September Song (6 page)

‘I don't see how,' I said.

‘Oh, nothing to worry about,' he said reassuringly, his brandy threatening to slop over the edge of his glass as he waved it about, ‘just make a few enquiries, ask around a bit. He can't be too far.' He glanced down at Miss Summers, his look a strange combination of affection and exasperation. ‘Jeannie, love, perhaps you could explain  . . .'

Jeannie Summers looked at me in the same heart-melting way she'd done the previous night. She wasn't as young or as pretty as I'd thought when I'd first seen her on the stage, but there was a fragility about her that made you want to hug her, to tell her that everything was all right, and if it wasn't, you'd make it so. She was wearing a green, full-skirted dress that left her pale shoulders bare, making her seem that little bit more vulnerable.

‘Lee has a need,' she said quietly, and she lowered her gaze to her drink again. ‘An illness, really, an addiction. It's not uncommon in our line of work.'

I wanted her to look at me again, but she didn't. Instead, she continued staring at the clear liquid in her glass. Her voice, though, soft, rich and low, still touched me. But something about it nagged at me.

‘Will you help find him?' she said.

I realized that she didn't look at me because she was expecting me to say no and didn't want me to see the hurt in her eyes.

‘How long has he been missing?' I said.

‘I haven't seen him since our second set last night. He didn't come back to the digs.'

‘Do you know where he went?'

She shook her head.

‘Did he leave with anyone?'

Again, she gave a little shake of her head. I wasn't quite sure if that just meant that she didn't know.

Twenty hours wasn't a long time in a junkie's life. I hadn't come across very many – only one, in fact – but I did know that he could stare in languid fascination at the sole of his boot for hours.

‘He's probably just lost track of time,' I said.

‘Yes.' She nodded her head. ‘He does that.'

I looked at Peter Baxter. ‘Anyone here I should talk to?' I said.

‘No,' he said. ‘We're completely clean here.'

‘And you don't know anything?'

‘No, and I don't want to.'

I raised my glass to Peter and tossed down the brandy. ‘OK,' I said. ‘I know a few places close by where I can ask. I'll try and be back in an hour or so.' I looked at Peter. ‘You won't try and charge me to come in again, will you?'

He laughed. ‘If you come back with Lee, you've got free entrance for life,' he said.

I put my glass down on the desk. ‘Deal,' I said.

As I passed her, Miss Summers put her hand on my arm and breathed, ‘Thank you.' The wedding band on her third finger suggested that she and Lee perhaps had more than a professional relationship.

I walked back into the club to tell Jerry I was disappearing for a while, and I realized what I'd been missing. Digs! Jeannie Summers wasn't American at all. She was English.

As I ran up the steps to Frith Street, I ruminated on the fact that my day seemed to have filled up with missing persons, and I ran through the few places in the immediate vicinity that Lee might have gone to. There were only three I could think of, and one of those was a very long shot. But it was the nearest. And the sleaziest.

Rainer, the German addict I had come across in Berlin when I was stationed there as a bean counter after hostilities had ceased, told me that junkies had no self-respect and no shame but they did have an amazing ability to home in on junk. I remembered his pinched face as he shivered in spite of the vast army greatcoat that enveloped him, his hands shiny with dirt, as he pleaded with me for money. He couldn't have been more than seventeen and almost certainly didn't make it to twenty, and he had the look of an elderly monkey, but he was clever and spoke excellent English. I let him sleep in the living room of the dusty, decaying apartment that had been requisitioned for me for a few weeks and tried to help him a little. But he didn't want food or a bed. He wanted junk, and I couldn't give him that, so one day he went out and never came back. Funnily enough, he didn't take anything of mine with him. A few of my colleagues wondered why I'd given him house room, and, to be honest, I don't really know the answer to that. Certainly, I never got any thanks. But I did get a small insight into the ways of the drug addict.

So, it was to the nearest and sleaziest place I went.

The Frighted Horse is just a hop, step and a jump from Pete's Place and is not a pub for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached. I've always assumed that there are only two reasons the landlord keeps his licence. The first is that half of the police in Soho are completely bent and money changes hands. The second is that the less corrupt members of the force are well advised to be complicit.

The bar itself, though not exactly inviting, is not, if you ignore the sad, careworn whores, the stick-thin, seedy alcoholics and the cold-eyed, over-the-hill toughs all waiting for something to happen, that much worse than some other Soho hostelries. But it's the two upstairs rooms where the action is.

Nobody looked up when I went in. Eye contact is not encouraged in the Frighted Horse. The smell of unwashed bodies, old urine, sour beer, bad feet, stale cigarette smoke and harsh cleaning fluids caught at the back of my throat, but I fought back the desire to gag and marched swiftly to the counter.

I risked a surreptitious look around. There wasn't much of a crowd in. There were a couple of craggy-faced low-life villains, nursing pints of Guinness and pinching out roll-ups after five or six puffs, slumped over a table in one corner.

Unusually, and sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, there were three expensively dressed black guys tucked away behind the door, which was why I hadn't seen them on my way in. They all seemed to be drinking white rum.

Two elderly, fat white brasses were trying to strike up a conversation. The men politely and silently ignored their repeated suggestions that they be bought a drink.

I turned back to the bar before it looked as though I was paying more attention to the other customers than was polite, or good for my health.

I hadn't seen the barman before. That wasn't too surprising. I'd only been in the pub three or four times in my life and avoided it if I could. He wasn't an old man, but he had the sunken cheeks of someone who'd long since lost his back teeth, and his thin, lined face suggested a very hard life. Or a few nasty habits. He sniffed and ran the back of his hand and the frayed cuff of his shirt across his mouth and nose before shuffling over to me. I decided not to ask for a drink.

‘I was just wondering,' I said, ‘if you've seen a tall American in here.'

The barman coughed and spat on the floor. ‘When?' he said.

‘The last twenty-four hours.'

‘Nah,' he said and spat again.

‘You sure?' I said, reaching into my pocket for my wallet.

He watched me slowly pull the wallet out of my inside pocket, running his tongue around his lips. ‘Well,' he said, ‘there might have been a Yank in. He didn't say much. But he might have been a Yank.'

‘When?' I said, sliding the edge of a ten-bob note out of my wallet.

‘Well after hours,' he said. ‘Late last night.'

‘And?' I said.

‘And what?' he said.

‘How long did he stay? Where is he now?'

‘Are you stupid? How am I s'posed to know that?'

‘Did you see him leave?'

‘No.'

‘Was he with anyone?'

‘No.'

I put my wallet away. ‘All right,' I said. ‘Thanks.' I put my hand in my pocket, took out a shilling and put it on the damp bar. ‘Here. Have a drink.'

He looked at the shilling, and then he looked at me. His eyes were red rimmed. He tilted his head slightly, indicating the stairs.

I nodded and pushed the shilling towards him. He snatched it and pocketed it.

‘Thanks,' I said very quietly. ‘You get the ten bob when I come down.'

His rheumy eyes lost what little interest had greedily and briefly flickered in them. He was a man who had long ago reached an accommodation with disappointment.

I pushed through the door to the left of the bar that led to the stairs. As it banged behind me, I pulled my wallet out from the inside pocket of my jacket and slipped it into my front trouser pocket. I didn't need to look behind me to know that one of the semi-retired toughs would have slid off his seat and be following me.

The smell on the dark stairs was even worse than in the bar.

I clumped carefully up, trying to avoid tripping on the worn and loose carpet, into the gloom of the first floor.

I heard the door to the bar open and close and someone shuffle through just as I reached the landing. I reckoned whoever it was would probably wait for me to come down. At any rate I didn't hear any stairs creak.

There was a room directly opposite me, and I thought I might as well start there. The old wooden knob on the door was loose and turning it didn't get me anywhere, but a gentle push did.

The room didn't smell any worse than the landing. But it didn't smell any better either. Apart from two beaten-up and heavily stained sofas and a small table with a lamp on it, the place was empty. The lamp gave off a dim, yellow light, and most of the room was in soft shadow. The old, rotting red carpet was worn away by the door and looked as if some medieval edict against the use of brooms had never been revoked. I was reluctant to step further in for fear of what I might tread in, but there was a splash of colour on one of the sofas that looked familiar. I tripped across to it as daintily as Jerry's big, ugly cat negotiating the narrow fence in our backyard and managed to avoid most of the debris sticking to my shoes.

The bright, pink tie was twisted and tied into a ligature, but it definitely looked like the one the piano player had been wearing. The
Brooks Bros, New York
label offered more than a little confirmation. He'd probably been here then.

I slipped the tie into my jacket pocket and wondered where to look for him next. Where would an American jazz musician addict go after getting his junk or his fix, or whatever it was he'd picked up here, if not back to the woman who loved him? Fortnum & Mason and Harrod's would both have been closed. So would the British Museum. Trafalgar Square? Buck House? Another jazz club, perhaps.

As I stood there, my thumb pressed against my lips, I heard a noise behind me.

‘Well, well, look who it isn't,' said a thin, reedy voice, just as something hard and blunt hit me on the back of the head and I fell into the black, treacly, spinning vortex of semi-consciousness.

FIVE

T
here's an old saying about what goes around, comes around. Unfortunately, after my head stopped whirling, I came around on that disgusting carpet, with grit pressed into my face and the whiff of damp and rot deep in my lungs. I coughed – well, spluttered – into consciousness.

Oddly, there was no one else in the room. The owner of the thin, reedy voice had gone. And so, too, I thought, had my wallet. Then I remembered I'd moved it to my trouser pocket. I tried sitting up and felt slightly sick. I touched the swelling on the back of my head. It hurt. But at least the skin wasn't broken, and there was no blood. A sock full of sand will raise an impressive lump and give you as nasty a headache as a proper, lovingly hand-stitched, lead-weighted life-preserver, so I could have been hit by an amateur.

I risked rising to my feet, but that didn't make me feel any better, and I stumbled over to one of the rat-nibbled, lumpy sofas, fell back on to it and closed my eyes for a few seconds.

When I opened them, there were two other men in the room.

I recognized Ricky Mountjoy immediately. It took me a moment or two to recall the other one as the lightweight from the altercation in Pete's Place the previous night. I remembered him whining at Peter Baxter about the loss of his membership. It must have been him who'd socked me.

‘We really must stop meeting like this,' Ricky Mountjoy said, putting down the brown-paper carrier bag he was holding. He affected a slight lisp, but the narrow-eyed look he gave me undercut any humour.

‘That's fine by me,' I said. ‘I've got a bit of a headache, anyway, and I thought I might head off home.'

I stood up, swayed a bit more theatrically than necessary and blinked away some pain that was just a little more imaginary than real.

‘Not tonight, Josephine,' he said. ‘Or, at least, not yet.'

He was still giving me that wary, hostile look, so I hadn't completely fooled him into thinking I was in a worse state than I really was.

When I thought about it, I couldn't blame him. I hadn't exactly convinced myself that I was feeling better than I really was.

‘We need to talk,' he said.

‘What about?' I said. ‘I have no business with you.'

‘Then what are you doing here?' he said.

‘Looking for someone,' I said. ‘As a favour to a friend.'

‘Who?' he said.

‘No one you know,' I said. ‘This doesn't concern you.'

He took a step towards me. ‘But it does,' he said. ‘You're on my turf.'

‘Really?' I said, looking around at the seedy room. ‘Moving up in the world, are you? I'd've thought this was a bit too far West for you. A bit out of your territory, a bit too classy.'

‘Don't try to be funny. Just tell me who you're looking for.'

‘I'm not trying to be funny, Ricky,' I said. ‘Just making an honest observation. And, like I said, I don't think it's anyone you're likely to know.'

He took another step towards me and so, slightly hesitantly, did the lightweight with the cosh.

‘Ricky,' I said, ‘I don't want any trouble with you, and I'm sure you don't want blood splashed all over that sharp suit or those nice shoes. It can be a devil to get out, it really can.' I paused and looked hard at the lightweight. ‘And you've already had your free hit. You're not getting another one.'