September Song (5 page)

‘Why's that?' I said.

‘Because I don't want you to and I'll hurt you if you do.'

‘You think you can do that, do you?' I said.

By way of answer, he slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and brought out a nasty-looking cut-throat razor.

I looked at him as evenly as I could but my pulse rate had gone up a little and I was aware of a slight trembling in my hands. I was fairly certain I could take him, but I was aware of his friends looking at us and I really couldn't see any point in raising the level of hostility. I decided to beat as gracious a retreat as possible.

I smiled at him pleasantly. ‘I'll bear your request in mind,' I said. ‘Now, if you'll excuse me  . . .'

He slipped the razor back into his pocket and ostentatiously, if gracelessly, stepped aside.

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,' I heard him say before the door closed behind me. I wasn't sure, but there could have been an unpleasant expletive included in there somewhere as well. There was certainly a little bark of muffled laughter from his friends.

The atmosphere in the Antelope was altogether more welcoming. For a start, Jerry was standing at the bar, a pint of wallop in his hand; there was the reassuring click of dominoes being laid down triumphantly and the phlegmy chuckle of the victor; and big Mickey Morgan was over at the dartboard, looking for someone to trounce. I smiled and shook my head when he waved the arrows at me and made my way through the blue-grey fug from a dozen Woodbines over to Jerry.

‘Tony, my friend,' he said expansively, ‘what are you having?'

I looked up at the big clock behind the bar, set ten minutes fast. It was saying ten to seven. Obviously, this wasn't Jerry's first pint, but he couldn't have sunk all that many in forty minutes.

‘I'll just have a lemonade, thanks,' I said, thinking of the whisky still roiling about in my guts.

‘You heard the man,' Jerry said to Henry, the cadaverous barman who had silently materialized as I'd approached the bar. Henry sniffed, put his cigarette down on the scarred wood and reached down for a glass and a bottle.

‘So,' I said to Jerry, ‘you coming to Pete's Place?'

‘You paying?' he said.

‘No,' I said, ‘this is pleasure, not business. I'm not babysitting young Philip tonight, thank God, so I'm not on exes.'

‘Pity,' he said. He took a pull at his pint. ‘She's good, this singer, is she?'

‘Yeah,' I said, ‘very.'

‘All right, then.' He lifted his glass again. ‘By the way, a package arrived for you in the four o'clock post.'

I raised my eyebrows. No one sent me packages.

‘Addressed to “Antoine”,' he said. ‘So I'm guessing that it might just have come from a certain lady in gay Paree.' He paused and sipped beer. ‘And that policeman, Rose, phoned. He said to tell you he was still on the case, following up a new lead.'

I groaned. It was obviously a coincidence, but the two things were related. The package was, as Jerry guessed, almost certainly from Ghislaine. And, although I hoped he didn't know it, she was who Inspector Rose was looking for. Since the two men whose premature demise she had been responsible for had been giving a damned good imitation of strangling me at the time – well, I'd certainly been convinced of the authenticity of their performance, and Daff's chicken soup had been all that my bruised oesophagus could cope with for nearly two weeks – I was more than a little grateful to her and intended to do everything I could to keep her out of it. This mainly involved keeping my mouth shut and playing ignorant, both of which came very easily to me. I told myself that Rose calling on the same day as a package arrived from Paris really was just coincidence. He didn't know anything. He didn't even know about her. He couldn't. He was just winding me up.

Very successfully.

I drained my glass.

R. White's finest tasted flat, bland and unappealing. Mind you, ever since the first time my mother had made
citron pressé
for me, when I was five, I'd found English commercial brands of lemonade disappointing and had always suspected that their relationship to lemons was tenuous at best. So maybe the image of Inspector Rose thoughtfully, and very irritatingly, filling his pipe with Golden Virginia and puffing contentedly on it for a few seconds before quietly asking some pertinent question that I didn't want to answer hadn't been responsible. Maybe.

Jerry looked at me with raised eyebrows. At first, I thought he might have been wondering what was bothering me, but then I noticed that his glass was empty.

‘Another?' I said.

‘Why not?' he said.

And, just as I raised my hand to beckon Henry over from the end of the bar where he was hunched over his cigarette, Mickey, with the impeccable timing he was known for, appeared next to me.

‘What you having, Mickey?' I said.

‘That's very good of you, Tone,' he said. ‘I'll have a brown ale, thanks.'

A short coughing fit wracked Henry's thin frame, and I waited quietly for it to subside before placing my order. I decided on a brandy for myself.

‘Tone,' Mickey said, ‘I don't want to worry you, but Dave Mountjoy's youngest, Ricky, has been asking around about you. Just thought you ought to know. He's been away, for a two stretch. Attacked some geezer with a knife was what I heard. Anyway, he got out a couple of months back. He was in here at dinner time.'

Henry plonked glasses down on the bar. He coughed again. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘He was real interested in you.'

‘What did you tell him?' I asked.

‘Nothing,' he said, taking my ten-bob note. ‘I don't know nothing about you.' The till dinged dully as he thumped some keys. ‘Or anybody else.' He pushed some silver and coppers my way. ‘But I'll tell you what: I'd watch meself, if I was you.' And he ghosted back to his corner for another quiet smoke.

Mickey picked up his beer. ‘Cheers, Tone,' he said, took a huge swig and looked over the rim of his glass and inclined his head slightly in the barman's direction. ‘Henry did happen to mention as how you was a war hero and a tough nut.'

I groaned. That'd really scare young Ricky off, and all the other would-be James Deans, looking to make names for themselves.

‘Mickey,' I said, ‘I'm not—'

Jerry reached out a hand and gently patted my shoulder. ‘Yes, you are,' he said.

‘Anyway,' Mickey said, ‘Henry's right. You should watch it. He's a right sneaky one. My eldest was at school with him. Vicious temper.' He drank more beer and nodded at the dartboard. ‘Fancy a game?'

‘Not tonight, Mickey. And thanks for the heads-up.'

He nodded and plodded back to the board, looking around for a victim.

‘What you been up to, then?' said Jerry. ‘And who's this Mountjoy?'

‘Nothing much,' I said, ‘and he's the son of someone my dad had a run-in with years ago. A not very nice someone  . . .'

Jerry looked serious, said nothing and supped ale.

FOUR

I
brooded on Ricky Mountjoy as Jerry and I rattled along deep under London and the Central Line train squealed and screeched its way into Bank station.

I wasn't overly bothered by the threat posed by young Ricky, although I didn't much fancy getting striped by his razor. It was more that his antipathy might complicate matters. It seemed likely that I'd have to have a word with his grandpa if I was going to find out anything for Daphne, and it wouldn't be easy to talk to the old boy in the best of circumstances. I was beginning to wish I'd kept my mouth shut in Vic's. It wasn't as if I even knew his wife, although she had my deepest sympathy.

As we slowly lurched and shrieked our way out of Bank, I remembered another vicious, little rat-faced sod. All the NCOs in basic training had been unpleasant bullies, but there had been one lance-corporal who'd been particularly nasty. The fact that he'd been a Geordie, and pretty much incomprehensible to me and Bernie Rosen and all the other London lads, had not improved matters. Bernie, of course, had been a professional soldier's nightmare. Unkempt, uncoordinated, uncooperative and uncommonly clever, Bernie was not cut out to be cannon fodder. He was always on a charge of some kind, but, whether he was spud-bashing or scrubbing the parade ground with a toothbrush, he smiled sweetly and bore it all with the patience of Job. Which drove Corporal Geordie Patterson wild. Our basic training was almost up when he finally cracked and decided to use Bernie as a punchbag. He got four or five good pokes in before I and two other lads dragged him off and quietened him down.

The quietening down, of course, was what got us into trouble.

Corporal Patterson lost two teeth, suffered a cracked cheekbone and three broken ribs. The other NCOs were not happy, although one of them did admit that he had it coming. As he also said, though, they couldn't pretend it hadn't happened, and they decided that all of those involved would spend three rounds in the ring with Sergeant Philip Harrison, who just happened to be regimental champion at middleweight and, we were told, a bit of an animal.

In fact, the anticipation turned out to be far worse than the event itself.

None of us survived the first round. I didn't survive the first half of the first round, but even that was about a minute more than Bernie managed. Harrison was good and fast, and he more than punched his weight.

We didn't see Patterson again, though, so we reckoned we just edged it on points.

Oh, and Bernie took us all back to his mum's for a proper Jewish momma's nosh. She fussed over our bruised mugs and kept on ladling out the chicken soup and other delights till we could hardly move. The other two lads weren't too keen on the food, being more your roast dinner sort of chaps, but I developed a real taste for potato latkes. And, for some reason, the Rosen family developed a liking for me.

I don't know why I thought of Lance-Corporal Geordie Patterson, although I suppose he did share a sly and unpleasant look with Ricky Mountjoy. I couldn't help but think that he'd been a lucky boy. He'd have suffered a bit more than a few cracked ribs if he'd encountered me after the commando training I'd undergone for Special Ops had toughened me up. Harrison would still have given me a good hiding, though.

Jerry and I walked from Tottenham Court Road station down to Pete's Place. Charing Cross Road sparkled under the street lights and the headlamps of the buses and cabs after a little shower had rinsed the tarmac and the paving stones. Two girls wearing tight-fitting blue jeans caught Jerry's eye, but they just giggled at him when he tried to start a conversation.

He shrugged, sighed theatrically, blew them a kiss and then told me enthusiastically that he'd tracked down some French records of Sidney Bechet and asked if I'd write to the recording company for him, to place an order. I suggested that, if he was paying, I could jump on a ferry and do the deal in person. He sniffed dismissively. I decided to take that as a ‘maybe'.

The band was enjoying a cigarette and beer break at Pete's Place and chatting in a desultory fashion with the half dozen customers who had beaten us to it. Peter Baxter himself was standing with his back to the bar, a pint in his hand, gloomily surveying the empty wilderness of his club. His trumpet gleamed dully on the dark wood of the counter, next to him, among the sticky puddles of spilt beer. He nodded at me and smiled bleakly.

‘Not many in tonight,' I said.

He cleared his throat. ‘Not now,' he said. ‘There were quite a few more in earlier.' He sighed and turned to the bar. ‘Let me buy you a drink,' he said. ‘For helping out last night.'

‘That's all right,' I said. ‘Let me get 'em. I'm having a short.'

‘In that case,' he said, ‘come back to my office. I've got a bottle of brandy there and I could do with a proper drink.' He looked at Jerry. ‘Will your mate be all right here?'

Jerry shrugged.

‘Sure,' I said. ‘I'll just get him a pint.'

Peter sank his own beer and picked up his trumpet while the barman poured Jerry's drink and took my money. Then Peter put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Jeannie's back there too. We wouldn't mind a quiet word.'

I slid Jerry's drink over to him. ‘I'll be back in a minute,' I said.

‘Take all the time you need, my friend,' Jerry said. ‘A jug of beer, a bag of crisps and thou  . . .' He smiled contentedly, and Peter gave him a puzzled frown before the two of us ambled over to the stage and slipped quickly along the narrow, dingy corridor where the dressing rooms and the office lay.

The heavy, dark-brown door with ‘Office' stencilled on it in black jogged unpleasant memories of loitering outside the headmaster's study at school, gloomily anticipating the inevitable consequence of the summons. He liked to keep us waiting, knowing, I suppose, that there was no punishment he could administer that was so bad it wasn't made much worse by being thought about. However, Peter and I didn't hang about outside the door.

Jeannie Summers looked up from her glass when we pushed past it, and she offered us a wan smile. But then she immediately resumed studying the glass of warm gin and tonic her hands were wrapped around.

Peter Baxter shaped up to pat her tentatively on the shoulder as he bustled by her, but he seemed to think better of it and his hand hung awkwardly in the air for a second or two before he moved behind his desk, put his trumpet down and fussed with a bottle of Hennessy's and two smeared tumblers. He handed me one of the tumblers and absent-mindedly splashed a large measure of brandy into it.

‘Her piano player's gone AWOL,' he said, pouring an even bigger slug into his own glass. After slurping at his drink, he continued: ‘Thing is. We were wondering if you could help.'

I couldn't think why he was asking me. I'd never even mastered the comb and tissue paper.