To Die For (8 page)

I was holding a couple of jacks and the flop threw up a third one and nothing bigger, so I decided I’d string it out a bit and then go in heavyish and hope someone had a high pair. The turn card was a four of clubs and that made three clubs showing, so then I thought I’d better not give anyone a chance to get a flush on the river and I went all in and, sure enough, I won. That pot was worth a hundred and fifty odd, which gave me a profit of about twenty quid per hour. I could’ve earned more on the door.

A voice behind me said, ‘Can I join in?’

‘Always room for more,’ Roger said. ‘Where you from?’

When she sat next to me, I had her down straightaway as a pro. Her perfume was too strong, the make-up around her eyes too thick, trying to cover the crow’s feet. She was pushing forty and all that make-up just made her look older. I hadn’t seen her before, but I knew that some of the pros were pimped by Frank Marriot. He had a scam going with the Sportsman’s management. The idea was the pros would pick out mugs from the floor, chat them up, ply them with comped drinks, egg them on at the tables, getting them to lose that little bit more. If they lost, the women would take them to their pad and charge them a fair rate. If they happened to win, the women would try and rob them and split the money with the management. The marks weren’t going to complain too much. What were they going to say? It helped if the bloke had a wedding ring, as Roger did.

I wondered if I should hang around a while and see if Roger had any more money to lose. If this woman flirted with him, he might get cocky and start laying it down in piles. But I was tired and my head was pounding and I couldn’t give a fuck about Roger’s money, so I gathered my chips and left the table.

The Sportsman had a lounge. The lounge had thick red carpets and easy-listening music that was just plain annoying. I assumed the idea was to force the punters back on to the tables as quickly as possible. As staff, I was allowed free drinks after work. I usually didn’t bother, but tonight I needed something to loosen me up.

Matheson was leaning against the wall, reading a tabloid, or looking at the pictures anyway. I took a seat at the bar. He looked up and saw me and brought over a beer.

‘Win?’

‘Some.’

‘Good,’ he said, and went back to his wall.

I nursed my drink for a few minutes, trying to relax and hope that the headache didn’t get a grip like they sometimes did.

‘Was it something I said?’

I glanced round. The black pro was sitting next to me. I hadn’t heard her arrive.

‘What?’

‘I take a seat and you leave.’ I shook my head. ‘Does that mean it wasn’t something I said?’

She had a northern accent. Yorkshire, I thought.

‘It means I’m tired.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, rubbing her neck. ‘Me too.’

She lit a cigarette and looked at me. She seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to ignore her. Finally, she sighed and said, ‘Bloody hell. A girl could die of thirst around you.’

I signalled to Matheson. He strolled over.

‘Get her a drink, will you?’ I said.

He hesitated for a bit, like he’d forgotten who he was and what he did and how to pour a drink. I just wanted to get rid of the woman. I flicked a glance at him.

‘What does she want?’ Matheson said to me.

I shrugged.

‘I’m over here,’ she said. She was smiling.

He pulled his eyes in her direction.

‘Double Bacardi and Coke,’ she said. ‘No. A treble. Make it two.’

She laughed and Matheson snatched a glass and dragged himself to the optics. He poured a double rum and added a splash of Coke and dropped the glass in front of her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, sarcasm in there.

Matheson had wandered off.

After she’d taken a long gulp of her drink, she turned to me and said, ‘I’m Brenda.’

I finished my beer and signalled to Matheson. He grabbed another for me and walked by, sliding the beer on the counter as he did so.

‘You’re Joe,’ Brenda said. I turned to look at her. ‘I asked the croupier,’ she said.

I nodded, wondering why she would be asking about me. For a moment, I thought she might be the law, but I threw that idea straight out. She was too worn out to be law, too deflated.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong? You punchy or something?’

‘No.’

‘You done some fighting, though. Right? You look like you did.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Professional?’

‘For a while.’

‘Heavyweight? You must’ve been or else you put on a lot of weight.’

My head hurt. I wanted to ease it with alcohol, not make it worse with talk. I wanted her to go.

‘So, you ever been in any fights I would’ve seen?’

‘How’m I supposed to know that?’

Her smile faded.

‘Yeah, right. Stupid question. What I mean is, have you ever been on TV?’

‘Only
Crimewatch
.’

She laughed out loud, throwing her head back. I hadn’t been joking. I looked at her then, looked properly for the first time. When she’d finished laughing, she sat smiling. The smile transformed her face. Her eyes, heavy-lidded, sparkled and her wide mouth gleamed with white teeth. She looked okay. I downed my drink and got another from Matheson. I wanted some alcohol now, just to take the edge off, just to escape for a while from the dullness.

I saw her turn and look around the casino. She froze for an instant and turned back round. The glint had gone from her eyes.

‘So why don’t you talk?’ she was saying. She sounded a little drunk and I wondered how many other rum and Cokes she’d earned that night.

‘I got nothing to say, so I don’t say it.’

‘I just thought maybe you were kinda punchy or something.’

Another one who thought I was dumb. I’d been getting that all my life, and now I was getting it from some over-the-hill drunk prostitute. The thing was, this time it bothered me. I didn’t know why.

‘I’m not punchy,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say you were, I just said I thought maybe you were.’

We sat there in silence for a while. Brenda had become tense, awkward. And yet when she’d sat down and started talking to me, she’d seemed relaxed. Cheerful even. I wasn’t used to that from people.

‘Well, maybe it’s because you don’t like me. Huh?’ she said quietly.

‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

‘It’s just you don’t talk so much. I thought maybe you didn’t like me.’

‘I don’t care about you one way or the other. I’m just not in the market.’

I heard her swallow hard. It sounded like a sob. She got up from the seat and walked quickly away. Matheson came over.

‘Know her, Joe?’

I shook my head.

‘Tart,’ Matheson said. ‘We get lots of them. Me, I don’t like ’em. Lower the tone.’

Everyone wanted to talk tonight.

A man took a seat at the bar, two stools up. I glanced over and saw that the man was Kenny Paget. Back then, Paget was the rising star. He’d started out as a bouncer in one of the Soho clubs. He was small for a bouncer, but he’d had a run-in one night with a couple of drunken loudmouths and he’d put them both in hospital. One had a knife wound from one side of his gut to the other. Paget was nicked for that, faced an attempted murder charge, but other bouncers testified that the knife had belonged to the drunk and Paget got off on self-defence. The bloke who owned the club was Frank Marriot. He recognized talent when he saw it and pushed Paget up until he was pretty much running the whole outfit, acting as Marriot’s enforcer. It was a hard, dirty business and Paget fitted right in.

When Matheson saw him, he unglued himself from the wall sharpish and tried to look like a barman. He smiled and walked over and said, ‘Usual, Mr Paget?’

Matheson selected a clean glass, polished it up some more and measured out vodka and tomato juice. He threw in a few other things to make it look fancy and put it on the bar counter, on top of a paper coaster thing, and slid it an inch towards Paget. Paget looked at it. Matheson waited just long enough to see he wasn’t going to get thanked, then floated off.

‘It’s Joe, right?’ I turned back to my beer. ‘I’ve heard about you.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Heard you’re one of Dave Kendall’s boys.’

I downed some more beer. He didn’t say anything for a while, but I knew he was looking at me. I was too tired to play that game. He finished his drink and slid the glass along towards Matheson.

‘Get me another,’ he said.

Matheson did as ordered, not bothering with the chit-chat this time. Paget slid off his stool and slid on to the one next to me. He was like that. He slid.

‘You don’t want to talk to me?’

‘No.’

‘You know who I am, though. Am I right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And yet you don’t want to talk to me. I consider that rude. Or stupid.’

He leaned forward. Matheson was edging away down the bar.

‘They say you’re a bit stupid. That right? A bit lacking in brain matter? Maybe I’d better explain something to you. Drinks are free. The whores aren’t. Got it?’

I downed some more beer. The man was beginning to annoy me. His voice was buzzing in my head.

‘That bird you were talking to, for example. She’s what we call a whore. She fucks for money. The money she gets goes to Mr Marriot. I make sure of that. Got it?’

He leaned closer still. I could smell his breath. I could hear the click in his throat as he spoke.

‘That nigger is of especial interest to me. So leave her alone.’

It was an effort not to shove his nose back into his head. Instead, I got up and walked away, leaving half my drink.

I decided to walk home and try to clear my head with fresh air, if that’s what you could call it in London. If I walked down St Paul’s Road, I could cut across to Green Lanes and follow that up to the Seven Sisters Road. It was only a couple of miles. I left the warm fuggy air of the Sportsman and hit a crisp, cold January night. It helped to clear my head, freshen me up a bit.

I’d gone a few dozen yards when I saw her, standing in a doorway, trying to light her cigarette. She was wearing a short black jacket. The collar was up. Her shoulders were hunched against the cold. I walked past.

‘Hey,’ she called after me.

I slowed and stopped. I didn’t turn around. I heard her trotting on high heels. When she reached me, she stood a moment. Her unlit cigarette was between her fingers. She moved from one foot to the other to keep warm. A jacket like that was useless in this weather, plain daft.

I thought that if I just gave her a few quid she’d leave me alone. I was waiting for the pitch, thinking she’d charge fifty quid tops for a quick one, figuring I’d give her a score and be off. Instead, she said, ‘That hurt, you know.’

‘Huh?’

‘What you said in there.’

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I waited for her to say something else. She managed to light her cigarette, took a deep drag and blew out a cloud of smoke and breath.

‘I wasn’t trying to solicit you, you know.’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘I’m off duty.’

She smiled then. I wondered why. She looked nice when she smiled. She didn’t look all washed-up and wasted. She looked as if she could still think life was fun, like a kid.

She had a slim body and she was tall, lanky really. In her heels she came up to my chin and not many women can do that. Her skirt rode high up on her thighs, and her blouse was thin. She stood shivering and her knees were together and she looked about as awkward as a woman can look. Her face became serious again. She frowned and there was something in there, something she couldn’t hide.

‘He a friend of yours?’

‘Who?’

‘That man, Paget.’

‘No.’

Her frown lifted. ‘Didn’t think so.’

‘What do you want?’ I said.

She looked down at the ground and pulled her jacket tighter about her. When she looked up, her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.

‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,’ she said.

I looked at my watch.

‘Nothing open round here.’

That was a lie. We both knew it.

‘We could go to my place,’ she said softly.

I was about to give up on her and go when she said quickly, ‘Just for tea.’

I sighed. ‘Yeah. Sure.’

We walked off, me striding like a walking wall, she tottering to keep up, smoking as she went.

It took us a while to walk to her place and all that time I was wondering what the hell I was doing. She’d say something now and then, making small talk, telling me about what a bloody awful day she’d had and how she just wanted to sit down with a cup of tea and all that kind of thing. I might have muttered something or other, but it was an effort.

She lived in a high-rise off the Caledonian Road. We passed a group of kids as we went in. They stared at us. I stopped at the lift and one of the kids laughed.

‘It’s not working,’ Brenda said. ‘Hasn’t ever worked as far as I know. I think they put it there for show.’

So we climbed the stairs. The building was a sixties thing, falling apart at the seams, cracked cement, damp in the stairwell. They should’ve pulled it down ten minutes after they’d put it up. Some of these buildings are getting tarted up these days, sold to City types for a bomb. This one hadn’t had that treatment, and if it ever did Brenda and all the others would have to go find some other piece of shit to live in.

‘Fancy a cuppa?’ she said, as she disappeared into the kitchen.

It was a one-bedroom flat, basic, but she’d done what she could with it. There were a few ornaments around and an Indian-style cotton throw on the settee. There was flowery wallpaper, but it was discoloured and peeling in the corner where the damp was coming through. It was warm, though. She used a blanket as a draught excluder for the front door.

In the lounge, there were pot plants all over by the window and a large plant in one corner. She was trying to bring life into the place.

I was looking at a print on the wall when she came in with the teas.

‘Sorry I took so long.’ She handed a mug to me. ‘Bloody kettle packed up. I have to boil water on the stove.’

She waited for me to drink some of my tea before drinking her own.