“I do bring a few poor folk over in the boot of my car now and again, whenever I’m feeling bored. I go to France and pack half a dozen in a white van, and don’t charge them a penny for the dubious pleasure of living on this right little tight little island. I’ve even taken one or two all the way to Bradford so that they can burn a few more books on sticks, and chase that writer for the million dollar reward.”
He nearly puked up the beer I’d bought him. “That’s the worst sort of racism.”
“Too fucking right, but you won’t say that when you have to send all your dumbed-down scripts to Mecca and get them stamped as OK to produce. Another thing is that if you tried to walk through Mecca in what you’re wearing now they’d have your guts for garters, so don’t talk to me about racism, you scumbag.”
I wanted to make him jump, but he wouldn’t spend the energy on me. “Religion may be the opium of the masses,” he said, “but it’s sacred all the same,” thus giving me more enjoyment that I deserved.
“Nothing’s sacred to me,” I said. “I never did believe in mumbo-jumbo.”
Margery Doldrum came in, and called out, before he could say he’d been in half an hour already and was waiting to leave: “Wayland! Been here long?”
She was willowy without being anorexic, with a well-painted face, and very fine legs visible due to the short skirt. She greeted me with a wave and a smile, and sat on a stool by Wayland. We had met at the time of her fling with Blaskin. “I’ve got you the gen on the GTG,” she said. “It’s all typed in here.”
Wayland stowed the plastic case of papers into his East German briefcase, while I tried not to show I knew what GTG acronomically signified. Instead of gulping the lees of my pint I ordered a double whisky, meanwhile noticing two bluebottles, who had survived the winter, playing leapfrog on the leaded windows from one square to the next, till one caught the other and they began their business.
Wayland frowned at Margery’s careless mention of the GTGs, so it was futile to act as if I hadn’t heard. “Still hoping to nail the drug smugglers and get a knighthood? You’re wasting your time. You tried the same game a few years ago with Moggerhanger, and it didn’t work. It won’t with the Green Toe Gang, either. I got you out of the drek, remember?”
“It’s only something on my mind,” he said sulkily. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Very hush-hush, is it? You want to sell it to ITV? The Beeb wouldn’t like such an underhand move.” I turned to Margery: “Can I get you a drink, love?”
“I’ll have a Cointreau.” She lit a cigarette. A youngish bloke with a General Custer hair-do came in, who I recognised as the man I’d given a quid to outside Selfridge’s a month ago. “Spare a copper for a pint?” he said to Wayland.
I knew he’d get no change there, and he didn’t, Wayland looking on him as a failure of the capitalist system who should be out on the streets throwing Molotov cocktails so that nice middle-class people like Wayland could watch it on television. I gave him something, and so did Margery, but a man further along the bar lifted a fist and told him, in unnecessarily strong language, to fuck off. The landlord’s features turned peevish at him going out to the next pub instead of staying to spend some of what he’d begged in his.
“Another of Thatcher’s dropouts,” Wayland said.
“I suppose you think he should be put to work making motorways in the Highlands?”
“Something like that.”
“When did you last wield a shovel?”
“What do you two have against each other?” Margery said.
I made the order. “Not a thing. I very much admire Wayland’s investigative journalism. He should just leave the drugs trade alone.”
“Someone has to do it,” she said.
Perhaps it would be best to encourage their pursuit of the Green Toe Gang, which would leave me a free hand to nobble Moggerhanger. In any case, I had no reason to involve myself with the GTGs. Let Wayland and Margery do it, though their plaguy incompetence could land them in an adder’s nest of such danger that after getting cut up for their trouble the morticians would have difficulty fitting the bits together. I had no wish to see Margery with a beard.
“Such opinions from you,” Wayland piped up smugly, “convince me that we should continue to do precisely what we’re doing.”
“All right,” I said, “but the Green Toe Gang don’t mess about. Do a programme on unmarried teenaged mothers in south London. Or investigate Islington Borough Council. You’ll only get knee-capped there, and that’s not so bad, though you’d look a right pair on crutches.”
“Tell the GTGs that. They’ll love you.” Wayland waved Margery’s cigarette wisp away: he’d given up his Stalin pipe on realising that King Arthur hadn’t smoked. “It’s too interesting to let go of.”
“Moggerhanger might deal with you marginally better,” I said, “if he caught you at something like that, because his outfit’s British to the core. But there’s a foreign element in the Green Toe Gang — which is the way things are going these days — and if you fall into their hands, God help you.”
He leaned close, a triumphant smirk. “What if I were to tell you I’d heard about a merger between Moggerhanger and the GTGs?”
“I wouldn’t believe it.”
“You may not even consider it worth thinking about, but I shan’t rest easy till Oscar Cross is behind bars.”
“And you know what would happen then? One morning at five o’clock the police would smash your front door down and find a kilo of cocaine in the line of Matrioshka dolls along your chest of drawers in the bedroom. You would have been well and truly framed, and telling it to the beak would do you no good. You’d then find yourself in the same cell as Oscar Cross, or a couple of his associates. They wouldn’t top you. Oh no”—I tried to sound like a lifetime jailbird in the know, “they’d let you live, day by day, with all the aggro they could invent. And as soon as you got out they’d move in for the kill.”
Wayland put on a show of not being afraid. In any case he was the type who’d like to see everybody behind bars except himself, loudspeakers in the cells impossible to turn off day or night, his voice on a circular tape shouting the benefits of Marxist-Leninist misery.
“All I’m trying to do,” I said, “is keep both of you from harm. If Oscar Cross or Moggerhanger are going to get caught let the police do it, and if you’ve got any information they don’t have you should give it to them like responsible citizens. Otherwise, stay clear.”
He looked glumly into the remains of his soapsuds, then his piggy little eyes glinted through the mists of middle-aged deliquescence at me, and I thought that if a puritanical vegetarian non-smoker like him got into a future Labour Government he would have an Institute of Political Correctness going within a week. “We don’t have anything concrete,” he said. “It’s still speculation, at the moment.”
“Keep it that way. Do something else. Write a novel, like Gilbert Blaskin. It keeps him out of mischief, most of the time.” I turned to Margery. “Another, love?”
She smiled at the mention of Blaskin. “How is the old roué?”
Her affair with him had long ago ended, so I could say: “When I left his place an hour ago he was doing something unspeakable to a young woman thesis writer on his casting couch, at the same time complaining that the life of a novelist was absolute agony. His hands started to go up her skirt, and her bulging eyes looked like those of a rabbit about to be eaten by a python at the zoo, so it was obviously the time for me to leave. The last thing I heard at the door was him saying: ‘I don’t have much to do with any woman now, my dear, unless it’s a case of instantaneous unadulterated and perfervid passion, against which no man can be expected to stand.’ They must be belting the arses off each other by now.”