--
The rain has stopped and the greasy streets are full of tourists trying to turn up the naughty bits of London. I get out of the cab and unlock the sober sage-green painted doors and Alex is standing there behind the lobby’s glass doors, his teeth highlighted whiter than ever beyond the glass’s bright reflection. I push open the glass doors and Alex helps me off with my coat.
“Anything?” I ask him.
“Nothing yet, Mr. Carter. A small game in the Green Room but it won’t get any bigger. The rest are just drinking.” Up above me there is the faint sound of Motown-style music.
“All the girls reported?”
“All of them,” Alex says.
I walk over to the plain door next to the cloakroom and unlock the door and open it and slide back the cage doors of the private lift and press the button. The lift only has one stop and that’s Gerald and Les’s penthouse office on the top of the club. The lift smells like the inside of a stripper’s G-string which isn’t surprising considering the amount of slag traffic it’s carried since my bosses, the Fletcher brothers, had it installed eighteen months ago. You’d have thought Gerald would have had enough of slags considering the route by which the two of them arrived at the top of the building that was now the centre of their operation. But not Gerald. Slags to him are like scotch to an alcoholic. Not that Les is a total abstainer but more often than not he’ll pour himself a drink and watch Gerald get on with it, with the kind of mild interest someone else would watch a couple of kittens at play. Les lives his life more in his head than Gerald does.
The lift stops and I get out. I’m in a small windowless hall. There is only one piece of furniture, a leatherette swivel armchair, and sitting in the armchair is Duggie Burnett. He’s wearing a hound’s-tooth suit—two buttons with side vents, narrow trousers with deep turn-ups—a yellow waistcoat, a Viyella check shirt and a plain woolen tie. He’d look like something straight off the early-morning downs at Newmarket if it wasn’t for the fact that his nose is on sideways and the rings he wears on each of his fingers aren’t there just for show. At the present moment he has a serviette tucked in his waistcoat and he is genteelly balancing a plate of sandwiches on his knees. The sandwiches have been daintily cut and served up with slices of tomato on top and a patterned doily underneath but Duggie is absorbed in gently taking the sandwiches apart and placing the salad stuff to one side and picking up the slices of ham with his fingers and eating them that way. Each time he places a slice in his mouth he thoroughly cleans the grease off his fingers with his handkerchief. I stand there watching him for a minute or two before I say anything to him.
“And supposing I was Wally Coleman and six hundred of the fellows that walk behind him?” I ask Duggie. “What would that make you and Gerald and Les by now?”
“But you ain’t,” says Duggie, not looking up from the disemboweled sandwiches. “If you was you’d be headfirst down that lift shaft with a bullet up your arse, no trouble.”
I grin at him.
“All right,” I say. “Let them know who’s here.”
He wipes his hands again and picks a handset off the wall next to him.
“Jack’s here,” he says, and puts the handset back on its cradle.
The door opposite the lift slides open and as I go in I say to Duggie, “Incidentally, it’s on the news a gorilla got out of Regent’s Park Zoo this afternoon. Haven’t caught him yet. If I was you I’d stay at home tonight.”
The door slides to behind me. I’m in another hall, bigger than the last. This hall has furniture, Regency repro, and gold-framed pictures, but there still aren’t any windows. The hall is lit by a single light set dead centre in the ceiling. There is another door, a replica of the one that is the entrance to the club, painted the same colour. I press a button on the wall next to the door and a second or two later the door is opened by another mug called Tony Crawford, the only difference between him and Duggie being that Tony’s gear is ten years out of date and that he’d eat the ham and the bread and the doily and the plate.
“Right, piss off, Tony, this is a meeting now,” says Gerald.
Tony closes the door behind me.
The room I am in is all Swedish. It’s a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they’d let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees with backs reaching the normal floor level, the honey-coloured polished floor itself with its scattered furs, the office area over by the window which runs all the length of one wall, the plain white desk that is worth half an Aston Martin, the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw
them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple’s closing-down sale.
Gerald is sitting in the sunken bit, making the leather look scruffy. He is wearing a very expensive three-piece suit, gray chalk stripe, but with it he is wearing a cheap nylon shirt and a tie that looks as though he’s nicked it off a rack in Woolworth’s. His shoes are black and unpolished and one of the shoelaces is undone. But even if the shirt had been tailor-made from Turnbull & Asser and the tie had come from Italy and the shoes had been handmade at Annello & David he would still look a mess. One of those people that make a difference to the clothes instead of it being the other way round. Les, on the other hand, is immaculate. He is perched with his arse on the edge of the white desk, smoking a Sobranie. He’s wearing one of his corduroy suits, the pale beige one, and with it he’s got on a lavender shirt and a carefully knotted brown silk tie, a pair of off-white suède slip-ons and socks that match the colour of his tie. What is left of his hair is beautifully barbered, just curling slightly over the collar of his shirt.
Audrey is there as well.
She’s over by the cocktail cabinet, getting the drinks together.
“So,” says Gerald, “we’re finally here at last, then.”
I sit down on an armless easy chair in the raised-up part of the room. I don’t say anything. There’s no point until Gerald and Les have run through today’s double act.
“I mean, we thought maybe Cross had nicked you or something.”
Gerald laughs at the others, encouraging them to
appreciate his wit.
“We thought he might have nicked you for being double- parked,” Les says in his humourless voice.
Audrey gives Gerald and Les their drinks, then pretends to remember that I’m there and I just might want one as well.
“Do you want one, Jack?” she says.
Gerald laughs and says, “Do you want one, Jack? Eh, Audrey, why don’t you give him one?”
He almost falls off the settee, he’s laughing so hard.
“No thanks,” I say to Audrey, looking her straight in the eye. “I had one before I came here.”
Les frowns and says, “You dropped off for a drink before you came here?”
“That’s right.”
Les looks at Gerald and Gerald says to me, “Listen, you mug, we told you to come straight back here. What’s the fucking idea?”
I look at Les and say, “Les, I left Cross three-quarters of an hour ago. After what he told me I didn’t think a swift vodka and tonic would make all that much difference.”
“Why?”
I take out my cigarettes and light up.
“Because,” I tell them, “it’s my opinion that Jimmy has been done good and proper and he’s weighed up twenty-five years against appearing for the Queen. Against us. And various other past associates that we don’t need to mention here.”
Gerald stands up and begins to turn bright red. “Bollocks!” he says. “Bloody bollocks. Christ, what, with Finbow? Jesus, all Finbow has to do is pick up the phone and he’s a few grand better off and Jimmy walks out a victim of circumstances. Besides, Jimmy’d never shop us. He’s Jack the Lad. Jesus, Jimmy and me are like bleeding cousins. From way back.”
“In any case,” Les says as he lights a new cigarette from the end of his old one, “the cunt wouldn’t dare.”
“No,” Gerald says. “He’s right. The cunt wouldn’t dare.”
I shrug. There is a silence. Audrey crosses her legs and the nylons sound like static on a cheap transistor.
Les pushes his hands in the pockets of his jacket and the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth causes him to narrow his eyes and hold his head back so that he’s squinting up at the ceiling.
“Is that what you really think?” he says.
“Well,” I say, “look at it this way. Jimmy was at Norwood. He was at Walthamstow. He was at Ealing. He was at
Finsbury Park. Granted that wasn’t one of ours but it’s another job. He was at Luton and he was at Dulwich and we all know what happened there.”
There is more silence and so I go on.
“At a rough calculation, I make it that Jimmy has done about a million and a half quids’ worth of overtime for us over the last six or seven years. A real little cornerstone to the firm he’s been. A right sweet little catch he’d make for some rising star in West End Central.”
“Yes, but Jack,” Gerald says, “it’s Finbow, for fuck’s sake. Herbert fucking Finbow.”
“If it was Finbow that plucked Jimmy, he’d have phoned by now. And in any case Jimmy’s been put out of the way. Finbow’d never do that. Unless Finbow’s had the operation.”
Gerald snorts. “Oh, yes, and I’m a fucking fairy.”
I shrug again.
“Why don’t we get in touch with Finbow and find out?” Les asks, as if I should have done it already.
“If it’s Finbow, there’s no point,” I say wearily. “If it’s not Finbow, there’s still no point. Can’t you see what I’m trying to say? Jimmy’s being done proper. So whoever’s doing him we can’t get to. They’re sticking it on him.
And because they’re sticking it on him they’ve made
him some kind of offer so that it looks good for him to stick it on us.”
“Yeah, but look,” Gerald says, “supposing he gets offered fifteen instead of twenty-five. Christ, that’s not big enough for him to drop in everybody else.”
“You’ve got more faith in Jimmy Swann than his mother ever had,” I tell Gerald.
Les gets up from the edge of the desk and walks over to the drinks cabinet.
“Anyhow,” he says, “even if he took the ten years’ difference he’d know we’d get him fixed on the inside. And Jimmy never was happy in a brace-up.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Gerald says. “He wouldn’t have the bleeding stomach for it.”
“Unless,” I tell them, “they’re fixing it so nobody can get to him, ever.”
“But why would they?” Gerald says. “What’s the point? Christ, if Jimmy spills, half the population of Inner London’d be standing side by side in the fucking dock and half of Old Bill’s mob as well. Jesus, they’re understrength as it is without putting their own boys away.”
“We don’t know what the point is, do we?” I say. “That’s just it. We don’t know what’s going on.”
“I thought that’s what we paid Cross for,” Les says, again looking at me as if I was to blame for Cross’s lack of material.
“If Jimmy’s turned Queen’s evidence then Cross will be sending his information in the other direction from now on,” I say.
After a while Gerald says, “If Jimmy’s done a deal he must have given them something already.”
“That’s right.”
“So if it’s like you think it is then why hasn’t anybody been picked up yet?”
I shrug. “Depends. If they want everybody Jimmy’s worked with for the last half-dozen years, they want them all at once. They don’t want anybody clearing out at the first arrest.”
“But it still doesn’t mean we can go on our holidays before we get to Jimmy,” Les says, rattling the ice cubes in his drink. “And if you’re right, then of course we’ve got to get to him, haven’t you, Jack?”
I’m expecting that one so I say, “Sure. That’s right. If you’ve got one of those diaries with tube maps on the back then I’ll start right away. If I go through the alphabet I’ll be at Wembly about 1980.”
“We pay you,” Gerald says. “You find him. I mean you haven’t tried Finbow yet. Or Mallory. Christ, what about Mallory? Why the fuck hasn’t he been in touch? It was yesterday. Bleeding yesterday.”
I look at Les and Les looks at me. Gerald looks at both of us.
“What?” he says. So I have to spell it to him.
“If Mallory hasn’t been in touch then he knows what’s going on. So he won’t exactly be sitting behind his desk waiting for us to get in touch with him.”
Gerald stands up and walks a few paces then turns back and sits down again. His arse on the leather makes a noise like a bad diver hitting the surface of the water.
“So where are you going to start?” he says.
I shrug and get up.
“May as well start with the obvious,” I say. “At least that way we’ll make sure it’s the way it looks.”
Les downs his drink and says, “Maybe, but don’t forget Swann’s got to be found this week. Next week’s too late. And when he’s found, no mistakes.”
I walk over to the door and open it and before I close it behind me I say to Les, “I don’t make mistakes. Like, for instance, employing Jimmy Swann in the first place.”