11
Of course I never expected to hear from him again.
So I worked away at Pitcher’s and they gave me an account (Tell-All Beachwear) of my very own and Tom stayed with me in my one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill and nothing enormously exciting was happening at all.
Oh, I should record the fact that Mr Orlando Wathen from SCRAP rang me and asked me if I was still seeing my client Keegan. For some reason I told him that I hadn’t seen Terry for a while and that I’d rather lost touch with him.
‘Typical,’ Orlando said. ‘Entirely typical. You can’t do anything for some of these little bastards. Hopeless cases, entirely hopeless!’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘I know so. Let me tell you. Peter and I were away at our place in the Dordogne and they got into Dorset Square. All the silver has gone and some pretty valuable pictures. I’m sorry, Lucy, the only place for some of these little menaces is back in the prisons where we found them.’
‘You never discovered who did it?’
‘Of course not! And the police can’t be bothered to find out. Longer sentences. That’s the only answer.’
‘Is that SCRAP policy from now on?’ I was more than a little surprised and wondered if Gwenny now supported that view.
‘SCRAP? Oh, I’m leaving SCRAP. I’m doing voluntary work at the Home Office. Advising on the parole system.’
‘You think we should have more of it?’
‘No. Far, far less. Keep in touch. The Home Secretary wants more information about failures in the praeceptor system.’
After that I didn’t think I’d be hearing much more from SCRAP and then, one morning at work, the switchboard girl told me that someone called Terry Keegan was on the phone, so I said, ‘Put him through,’ and there he was, sounding more calm and self-confident than I ever remembered.
‘Where’ve you been hiding, Lucy?’ he said, as though it was my fault. ‘What about meeting up for a drink or something?’
‘Of course, I’d like that. Where exactly?’
‘How about my club?’
‘What’s your club then,’ I asked. ‘The Athenaeum?’
I had a momentary absurd vision of Terry in the bar of the Athenaeum in Pall Mall (Robert of course belongs to it), holding forth to an audience of senior civil servants, judges and professors of history on life in the Scrubs.
‘It’s the Beau Brummell in Harrowby Street. I think you’ll find I’m pretty well known there.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘Would you be free Thursday, shall we say round six o’clock?’
‘Why ever not?’
Terry’s club turned out to be a far cry from the Athenaeum. There were two large and burly men wearing top hats at the entrance who I took to be bouncers. They gave me the sort of amused and condescending look of those who knew single women only entered the Beau Brummell for one reason and they might expect to get a cut of anything she earned there. The girl at the desk said that Mr Keegan was waiting for me in the club room and I went up in the lift to find him.
Of course the Brummell bore very little resemblance to what I remember of the Athenaeum when Robert took me there. Pools of light lit up the tables, where girls wearing bow ties and very little else were dealing out cards or spinning roulette wheels. There were hardly lit areas where large men and shadowy women were sitting talking. The whole place smelt of perfume and air freshener with a distinct undercurrent of the burning old-carpet odour of pot. Under the tactfully dimmer lights of the bar, I saw Terry sitting beside an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne.
He was wearing a dark suit and, extraordinarily enough, a tie, his hair was neatly brushed and he gave off an expensive smell of aftershave. If I didn’t know, I’d have put him down as some high-flying broker from the City.
‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a glass of bubbles?’
I said I didn’t see why not and then there was a silence, as though neither of us was quite prepared to explain the strange situation in which we now found ourselves. Then he said, ‘I brought you this.’ He fished up a plastic bag from the floor beside his bar stool. ‘He can have it back,’ he said.
It, of course, was Timbo’s boxing cup.
‘Are you sure?’ I had made a point of leaving it with him as a recompense for Tim’s ridiculous attack.
‘Of course I’m sure. Anyway, you couldn’t get much for it, not from anyone dealing in such things.’
‘And do you know anyone dealing in such things?’
‘Perhaps.’ He seemed determined not to give too much away. ‘From the old days, of course.’
‘So, thank you for giving this back.’ I put Tim’s cup beside my stool. I’d scored a bit of a praeceptor’s success, although Orlando Wathen might not be pleased with me.
‘Have you got a job now, Terry?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve got a job.’
‘What is it exactly?’
‘Helping Chippy out with his business.’
‘You mean the Environmentally Friendly Investment business?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘It must be doing pretty well.’
‘It’s doing all right. Yes.’
Before I could ask any more about Chippy’s to me rather mysterious investment business, Terry, whom I saw looking towards the roulette table, gave a great shout of ‘Sandy!’ At which a pink-cheeked plump little man, wearing a deafening Hawaiian patterned shirt and lightweight suit, got up and crossed towards us to greet Terry with a quick embrace.
‘This is Sandy, a friend of my Uncle Arthur’s.’ Terry introduced us in a way I found even more encouraging. ‘This is Lucy, a friend of mine.’
‘Good to meet you, Lucy.’ Sandy took my hand and pumped it energetically. ‘Your Uncle Arthur, Terry,’ he said when he’d finished with my hand, ‘dreadful bad luck that was, the job he got put away for.’
‘I was away myself,’ Terry explained. ‘I don’t really know what happened.’
Sandy looked at me doubtfully for a moment and then said, ‘Can we talk freely?’
‘Quite freely,’ Terry assured him. ‘Lucy’s used to it. Her father’s a bishop.’ I suppose this was meant to be a joke. He was obviously in a good mood.
What Sandy wanted to say was that Uncle Arthur was doing ten years for his part in an armed robbery.
‘The Bright Penny Friendly Society office in Peckham. They kept a lot of cash there,’ Sandy was explaining to me as though to a child. ‘Of course, he never ought to have got caught. It was all Jim Nichols’s fault. A tragedy really, but we had to laugh.
‘They’re in the getaway car, with Big Jim Nichols driving, and the rozzers that got called after the party was over chasing them. They’re going fast, with your Uncle Arthur in it, when the freestanding phone in the car rings and this male voice asks, “Hello, is Jim Nichols there?” So Jim answers, “Yes,” and the voice goes on, “This is Chris Tarrant from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” You know what the game Millionaire is, don’t you?’ The man in the Hawaiian shirt looked at me as though I might not know anything about contemporary life.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do know about Millionaire.’
‘All right then. So Chris Tarrant goes on, “We’ve got your friend Harry Stoker here in the studio and he’s doing rather well. In fact he’s up to £32,000, but he’s stuck on one question so he’s chosen you as his friend.”
“‘OK,” Big Jim Nichols says, this being the most bloody foolish thing he’s ever done, “put him on.” ’
For any of you - and I can’t imagine that there are any of you - who don’t know, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a programme on television in which Chris Tarrant is the quiz-master and competitors, who may win large sums of money, are allowed to phone a friend to help them with one of the general knowledge questions.
‘ “The next voice you hear will be Harry’s and he has one question with four possible answers.” Apparently Jim had foolishly agreed to be a friend that evening.
‘ “You ready, Jim?”
‘ “Yes, mate,” Jim says, already slowing down slightly.
‘Harry said, “The question is, which king died of a surfeit of lampreys? Was it a) King John, b) King Charles I, c) King Harold or d) King Henry I?”
‘ “King Charles I?” Big Jim wondered out loud, and it seems your Uncle Arthur chipped in with, “No. It couldn’t be him. He died of having his head chopped off.” And then they were all arguing about who died of lampreys and what lampreys were anyway, and Jim slowed down so much that the rozzers got them, each and every one of them. Funny, isn’t it? I heard the story from a bloke who was with your Uncle Arthur in Parkhurst. Most unfortunate, but I had to laugh.’
I had to laugh too, but Terry looked serious. ‘I never heard that,’ he said. ‘I never heard about my Aunt Dot either.’
‘No. She was a good woman was your Aunt Dot. Helped me out a few times, I can tell you. There’s Rosanne waving at me. I’ve got to go back to her.’ He was looking towards a woman in a green top who was signalling to him from the roulette table.
‘I told Rosanne she brought me luck sitting beside me,’ Sandy was still laughing at the misfortunes of life, ‘and when I lose, like I have been doing, I tell her that I’d have lost a lot more if she hadn’t been there.’ So he went off, apparently cheerfully.
‘I never knew all that about Uncle Arthur,’ Terry repeated, without smiling, when we were left alone together. His mood seemed to have deteriorated a bit.
‘You know,’ I said to him, ‘all that Environmentally Friendly Investments stuff is a load of nonsense, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ He began to look angry and defensive.
‘I mean that whatever’s bought you a new suit and a tie and a bottle of bubbles in this extraordinary club wasn’t investments that were at all friendly to the environment.’
There was a bit of silence after that. He was frowning as he said, ‘You still trying to reform me, are you?’
If I said yes I knew we’d lose contact altogether, so what I said was, ‘Certainly not! I gave you up months ago as a completely hopeless case.’
‘A hopeless case, am I?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So you gave up on me?’
‘What else could I do?’
‘Yeah,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘What else could you do? You lot will never begin to understand.’
‘Which lot?’
‘The lot that tries to reform people. And that.’
‘You mean we don’t understand why you need smart suits and maisonettes, fast cars and all that sort of thing?’
‘I haven’t even got a car.’
‘Haven’t you? Poor Terry!’ I pretended to sound terribly sorry for him.
‘I could fix myself up with one of course. In time of need.’
‘Oh good.’
‘None of you understands the real reason.’
‘And what is the real reason, Terry?’
By now Terry had drunk most of the champagne. I’d had a glass, which wasn’t really as good as the house stuff at the Close-Up. But whether or not the drink, such as it was, had loosened his tongue, I don’t know, but what Terry said then had a profound effect on me and, indeed, on the rest of this story.
‘It’s the excitement. That’s what you lot don’t understand.’
‘What do you mean, the excitement?’
‘People do all sorts of dangerous things, don’t they? They climb up bloody great precipices. They set out to walk to the North Pole, or drop out of aeroplanes or try to cross the Atlantic in a canoe or something equally daft. What do they do it for? The excitement. I tell you honestly, Lucy, all that’s nothing compared to the excitement of a decent bit of crime.’
‘You mean pinching things?’ It was the longest speech he’d ever made to me.
‘All right then. Pinching things. Even taking Rev. Timbo’s bloody boxing cup gave me a little bit of a thrill when I nicked it.’
‘Now you’re giving it back.’
‘Of course.’ Terry sighed as though I was extremely slow on the uptake. ‘It was taking it that was worthwhile. The pot’s hardly worth trying to flog down the pub on a Saturday night.’
‘You mean you’ve found other crimes much more exciting?’
‘Tell you a story,’ Terry said. ‘I remember what my old Uncle Arthur told me about his friend Springy Malone, so called because he could hop across roofs and so forth. Well, Springy did serious crime until he got reformed and took up religion. But he told Arthur how disappointing it was when he went to the bank to draw out a pile of money for his house repairs or his wife support or something. He stood watching the cashier count it out and he thought, in the good old days I’d have pulled out a shooter and taken the lot off you. How dull life has become! Can you understand that?’
‘I might try to.’
‘Forget all the mountain climbing and falling out of aeroplanes and all that. Being in someone else’s house at night. Getting the silver out of the drawers and the money out of the safe and the pictures off the walls and wondering all the time if they’re going to wake up and you’ll be caught and put away for another few years or so. I tell you, Lucy, there’s nothing so exciting. People can’t get cured of it.’
‘You mean you can’t.’
‘You still don’t understand it,’ he said, not angrily, but smiling. Then he picked up his cuff to display a classy sort of watch which I hadn’t seen before. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an appointment.’
‘With Environmentally Friendly Investments?’
‘Something like that, yes.’ It was not really that he seemed, at that moment, better-looking, more in control, than he ever had before. It was like, quite honestly, that he was going off into a world in which there was no place for me at all.
‘But like I said,’ he went on, ‘you lot will never understand it. You may have given up trying to reform me. But you’ll never understand why we want to do it. Got to go now.’ And then he smiled unexpectedly. ‘We might do this again. Some time soon.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘some time soon.’
He left me then. I had a moment’s fear that he might have landed me with the bill, but no, it had all been paid for.
On my way out I passed Sandy and saw a great pile of his chips being raked away on the roulette table. In spite of his bad luck, he waved a cheerful goodbye. I waved back, happy to feel at that moment a small part of Terry’s world. The truly worrying thing, I realized, was that I had done what no decent praeceptor should ever do - fallen in love with the client.