Jack Carter's Law (12 page)

“Were you going without this?” she says, touching the coat that’s wrapped round her.

“You must be joking,” I say.

“What do you want me to do, then? Take it off here?”

“I’ve already seen the sights, thanks.”

“Then you won’t mind waiting while I get my own from the cloakroom will you?”

“No, I won’t mind waiting, not for that gear. I waited long enough to get it.” She gives me her fiercest look, stoked up not only by the fact that she didn’t like me in the first place but also because I’ve been a witness to the treatment Hume’s just given her. There’s only one way a girl like that can get her face back and I wonder if she’s going to be bothered enough to try.

After she’s given the look everything she can she turns away from me and makes for the ladies room. While she’s off reorganizing the coat situation I go over to the now deserted reception desk and dial the number of Terri Palin’s establishment. The phone rings for a long time and then the receiver is lifted and this very snotty, very businesslike female voice twangs the wires and says, “Yes?”

“Listen, I’m Jack Carter, and I know who you are as well. So don’t give me the wrong-number crap. I want to speak to Terri straight away, all right?”

“I’m sorry,” says the voice at the other end. “I think you must be mistaken. This is—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Tonight I can do without it. If you don’t recognise my voice just get Terri, will you, and she’ll set you straight. Tell her if she doesn’t come to the phone I’ll be round in five minutes flat kicking in windows.”

I hear the receiver rattle as the phone is laid to rest at the other end and while I’m waiting I search my pockets for a cigarette only to find I’m completely out. The foyer is empty so there’s nobody I can burn off and I start to get that stupid uncontrollable need for something I can’t have. And the longer I wait the more I channel the anger caused by my desire at Gerald and Les. What a pair of fucking ponces. What fucking eggs. Out tonking in the candy-floss fantasy world of Terri Palin’s Disneyland. Hosting the Yanks to scenes from an English kindergarten while there’s twenty-five years apiece waiting to be shared out to the stupid bastards. They’re so high on their own reputations they don’t really believe it’s going to happen to them. And the more I think about it the more I get cross with myself for chasing about for them. If it wasn’t for the fact that Jimmy Swann could score me for at least fifteen I’d just walk away from the stupid sods and leave them to sort it themselves.

I start going through my pockets for the third time when Terri Palin’s voice comes over the line.

“Yes?” she says.

“Terri,” I say. “It’s Jack.”

There is a short silence and then there is a sigh that for once isn’t a piece of Terri’s stock in trade.

“Jesus,” she says. “I had this feeling, you know? I’ve had it all week, just this feeling that I’m going to get a visit, that somewhere somebody’s been chewing away at something and something’s going to fall over, with me on it. Even that a tip-off would only be a gesture.”

“What makes you think like that?”

“I don’t know. A feeling. Sometimes the people that come here affect you with what’s going on in their minds. You never get anything more specific, but sometimes you get the shits for no reason at all.”

I’m really dying for that cigarette by now. Terri knows nothing and she never did, but that’s beside the point; I’ve known her to have these fucking stupid feelings before.

“Well,” I say, “relax. This is no useless tip-off. I’m only phoning to jerk Gerald and Les out of whatever scene they’re into.”

The girl called Lesley reappears from the ladies’ room and walks towards me, holding my coat. Now she could do one of two things; she could put the coat on the
reception desk and walk out of the club or she could wait, holding my coat, until I finish my phone call.

“I couldn’t do that, Jack,” Terri says. “You know that.”

“Just try, will you?”

“Impossible. If I was to pull them out of what they’re into at the moment Christ knows what would happen. You should know, Jack.”

I put my fingers to my eyes and close my lids and squeeze my eyeballs about in my sockets. I open my eyes again and the girl is standing by the reception desk, holding my coat. I look at my watch. It’s three o’clock. At least five hours before Gerald and Les get back to the club for a wash and brush-up and their breakfast. Now there is no longer any point in trying to give them the good news. I’ve done all I can. If the filth gets to them before I do there’s nothing I can do about that.

“Oh, well,” I say to Terri. “Fuck them, then.”

“I believe that’s being done at the moment,” she says.

The line goes dead and I put the receiver down. I look at the girl who is staring back at me with the same kind of expression she was wearing before she went into the ladies’ room. Only this time it’s a little better made up.

“Got a cigarette?” I say to her.

She keeps the look going for a few moments more then she dumps my coat down on the desk and fishes in her bag and takes out her packet of cigarettes. She takes one out and puts it in her mouth then offers me the packet and lights herself up.

After I’ve lit myself up, I hand her back the packet and I say, “Nice coat you’ve got there. Suits you.”

She blows out her smoke and she says, “Coat fetishist, are you?”

“No, I’m a funny one. I like women. But promise you’ll keep it to yourself.”

“I can’t imagine a situation where I’m likely to want
anyone to know I know anything about you.”

“Oh, I don’t know. When you go home to Grimsby for Christmas you might want to give your younger brother nightmares.”

That throws her a little bit. “So you’re good on accents.”

“Better than you are. That elocution’s lousy.”

Now she’s got more colour in her face than she’s had all evening.

“You think you’re really something, don’t you?” she says. “You really think you’re something special.”

“And what do you think?”

She tightens up her mouth and doesn’t answer.

“But you’d still accept a lift with me, wouldn’t you?” I say.

She still doesn’t say anything so I pick up my coat and put it on and begin to walk towards the door. She can follow me or she can stay there all night or she can wait until I’ve left the premises depending on which bunch of thoughts she’s having at the moment. I pause at the door and hold it open for her. She’s still standing by the desk, watching me. Then suddenly she stubs out her cigarette and walks towards me. After she’s passed me by I let the door swing to and I begin to walk down the steps. She’s standing at the bottom of the steps looking down the street as if she’s expecting a Silver Shadow to ghost up to the curbside and transport her off in the manner to which she thinks she ought to be accustomed. I take no notice of her and turn left and walk down the pavement to where I’ve left Con’s Scimitar. I unlock the door and get in and start the engine. She doesn’t appear at the curb so I look in the driving mirror and see that she’s still standing at the bottom of the steps, pretending I’m going back to collect her. I stay there idling the engine and she has another choice to make. Eventually she swishes herself round and starts walking to the car. It occurs to me that she’d make a lousy poker player but on the other hand I’d hate to think she was all bluff. She stands by the car waiting for the door to be opened and I think, Why not, let her win one for a change, and lean over and flip the handle and push. She gets in and slams the door and I pull away from the curb.

We drive in silence for a minute or two and then I say, “Where am I taking you to?”

She lights another cigarette and says, “I thought we’d be going to your place. Home ground and all that kind of thing.”

I take the cigarette packet from her and shake my head.

“Not tonight,” I say. “Got me relations down from up north. They might get the wrong idea. You know what they’re like up there.”

I light my cigarette and drop the packet in her lap.

“I live off Baker Street if that’s not too far out of your way,” she says, snapping up the packet. There is another silence.

“How were you so sure about Grimsby?” she says after
a while.

“Because I’m from Scunthorpe.”

“Scunthorpe?”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

“Well, that’s the difference between you and me then, isn’t it?”

She says something which I don’t catch because as she speaks she turns away and rolls down the window and lets in the sound of the rushing wind.

“Been down here long?” I ask her.

“Have you?”

“Long enough. I think it’s a shit-hole.”

“Rather depends on the life you lead, doesn’t it?”

I laugh and then I say to her, “I expect you think it’s
all right.”

“Have you ever been to Grimsby?”

“Only when Scunthorpe were away to them.”

“Up the bleeding Mariners,” she says and looks out of the window. We don’t speak again until we get close to Baker Street.

“Do you know Crawford Street?” she says.

“I know Crawford Street.”

“Well, that’s where I live.”

I turn in to Crawford Street and drop my speed.

“Just over there,” she says. “Beyond the antique shop. The corner where the pub is.”

I draw the car in to the curb but I keep the engine
running.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says and gets out.

I switch the engine off and I get out as well.

The block where her flat is is a postwar piece of architecture, flat-roofed and ocher-coloured. There is an open access to a flight of tiled steps illuminated by dim lights on the ceiling too high for anyone to smash. There is also a slight smell of urine. I follow her up the stairs and we climb three flights until we get to a landing that has two doors and she goes over to one of them and takes her key out and pushes it in the lock, puts her knee against the door and the door swings inwards. She goes inside without looking behind her. I follow her through the door but she’s already disappeared from the hall. I follow her perfume and I find myself in a long narrow room divided in two by a five-foot-high antique folding screen. In the first half of the room there is a very nicely restored chaise longue and a matching button-back low chair and there is a sheepskin rug on the floor. The walls are painted Prussian blue and the off-white covering of the chaise longue and the chair and the colour of the rug contrast nicely with the walls, as do the framed, pale modern drawings arranged on the walls with perfect carelessness. The carpet is Prussian blue as well and between the carpet and the walls the white baseboard is gleaming and streamlined. I walk over to the screen and look beyond it. There is an aluminum-and-glass dining table with half a dozen matching chairs ranged against a window covered by full-length gray-and-pale-blue patterned curtains. There are dozens of bright-coloured cushions scattered all over the floor and an enormous picture covering most of one wall, painted in two colours: red and red. The only other furniture in this half of the room is a stripped Welsh dresser but instead of crockery on the shelves there is the best selection of drinks I’ve seen in a long time. Next to the dresser there is an open door and through that door I can see the corner of a bed and beyond the bed a wall that is just one big mirror reflecting the salmon-pink glow of a single table lamp. The carpet in the bedroom is white and so is the bed cover. Draped on the bed is the coat that the girl has just been wearing, its dark colour stark against the cover’s whiteness. Then Lesley appears in the doorway, blotting out the view. But I don’t mind that because she’s taken off the remains of her dress and slipped on a mohair cardigan over her shoulders, which she hasn’t bothered to fasten. She is still wearing her tights and her pants.

“Now you can see what Hume didn’t get round to revealing,” she says. “Or would you have rather torn off the rest yourself?”

“Very nice,” I tell her. “Does Hume pay for the central heating as well? Or can you afford to be out of work with pneumonia?”

“I can afford to be out of work,” she says.

“I’ll bet,” I say, looking round the room. “I didn’t know there was that much money in what you did. What was it you said you did?” She doesn’t answer that one.

I go over to the dresser and take a glass and pour myself a drink. After I’ve taken a sip I take off my coat and drape it across the glass-and-aluminum table. Then I sit down on one of the matching chairs and take off my shoes and socks and then I stand up again and take off the rest of my clothes. Then I pick up my glass and take another drink.

“Who’s going to win, then?” I ask her.

She lowers her eyes until she’s staring at the object of my affections.

“Judging by the look of you, you are,” she says.

“Cheers, then,” I say, and put down my glass and walk towards her.

She slips back into the bedroom and slams the door and there is the sound of a bolt sliding into its socket.

I stand there for a minute and then I go back to my glass and pour another drink and take it over to one of the matching chairs and sit down again.