10
‘Where are you going?’ the Reverend Timbo asked me, and my answer was, ‘Away.’ By that time I had his silver cup in my luggage in spite of the warning Lucy had given me about silver cups in general. I figured that he deserved to lose one to make up for the pain he had inflicted on my jaw.
It’s all very well to say you’re going away, but where the away is, that’s what matters. When I got on the train to London my future was uncertain. I had a bit of money, but not enough to pay for some decent accommodation. I got out of the train at Waterloo and stood for a while looking at people, all going to places with some sort of definite plan in mind.
I arrived in London just before midnight and I spent out on a room in a small hotel near Waterloo, where the bleary-eyed woman in charge looked as though she wasn’t used to singles but specialized in odd couples who couldn’t go home to their husbands and wives because they were so desperately in need of a fuck. I found a used condom in the empty fireplace and the bed was home to various insects who stung me during the night. In the morning, not wishing to spend any longer in such a place, I decided to give Chippy a tinkle in the faint hope he might have improved since our last meeting.
‘Leonard McGrath, Environmentally Friendly Investments, Diane speaking,’ was what I got from a girl with a voice like a rusty gate. ‘How can I help you?’
‘By cutting all the crap,’ I told her, ‘and giving me Chippy McGrath.’
‘You wish to speak with Mr Leonard McGrath?’
‘That’s the idea behind me ringing up, yes.’
‘May I ask who’s calling?’
‘Tell him it’s Terry Keegan. His old friend.’
‘Please hold.’ I heard her screech, ‘Chippy,’ faintly and after a considerable wait my old friend came on the line.
‘Terry, you old devil! I thought you were coming to stay at the maisonette.’
‘So I was. Until you told me not to.’
‘Did I? Did I really do that to you, old friend?’
‘You did. And you left me to pay for a bottle of champagne at that lousy club of yours. That cleaned me out of my prison money. I had to sleep on Euston Station.’
‘Did you really?’ Chippy was laughing his head off. ‘You still sleeping there, are you?’
‘No, I went to Aldershot.’ Chippy found this quite funny too. But then he said, ‘Come round. There’s still a spare bed for you in the maisonette.’
He gave me the address in Connaught Square and it was there I unpacked my toothbrush, shirts and razor in Chippy’s spare room. It was when we were sitting in the white armchairs in his lounge room and Diane brought us two large whiskies that I asked Chippy what all the stuff about Environmentally Friendly Investments was about. Was it a cover?
‘Call it that if you like, Terry.’ He was still finding my reappearance in his life most amusing. ‘It’s a good friendly cover anyway. You make mention of the environment and everyone’s on your side.’
I waited until Diane went out of the room to make us some sandwiches, as I’d eaten nothing since leaving the Intimate Bistro, and then I asked Chippy if he was doing environmentally friendly crime.
‘I suppose you could call it that,’ he said, still laughing.
‘I didn’t want to ask you in front of Diane.’
‘Oh, she knows all about me. We needn’t have any secrets from her.’ I thought at the time that was a dangerous situation but I didn’t say so. We were chewing smoked salmon sandwiches when Chippy said, ‘We can go back to being partners now, can’t we, Terry? It’ll be quite like old times.’
‘Possibly,’ was all I said about that. However, I gave Chippy the Reverend’s silver cup and explained that I couldn’t pay much rent until I found work to do.
‘We’ll find you work,’ Chippy said. ‘Don’t worry about that. Where did you get this?’ He examined the writing on the cup closely.
‘I took it from a reverend guy who tried to break my jaw.’
‘You mean you nicked it?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, that’s encouraging anyway.’ Chippy was still looking critically at the article in question. ‘You wouldn’t get much for it even melted down.’
‘I know. I thought you might like to have it. Just as an ornament.’
Chippy stood up and put it on his mantelpiece. ‘We’ll be partners,’ he repeated. ‘Just like old times.’
Chippy’s spare bedroom was a good deal brighter and warmer than the one I’d had at Timbo’s and for the first time in several years I sank into a really comfortable bed. I also felt at home there, which I’d never felt at Aldershot.
It was like, when I got that upper cut, something snapped inside of me. It was as if I couldn’t take it any longer, all these people trying to reform me as though I had some sort of nasty disease which they couldn’t quite understand.
It was also that I felt sick of having to be so grateful for everything, from a job in that Robin’s bistro where the pay was not all that marvellous, quite honestly, to being socked on the jaw for my own good.
It was also that they seemed sort of excited by the idea of me being an interesting specimen, a real live criminal. ‘Is this your little criminal?’ was what Robin had said to Lucy, and, ‘How tremendously exciting.’ So I began to think I was just there as an entertainment which they would get used to and then get bored with the whole business.
So by the time I rang Chippy I’d decided to break with the past, at least as far as Aldershot was concerned. I got Chippy to ring Mr Markby, my probation officer, to tell him that I’d got first-class accommodation with Leonard McGrath of Environmentally Friendly Investments, and a good prospect of getting a job with him eventually.
While I had been away, Chippy had formed an extremely efficient organization. Bent burglar-alarm salesmen gave him news of particularly well-stocked houses. Bent insurers told him where the best pictures and the finest collections of silver could be found. His personal fence had a house in Brighton where art treasures could be turned into ready money, and he even found a bent art expert to tell him which pictures were valuable, but not so famous that you could never get rid of them. Chippy and his associates selected houses from Richmond to Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb.
From time to time, Chippy was even more ambitious. He’d enlarge the team to include a peterman to blow safes. We’d do warehouse breaking and one time we got away with a whole safe full of expensive watches, which sold well from the house in Brighton. The point was that Chippy was in a pretty prosperous line of business and, as luck would have it, I was able to share a bit in his prosperity.
Working with Mr Leonard McGrath of Environmentally Friendly Investments in a number of posh houses to the north of Oxford Street, I earned quite a bit of cash, which enabled me to order drinks, being well able to pay for them, in the Beau Brummell Club, which I no longer considered lousy but an excellent place to meet up with the better quality of blaggers, reliable sources of information, as well as some quite well-known footballers and personalities on television. I went with Chippy at first, but as I gained confidence I started to go on my own and had some quite interesting conversations there.
I suppose it all started again when we got news about a house in Dorset Square which was shared, the information was, by a couple of blokes, one older and the other considerably younger. We got the information from the firm they used for a bit of cleaning. So I was in there one night, sorting out the silver and a few small pictures the insurance people had told us might be worth lifting off the walls, when I suddenly saw it, a photograph pinned to a sort of noticeboard in what I took to be the older chap’s study. I’d shone a torch on it during my search of the place and there it was. A group of girls around a grey-haired man in a crumpled suit in front of a door marked ‘SCRAP Central Office’. And I saw her among the girls present, smiling out shyly at the camera: Lucinda ‘call me Lucy’ Purefoy, who had tried to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing when I saw her photograph.
I can’t say how I felt. I’d decided to go back to the life I knew and that was it. All the same I felt, well, I won’t say it was guilt, but I had to admit Lucy had done her best to help me and we’d also had some good conversations, not like those I got in the Beau Brummell Club but good conversations all the same. And I’d gone off without a single goodbye, which, looking back on it, seemed a bit of a mean way of going on. On the other hand, there was nothing much I could do about it now, so I dismissed her from my mind.
But she kept coming back. I could see her as she was when we chatted in the bistro, fair hair falling across her forehead, her bellybutton out on view, and that look she gave as though she was genuinely worried about me. Of course, I didn’t miss her worry, but in some weird sort of way I was beginning to miss her. Perhaps it was because she was so different from Chippy’s Diane or the brass you got to meet round the Brummell that I missed Lucy, but if we ever met again I was certain she would give me up as a hopeless case, certainly not worth any further trouble, so I told myself to stop thinking about her.
As this is to be a story about me and Lucy, I must go on to about three months after I left Aldershot, which would make it June, the start of a grey, wet summer. It seemed that Aldershot and all that happened there was just a distant memory when I walked into Chippy’s lounge room and, for God’s sake, there she was, looking just as I remembered her, holding the Reverend Timbo’s silver cup in her hands and admitting that she had gained access to Chippy’s maisonette by the use of an assumed name. I could see that this particular conduct, which I found a bit hard to understand, had irritated Chippy and I told him to calm down because she was a friend of mine, at which I thought Lucy looked surprised and grateful.
Chippy, on the other hand, was not so easily cheered up. ‘We don’t like people,’ he told her, ‘who come here pretending to be someone else.’
‘I thought,’ this was her explanation, ‘Terry wouldn’t want me to come up if I gave my real name.’
‘Why wouldn’t Terry want you to come up?’ Chippy was always suspicious and probably rightly so. ‘There is nothing here in Environmentally Friendly Investments for us to be ashamed of.’
‘I’m sure there isn’t, Mr McGrath.’ She was still smiling, but respectful. ‘I’m absolutely sure of it.’
‘You come to get Reverend Tim’s cup back, have you?’ was what I asked her.
‘Not necessarily.’ And much to my surprise, she put the silver pot in question back on the mantelpiece. ‘I came here to find you. I thought we might have a drink together some time. And a bit of a chat. You know, like we did when you were working at the Intimate Bistro.’
She certainly knew the right thing to say because, as I say, that was the chat I remembered. But she wasn’t pushy about it, not at all pushy.
‘Ring me if you feel like it. I’m working for Pitcher and Pitcher in Oxford Street. Ring me any time.’
She gave me a card, which I put away carefully, and then she left us. When she had gone, Chippy looked unhappy and said, ‘What the hell is she? Working for the Serious Crime Squad at Paddington nick, is she? Come here to find things out?’
‘She’s not working for any nick, you can be sure of that.’
‘All right then. But she’s your responsibility, Terry. I’ll hold you responsible for her and anything she might do uncalled for. I want you to be aware of that.’
I told him I was well aware.