She stood on the doorstep to wave me goodbye, assured and half-mocking, a girl with bright brown eyes, graceful neck, and neat nose and mouth in between.
I booked into the Gloucester Hotel, where I’d never stayed before, and ate a leisurely and much needed dinner in a nearby restaurant. I shouldn’t have accepted the ride on Notebook, I thought ruefully; I’d hardly enough strength to cut up a steak.
A strong feeling of walking blindfold towards a precipice dragged at my feet all the way to Vivian Iverson’s gambling club. I didn’t know which way the precipice lay: ahead, behind, or all round. I only suspected that it was still there, and if I did nothing about finding it, I could walk straight over.
The Vivat Club proved as suave and well-manicured as its owner, and was a matter of interconnecting small rooms, not open expanses like casinos. There were no croupiers in eye-shades with bright dramatic spotlights over the tables, and no ladies tinkling with diamonds in half shadow. There were however two or three discreet chandeliers, a good deal of cigar smoke, and a sort of reverent hush.
Vivian, good as his word, had left a note for me to be let in, and as an extra, treated as a guest. I walked slowly from room to room, balloon glass of brandy in hand, looking for his elegant shape, and not finding it.
There were a good many businessmen in lounge suits earnestly playing chemin-de-fer, and women among them with eyes that flicked concentratedly from side to side with every delivered card. I’d never had an urge towards betting for hours on the turn of a card, but everyone to his own poison.
‘Ro, my dear fellow,’ Vivian said behind me. ‘Come to play?’
‘On an accountant’s earnings?’ I said, turning to him and smiling. ‘What are the stakes?’
‘Whatever you can afford to lose, my dear fellow.’
‘Life, liberty, and a ticket to the Cup Final.’
His eyes didn’t smile as thoroughly as his mouth. ‘Some people lose honour, fortunes, reputation, and their heads.’
‘Does it disturb you?’ I asked.
He made a small waving gesture towards the chemin-de-fer. ‘I provide a pastime to cater for an impulse. Like bingo.’
He put his hand on my shoulder as if we were long-lost friends and steered me towards a further room. There were heavy gold links in his cuffs, and a silk cord edging to his blue velvet jacket. Dark glossy hair on a well-shaped head, flat stomach, faint smell of fresh talc. About thirty-five, and shrewdly succeeding where others had fallen to bailiffs.
There was a green baize raised-edge gaming table in the further room, but no one was playing cards.
Behind the table, in the club’s ubiquitous wooden-armed, studded-leather armchairs, sat three men.
They were all large, smoothly dressed, and unfriendly. I knew them, from way back.
Connaught Powys. Glitberg. Ownslow.
‘We hear you’re looking for us,’ Connaught Powys said.
9
I stood still. Vivian closed the door behind me and sat in another armchair on the edge of my left-hand vision. He crossed one leg elegantly over the other and eased the cloth over the knee with a languid hand.
Ownslow watched with disfavour.
‘Piss off,’ he said.
Vivian’s answer was an extra-sophisticated drawl. ‘My dear fellow, I may have set him up, but you’ve no license to knock him down.’
There were several other empty chairs, pulled back haphazardly from the centre table. I sat unhurriedly in one of them and did my best with Vivian’s leg-crossing ritual, hoping that casualness would reduce the atmosphere from bash-up to boardroom. Ownslow’s malevolent stare hardly persuaded me that I’d succeeded.
Ownslow and Glitberg had run a flourishing construction racket for years, robbing the ratepayers of literally millions. Like all huge frauds, theirs had been done on paper, with Glitberg in the council’s Planning Office, and Ownslow in the Works and Maintenance. They had simply invented a large number of buildings: offices, flats and housing estates. The whole council having approved the buildings in principle, Glitberg, in his official capacity, advertised for tenders from developers. The lowest good-looking tender often came from a firm called National Construction (Wessex) Ltd and the council confidently entrusted the building to them.
National Construction (Wessex) Ltd. did not exist except as expensively produced letterheads. The sanctioned buildings were never built. Huge sums of money were authorised and paid to National Construction (Wessex) Ltd., and regular reports of the buildings’ progress came back as Glitberg, from Planning, made regular inspections. After the point when the buildings were passed as ready for occupation the Maintenance department took over. Ownslow’s men maintained bona-fide buildings, and Ownslow also requisitioned huge sums for the maintenance of the well-documented imaginary lot.
All the paperwork had been punctiliously, even brilliantly, completed. There were full records of rents received from the imaginary buildings, and rates paid by the imaginary tenants; but as all councils took it for granted that council buildings had to be heavily subsidised, the permanent gap between revenue and expenditure was accepted as normal.
Like many big frauds it had been uncovered by accident, and the accident had been my digging a little too deeply into the affairs of one of the smaller operators sharing in the crumbs of the greater rip-off.
The council, when I’d informed them, had refused to believe me. Not, that was, until they toured their area in detail, and found weedy grass where they had paid for, among other things, six storeys of flats for low-income families, a cul-de-sac of maisonettes for single pensioners, and two roadfuls of semi-detached bungalows for the retired and handicapped.
Blind-eye money had obviously been passed to various council members, but bribery in cash was hard to prove. The council had been publicly embarrassed and had not forgiven me. Glitberg and Ownslow, who had seen that the caper could not continue for ever, had been already preparing a quiet departure when the police descended on them in force on a Sunday afternoon. They had not exactly forgiven me either.
In line with all their other attention to detail, neither of them had made the mistake of living above his legal income. The huge sums they had creamed off had been withdrawn from the National Construction (Wessex) Ltd. bank account over the years as a stream of cheques and cash which had aroused no suspicion at the bank, and had then apparently vanished into thin air. Of the million-plus which they had each stolen, not a pound had been recovered.
‘Whatever you want from us,’ Glitberg said, ‘you’re not going to get.’
‘You’re a danger to us,’ Connaught Powys said.
‘And like a wasp, you’ll get swatted,’ said Ownslow.
I looked at their faces. All three showed the pudgy roundness of self-indulgence, and all three had the sharp wary eyes of guilt. Separately, Connaught Powys, with his sun-lamp tan and smoothly brushed hair, looked a high-up City gent. Heavy of body, in navy blue pin-stripes. Pale grey silk tie. Overall air of power and opulence, and not a whisper of cell-fug and slopping-out in the mornings.
Ownslow in jail was an easier picture. Fairish hair straggled to his collar from a fringe round a bald dome. Thick neck, bull shoulders, hands like baseball gloves. A hard tough man whose accent came from worlds away from Connaught Powys.
Glitberg, in glasses, had short bushy grey hair and a fanned-out spread of white side-whiskers, which made him look like a species of ape. If Connaught Powys was power, and Ownslow was muscle, Glitberg was venom.