Girls

by Bill James

  This action had been important to the girl, but much more important to Ember, crucial to Ember. His character and manliness became involved with that abused youngster, depended on that abused youngster. His steps towards the BMW had been steps towards a brilliantly improved, resolute self. How could people think of him as Panicking Ralph, or Ralphy, when he audaciously, quite selflessly, dealt with a perilous situation in this style? Yes, style. Of course, not many would know about it, but, alternatively, and inspiringly, how could he think of himself as Panicking Ralph after what happened, although he had sometimes been forced in honesty to admit he did get totally disabling panics.

  Noblesse oblige. He recalled that phrase. It meant, roughly, high rank and privilege brought big duties. He thanked God he’d had the resolve to recognize a duty to that pressganged piece BMW’d on the night with a corpse. AlthoughRalph realized he, technically, did not yet possess full noblesse, such as a title or true aristocratic background, noblesse could also be taken to mean distinction through quality. And, yes, Ralph believed he certainly had distinction, especially when considered against this abducted, corrupted, enslaved, immigrant girl – most likely a ‘sans papiers’, as they apparently, touchingly, called themselves in France: ‘without papers’, without identity.

  Whereas, Ember’s identity? Established. Acknowledged. Aglow. Didn’t he own his club, the Monty, and plan to raise its social rating magnificently very soon, ditching the crooked fucking riff-raff and their noisy slags he had to grant membership at present? Also, Ember was a famed campaigner on environmental and anti-pollution topics, especially rivers and litter, through sharp, positive letters frequently published in the local papers over the names R.W. Ember or Ralph W. Ember, by now familiar to many, and of major weight. Further, he and his family lived in an unmortgaged, three-hundred-plus years old manor house, Low Pastures, with spacious grounds and stables and paddocks for his daughters’ riding.

  As to French, one of his daughters, Venetia, knew the language, having been to school for a spell at Poitiers, then Bordeaux, and she told Ralph that Low Pastures would be called a ‘gentilhommière’ in that country. There had been French girls at these schools with her who came from gentilhommières in, for example, the Auvergne or Bourgogne. Ember loved the word and often enunciated it slowly to himself, ‘gentilhommière’: a gentleman’s residence, in the old, full, admirable sense of an English gentleman bound by noblesse oblige. You would not expect to find someone like Manse Shale and his ferret eyes and rickety grammar in a gentilhommière. If you mentioned that word to Manse, the bewilderment in his face would be comical, though also pitiable. Of course, Manse did scrape around for status and had that one-time rectory. Ralph certainly did not despise the Church, yet a rectory could never add up to a gentilhommière. Manse would probably qualify for that new social category mentioned in the Press, a ‘chav’: someone rich and vulgar. Mansel was the sort who’d admit it and pick up the cliché, ‘Better a chav than a chavnot,’ as if he’d just thought of it for himself, so as to prove chavs could be witty and frank.

  People worked at their image, including Ember. Although Ralph felt warm about the way he spontaneously looked after the girl, he wondered, glancing back, whether he had looked after her enough. He must find this conscripted young tart again. Now that his own personal rating – his rating as a gentilhomme, fit to live in a gentilhommière – yes, now that all this hung on her state and fate, he decided it was morally lacklustre merely to have pulled her out of the car, shed a few measly fucking tens and twenties, and abandoned her. Where could she go? He hadn’t troubled to wonder, had he? She’d left, with the money still on show, and walked into the next street, then, presumably the next, and where, finally?

  As far as Ralph cared at the time, she could go anywhere because he had performed his little spell of salvaging, and afterwards wanted to forget her – wanted to imagine he had gloriously saved her from something, and that in the future she’d stay safe and free and touchingly grateful. Shale had encouraged that kind of write-off, and this probably influenced Ralph. But he’d been part of the decision himself. And the convenient, callous hand-washing and stupid optimism he now came to see as more suitable to Panicking Ralph, or even Panicking Ralphy, than to a gracious man of honour and officer material, aware in toto of his responsibilities. He had tried to buy off his conscience and knew it.

  The revelation hit Ember badly. For a second he thought it would put him into one of his authentic Panicking Ralph, or Ralphy, panics. Perhaps despite everything that’s who he really was. Oh, God, irony – he finds out he’s a nothing through trying to be something. But he managed to fight off a bumper panic, at least for the moment.

  To restore self-belief and escape shame, he decided he must get up to Morton Cross, or near, urgently and trace the girl, check she was all right, and do more than that. He had no sexual feelings for her. Simply, he cared in a principled British way – a way natural to the owner of a gentilhommière which went right back in history – simply he cared in a principled British way for this duped, victimized alien. Because he’d seen her, had that slight contact with her, she’d become his responsibility. He asked himself, how could he check she was all right, and the answer he gave himself back said she couldn’t really be all right. He would tour Morton Cross and see if he could find her among the tarts on the street. And, if he did find her, would that be ‘all right’ then? No, it would mean she had simply reverted because for her no other livelihood existed or could. A few pounds from him and Manse could not buy her a new career. She was blighted. And, on account of the ruthless pimpery – probably foreign and barbaric – she would not even be able to keep much of the cash. He must change this. His own soul and personal dignity lay invested in her. These amounted to far more than that mere handful of pocket money.

  He prepared to go immediately. It might be difficult around Morton Cross, Inton and the Park. Police would still have a big, after-the-event presence there. Usually, they weren’t especially down on tarts but tarts had become symptoms of gang war, gang deaths, and these mattered. Such deaths made the Press and troubled the politicians. The police had to respond. Girls parading on offer were sure to be more careful for now. Even before the Chilton Park incident, they must have been fairly discreet when working that district, because the area had a lot of big properties and influential people who would object to street walkers cheapening the scene and possibly making casual use of excellently laid out front gardens, leaving condoms and arse prints on the soil. The fact was, this district lacked altogether a recognized tradition of busy whoredom and kerb cruising. Now, owing to upped police numbers, conditions would be even tougher. Just the same, Ember knew he must look. It might be his salvation, as well as the girl’s. She could help him finally snuff out and bury Panicking Ralph, or Ralphy. She knew the finality of death.

  He thought he would not discuss this quest with his wife. Margaret was probably unaware that some referred to him as Panicking Ralph, or Ralphy. Keep it like that. He intensely needed her to have faith in him and to admire him in his worthwhile Ralph Ember or Ralph W. Ember essence. And without disclosing those demeaning, abominable other names to her, he would not be able to explain the fierce compulsion in him to do a tart tour – the fierce and, he felt, rather illustrious compulsion.

  He had no name for the kid to help trace her. He must hope that some of the girls knew she had been in the BMW that night and could point him on to her new work site. It was even possible that Tirana did love her and some kind of relationship existed. This would make identification fairly easy, as long as colleagues agreed to talk. Ember put four hundred pounds from the Monty safe in his pockets to ease introductions: fifties, twenties, tens. Although language might be tricky if most of the girls up there were flesh imports, a good glimpse of readies would make them try to understand and help. He took no pistol. It would be inappropriate, in his view. He had a project to aid someone, and through aiding her aid himself. Why should a firearm come into such plans? This g
irl had probably seen a lot of guns although so young, and she might instantly spot a holster bulge under his jacket and get scared and hostile – might take Ralph to be part of the same brutal scene he wished to free her from.

  He told Monty staff he would be gone for a few hours at most and left them to run the club. That was all right. He liked to be at the Monty for the last hour or so before closing at 2 a.m., to make sure things stayed peaceful. Some members might be very full of booze and grandiosity by then and difficult to shift. Oh, God, to be able to ban the fuckers for ever! He should get back in time for doors shut tonight.

  Of course, he realized that because of increased police patrols at Morton Cross the girls and the substances trade had possibly shifted ground. Any move would most likely be to the Valencia streets ultimately, where tolerance operated following decades of custom and practice. The story went that Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles had a girl down there. Lately, the story also went that one of the new trades people at Morton Cross, Adrian Cologne, had tried to take over running of that girl, and had grown rough with her when she acted awkward. If this were true and Iles found out – which he would, of course – Adrian Cologne might be in line for hard retaliation.

  Ralph had certainly heard forecasts from operatives in his firms about transference of these Morton Cross outfits to the Valencia, and had wondered himself. But no news of this invasion reached him so far. Several days after the Chilton Park discord, business might be resuming up there, though in a quieter mode and perhaps more towards the west or south, away from the Park. He thought he’d start his search at the border streets between Morton Cross and Inton, two comparable regions of high suburbia, and, should that produce nothing, he could turn back to the Park.

  And as he trekked through the first few Inton avenues and crescents and so on he had a bit of a smile. Always this sort of glossy, bumptious district tickled him. The houses were big – five or six bedrooms, most of them – and their gardens big, too. You could tell that the people who lived here really thought they had achieved something. Yet these smug fuckers probably would not even know what a fucking gentilhommière was. Their properties had been constructed of cheapo cement bricks, tinted and antiqued to make them look like the geniune clay-based, oven-baked article. Sad. On the other hand, Low Pastures featured authentic stone walls and Ralph and his adviser on design and decor had decided to keep the stone exposed here and there, as a tribute to its basic beauty and strength. Ralph loved this rawness, this intimacy with the past. As he’d told Margaret, they seemed to place him in a context. He longed to be worthy of that past, this context, which was why he would transform the Monty. Low Pastures dated from a century when Britain secured India and Inton did not exist, except as fields. He drove on slowly. So far he’d seen no girl groups around these streets.

  As a matter of fact, Iles lived not far from here in one of these large gimcrack places. You’d think someone like Iles would not be content with such a base. They said Harpur used to get in there a while ago to commingle with Iles’s wife when the ACC was away at courses or Association of Chief Police Officer shindigs. The fat, tall hedges helped Harpur slink in and out not too obviously, the shag-happy yob. This furtiveness could not be less like that picture of himself Ralph had as a fearless unit commander heading his men as they burst from their trenches. Iles rumbled the adultery, though, and would occasionally scream the details at Harpur publicly even now, sometimes while in full ceremonial uniform at civic functions. Reports of such behaviour unsettled Ember. If one senior police officer yelled accusations in, say, a cenotaph Remembrance Day service, at another senior police officer about banging his – the first senior officer’s – wife on the quiet in the first senior officer’s own expensive property, though not of the gentilhommière category, plainly, this must embarrass ordinary folk and make them wonder whether suitable people ran law and order here. Often Ralph thought that British standards, as they once were, had begun to slide at such a rate they could never be stopped, let alone fucking reversed.

  Now, his instincts did turn out fruitful and he found a trio of corner girls in a short, pricey, very bay-windowed street on the edge of Inton, not quite Morton Cross, and a long way from the Park. He pulled up and lowered the front passenger side window of the Saab. Often his profile affected women. It could be a pest, the way they came after him, but he did not mind tonight. One girl approached at once. The three looked anything between fourteen and eighteen, dressed revelatory, and most likely non-Brit. The one who moved to greet him was dark, very tall, very angular, large-eyed, wide-mouthed. She stuck her head into the car and said: ‘Seventy-five long time, dearie, fifty quicky, forty blow. You have that cash?’

  Ember translated this as, Are you only up to window shopping, Mr Poverty-Prick? ‘Yes, plenty,’ he said.

  The girl gave a backward twitch of her head indicating the other two: ‘Me the best. Tight as a mouse’s ear. A lot of bounce and emotion.’ Ember didn’t know an Albanian accent but thought this might be it. Maybe on account of her poor English, she had been given lines to speak and professional jargon: ‘dearie’, ‘long time’, ‘quicky’, ‘blow’, ‘bounce’, ‘emotion’. And the tight ‘mouse’s ear’, of course. Or perhaps that could be a direct translation from Albanian. They might believe in spelling things out rather coarsely there.

  ‘I’m searching for someone,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Me. The best.’

  ‘Another girl,’ Ember said. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Another?’ She looked insulted and angry.

  ‘A girl not here now but at Morton Cross that night.’

  ‘You got cash?’ she replied. ‘You will show me cash?’

  He thought she smelled really good – not scent but an encouraging, wholesome soap, filling the car. It could be Imperial Leather. They might not have this in her country abroad if it had never owned an empire that produced leather, and she’d probably been won over by the soap and given herself a real sudding. Cleanliness offered a grand plus in a whore of whatever age. Ralph hated ingrained knuckles. There seemed a thorough spruceness to this girl’s hair. You would not mind that head on one of your personal pillows if the family were away and you took her home briefly. Or on the back-seat upholstery of even a luxury car. The shakiness of her English made it important to have other favourable factors. He pulled out a couple of fifties and displayed them for her.

  She wagged a finger at him, like a mother to her child: ‘No good,’ she said.

  True, forged fifties appeared now and then. Of course, Ralph or someone at the club had checked these, but he did not try to explain that now. She must have been told by the management to refuse them. He put the notes back in his pocket and produced four twenties instead. ‘Tirana’s girl,’ he said.

  ‘Tirana? My city.’

  ‘Ah, you’re Albanian. A lovely country, I believe. Mountains. Chrome.’

  ‘Send money home every week.’ She touched the twenties but he held on.

  ‘That’s very good,’ he said. ‘We call those “remittance contributions”, important factors in some countries’ economies. But I mean the businessman they call Tirana, not the town.’

  ‘Ah, businessman.’

  ‘They called him Tirana. He was dead in a car. A girl with him. I have to find that girl. There’s eighty if you can help me.’

  ‘Me best.’ She pointed at his wristwatch. ‘One hour. Seventy-five. Eighty is . . . oh, maybe ten more minutes.’ She touched the twenties again.

  ‘I have to find that girl.’

  ‘For fucking?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Not for fucking? Is she a girl not for fucking, never for fucking? She is nun?’

  ‘Yes, she was a girl for fucking, but not tonight. I want to meet her, that’s all.’

  ‘Tirana? He had many girls.’

  ‘Yes, but the one with him that night.’

  ‘Eighty is good.’

  ‘Because I’m taking your time,’ Ember
replied.

  ‘Time? You take it? How take my time?’

  ‘There might be other customers. I’m in the way.’

  ‘To talk about Tirana – we don’t like that. Yes, he dead, but we don’t like to talk about him.’

  ‘No, I realize that.’

  ‘Dangerous.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not really about Tirana. The girl.’

  ‘You are police?’ She did a stare at the dashboard of the Saab, most likely looking for switch-on blue lamps. She had learned the way of things here fast.

  ‘I want to help this girl,’ Ember replied.

  ‘Help? Why?’

  How did he explain in language she could follow that the one he sought had given him stature, brought him aplomb and goodness, activated his courage? ‘Do you know where she’s putting out tonight? he said. ‘Which street?’

  The girl pulled her head back out of the car and turned to speak to the others, perhaps passing on his question or perhaps telling them what a lousy prat she’d got herself stuck with. Ember could hardly hear and knew he wouldn’t have understood anyway.