Friday

I COULD TELL IT was windy out before I could hear the wind. It was the daylight, what bit that was getting through the cracks of the curtains. I knew it was windy because of the kind of daylight it was.

I rolled onto my back and looked at my watch. It was quarter to eight. I reached out and grabbed a fag and smoked it looking up at the reflected light on the ceiling getting depressed with the greeny brown gloom, getting impatient with myself for not getting up but laying there anyway, just smoking, balancing the packet on my chest for an ashtray.

Finally I swung out of bed and went into the cold bathroom and got ready for the day. The wind swished about outside beyond the bright frosted glass.

I went downstairs and switched on the wireless. While Family Choice warmed up I went into the kitchen and found the tea caddy and put the kettle on the gas. I made the tea and began to put my cufflinks in.

The back door opened and Doreen came in. She was wearing a black coat, a nice looking one, short, and she had something on the Garbo lines on her head. Her pale gold hair was long and some of it was placed so that it fell down in front of her shoulders, between her shoulders and neck, almost on her breasts.

She looked at me for a minute before shutting the door. After she’d shut it she didn’t move except to take her hat off and put it on the drainer and then just stood there with her hands in her high pockets and feet together looking at the floor. She looked more bad tempered than unhappy.

I finished doing my cufflinks.

“Hello, Doreen,” I said.

“ ’Lo,” she said.

“How are you feeling?” I said.

“How do you think?”

I began to pour out the tea.

“I’m very sorry about your dad,” I said. She didn’t say anything. I offered her a cup of tea but she turned away.

“Enjoying the music, are you?” she said.

“The house seemed cold,” I said. “Besides …”

She shrugged and went into the scullery and sat down on Frank’s chair, her hands still in her pockets, her feet still together. I followed her in and sat on the arm of the divan, sipping my tea.

“I really am sorry, Doreen,” I said. “He was my brother, you know.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

Silence.

I didn’t want to ask her anything outright before the funeral so I said:

“I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. He was always so careful.”

Silence.

“I mean, he only drank halves.”

Silence.

“And not turning up for work.”

Two tears began rolling down Doreen’s face.

“He wasn’t worried about anything, was he? I mean, something on his mind, like, that’d make him careless, through worry, like.”

Silence. The tears rolled further.

“Doreen?”

She whirled up out of the chair.

“Shut up.” she shouted, the tears coining faster. “Shut up. I can’t bear it.”

She ran into the kitchen and stopped in front of the sink, head bowed, shoulders heaving, her arms by her side.

“Can’t bear what, love?” I said standing behind her. “What is it you can’t bear?”

“Me dad,” she said. “Me dad. He’s bloody dead, isn’t he?” She turned towards me. “Isn’t he?”

I put my arms up and she fell against me. I pressed her to me and let her get it over with.

After a while she straightened up and I poured her a fresh cup of tea. This time she took it. I sat down on the red leatherette-topped high stool next to the sink unit and watched her alternately drinking out of and looking into the cup. I wondered if it had all been just because her dad was dead through in the front room or was there something else. I couldn’t really tell. Last time I saw her was eight years ago and then she’d been seven so I didn’t know what she was like. I could guess though.

She was older than her fifteen natural years. I could have fancied her myself if she hadn’t been who she was. You could tell she knew what was what. It’s all in the eyes. I wondered if Frank had known she was no virgin. Probably, but he’d never have let on to himself. And if anything had been worrying him he wouldn’t have let on to her either. That was the way Frank was. So there was no reason why she should know anything unless she’d seen something or heard something that Frank didn’t know she heard. If she had I’d find out, but not today.

I got off the stool and went into the scullery and turned the wireless off. It was half past eight. Outside, a milk trolley was whirring by. I went back into the kitchen.

“Would you like a fag?” I said.

She nodded and put the cup down. I lit us up. She didn’t smoke too badly even though she was conscious of it. After a few drags, I said:

“What do you intend doing now?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, you won’t be staying here, will you?”

She shook her head.

“Look,” I said, “I know you don’t know me very well and what you do know you don’t like, but I’m going to suggest something to you. You probably won’t be very keen on the idea, but I want you to think about it over the next few days: I’m off to South Africa next week. With a woman I may or may not end up marrying. We’re flying on Wednesday. I’ve got three tickets. Why don’t you come with us?”

She looked at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“Think about it. I’d like you to come. If only to square certain things with your dad.”

“Charming,” she said. “You make me feel real wanted.”

“I’ll be here all over the weekend,” I said. “So you’ve time to think about it.”

“No thanks.”

She carried on looking at me. I looked at my watch.

“They’ll be here at quarter to,” I said. “Do you want five minutes with him before they come?”

She looked away. She was her fifteen years again.

“No.”

“He’d want it,” I said.

She sobbed, once.

“Go on,” I said. “You’ve just time.”

She put her cigarette down on her saucer and went through. Five minutes later she came out. Her face was wet and her eyes were red.

I put my jacket on and went into the front room. I stood next to the casket. The face looked up at the ceiling. There was never anything so still as that face.

I heard a motor outside and then there was a knock at the door.

“Ta-ra, Frank,” I said.

I turned away and walked out of the room via the door that led into the hall. I opened the front door. The man in the tall hat was there.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, in that voice they all have.

We left the church and got into the car again. Doreen and I got into the back and the Vicar got in next to the driver. We drove along the back streets. At one point an old josser on a bike just as old gave us right of way at a junction and slowly and gravely raised his hat.

After a bit the Vicar leant his arm on the back of his seat and looking around him said:

“You’ll see some changes in the town since you’ve been away, Mr. Carter.”

“A few,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Things are changing. But not quickly enough to my mind. One day, though, all this will be gone. And then, thank heaven, people will have somewhere decent to bring up their children. Somewhere they’ll want to go home to instead of the street.”

I said: “Always assuming what they replace it with will be better.”

“Oh,” he said, “but it must be. It’s bound to be.”

“Is it?” I said.

I looked at him. He had sandy hair and glasses and a yellow face. It was impossible to tell how old he was.

We rolled down the hill to the cemetery. The day was bright and windy and low grey fluffy clouds raced across the thin sun.

At the graveside apart from the Vicar and the digger and the undertaker’s men there was me and Doreen and two blokes who’d been waiting near where the coffin had been unloaded. One of them was about fifty, the other about twenty-two or -three. They looked like barmen and no mistake. They were neatest around the neck, with their clean white collars and neat knots, but the smartness tapered off the lower down their bodies you got and they were scruffiest round their feet. They stood there with their heads bowed and their hands clasped in front of them, a bit behind me and Doreen.

I held her hand while the Vicar said the words. The grave-digger was unshaven and wore a big ex-army greatcoat with the collar turned up and all through the Vicar’s spiel he kept looking at Doreen, the dirty old sod.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

I reached down and picked up a handful of earth and gave some to Doreen. The barmen stepped forward and got some as well and we showered the lowering coffin. The barmen stepped back. The older one put his hand to his mouth and coughed and stood to attention and the younger one shot his cuffs.

The Vicar led us into “Rock of Ages.” Doreen got past the first few words then shook and didn’t sing any more. The grave-digger went to work with his shovel. Wind whistled through my black mohair. A dozen or so rows away two middle-aged women in grey hats paused to watch as they picked their way among the headstones.

And then that was it.

I guided Doreen away from the grave. She stumbled as she took one look back at what she didn’t understand. The barmen stepped back to let us by. I nodded to them.

We got to the cars. I looked towards the gates. A woman with blonde hair wearing a bright green belted coat was standing beyond the railings.

“Is that Margaret?” I said.

Doreen nodded.

I looked across at the woman. She didn’t move. Doreen got in the car still crying.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. I turned to the barmen who were walking in the direction of the cars, lighting up.

“Can you wait?” I called.

They looked at each other. The older one looked at his watch and nodded. I walked over to the gates. Margaret was still there and she didn’t attempt to move. She wasn’t bad looking. The only thing being that she looked exactly what she was: a singing room belle.

“I thought you said you weren’t coming,” I said.

“I changed me mind,” she said.

There was a trace of a London accent on top of her broad Northern.

“I’m glad,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Doreen,” I lied.

She looked across to the waiting cars.

“Did—did everything go off all right?” she said.

“Fine. The arrangements were fine. Thanks.”

Her eyes were just as wet as those sort of eyes will ever be.

“I want to talk to you,” I said again.

She carried on looking at the cars.

“How’s Doreen?”

“How’d you expect?” I said. “She know about you and Frank?”

Margaret gave me a smile that meant she thought I had something missing.

“She knew. Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because, like, I was thinking, can’t you come back with us? Now? I mean, Doreen needs somebody and I’m not much use.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said, “so don’t ask.”

“Well, when? I mean, I’ve got to settle up things before I go back. How about later on?”

“No,” she said.

“Sometime tomorrow?”

She looked at me.

“All right,” she said. “Tomorrow morning. In The Cecil at twelve.”

“That’s where Frank worked,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I go there because it’s a long walk for me husband from where we live.”

“All right.” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She turned and began to walk away.

I watched her for a minute then I went back into the cemetery.

I opened the front door. Doreen went in first and the two barmen followed. In the hall Doreen took her hat off.

“Go through,” I said to the blokes. “I shan’t be a minute.”

I went upstairs and got some ginger ales and two bottles of scotch out of my hold-all. When I got downstairs Doreen was in the kitchen and the two blokes were standing in front of the fireplace lighting up again.

“Will this do?” I said, holding up the bottle.

“Oh, well,” said the older one, “thanks very much.”

“Ta,” said the younger one.

They tried to look solemn and appreciative at the same time.

I went through into the kitchen. Doreen was making some tea.

“Doreen, love,” I said, “could you tell me where there’s any glasses, please?”

She indicated a cabinet. I took out the glasses and began pouring the scotch.

“How long are they going to be?” she said.

“I don’t know, love,” I said. “Not long.”

I took the top off a ginger ale and filled a small jug with water.

“Will you have one?” I said. “It’ll do you good.”

Doreen took a long look at the bottle, then got hold of it and poured herself some. She took it straight back and made a face and then stared into the bottom of the glass. I poured three large ones and took them through.

“Water or ginger?” I said.

It was water for the older one and ginger for the younger one.

I went back into the kitchen. Doreen had taken another drink.

“Are you going to join us?” I said.

She shook her head. I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Suit yourself, love,” I said. “Just do what you want.”

I went through again. I put the ginger and the jug and the bottle I’d opened on the low table in front of the divan.

“Dig in,” I said.

They helped themselves.

“Absent friends,” I said.

“Absent friends,” they said.

We drank.

The older one was called Eddie Appleyard. He had frizzy black hair, quite long, brushed straight back from his forehead and long sideboards that spread across his cheeks in whispy patches that were turning grey. He had false teeth that didn’t fit properly. He was a local.

The younger one was called Keith Lacey. He had the face and build of a young footballer. The face was flat the body compact and stocky. His hair was fair and it had been curly before he’d had it given a crew cut. He wore a gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. He was from Liverpool.

I filled up the glasses.

“Well,” I said. “I’d like to say thanks for coming.”

“Don’t thank us, Mr. Carter,” said Eddie. “Frank was a good bloke.”

“He was that,” said Keith.

“One of the best,” said Eddie.

“How long had you known him?” I said.

“Me?” said Eddie. “We first got pally when we was working at Lingholme working men’s club. That were, oh, five, six year ago. We got on more or less right from the start like. I left about a year after, went to Crown and Anchor, but we used to see each other on Saturdays. He’d changed his job as well and neither of us was far from ground and we used to meet outside at half past three after we’d done siding up. We’d buy a couple of hot pies outside and take ’em in ground with us and we’d have missed about half an hour of game but we always used to go. Never missed a game, not even when they went down to third division for a bit.”

“Aye,” I said, “he liked his football, did Frank. We always used to go when we was kids.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard,” said Keith. “I mean, I was surprised when he didn’t turn up for evening session, because like, Frank was always on time, always first in. But when I heard, I mean, I couldn’t understand it. I mean, Frank only drank halves. And he always used to say that whenever he went out for a drink he’d always leave his car behind so’s he could enjoy himself.”

“I know,” I said. “Frank was always careful.”

There was a silence.

“I still can’t believe it,” said Keith.

We all drank. I moved the bottle round again.

“Everybody liked Frank,” said Eddie.

There was more silence.

“He always spoke well of you, Mr. Carter,” said Keith. “He always said he admired you for getting on so well.”

Frank had always said that to people. Perhaps he’d even got so he thought that way himself.

“It’s a bloody funny thing, though,” said Eddie. “I mean, you know a bloke for six bloody years and all the time he’s as calm as Gentle Jesus, never touches the hard stuff and then he goes off and drinks a bottle of fucking whisky and drives himself off top road and finishes up in three feet of water. It’s not right, you know, it’s not bloody right.” He took a quick drink. “It shouldn’t have happened. Not to a bloke like Frank. He was one of the best.”

His eyes were getting watery. He fumbled a fag into his mouth and I poured some more scotch. Eddie couldn’t find his matches so I lit him up.

“Thanks,” he said, from the back of his throat. Whether it was the scotch or genuine feeling that was breaking Eddie up didn’t really matter because whichever way it was, right now Eddie believed completely in the sincerity of his words.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then I said:

“You don’t think he might have done it on purpose?”

They looked at me.

“What? You mean, like, killed himself?” said Keith.

I didn’t say anything.

Keith turned his head slightly to one side then looked back at me, a grotesque half smile on his face.

“Naw,” he said. “Frank? Kill himself? You what?”

I carried on looking at him. He looked back at me, incredulous.

“I mean, what for?”

“That’s what I was wondering,” I said.

“Come off,” he said. “I mean, Frank was … was … well … I mean … he wasn’t the bloke to get into a mess or owt, something he couldn’t see the way out of. And he’d no worries, I know. I mean, I would have known. Hell, we worked together every day for the last year. It would have showed.”

“Why would it?”

“Well, it just would. I mean, he was always the same. Always. Never any different.”

“What was he like when you saw him last?”

“Sunday? Just the same. On time. Worked hard. You know.”

Eddie poured himself a large one.

“And there was nothing he did to make you think maybe something was up?”

“Naw, nothing. I tell you, he was just the same.”

“And you don’t suppose something could have happened between when you saw him and when he started getting drunk?”

“Well, I don’t know. I suppose so. But it’d have to be something awful. And what happened that’s awful?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I mean, you’d know if something had.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Eddie was pouring another drink. He seemed to have left the conversation a few drinks back.

“Bloody good bloke,” he said. “One of the best.”

“How the fuckin’ hell would you know, you old pissarse,” shrieked Doreen.

She was standing in the doorway, glass in hand. Behind her I could see the bottle I’d left on the sink. It was well down. Tears were streaming down her face. Her coat was undone.

“How would you know?” she shrieked again, this time a little lower pitched. “Or you? Or you? Especially you,” she said to me. “None of you knew. I knew. He was me dad.”

The last word was a terrible scream and as she screamed it she flung the glass in the direction of Eddie although I’m pretty sure she wasn’t aiming at anyone in particular. The glass hit Eddie on his shoulder and whisky went all over his sleeve. He leapt up out of his seat. I moved towards Doreen. Keith stood up, still holding his glass.

“Now, Doreen, love,” I said.

“Get away,” she said. “Get away from me.”

“Look,” I said. “I know how you feel and …”

“No you don’t, no you don’t. If you did you’d leave me alone!” She ran over to the door that led into the hall and pulled it open. “Come on,” she said. “Clear off! Clear off, the lot of you!”

I nodded to the others. They drank up and began to walk out. Eddie was dabbing at his sleeve with his handkerchief.

“Hang about,” I said. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

When they’d gone I was about to say something to Doreen but she rushed away from the door and flung herself down in Frank’s chair, her fist pressed against her lips, her legs drawn up underneath her. She began to cry again.

“Look,” I said, “if I was you I’d go and have a lie down for a bit.”

She didn’t answer.

“I’ve got to go out for an hour,” I said, “but I’ll be back later.”

Nothing.

I looked at her for a minute or two and then went out, closing the door quietly behind me.

They were standing on the pavement, by the gate. Eddie was still dabbing away. They looked at me as I came out.

“Sorry about that,” I said, closing the gate. “She’s taking it bad.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Keith, “don’t worry about it. I mean she’s upset, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Eddie, “poor old lass.”

I took a quid out of my wallet.

“Here,” I said. “This is for the dry cleaning.”

“Oh no, Mr. Carter,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

But I knew he could and eventually he did.

“Anyway,” I said, “let’s go and have a drink.”

Eddie looked at his watch.

“I can’t very well,” he said. “I’ve got to be at work in twenty minutes.”

“How about you?” I said to Keith.

“I’m all right. I’m not on till six.”

Eddie said: “Well I’ll be off then.”

There was regret in his voice. He was sad about missing the forthcoming whiskies.

I shook hands with him.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

He became emotional again.

“It’s the least I could have done,” he said. “Frank was a good bloke. One of the best.”

“Yes,” I said.

We all stood there for a minute.

“Anyway,” said Eddie.

He shook my hand again and turned away and began to cross the road, diagonally making for the end of the street, his hands in his pockets, his jacket unbuttoned and blowing behind him in the breeze.

I turned to Keith.

“Come on,” I said.

We walked along the street in the opposite direction to the way Eddie had gone.

The corner of Jackson Street and Park Street, the street that led back to the High Street was about twenty yards from the railings at the bottom. Keith automatically began to turn the corner but when he saw I was carrying on to the bottom he stopped and wandered down after me.

I stood by the railings and looked across the remains of the grass to where the dyke used to be. A couple of blokes from the engineering works were carrying a packing case into the building. The lathe droned on.

Keith was standing behind me.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Nowt,” I said. “Just having a look.”

On the way to The Cecil I made a phone call. Keith waited outside the box, leaning against the post office wall.

When I got through Audrey’s voice said:

“Hello, Audrey Fletcher speaking.”

That meant Gerald was there.

“I’ll call back,” I said. “Tell Gerald it was a wrong number.”

“I’m sorry, I think you must have the wrong number.”

“You’ve got a lovely pair of titties,” I said.

“That’s quite all right,” she said and put the phone down. We walked into The Cecil.

I’d remembered it very well, considering it must have been twelve years since I’d been inside it.

When I was a kid, when I’d started going in pubs, they’d said you want to keep out of The Cecil, you don’t want to be going there, it’s rough, especially Saturday, it’s the worst pub in town. Somebody had once said they should advertise it as having “Singing till ten, fighting till eleven.” So naturally I started going in there as soon as they’d let me get up to the bar. One of the first times I’d ever been in, it was a Friday, everything had been all right, nobody seemed to be looking for anything and I’d gone for a slash, and when I’d come out again, there was a great space cleared in front of the bar, all the tables had been pushed back from it, everybody was standing up, some on tables or chairs, all holding their drinks and it was very quiet. In front of the bar in the space that’d been cleared there were eight blokes, standing facing the bar, all holding bottles or broken glasses, and standing on the bar top were the barmen, about a dozen of them, all facing the blokes, all holding bum starters, ready for it.

The main bar was one of the biggest I’ve ever been in. You go in through the double doors that open on to the High Street, and first off all you see are tables, hundreds of round tables, set out in rows going diagonally across the room, stretching as far back as you can see. Beyond the tables, it seems like a hundred yards away, there’s the stage, a long low platform and on it a set of drums, a piano and a Hammond organ with all the attachments. Running down the left hand wall as you look from the entrance is the bar. There are eight sets of pumps. The bar stops flush with the stage. It’s that long.

Between the tables and the entrance there is a strip of carpet about twelve feet wide. It runs along the top end of the room, flush to the bar seats beneath the windows. Against the bar seats are more tables, just one row, five either side of the door, following the carpet from the bar to the right hand wall. These tables are where you sit at dinner time, so that the main mass of tables remain clean and polished for the evening when they have singing and comedians and strippers and fights.

Keith and I walked across the carpet to the bar. There were three barmen on duty. So far we were the only customers.

The nearest barman moved towards us. He looked at Keith and nodded.

“Hello, Keith,” he said.

“Now then,” said Keith.

I took my wallet out.

“Yes, sir,” said the barman.

“What do you want Keith?” I said.

“Pint of bitter, please,” he said.

“Two pints and two large scotches,” I said. “Bell’s if you’ve got it.”

“Right you are, sir,” he said and moved across to the nearest pumps.

“Thanks very much,” said Keith.

“Does he know where you’ve been?” I said, indicating the barman.

“Yes.”

“How is it he didn’t come?”

“He’s only been here a week today. He only met Frank twice.”

“What about any of the others?”

Keith shrugged.

“I dunno. A couple of ’em said they’d try and make it. But what with it being either their time off, or else working, you know.”

He looked a bit embarrassed.

“So Frank wasn’t all that popular,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say that. He kept himself to himself. You know.”

“What did he do, work too hard for their bloody liking?”

Keith shrugged again and frowned and there was a touch of red on his cheeks.

The barman came back with the drinks.

“Anything with the scotch, sir?” he said.

“A ginger ale,” I said. “How much is that?”

“Fifteen and five, sir.”

“Will you have one?”

“Oh well, that’s very kind of you, sir. I’ll have a Mackeson if I might.”

He took for the drinks and we carried them over to a table near the door. I drank the scotch and took a sip of beer. Keith gave me a fag and we lit up. Beyond the smoked glass traffic droned up and down the High Street. Occasionally the wind rattled the double doors.

“Keith,” I said, “how friendly were you and Frank?”

He scratched the skin between his nostrils and his upper lip.

“Well, you know, like I said. We worked together. I’d known him twelve months. Ever since I worked here.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know. But how well did you know him?”

He frowned.

“Well, we sort of used to talk when it was quiet, you know about football and the general state of affairs in the world, things like that.”

“Did you ever go back home with him?”

“Oh no. This was during working time.”

“You never went drinking with him or owt like that?”

“Naw. Nowt like that. I once bumped into him in The Crown, and had a couple with him, but it was only accidental.”

“Who was he with?”

“His girlfriend, Margaret.”

“Did he ever talk to you about her?”

“No.”

“How is it you know who she is?”

He looked at me, sideways, wondering.

“Well, she’s fairly well known. Round the pubs like.”

I took a drag.

“I’d say she was a whore,” I said. “What would you say?”

He gave me that look again.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Come off it,” I said.

“Well, yeah, I’d say so.”

“And everybody knew she was a whore, didn’t they?”

“I expect so.”

“You know it,” I said. “Did Frank know it?”

He took a drink.

“I don’t know.”

“And if he didn’t, you didn’t bother to tell him?”

“Well, you can’t, can you? Anyway, he must have known. She doesn’t exactly hide her light under a bushel.”

“Right,” I said. “Right.”

I took a long drink of beer.

“Did Frank ever talk to you about his missus?”

“No.”

“Did you know he had one?”

“Well, I guessed. Because of the kid, like.”

“Did you know Doreen, then?”

“Today was the first time I ever saw her.”

“Frank told you about her?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say about her?”

“Well, you know, he’d tell me what he’d been doing for her. Fixing up her bedroom. Papering the hall because she wanted it brightening up. Things like that. He liked to talk about her.”

“She was all he bloody well had,” I said.

Keith took a long drink of beer, watching me all the time.

“Shall I tell you something?” I said.

Keith said nothing.

“His wife, Frank’s, she was one of those women you see shopping in the street, with her shopping bag and her headscarf and her glasses and her fag on all the time. She was plain as buggery. She even used to look like it before she was married. She looked as if she’d let herself give it to Frank once, on their wedding night, and after that he could whistle. I remember she always wore her glasses and she only needed them for reading. But Frank married her.”

Keith kept on looking at me.

“And do you know what happened? Some wogs moved into the house down the street. Pakistanis. One day Frank gashed his hand on a glass at work and had to go to hospital to get some stitches put in. He called in at home after. Only she wasn’t there. He went out of the house to see if she was coming down the street but there was no signs. He was just going back in when he saw her coming out of the wogs’ place. He couldn’t grasp it at first until she saw him and started to run off down the street. Then he knew all right. He caught her and dragged her back home and beat the shit out of her. A few days later the wogs left, went to Leeds or somewhere. And she went with them. That was when Doreen was seven.”

“Hell,” said Keith. “No wonder he never said owt about her.”

“Do you know what she did?” I said. “After?”

“What?” said Keith.

“A few days after she left she sent Frank a letter. He got it the day of our dad’s funeral. I was up for it. In the letter she called Frank everything she could think of. She finished up saying that Doreen wasn’t Frank’s kid. She said that I was Doreen’s father. She said it because she knew how much Frank thought about Doreen.”

“Christ,” said Keith.

“Frank showed me the letter,” I said. “He was very calm about it. He stood there while I read it and then he just said, ‘Jack, I don’t ever want to see you in this house again.’ I mean, he’d had the letter from the day before. He’d had time to do all sorts of things. Get drunk, go for me, anything. But he held it all back. He just told me he didn’t want anything else to do with me and that was that.”

“So he believed her then?”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t true though?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Keith looked at me.

“What I mean is, I had Muriel, ugly as she bloody was, shortly before they were married. I was only twenty-two. Doreen came on the scene eight months after they were wed. So I don’t know, do I? I saw her today for the first time in eight years. The time before that she was a baby.”

Keith looked into his beer. I remembered how it had happened. I’d been on my way home from the pub and I’d bumped into Muriel and two of her mates. They’d been pissed as farts. They’d had a hen party on the strength of Muriel’s coming wedding. When I’d bumped into them they’d been full of it. Talking dirty, swearing, having me on. There’s nobody muckier minded than a pissed-up bird. One of them had lived nearby. She’d said why didn’t we all go back to her place for a cup of tea? I’d said all right. I hadn’t been sober and I’d quite fancied my chances with one of the birds. When we’d got back there the bird had brought the drinks out and the talk’d got filthier. It’d made me very horny. I’d been sitting in an easy chair and Muriel’d been sitting in one facing me and the other two birds were on the settee. Muriel hadn’t been particular about the way she’d been sitting and I’d been able to see right up her legs. Not that I’d been pretending not to. I’d been too far gone for that. One of the birds on the settee had made a joke about it to Muriel and Muriel’d leant across and lifted the skirt of the other bird and’d said something like now we can all see what you’ve got too. The other bird had done the same back to Muriel and then the two of them had started mucking about trying to shove each other’s skirts up to their waists. They’d kept looking at me and screeching and laughing all the time it’d gone on. They’d been so pissed they hadn’t even tried to keep the noise down. The third bird’d joined in and between them they’d pinned Muriel down on the settee and whipped her drawers off. One of the birds’d danced round the room waving them in the air while Muriel’d tried to get them back off her. Eventually the third bird’d looked at me and said to the others something like why should he be getting to see everything? Why should he have all the fun? Let’s have a look at his. The two other birds had jumped on me and started unbuttoning my flies. Muriel’d staggered over and joined in. I hadn’t actually tried to put up a lot of resistance. Anyway, at that point, somebody knocked on the front door and the bird who’d lived there had gone to see who it was. I’d fastened up just in case. I’d thought it might have been the bird’s folks coming home. It’d been some neighbour on about the noise. The bird and the neighbour’d started having a ding-dong on the steps. While that’d been going on the third bird’d started feeling sick and she’d cleared off to the lav. That’d left me and Muriel. She’d come and sat on the arm of the chair and started unbuttoning me again, making sure I was seeing everything she’d got. The front door’d slammed but the bird hadn’t come back in the room because the third bird’d started puking all up the stair carpet.

It’d been all over in five minutes. We’d laid down on the carpet and the minute I’d put it in her I’d come. And the minute I’d come I’d started to feel fucking awful. I’d wanted to cry and beat my fists on the floor and be sick but all Muriel had been doing was bloody cursing because it was all over. I remember I’d got up off her and I’d started cursing her at the top of my voice. The knocking had started again on the front door and the bird whose place it was had come in to see what I was on about. Finally I’d just run out past her, out of the front door past the old bugger who’d been doing the complaining.

I’d known I wouldn’t be able to face Frank, not when the wedding was only a week off. I’d been living at Albert’s at the time because our dad wouldn’t have me in the house. Neither Frank nor our dad had known where I was so it was easy for me not to turn up at the wedding. I only saw Muriel once after that. The night I half killed our dad. Frank and her had lived at Jackson Street and when I saw her I couldn’t believe it had happened. She’d never looked anything at all but seeing her there with her hair in curlers and her fag on and no make-up made me almost think I’d dreamt it. But I hadn’t.

When I found out Frank’d got a daughter it never clicked that it could have been mine. Maybe I’d brainwashed myself about that night to the point where I couldn’t let any thought like that into my mind. Even when Frank showed me the letter at our dad’s funeral I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I never had done. Not even now. Doreen was Frank’s. What had happened between me and Muriel had happened. But Doreen was Frank’s. She had to be Frank’s. He had to have that.

The thing I’d always wondered, though, was whether Frank’d believed Muriel. He believed that me and Muriel had been together. He knew that we were both capable of that. But whether or not he’d believed that Doreen might not be his was another matter. I don’t think he allowed himself to believe it. That’s the way Frank was. Anything he didn’t like he shut out. Like me.

“So, like I was saying,” I said to Keith, “the one time Frank had a good reason to either kill me or kill Muriel or go crazy one way or another, he just turned himself inside out and asked me if I wouldn’t mind leaving the room. If he did drive himself off top road then whatever made him do it was even worse than what he found out about me and Muriel.”

“And Doreen,” said Keith.

I didn’t pass any remark at what Keith said.

“But,” I said, “I doubt if he did it on purpose.”

“So do I,” said Keith. “As you say, Frank wasn’t the type.”

“At the same time … Frank wouldn’t have got blind pissed on scotch instead of turning up for work, would he?”

“Well, no,” said Keith.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

“Keith,” I said, “how much do you know about what goes on?”

“How do you mean?”

“Around here. Among the big boys. The governors.”

“I don’t know nowt, I suppose.”

“But you know that there are governors?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“Ever met any of them?”

“No.”

“Do you know any of their names?”

“Well, I know there’s a bloke called Thorpe.”

“And what does he do?”

“He does loans around steelworks. He has a few blokes who do his collecting for him. They come in here sometimes.”

“And he’s a governor, is he?”

Keith didn’t say anything. I smiled.

“Do you know who your boss is?”

“Mr. Gardner.”

“Who’s he?”

“The manager.”

“And who does he work for?”

“Well, this isn’t a brewery house, so he works for the company who owns it.”

“Cotel Limited?”

“That’s right.”

“They own motels and hotels together with one or two pubs, don’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“And who owns Cotel Limited?”

“I don’t know.”

“No,” I said, “and you never will. Except that he’s a governor. Do you know who Thorpe works for?”

“No.”

“The owner of Cotel Limited. Do you know who runs Greenley’s Betting Shops?”

Keith didn’t answer.

“Right,” I said. “You’ve heard of Wold Haulage Limited?”

He nodded.

“Chap called Marsh runs it, doesn’t he?”

Keith nodded again.

“Well, he doesn’t. Guess who does? And who owns the wog houses in Jackson Street and Voltaire Road and Linden Street? And the gambling clubs and the brothels and Greaves’ Country Pies and Sausages Ltd?”

Keith’s cigarette had burned down to the tip. He put it out and got another one from his packet.

“Do you remember a couple of years ago when five Pakistanis got carved up outside of here? On the pavement?”

“I wasn’t here then but I heard about it.”

“It said in the papers there were about eighteen of them, all Pakistanis. Fighting among themselves.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, what happened, you see, was that some of our coloured friends had started a cheap whorehouse down Clarendon Street. The novelty attracted a lot of customers. Too many. They decided to open up additional premises. That was just before the party on the pavement. Everybody thought it was just what it looked like; too much ale. But what happened was that there was half a dozen Pakistanis from the whorehouse against half a dozen Pakistanis from various properties in Jackson Street and Voltaire Road and Linden Street. Properties owned by a certain person. They were helped by half a dozen gents of the strictly British persuasion. Lots of people saw it but there were no witnesses. The police only arrested the ones who’d been hospitalised. For some reason or other they were satisfied with the ones they’d got. Anyway, you’ll gather that after that nobody else bothered to try and open up in competition.”

Keith was watching me, wondering how I knew about it all.

“It was in all the papers. I guessed that something of this sort was going on, so I rang Frank up. Just to see if he was all right, in one way or another. Frank had a good idea that it wasn’t the way it looked, but he wasn’t saying anything. Frank wouldn’t get involved in owt like that for all the tea in China. He always played safe. But he knew. He always knew what was going on.”

I looked at Keith.

“You see, the only way Frank could get into trouble was if he’d heard something and told somebody else about it. But he wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“Well, no,” said Keith.

“So he wasn’t the kind of bloke to get pissed and accidentally drive himself off top road. He wasn’t the kind of bloke to do it on purpose. And he wasn’t the kind of bloke to get into trouble with some people that might matter. So what?”

The doors were pushed open and three steel workers came in, carrying their knapsacks. They all looked clean, so that meant they were coming in for a morning session before they went on two to ten.

Keith said: “I dunno. What?”

“There’s only one way Frank’d get mixed up in anything; that’s if he saw something he didn’t want to see. If that happened, then whatever he saw would have to be pretty dicey. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I would. But …”

“But what?”

“Well, what you’re saying is that Frank … Frank was knocked off. I mean definitely.”

“He was.”

“But how can you say that?”

“Because I know it.”

“But how?”

“Because of the line of business I’m in.”

I watched him while that sank in.

“That’s why I’m sure, matey,” I said. “That’s why I’m sure.” I drained my glass. “Shall we have another?”

When he came back from the bar he’d had time to think about everything I’d said, which was the idea. I’d had time to think too. Now was the time to see if I was right or not.

He put the drinks down.

“Cheers,” I said.

“Cheers,” he said.

I drank the scotch off.

“So believing that, Keith,” I said, “what do you think I should do? Go to the scullers?”

I smiled as I said it. He didn’t say anything.

I stopped smiling.

“I want you to do something for me,” I said.

He still didn’t say anything.

“I want you to keep your eyes and ears open. I want to know anything you hear at the bar. I want to know who says what. About business, about Frank, me, anything. And if anybody asks where I’m staying I want to know that most of all. As soon as you hear that, you put your coat on and walk out of the pub and you come over to seventeen Holden Street and tell me. There’s money in it to take care of you till you get another job.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but …”

“But what?”

“It’s a bit dicey, isn’t it? I mean, what if they know I’ve been to the funeral and met you?”

“Oh, they’ll know that,” I said. “You can count on it.”

“Well, there you are. I mean, if I tell on them to you, I’ll be in for it, won’t I?”

“No,” I lied, “ ’course not. It’s me they’ll want. They’ll leave you alone. If they touched you it’d be more trouble for them than it’s worth.”

“Well …”

“And anyway,” I said, “I shall be around, in here, so they don’t have to know where I live. It’s just important to me to know who it’s important to. You probably won’t have to come to where I am. Just tip us the wink when I come in. You know.”

“Well, I suppose so. I mean, if you’re in, they don’t have to know what we’re up to, do they?”

“ ’Course they don’t,” I said. “ ’Course they don’t.”

I left Keith at one o’clock, picked up the car from the garage in Holden Street and went back to Frank’s. Doreen was as I’d left her, except she was asleep. I poured myself a drink and sat down on the divan and waited for her to wake up. I sipped my drink and looked at her. She was well away. You’d have thought she was dead.

Well, if she was mine there was nothing of me there to show for it. There was a lot of Muriel there, but because Doreen was young and looked after herself it didn’t matter. I tried to see something of Frank in her but I’d stared at her for too long: she was just a young girl I’d met for the first time that morning. A young girl I’d been to a funeral with.

And now in a way, it didn’t matter who she was. If she came to South Africa with me and Audrey then it was up to me to take up where Frank’d left off. Mine or not, like it or not. Whatever she felt about me wouldn’t matter all that much: she’d never be short of anything if she came with us. If she came. If she didn’t I wasn’t going to make her. She could suit herself. I always had done. If she didn’t come I’d make arrangements for her to have set amounts of cash from time to time. At least she’d appreciate that. I know I would have done at her age.

She woke up.

She looked at me for a few minutes while she remembered who I was and what had happened.

“How are you feeling now?” I said.

“Lousy,” she said. She moved her tongue about in her dry mouth.

“Would you like another drink?” I said.

She pulled a face.

“Cigarette?”

She shook her head.

I waited for a while.

“Doreen,” I said, “I know it’s not a good time.”

She just stared in front of her at the wall.

“But I’m, you know, I’m a bit puzzled. You know, about what happened.”

Nothing.

I leant forward.

“I mean, was your dad worried about anything?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you think he’d have to be, or annoyed or something, to get drunk the way he did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, something like a row with the boss or something?”

“I didn’t see him Sunday night. He was at Margaret’s. I was in bed when he got in.”

I took another drink.

“Did you like Margaret?” I said.

“She was all right. She was good fun.”

“You didn’t mind what was going on between her and your dad?”

“Why should I?”

I shrugged.

“How do you mean, she was good fun?” I said.

“She just was. When we went out and that.”

“Did you and her ever talk? When Frank wasn’t about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, just talk.”

“Sometimes.”

“What about?”

“All sorts.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing in particular. She used to tell me what she’d got up to in London and that.”

“When was she in London?”

“I don’t know, years ago.”

“What was she doing down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“Well, she worked as a hostess or something.”

“Or something. Was she on the game?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Clip joints?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you didn’t mind your dad having it off with a slag like her?”

“Look,” she said, “bloody shut up. Me dad knew what she was like. It was his business. She was all right, was Margaret. She understood things.”

“What things?”

“About life.”

“What about life?”

“She didn’t care what everybody thought.”

“In what way?”

“She lived as she pleased.”

“And you agree with her?”

“Well, why not? You’re only here once.”

“How many blokes have you had, Doreen?”

“Now look …”

“How many?”

“Mind your bloody business.”

“Did your dad know?”

“Nowt to do with anybody but meself.”

“Did he?”

“Shut up.”

“Do you think he’d have liked it?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“I bet Margaret knew, though. I bet you talked about it with her, didn’t you?”

“Why not?”

“I bet you had a right laugh behind his back. I bet he didn’t know half of what she was up to, let alone you.”

“She was married. She did as she liked.”

“You sound closer to her than you were to your dad.”

She stood up.

“She understood me,” she said, tears beginning. “She knew what it was like.”

“Didn’t your dad?”

“No.”

“You’ll have a better time now he’s gone, then, won’t you?”

She flew at me. I took hold of her wrists.

“Now listen,” I said. “Tell me. What was up with your dad? What did he know?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“I don’t believe you. What was wrong?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Margaret …”

“What?”

“Maybe she finished with him.”

“And he’d get drunk over that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet,” I said. “I bet.”

I pushed her down on to Frank’s chair and leaned over her.

“Now look,” I said. “It strikes me that for Frank to get drunk the way he did and for him to drive off top road, there must have been something on his mind that was pretty heavy.”

She stared at me.

“Now,” I said, “I don’t know whether it was an accident or on purpose or what. But I’m going to find out. And if it turns out that you know something you’re not telling me then I’ll knock the living daylights out of you.”

She was frightened to death and at the same time she was bewildered by what I’d said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “It was an accident. What do you mean?”

I straightened up. So that was it. She didn’t know anything.

“What do you mean?” she said again.

“I’ll tell you if and when I find out,” I said.

I started to go out of the room and up the stairs. She followed after me.

“What, Uncle Jack?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “so don’t ask.”

I went into the bedroom and picked up the hold-all and the shotgun and box of shells.

“But you think …”

“I don’t know what I think,” I said.

I walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Doreen stood at the top of the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“To where I’m staying.”

“But what about me dad?”

“I’ll let you know what happens.”

“You don’t know where I’m staying.”

“I’ll find you,” I said.

I closed the front door behind me. I put the hold-all on the front seat and went round to the boot and opened it. I laid the shotgun and the box of shells down on the carpeting. I closed the lid and turned the key in the lock.

I phoned Audrey again. This time Gerald wasn’t there.

“Jack,” she said. “I’m worried.”

“What about?”

“I’ve been thinking. About what Gerald might do.”

“Don’t. He’s got to go to the trouble of coming out to Johannesburg himself if he wants you back and I doubt if even you’re worth the trouble that’d cause him.”

“But supposing …”

“Listen. I’ve told you. Stein knows. He’ll back me. I’m valuable to him. What I know means money to him. That’s what he’s paying for.”

There was a silence.

“You know what Gerald would do, don’t you? If he ever caught me?”

“Well, he won’t because he’d have to do it to me too. So drop it.”

There was another silence.

“Will you be back Sunday?”

“I don’t know. You may have to collect the stuff from Maurice yourself if I’m not.”

“When will you let me know?”

“I don’t know. Saturday. I’ll phone Maurice.”

“What about Doreen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Do you want her to come with us, Jack?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope you’ve thought about it, Jack.”

“I’ve thought,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll phone Saturday.”

“Jack, you’d better be careful. Gerald just might drop you in the cart.”

“I know that. What do you think I am?”

“All right,” she said. “But try and make it Sunday. You never know.”

“I’ll try,” I said and put the receiver down.

I knocked on the door of the boarding house. When she came to the door I said:

“Hello, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m a bit earlier than I expected. I hope it’s okay.”

“It makes no difference to me,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said.

I went in and she watched me go up the stairs.

“I expect you’ll need some rest,” she said.

I played along with her. I turned at the top of the stairs.

“Well, you know,” I said.

Her face cracked for the first time since we’d met. She obviously liked to think what she was thinking.

“I’m making a cup of tea,” she said. “Would you like one?”

“Oh, yes, please,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.”

I went into my room and lay down on the bed and lit cigarette. A few minutes later the door opened. She walked over to the table by the bed and put the tea down. I leaned up on my elbow and took the tea. She sat down on a chair opposite the bed. She folded her arms and crossed her legs. I could see her stocking tops and she knew I could so I looked at them over the top of my tea.

“Ah,” I said, “that’s better.”

“You’ll be needing that,” she said.

“Too true,” I said. “Too true.”

She smirked again. She sat there smirking for a long time. Then she uncrossed her legs so that I could see up her knickers. They were loose-legged and bright green with white lace. They looked new. She watched me watch her. Slowly she got up, her arms still folded.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll let you get your rest.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She opened the door.

“Will you be going out tonight?” she said.

“Yes, probably,” I said.

“Because if you’re back at a reasonable hour I’ll do you some supper if you like.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said.

She didn’t say anything and then she closed the door.

Six-thirty and Friday night. Too late for people going home from work and too early for people coming out to get drunk. Except for the workmen who were already in the pubs splashing their pay packets about.

I drove down the High Street. There was hardly any traffic. The remains of the sun were blustered into long shadows by the thin wind. I drove past Woolworth’s and British Home Stores and Millet’s and Willerby’s. I drove past the Essoldo and the Pricerite and past the dead buildings at the end of town and abruptly I was out in the country. I followed the road as it rose up towards the top of the wolds. On either side of me, the steelworks darkened against the raggy, saffron sky. The road got steeper. I began to slow down, keeping to the crown, looking out on my right. There. There it was. I pulled the car over to the left and stopped and got out.

The air was not as noisy as I thought it would be. The wind was going. It was getting darker by the minute. I walked across the road. Just beyond the grass verge was a hedge and behind the hedge, hugging it, was an old rotten fence. There were tire marks in the ground on the verge and there was a hole in the hedge and behind it I could only see a few splinters belonging to the fence. I went and stood in the hole in the hedge and looked down.

It was more of an incline than a drop. It stretched down for about a hundred and fifty feet until it came to the water that filled the bottom of the disused sandstone quarry. The quarry looked enormous but that was probably because of the hundreds of little islands of sandstone that rose above the water. They gave you the impression that they were bigger than they were because there was nothing to give them any scale, just the water. They were oblong shaped, twenty times as long as they were wide, with sloping sides forming ridges running the length of the islands. In the dusk it looked like a dumping ground for old Toblerone packets.

The car had been moved. From where I was there was nothing to show that it had ever been there. I turned slightly so I could look at the path the car had taken through the hedge. From the way it went, he’d been coming down hill, going towards town, which meant if it had been an accident, then he’d been drinking somewhere out of town in one of the villages—which was something else Frank wouldn’t have done. If he’d got any drinking to do, drinking like that (which was something else) he wouldn’t have left the town. As far as the outskirts, maybe, but not outside.

I walked back to the car and got in and sat there. I didn’t really know why I’d come. Just to see, I suppose. Just to see what it looked like.

I drove off down the hill towards the town and as I drove I decided that tonight I had to spend in The Cecil. I couldn’t piss about. They knew I was in town anyway. All hanging about in The Cecil would do would be to perhaps make them wonder why I hadn’t gone home, make them think I knew something, make them decide that I hadn’t just come for the funeral. And they’d know if Keith was tipping the wink. They’d see me and him and they’d get him and work on him until he told them things, which was hard luck for him but it would tell me what I wanted to know. He’d be able to put me on to the blokes who worked on him and from there I might get somewhere. Somewhere Gerald and Les wouldn’t want me to get. I remembered what was said in Gerald’s flat before I left. They’d both been there. Gerald in his county houndstooth and his lilac shirt, sitting at his Cintura-topped desk, the picture window behind him, Belsize Park and Camden Town below him and Les sitting on the edge of the desk, in his corduroy suit, thumbing through a copy of Punch. I’d sat in the leather stud-backed chair with the round seat, and Audrey had poured the drinks and passed them round. She’d been wearing a culotte skirt and a ruffled blouse, a sort of Pop Paisley, and I’d wondered what would happen if Gerald found out that this time next week I’d be screwing her three thousand miles away instead of under his nose.

Gerald had said:

“I’m sure you’re wrong, Jack. I can’t really convince myself into seeing it your way. I’m sure it’s the way it looks.”

“It smells shitty, Gerald. It’s so strong it’s blowing all the way down from the north into your air-conditioned system and right up my nose.”

“Well,” he’d said, “if you feel you’re right, feel it so strongly, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to the funeral aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are, and then what?”

“I’ll see if anyone has any knowledge.”

“You’ll start sniffing?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Jack, if Frank was mixed up, if he was knocked off, then you can bet the coppers know all about it. And they’re saying it was an accident. So if it wasn’t, then they’re keeping quiet because somebody with connections is involved.”

“That’s probable.”

There’d been a silence.

“Of course,” Gerald had said, “if that was the case, there are only two or three people up there who would have those kind of connections.”

“That’s right.”

There was another silence.

“You know, of course, how much we value our business arrangements with a certain gentleman who lives in the vicinity of your home town?”

“Do me a favour.”

“Yes, right. Well, all I’m saying, Jack, is think. Whatever you come across, think. I wouldn’t want the business, us, to be embarrassed in any way.”

“You don’t know anything, do you, Gerald?”

“Jack …”

Another silence.

“All I can say is this,” he’d said. “They’ll all know you’re there. That’ll mean trouble. With some people, all right. With others, well … we wouldn’t want to make a bad situation worse by sticking by you. And if you caused a bit of trouble, and you got sorted out, well, you wouldn’t be all that fit to do the job you’re doing now. Would you?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Of course you will, Jack. All I hope is you won’t do anything, you know, thoughtless.”

Les, still flicking through Punch, had said:

“One thing, Jack. If there has been any funny business, and the scuffers are keeping mum, well, if you create a bit more, they might feel they’ll have to do something. You know. They don’t like members from town going up there and doing whatever they like.”

“Yes,” said Gerald. “It might get into the papers, then they’d have to, like it or not.”

“I know all that,” I’d said, “so don’t tell me about it.”

Another silence. Then Gerald had said:

“Well, there’s only this; you do good work for us, Jack. I’m not saying we couldn’t do without you, but it’d be an unnecessarily difficult job finding someone to replace you.”

I’d said nothing.

“So whichever way you look at things, have a think before you make any important decisions. Like going to a funeral, for instance.”

He’d had to smile then, to make the last bit seem like more of a joke than it was meant to be.

I parked the car in The Cecil car park, but I didn’t go in by the side door. I walked round the front and in by the main entrance.

I walked over to the bar. Keith was on duty three barmen away. He looked at me. I shook my head. He looked away. I had to keep up the pretence of secrecy in front of him in case he wondered why I wasn’t bothering to play it cagey.

I got my drinks and turned round and leaned against the bar, so that I could see the Friday-nighters as they got them in down and over. Nothing had changed.

The double doors opened and a man came in.

He was fairly tall, on the thin side, his hair, what you could see of it, was dark, and he walked erect with one hand in his jacket pocket, royalty-style, a cigarette in his other hand, held at waist height, pressed into his middle, and he wore a peaked hat that had a very shiny visor and a double-breasted blue serge suit, three-button, silver buttons, the kind of suit all chauffeurs wear.

It was my old friend Eric Paice. How nice to see him, I thought.

He walked up to the bar and pretended not to see me. He’d seen me the minute he’d opened the door, if not before.

While he was ordering I picked up my drinks and walked along to where he was standing. I gave him a minute while he counted out his change, still pretending.

“Hello, Eric.”

He turned. His expression was meant to be full of amazement. All that happened was his right eyebrow moved an eighth of an inch towards the peak of his cap.

“Good God,” he said.

I smiled.

“Jack Carter,” he said.

His voice was as surprised as his face.

“Eric,” I said. “Eric Paice.”

He put his money in his pocket.

“You’re the last person I should have expected to see round this way,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “You didn’t know this is my home town, like?”

“Well, blow me,” he said. “I never knew that.”

“Funny isn’t it,” I said.

“So what’re you doing? On your holidays?”

“Visiting relatives.”

“Relatives, eh? Very nice.”

“It would be. If they were still living.”

“How do you mean?”

“A bereavement. There’s been a death in the family.”

“Oh, what a shame. Nothing serious, I hope.”

I gave him credit. His face was as straight as a poker.

“Yes,” I said. “My brother. Car accident, you know.”

“Oh, dear,” he said. “What a pity—here! Not that feller that went off top road? Monday?”

“That’s right.”

“No! Well, blow me. Would you believe it. Read about it in the paper, Tuesday night. And he was your brother, eh? Well, well. I mean, I read the name, but I never dreamt …”

“Small world,” I said.

He downed his drink.

“Are you having another?” I said.

He looked at his glass.

“Well,” he said, “I shouldn’t.”

I ordered more drinks. When they came I said: “Fancy sitting down?”

“Well …” he said.

“Come on,” I said, “we can talk about the old days.”

I walked over to one of the tables at the back. He made a show of deciding whether or not to follow. He followed me, as I knew he would.

I sat down and he sat down.

“Cheers,” I said.

He nodded, then drank. I looked at him.

He looked exactly the way he’d looked last time I’d seen him. Five years ago. In the office at the Hamburg Club off Praed Street, standing behind Jimmy the Welshman who’d been sitting behind his big antique desk, well, not his desk, the desk which Tony Pinner had provided him with, and Jimmy the Welshman had been sweating like the fat pig he was. Myself and Jock Mitchell and Ted Shucksmith had been standing at the other side of the desk. Jimmy the Welshman’s sister, Eric’s girlfriend, had been lying on the floor crying, which is what she’d been doing ever since Jock had put her there in order to stop her screaming. There had been no boys left to help Jimmy because since five minutes and three hundred pounds ago, three of them had started working for us and a fourth one was lying in the toilet presently not working for anybody.

“You’re out of a job, Jimmy,” I’d said to him. “How’s your pulling these days? You might have to brush up on it.”

He’d managed to say, “What’s up?”

“Everything,” I’d said. “This club isn’t owned by Tony any more. Neither is the Matador, or the Manhattan or The Spinning Wheel. They are now owned by certain parties who have instructed me to inform you that as from tonight the gaff is under new management.”

He’d thought about that for a while. Then he’d sweated a bit more and he’d said:

“I can’t leave. Tony’d kill me. You know what he’d do.”

I’d smiled at him.

“Get out, Jimmy,” I’d said. “Tony doesn’t care about you any more.”

He’d sat there for a bit and then very quickly he’d got up from his desk almost knocking his chair over and he’d gone out. As he’d walked out, his sister had moaned at him but he’d stepped over her, not looking at her. After the door had closed, I’d said:

“That leaves you, Eric.”

“And the bird,” Jock’d said.

“What happened to the others?” Eric had asked.

“Seventy-five per cent are working for us.”

“And me?”

“Gerald still remembers Chiswick, Eric. He asked me to remind you about it.”

Eric’s face had gone the colour of lemonade.

“Gerald’s wife still has the marks, you know. I must admit they were very discreetly placed.”

“And Jack’d know,” Jock’d said, then he’d wished he hadn’t because I’d looked at him.

“It was her,” Eric’d said, indicating the girl on the floor. “It was her that wanted to do that. All I’d been told was to get hold of her and scare her, get Gerald rattled, you know. It was her that wanted to do that.”

“Of course, Eric. And just let’s say that’s the truth. You couldn’t have stopped her, could you?”

“No,” he’d said, “no, I couldn’t. Wes the Spade was there. He egged her on. I couldn’t do anything. Honest.”

“We were talking to Wes earlier,” I’d said. “He said it was you two.”

“Ask Gerald’s wife, then. Ask her. She’ll tell you.”

“Audrey,” I’d said.

Audrey had walked into the office. Now Eric’s face was ice-cream soda.

“What’s the story, Audrey?”

Audrey had looked at the girl on the floor, who by then had been trying to crawl into the space under Jimmy’s desk.

“Her,” she’d said. “I want her.”

“Yes, I know,” I’d said. “I know what you want. But the truth? Tell it to me. After all, if Gerald knew you were here …”

“I want her,” she’d said. “He can watch. Unless he’d like to take her place.”

We’d all looked at Eric. He’d made no movement.

“So,” I’d said.

Audrey had sat on the edge of Jimmy’s desk and had taken out a cigarette. Jock and Ted had picked up the girl and they’d neatly and quickly taken off her dress, put the belt to her dress on Jimmy’s desk and tied her to Jimmy’s chair.

“Eric,” the girl had said. “Please.”

Eric had remained standing where he’d been when we’d first entered the office. Afterwards we’d let him walk out of the room and since then nobody had seen him around town. The way he’d looked when we’d let him go suggested he might have been off for a long holiday.

And this was where he’d ended up. In a chauffeur’s uniform in my home town. Acting quite normally towards me. Not afraid any more. Obviously working for someone. That’s why I wasn’t frightening him. He was at home. I was the away team. If he knew anything, had anything to do with it, and I hoped he had, he was cool; it didn’t matter, he had his backers. He could afford not to shake. He could afford to drink with me. Oh Eric, I thought, I hope you can help me. I really do.

“Well, Eric,” I said. “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Funny, too. Here I am, working in London, visiting my home town, and you, you’re not living in your home town but working in mine.”

“Yeah, funny.”

“Who, er, who are you working for, Eric?”

He gave me a sidelong glance and smiled and snorted, which meant I must be out of my tiny mind.

I smiled too.

“I’m straight,” he said. “Look at me. Respectable.”

“Come on,” I said. “Who is it? It can only be one of three people.”

He carried on smiling into his beer and began shaking his head from side to side.

“Rayner?”

More smiling.

“Brumby?”

Shaking.

“Kinnear?”

Bigger smile than ever. He looked at me. I smiled back.

“Why do you care?”

“Me? I don’t care, Eric. Just nosey.”

“That’s not always a good way to be.”

I laughed and put my hand on his leg.

“So you’re doing all right, Eric, then,” I said. “You’re making good.”

“Not bad.”

“Good prospects for advancement?”

He smiled again.

I squeezed his leg and smiled even bigger.

“All right, Eric,” I said. “All right.”

I took a drink.

“When was the funeral?” he said.

“Today,” I said.

“Oh,” he said mildly, as if he didn’t know. If he were here for the reason I hoped he was here for, he’d know all right. He’d know what colour braces I’d worn to it.

“You’ll be off back to town soon, then,” he said.

“Oh, pretty soon. Sunday or Monday. Got a bit of tidying up to do. Affairs. You know. Shouldn’t be later than Monday.”

“Ah,” said Eric.

While we’d been talking the band had drifted on to the stage. There was an old fat drummer in an old tux and a bloke on an electric bass and at the organ with all its magic attachments sat a bald headed man with a shiny face, a blue crew neck sweater and a green cravat. They struck up with “I’m a Tiger.”

I got up.

“Off to the Gents,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He nodded.

I picked my way through the noisy tables and went into the Gents. I stood in the anteroom and gave him a minute and then I opened a door on my left that led on to the car park.

It was blustering with rain again. Blue neon shone in puddles. Eric was standing by a Rolls Royce. He was looking towards the pub. He waited a few seconds then got into the car and started it up. I waited until he began to pull across the pavement into the main road. I ducked down and left the doorway and ran along a row of cars to where mine was. Meanwhile, Eric had turned left and pulled away, driving along the High Street towards the top end of the town.

I shot the car out of the parking space and across the tarmac to the exit on the other side of the car park, opposite the exit Eric had left by. The exit opened into Allenby Street. It ran exactly parallel to the High Street. I turned right into Allenby Street.

I shot across three intersections without looking. I hadn’t the time. I’d got sixty on the clock before I turned right again. In front of me, fifty yards away, was the High Street again, running across the top of the road. I reached the lights. They were at amber. I stopped. The High Street traffic began to slide across in front of me.

One of the last to cross was the Rolls.

The lights changed. I whipped round the corner. Eric was three cars in front. That was fine. I’d keep it like that.

I was very interested in where Eric might be going. If he’d come to The Cecil to sound me out then he might be going to tell somebody about it and I’d like to know who. And then, he might have been told to show himself, to make me realise they knew I was there and they would do something about it if I made them, and if that was so, he still might be going to tell someone. ‘Course, it might just have been an accident, bumping into me like that, but even then he’d know I was in town. Everybody would who mattered. And even the ones who mattered who hadn’t had anything to do with Frank’s killing would have a good idea of who did. And everything else apart, it would be very interesting to know who Eric was working for. Eric didn’t love me very much, but the governor who employed him would love me even less, if only because I was a foreigner on the home turf. Frank or no Frank, they might feel happier if they were waving goodbye to me at the railway station.

At the top of the hill, where the High Street officially became City Road, Eric turned left. Here the road rose again, and wound upwards through the landscaped suburb that belonged to the town’s wealthy. There were soft lawns and discreet trees and refined bushes and modern Georgian houses.

He turned left again, into a narrower road disappearing between banks of foliage. A sign at the turn-off said THE CASINO. I drove past the entrance to give him time, then I turned and drove back and turned right. There was just enough room for two cars to get by one another. Then the trees stopped. There was a gravel car park and a lot of cars. Beyond the car park was The Casino. It looked like the alternative plan to the new version of Euston Station. White, low and ugly. A lot of glass. A single piece of second storey that was a penthouse. A lot of sodium lighting. Plenty of phoney ranch-house brickwork. Probably the worst beer for seventy miles.

The Rolls was parked in a reserved space.

I parked my car and walked over to the glassy entrance. There was a doorman in Tom Arnold livery. I walked past him and into the huge foyer. There were only two bouncers. One at either end, like book-ends. They both took me in but allowed me to get as far as the reception desk. The man behind the desk looked as though he’d graduated from Bingo calling. In his younger days he might have crooned in provincial palais.

“Good evening, sir,” he said, his quiff bobbing. “Are you a member?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I leant on the desk, using one arm, hand clenched. I unclenched the hand and kept the fingers suspended so that he could see the money. Somehow he managed to look past me at the bouncers without taking his eyes off my face. He was thinking very seriously. He chanced it with the bouncers.

He took the money and as he picked it up a small pink card took its place on the desk top.

“Yes,” he said, loud enough for the bouncers to hear, “that’s right, sir. Mr. Jackson’s guest. He’s signed you in and is waiting for you inside. Would you sign in too, please?”

I signed my real name and picked up the pink card. I drifted away from the desk and down the steps towards the door that led into the first gambling rooms. I flashed my card at a third bouncer who was standing by the door and who looked at me as though he didn’t like me very much.

As I walked through the door one of the two book-end bouncers began to saunter over to the reception desk.

Inside, the decor was pure British B-feature except with better lighting.

The clientele thought they were select. There were farmers, garage proprietors, owners of chains of cafés, electrical contractors, builders, quarry owners; the new Gentry. And occasionally, though never with them, their terrible offspring. The Sprite drivers with the accents not quite right, but ten times more like it than their parents, with their suède boots and their houndstooth jackets and their ex-grammar school girlfriends from the semi-detached trying for the accent, indulging in a bit of finger pie on Saturday after the halves of pressure beer at the Old Black Swan, in the hope that the finger pie will accelerate the dreams of the Rover for him and the mini for her and the modern bungalow, a farmhouse style place, not too far from the Leeds Motorway for the Friday shopping.

I looked around the room and saw the wives of the new Gentry. Not one of them was not overdressed. Not one of them looked as though they were not sick to their stomachs with jealousy of someone or something. They’d had nothing when they were younger, since the war they’d gradually got the lot, and the change had been so surprising they could never stop wanting, never be satisfied. They were the kind of people who made me know I was right.

But while all these thoughts were making me feel the way I always feel I noticed that the bouncer who had gone over to the reception desk had come through the door and was trying to see where I was, so I stepped behind a square white-gloss pillar (it was that kind of place) and looked at him from behind some thin wrought-iron trellis-work (it was also that kind of place). He looked sick because naturally he couldn’t see me, so he pulled his jacket more squarely on his shoulders, which was the equivalent to him swallowing a lump in his throat, and made for a place where there was somebody he could tell all about it. There was one of those doors that lead somewhere and he went through it. I wended my weary way across the room and opened the door. In front of me was a flight of juicily carpeted stairs. On either side of me were two doors like the one I’d just closed behind me. Somewhere above me I could hear voices. I went up the stairs, turned sharp right and there were another eight stairs. Beyond these eight stairs was a short landing and an open doorway. From my position at the turn I could see the back of the bouncer’s D.J.

“Well, he must be somewhere downstairs, I suppose,” the bouncer was saying.

“You stupid fucker,” a voice from the room beyond said.

Good old Eric.

“Well, I didn’t know,” said the bouncer.

“No,” said a different voice, honed on about two million cigarettes, “and you never will, I don’t suppose.”

The bouncer continued holding the door open.

“Well?” said the second voice. “Hadn’t you better go and see what he’s doing?”

The bouncer jumped back to life, but not half as much as he jumped when he turned and saw me gazing into his eyes from about six inches away. He didn’t exactly scream but his blow-wave went for a burton. I blew him a kiss and walked past him into the penthouse room.

It was all glass with black night and crayon neon beyond. The carpet lapped at the glass all the way round the room. There seemed to be a lot of low tables and little white rugs. Now the trick with this room was you’d think with all that glass about you’d be able to see what was going on from outside any time of day or night. But they’d been very clever and amusing and witty and they’d made most of the room five feet below floor level. So what you’d got was a room with a gallery of six feet going all the way around this enormous area that housed all these soft leather sofas and soft leather chairs and Swedish lamps and a roulette wheel set in a very beautiful antique rosewood table, a nicely appointed little bar, a very nice and spacious table which was for some reason or another covered with green baize. They’d had a very nice thought for decorating this green baize; they’d arranged little groups of cards with patterned backs to lie adjacent to slightly less neat, rather more ostentatious piles of money. Around the table, on chairs, there were men. Another man was standing up behind a chair on which one of the other men was sitting. They were all looking up at me, as were the three girls who were arranged variously on the soft leather sofas and the soft leather chairs.

I walked over to the edge of the drop and leant on a padded rail. The man with the voice like two million cigarettes raised his eyebrows and said slowly and petulantly:

“You see what it’s like, these days, Jack,” he said. “You can’t get the material.” I sensed the bouncer’s embarrassment behind me. “How can you run anything when that’s the kind of material you get.”

He inhaled and exhaled. “I could weep. I really could. I sometimes think I’ll retire. Just get out and piss off to Ibiza or somewhere and then let them try and find somebody else to employ them. If I wasn’t so philanthropic they’d be down at the Labour standing behind the coons.” Inhale, exhale and a wave of the hand. “Do you get this, Jack? Is it the same in the smoke? I expect it is. Everything’s going down the nick. Except for blokes like you and Eric, but then you’re like me. You’ve had the hard times harden you. Not like these cunts. Getting tough is practising fifty breaks at snooker and reading Hank Janson. I sometimes wish I had a time machine. I’d take ’em back and show ’em me at their age. Then I’d leave ’em there and tell them to get in touch with me when they catch up to 1970 and let me know how they made out. But I’d never know though. They’d never catch up.”

The bouncer was still there sending out waves like oil-fired central heating.

“Clear off, Ray,” said the man, “and pay off Hughie. Give him his money, less what Jack gave him, and this time close the door behind you.” The door closed behind him.

The man looked at Eric, who was looking at me. The man smiled and looked at me too.

“Never mind, Eric,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect. You should have caught a bus instead.”

Cyril Kinnear was very, very fat. He was the kind of man that fat men like to stand next to. He had no hair and a handlebar moustache that his face made look a foot long on each side. In one way it was a very pleasant face, the face of a wealthy farmer or of an ex-Indian army officer in the used car business, but the trouble was he had eyes like a ferret’s. They had black pupils an eighth of an inch in diameter surrounded by whites the colour of the fish part of fish fingers.

He was also only five foot two inches tall.

“Hello, Mr. Kinnear,” I said.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” he said. “Come and join us.” He laughed. “Come and join us, come and join us, we’re the soldiers of the Lord,” he sang. “Joy, get Jack a drink. What is it, Jack, scotch? Get Jack a scotch.”

I walked down the cedarwood planked stairs.

Of the other three men round the table, one was slim and elegant with distinguished grey flecks in his wind-tunnel-tested toupée, another looked as though the trousers to his dinner suit should be tucked into gumboots, and the third was just a little rat with a tiny permanently frightened rat’s face.

“Jack, sit down,” said Kinnear.

I sat down on a sofa next to the best looking of the birds. She was a long-haired blonde, more thin than fat, with a face that ten years ago would have got her somewhere in the modelling business (I mean the advertising one) or maybe a film part opposite Norman Wisdom, but even if those things had still been open to her in 1970, she had today’s look that told me she wouldn’t have bothered. She smiled into her drink as I sat down, then smiled at me and then smiled into her drink again.

The girl called Joy brought me my drink. She was strictly Harrison Marks.

“Ta,” I said. “Cheers, Mr. Kinnear.”

“Cheers, Jack,” he said. “All the best.” Kinnear and I drank. The others kept on looking.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” I said.

“Of course not, Jack,” said Kinnear. “I hope I didn’t give you that impression because of that little business with Ray. It’s just that I pay him to know things. You know.”

“Gerald and Les asked me to call and give you their regards,” I said. “Seeing as I was coming up anyway.”

“Nice thought,” said Kinnear. “Nice boys. How are they? How’s business?”

“Pretty good.”

“Of course it is. Of course it is.”

A silence.

“Eric told me about your bereavement.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know, I never knew he worked for me. I never knew your brother worked for me.”

“Funny,” I said.

“If I’d have known, well, I would have fixed him up somehow.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Nasty way to go,” said Kinnear, “a car crash—Joy, Joy, look, give Jack another drink, no, give him the bloody bottle, that’s better, you can’t offer a man like Jack drinks in pissing little glasses like that.”

I was given the bottle. The girl sitting next to me looked at the neck as I held it upright and giggled. She was drunk.

The man with the gum-boot manner spoke: “Are we here to play cards or are we here to talk about the good old days?”

Kinnear shifted his weight in his chair and gaped at the speaker.

“Harry,” he said. “Harry. Of course we are. Of course—Jack. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be rude, but these gentlemen have brought a lot of money with them—hang on, hang about—perhaps you’d like a hand? A couple of rounds? Take your mind off things? You lads don’t mind? The more the merrier eh? Eric, get Jack a chair, will you?”

“No, I won’t just now thanks, Mr. Kinnear,” I said. “I have to be going soon.”

“Well, you just do as you please. Make yourself comfortable while we carry on.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The man with the greying wig began to deal. Kinnear’s eyes were as black as liquorice. Eric looked as though he wanted to spit at me. I relaxed on the sofa and watched Kinnear. He didn’t like it. He never looked at me, but I knew, and he knew that I knew. He didn’t like anything very much at the moment, from the way I’d got in to the way I was sitting, but he was forced to give me this old pals routine not because he wanted to save face in front of his mateys but because I knew he was narked. It was the only way for him to be. But whether he was narked because a London boy had made his chauffeur look daft and his boys look dafter, or whether he was narked for other reasons, I didn’t know.

The girl sitting next to me said : “You know Les Fletcher, do you?”

“I work for him.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

She smiled her private oh-so-clever-oh-so-knowing-but-oh isn’t-everything-a-drag-smile. It made her look very simple as well as very drunk. I thought the conversation had ended until she spoke again.

“I know him too,” she said.

“Oh, do you?”

“Yes.”

“No,” I said, “do you really?”

“Yes,” she said. “I met him last year.”

“Go on,” I said in a fascinated voice.

“Oh yes. When he came up on business.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He came to see Mr. Kinnear.”

“No.”

“Oh yes. We went about together.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, while he was here.”

“While he was here?”

“He was here for four days. About.”

I shook my head as though I could hardly believe what she’d just said. She went back to looking in her glass.

“I’ll open,” said the gum-boots man. “Give me two.”

Grey Wig gave him two cards. The Rat was next. He stared at his hand for about twenty-four hours and said: “I’ll take four.”

“Three now, one later,” said Grey Wig as he dealt them.

Grey Wig himself took three. Kinnear fondled his moustache.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “What shall I do? What shall I do? Oh—I think I’ll stay as I am.”

Rat Face looked up sharply and Grey Wig gave a thin smile.

Gum Boots said: “Bloody bluffing bastard.”

“That’s what you pay to find out,” said Kinnear. “Isn’t that right, Jack?”

“That’s right,” I said. “If you can afford it.”

“I thought you said you were going soon,” said Gum Boots.

“Soon,” I said. “After you’ve lost your money, which won’t be very long.”

Gum Boots looked at me for a long time. “Clever sod, aren’t you?” he said.

“Comparatively,” I said, giving him his look back.

Gum Boots was about to say something back when Kinnear spoke.

“Harry.” he said, “I don’t like to push, but could you let us know how much your hand’s worth?”

Gum Boots gave off looking at me for a minute and pushed a tenner into the middle. He was about to look back at me when Rat Face captured his attention by stacking.

“Christ Almighty,” said Gum Boots. “Not again.”

Rat Face fidgeted. “Well …” he said.

“Every bloody time,” said Gum Boots. “Every bloody time he stacks. He only goes if he’s got higher than a full house. Why the bloody hell do you ask him to play, Cyril?”

“Harry,” said Kinnear, “however he plays, he certainly doesn’t lose the way you do.”

Gum Boots went black. Grey Wig pushed a tenner in. They all went round a couple of times pushing tenners until Kinnear said:

“Well, I don’t know. Let’s see how we all feel. I’ll follow the ten and I’ll raise it to fifty.”

“What’s that? Fifty?” said Gum Boots.

“That’s right, Harry,” said Kinnear.

Gum Boots sorted out fifty and pushed it in. Grey Wig smiled to himself and did the same. Kinnear pushed in another fifty, then with studied staginess counted out another fifty.

“What’s that?” said Gum Boots.

“That, Harry? That’s another fifty pounds—ten five-pound notes of the realm.”

“Hundred altogether?”

“A hundred altogether, Harry.”

Gum Boots looked at the money and then at his cards which were face down on the table. He was dying to pick up the cards to have another look to reassure him of their strength. He managed to contain himself and somehow he got the hundred into the middle without shredding the notes into little pieces.

Grey Wig gave the classic smile and shake of the head and turned in his cards. Kinnear picked up his cards and pursed his lips and sucked in his breath and looked at his hand. Gum Boots managed not to drum his fingers on the edge of the table. Kinnear finally stopped playing and said:

“I’ll follow that and go another hundred.”

Gum Boots looked very sick.

“You could always see me, Harry,” said Kinnear.

Gum Boots was staring at Kinnear’s hand as if he was trying to burn his way through to the other side. He had the choice of putting in another two hundred and seeing what Kinnear had got or he could put in another two hundred without seeing Kinnear in the hope that Kinnear would fold at the sight of Gum Boots following. It all depended on whether or not Kinnear was bluffing. Gum Boots had to make a decision. A decision based on the one hundred and eighty pounds of his that was already in the kitty.

He must have decided that Kinnear was bluffing.

“All right,” he said, his voice like water gurgling down a plughole. “Two hundred.”

He pushed the two hundred pounds into the middle.

Kinnear raised his eyebrows slightly.

“Mm!” he said.

Then he got up and went over to a cupboard and unlocked it and took some money out of it. He sat down again and counted out a lot of notes. He put the notes in the kitty.

“What’s that?” said Gum Boots.

“That’s six hundred pounds, Harry,” said Kinnear. “Two hundred to follow you and I’ve raised it to four hundred.”

“Four hundred,” said Gum Boots.

“That’s right,” said Kinnear.

“You’re not seeing me,” said Gum Boots.

“No, Harry,” said Kinnear.

Gum Boots would have swallowed if he could have stopped his Adam’s apple from rushing up and down his neck. Now he was back to where he was a few minutes ago. Except now it was four hundred to play the game. Gum Boots must have still thought Kinnear was bluffing, but he didn’t want to go to eight hundred next time round. So he saw him.

He reached down by the side of his chair and picked up a briefcase. He took out a lot of money and counted some of it out and put it in the middle of the table.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

“Calling my bluff, are you, Harry?” Kinnear smiled at him.

Gum Boots nodded.

“Well now,” said Kinnear, “let’s see what I’ve got. I’ve forgotten what I had with all the excitement. Oh yes. I expect it’s yours, Harry.”

Kinnear laid his hand down. He had a hearts flush, Queen high.

Gum Boots turned the colour of a piece of very old Camembert.

“Oh come on, Harry,” said Kinnear, “I haven’t won, have I? Go on, you’re pulling my leg.”

Kinnear reached across the table to turn over Gum Boots cards but Gum Boots grabbed them first and stacked them with the pack. Kinnear laughed.

“How about that, eh, Jack?” he said. “Old Harry thought I was having him on.”

“You’ve got to be a good poker player to play poker with a good poker player,” I said.

“Shut up,” said Gum Boots.

Kinnear laughed again. I stood up.

“Not going are you, Jack?” said Kinnear.

“Have to,” I said. “Things to see to.”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “Well, any time you’ve a bit more time, drop in again. Like to see you.”

“I will do,” I said. “If I can fit it in.”

The girl on the sofa giggled.

“Give my regards to Gerald and Les,” said Kinnear.

“I’ll do that,” I said. I walked up the stairs and over to the door. The silence was hard and pure. I opened the door and it made a very loud noise as it ruffled the fitted carpet. Everybody was looking at me. I smiled across at Gum Boots.

“I told you I wouldn’t be staying long,” I said. Gum Boots swore.

I went out.

I’d got downstairs as far as the door that I’d come in through when I heard the upstairs door go. I waited. Eric appeared on the stairs. He walked down and joined me. I put my hand on the door knob and looked at him. His eyes were full of not very friendly thoughts.

“I didn’t like that very much, Jack,” he said.

I smiled at him.

“If you’d have told me who you were working for it wouldn’t have happened,” I said.

“Cyril didn’t like it either.”

“Cyril, eh?” I said. “All girls together is it?”

“But you’ve not been as clever as you think you have. You’ve got Cyril thinking. Like you got me thinking. He’s wondering why you wanted to know who I work for.”

“Doesn’t he know?”

“No, he bloody doesn’t. But maybe he’s thinking that Gerald and Les might like to know you’re sticking your nose in. He gets the idea they wouldn’t like that very much.”

“He’s right. So tell him to save the money on the phone call.”

“You see,” he said, “Cyril wonders why you should go to the trouble of playing cops and robbers just to find out who I worked for.”

“I told him,” I said. “Gerald and Les asked me to give him their regards. I’d been told where to find him. Following you was incidental.”

I grinned at the way Eric looked at me. Then he turned away and started to walk back up the stairs.

“Tell Kinnear I’ll be leaving as soon as I’ve cleared up Frank’s affairs,” I said.

Eric turned round and looked at me.

“Goodnight, Eric,” I said.

I drove down the narrow road that led away from The Casino. The dark, close trees came to an end and I was back bathing in the rateable value of the yellow street lights. There was nobody about. The California-style houses were still and silent, tucked away beyond the yards and yards of civic style lawn. Where a house showed signs of life naturally the curtains were drawn well back to inform the neighbours of the riches smugly placed within. Well-placed conifers stood sentry over the suburbs’ snug and wealthy taxpayers.

I remembered this place when it was called Back Hill.

Back Hill. The woods used to seem to stretch up to the sky. Except for the patches of red-brown earth that showed through here and there. You could see the hill from the end of Jackson Street. And although the hill was a natural place for kids to play, there were never very many kids up there when Frank and I used to roam about. We used to go up there on a Saturday morning and it seemed as though we’d wander for bloody miles. There were all kinds of secret places that were Frank’s and my private property. When we were older, getting on for sixteen, we’d stroll about taking turns carrying the shotgun, placing it in the crook of the arm, just so, like cowboys, Wellingtons making that good slopping sound, lumber jacket collars turned up, taking things slow, occasionally stopping in a hidden hollow, squatting down on our haunches, just looking around, cold breath curling up to the grey sky, not talking, feeling just right. Of course that was before I met Albert Swift. Before the fight between me and my dad. Before the driving. Before Ansley School. Before a lot of things. But it used to be a great place to be. You could walk to the top (and there was a top, a small flat plateau covered in grass that whipped about in the wind) and you wouldn’t turn round until you got to this plateau and then you’d look down and over the tops of the trees and you’d see the town lying there, just as though it had been chucked down in handfuls: the ring of steelworks, the wolds ten miles away to the right rising up from the river plain, the river itself eight miles away dead ahead, a gleaming broadness, and more wolds, even higher, receding beyond it. And above it all, the broad sky, wider than any other sky could be, soaring and sweeping, pushed along by the north winds.

This place, the plateau, was where we’d spend most of our time on Back Hill. In March, we’d huddle under the one bush that grew right on the edge, and we’d be just below the edge, on a sandy ridge, out of the wind, and we’d watch the March wind beat up the white horses on the river. In August, we’d lie on our backs and look up at the blue sky with its pink flecks on our eyes and a tall blade of grass would occasionally incline into my vision and Frank would talk really more to himself than to me about what he liked and what he’d like to do. Jack, he’d say, those seventy-eights I got yesterday in Arcade, don’t you reckon that that one by the Benny Goodman Sextet “Don’t Be That Way,” was the best? That drumming by Gene Krupa. Hell! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to do that? But if you could, you couldn’t do it in this hole. Nobody’s interested. They’d say it was a row. You can do things like that in America. They encourage you because they think jazz is dead good. America. That’d be the place, though, wouldn’t it? Imagine. Those cars with all those springs that rock back and forwards like a see-saw when you put the brakes on. You can drive one of them when you’re sixteen over there. Just think, our kid. Driving one of those along one of them highways wearing a drape suit with no tie, like Richard Widmark, with the radio on real loud listening to Benny Goodman. Cor! I reckon when I leave school I’ll go to America. Work my passage. I could easy get a job. Even labourers out there get fifty quid a week. Electricians and that can get two hundred. They can. And you can go to pictures at two in morning and see three pictures in one programme. You could get one of them houses with big lawns and no fences.

I drove down the hill past the houses with the big lawns and no fences.

The Cecil. I parked the car again and went in. The lights were lower now. A crooner in a John Collier suit was trying to sound like Vince Hill. I went over to the bar and ordered a large scotch. Keith was serving at the far end of the bar. The bar was three deep in blokes. The tables had at least six people round each one. The crooner finished. A lot of people clapped and whistled. The crooner turned into his M.C. bit and said:

“And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, and especially gentlemen, I’d like to introduce the star attraction for tonight, a little lady who’s no stranger to these parts, someone who’s having a highly successful tour of the northern clubs, and who’s managed for one night and one night only to squeeze (and I mean squeeze) in an appearance here for us tonight. In fact she needs no introduction from me, Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Miss … Jackie … Du … Val!”

Loud cheers and whistles and all the blokes at the bar shoved along to get nearer to the front. The music started. “Big Spender.” Miss Jackie Du Val walked on to the stage, arms raised high. She was wearing a tangerine evening gown and matching gloves that didn’t. She had black hair wound up into a grotesque bee-hive and if she was this side of forty she was only just. She walked along the short dais that led a bit of the way into the tables and the band got round to the beginning of the tune again and she began to sing à la Bassey, only louder. As she sang she began going into the routine of first one glove and then the next and pushing the fishnet knee through the slit in her dress and I thought Jesus Christ! and turned to the bar and looked at the bottles and read the labels.

After I’d done that I thought about me and Audrey. And like when I usually thought about me and Audrey it was with mixed feelings: I used to think, Christ, what a bloody idiot thing to do, start shacking up with the boss’s wife when you’re on such a good number and then I used to think about the things Audrey could do to make me act like a bloody idiot.

God, she was good.

I’d never had anyone like her. Not that I’d had a lot. I’d had it regular from the slags that worked for us, but the trouble was all I’d had to do was to phone up and a couple of them’d be round in half an hour. And more than likely gone in half an hour.

But when Audrey touched me for the first time, that’s what it was like: the first time, and it’d taken me all my time not to blow it as soon as her fingers’d felt me.

But she’d made me wait and that’d had something to do with it too.

She’d only been married to Gerald for eight months before I started getting the picture. Gerald’d picked her up out in Viareggio while he’d been on his holidays. He’d come back early and given Rae and their two kids the boot and he’d moved Audrey in straight away. They’d got married the day the divorce came through. Les’d thought Gerald’d been a bit of a cunt about it all but he’d never told Gerald to his face. Gerald’d been like a bloody kid over her. Everything she wanted she got. But it wasn’t because of Gerald she’d got me. She’d managed that all by herself.

Keith wandered up. He was polishing a glass. He could afford the time while they were all gawping.

“Hello, Keith,” I said.

“Somebody been asking about you,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” I said. “Anybody we know?”

“Remember we were talking about Thorpey? The loan merchant?”

“Old Thorpey, eh? Haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“That’s what he was saying about you.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. He said he’d heard you were visiting town and he was wondering if I knew where you were staying at, like. Wanted to look you up. Old times’ sake and that.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“I would have come to tell you but I didn’t think you’d be there.”

“Sure.”

Keith began to go red.

“I would have come, honest.”

“What did you tell him?”

He went redder.

“Nowt,” he said.

“Good. How was it left?”

“They went after they realised I wasn’t letting on.”

“They?”

“There were three of them.”

I lit a fag.

“Thorpey, eh?”

Thorpey was the kind of rat who I would have thought preferred to work on his own. Not for a governor, at any rate. He’d always been very full of himself. He’d liked being a top dog in his own little way, and the business he operated saw him very nicely. He’d like the profit margin kept the way it was. Supposing Frank had done something to upset Thorpey? Which of course he wouldn’t. But supposing. What could Frank have done to Thorpey that warranted Thorpey going to the trouble of knocking Frank off? Even if Thorpey and his lads had half the nerve. So if Thorpey was on his own, there’d be no need for him to want to see me. But, of course, there might have been a merger. The loan systems in Doncaster and Bradford and Leeds and Barnsley and Grimsby all owned by one governor might have been added to by seconding Thorpey’s little operation, just to make things nice. Thorpey would still be the figurehead, but from time to time whoever he was working for would ask him to do this and that, things that on his own Thorpey normally would have steered clear of. Like having a little talk with me. Or filling Frank up with scotch and letting the hand brake off his car.

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was quarter to ten.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where they went?” I said.

Keith shrugged.

“Could have gone anywhere. The clubs, pubs, anywhere. But wherever they are, they’ll be looking for you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What are you off to do?” asked Keith.

“Go and see somebody who can give me a little bit of gossip.”

“Who?”

“Oh, just an old friend I haven’t seen in years,” I said.

I walked away from the bar. Miss Jackie Du Val was naked except for a g-string. She’d come off the stage and now she was moving between the tables. There was hands all over the place. One bloke held up a pint of mild and Miss Jackie Du Val sat down on his knee and dipped her left breast in it. There was a load of laughter until the woman who was with the bloke with the pint of mild grabbed it and chucked it all over Miss Jackie Du Val and the bloke. The bloke got up and Miss Jackie Du Val hit the floor shrieking. The bloke socked the woman he was with and began wiping himself down. The woman fell over a chair and landed on the floor too. She and Miss Jackie Du Val found each other and began rolling about on the floor pulling and scratching and biting. There was much cheering. The woman on top of Miss Jackie Du Val was trying to bite one of Miss Jackie Du Val’s titties while Miss Jackie Du Val was trying to remove both of the woman’s eyes. A very drunken woman on the edge of the circle the crowd was making round them put her foot forward and with the toe of her shoe lifted the dress of the woman on top right up to her waist. There was more shrieking laughter. A couple of barmen had vaulted the bar and were trying to get through the crowd. The bloke who’d had the mild all over him stopped wiping himself and picked up a pint bottle of brown ale and emptied it slowly and deliberately over the upturned bottom of the woman on top, moving the bottle from side to side so that the woman’s pants were evenly soaked. The woman began to screech her rage as I went through the doors and out into the High Street.

There’s a place on the edge of the town where they’d built a council estate somewhere back in the fifties. This place used to be what you could call a natural piece of waste land. What I mean is, there’d never been anything there that had been knocked down or carted away (like an old aerodrome) to give it that used look, laid waste, the kind of land where those erect and rusty weeds grow upright between old half-bricks and cracks in grey concrete; they just grew here anyway. The place used to stretch for the best part of a quarter of a mile away from the town. In another town they would have turned it into allotments. But in another town it might have looked as if something could be grown there.

Before they built the estate there, there had been only one house near this place, right on the very edge, as far away from the town as it could be. It was a symmetrical doublefronted Victorian farmhouse. The colour of the bricks wasn’t quite red. The window frames had been painted lime green approximately seventy-four years ago. Now, although there were curtains at the windows you couldn’t see them from the outside. The chimney was in the middle of the roof and whether it was December or July it was always smoking. There was a shed at the back, about forty yards away from the house, and two hundred yards beyond this, the steelworks began, black at first, then glowing into savage flames.

There was no formal garden to the house, no garden fence. The weeds just got shorter the closer you got to the house. If you wanted to drive up to the house you bumped the car off the road over the grass verge and just took the straightest line between two points. Which was what I did.

I stopped the car and got out. There was the occasional clank and groan from the formless black and gold of the steelworks. The wind droned across my face. I walked towards the house. There were no lights on at the front. I went round the back. A motorbike and sidecar was illuminated by light from the naked bulb inside the kitchen. I knocked on the door. A woman of around seventy opened it. She stepped back to let me in and said:

“You’ll have to wait a few moments, she’s engaged at present.”

Stepping through I said: “I’ve come to see Albert.”

“Oh,” she said and began to close the door. “Albert, there’s a feller to see you. What shall I say?”

But before she was able to close the door I was inside the kitchen.

The telly was in the corner. It was turned up full blast. Sitting on a high stool to one side of the telly with her back to me was a woman in a top-coat with her hair in curlers. She was sitting hunched up with her hands in her coat pockets. She didn’t turn round but carried on looking at the telly. Two kids, about five or six years old, girls, were sitting on the floor watching telly as well. One of them turned her head round and looked at me for a minute then looked back at the screen. Her face was as filthy as her clothes. On the kitchen table amongst the dirty plates from at least half a dozen meals was a carry-cot. Inside the carry-cot was a baby that was no more than two months old.

Across on the other side of the table, near the wall next to a teak cocktail cabinet that was the only new piece of furniture in the room was a chair also facing the telly and in the chair sat a man with a glass in his hand who was looking at me with some surprise.

“Hello, Albert,” I said.

“Christ,” said Albert Swift, “Jack Carter.”

The last time I’d seen him was eleven years ago after I’d come out the wrong side of eighteen months. I’d gone to see him to get my old job back but eighteen months had been a long time. They’d got a new driver and Albert had liked him very much because he hadn’t any form. Albert had been very sympathetic but sympathy didn’t go very far. So for three years I’d worked on my own. Until I’d decided to move to the smoke. But there’d been no hard feelings between me and Albert. In fact he’d let me have a few bob to see me clear. We’d known each other too long for hard feelings.

I’d met him when I was fifteen. He was three years older than me. He’d got a gang in Mortimer Street. A right tearaway was Albert. The first real tearaway I’d met. Me and Frank had been playing billiards at the Liberal club, a big chapel-like building on Kenworthy Road. There used to be two snooker tables and a table-tennis table and as many Dandelion and Burdocks as you could get down you. Only us kids used the place in the week. An old twat called Waller Havercroft looked after it. During the day he worked on the Dilly Cart and by Christ he hated us kids. Especially me. Anyway, me and Frank were playing billiards on the far table at the gloomiest end of the hall, and there was just the billiard light on and the light from Waller’s office at the other end and it was really snug, the green cloth had that silent cosiness and we were really enjoying ourselves, saying nowt, taking our time, watching the nice straight angles the billiard balls were tracing on the table. Then the door’d burst open and Albert Swift and his gang had walked in. Albert’d been wearing a wide-boy’s jacket, double breasted with padding all over the place, tartan shirt and brown corduroy trousers. He’d looked round the place and said, “Jesus.” One of his gang’d spat on the floor. Old Waller’d been going to come out of his office and shoot them out until he’d seen who it was. He’d got a bit of the way out of his room and then he’d tried to get back in again without them noticing. But they did. Albert had turned to Waller and very sarcastically had said:

“Oh yes?”

Waller, still retreating, turning away to go back into his room, had mumbled something about something or other.

“D’you what?” Albert’d said. Waller’d closed the half-door with the little ledge on top that you used to put the money on for your Dandelion and Burdock.

“Did you say something, Old Cock?” Albert’d said.

Waller’d shot the bolt and lowered his eyes. Albert had taken out a cig and put it in his mouth and lit it and kept the match going then he’d taken a penny banger from his top pocket and lit the blue touch paper.

“I say, Old Cock. Were you saying something to me?” he’d said.

Waller’d retreated farther back into his office but there hadn’t been all that much farther for him to go. The banger’d started zizzing furiously. Albert’d flicked the banger over the top of the half-door. Waller’d almost fallen over a crate of pop bottles trying to get out of the way. The banger had boomed. Waller had shrieked. Albert’s boys had laughed. One of them had taken another banger out and lit it and he’d tossed it in the office as well. Frank and me had stopped playing billiards the minute they’d come through the door. We’d been the only two kids in the place. Albert’d taken another banger from his top pocket. Frank’d put down his billiard cue and moved to the end of the table that was nearest the gang.

“I don’t think you ought to do that,” he’d said.

Albert’d turned to face him.

“And who the fuckin’ hell are you?”

Frank hadn’t answered.

“Eh?” Albert’d said.

Albert and the gang had walked over and stood in front of Frank.

“You could hurt somebody,” Frank’d said.

“Did anybody ask you, cunt?” Albert’d said.

Frank hadn’t answered. Albert’d leaned forward and patted Frank’s face and ruffled his hair.

“Think you’re clever, do you?” Albert’d said.

Frank hadn’t moved. He’d just stood there not saying anything. Albert’d pushed Frank so that Frank had to steady himself on the edge of the snooker table.

“Come on, then,” Albert’d said. “Are you off to do something about it?”

“I don’t fight,” Frank’d said.

“What do you do then?” Albert’d said. “Smack handies?”

They’d all laughed.

Albert’d lit the banger he’d taken out and offered it to Frank. Frank wouldn’t take it. Albert’d held the firework against Frank’s pullover and Frank’d tried to wriggle away from Albert but Albert had got him pinned against the snooker table. Just before the banger was due to go off Albert’d stuffed it down Frank’s pullover and jumped back. Frank’d managed to shake his pullover in time and the banger hadn’t exploded until it was about a foot from the floor in its fall from Frank’s pullover. Frank’d jumped up in the air to try to get out of the way. They’d all laughed. Frank’d pulled himself together and he’d walked back to where his cue had been and picked it up.

“Your shot, our kid,” he’d said, his voice shaking.

I’d felt sick. At that moment I’d hated Frank. I could have killed him. I’d lost everything I’d ever felt for him. He’d shown himself up. He hadn’t wanted to fight. He’d let Albert scare him by not doing anything. I’d felt like crying. I’d stared at him for a long time after he’d spoken.

Then Albert had begun walking round the corner of the table to where Frank was so I’d made the shot but I hit it as hard as I could so that the red flew off the table and just missed Albert. Albert’d stopped and looked at me. I’d straightened up and stared back.

“Sorry,” I’d said. “Me cue slipped.”

Albert’d carried on looking at me.

“Want to make owt of it?” I’d said.

“Jack,” Frank’d said.

“Fuck off,” I’d said. Then to Albert: “Come on then. Or are you frit?”

Albert’d bellowed with laughter.

“I eat four of you every day before breakfast,” he’d said.

I’d thrown my cue down and I’d run round the table to get at Albert but Frank had got to me first and he’d managed to hold me back.

“Your bloody kid’s got more spunk than you’ll ever have, cuntie,” Albert’d said.

Frank’d let me go and he’d turned to face Albert.

“Come on then,” Albert’d said. “Put ’em up.”

For a minute I’d thought Frank was going to stick up for himself. But he hadn’t tried to do anything. Albert had given him three or four quick punches that had put him on the floor and made his nose bleed. Frank had sat up and taken out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. I remember that seeing him do that made me realise something I’d always been aware of but never thought about; Frank always carried a clean handkerchief.

Then Albert had turned and walked away and his gang had followed. When he’d got as far as the door he’d paused. “Come on, Yukker,” he’d said. “Leave the pansy to his knitting circle.”

I’d looked down at Frank. He’d made no attempt to get up. He’d been looking at the spots on his handkerchief and at Albert’s words he’d looked up at me but he’d already guessed what I was going to do.

At that time, Albert Swift had been very good looking. He’d had black hair, well greased, and long sideboards. His teeth were white and he’d had very clear light grey eyes. The shape of his face had been sharp and square. The man who sat in the chair across the room on the other side of the kitchen table looked nothing like the man I’d known at that time. There was no hair on the top of his head though he still had his sideboards. His teeth were very brown. The sharp, clean features had sunk without trace, hidden behind lined fish-coloured skin. His eyes had a yellow tint and glowed red at the edges.

After he’d spoken, he sat there for a bit staring at me and the room while it sank in that Jack Carter was actually there standing in the room, living and breathing. Then when it finally got through he started to get up. No, that’s not quite right—an exaggeration. He gave the impression he was going to get up but there was no movement significant enough for you to be able to guess that that was what he was going to do. His shirt might have creased a little bit but that was about all.

I walked round the kitchen table.

“Don’t get up, Albert,” I said.

Mentally he sank back in his chair. I opened out a metal garden chair that was propped up against the table and sat down and lit a fag.

Albert didn’t look very well at all.

“How are you keeping, Albert?” I said.

“Not too bad,” he said. “You know.”

There was a silence.

“Jack Carter,” he said. “Who’d have thought it?”

“Didn’t you know I was in town?”

“Well, you know, I don’t get out any more, Jack.” He tapped his chest. “Me tubes. I stop at home and keep warm. I only get to know what Lucille tells me.”

I looked at the woman in curlers who was still staring at the television.

“No,” he said, “Lucille, the wife—that’s Greer, her sister.”

Greer carried on with her staring.

“I didn’t know you’d got married, Albert,” I said.

“Well …” he said. “I mean, you have to, don’t you?” He smiled in a certain way. “You get too old for work, don’t you.”

“What are you doing these days then?” I asked.

“Nowt much. This and that. Anything I can fix up without getting out of me chair.”

“You’re very lucky,” I said.

“Not really,” he said. “Not my own choosing. Doctor’s orders. I miss the old life.”

There was a silence.

“You’re looking good, Jack,” he said. “Very good. I hear you’re doing very well.”

“Oh, you’ve heard that much,” I said.

“Heard that years ago, Jack. When I was out and about.”

A door opened. The door was at the opposite end of the kitchen from where the telly was. I looked round and Albert half turned his head. A man and a woman came through the door. The man was wearing a donkey jacket and overalls. He had a knapsack over his shoulder. He lit a fag as he came through the door. The woman was wearing a man’s tartan dressing gown. I wouldn’t know what she was wearing underneath. Her hair was ginger and naturally it was in curlers. She was already half-way down a Woodbine. The man in the donkey jacket began to walk towards the back door. The old bird who’d let me in had been sitting on another of those garden chairs pushed up against the kitchen table. The minute the bloke started for the door the old bird got up off her seat and stood in his way.

“Would you like to give something to Ma?” said the woman in the man’s dressing gown.

The bloke stopped and put his fag in his mouth and undid his donkey jacket, took a roll of notes out of the top pocket of his overalls, peeled off a ten bob note and gave it to the old bird. The old bird took the money and sat down again without saying anything. The bloke continued on his way to the door.

“Goodnight, Len,” said Albert. “See you again.”

The bloke nodded and went to open the door but before he could get his hand to it the oldest of the little girls jumped up from the floor and shot across the kitchen and opened it for him.

“Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” she shrieked, grinning all over her face.

“Goodnight,” the bloke said to her, and went out. The little girl beamed all round the room and went and sat down again.

“ ’Jack,” said Albert, “meet the wife. Lucille, this is Jack Carter. Friend of mine from the old days.”

“ ’Lo,” said Lucille.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I didn’t stand up.

She walked round the table and got a chair that had been standing underneath the window and put it next to the stool where Greer was sitting.

“ ’Lo, Lucille,” said Greer.

“ ’Lo, Greer,” said Lucille.

“I’ve brought Club,” said Greer and reached down to her shopping bag that was on the floor by her stool and took out one of those big mail order catalogues and she and Lucille began to go through it. Albert threw his fag into the fireplace and took his packet out of his cardigan pocket and offered one to me but I was already on. He took one for himself and lit up. Outside there was the sound of a motor cycle starting up.

“You heard about Frank, of course,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, inhaling. “Bad business.”

“You think so?” I said.

“Why yes,” he said.

“What do you know about it, Albert?” I said.

“What do I know about it?”

“That’s right.”

“What I saw in the paper. That’s what I know about it. Same as everybody else.”

“Stop playing silly buggers, Albert. You know Frank was finished off on purpose.”

Albert looked me straight in the eyes.

“That’s a very interesting remark, Jack,” he said.

“Put it another way; if Frank was knocked off then you’d know that that was the case. Wouldn’t you? Just as you knew I was in town and just as you’d know that I wouldn’t leave until I’d squared things up. And I know Frank was knocked off. So there you are.”

Albert blew out a lot of smoke.

“It doesn’t really matter if you don’t want to tell me anything, Albert,” I said, “because I’d understand. But do me a favour. Don’t play silly buggers.”

Albert looked towards Lucille and Greer but our talk was strained by the row from the telly and their own chatter so there was no need for him to worry.

“Jack,” he said, “all I know is that it struck me as being a bit funny. Knowing Frank. The circumstances, like. But if I did know anything for certain that summat like that’d happened, then you know it would be very hard for me to tell you anything about it.”

There was a silence.

“Who was it, Albert?” I said after a while.

Albert kept looking at me. He didn’t say anything.

“All right,” I said. “I shan’t ask you again.”

I lit up a fresh fag.

“Then tell us this; who’s Thorpey working for these days?”

Albert inhaled.

“Thorpey?” he said. “Steelworks Thorpey?”

“Steelworks Thorpey.”

“Isn’t he still working for himself, then?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?”

Albert went into the business of looking as if he was trying to remember when he’d last heard owt about Thorpey.

“No,” he said eventually, “the last I heard he was still working for himself. I think that must have been, oh, six months ago.”

I looked at him.

“Straight up, Jack,” he said. “As far as I know Thorpey still works for himself.”

“Then why the fucking hell would he be wanting to know where to find me?”

“Maybe he’s got something to tell you.”

“My mother’s fat arse. Remember that fracas at Skeggie?”

Albert didn’t say anything for a minute.

“Well in that case, maybe he wants to get to you before you get to him.”

“Why should a little squit like Thorpey knock off Frank? Besides, he wouldn’t have the guts. He’d pee his pants if you so much as looked at him.”

Albert shrugged.

“Well, I don’t know, Jack,” he said.

“Yes you do, Albert,” I said. “But I don’t expect you to tell me, even if it’s only an idea. But Thorpey’s different. Just who he’s working for?”

“Jack, I’ve told you. As far as I know he’s still working for himself.”

“As far as you know,” I said.

I stood up and threw my cigarette in the hearth.

“Well,” I said, “thanks, Albert. You’ve been a big help. You must let me know if I can do you a favour sometime.”

Albert put on a weary face.

“Think what you like, Jack,” he said. “I can’t say I know something if I don’t.”

“That’s right, Albert,” I said.

I walked over to the door.

“Well, don’t forget,” said Albert, “any time you’re up again, drop in. We can talk over the old days.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” shouted the little girl.

I closed the door behind me.

The club was crowded. Old men sat riveted by dominoes. Young men thronged the six dart boards. There was no music, no singing, no women. Just the bad lighting and the good dark brown beer and the plain floor and a bar that was decorated only by some barrels of beer lined up at one end.

I looked round the room. The man I’d come to see was in the same corner he’d been in the last time I’d seen him.

I went over to his table. Nobody else was sitting with him.

He would have been a thin man if it hadn’t been for the size of his gut. Cider and Guinness had given him a barrage balloon for a stomach. It hung over the edge of the seat looking as though it needed a crutch to support it. A walking stick was propped between his legs. Both his hands were folded on the handle of the stick. His eyes were dead behind round gold-rimmed glasses. His tongue regularly darted out of his mouth and flicked this way and that along his lips like a tiddler under water. He smelt of what he drank.

I sat down beside him.

“What do you know, Rowley?” I said.

The tongue darted along his lips.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Who killed Frank?” I said.

“The Demon Drink,” said old Rowley. “That’s what I heard.”

He took one hand off his walking stick and adjusted his glasses.

“It’d be worth it if you knew,” I said.

“Don’t know that, Jack,” said old Rowley. “Don’t know that.”

“Think of all the mucky books you could buy if you had a few quid,” I said.

“Don’t know anything about Frank,” he said but his eyes weren’t quite so dead as they had been.

“You know there’s something to know, though. Don’t you?”

“There’s always something to know, Jack.”

“All right,” I said. “Who does Thorpey work for these days?”

He didn’t answer.

“A few quid,” I said. “Keep you in books for weeks.”

He took a sip of his cider and Guinness.

“Thorpey?”

“Thorpey.”

“Rayner pays him now and then to do the odd jobs,” said old Rowley, “or so I hear.”

“Rayner?”

He nodded. The tongue darted. I took my wallet out and took two fivers and put them on the table. He looked at them. A hand separated itself from the walking stick. The hand began to move across the table towards the money. Just like a crab. As the hand began to close over the money I whipped the notes off the table.

“Lying old bastard,” I said.

I stood up.

“No, wait a minute,” said old Rowley. “It’s true. Ask anybody.”

“ ’Course it’s true,” I said. “Why would you say it if it wasn’t?”

I looked at him while he watched me put the money back in my wallet.

“Ta-ra, Rowley,” I said.

He shrugged and adjusted his glasses again. I left him to his smell.

I drove back into town. I was feeling dry. The scotch was back at the digs. I thought I’d drop in and have a drink and a think and then take it from there. The night was young. The pubs were only just chucking out. The Chinese restaurants would be filling up, just like the wash bowls in the Gents at the Baths where there was a dance and a bar till one o’clock every Friday night. Waltzing till ten, fighting till one. Spot fights. Progressive Barn Punch-Ups. Quick-steps in and out of the groin.

I drove past the Baths, which were on the corner of the High Street and the street where my digs were. Yobboes were marching up the steps of the Baths in groups of half-a-dozen at a time. Hands in pockets, jackets open. Open-necked shirts and Walker Brothers’ hair cuts.

I turned left and slowed down and backed the car into the drive and got out. All the windows at the Baths were open to let the sweat out and the sound of the group was an ebbing muffled blast in the cold night air. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich were as precise as a Mozart quartet against these boys.

I locked the car and began to walk back to the pavement on my way round to the front door. There was a sound of footsteps. Running. I stood at the edge of the drive, out of sight of the approaching runner. The steps were closer. A figure shot past the end of the driveway. It was Keith. I grabbed his arm and pulled him off the pavement.

“Fuck me,” he said between gasps. “You frightened the fucking life out of me.”

He was sweating like a pig. There was the start of a bruise above his right eye. The knot in his tie was somewhere up behind his left ear. The sleeve of his jacket and the knees of his trousers had damp and gravel on them. He didn’t have a lot of skin left on the knuckles on his right hand.

“What’s up?” I said.

There was the sound of a car screaming round the end of the street. Abruptly the sound was reduced as the car slowed right down. The soft noise got closer.

“Thorpey,” said Keith. “They were waiting in car park. They thought it’d be easy.”

“Was there many?”

“Four of them.”

“Including Thorpey?”

He nodded.

“Three then,” I said.

An old Zodiac slid past the driveway at about two miles an hour, two wheels up the pavement. Four faces gaped into the darkness where we stood. The car stopped. It blocked the exit to the driveway. Nobody got out.

“Hang about,” I said to Keith.

The nearside back window was wound down.

“Jack?” said Thorpey’s voice.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Like a word with you, Jack,” he said. He didn’t sound very happy.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Confidential, like.”

“Stay in the car and I’ll come and listen.”

“All right.”

I walked the short distance to the car and bathed myself in yellow light. I leant forward and rested my arm on the open window.

“What do you want to tell me, Thorpey?” I said.

Thorpey shoved his shaky claw out of the window. There was something in it.

“I’ve been asked to give you this,” he said.

He dropped the something into my hand. It was a British Railways ticket to London. I smiled.

“Train goes at four minutes past twelve,” he said. “You’ve just got time.”

“Well that’s very kind of somebody,” I said. “Who do I have to thank?”

Thorpey said nothing. His ratty eyes glittered yellow in the dark of the car.

“What happens if I miss the train?” I said.

“I’ve been asked to make sure you don’t,” he said.

His voice was getting braver by the minute but not quite brave enough.

“Oh?” I said. “Getting optimistic in your old age, aren’t you, Thorpey?”

“Let’s stop fucking about,” said a voice nearest me in the front.

“Are you coming, Jack?” said Thorpey. “It’d be best.”

I let the ticket fall to the ground.

“Right lads,” said Thorpey.

Three doors opened. Thorpey’s wasn’t one of them. The bloke who’d wanted to get on with it started to climb out of the front seat. I grabbed the door handle and pulled the door wide open and with all my force slammed the door into him before he could do anything about it. I timed it just right. He was half-way in and half-way out. The top edge of the door caught him on his forehead and on part of the bridge of his nose and the side edge caught a knee cap. He was very hard hit. He fell back across the front seats and started being sick. I jumped on to the bonnet of the car and kicked the driver on the side of his head before he’d had time to turn round completely after getting out of his seat. He went over but only for a minute. The third bloke was squaring himself up. I jumped down off the bonnet into the street. He made the mistake of coming to me instead of letting me go to him. He swung at me and I took hold of his arm one handed and pulled him to me giving him a forearm smash in the windpipe with my other arm. He went down trying to catch hold of the breath he’d just lost. I gave him one for luck on the back of his neck. His face hit the concrete before any of the rest of him. I turned back to see the bloke I’d kicked. He’d got up but Keith was there giving him a boxer’s right but while my back was turned Thorpey had wriggled out of the car and was off down the road like a frightened rabbit.

“Thorpey!” I roared.

He kept going.

I got into the car. There was no time to turn round or to shove out the bloke lying across the seat so I sat down on him. I pressed the starter and put the car into reverse. I caught up with Thorpey at the end of the street but he turned right into the High Street. I couldn’t reverse round the corner so I got out and ran after him. There were plenty of people about but neither me nor Thorpey was particularly interested in them in the way that they were interested in us.

The mistake Thorpey made was to decide to go and hide in the Baths. Fucking hell, I thought at first when I saw him racing up the steps but the next minute his foot slipped and he was flat on his bloody face sliding down them again. A few people burst out laughing when they saw it happen but they soon stopped when they saw me rush up and turn him over and pull him up on to his feet. It wasn’t so much that as stopped them but the short jab I gave to Thorpey’s ribs.

“Now then,” I said. “What was that confidential information you were going to tell me about?”

“Don’t, Jack,” he said. “Don’t, Jack. It wasn’t my idea, honest.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go and find out who’s bloody idea it was then.”

I took hold of his collar and tie and started to pull him after me down the steps. Somebody pushed me hard in the chest.

“What do you think you’re playing at?” a voice said.

A yobbo was standing in front of me, a step below me, and below him was another yobboe. They were both looking up into my face with much interest.

“Nothing you’d be interested in,” I said.

“Oh, yes?” he said. Then to Thorpey: “What’s up, mate? Do you want any help?”

Thorpey didn’t know what the bloody hell to say.

“Look, fellers,” I said. “Don’t get yourself into something you can’t get yourself out of.”

“Oh, yes?” said the yobboe.

I started to walk down the steps again. The yobboe pushed me in the chest again. Only harder this time.

“He’s littler than you are,” the yobboe said.

“So are you,” I said, “so why chance it?”

The yobbo drew back to have a go. He thought the movement made him look tough but all it did was to make him slow. I gave him one in the stomach. His Walker Brothers’ hairstyle flopped over his face and he sank to his knees on the steps. His mate watched him go all the way down then slowly turned his gaze on me.

“Do you want some?” I said. “Or do you only work as a double act?”

The yobboe didn’t answer. I walked past him and his mate who by now was resting his forehead on one of the steps trying to remember how he’d happened to get such a terrible pain in his gut. Nobody else stood in my way and so I walked on leaving the lights from the inside of the Baths streaming over the praying yobbo on the steps. Thorpey, of course, walked with me. I let go of him only when we turned into the street where my digs were.

The car was where I’d left it. One of Thorpey’s boys was helping the boyo I’d given the forearm to into the back seat. The one giving the helping hand looked at me and Thorpey but that was all. Then he went round the other side of the car and lifted the legs of the boyo on the front seat and packed them away under the dashboard. After he’d done that, he got into the driving seat and did what I didn’t do; he reversed very quickly into the High Street. Thorpey was very sensible. He didn’t run screaming after the car. Keith was standing on the pavement outside my digs talking to a woman. The woman was my landlady. Across the street there were lights on that hadn’t been on before.

“Now then,” said my landlady when I got there, “just what the bloody hell do you think you’re on?”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“You look it,” she said.

“No, I am, really,” I said.

“Don’t come that bloody flannel with me,” she said. “If you’re a travelling man, I’m bloody Twiggy. What the ’ell’s going on? And who’s he?”

Thorpey continued to be at a loss for words. An elderly woman wrapped inside a dressing gown traipsed across the road.

“What’s going on? Have you no thought for others?” she shouted. Her thin voice was whipped away by the wind and carried off above the street lights.

“Maybe if we went inside it’d be better,” I said.

“Inside?” said my landlady. “Why should I give house-room to your sort?”

“Everybody knows you, Edna Garfoot,” shouted the old woman. “Everybody knew there’d be trouble. This is a respectable street.”

I looked at my landlady and smiled. My landlady frowned. She turned to the old woman.

“You keep your bloody trap shut, Ma,” she said.

“Oh! Oh!” said the old woman. “I’ll send my old man over to see you.”

“Yes, and wouldn’t he love it, you dried up old biddy,” said my landlady.

“Oh!” said the old woman. “Oh!”

She began to retreat across the street. I nodded to Keith and gave Thorpey a shove. We went into the house.

“Here!” said my landlady. She rushed up the path. We waited for her in the hall. She didn’t close the door.

“Well?” she said.

“Well,” I said, “you might as well close the door. We’re in now.”

She glared at me for a minute then breathed in and closed the door. Keith and Thorpey and me began to go upstairs.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

“To my room,” I said. “We’ve got one or two things to talk over.”

She followed us up the stairs.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

I opened the door to my room.

“Why don’t you go and make us all a nice cup of tea?” I said.

I nodded to Keith. Keith bundled Thorpey into the room.

“What are you going to do?” she said again.

I closed the door in her face and locked it.

“Make us a nice cup of tea and I’ll tell you,” I said. “I might even let you come in and watch.”

“I’ll call the police,” she said.

“No you won’t,” I said.

There was a silence.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. Just get us that tea.”

There was more silence, eventually the silence of her going away.

Keith and Thorpey were standing in the middle of the room. Keith had his hands in his trouser pockets. He was looking at me. Thorpey was looking at me too but he didn’t have his hands in his pockets. He was standing to attention looking like somebody from the British Legion. His thumbs were turned down following the lines where the uniform stripes would have been.

“Sit down, Thorpey,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“Relax,” I said. “Keith, get Thorpey a chair.”

Keith got the chair that my landlady had displayed herself on earlier in the day. He put the chair down in the middle of the room behind Thorpey.

Thorpey remained standing.

I rooted in my hold-all and got a bottle out and also my flask.

I unscrewed the cap of the flask and very carefully poured in some scotch from the bottle. I handed the flask to Keith and sat down on the bed. Keith took a pull and I took off my jacket and loosened the laces in my shoes.

Thorpey remained standing.

I took a big drink from the bottle. I put it down on the floor and took my fags out and offered one to Keith. We lit up.

“Well now, Thorpey,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Seems I’ve got a secret benefactor,” I said.

I took another drink. Thorpey watched the bottle on its way up from the floor into my mouth and down to the floor again.

“It’s a very nice thing to know is that,” I said. “Isn’t it, Keith?”

Keith didn’t answer. He didn’t nod either. I got the feeling he was worried about something.

“Trouble is about a secret benefactor,” I said, “not knowing who he is, it makes you feel a bit embarrassed, like. I mean, there’s no way you can say Ta, is there?”

Thorpey was still gazing at the bottle.

“There’s also this about it,” I said. “A benefactor like that, well, you get to wondering why they’ve picked on you. I mean, out of all the needy cases there are about these days.”

There was silence.

“I’d like to know who it is, Thorpey.”

Nothing.

“All right, all right,” I said wearily. “If you like, we’ll stop mucking about. Somebody sent you to put me on a train because they’re shit scared of me sticking my nose in something or other and I’ve a good idea of the something or other they don’t want my nose in. If I’m right then one or two people are going to be in quite a little bit of trouble.

Now, I don’t know, but you might be one of them. If you are, God help you. Because if you are, I’ll find out. But you may not know anything about it at all. Maybe all you know is that somebody gave you a bundle of fivers to do a job. What I want you to tell me more than anything else is who gave you the bundle of fivers.”

Thorpey looked at me.

“I can’t, Jack,” he said. “How can I?”

“Yes you can, Thorpey.”

“Honest, mate, I can’t.”

“Come on now. You know it’s for the best.”

He looked at the floor and shook his head.

“Did you have anything to do with it, Thorpey?” I said.

“What?”

“Frank.”

“What?”

“Were you there?”

“When?”

“When they poured the whisky down his throat?”

“What?”

“Did you hold the bottle?”

“What?”

There was a knock on the door. I nodded to Keith. He let her in. She was carrying a tea tray.

“Did you have a good laugh when he was sicking it up as fast as you could pour it down him?”

Thorpey stared at me.

“Was it a giggle when you let out the hand brake and Frank’s car started rolling down top road?”

His head began to shake.

“Did you all pass the bottle round after the car went through the hedge? The same bottle you’d shoved halfway down his throat?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack,” said Thorpey.

“Well, I do,” I said.

I jumped off the bed and grabbed Thorpey’s scruffy neck and shoved him back on to the chair.

“I’m talking about me bloody brother, Thorpey. That’s what I’m talking about. So bloody well start spouting or else!”

Thorpey kept staring up into my face so I let him have three across it. He raised his arms to cover his head and said:

“No, don’t, Jack. Don’t.”

“Who killed him, Thorpey?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“But you know he was killed.”

“No. No.”

“Who asked you to get me out of it?”

He shook his head. I hit him again, a low uppercut connecting smack in the middle of his bowed head.

“No, don’t hit us, Jack,” he said.

“Then tell us.”

“All right. All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”

I stood back. He stayed perched on the edge of the seat, still crouching forward.

“Brumby,” he said. “He gave us the money. But that’s all I know. Honest.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He just said find out where you were and make sure you caught twelve o’clock train.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. Honest, Jack.”

“Did the boyos know where the money was coming from?”

“No, only me.”

I went back to the bed and sat down.

“Brumby eh?” I said.

“But for Christ’s sake don’t tell him I said so, Jack. Please.”

“Do you work for him all the time these days?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Just the odd jobs.”

“He wouldn’t have paid you to do something for him recently would he? Like say last Sunday?”

“Honest, Jack, that’s all. Honest.”

I took a drink. My landlady was still standing in front of the door holding the tea tray.

“Ah, that’s nice,” I said. “Just what we all need. A nice cup of tea.”

She didn’t look quite so indignant as she’d looked before. She put the tray down on the dressing table and began to pour the tea out.

“Brumby,” I said again.

“Can I go now?” said Thorpey.

“No, you bloody well can’t,” I said.

“Who’s Brumby?” said Keith.

“Cliff Brumby?” I said. “Ever been to Cleethorpes?”

Keith nodded.

“Ever walked into an arcade and put a penny in a slot machine?”

“Yes,” said Keith.

“Well, ten to one the slot machine belongs to Brumby and like as not the bloody arcade as well. Same in Brid and Skeggie. Isn’t that right, Thorpey?”

Thorpey didn’t answer.

“Where does Cliff hang out these days, Thorpey?”

No reply.

“Thorpey?”

“You might find him at the Conservative Club. He goes there most Fridays. He’s a snooker player.”

“And where does he live?”

“He’s got a house at Burnham.”

“What’s the address?”

No reply.

“Thorpey?”

“House is called ‘Pantiles.’ He had it built a year or so ago.”

“Well,” I said. Thanks very much.”

My landlady gave me a cup of tea.

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Garfoot. Or may I call you Edna?”

“Suppose you tell me just what the bloody hell’s going on. It is my house you know.”

I poured some whisky into my tea and stirred it up.

“Yes,” I said. “You’ve been very good about the whole thing, Edna, you really have.”

“Stick the soft soap. Let’s be having it.”

I drank my tea and stood up.

“Can’t explain right now,” I said. “Have to go out for a bit. Keith’ll put you in the picture.”

“Keith?”

“Oh,” I said shrugging on my jacket, “I’m ever so sorry. Edna, Keith. Keith, Edna.”

“Who says he’s staying here?” said my landlady.

“Well, he has to, doesn’t he? Till I come back. Make sure Thorpey doesn’t walk out and make a couple of phone calls.”

“Oh, heck,” said Thorpey.

“Now just a minute …” said my landlady.

“Ta-ra,” I said. “Oh and Keith, ta very much. You’ve been a big help. I’ll see you’re all right. Okay, mate?”

Keith half smiled.

“Right, mate,” he said.

I closed the door and went down the stairs.

I tried the Conservative Club first.

There was no receptionist this time. I walked straight in. There was a badly lit hallway with two fruit machines standing on either side like sentries. Nobody was playing them. Rooms with closed doors lined the hallway. At the far end were some double doors and beyond those doors there were the sounds of snooker. I walked down the hall and through the doors.

There were six tables, all occupied. The ceiling was very, very high and the table lights looked a bit daft suspended on their thin wires that went upwards through the acres of darkness. There was a raised platform about a foot high going round the whole of the room and on this platform there were benches flush to the wall so that the non-players could sit and watch the players. Brumby was among neither of these two groups. Apart from the lights above the tables the only bright light in the room was in one corner and it came from the tiny curved bar at which the steward leaned, his chin cupped in his hands, watching the game on the table nearest the bar. That is, until he saw me. Then he straightened up and frowned. He was about to lift the bar flap and come through to say a few words to me but I didn’t give him the chance. I was at the bar before you could say ‘Members Only.’

“I’m very sorry to intrude like this,” I said, “but I have an urgent message for a Mr. Brumby. Could you tell me where I’m likely to find him?”

“This is very irregular,” he said. “We never allow non-members unaccompanied into the club.”

“No, I know,” I said, “like I said, I’m sorry to intrude like this, but it is rather urgent.”

“And nobody’s allowed in after eleven,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I know. But you see I was told Mr. Brumby might be here and it’s a matter that really could do with his attention …”

“To do with his business is it?” said the nosey old bugger.

“No, not exactly,” I said. “But it is rather urgent.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“A friend of Mr. Brumby’s. Now …”

“Never seen you before.”

“No. I’ve just driven up from London.”

“Oh, yes?”

I began to walk away from the bar.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he said.

“To look for Mr. Brumby.”

“Well it’s no good looking here,” he said. “Mr. Brumby hasn’t been in tonight.”

I turned round.

“Oh?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not tonight. It’s the Police Ball, isn’t it?”

The night was very black and the roads were very narrow. The windscreen wipers droned on and on. I looked at my watch. The luminous hands said ten past one. If the dance finished at one o’clock it would take him about thirty-five to forty minutes to drive out to Burnham. I’d be ahead of him by about twenty minutes. If the dance didn’t finish until half past one or two o’clock then I’d have a long wait. But I didn’t mind that.

The road dipped and the headlights picked out the sign that said Burnham. I slowed down. It was only a small village and I didn’t want to miss the house.

There wasn’t much chance of that. I stopped the car and wound the window down. Set back from the road on quite a steep rise was a new ranch-style house. All the lights were on. There were a lot of cars parked in the drive and up and down the road. A lot of noise was going on inside but I couldn’t hear much of it. I could only see the people who were making it. The house was packed with kids. A little party for the offspring while Mummy and Daddy kissed the Chief Inspector’s bum. Well, there wasn’t much point in ringing that musical doorbell for a while. I backed the car up on to the grass verge on the opposite side of the road to the house and lit a fag and watched and waited. A few people came out and got into cars and went and one young bloke came out on all fours and was sick all over the begonias but apart from that nothing much happened except that the insides of the windows got steamier and the music got noisier.

About quarter to two a nice new Rover crept down the road and turned into the drive. The car braked abruptly in the middle of the gateway. The engine was turned off. Nothing happened for a minute or two. Then the passenger door opened and Cliff Brumby got out. He looked very nice. He had on a beautiful dark double-breasted overcoat which he wore undone and draped round his shoulders was a tasselled white silk scarf. His height added to his elegant appearance as did his beautifully barbered greying hair. He looked more like Henry Cabot Lodge just come from the White House than a fiddling slot machine king just come from the Police Ball.

He stood looking at the house for a full minute, not moving, his hand on the car door.

“Fuck me,” he said.

He still didn’t move.

“Now Cliff,” came a woman’s voice from inside the car, “don’t get mad. You’ll only regret it.”

Cliff slammed the door of the car, as hard as I’d slammed the door of the car on his boyo earlier in the evening.

“I’ll murder the little bitch,” he said.

“Cliff …” said the woman’s voice.

Cliff strolled up the drive, deliberately not hurrying. He stopped once to look at the young blood sleeping among the begonias. He looked at him for quite some time before turning away. When he got to the front door he didn’t open it and simply go in. Instead, he rang the bell and stepped back and folded his arms. The musical chimes were just strident enough to separate themselves from the rest of the noise. A red dress rippled behind the full length frosted glass panel. The door opened. The girl was very pretty. Her eyes were very bright and her cheeks were very red and she looked very happy until she saw who was standing there before her.

“Daddy,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Bloody Daddy.”

“But it’s only quarter to two,” she said thinking out loud. “The dance doesn’t finish till two o’clock.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Perhaps this’ll teach you never to bet on certainties.”

The girl’s face began to crumble.

“And this is what you call having a few friends in for coffee is it?” said Cliff.

“Oh-h,” the girl said.

Cliff began to walk past her into the house.

“Running bloody riot over my bloody furniture, drinking my bloody booze, spewing all over my …”

The rest was lost as he disappeared inside. The door on the driver’s side of the Rover opened and the woman got out. She was wearing a white evening dress, very plain and beautiful, and a mink coat, also very plain and beautiful. The trouble was, she was fat, so the beautiful dress and the beautiful coat didn’t really matter very much. She stood there watching the house and chewing herself up. I couldn’t see a bloke like Cliff spending more hours a day with her than he had to.

People started pouring out of the house. The music stopped. Cars started. Cliff was visible through the windows as he went from room to room directing operations. Finally he appeared at the door, helping out a boy and a girl holding them by the scruffs of their necks. The girl looked very rumpled and the boy was having trouble with his fly which had somehow got jammed.

After Cliff had propelled this particular couple on their way, he wandered over to the begonias and picked up the young blood and carried him down the drive and dropped him on the grass verge by the gateway.

“Cliff, be careful,” said the woman.

“Shut up,” said Cliff.

He walked back to the house. The woman followed. Cliff stood to one side to let the last few people leave. He looked into the face of each one of them as they passed him. When they’d gone he went into the house.

“Sandra!”

It was a wonder his double glazing stayed intact. The woman went into the house and closed the door but I could still hear Cliff’s voice.

“Sandra!”

There was a silence then I saw Cliff appear beyond one of the upstairs windows. He stood with his back to the window looking down at a point out of sight inside the bedroom. He began shouting again.

I got out of the car and closed the door.

I crossed the road and walked up the drive. I stood outside the front door for a few moments. Cliff was still delivering his spiel upstairs. The rest of the house was silent. There was no sound of glasses being moved or ashtrays being emptied or furniture being straightened.

I opened the front door and closed it behind me without making any noise at all.

I was in a square hall. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t small. A fitted carpet washed across the floor and its floral pattern was far too big to fit into the space it occupied. There was a low staircase, central to the hall that turned at right angles three times before it reached the balcony that ran all the way around the four walls. The banisters and balcony railings were white-glossed wrought iron. The wallpaper was floral, too. The pattern was not much smaller than the pattern on the carpet. There was a print of the green-faced Oriental Girl in a white frame on one of the walls and on another wall high up there was a pair of plastic duelling pistols. In one corner near the front door was a glass topped wrought iron telephone table with a red telephone on it. All the doors leading off the hall had full length panels of frosted glass set into them. One of the doors was open. Without moving from the front door I looked through it. I could see the whole of a big white armchair and part of a matching sofa. Beyond the sofa, I could see part of a farmhouse-style brick-fronted fireplace with an electric fire set in the middle of it. The fire was just warming up. On the mantelpiece there were lots of glasses and ashtrays. Above the glasses and ashtrays there was Flatford Mill.

I walked into the room. Mrs. Brumby was sitting at the end of the sofa that had previously been out of sight. She still had her coat on. She was looking at the bars of the electric fire. Her elbow was resting on the arm of the sofa and her fingers were slowly stroking her forehead, as if she was trying to get rid of a mild headache. She didn’t notice me at first.

“Good evening,” I said.

At first all she did was to turn her head slowly as if she wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary, but when she saw me she stood up very quickly and knocked an ashtray off the arm of the sofa.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” I said. “I pressed the bell but nothing happened. So as the door was open …”

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The name’s Carter. Jack Carter.”

“Have you come about the noise?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m an old friend of Cliff’s. I thought I’d drop in as there’s something I’d like to talk to him about.”

At first there was slight relief in her face then her subsequent expressions described what was going through her mind. An old friend. From the old days. At this time of night. She looked at her watch, then up to the ceiling. Cliff’s voice droned on and on.

“I know it’s a bit of an odd time to be calling,” I said. “But it is rather urgent.”

“What do you want to see Cliff about?”

“Well, actually, it is business …” I said.

“I know all about Cliff’s business,” she said.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Well?”

“Look, Mrs. Brumby,” I said. “I’m not acting for myself, understand. Just tell Cliff Jack Carter from London’s here to see him.”

She raised her chin a bit and looked at me.

“How am I supposed to know it’s business?” she said. “Why should I take your word for it? I don’t know.”

“But you know Gerald and Les Fletcher, don’t you?” I said.

She looked at me some more and I could tell she believed I was with Gerald and Les. But she didn’t know what to believe about why I was there. But whatever the reason she knew I wouldn’t be leaving until I’d seen Cliff. So she concentrated her look for a bit longer and then walked quickly out of the room and up the stairs.

I looked round the room. Over on the other side of the room in front of the picture window that looked out on to I don’t know what was a reproduction refectory table with matching dining chairs. The table was awash with drink. Empty Pipkins took up a third of the table top. The rest was just glasses and booze from Cliff’s musical cocktail cabinet. On one edge of the table a cigarette had burned a nice little groove in the polished oak.

Upstairs things were happening. The voices were now droning on, but much softer. Then there was quiet. A door opened and closed. Footsteps ruffled the stair carpet. Cliff Brumby came into the room. I turned to face him. He didn’t look very pleased at all. I don’t think I could have been looking too happy either because there was something stirring down in my gut, a feeling I didn’t like very much. It had something to do with my looking at Cliff’s face and seeing what I saw there.

“What the fucking hell’s all this?” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I suppose you know what the bloody time is?”

I nodded. He told me anyway.

“It’s quarter past two in the bloody morning.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

I took out my fags and lit one.

“Dot told me the Fletchers sent you. What’s so bloody important it can’t wait till the morning?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “The Fletchers didn’t send me.”

He looked at me. Then he walked forward and clenched his fist and pointed his index finger at my face about an inch from my nose.

“Now look,” he said. “Just bloody look. I’m not in the mood tonight. I’ve had it. Right up to here. So let’s not try and be too funny, eh? Because I don’t feel much like bloody laughing.”

“I made a mistake,” I said.

“What?”

“I said it looks as if I’ve made a mistake.”

“A mistake? About what?”

“I was given some wrong information.”

“Wrong information? What about?”

“I was given some wrong information about you. I’ve known it was wrong since you came into this room.”

Cliff sat down on the arm of the sofa. Things were dawning.

“It wasn’t business, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t business,” I said.

There was a silence. Things dawned on him.

“You came here to do me. Is that it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What for, Jack?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“You’d rather not say?”

“Cliff, I made a mistake. I’ve got to get back. See somebody about something.”

I began to walk over to the door. Cliff whisked up from the sofa and grabbed my lapels.

“Now just you bloody well look here. I don’t like hard cases walking in and out of my house in the middle of the night threatening to do me. You’re not leaving here until you’ve explained your bloody self. You came here to do me and I want to know what for. If somebody’s been putting something about about me, I want to know who the fucking hell it is. And when I know what it is and who’s been saying it, I just might want to take the matter up with you, Jack, mightn’t I?”

“You might,” I said. “And then again, you might not.”

“Meaning?”

“Cliff, you’re a big bloke—you’re in good shape. But I know more than you do.”

It wasn’t exactly the best thing I could have said. Cliff swung me round with all his strength and flung me down on the settee. He leant over me and only just managed to stop himself from smashing my face in.

“Now then, cuntie,” he said. “Let’s be having you.”

I let him have me. I kicked him hard on his shin and gave him one in his gut, not too hard, but hard enough.

I stood up. This time it was my turn with the lapels. I straightened him up and looked into his face. It was slightly greyer than it had been before.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “Some things go against the grain.”

I walked out of the room. Mrs. Brumby was standing stock still on the stairs.

“Goodnight,” I said.

I opened the front door. Mrs. Brumby ran into the front room.

“What happened?” I heard her say. “Are you all right? Who was it? What did he want?”

“None of your bloody business.”

“There was trouble, wasn’t there?”

“Isn’t it about time you started clearing up the bloody mess your daughter’s made?”

A slight pause.

“Yes, Cliff. I suppose it is.”

I closed the door as quietly as I’d done when I’d come in.

I backed the car into the garage and walked round to the front door of the boarding house. It was open. Only a few inches, but it was open.

I didn’t make any noise. The light was still on, illuminating the air a few feet round the bulb and nothing else. There was no sound in the house.

I walked over to the foot of the stairs. The door into the kitchen at the end of the hall opened slightly. Whoever was in the kitchen preferred to be in there without any lights on.

I turned from the foot of the stairs and walked quickly down the hall and pushed the kitchen door wide open. It opened inwards. The door bumped against whoever it was who’d begun to open it. I felt inside the doorway and flicked the light switch. There was a small scream. I yanked the door back and slammed it to behind me. My landlady was standing there trying to press herself into the wallpaper. There was a bruise under her right eye. It was going to be quite a rainbow. She was wearing a long red dressing gown with a wafting white feather collar. She was holding a glass and a cigarette in her left hand and in her right hand she was holding an ornamental brass poker. She looked at me and I looked at her.

“Well,” I said. “What happened?”

She stopped looking at me and went over to the kitchen table. She picked up a bottle of brandy. It was good stuff. She poured some of the good stuff into her glass.

“They came back, didn’t they?”

She took a drink.

“One of them did. With two different fellers.”

“What happened?”

“What the Christ do you think happened?”

I didn’t say anything.

“They came for that bloke, didn’t they? They knew you wouldn’t be here. They thought it was all very funny.”

“All right,” I said. “So what happened? What did they do to Keith?”

“They took him with them. The one who was here before wasn’t very pleased with him.”

“What happened to you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Well?”

“Put it this way; you owe me for a new blouse.”

“You were lucky,” I said, lighting up. I looked round the kitchen. On the wall was a whitewood cabinet. I slid the glass door back and took out a cup. I went over to the table and sat down on a kitchen chair and poured myself a brandy.

“Is that it, then?” said my landlady.

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t care, do you? They could have done anything.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And what about that lad? Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

“Nothing I can do, is there?”

“What’ll they do to him?”

“Hard to say, offhand.”

I took a drink.

She rushed over to the kitchen door and pulled it open so that it banged on the kitchen wall.

“Get out,” she screamed. “Get out of my house.”

I took another drink. She began to cry.

“Bloody rotten sod, you are,” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are? They hurt me tonight. They bloody hurt me.”

“That’s nothing to what they did to my brother,” I said.

“And what are you going to do? Do it back to them?”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t get very far tonight, did you?”

I didn’t answer.

“What happened? Did you murder the wrong man?”

“No I bloody didn’t so put a sock in it.”

“Oh, they were full of it when they came to get Thorpey. Thorpey really thought it was funny.”

“Shut up.”

“He was saying as how he’d been told to tell you Brumby’d sent him if they couldn’t manage you. Thorpey said he’d like to have seen Brumby’s face when you tackled him.”

“And why should Brumby fix me if four of them bastards couldn’t?”

“You’re missing the point. They were hoping you might fix Brumby. Kill him, with a bit of luck. They know you’re not the kind of bloke to ask questions first. Thorpey said it’d kill two birds with one stone. Get Brumby out of the way and you fixed for doing him at the same time. Thorpey’s waiting to hear what happened so he can phone somebody he knows at Cop Shop and tell him all about it.”

“Well, he’ll be disappointed, won’t he?”

“What happened? Was Brumby bigger than you expected?”

I said nothing.

“Bloody brave aren’t you with a little bloke like Thorpey.”

“Shut up.”

“Good job Keith was there to help you out earlier. Pity though, isn’t it, that you’re not there when he needs a hand.”

“Do you want something?”

“Oh, yes. You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

“No, but you might.”

She rushed over to me.

“Would you like to see the bruises?”

“Why? Do you want to show me?”

She hit me across the face. I hit her back. She hit me again. I stood up and took hold of her by the wrists and swung her against the wall. I let go of her before she connected and walked out of the kitchen and down the hall and began to go up the stairs. She ran out of the kitchen.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she screamed.

“To bed. Coming?” I said, not stopping.

She ran to the bottom of the stairs.

“You’ll get out! You’ll bloody well get out! If you don’t I’ll call the police.”

“Sure you will,” I said, going into the bedroom.

I went over to the bed and lifted the counterpane. I took the long parcel from underneath the bed and began to unwrap the newspapers. My landlady appeared in the doorway but I didn’t take any notice of her. She took a lot of notice of me when she saw I was unwrapping a shotgun. I broke the gun and took the box of cartridges from the hold-all and put two up the spout.

“What are you going to do with that?” she said.

“Protect my goods and chattels.”

“They won’t be back tonight? Will they?”

I snapped the gun together again.

“You never know,” I said.

“And you’d use that if they did?”

“Don’t be bloody silly. You only have to point one of these to get results.”

“Then why have you loaded it?”

“Somebody might think I was bluffing. I’d like to be certain I wasn’t.”

“Jesus,” she said wearily.

I leant the gun against the wall next to the bed and stretched out and closed my eyes. I heard my landlady walk over to the bedside table and pick up one of the cups and pour something into it.

“Why did they kill your brother?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t know who ‘they’ are either.”

“Didn’t Thorpey have anything to do with it then?”

“I very much doubt it. He wouldn’t have the nerve.”

“He had the nerve to send you on a wild goose chase tonight.”

“That wasn’t nerve; that was betting on a dead cert. I wasn’t supposed to finish up back here whichever way the land lay. He’ll be peeing his pants when he finds out I didn’t act true to type.”

“Will you go after him?”

“I would if I thought I could catch him. He’s probably half-way to Doncaster or Barnsley or somewhere by now. He won’t be back until I’ve been gone a month.”

“What about Keith? What are you going to do about him?”

“Give him some money.”

“That’s a lot of use to him right now.”

“I don’t know where he lives, do I? I don’t know where they’ve taken him, do I? Do you know?”

“No.”

“There you are then.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. I sat up and had a big drink and lay down again and closed my eyes.

“What are you going to do if you catch who did it?” she said.

“What do you think?”

Another silence.

“Why?” she said.

“He was my brother.”

She sat down on the bed.

“You’d just kill them? Just like that?”

“If they didn’t kill me first.”

“Could you do it? I mean without worrying about it?”

“Anybody could if it was their own flesh and blood as was involved and they knew they weren’t going to get caught.”

“And you’re not going to get caught?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.”

After a little while she said:

“Supposing I phoned the police and told them that there was a bloke in my boarding house with a shotgun and he’d told me he was off to shoot somebody with it?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“Because I know you wear green underwear.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Think about it.”

She thought about it.

There was a long long pause in which nothing at all happened except that I opened my eyes and found that I was looking into hers. She wasn’t looking at me as though she liked me but then she didn’t have to. Women that wear green underwear don’t. I stretched an arm out and pulled open the front of her dressing gown. The bra matched what I’d already seen. There was a bruise near her left nipple. She kept looking at me.

“What did they do?” I said.

“One of them ripped my blouse. Another punched me. They would have gone on if Thorpey hadn’t started getting worried about things.”

I touched the bruise with my finger.

“He hit you there, did he?” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“That couldn’t have been very pleasant,” I said. “Or could it?”

“You’re a bastard, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer, I kept massaging the bruise. Then she leant backwards so that her back was arched across my chest. She undid the cord on her dressing gown and then squirmed her arms underneath her and unhooked her bra and left her arms where they were, pinned underneath her. I extended the massaging to cover a larger area. Eventually, still lying across me, she rolled over on to her side, facing away from me.