you know,” Eddie says. “You know what it’s like on amateur night. They let you have their music beforehand, but you never get time to go through it with them. So on the night, when they lose, they blame the backing for not doing it right.”

Slight non-glance in my direction to see if I’m clocking his routine. Jackie puts a pint in front of Eddie.

“That’s why I’m setting up this morning, just in case the lads can get in early tomorrow so it might give one or two of the punters a chance to go through their paces.”

Eddie drinks, then acts his recognition of me over the top of his pint. He lowers his glass and walks over to where I’m sitting, sits down.

“Busy?” I ask him.

“Busy? I’m trying to get the acoustic balance right all by myself,” he says. “That’s the trouble. The other lads are only semipro; during the day I have to do their work for them. And some of them are married, and they can’t go home at night and have their tea and come straight out again. So that leaves me driving the equipment to the gigs during the day so’s we’re not wasting half the evening setting up. Sometimes Cyril can get an hour or two away to give us a hand. He works for the Electricity Board.”

“An impresario’s work is never done,” I say to him.

“Yeah,” he says, laughing only to show me that he’s the kind of fellow who can take a joke.

He takes another sip of his drink.

“Take tomorrow night,” he says. “I’m organising the whole fucking issue. A lot of work. Twenty different acts. We’ve even got somebody reciting poetry; ‘If’ or something. But it’s all a waste of time.”

“Why’s that, Eddie?”

He leans towards me slightly.

“Well,” he says, “I know you wouldn’t let on, but the winner’s already fixed up.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Not that she doesn’t deserve it. She’s great. I’ve asked her if she’ll join the group for the summer season.”

“That good, eh?”

“Fan-bloody-tastic. The group’s rehearsing tonight. I’m hoping she’ll be able to drop in and go through her numbers with the lads.”

“She a local girl?”

“I dunno. I think she did Butlins at Skegness last season. I think she is.”

A fellow in Electricity Board overalls comes in, looks around. Eddie clocks him.

“That’s Cyril,” Eddie says, downing his pint. “Better not hang about; he hasn’t got long.”

As Eddie moves off, he says, “If you’re around tonight, why not drop in and catch the rehearsal? Unless you’re already doing something else.”

“Thanks. I might do that.”

“Great.”

Eddie and Cyril go out. I smile to myself. As if I’m not doing anything else.

No, I’m not doing anything else.

Only time.

THE SMOKE

I
DECIDED TO TALK
to Mickey about it. He had nothing to do with the collectors other than on the odd occasion I’d had reason to send him to go and talk to one or two of them.

“After what the accountant said,” I told him, “it doesn’t look like the kind of pilfering we allow for anyway. So we’ve got to make a decision on the odds. Because of the amount involved, I’d suggest starting at the top, with the ones who are the last to collect the money before it’s delivered here. At any rate the accountant thinks that way.”

Mickey thought about it.

“Do you really think they’d try it on? I mean, Hales, Wilson, Chapman, Warren. They make a lot of bread. Would they risk what they already get? And risk what they’d get if they were sussed out?”

“Money has a funny effect on people, Mickey,” I said to him. “Corrupting. Sometimes it makes them act very peculiar.”

Mickey thought some more.

“And the accountant’s sure that’s what the books say?” he said.

“As sure as he could be. Naturally he didn’t have everything entirely at his disposal.”

“And supposing all four of them are at it?”

“Then we’ll find out all four of them are at it, won’t we?”

Mickey lit a cigarette. “So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to talk to them. But if I invite them here and they’re the ones who’re at it, they might not come, if you get my meaning, and once we’ve talked to one, and supposing it’s not him, and the others get wind, then there’ll be nobody to talk to at all.”

“So you’d like me to bring them along to Sammy’s?”

“That’s right.”

“Who would you like to see first?”

“I don’t know. Try Ray Warren.”

Mickey blew smoke from his cigarette upwards towards the ceiling.

“I think,” Mickey said, “I
think
Ray’s gone to Bolton for a few days. His mother’s in a terminal situation.”

I shrugged.

“I’ll leave it to you, then.”

Mickey nodded. There was a short silence.

“I don’t know,” Mickey said. “People. They never cease to amaze me.”

THE SEA

I
T
’
S ONLY A QUARTER
of an hour’s drive from Mablethorpe to the bungalow, but after I’ve finished reading the papers in the South and get back into my car and drive along the street and out of the town, I don’t turn off the main road and head for the bungalow; instead I keep going and without doing above fifty I’m in Grimsby inside three-quarters of an hour.

Grimsby is a place that looks exactly the way it sounds; life imitating art, so to speak. A huge chunk of its centre’s been cleared out in recent years and replaced with an enormous self-contained shopping precinct, with piazzas, the lot. Piazzas in Grimsby. Still, they have cod and chips in Benidorm. It’s a small revenge perhaps.

I park the car in the multi-storey and when I’ve found my way out of this tower I make my way on to the confines of the basilica and wander through the pedestrian thoroughfares until I come to a built-in pub called the Monastic Habit. It’s got a restaurant that is not quite half bad; young execs and a big demand for prawn cocktails from their escortees.

I take my place at a table for two against the gauze-draped picture window that offers me an uninterrupted view of Sketchleys and John Menzies and the Vallances on the other side of the pedestrian thoroughfare.

A waitress comes to take my order and I order the fish. When in Rome.

I also get her to send over the wine waiter and I choose the wine and ask for it to be brought straightaway; when he returns with it he pours it for me to taste but I waive the ritual and he adds some more to my glass and retires hurt.

While I’m waiting for my meal to arrive I turn my attention from the commercial aspect outside to the cluster of the better halves of young marrieds at the small cocktail bar across the room. They’re all wearing credit-account machine tailoreds and drinking halves of keg. There’s a couple of groups of them, and in each group there’s the token secretary brought along to remind the collected marrieds that each one is still singularly a bit of a lad.

A man of the same ilk except five years on and perhaps with an office all to himself is sitting alone on one of the high stools, nursing a tomato juice, doing a crossword in the newspaper that’s folded and balanced on his legs.

I take a sip of my drink and while I’m doing that a girl in her early twenties comes into the restaurant and goes over to the cocktail bar. She looks good in one of those double-breasted PVC macs, trench-coat length, leather boots that stop just below the knee. Beneath her maroon coat I can see the rolled top of a white cashmere sweater softly emphasising the clear line of her jaw. Her fair hair would be about shoulder length if it hadn’t been dressed so that it turned under, hiding the back of her neck in a soft inward-turning wave. As she crosses the room her walk is confident, unhesitant, expressing a certain self-containment, all combining to give her an air of authority that she obviously feels she doesn’t have to work at.

When she reaches the bar, she sits down on one of the bar stools so that there is just a single stool between her and the man with the crossword. The barman steps forward and waits. She takes her purse out and puts a five-pound note on the table and gives the barman her order; he goes off to work the vodka optic. While she’s waiting she takes out a packet of Dunhill’s
and lights up. Meanwhile, her arrival has not gone unnoticed by the man with the crossword. He gives her an up and down but returns to his crossword when he sees that she’s impassively clocked his appraisal.

And you can’t really blame him. She’s a very good looking girl, very even features, excellently made up, the kind of look of the girls who hand over the prizes on the quiz programmes on TV, or decorate the latest models at the Motor Show.

I cast a professional eye over her and along with considering the former association of ideas the possibility of her being on the game roams through the corridors of my mind. In the Smoke, it would have been a certainty; but here, the air of respectability very carefully prepared to cloak the nature of her business until she herself revealed what she wanted the prospective punter to know, here, in a town like this, all that would be a waste of time. A brass here would be highly polished in a different way, to express her occupation, not to conceal it.

So although I conclude that that particular possibility is virtually not on, there is an aura about her that doesn’t make me close my mental book on her entirely, and although not normally a gambling man, I keep the book on her open as a way of passing the time. I also run a little side bet on the man with the crossword. Will he or won’t he, and if so, how?

He gets his chance when she checks her wristwatch against the clock above the bar. An enquiry as to whether she’s waiting for someone or not. Her reaction to that is neither a frost nor a come on. Although I can’t hear what either of them is saying, from that point on the conversation appears to flow fairly smoothly, with just the faint expression from the girl to the man that it is not a conversation that in any way will lead to a discussion concerning territorial gains. In fact the closest he appears to get to her is when he buys her a drink. To do this he stands up and when the drinks have been replaced he hands her hers and sits down on the stool that previously stood between them.

By that time my fish has arrived and for a while, because it’s so good, I devote my attentions to that. I don’t look across at the bar again until I’ve finished eating. Sipping my wine, I now see that the girl is no longer there. So perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps he couldn’t afford the asking. In any case, so what? I have to pass my time somehow but …

Vaguely irritated, I refill my glass, and the waitress appears to take my order for dessert. I order ice cream and when the waitress goes away, the girl has returned to the bar and is again sitting on her stool. She’s only been to the powder room. And so now I begin to re-speculate, even more irritated with myself. Whoever she’s waiting for, if she’s waiting for anyone, is by now very late. She’s showing no irritation at the lack of arrival, and appears to be enjoying the conversation, though not perhaps as much as he would like her to.

I shake my head. Even though my instincts still nudge me towards a different conclusion, sense tells me that if she was a brass they would have left together at least a quarter of an hour ago.

The ice cream arrives and I eat it in a couple of minutes flat; my obsessiveness is really beginning to get on my nerves. I call for my bill and get up and leave the restaurant and go out into the precinct, in search of a movie to occupy my mind for the rest of the afternoon.

THE SMOKE

H
ENRY
C
HAPMAN WAS THE
first. When Mickey brought him in he looked a very worried man, but then anybody being picked up by Mickey and being brought into Sammy’s house would look worried, innocent or not.

The room was set up as before, and, as before, Jean was there.

Henry was asked to sit down in the chair. He declined my offer of a drink.

“All right,” he said. “Just what the fuck is going down?”

I lit a cigarette. “How’d you like living out at Marlowe now, Henry?” I asked him. “The missus got used to the neighbours yet? Kids settled in at the new school all right?”

“Look, George, fuck the fun and games. I’m here for a reason. First off, I want to know what it is.”

“Maybe you already do?”

“I know all sorts of things, George, as you are very well aware.”

I nodded.

“Those apart,” I said. “The new house, I mean as I mortgaged it for you, I know what it’s costing you a month. And the school fees, those are a couple of good schools. And then there’s the Algarve, and Las Palmas, and—”

“I can afford all that. As you pointed out, you know all about my financial situation.”

“Do I?”

A short silence.

“This is about money, isn’t it?” Henry said.

“You’re getting warm.”

Henry considered what he was going to say. Then he said, “George, I’ve been a member of this firm a long time. A very long time. And I’m not stupid; I know how well paid I am. I don’t go out on fourhanders any more, not even for you; I don’t have to. Failing a financial situation of the kind that happened in Germany before the war, not only am I set up for the rest of my life, but so are my kids. So, would I, in my right mind, put all that down the pan for sake of creaming a few extras?”

“So you know that’s the area we’re going to be talking about?”

Henry shakes his head.

“George, give me the kind of credit you give me for being able to do my job.”

“All right. Supposing it wasn’t you. What about the other three?”

“I don’t know, do I? I should imagine they’re as happy in their lot as I am in mine.”

“And those you collect from?”

Henry shrugged.

“They know me. They know what’d happen if I caught them at anything. That’s one of the reasons you gave me the job.”

I poured myself another drink. There was a long silence.

“Does the missus know about the cottage outside of Saffron Walden?” I asked him.

Henry went the colour of cream cheese.

“And does she know how much it costs to keep Millie Rowson there fifty-two weeks a year? Not to mention what it costs when she comes up to town shopping or goes on her holidays.”