“You’re not very lucky in your parents or employers. You deserve better.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I can live in all weathers. But she did alter her tune when I pulled out the signed copy of Sidney Blood. She snatched it from me, and started to read straightaway. Told me to go out and nick a few more.”
I regretted the loss of stock in backstreet bookshops trying to make a go of it. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary. Sidney will give you another anytime. He’s generous with his fans. But lend me a hand to get these packets above the garage, then I can go in and see the boss.”
He picked up two to my four. “He’s not in residence.”
I wanted to get the encounter over as soon as possible but, on the other hand, I was thankful for some delay. “Where is he?”
“You know how he likes to treat us as if we’re all part of the same family? He’s gone to Northampton, to be at Eric Alport’s funeral.”
My heart thumped like an empty petrol drum. “Eric? You mean he’s snuffed it?”
“Poor geezer. Somebody drove his powder blue minivan off the road in Yorkshire a week ago. He went over a cliff and died at the wheel. His boyfriend belled Moggerhanger, sobbing his socks off. Mogg thought he had to go to the funeral, after threatening with all sorts of things not long before. But he’ll be back any minute. He left word that when you came in you were to take it easy in the flat and wait.”
“You mean I can’t go out and buy some condoms?”
He pushed his squalid yet lively features close. “Aren’t thinking of humping the cat, are you?”
“Don’t worry.” I laughed. “I shan’t get you into trouble by breaking my parole. If I did he might be tempted to go for that tiny clear patch on your right cheek, and bruise that up as well. But I would like to meet your mother some day. She seems a real old dragon,” I said, on my way for more parcels.
“Oh, she is one of them,” he called proudly. “She’s all that and more.”
“Sounds as if we’d hit it off like a bed on fire.”
“You’d have to be on your best behaviour, Michael.”
“I’d arrive with flowers, then.”
He kicked the door open. “If you took some chockies as well you’d be in her good books forever. She likes Belgians. They make lovely Ovaltine.”
I was beyond amusement at what he came out with. “When we’ve packed this stuff away we can sample some Greek beer I brought back.”
“No can do. I’ve got to collect some cash from Lord Moggerhanger’s clubs. The managers’ll see these bruises, and pay up right away. They know they’ll soon have some of their own if they don’t.”
“I’ll put a couple of bottles aside, then. You can give one to your mother, to mix with her stout.”
When he took my hand I thought he was going to cry. “You’re a good mate, Mick. Nobody in this place treats me like you do.”
“Fuck off,” I said playfully. He bent double to get out by the little door in the gate, taking the key, which made me laugh, because I could have gone over the wall like a rat on fire if I’d wanted.
I went to see what Mrs Blemish had on the boil or fry for lunch. The kitchen was as big as a living room, every state-of-the-art stove and machine at her disposal, though there was no sign of cooking.
In Moggerhanger’s study I patted the cool side of the six-foot whisky bottle, wanting to smash it and flood the room. Moggerhanger would suspect I’d done it, of course, and if I didn’t talk he’d wipe out his whole crew rather than get the wrong man. I decided such depredation would have to wait, but how tempting it was, to pick up the heavy cut glass ashtray and fling it at some vulnerable part.
Instead I lifted the lid of his Monte Cristo box. Clever bastard, because a recorded message from a contraption bedded somewhere in the wood said: “Put that cigar back. They’re not for the likes of you, whoever you might be. In any case, they’re counted, and if you don’t get a move on you’ll lose a finger, or get a cut that will be a long time healing.”
Discouragement was not in me. Under the box I found a tiny deactivate button which Moggerhanger used when wanting a smoke himself. I put it back on before walking out with a tube in my pocket. I wasn’t born yesterday, nor the day before, though I’d take care not to puff it away in the house.
Alice Whipplegate was in the small office off the boss’s sanctum. Her desk and filing cabinets took up most of the space. Pins in a wall map marked Moggerhanger’s second homes and hideaways: Peppercorn Cottage, Spleen Manor, Upper Scroatham, Breezeblock Villa at Back Enderby, and a few I hadn’t heard about. I was surprised to see a pin in Doggerel Bank, where Ronald Delphick gave poetry lessons and what he called workshops but which I could only think of as knocking shops. I was also shocked to find a pin in my country residence at Upper Mayhem. If Moggerhanger considered it useful to him I must get up there ASAP and rip up the floorboards to see what he had sent his men up to hide from the police while I was away, unless he’d only been having a bit of little boy fun with his pins. Or had be been so convinced I was going to get killed in Greece that he was already thinking of buying the place?
“Michael!” Alice cried. “You’re back!”
“No,” I said. “I’m the ghost of myself. I was done away with, after collecting a dozen parcels of hard drugs in Athens.”
She was a slender woman nearing forty, whose husband had wrapped his car around a tree and killed himself some time back. At Spleen Manor, on Moggerhanger’s business a few years ago, I had slid into her bed, after so many preliminaries I thought I’d never manage it. But when I did it was more than worthwhile. Like so many women with flattish chests she usually wore low cut tops, which from her I took to mean: ‘If you don’t like me like this, too bad, mate. It’s my bosom, not yours. I love what I’ve got in every other department as well.’
Women with not much on their rib cases were invariably more interesting when you got there than those who walked on overload. Her thin face promised only as much as she wanted to give, but such an amount had satisfied me, her features having more wit written over them than could be expected from a more fleshy phizzog. Not that I had anything against those, however. All I knew was that though I hadn’t made love to her for a few years she had in no way lost her pull on me.
She stood before the typewriter, a stylo in hand. “Michael, you know very well that Lord Moggerhanger has a perfectly legitimate import-export business.”
Instead of falling over at this naive and startling untruth I put my hands on her waist and pressed sufficiently for her behind to go slightly back and out of true, then gave a tender kiss to find the direction of the wind before I tried something else. She didn’t look displeased, though her smile couldn’t altogether hide some anxiety. “You know Lady Moggerhanger has a passion for halva. And so has his Lordship, at times. They like the real thing.”
“In that case I wish they’d sample some of the stuff in those packets. I’m not sure how sweet they’d find it, though. They wouldn’t sit down for three months, or they’d end up at the de-tox box at Charing Cross hospital. Or maybe the Old Bailey, for trafficking. And I’d get done as well for having brought it into the country.”
I needed to find out how much she knew about the robber baron’s real business, but without her getting pulled in if the organisation dominoed down the chute. I wanted to see real sweat on Moggerhanger’s chops while led off in handcuffs to be charged with misdemeanours he had no hope of denying. What had to be done to make it happen didn’t bear thinking about, planning and good luck essential if I was to bring it off without landing myself in clink as well. Getting Alice to provide me with evidence would make it easier, for she knew all of it was stored in the filing cabinets flanking her desk. She played dumb, but I knew her as very much otherwise. I could burgle the place, with Bill Straw’s help, and carry the files away in a pick-up truck, but such a stunt would call for half the SAS as well, because Moggerhanger’s compound was the most protected area in Ealing, which as far as I was concerned meant the world. But if I didn’t fill myself with hope to do it, however hopeless the scheme, I’d be dead from the neck up.