Utterly Monkey (24 page)

‘You serious?’

Danny nodded.

‘We could I suppose. Get up early and drive to his hotel.’

‘And wait for him to come out. Just follow him.’

‘You’re not going to work then?’

‘Nope,’ Danny looked at his diving watch, ‘and it’s already gone four. We might as well stay up and wait.’

‘Here…Check it out.’ Geordie was nodding through the windscreen. A voluptuous white girl was walking down the pavement towards them. She wore tight jeans and a pink cropped top that was trying and failing to control her breasts. They’d parked outside the Kingston Shamrock Bed & Breakfast (which, surprisingly perhaps, had NO VACANCIES, according to a handwritten page blu-tacked to its front window). The Lord Gregory was opposite, several times larger, with upper parts that faced onto the High Road. Its blue front door, on this side street, was for now firmly shut.

‘Okay but wait…wait…wait…There…Minging.’

‘Yeah, not a great puss on her.’

‘Albert would term your problem the eternal optimism of the hopelessly short-sighted.’

On the train to a departmental conference in Brighton,
Danny and Albert had sat facing forward and across the aisle from each other. They’d spent the hour and a half watching women walk down the carriage towards them. Danny hadn’t his glasses on and Albert had accordingly diagnosed his misjudgements as the eternal etc. Geordie ignored Danny’s comment: he didn’t seem to like Albert. After a lengthy pause he said, ‘I keep thinking I can see Ian’s big baldy head popping out the door. I’m on tentative hooks with this waiting.’

‘Tenterhooks,’ Danny murmured reflexively.

‘Tender hooks.’

‘
Tent
erhooks.’

It was 7.13 a.m. and they were sitting in Danny’s musty red Polo on Butler Street in Kilburn. He hadn’t driven it for over a month and each time he’d spotted the parked car out the living room window he had felt vaguely guilty, like it was an unwalked dog. Despite this neglect the car had started first time and the traffic through London had been pretty light.

Geordie was wearing a red baseball cap that was too big for his head and gave him the look of a child with leukaemia. Danny, his partner on the stakeout, the sensible one, had put on his glasses and a floppy navy sunhat. Geordie said it was like a reconstruction from
Crimewatch
. Danny had wound the window down a few inches to let in some air: Geordie was jubilantly farting. Although their hangovers were not yet biting, they were both knackered, and their initial enthusiasm for the big adventure had quickly dried up. After smoking a couple of spliffs at the kitchen table they had adjourned to the sofa and watched
In the Heat of the Night.
Sitting in the car Danny tried to keep focused. He was Sidney Poitier
as Mr Tibbs: maligned and mistreated, but dignified, handsome and coolly determined to bring wrongdoers to justice.

Around six, after Mr Tibbs had overcome the racism, apprehended the killer, and the final credits had rolled, Danny had grilled some bacon while Geordie made two mugs of coffee. There was no blind in the kitchen and the pale dawn gave the white work surfaces the ghostly sheen of milk. They sat at the kitchen table again, in the same seats as before, eating the sandwiches in silence and staring at nothing. Then they’d sloped off to get dressed and organized. When Geordie gently opened the door of the boxroom Danny caught a glimpse of Janice’s silver-blonde hair fanned over a pillow. He hadn’t seen it down before. She looked like a nineteen-forties movie star.

He rang directory enquiries and wrote down the Lord Gregory’s address, then found an
A to Z
on the windowsill in his bedroom. Geordie had washed and was now pottering around the kitchen filling a plastic bag with supplies: a full two-litre carton of milk, the fat yellow claw of a bunch of bananas, and an unopened packet of Jaffa Cakes. They were ready.

At half-seven Geordie stated for the fourth time that he could
murder another bacon bap
and started peeling a second banana. The smell of Geordie’s bananas and flatulence was advancing the cause of Danny’s nausea. He wound the window down further and opened the biscuits. His stomach was burbling, bewildered at all the abuse it was getting. A street cleaner slowly crossed by the lights at the junction, pushing his cart like a barrow boy heading to market. Danny slid a whole Jaffa Cake
into his mouth. This was quite a nice road, although the trees that speckled the pavement with shadow were inconsistently spaced, and so near to the terraced houses that Danny found himself thinking about subsidence insurance. He was trying to worry about what had happened at work, about what he had done
to
work, but found that he couldn’t concentrate. They would probably sack him. That was true and it was serious. But he had some savings. Maybe he would go travelling. Or move back home. Or get another job. There must be other jobs. All of the people who lived in
these
houses must make enough money to live on.

By eight o’clock Geordie had fallen asleep and was snoring, but very faintly, as if miles away someone was using a chainsaw. Danny had finished cleaning his nails with a paperclip he’d found in the ashtray. He noticed a fleck of something in the vitreous humour of his right eye and played ping pong with it for a moment, flicking and skiffling it from the treetop to the lamppost and back.

By seventeen minutes past eight Danny had nodded off and Geordie’d woken up. His head had slipped down off the edge of the car seat and knocked into the window. He was restless and opened the glove compartment where there was a road atlas of the United Kingdom and a thick black marker. He started flicking through the atlas. Who knew Birmingham was there? Or that London was so far south? The satellite picture of the British Isles on the cover made it look as if Britain was trying to hug Ireland. Or eat it. He uncapped the marker. Danny shifted around in his seat, still asleep. Geordie leaned over and carefully daubed a Hitler moustache across Danny’s
philtrum. Danny stirred and Geordie withdrew, rocking about in his seat in excitement.

At 8.32 Danny was woken when a kid on a skateboard went past, clack-clacking over the slabs of the pavement. Geordie was grinning and chuckling softly to himself.

‘What’s funny?’ Danny said, irritated.

‘Nothing,’ Geordie ventured.

‘You wouldn’t think so.’

Geordie immediately capitulated: there was no one else to appreciate the joke.

‘Stop being such a Nazi,’ he said, still grinning. Danny noticed Geordie glancing at his upper lip and leaned over to look in the mirror.

‘You stupid cunt.’ He tried to wipe it off but just managed to smudge one half of it into a Mexican’s droopy moustache. Geordie cackled. Danny grabbed the pen from Geordie’s hand and chucked it out the window. Immediately he regretted not keeping it, and not holding Geordie down to scrawl an obscenity with it on the plaque of the little shit’s forehead.

At a quarter to nine Danny removed his sunhat and eyed his reflection in the rearview mirror. He had rubbed his upper lip red and the moustache had still not come off. He was less Sidney Poitier now and more a Spanish game show host who had just learned his series was not being renewed. And who had been recently punched in the eye. It was not a good look. Danny pulled his hat back on. He was so tired that when he moved his head it took his eyes a moment to re-focus, and the street seemed to shift a little, airpocket and shudder. Geordie was describing the serious trials his bowels were currently
undergoing, and the casual heroism he needed not to complain about them. Danny’s response was engaged and direct:

‘If you fart again, I will chuck you out of this car.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘
Okay
.’

‘You just farted, didn’t you?’

‘Fraid so.’

Just before nine the blue door of the Lord Gregory hotel (prop: N. Patel, rating: one star) opened, and Ian appeared, swinging a black sports bag. He was walking fast and away from them. Geordie needlessly exclaimed, ‘Fucking hell, there he is,’ and Danny started the car. Ian was smaller and broader than Danny remembered. His arms and legs were little pistons on an incredible engine that was gathering momentum. He vanished round the corner onto the High Road.

‘We’re going to fucking lose him,’ Geordie leaned across Danny and tried to chuck the banana skin he’d been absent-mindedly holding out of the window. It hit the glass and fell down the side of Danny’s car seat.

‘You twat.’ Danny pulled out and drove up to the junction. Geordie tugged his cap down even further–his ears were already inside its rim–and slinked an inch or two into his seat. Ian was within thirty metres of them but walking purposefully away. He wore blue jeans and a black shirt tightly tucked in. His back was an isosceles triangle, and so wide that his shaved head seemed tiny upon it, like an egg rolling around on a table.

‘He’s turning in.’ Geordie had leant forward and
was holding onto the dashboard with one hand.

‘Mate, can you calm down a bit? He’ll see us. Check the
A to Z.
’

‘What for?’ Ian stepped out of sight again, back off the High Road and into a street called Wallace Row. Danny pulled up to the kerb and stuck his hazards on.

‘I don’t know. See if it’s a cul-de-sac or something.’

‘Well there’s no dead-end sign.’

‘True.’

Danny waited for a bus to go round him and then pulled back out. He indicated and turned into the street Ian had just thundered down.

‘I can’t see him.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Let’s pull up somewhere.’

Danny reverse-parked in front of someone’s stone-cladded home and turned the engine off.

‘Well what do we do now?’ Geordie sounded truculent.

‘I don’t know…Wait a minute, what shoes does Ian wear?’

‘What? Not sure. Brown leather?’

‘I can see his fucking foot. That’s his fucking foot.’

Across the road and three parked cars away sat a white transit van with its driver’s door ajar. Someone appeared to be lying halfway under the front bumper, working at the registration plate. Their foot poked out into the road, displaying a brown leather shoe and a band of white sock.

‘What’s he doing?’ Geordie asked, excited again.

‘I don’t know.’

A stubby hand moved into view and set a screwdriver
onto the tarmac. It rolled for an inch or two before the hand reappeared and stopped it.

‘Can you read the reg? Is he taking the plate off or putting it on?’

‘I think it’s Northern Irish. I can only see the last three digits. Looks like he’s taking it off.’

‘What the fuck’s he doing that for?’

Ian was up on his feet–‘Watch out,’ Geordie whispered and scrunched lower–and then Ian crouched back down again, placing something into a black holdall. Just then Danny’s mobile rang. He gingerly took it out of his jeans and looked at the display. Number Withheld. That meant it was Monks. His stomach tightened with expectancy.

‘It’s work. Fuck. Will I speak to them?’

‘Give it here.’ Geordie pressed the button to accept the call.

‘Hello?…No, this is Mr Wilson…George Wilson Esquire.’ Danny tried to grab the phone back but Geordie pushed him away. ‘No, I haven’t seen him this morning. No, he’s not in his room. Okay, let me write it down…’ Geordie looked over at Danny, who was shaking his grimacing head, and winked to say
it’s all under control
. He tapped the mouthpiece of the mobile on the dashboard for a second and then said, ‘Okay, I’ve a pen here. Fire away. Carrie, uh-huh, Adam’s secretary, uh-huh. And Mr Vyse is out for blood…I quite understand. Hold on.’ He tapped the phone against the dashboard again and pointed at the white transit: Ian was getting into it. Danny lifted a newspaper from the back seat–a year old
Guardian
–and opened it out in front of his face.

‘Sorry about that. My pen’s not working properly. Right…yes…jeopardised the bid. Got you, yep…Empty his desk? Of everything? Okay. Right. Yes…
Lying
Printers? Oh,
Lion
Printers, yep…At five in the morning? Right, Adam came in and rushed another copy round…So the bid was made…Thanks to Brad. Is that short for Bradford? Bradley. Yes, I’ve got that. Okay, I’ll pass the message on…Thanks for
your
time, Carrie…No, thank
you
.’ He turned the phone off completely and pretended to forage for something down by his feet.

‘Not good then?’ Danny said.

‘He’s about to drive past…He’s just driven past. Start the car. Unlucky, mate. You’ve been sacked for gross misconduct. Effective immediately. You can clear your desk or they can send you your things.’

‘Okay,’ Danny said simply. He turned the key in the ignition, and felt whatever energy he had left flow out of him and into the little car. It shuddered and then started pulsing impatiently.

Geordie gave a little purr of calculation, then whispered, ‘It’s not the end of the world, boss.’

‘No.’ Danny was too shocked to speak. He was unemployed. Like Geordie. He was out of work. After years of staying anchored to a desk, witnessing his gradual submersion by the high tide of a job he didn’t like and couldn’t do, he’d been cut loose. He was floating on the surface. This was good. This was a good thing, he repeated in his head, not quite able to swim across to the far side of the persuaded.

Suddenly Geordie bellowed in his smoker’s thickened voice, ‘Come
on
, we have to follow him.’

Ian was at the junction behind them. Danny worked the car into a three-point turn. Ian was pulling out.

‘Watch where he goes,’ Danny mumbled. The Polo reached the T-junction and the white van was on the other side of the road, waiting at the traffic lights. Danny pulled out into the path of a bus. After braking and giving a long blast of its horn, it sailed up beside them. Danny looked across to see a row of faces watching him impassively, like a jury. They were two cars away from Ian but the colour of the bus reminded Danny that their vehicle was similarly conspicuous, a red too bright and noticeable to tail the van successfully. He should be driving something khaki. But there were so many cars in London: every corner brought a new herd of them shuffling out to join the northerly or southerly migrations along the High Road. The lights changed and Ian drove forward a few hundred metres before pulling into Ritchie Street. Danny turned in after him but the van was gone.

‘It’s disappeared,’ Geordie said.