Wildeve handed out brown envelopes to the blokes in uniform and told them to collect every bit of mashed potato. It was not a way to make friends or influence people.
Driving back along the Hampstead Road in Jack’s Wolseley, Troy took the gun out of its wrapping—a page from that evening’s Standard—and held it between his fingertips. It was tiny, almost weightless. The bore could not be more than .20. And he’d never seen anything like it. He often examined a gun by sticking a pencil up the barrel and holding it like a lollipop, but he couldn’t get a pencil up the barrel of this one. It must have been like shooting someone with a needle.
At red traffic lights, Jack glanced across.
“Looks like a toy.”
“Feels like one, too.”
The lights changed. Jack slipped the car into first.
“Y’know what strikes me, Freddie? The balls of it. The sheer bollocks of shooting a man in broad daylight, with people milling all round; shooting a chap with something that looks like a popgun and then just kicking it away and carrying on as though nothing had happened. Now, I know that’s what I said I’d do myself but that was a hypothetical me. I think this took balls of steel.”
“I’m inclined to agree. Even allowing for the innate lack of curiosity of the English, their ability to walk round a corpse and hurry home for tea, I’m still inclined to agree.”
Crossing Fitzroy Square, towards the north end of Charlotte Street, Troy said, “Can you handle this alone?”
“Something urgent?”
“I’m meeting a new nark. Someone I’ve heard of but never actually met. He’s being sold to me as a man who knows everything and everyone in Soho and Fitzrovia.”
“Then,” Jack said, “given the late Mr. Skolnik lived bang in the middle of Fitzrovia, perhaps your nark knew him.”
“It’ll be the first thing I ask him about,” said Troy.
It wasn’t.