Not long afterwards he tried some of this, and was arrested on a charge of extortion. At first I was glad that the great Moggerhanger had come crashing down at last, even though I’d listened to his talk with a lot of admiration. And I thought goddammit here goes my job, but suddenly he pours into the house from a taxi, having got out on five thousand pounds bail. And then I was pleased to see him. His wife clung to him as if he’d already done twenty years in prison. ‘I wish you’d retire, Claud,’ she said, ‘and not get mixed up in things like this any more.’ She seemed to have the idea that he was the managing director of a straight factory who’d got taken in by dishonest underlings.
He gave her that impression as welclass="underline" ‘No, Agnes. Who’d run things without me? Everything would fall to pieces. There are too many relying on me. Don’t worry, love. It’ll all blow calm again. There’s nothing they can put on me, and they know it. They try a little frame-up now and again in the hope that it’ll stick. They haven’t got a chance. That Detective Inspector Lantorn just won’t be sensible and let go. He’s got to show willing now and again to Chief Inspector Jockstrap, otherwise he’s a decent enough bloke. In many ways I’ve got a lot to thank him for, but we won’t go into that now, especially a few years ago when …’
He saw me listening, and though I’m sure he trusted me, some inborn caution told him not to go on. It was true that we had become quite friendly, though with a certain distance always between us. He talked to me as if I were himself, and though this sometimes made me feel as if I were no longer myself, it did make it the most interesting job I’d so far had. He had a certain flinty wisdom which I was too young to see myself as ever having. I won’t say I wanted to be like him, because I was too frightened of him for that, but I admired him nevertheless.
There was a suite of kennels outside the house. Apart from a brace of Dobermann Pinschers which served as guard dogs to his property, Moggerhanger kept a couple of champion greyhounds. One was run under the name of Long Tom, while the other was called Abel Cain. He’d bought them six months ago, but already they’d won a few races and were high up in the lists. They would have turned any Nottingham collier green with envy, if such people still kept whippets, which I wasn’t sure of, because I’d never seen them doing so in my short life.
The only blight on Moggerhanger’s arrest was that, as a condition of his bail, he was not supposed to leave town, and this came at the time when his sporting heart was set on letting Long Tom and Abel Cain race on a dogcourse in Devon. He not only stood to win fair money, but to increase the fame of his prime animals — which would jack up their price when they were worn out and he wanted to sell them. He fumed about this unreasonable confinement as I drove him from one to another of his clubs by day, and to a certain place in Knightsbridge at night outside which I had to wait in the car for several hours till he came wearily down, snappy with me, but pleased with himself. Cursing his ill-luck in this way was Moggerhanger’s method of clarifying his thoughts towards a certain plan. He proposed to invite Detective Inspector Lantern over to dinner, and I was sent to the appropriate police station at seven o’clock to bring him back to Ealing.
He had a face that was distinguished by being utterly unrecognizable. He was as tall and thin as a ramrod. His look was thin and expressionless, and with the grey suit he was wearing and the glassy stare in his eyes he could perhaps more than in any other country have vanished like a fish in water, because if there were any features at all in his face I saw that they were getting uncomfortably close to those of a fish the more I got the opportunity of glancing at him.
I sprang out and opened the back door for him as he came down the steps — as I’d been told to do. He got in and sat down without even a thank you. What went on at the dinner I shall never know. Walking the lawns outside, I certainly heard a lot of glass clinking and gruff matey laughter. I don’t suppose many people can claim to have been dined and swined at the Moggerhanger’s, but when I drove Lantorn back to his Wembley home that night he was singing Kemp Town Races all the way, even when I’d let him out and watched him go crump at his matchbox gate.
Two days later I was called at six in the morning to drive them to the racecourse in Devon. For an hour neither Lantorn nor Moggerhanger spoke a word, but sat well back behind, arms folded into their overcoats, not even glimpsing out at the ominous fish-red dawn. Two sleek greyhounds sprawled on the upholstery at their feet, opening their scissor-jaws now and again for a yawn so wide that they seemed capable of swallowing the whole car. That’s the picture I got when I heard the sharp whine of it above the purr of the engine. The sky as I went south from Wembley was purple and red as if God had slit His own throat, and was spilling Himself over the whole world. It seemed a normal, raw, unkindly London dawn, and I was glad to turn my back on it when we swung on to the Great West Road at Heston.