He was snarling again now, and his hand was shaking so much the beer was slopping over the edge of his glass onto the plastic table. I reckon he must have a blood pressure problem.
“I’d be very disappointed if that was the case. Very disappointed.”
Craig made disappointment sound fatal. Maybe it was time to try a bit of appeasement.
“I’m not interested in that sort of game, Eddie. I’ll stick to my own business, thanks very much. It smells better.”
He didn’t like that either. Maybe I need a bit more practice on my appeasement skills. Craig ended up with his finger poked almost in my face, grimacing at me like a frustrated gargoyle.
“So why was your Thompson boy taken in by the Serious Crime Squad? What’s their interest in him?”
“I don’t know.”
Eddie was well informed in these areas. No doubt half the squad were on his payroll anyway. He must have read the expression on my face correctly, because he leaned back and took another drink. Lump Hammer Stan and the other two lads relaxed a fraction. I was glad about that — I didn’t like to see them so tense, it might give them indigestion.
“A driver, isn’t he? Thompson?” said Craig.
“Yeah, among other things.”
“Has he been moonlighting? Working for someone else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You see, McClure, I know you were asking questions of poor old Mick Kelk the other night. He was quite eager to tell us about it.” Craig paused deliberately, smiled that ferret smile again. “Poor old Mick.”
“Yeah, poor old Mick.”
I felt a bit sick in my stomach. As soon as I got away from here I’d have to find out what happened to Kelk. Poor old Mick.
“Kelk’s been driving for somebody,” I told him.
“I know. That was something else he told me. Now I want to hear how you’re involved.”
“Look, I told you — I’m not involved at all.”
The dried blood on my head was itching, and I instinctively tried to raise my hand to scratch it, forgetting the belt. Stan grabbed me and thumped me back upright. He did it a bit harder than necessary, I thought.
“It’s got to stop, McClure,” said Craig in his Mister Nasty voice.
Did he mean all this senseless violence? If so, I was right with him.
“You’re right. So let me go and we’ll forget all about it, eh? I’ll shake hands with Stan, and you can pay for a new door for the vicarage. Then we’ll all sleep happily in our beds.”
“Don’t be clever. I did try to warn you, in a friendly way. But it doesn’t work, does it? We might have had a peaceful arrangement of interests once, but that’s over now. A shame you’ve gone and spoiled it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eddie. All I want to do is get on with my business. Why do people keep interfering?”
Craig didn’t take much notice. He shook his head, as if he didn’t believe me. Did he know me that well?
“Did you think your friends in the police would help you?”
“Friends?”
“Maybe they decided to use you to try and close me down. You and the police would like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Eddie.”
Even to me my voice sounded weary. I saw Craig hesitate for the first time. He isn’t stupid. He’s got to have good judgement or he wouldn’t have survived in this business so long.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about you, McClure.”
“Don’t I know it. And I suppose you think there’s no smoke without fire? I suppose you’ve added two and two together somewhere along the way?”
A saw that movement out of the corner of my eye again. It was Lump Hammer Stan taking a step towards me. He thought the big words were swearing. I flinched a bit, trying to hide all the bits that already hurt. But Craig just lifted a hand to hold him back, and Stan went back to lurking just outside my field of vision.
“You’ve been making a nuisance of yourself. Asking a lot of questions. Dealing in information. That’s a long way from your car boot stalls.”
“The information I wanted was about who’s been fouling up my business. I’ve been suffering here, Eddie. Like, you, I guess.”
“Not like me, I don’t think.”
Craig lit a cigarette. I was glad he didn’t offer me one. I gave up smoking a long time ago. Besides, my mouth hurt.
“There’s always been a lot of this sort of thing going on. Petty crime — your sort of crime, McClure. It never really occurred to me before that it was organised on any scale. Now it seems as though it is.”
“Not by me. I’ve hardly got started.”
“I think you’ve stirred somebody up. They’ve been bringing in a lot of cash, on the quiet. But now they’re upset, and they’re lashing out. At you. And even at me. It won’t do.”
“I don’t know anything about them.”
Craig nodded. I instantly tensed, thinking maybe it was a signal for Stan to start doing a bit of gardening with the baseball bat. But nothing happened. Craig nodded again. I realised he was trying to tell me that he actually believed me.
“But you’d like to know this person is, wouldn’t you, McClure?”
Craig looked at the end of his cigarette for a while. I just hoped he was planning on smoking it and not using it for anything else.
“This person — he’s the one who’s been fouling up my deliveries?” I said.
“They call him Perella,” said Craig, with a smug look. He was relaxed now. He thought he was completely in charge, that he knew everything and I knew nothing. He thought he had control over me. His calmness was more worrying than his high blood pressure.
“You knew who it was all along? But why—”
“It was him or you. Maybe both of you together, who knows? But you were the most convenient to get hold of.”
“That’ll teach me to be accessible to my public.”
“Well, relatively convenient,” said Craig, with a glance towards Stan. For the first time, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one in Craig’s bad books at the moment. You can’t over-rate fellow feeling too highly, even when you have to call somebody like Lump Hammer Stan a chum.
“Perella, now, I can’t find him at all,” said Craig. “No one knows where he lives or where he comes from, or where he hangs out. So obviously I had to start with you. We do have some interests in common, don’t we?”
I didn’t like the way he said this. I don’t like to think I have too much in common with the likes of Eddie Craig. So I kept mum and admired the garden. I’d just noticed that it wasn’t all wild undergrowth out there after all. Somebody had recently been doing quite a lot of deep digging in a bed just under the window.
“So you do believe me, Eddie? We’re on the same side in this, you and me.”
“Well, I thought you might say that, McClure. In fact, I’m delighted that you’re so willing to take up my proposition.”
There was a small silence. I got the feeling there was something I was supposed to say. A little voice at the back of my mind suggested I didn’t say it, just to see what happened. But the silence, and Eddie Craig’s way of staring at the end of his cigarette, were just too convincing.
“What proposition?”
“You see, I’m a stranger outside Mansfield, I don’t know your area too well. But you’re a man with a lot of contacts round here. You know how to ask questions in the right places. With your friends in the police, for example.”
“I don’t have any—”
“Yes, yes. But also you’re not so high profile as myself. I think that you’re the ideal man to find this Perella. Then we both benefit, don’t we? It’s quite obvious to me that you have a personal interest, and you’ve already put yourself out to make inquiries. So we make use of your enthusiasm.”