‘I intended paying up from the beginning, yet I needn’t if I don’t want to. As soon as I see him coming with the change for twenty quid I can nip smartly back into second class, and nobody will be any the wiser. It pays to hold off till the last minute, because you never know what’s going to turn up. It’s because it’s good exercise racking my brains for a way out, and probably as near to real life as I can get. In any case, suppose my briefcase above your head was full of explosives, and I thought somebody might be on the look-out for it. To divert suspicion, I’d cause a fuss about something insignificant, as a way of practising the theory of the indirect approach.’
He had turned pale, in the lurid light caused by the darkening sky. ‘But what are you practising for?’
Raindrops splashed the window. ‘Fun, as far as you are concerned. But you never know when the fun’s going to turn nasty, do you? Or serious, for that matter. And therein lies the danger for anybody else who happens to be present. I just don’t like a jumped-up, swivel-eyed prick like you trying to fuck me around, that’s all.’
‘Seems like we’re going to become friends.’ He brought out a silver cigar case of real Havanas. I smoked Jamaicans which were just as good. He passed one across. ‘What sort of work do you do?’
‘Work?’ I dropped the crushed tube to the floor, and scuffed it under the seat with my heel. ‘Work,’ I said, ‘is a habit which I gave up when I started living off my wife.’
He smiled, not knowing whether to believe me. The only blemish in his otherwise well-bred presentation was that his teeth were rotten, though not too much for a forty-year-old who hadn’t yet got false ones, or too good for a perspicacious German not to recognise him for an Englishman. ‘What sort of work do you do?’
‘I don’t think I could describe what I do as work,’ he said. ‘I’m a Royal Messenger, flitting not only between the Palace and the Foreign Office in my powder blue Mini-van, but occasionally using trains, and even planes, when engaged on overseas duties. I go from place to place as a courier.’
‘I thought you were in something important. My name’s Michael Cullen, by the way.’
He held out his manicured hand. ‘I was christened Eric Samuel Raymond, and my surname is Alport. Call me Eric. At the moment I’m just back from Sandringham.’
I could only suppose that he had fallen arse backwards into that kind of an occupation, and yet I was convinced that he lied, and that if so he was more of an artist at it than I was — or used to be. He lied, right from the back of his throat, for he was no kind of Royal Messenger. I knew he had been in jail because the first thing people learn inside is how to lie. Learning how to become better criminals is only secondary. The lies they tell each other inside are picturesque. The lies they tell everyone they meet after they get out are calamitous and wild. It gives them something to do, and is a way of feeling their way back towards self-respect. But when they come out they betray themselves to people like me by the way they lie with such wonderful confidence. And lying is the first step that leads them back to jail where lying at least is safe.
He settled himself in his seat. ‘It’s a very nice occupation. The more responsible members of our family have done it for generations. It began when a great-uncle of mine worked at Tishbite Hall as a page boy. He was a bit of a dogsbody in those days. Whenever he made the slightest mistake in laying the table the butler kicked him up the arse and booted him out of the room. So my great-uncle soon learned to be good at the jobs he had to do. That kind of treatment went on even when he got to the age of twenty, but he had to put up with it because there was nowhere else for him to go. Then he fell in love with one of the kitchen maids, and decided he would marry her. That meant he had to give up his job, because at such houses only the butler was allowed to be married.
‘So he wrote out his notice, and put on it that he was leaving because he wanted to emigrate to Canada. Now the butler already knew he was leaving to get married, and told Lord Tishbite. In those days that was a good job for my great-uncle to have. His father lived in a village ten miles away, and every so often he would get the word that he should go over to Tishbite Hall. So the father set off over the fields by footpaths, carrying a sackbag folded under his arm. When he got to Tishbite Hall he was given legs of lamb, pheasants and rabbits and all kinds of game, so much that he could just about carry it away. It was stuff that had been thrown out of the larders to be given to the pigs. So the father struggled home with it, and after taking out all that his family could possibly eat for the next few days he handed the rest to the poor of the village. There was certainly no need to starve if you had somebody in service at a place like Tishbite Hall.
‘Anyway, when Lord Tishbite heard from the butler that my great-uncle had handed in his notice because he wanted to get married instead of emigrate he got him on the carpet. Lying was the worst thing you could do, in them days. It was almost as bad as murder. Well, my great-uncle, bless him, was trembling in his boots, because he thought this was the end. He wouldn’t be able to get a reference, and it would be impossible to find another job. He might be able to get married, but he’d damn well starve. That was the days before the dole, remember.
‘But Lord Tishbite, after rating him for a bit, told him he’d been such a good worker during his eight years in service that he wanted to do something for him. Maybe he’d taken a shine to him. I don’t know. But he asked him if he would like to live in London, and the upshot was that he got him a post as a Queen’s Messenger, in Whitehall. He was so outstanding at this that he eventually got his sons into the business, though he always put them in service first to make sure they had a good grounding in discipline and smartness. My early days, for instance, were spent working at a big house, mostly polishing boots. I could tell you a thing or two about shining boots! But I kept my eyes and ears open, and it certainly put the polish on me. Boning boots was the first step towards me becoming a gentleman’s gentleman which was, after service in the army, from which I retired as a sergeant, to lead me to the post I have now. The old great-uncle insisted that none of us should get the job easily. After serving Queen Victoria he eventually became a messenger for Edward VII, and then King George V.’
‘A very interesting tale,’ I had to admit. ‘If ever we meet again I must tell you mine. You’ve obviously rumbled the fact that I wasn’t telling the truth when I said I had no job.’
He took a miniature make-up case from his top pocket and extracted tiny tweezers, with which he began fishing about for a hair which he thought might be protruding from his nose, though I could see no such thing and knew that if he went on probing in so blind a fashion he would end up doing himself an injury. He took the telepathic hint, which somewhat increased my estimation of his abilities, and put the thing back into its box.
In prison you shared a cell with someone in a certain trade, and he talked so much about it that on getting out you could pretend to be in the same line of work. He couldn’t fool me. I ran through the list of prisons and wondered which he had been discharged from that morning. I knew the names, populations, locations and reputations, but none seemed to fit. I’d been in one, but my information was so out of date that I decided to rummage at the next station bookstall through the current issue of the Good Nick Guide. There were more people inside in England, per head of population, than in any other country in Europe, so maybe somebody had published one. They would sell over forty thousand copies right away. It was a captive market.