It was also that I felt sick of having to be so grateful for everything, from a job in that Robin’s bistro where the pay was not all that marvellous, quite honestly, to being socked on the jaw for my own good.
It was also that they seemed sort of excited by the idea of me being an interesting specimen, a real live criminal. ‘Is this your little criminal?’ was what Robin had said to Lucy, and, ‘How tremendously exciting.’ So I began to think I was just there as an entertainment which they would get used to and then get bored with the whole business.
So by the time I rang Chippy I’d decided to break with the past, at least as far as Aldershot was concerned. I got Chippy to ring Mr Markby, my probation officer, to tell him that I’d got first-class accommodation with Leonard McGrath of Environmentally Friendly Investments, and a good prospect of getting a job with him eventually.
While I had been away, Chippy had formed an extremely efficient organization. Bent burglar-alarm salesmen gave him news of particularly well-stocked houses. Bent insurers told him where the best pictures and the finest collections of silver could be found. His personal fence had a house in Brighton where art treasures could be turned into ready money, and he even found a bent art expert to tell him which pictures were valuable, but not so famous that you could never get rid of them. Chippy and his associates selected houses from Richmond to Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb.
From time to time, Chippy was even more ambitious. He’d enlarge the team to include a peterman to blow safes. We’d do warehouse breaking and one time we got away with a whole safe full of expensive watches, which sold well from the house in Brighton. The point was that Chippy was in a pretty prosperous line of business and, as luck would have it, I was able to share a bit in his prosperity.
Working with Mr Leonard McGrath of Environmentally Friendly Investments in a number of posh houses to the north of Oxford Street, I earned quite a bit of cash, which enabled me to order drinks, being well able to pay for them, in the Beau Brummell Club, which I no longer considered lousy but an excellent place to meet up with the better quality of blaggers, reliable sources of information, as well as some quite well-known footballers and personalities on television. I went with Chippy at first, but as I gained confidence I started to go on my own and had some quite interesting conversations there.
I suppose it all started again when we got news about a house in Dorset Square which was shared, the information was, by a couple of blokes, one older and the other considerably younger. We got the information from the firm they used for a bit of cleaning. So I was in there one night, sorting out the silver and a few small pictures the insurance people had told us might be worth lifting off the walls, when I suddenly saw it, a photograph pinned to a sort of noticeboard in what I took to be the older chap’s study. I’d shone a torch on it during my search of the place and there it was. A group of girls around a grey-haired man in a crumpled suit in front of a door marked ‘SCRAP Central Office’. And I saw her among the girls present, smiling out shyly at the camera: Lucinda ‘call me Lucy’ Purefoy, who had tried to stop me from doing exactly what I was doing when I saw her photograph.
I can’t say how I felt. I’d decided to go back to the life I knew and that was it. All the same I felt, well, I won’t say it was guilt, but I had to admit Lucy had done her best to help me and we’d also had some good conversations, not like those I got in the Beau Brummell Club but good conversations all the same. And I’d gone off without a single goodbye, which, looking back on it, seemed a bit of a mean way of going on. On the other hand, there was nothing much I could do about it now, so I dismissed her from my mind.
But she kept coming back. I could see her as she was when we chatted in the bistro, fair hair falling across her forehead, her bellybutton out on view, and that look she gave as though she was genuinely worried about me. Of course, I didn’t miss her worry, but in some weird sort of way I was beginning to miss her. Perhaps it was because she was so different from Chippy’s Diane or the brass you got to meet round the Brummell that I missed Lucy, but if we ever met again I was certain she would give me up as a hopeless case, certainly not worth any further trouble, so I told myself to stop thinking about her.
As this is to be a story about me and Lucy, I must go on to about three months after I left Aldershot, which would make it June, the start of a grey, wet summer. It seemed that Aldershot and all that happened there was just a distant memory when I walked into Chippy’s lounge room and, for God’s sake, there she was, looking just as I remembered her, holding the Reverend Timbo’s silver cup in her hands and admitting that she had gained access to Chippy’s maisonette by the use of an assumed name. I could see that this particular conduct, which I found a bit hard to understand, had irritated Chippy and I told him to calm down because she was a friend of mine, at which I thought Lucy looked surprised and grateful.
Chippy, on the other hand, was not so easily cheered up. ‘We don’t like people,’ he told her, ‘who come here pretending to be someone else.’
‘I thought,’ this was her explanation, ‘Terry wouldn’t want me to come up if I gave my real name.’
‘Why wouldn’t Terry want you to come up?’ Chippy was always suspicious and probably rightly so. ‘There is nothing here in Environmentally Friendly Investments for us to be ashamed of.’
‘I’m sure there isn’t, Mr McGrath.’ She was still smiling, but respectful. ‘I’m absolutely sure of it.’
‘You come to get Reverend Tim’s cup back, have you?’ was what I asked her.
‘Not necessarily.’ And much to my surprise, she put the silver pot in question back on the mantelpiece. ‘I came here to find you. I thought we might have a drink together some time. And a bit of a chat. You know, like we did when you were working at the Intimate Bistro.’
She certainly knew the right thing to say because, as I say, that was the chat I remembered. But she wasn’t pushy about it, not at all pushy.
‘Ring me if you feel like it. I’m working for Pitcher and Pitcher in Oxford Street. Ring me any time.’
She gave me a card, which I put away carefully, and then she left us. When she had gone, Chippy looked unhappy and said, ‘What the hell is she? Working for the Serious Crime Squad at Paddington nick, is she? Come here to find things out?’
‘She’s not working for any nick, you can be sure of that.’
‘All right then. But she’s your responsibility, Terry. I’ll hold you responsible for her and anything she might do uncalled for. I want you to be aware of that.’
I told him I was well aware.
11
Of course I never expected to hear from him again.
So I worked away at Pitcher’s and they gave me an account (Tell-All Beachwear) of my very own and Tom stayed with me in my one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill and nothing enormously exciting was happening at all.
Oh, I should record the fact that Mr Orlando Wathen from SCRAP rang me and asked me if I was still seeing my client Keegan. For some reason I told him that I hadn’t seen Terry for a while and that I’d rather lost touch with him.
‘Typical,’ Orlando said. ‘Entirely typical. You can’t do anything for some of these little bastards. Hopeless cases, entirely hopeless!’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘I know so. Let me tell you. Peter and I were away at our place in the Dordogne and they got into Dorset Square. All the silver has gone and some pretty valuable pictures. I’m sorry, Lucy, the only place for some of these little menaces is back in the prisons where we found them.’
‘You never discovered who did it?’
‘Of course not! And the police can’t be bothered to find out. Longer sentences. That’s the only answer.’
‘Is that SCRAP policy from now on?’ I was more than a little surprised and wondered if Gwenny now supported that view.
‘SCRAP? Oh, I’m leaving SCRAP. I’m doing voluntary work at the Home Office. Advising on the parole system.’
‘You think we shoul
d have more of it?’
‘No. Far, far less. Keep in touch. The Home Secretary wants more information about failures in the praeceptor system.’
After that I didn’t think I’d be hearing much more from SCRAP and then, one morning at work, the switchboard girl told me that someone called Terry Keegan was on the phone, so I said, ‘Put him through,’ and there he was, sounding more calm and self-confident than I ever remembered.
‘Where’ve you been hiding, Lucy?’ he said, as though it was my fault. ‘What about meeting up for a drink or something?’
‘Of course, I’d like that. Where exactly?’
‘How about my club?’
‘What’s your club then,’ I asked. ‘The Athenaeum?’
I had a momentary absurd vision of Terry in the bar of the Athenaeum in Pall Mall (Robert of course belongs to it), holding forth to an audience of senior civil servants, judges and professors of history on life in the Scrubs.
‘It’s the Beau Brummell in Harrowby Street. I think you’ll find I’m pretty well known there.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘Would you be free Thursday, shall we say round six o’clock?’
‘Why ever not?’
Terry’s club turned out to be a far cry from the Athenaeum. There were two large and burly men wearing top hats at the entrance who I took to be bouncers. They gave me the sort of amused and condescending look of those who knew single women only entered the Beau Brummell for one reason and they might expect to get a cut of anything she earned there. The girl at the desk said that Mr Keegan was waiting for me in the club room and I went up in the lift to find him.
Of course the Brummell bore very little resemblance to what I remember of the Athenaeum when Robert took me there. Pools of light lit up the tables, where girls wearing bow ties and very little else were dealing out cards or spinning roulette wheels. There were hardly lit areas where large men and shadowy women were sitting talking. The whole place smelt of perfume and air freshener with a distinct undercurrent of the burning old-carpet odour of pot. Under the tactfully dimmer lights of the bar, I saw Terry sitting beside an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne.
He was wearing a dark suit and, extraordinarily enough, a tie, his hair was neatly brushed and he gave off an expensive smell of aftershave. If I didn’t know, I’d have put him down as some high-flying broker from the City.
‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a glass of bubbles?’
I said I didn’t see why not and then there was a silence, as though neither of us was quite prepared to explain the strange situation in which we now found ourselves. Then he said, ‘I brought you this.’ He fished up a plastic bag from the floor beside his bar stool. ‘He can have it back,’ he said.
It, of course, was Timbo’s boxing cup.
‘Are you sure?’ I had made a point of leaving it with him as a recompense for Tim’s ridiculous attack.
‘Of course I’m sure. Anyway, you couldn’t get much for it, not from anyone dealing in such things.’
‘And do you know anyone dealing in such things?’
‘Perhaps.’ He seemed determined not to give too much away. ‘From the old days, of course.’
‘So, thank you for giving this back.’ I put Tim’s cup beside my stool. I’d scored a bit of a praeceptor’s success, although Orlando Wathen might not be pleased with me.
‘Have you got a job now, Terry?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve got a job.’
‘What is it exactly?’
‘Helping Chippy out with his business.’
‘You mean the Environmentally Friendly Investment business?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘It must be doing pretty well.’
‘It’s doing all right. Yes.’
Before I could ask any more about Chippy’s to me rather mysterious investment business, Terry, whom I saw looking towards the roulette table, gave a great shout of ‘Sandy!’ At which a pink-cheeked plump little man, wearing a deafening Hawaiian patterned shirt and lightweight suit, got up and crossed towards us to greet Terry with a quick embrace.
‘This is Sandy, a friend of my Uncle Arthur’s.’ Terry introduced us in a way I found even more encouraging. ‘This is Lucy, a friend of mine.’
‘Good to meet you, Lucy.’ Sandy took my hand and pumped it energetically. ‘Your Uncle Arthur, Terry,’ he said when he’d finished with my hand, ‘dreadful bad luck that was, the job he got put away for.’
‘I was away myself,’ Terry explained. ‘I don’t really know what happened.’
Sandy looked at me doubtfully for a moment and then said, ‘Can we talk freely?’
‘Quite freely,’ Terry assured him. ‘Lucy’s used to it. Her father’s a bishop.’ I suppose this was meant to be a joke. He was obviously in a good mood.
What Sandy wanted to say was that Uncle Arthur was doing ten years for his part in an armed robbery.
‘The Bright Penny Friendly Society office in Peckham. They kept a lot of cash there,’ Sandy was explaining to me as though to a child. ‘Of course, he never ought to have got caught. It was all Jim Nichols’s fault. A tragedy really, but we had to laugh.
‘They’re in the getaway car, with Big Jim Nichols driving, and the rozzers that got called after the party was over chasing them. They’re going fast, with your Uncle Arthur in it, when the freestanding phone in the car rings and this male voice asks, “Hello, is Jim Nichols there?” So Jim answers, “Yes,” and the voice goes on, “This is Chris Tarrant from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” You know what the game Millionaire is, don’t you?’ The man in the Hawaiian shirt looked at me as though I might not know anything about contemporary life.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do know about Millionaire.’
‘All right then. So Chris Tarrant goes on, “We’ve got your friend Harry Stoker here in the studio and he’s doing rather well. In fact he’s up to £32,000, but he’s stuck on one question so he’s chosen you as his friend.”
“‘OK,” Big Jim Nichols says, this being the most bloody foolish thing he’s ever done, “put him on.” ’
For any of you - and I can’t imagine that there are any of you - who don’t know, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a programme on television in which Chris Tarrant is the quiz-master and competitors, who may win large sums of money, are allowed to phone a friend to help them with one of the general knowledge questions.
‘ “The next voice you hear will be Harry’s and he has one question with four possible answers.” Apparently Jim had foolishly agreed to be a friend that evening.
‘ “You ready, Jim?”
‘ “Yes, mate,” Jim says, already slowing down slightly.
‘Harry said, “The question is, which king died of a surfeit of lampreys? Was it a) King John, b) King Charles I, c) King Harold or d) King Henry I?”
‘ “King Charles I?” Big Jim wondered out loud, and it seems your Uncle Arthur chipped in with, “No. It couldn’t be him. He died of having his head chopped off.” And then they were all arguing about who died of lampreys and what lampreys were anyway, and Jim slowed down so much that the rozzers got them, each and every one of them. Funny, isn’t it? I heard the story from a bloke who was with your Uncle Arthur in Parkhurst. Most unfortunate, but I had to laugh.’
I had to laugh too, but Terry looked serious. ‘I never heard that,’ he said. ‘I never heard about my Aunt Dot either.’
‘No. She was a good woman was your Aunt Dot. Helped me out a few times, I can tell you. There’s Rosanne waving at me. I’ve got to go back to her.’ He was looking towards a woman in a green top who was signalling to him from the roulette table.
‘I told Rosanne she brought me luck sitting beside me,’ Sandy was still laughing at the misfortunes of life, ‘and when I lose, like I have been doing, I tell her that I’d have lost a lot more if she hadn’t been there.’ So he went off, apparently cheerfully.
‘I never knew all that about Uncle Arthur,’ Terry repeated, without smili
ng, when we were left alone together. His mood seemed to have deteriorated a bit.
‘You know,’ I said to him, ‘all that Environmentally Friendly Investments stuff is a load of nonsense, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ He began to look angry and defensive.
‘I mean that whatever’s bought you a new suit and a tie and a bottle of bubbles in this extraordinary club wasn’t investments that were at all friendly to the environment.’
There was a bit of silence after that. He was frowning as he said, ‘You still trying to reform me, are you?’
If I said yes I knew we’d lose contact altogether, so what I said was, ‘Certainly not! I gave you up months ago as a completely hopeless case.’
‘A hopeless case, am I?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So you gave up on me?’
‘What else could I do?’
‘Yeah,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘What else could you do? You lot will never begin to understand.’
‘Which lot?’
‘The lot that tries to reform people. And that.’
‘You mean we don’t understand why you need smart suits and maisonettes, fast cars and all that sort of thing?’
‘I haven’t even got a car.’
‘Haven’t you? Poor Terry!’ I pretended to sound terribly sorry for him.
‘I could fix myself up with one of course. In time of need.’
‘Oh good.’
‘None of you understands the real reason.’
‘And what is the real reason, Terry?’
By now Terry had drunk most of the champagne. I’d had a glass, which wasn’t really as good as the house stuff at the Close-Up. But whether or not the drink, such as it was, had loosened his tongue, I don’t know, but what Terry said then had a profound effect on me and, indeed, on the rest of this story.
‘It’s the excitement. That’s what you lot don’t understand.’
‘What do you mean, the excitement?’
‘People do all sorts of dangerous things, don’t they? They climb up bloody great precipices. They set out to walk to the North Pole, or drop out of aeroplanes or try to cross the Atlantic in a canoe or something equally daft. What do they do it for? The excitement. I tell you honestly, Lucy, all that’s nothing compared to the excitement of a decent bit of crime.’
Quite Honestly Page 7
