Jack Carter's Law (24 page)

I push the door open so there’s room enough for Peter to go through and when he’s done that I follow him and close and lock the door behind us. We’re in a small square unlit hall. Including the front door there is a door in each of the four walls. One of the doors is open about an inch and this is where the light and the voice are coming from. I walk the couple of steps it takes to get to the door and I have a look to see what I can see through the crack.

Eddie’s been very considerate because he’s placed himself precisely where I can see him. He’s standing over by the window with his back to the room, looking out at the falling snowflakes. The phone’s pressed to his ear and whoever he’s talking to is doing all the talking at the moment because Eddie’s just making the occasional grunt of agreement. He’s wearing the waistcoat and trousers to a very nice dove-gray pin-stripe suit and on his feet he’s wearing a pair of tartan carpet slippers.

I push the door open very, very slowly. Eddie continues nodding and grunting so without making a sound I move into the room and Peter follows me. When we’re both in, Eddie puts the receiver down on the cradle which is perched on the windowsill and scratches his head and shoves his hands in his pockets and continues to look out of the window until in the blackness he registers our reflections instead of the snowflakes. Then he spins round and catches the phone with his right hand and sends it crashing and tinkling to the floor. He looks from side to side like a rubbish defender looking for someone to play the ball to, then chooses a direction and begins to bluster through the furniture in the direction of the kitchenette but I take off at a tangent and cut him off and at the same time Peter pulls a chair directly in front of the door we’ve just come through and sits down in it and takes out a cheroot and lights it up. Eddie now is forced to forget his instincts and pulls himself up short to try and rationalise the situation. He knows there’s nothing he can say, because if there was we wouldn’t be there. There’s no way out for him, but he can’t prevent the cogs in his brain turning and turning just in case he can come up with something. So I light up a cigarette and look round the place and wait for Eddie to reach his logical conclusion.

The place is done out like a miniature brothel. Everything that is possible to have a pattern on it is patterned: the suite, the curtains, the wallpaper, the carpet, the cushions. One wall consists of rose-tinted paneled mirrors and yet in the middle of those panels is set an electric fire and round this fire there is even an inlaid pattern of roses. In fact all the patterns are floral (but never the same one twice) and the whole effect makes the ramrod stripes of Eddie’s beautiful suiting seem quite spectacularly out of place, like a graph superimposed over a flower study. And then there are the ornaments. There are a couple of shelves on the wall where the window is that are brimful of miniature liqueur and spirit bottles. Then there are three whole shelves on a bookcase that are stacked with mementos of holidays abroad, like pot sombreros or ashtrays set in basket weave or little figures of donkeys in sombreros with little bambinos leading them or cellophane encased dolls in national costume, or models of famous pieces of architecture with tiny barometers set in relevant positions to the design. And then there are the reproductions: Picasso’s
Clown
, Tretchikoff’s
The Tear
, and the wild horses in the surf.

I throw my spent match in a wastebin with a floral pattern which is set in a mock wrought-iron receptacle and I say, “I always thought it quiet round here, Eddie, until I saw the inside of this place.”

By this time Eddie has reached the macaroni stage and his face has gone as slack as a melting waxwork and the only thing that stops him sinking to his knees on the carpet is the unconscious awareness of the knife edges in his trousers. His mouth is wide open like the mouth of a fish with a hook inside it but he’s not going to be able to control his lips so that he can form any words. His face is the colour of vanilla ice cream and beads of oily sweat are slowly following the downward pattern of his expression. Inside he must be wishing he’d worshiped a little more fastidiously at the shrine of the God he’s now praying to.

“Well,” I say. “Eddie.”

Eddie’s hands move briefly as though somebody’s pulling the strings and I walk over to him and flip the top of my cigarette packet and offer him a cigarette but all that happens is that his mouth falls open a little bit wider. So I take hold of one of his hands and insert a cigarette between the fore and middle fingers and lift his arm and hold his hand so that the cigarette is near his lips and he automatically does the rest himself. I light the cigarette for him and he manages to inhale and while he’s doing that I draw well back and hit him as hard as I can just below his breastbone. The punch makes him stagger backwards rather than fall over immediately but he’s got to fall over sometime and when he does it’s across a low table next to the colour telly, upending the little wrought-iron magazine holder and scattering the telly papers all over the place. I give him a few minutes to get his breath back and to pass the time I watch the cigarette I gave him burn a hole in the centre of one of the flowers in the pattern on the carpet.

When Eddie’s got himself back together I say to him, “As you know, we haven’t the time to play mulberry bushes. All we want to know is what’s happening, from beginning to end. That’s all we want, Eddie, and I think you know that shooting shit won’t help your position one little bit.”

Eddie drags himself up off the floor and supports himself on the back of an easy chair and exercises his lungs for a couple of minutes.

Then he looks up at me and says, “What’s going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know, Eddie,” I tell him.

He looks down at the back of the chair again and nods.

“Yes,” he says.

I sit down in the opposite armchair and say, “Tell us first, Eddie. You never know, depending on what kind of fairy tale it is there might just be a happy ending.”

Eddie stays the way he is for a minute then works his way round to the front of the chair and eases himself down into it. Then he sees the cigarette lying on the floor burning its way through the carpet and he bends over and picks it up and flicks the ash into an ashtray and takes a drag.

Then he passes his hand through his hair and is about to speak, but before he can, I say, “First, Eddie. The wife. The kids. Where are they?”

“They’re out of it,” he says. “They’re away. That I’m not telling you.”

“It’s not important right now,” I tell him. “Just didn’t want us to be interrupted once you got into full flow.’’

Eddie takes another drag on his cigarette.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he says.

I don’t make any comment on his statement so there’s no alternative but for him to go on. “I mean, I said to Wally, ‘We’re all right as we are, aren’t we? What’s wrong with the setup we already have? This idea is going to bring us nothing but fucking strife.’ But Wally just rubbed his hands together and said he’d been looking forward to a setup like this for years.”

Eddie puts the cigarette out in the ashtray. He looks at me and then at Peter and then back to me.

“What was the idea, Eddie?” I say to him.

“Well, it wasn’t even Wally’s idea, was it? I mean, if it hadn’t been served up to him he’d never have thought of it by himself, would he? I mean, be fair. Would he?”

“So whose idea was it?”

Eddie makes sure he’s not looking into my eyes when he says, “Hume.”

Eddie might be avoiding my eyes but I can certainly feel Peter’s boring into the back of my neck when the word drops into the silence of the room.

“See, Hume comes round to see Wally one day about this bullion job we put out over in Bromley. He comes steaming in with his usual spiel about how he’s fitted up somebody who wasn’t even on the job and how to save himself ten out of twenty this somebody’s going to stand up and point at me and Wally. Of course, Wally tells Hume to piss off and go and play in the next street. I mean, the thing is that this somebody’s a geezer called Danny Ross and Wally did Danny a great big favour once and Danny’s soft as shit and he’d do thirty rather than point at me and Wally and Wally tells Hume as much. Hume doesn’t like it, understandably enough, so he takes his pleasure by saying that if Danny’s such an old mucker of ours we’ll enjoy seeing him do a twenty-five for this and a couple of others Hume will fit him in on, not to mention Danny’s old lady who he’ll do for harbouring and receiving and being an accessory and all that rubbish. So Walter says all right, all right, how much? Hume calms down and then he asks us how much we fenced it for. I mean, he sat there and fucking asked us. So Walter tells him half of what we got for it and Hume says in that case ten grand’ll see Danny at home with his wife and kiddies until the next time. Wally says five and they finally fix a figure. And with that Hume trolleys off. For a while Wally’s blazing and all for putting a bomb outside Hume’s front door but I cool him off and he lets the matter drop. Then a month or so later Hume comes back and says to us how’d we like to have him as a permanent partner? Wally says fucking lovely, it’ll only cost us fifty grand a year at Hume’s rates, why doesn’t he start today? Hume wears it all and when Wally’s finished he says, ‘Let’s not be silly, you couldn’t even afford that if you had Gerald and Les’s patch as well,’ and Wally says, ‘Yes, you can afford anything when you’re dead.’ Hume shakes his head a few times and then puts us this proposition; first, that he’d heard he could get Finbow’s job if Finbow was out of it. And that would be a step in the right direction but Gerald and Les would still be there, Finbow or not. So, he says, supposing somebody blew the whistle on Gerald and Les? Supposing it could be guaranteed that somebody would be out of the country the day the trial ended, with a new name on his passport and free passage to anywhere he wants to go with his family and ten thousand quid out of the police fund? Plus, of course, whatever me and Wally’d want to chip in, which could make the offer much more attractive. And he says with him in West End Central and Gerald and Les and you out of the way he’d look after us the way Finbow looked after you lot. And we’d be doing twice the business, what with the shops and the clubs and the places and all those things.”

“Yes,” I say to him. “I know about those things, Eddie.”

“Look, Jack, for Christ’s sake, do me a favour, will you?” He slides off the chair and sinks to the floor and puts his hands on my knees. “Christ, I didn’t . . . ”

I take his hands away.

“Sit down and finish the story,” I say to him. “There’s time for all that afterwards.” Eddie shakes his head and a tear flicks from his eye on to the carpet but he back-pedals on his knees and finds the chair and slides back into it.

“I told Wally he’d be barmy to think of it but Wally shut me up and asked Hume if he’d worked out how to do it yet. Hume said he’d let us know and he went away. He comes back a week later and tells us he’s done some sniffing and he’s found out from someone in the Fraud Squad that Mallory’s behind some dodgy companies that are just about to make the headlines and even Mallory won’t be able to avoid getting five to seven. So he promises Mallory some friendship if he can figure a way to blow Finbow and put it on Gerald and Les. And he does. He comes up with the pictures and Jimmy Swann. Wally’s over the moon about it, especially as Hume says he’s already put it to the top brass and they’re prepared to let him play it his way and also finance Jimmy. And from then on there’s no stopping Wally. He can’t wait for the action to start.”

“What held him back last night?”

“Hume wanted him to keep buttoned up. But today when Wally heard about you getting to the Abbotts he decided to have his fun and join in. You know what Wally’s like.”

“Yes, I know what Wally’s like,” I say. I light another cigarette. “But Hume saw me last night. He could have had me then. Jimmy needn’t even have signed his statement.”

“Hume fixed Finbow but he doesn’t want anybody to know on account of being next in line. So he’s worked it that someone else does the lifting and he’s prepared to come in with any further names and evidence for the glory later on; that’s why so many names are still walking around enjoying the fresh air. But after today Hume will have to start pulling them in right away.”

Eddie stops talking. I don’t say anything for a while. Eventually I say, “So where’s Jimmy Swann?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Only Hume knows that.”

I look at him. “I’ll only ask you once more, Eddie.”

“Jack, honest. I don’t know. Christ, I’d tell you if I knew. I’ve told you everything else. Why shouldn’t I tell you that?”

“All right, we’ll leave that for the time being. So where’s Walter?”

He shakes his head again.

“Come on, Eddie,” I say to him. “You know where Walter is.”

“Yes,” he says. “I know where he is. But Jack, he’s my own brother. How can I tell you where my own brother is?”

“Quite easily,” I tell him, and wait for the reply.

After a while Eddie says, “Wally’s got this place in Suffolk. Big old farmhouse in about ten acres. Bought it last year and had it done up. He went there this afternoon. He’s staying till Boxing Day.”

I sit there and think about what Eddie’s told me. Then I say, “All right, Eddie. Put your coat on.”

“Jack . . . ” Eddie says.

“Your coat.”

Eddie’s face sags even more and he drags himself up out of his chair and I get up as well.