Get Carter (10 page)

“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 T
HE
C
ASINO
. 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.