by Mike Ripley
I turned to see the barman and the three customers at the bar all staring at me. I moved towards them rapidly, figuring that using the toilet before spending any money there was also grounds for being asked to leave.
‘A pint of your excellent McMullen’s IPA, please,’ I smarmed.
‘Is he 18?’ the barman came back snappily. Another dismissal offence.
‘And a large orange juice, please.’
The barman nodded that this was acceptable – just – and I paid and carried the drinks back to our table.
Lee reappeared and sat down. It hadn’t really occurred to me that he would do a runner, though he easily could have, as there was an exit from the staircase direct on to Cambridge Circus.
‘Cheers,’ sniffed Lee, downing the orange juice in one go. I knew that licensees were told to watch out for strange behaviour from people returning from the toilets, in an effort to spot and stop drug taking. They were also trained to notice tell-tale signs such as the rapid consumption of soft drinks with large amounts of Vitamin C in them. I reckoned we were on borrowed time in this pub.
‘So, what do you know about Tigger, Lee? It’s okay, you can tell me.’
‘I’m not going to the funeral you know. I don’t do funerals.’
He picked a spent match out of the ashtray and began to snap it into small pieces.
‘Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to,’ I tried, in my second-best bedside manner. ‘I just need to know what Tigger told you.’
‘About what?’ He was genuinely perplexed.
‘I was hoping you’d tell me. Did he ever mention a guy called Bassotti?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Hubbard?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Did he ever talk about money? Did he ever give you any?’
‘Tigger never had trouble getting money. Said he had lots of old friends who were always willing to lend a hand. He told me not to worry about where it came from. Told me not to worry at all. He said he’d take care of me.’
This was more painful than I had thought it would be.
‘Did he mention money, bank accounts, a stash of cash somewhere? Where did he keep all his stuff?’
‘What stuff?’
‘His clothes, his CDs, his Filofax, I don’t fucking know. His stuff, for Christ’s sake.’
I thought he was going to cry again.
‘He didn’t have “stuff”. He never had anything he wasn’t able to carry around with him.’
‘Look, Lee, I didn’t mean to get ratty. Are you saying that Tigger never had a base camp anywhere? Come on, think. He must have had a stash of some sort.’
‘Not that I know, honest.’
I felt near to tears myself by now.
‘Listen, when Tigger and I worked together, he used to get his cut – his wages – and post them somewhere, every night. Where would he be sending them, Lee? There must be an address ... ?’
He thought about it hard, he really did. I could see the strain on his face.
‘No, straight up, there was nowhere, nothing. He never said. He didn’t even have a change of clothes. He just wore stuff then dumped it. If he liked things, he’d give them to people, like he gave me these trainers.’
We both looked down at Lee’s feet.
‘He gave you those?’
I had a mental flashback to Tigger, feet up on the dash of Bassotti’s van then taking off one of his hi-tops and producing my wages from it like a rabbit from a hat.
‘Yes,’ said Lee. ‘Told me to take special care of them as he might want them back. Of course, he never came back …’
‘Get ‘em off.’
‘What?’
‘Take ‘em off, I want to have a look at them.’
He looked at me as if I had flipped, then thought: why not? It probably wasn’t the weirdest offer he’d had that day.
He leant back in his chair and put both feet up on the table and began pulling at the long white laces.
That was when we got thrown out of the pub.
Chapter Fifteen
It was a key. Smaller than a house door key but bigger than, say, a briefcase lock or padlock key. And it had been hidden in the heel of Lee’s right trainer quite simply by making a cut in the rubber where the heel sloped into the rest of the sole and sliding the key in. The pressure of the wearer’s foot squeezed the rubber together to hide it and keep it in place, almost like the self-sealing tyres the Americans developed in Viet Nam.
But a key to what? And where? Lee didn’t know and didn’t really care much either. He was still trying to work out how I’d done the conjuring trick of finding the key. Neither did it strike him as odd to be standing on one foot leaning against the pedestrian railings in Cambridge Circus, handing over 50 per cent of his footwear to a virtual stranger while the rush hour crowd ebbed and flowed round him and the ticket touts began to pick their pitches for the evening performance of Les Miserables.
I handed Lee his hi-top and asked him one last question. ‘Are you still using that tent in Lincoln’s Inn for a berth?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, but shy all of a sudden. ‘Unless, you know, something else comes up.’
‘You could have chosen your words more carefully, but I know what you mean. What happens to the tent during the day?’
‘One of the regulars looks after it for me. I do him ... favours.’ He looked at me, hurt. ‘It’d get nicked otherwise.’
‘You’re right, it would. Did Tigger buy it for you?’
He nodded.
‘I thought so. Did he pay cash?’
‘Did, as a matter of fact. He was rolling in it a coupla weeks before ... he ... before …’
‘Did he leave you any dosh?’
Lee smiled for the first time that afternoon; maybe that week.
‘What, trust me with cash? He may have been a flake, but he wasn’t fucking stupid.’
‘Is a tenner any good to you?’
‘Was Jesus a Jew?’
‘Yes,’ I said deadpan, and waited as if for him to continue. I’ve found it the best way to deal with a smart-mouth.
‘Er ... I’m sorry. Yes, I could really use a tenner. Anything.’
I gave him a note and said: ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ He bent down to fasten the laces on his trainer.
I headed back to where I’d left Armstrong on Denmark Street but cut across Charing Cross Road opposite the arcade where I’d found him. There was a bookshop with large, open, plate glass windows and I took up position there, pretending to browse through a biography of the twenty-seventh best-Prime-Minister-we-never-had-this-century.
Within a minute I spotted Lee turning into the arcade, waving the £10 note above his head.
I was glad I hadn’t bothered to tell him to spend it wisely.
Rewind. Forward. Pause. Slow motion.
Something had bugged me from the start, and that was Tigger’s habit of posting his wages every night. I had no idea of the address and had never had a chance to catch him writing it, as he always carried a pre-written, stamped envelope. But if that was how he made his deposits, there was something nagging me about how he made withdrawals. The connection, again, was Lee.
I replayed the scene in my mind when Tigger called me out from the dispatch company in order to pick up Lee. He had waved a wodge of £20 notes at me and had said something to the effect that he’d got them from the 24-hour cash dispenser at the nearby bank on Seymour Street.
They are actually called ATMs – automated teller machines – but most people call them holes-in-the-wall or ‘spits’, because they spit money at you. Sometimes they don’t, they just gobble up your card and leave you fuming and beating your head against the surrounding concrete. Ever wondered why they’re always set in concrete? There had been a rash of spectacul
ar thefts the year before, where whole machines had been ripped out of the wall by mechanical diggers or small mobile cranes, usually early on a Friday night in the winter, when it was dark and the machine had been filled with cash for the weekend. And everyone knew the story – or saloon-bar legend – of the gang who built a fake machine and waited for customers to stick their card in and enter their personal identification number, before swallowing the lot and nipping round the corner to the real ATM to make a rather large withdrawal.
Whatever their weaknesses, the one thing they don’t do is spit out used and crumpled notes, because that would gum up the mechanism. And that’s what Tigger had had that morning. There was also another reason I knew Tigger had been lying, and that was the fact that the nearest bank only had ATMs inside, to take the pressure off the human tellers during peak periods. At the time I picked up Tigger, the bank’s doors were still shut, so there was no way he could have used the machine there.
Of course he could have drawn the money out of a machine the day before, but everything about Tigger had suggested that he did not carry cash around if he could help it. So where had he got a fairly thick pile of notes at that time of the morning?
I reasoned that it had to be nearby, and that necessitated a scouting patrol on foot.
I made it to Seymour Place just after six and parked up Armstrong in one of the mews off George Street. That meant I was halfway between Gloucester Place and the Edgware Road, with Marble Arch forming the tip of an upside-down triangle. I told myself I would start in that area and then work outwards. The one thing I couldn’t tell myself was what the hell I was looking for.
I began by heading towards the Edgware Road and quartering back on myself through the area known as Little Beirut because of the density of Lebanese restaurants per square yard.
Nothing jumped out and bit me as a likely Tigger bolt hole or safe house, though I got some funny looks from a passing traffic warden, who caught me examining the drain covers of a Catholic church.
I hit the lucky button over towards Gloucester Place, in a side street behind the Churchill Hotel. The street had a pub and an Indian restaurant and a florist and an estate agent’s and what we are now taught to call a ‘convenience store’ but at one time would have been described as the ‘village shop’ or the ‘OAH’ (Open All Hours).
This one was no different from a thousand other corner newsagents except that it had, instead of a shop window, a rank of mailboxes, above which was a sign saying ‘For Hire’.
I wandered over casually and began to read the ‘Conditions of Hire’ card that had been Sellotaped to the front of box number 1. The rates were reasonable. You paid a signing-on fee and then quarterly rental, and for that you had confidentiality and 24-hour access to your personal mailbox, by use of your exclusive key (deposit: £25). Mail was addressed to the shop and sorted by name or box number into the boxes. You collected whenever you felt like it.
There were 16 boxes in rows of four. While I was reading the instructions pinned to the first, I fumbled Tigger’s key out of my pocket and, keeping my arm near my side, tried it in box number 14, the second box in the bottom row. The lock wouldn’t turn, but there was no doubt it was the right sort of key. I now had 15 boxes to try, but there was no way I was going to do that in broad daylight with the shop still open.
Which gave me an idea. I went inside and picked an Evening Standard off the counter, offering a pound coin to the dark-skinned lady behind the cash register.
‘I’ve been looking at your rental boxes,’ I charmed her. ‘Got any spare ones, or are they all taken?’
‘You have to fill in form,’ she said, rooting around among the circulars and bits of paper stuffed down the side of the till. ‘And you have to pay deposit for key and a fee and the first rent in advance. But I haven’t got any forms. Come back tomorrow.’
‘Sure, but can you tell me if you’ve got one that’s free?’
She scowled at this, but that was the trouble with customers – they kept wanting things.
She bent down behind the counter and came up holding a small, black tin cashbox. She opened it and removed a bunch of papers, most of which looked like unpaid telephone bills, and then came up with three keys, all identical to Tigger’s, except these had numbered discs attached to the hole in the base of the key by safety pins.
‘We got three to rent, looks like,’ she said helpfully.
I leaned over and nodded in agreement, getting a good look at the numbers in the process.
‘Well, one will do. Thanks. I’ll pop back tomorrow. What time are you open?’
‘We open seven to seven every day,’ she said, taking away the need for my next question.
I smiled at her and left with my newspaper. It was only out on the street that I thought she might have been trying to get rid of me because I had been smiling my bruised and broken-cheeked leer. It obviously didn’t work with some women.
I strode across the road without looking back at the shop, and into the Indian restaurant opposite. I ordered a Kingfisher beer, a mild prawn curry, cottage cheese cooked in tomato sauce and rice instead of nan bread, because I reckoned that was as much as my teeth could handle.
As I was the first customer of the evening, I had no trouble getting a table near the window so I could watch the shop. Just before seven, the dark-skinned lady (Cypriot? Lebanese?) turned the lights off, locked up and left. On her way out she posted something through the slots in two of the mailboxes, numbers. 4 and 7. I doubted if anyone was writing to Tigger here, so unless it was a reminder that his rent was overdue or similar, I thought it safe to assume that those two boxes were someone else’s.
On the inside cover of a book of matches advertising the restaurant I drew four horizontal lines and three vertical ones to give me a grid for 16 numbers. I wrote in numbers 4 and 7, then added 14, which I’d tried with Tigger’s key. Then I put in the numbers of the three keys the shop lady had said were still free: 2, 8 and 9. That left me ten boxes to choose from. Ten-to-one were not the best odds I could wish for, but as I ate and drank another Kingfisher, two no-doubt scrupulously honest citizens going about their lawful business came along and improved the odds. One was a man in a sharp suit who left his Porsche parked half on the kerb as he opened box number 16. The mail almost fell out on to his brogues, there was so much in it. I put money on him running a reclaim scam. (You mailshot people saying that, for instance, £500 worth of camera has been left at, say, Chicago O’Hare airport with their name on it and if they send £15 pounds now to cover postage ... well, you can guess the rest.) The other was a small Chinese girl who opened box number 11. I saw her shoulders sag and almost heard her sigh as she gazed into the empty box.
That brought the odds down to eight-to-one. Still not good, if anyone was looking, and in view of the fact that there was a police station around the corner. Still, it had to be tried.
I paid the bill on a credit card in the name F MacLean Angel, which put me under ‘M’ in the computer instead of ‘A’. Apart from that, it was a genuine card and the only one I had not up to my credit limit. It wasn’t that the meal had been so good that I didn’t mind paying for it, it was that I didn’t want to give the restaurant any reason to remember me.
I said a cheery goodnight to my waiter and, as a party of four entered, I left and headed straight across the road. I had the key in my hand, and in rapid succession tried it in boxes 5 and 6.
No go. I risked one more, number 3, and again it refused to turn. At that point, a gang of young men fell noisily out of the nearby pub. I wasn’t prepared to risk it, so I turned on my heel and set off back towards Armstrong.
It was now five-to-one and I felt confident that I could do the lot under cover of Armstrong. I cut through the side streets and drew up outside the shop, mounting the pavement. Armstrong now effectively shielded me from passers-by, though I wondered why I was worried. I could probably have unscrewed t
he entire lot and taken them away in a truck without anyone noticing.
I left box number 1 as a last resort, as numbers 10, 12, 13 and 15 were lower down and out of sight behind Armstrong’s gently idling engine. Ten and 12 were bad calls. Number 13 came up trumps.
Unlucky for some 13. It just had to be.
There were about a dozen envelopes in the box along with some sort of plastic sheets rolled up and secured with an elastic band. I grabbed the lot, hugging everything to my chest, locked the box and piled back into Armstrong.
I drove around Portman Square and cut across into Manchester Square, parking on an empty meter. Only then did I start to sift through my booty.
All the envelopes except one contained money. All were addressed to ‘A A Milne’ care of box 13 at the accommodation address. Nice one, Tigger, taking your creator’s name in vain.
Some of the envelopes had postmarks from a year before. Some of the more recent ones hadn’t even been opened. They were addressed in a mixture of handwriting and typing, and while most of the postmarks were London, there were two from Reading, one from Norwich and one from Canterbury. They all had sums of at least £50 or £100 in used notes, mostly twenties, except the most recent of all, which was a brown foolscap envelope bearing a commercial postmark rather than a stamp. That one had been slit open and positively bulged with £20 notes; on a quick flick count, about £2,000.
Two of the stamped, handwritten envelopes contained slips of paper as well as cash. On one, a pink piece of card the size of a visiting card, was scribbled: ‘Call me. Please.’ On the other, a sheet of cheap writing paper, was written: ‘Tigger, this is the last. No more.’ Neither was signed.
One envelope did not contain cash. That one held a building society passbook showing that C R O’Neil had an instant access account with a credit balance of £11,953. I had found not only Tigger’s own personal hole-in-the-wall machine, but his life savings as well. And there were no prizes for guessing how he had come by these voluntary donations.
Except the latest and biggest. I peered at the franking machine stamp. Somebody had been careless, sending blackmail money through the office post. Although maybe they had been pretty sure they could recover it. Somebody at H B Builders, that is.
