September Song (23 page)

From an open window on the opposite side of the street a wireless pipped its pips and the gentle reassuring voice of Jean Metcalfe announced that in Britain it was twelve noon, in Germany it was one o'clock, but home and away it was time for ‘Two-Way Family Favourites'. We turned a corner to the distant sound of ‘With a Song in My Heart'.

I didn't know where I stood with James Fitzgerald. I'm not a terribly subtle man, and I hadn't a clue what he was up to, but I was sure he wasn't playing straight with me. I also had the uneasy feeling that he might be using me for something, but I didn't know just how devious he was being. Perhaps our next meeting would give me some idea. Most likely it wouldn't. I wasn't even sure if I disliked him because he was genuinely dislikable or if it was just my prejudice against the public-school officer class. Probably a bit of both. That and the fact that he was a wrong 'un.

As we approached the Frighted Horse, I gave Charlie a couple of bob for a drink and told him to walk around the block before coming in. I just felt safer if no one in there clocked that I had any backup.

If anything, the place was more squalid than usual. A strong smell of Jeyes Fluid lay on top of all the other noxious odours, suggesting that the toilet had suffered its annual cleaning. The dull, overcast day meant that little light came in through the grimy windows, but, all the same, daylight wasn't kind to the place. A patina of dirt coated the bare boards on the floor, and decades of nicotine consumption had stained the walls and ceiling – once a fetching primrose colour, I suspected – a sludgy brown.

The few customers, as disreputable as ever, sat silently staring into pint glasses.

The barman was as thin and weasel-like as the one who'd served me the other night, but, fortunately, it wasn't the same man. This one was considerably older. Or maybe he just had more unpleasant habits that had taken even more of a toll.

I ordered a brandy and, after a quick look to make sure there was nothing too nasty in the smeared glass, sipped at it until Charlie came in. He took up a position at the opposite end of the bar to me and bought himself a bottle of stout.

I waited a couple of minutes and took another sip, then, when the barman ghosted past – he was so thin and frail that he hardly had a physical presence – I nodded to him. ‘I'm off to the lavatory,' I said.

‘What's that to me?' he said. He was a surly so and so.

‘Just mentioning it so you don't take my drink,' I said.

He gave me the sort of look most people reserve for when they sniff a rotting fish. ‘Lavvy's round the back,' he said, pointing with a jerk of his thumb.

I knew the way and went through the door and quickly up the stairs to the first floor. The first room – the one where I'd found Lee's tie and had such a close and personal encounter with the late, and probably much lamented by his mother, Billy's cosh – was empty, so I trod carefully along to the second and opened the door.

This one was just as foul-smelling and shabby but wasn't empty. It was positively crowded in comparison.

There were three men in it. Four, if you counted Philip Graham. But I've always thought of him as a boy, and he didn't present much of a threat as he was slumped in an old chair that had had the stuffing knocked out of it, much as he had, with his head lolling on his chest, giving a very passable impression of semi-consciousness. He'd been slapped about a bit and wasn't looking quite as pretty as Les would like. The drool leaking in a thin line down his chin was flecked with blood.

In any case, I wasn't doing too much counting because one of the three immaculately groomed and expensively dressed black guys was pointing a sawn-off shotgun at my midriff. It was all a bit strange and exotic for me.

‘What ya doin' here, man?' he said in a curious lilting accent that I'd heard once or twice before, when I'd popped in to one of the black clubs in pursuit of an even less pleasant and more disreputable leading man than Philip Graham, and sort of recognized as coming from the West Indies.

‘Whoa,' I said, ‘I'm just looking for the toilet. I must have got lost.'

‘Yeah,' he said, ‘you lost.'

‘Right,' I said, ‘I'm on my way.' I paused. ‘Do you know where the toilet is?'

And I might just have got away with it, if Philip Graham, with that immaculate sense of timing for which he is renown, had not chosen that very moment to swim back to something approaching consciousness.

‘Tony!' he said. ‘Tony, thank God.'

A sawn-off shotgun is not something to argue with – at that range and with the spread there's no way he could have missed me – and when the guy indicated that I should move away from the door and enter the room, I did just that. I even raised my hands, although he hadn't asked me to. I really did not want my liver, or some other useful organ, nicked by birdshot.

One of the others came over to check my pockets for lethal weapons. The tie he was wearing was pure silk, but the bright green and yellow stripes made it a bit flamboyant for my taste. Still, it probably cost more than my suit. He smelled of musky cologne, which was certainly better than the mouldy damp of the shabby room.

I've never been patted down before, and it was a strangely intimate and embarrassing experience. I didn't much care for it. Needless to say, he didn't find so much as a soggy handkerchief. I'd left that with Miss Summers.

The guy stopped feeling my waist and stepped back with a shrug. The one with the gun continued to point it unwaveringly in my direction as the third man spoke.

‘You wit' Mr Fitz?' he said.

I shook my head.

‘Only, I think I saw you wit' one of his men, yesterday,' he said.

He must have been talking about Malcolm. ‘Just a casual acquaintance,' I said.

He nodded slowly. He had a toothpick between his lips, and he moved it from one corner of his mouth to the other. Then he took it out and smiled. It was a dazzling smile, not least because one of his front teeth was gold. ‘So,' he said, ‘who you wit'?'

‘No one,' I said.

‘No one,' he repeated. ‘So, how you know James Dean here?'

‘I do some work for a film company,' I said.

He started chewing on the toothpick again. ‘What sort of work?' he said. ‘Can you get me into pictures?' He laughed, and the other two joined in.

‘No,' I said, ‘I'm just a bookkeeper.'

He looked me up and down. He didn't give me the impression that he was impressed by what he saw. ‘So, what you doin' here?' he said.

I decided to come clean. Sort of.

I pointed at Philip Graham.

‘Looking for him. The studio's a bit worried. They don't like their assets going missing.'

He nodded slowly. ‘Yeah,' he said, ‘I can dig that.' He laughed again. ‘I don't like my assets goin' missin' neither.' He took the chewed toothpick out of his mouth and dropped it on the floor. There were about a dozen more lying there. ‘So,' he said, ‘you ain't a party to the business?'

I tried to look suitably puzzled, and I probably overdid it. ‘What business?' I said. ‘Like I said, I'm a bookkeeper at Hoxton Films, so I suppose I am a party to the film business.'

He chuckled in what seemed like a friendly enough way. ‘So,' he said, ‘you don't know Ricky Mountjoy? Or where I can find him?'

I decided to answer only the second question. ‘No,' I said, as innocently as I could. ‘Sorry.'

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out another toothpick.

He stepped towards me and held the toothpick close to my left eye.

‘I hope you telling me the trut',' he said. ‘Cause if you ain't, I
will
take your eye out.' He paused, and we stood in silence, staring at each other. He wanted me to know that he meant it.

I believed him.

Thin, red threads ran across the whites of his eyes, and the dark-brown pupils were slightly dilated. His sharp eau de cologne didn't disguise the earthy, sweaty smell of him, or the strange, sweet smoky reek of his clothes.

Something about my response must have satisfied him, because he stepped back and smiled that golden smile. ‘What's your name?' he said.

‘Tony,' I said. ‘What's yours?'

He laughed, and the others chuckled. ‘I tell you what, Tony,' he said, ‘you can call me Boss.'

He seemed to find this thigh-slappingly amusing, because he roared with laughter and slapped his thighs. The other two continued to chuckle.

Right, I thought, now that you've convinced them you're no kind of threat and they've dropped their guard, it's time to do the ‘with one bound he was free' stuff. The only problem was that I couldn't think how to do it.

And then there was the only other problem: I didn't know how long Charlie would wait before he came looking for me. I really didn't want Charlie to walk into this. I couldn't be sure, but I rather thought that Charlie would come in punching, and that could end up with one or more of us with a gutful of birdshot, or whatever was in the sawn-off.

‘I'll just get on my way then,' I said, ‘if that's all right  . . .'

The man who suggested I call him Boss cocked his head to one side, a bit like a budgie before it says something its owner thinks is cute. ‘Now, Tony, I could let you walk out that door. And I could let you take this rassclart wit' you.' I assumed he was talking about Philip Graham, and I assumed he wasn't describing him as a nice young man. ‘But I ain't gonna do it. You see, your friend here, he's been messin' wit' my business, and I can't be doin' wit' that.'

‘I'm sure there must be some misunderstanding,' I said, going for the authentic bluster of the pukka white man. ‘I'm sure that we can sort this out in a friendly fashion. And impress upon Mr Graham that interfering in your business – whatever that business is – is really not on.'

‘Oh, we can sort it out, all right, and we can make sure he doesn't interfere in our business again,' he said. ‘And the t'ing is, we don't need your help to do it.'

He beamed at his two companions. They both chuckled again. Though, worryingly, these chuckles edged towards the sniggering of playground bullies.

‘Oh, I don't imagine that you
need
my help,' I said, still blustering away like a good 'un, ‘but I thought I'd offer.'

They chuckled away again.

I could only see the one firearm, but I wasn't sure. There were no suspiciously large bulges in jacket pockets that suggested impressive handguns, but I assumed they carried knives as standard kit.

I suppose I heard the sound of light footsteps on the landing outside before they did because I expected to hear them. And they, of course, were busy wetting themselves with merriment at my expense at the time.

So I was ready when someone cautiously opened the door.

And, happily, they weren't.

All three of them glanced at the door as Charlie's tousled head appeared around it.

I charged across the stained and ragged carpet and slammed the heel of my hand into the top lip of the guy with the gun. I'd aimed at the base of the nose, but I missed. My old unarmed combat instructor would have been appalled. I could still see him, a wiry little bruiser in his singlet, shorts and plimsolls, all sinew and gristle and varicose veins, standing on a coconut mat in a freezing church hall, barking instructions on how to kill someone with a rolled-up magazine.

Still, I may not have killed him – as Sergeant Wilkinson would have desired – but the blow seemed to have done the job I wanted it to as the bloke clutched at his bleeding mouth and loosened teeth and forgot he was riding shotgun. I poked a decent short left jab into his now unprotected stomach, and as he doubled up I hit him hard in the side of his face with my right forearm. He went down, bleeding all over his expensive suit, and I wrestled the gun away from him and turned back into the room.

The guy who'd patted me down was sprawled on his backside, feeling his jaw, so I was guessing he had experienced Charlie's very impressive right hand.

Boss, though, was wielding a nasty-looking blade, swishing it about in front of him, and had Charlie backed up against the wall.

As I fiddled with the sawn-off, to my utter amazement, Philip Graham, who, it seemed, had not been tied to the chair, jumped up and grabbed Boss's knife arm – who would have thought he had it in him? – allowing Charlie a free hit. Which Charlie duly made the most of, following a left jab with a cracking right cross. Boss dropped with all the grace and dignity of a sack of potatoes. Philip Graham kicked him in the ribs, hard. I looked at the blood clotted around young Philip's nose and caked around his mouth, and I couldn't find it in my heart to chastise him.

The man who Charlie had taken out first, the one who'd searched me, was struggling to his feet, and I walked over and pointed the sawn-off at him. His tie was looking a bit more garish than before, as a little blood had dribbled down his chin and splashed on it. He was still a bit glassy-eyed and finding it difficult to focus and even harder to stand still. His legs wavered a little, as if he was too heavy to support.

I pointed the gun at the crumpled heap of tailoring that had called itself Boss.

‘Tell him this is all over,' I said. ‘There will be no more interference in your business from him.' I waved the gun vaguely in the direction of Philip Graham. ‘I guarantee it. Do you understand?'

He nodded.

‘You take this any further with him,' I said, ‘and I will personally see to it that you regret it.'

He nodded his understanding again and dabbed at his mouth with his tie. His business must have paid a lot better than mine if he could treat a silk tie like that.

The nodding head did not reassure me. As I stared at him, he gave me the kind of hard-eyed, contemptuous look that left me with the distinct impression that he was more than prepared to risk my wrath. Then he spat bloody spittle on to the floor.