"Some cushions, at least. I know where you can get some lovely ones, not too expensive. They'd go with the carpet. Sort of."
I said nothing while we both looked at the floor and tried to picture something that would go well with curry stains.
"Perhaps a rug would be a good idea," she said. "Something big and furry that you could cuddle up on in front of the fire."
"There's nothing wrong with this room," I said. "Nothing at all."
But she was drifting about, looking classy and smart in a pale green trouser suit, deliberately trying to make my wallpaper seem shabby and clashing with my off-yellow paintwork.
"You could really make something of it, if you tried," she said. "There's the basis of a nice home under this rough exterior."
She'd somehow sneaked up on me and laid a hand on my chest. The look in her eyes set alarm bells clanging in the back of my head, even as the soft hairs began to stir on my belly.
"It suits me, this house. It matches my personality," I said.
"Of course." She backed down then, smiling as she watched me pick up my jacket from the floor. Somehow I wasn't quite sure whether I'd said what I meant to say.
"Are we going out somewhere, Stones?"
"I've got things to do later," I said. "Business. I'll take you home, but I've got to call at the church first."
"Oh?"
I didn't like the way her eyes lit up then. She was supposed to be disappointed that I was taking her home. Then I realised it was the word 'church'. Women's minds only run on one track after they've known you for a bit. They start thinking about white dresses and wedding rings and revolting nephews in bow ties, all that shit. I really had to get out from under this one very soon. A pity she was so sexy and good in bed. It sort of takes your mind off the risks.
"On second thoughts," I said. "I can call there some other time."
"Where else are you going, then?"
"Me? Up the Cow's Arse."
* * * *
Everyone knows they can find me up the Cow's Arse when I'm not out on business. Officially, it's called the Black Bull, and that's the name over the door. But then, who ever cared about 'officially' round here? The sign outside the pub looks like a cow's arse, so that's its name. Medensworth folk aren't too good at reading, but they can make out pictures. Besides, the landlord there is Baggy Prentiss, and he has a wife who looks like a... well, I'll let you guess.
I had to make a bit of a detour out of Medensworth to drop Lisa home, and by the time I got to the pub Doncaster Dave was there waiting for me. When I say waiting, I mean he had his face in a plate of steak pie and chips, with plenty of gravy. It was a bit late for lunch, but at the Cow's Arse they tend to serve him whenever he feels hungry, which is all day. The pub was full, except for two spare seats at the table where Dave was sitting. It wasn't that he was saving them for us exactly - just that no one else wanted to sit with him.
"Lo Hones."
I rocked back in admiration. The standard of Dave's conversation is blistering, even when he's concentrating on destroying a steak pie. Oscar Wilde, eat your heart out.
I looked around for Slow Kid and sent him to buy the drinks. It's easier than writing it down for Dave. Besides, I wanted a tequila, and Dave has never seen a word with a 'q' in it before. He'd probably think I'd written a 'g' the wrong way round.
Oh yes, a tequila. So you thought the Cow's Arse would be the sort of place where the bar has a choice between lager and lager, and you don't dare ask for anything in it? Wrong. Didn't I tell you not to be fooled by a name? You maybe pictured a scabby pub with bloodstains on the walls and sawdust on the floor to soak up the spilled beer? Wrong again. Baggy had the bloodstains painted over last week.
"How's Denise then, Donc?"
"Aw-right."
"Yeah? She's got over that flu, has she?"
Dave shrugged. I took this for a 'yes'. Dave and his sister are really close, actually. Denise has been married once, but she left her husband to move in with Dave and look after him when their mum died. That's what it seemed like, anyway. Of course, she knew that Dave would have eaten the furniture in no time if she hadn't. Now they share a council house and Denise has a full time job trying to feed him. She worries like mad that he's not eating properly when he's out of the house.
"She went to the doctor," said Dave.
"Oh good. Did he give her something?"
"Useless bastard."
That seemed to be the end of the conversation. I'd distracted him from his food for too long. He went back to the pie. Watching Dave eat isn't much fun at the best of times. The way he constantly has to stoke up his reserves reminds me of a Sperm Whale I once saw on one of those wildlife programmes on BBC2. This huge animal ploughs through the sea with its mouth permanently stuck open, sucking in plankton and seaweed and whatever else drifts about in the water out there, including beer cans chucked over the side of cruise liners probably. Anyway, the point is that it can never stop feeding, because its bulk uses up so much energy keeping it moving. And it has to keep moving to take in the food to give it the energy... What a life.
Come to think of it, a whale is shaped a bit like Dave too. And doesn't it have a very tiny brain, about half the size of a human's brain? That's where they differ then - Dave's is much smaller than that.
I had to get a stiff drink inside me to make sitting with Dave even halfway tolerable. At least Slow Kid was reasonably articulate. And there was something niggling at me that I wanted to ask him.
"Hey, it's like a madhouse in here," he said when he came back with the drinks, winding his way through slot-heads playing fruit machines and video games. Trivial Pursuit, Cops 'n' Robbers. Baggy Prentiss's idea of irony, I always thought.
Slow was drinking some expensive American beer straight from the bottle, but Dave was putting up with Baggy's bitter, which is about as interesting as those dregs in the bottom of the milk carton that's still in my fridge from last year.
"Slow, I need to know what went wrong with that load."
"Oh yeah. What a pisser."
"Pisser is right. I'm seriously dischuffed here and I need to hear what went off."
"Well, it seems their bloke stopped at the services on the M1, near Leicester, you know it? And when he came out there were the cops, all over the rig."
"Silly sod."
"Obviously the bloke stayed well clear. He legged it as fast as he could. Got a lift out of there with a trucker. Left ten grands' worth of gear sitting in the service station car park. Mind you, it could have been worse. If the cops had any sense, they'd have laid low and waited for him to come out, wouldn't they? No sense, Stones, eh?"
"The cops were quick off the mark for once, though. You don't think they had a tip-off?"
"What? How could they?"
"I don't know. But I don't like it."
"Hey, Stones, it was just bad luck. The next one'll be okay. Just watch."
"This was the first. It should have gone right."
"Like I said, bad luck."
"That van's bothering me too," I said. "Rawlings and the other bloke."
"Wow, yeah. That was real, that fire. You'd never have guessed Reeboks would go up so well."
"What would make it burn like that?"
"Big fuel tanks on them things, Stones. Smash it sideways into a tree or something and do it hard enough, you'd split the tank. Bit of a spark from the electrics, and wham! Get that smell of burning rubber."
I shook my head. "That van hadn't crashed into anything. There were no trees, no concrete bridges. And there was no third party involved."
Slow Kid looked at me curiously. "Yeah, well. There's other ways of making something go bang, if you really want to."
"Like?"
"Like, well..."
"A bomb?"
"Right. A couple of bags of sugar, some fertiliser, a milk bottle full of petrol. No problem."
"And a timer maybe?"
"A doddle, Stones. There's plenty of blokes round here who know how to
do that. There were a couple went off in Worksop a year or two back, remember? One at the cop shop, one at the Miners' Welfare."
"They didn't do much damage, though."
"Nah, they weren't planted right. They were shoved up against brick walls or something. They go off, see, but they don't get hold on anything."
"But plant one in the right spot, over a fuel tank for instance..."
"Right on. Barbecued van. You reckon somebody had it in for Rawlings and his mate, then?"
There was something that wasn't right about Slow Kid. He always plays his cards close to his chest. Well, don't we all? But I had the feeling there was something here he wasn't telling me.
"No, not them," I said.
"What do you mean, Stones?"
"I think somebody had it in for us. If I'd gone for that deal with the Reeboks, the stuff would have been in our van."
"Yeah. I got you." Slow Kid stuck the neck of the beer bottle in his mouth and squinted at me over its base. "But who'd do that? Who've we pissed off recently?"
"If you've got a bit of paper, we'll make a list."
"Nah. We always treat folk fair." He sucked a bit of beer out of the stubble on his top lip. "Except the ones we nick stuff from, obviously."
But then, before I could get to the bottom of what Slow Kid knew, before I'd even got halfway down my tequila, before Doncaster Dave could even stuff away six more mouthfuls of pie and chips, my whole afternoon was ruined. A shape appeared in the doorway, lurking in a vaguely familiar manner that could only mean one thing. Wow, what a treat. My favourite visitor, Detective Inspector Frank Moxon. And behind him, the untidy bulk of his sidekick, DS Wally Stubbs.
DI Moxon is one of that new breed of CID coppers who have pissed from a great height on the old Inspector Morse types. He's too serious. His parents managed to find a grammar school to send him to, and he has a degree from Nottingham University in some really handy subject - Anglo Saxon Poetry or Nineteenth Century Russian Trade Union Reform, or I don't know what. Something useful enough, anyway, to get him on the fast track to promotion, leapfrogging the more mundane blokes on the way - the ones, that is, who wouldn't know their Beowulf from their Bolsheviks, but only know about catching crooks, the poor sods.
Moxon wears gold-rimmed glasses. He has a neat little blond moustache and a nasty habit of turning up in snappy suits and bright ties. He doesn't drink, not even off duty, and he doesn't smoke either. He plays squash to keep fit, but hasn't managed to keep his balls in play long enough to give his wife any kids. His manners leave something to be desired, but then I suppose I never see him at his best. His bosses at Sherwood Lodge seem to love him. As for Wally Stubbs, he tries to copy his boss's style, but he hasn't got the build for it - or the will power to keep off the fags and booze.
When Moxon and Stubbs came in, a sort of self-conscious hush fell over the bar of the Cow, as if three quarters of the people in the place knew exactly who these two were. I could see Baggy Prentiss sigh at the damage to his custom.
Moxon and Stubbs paused in the doorway, surveying the room. They wanted everybody to know they were there. But you could hardly miss them in those shiny jackets and ties like smears of technicolor vomit. Their hands were shoved casually into their trouser pockets and their eyes were everywhere, like maggots on a fresh corpse.
We all sat very still, like a roomful of schoolkids willing the teacher to pick on someone else to read the next page of Jude the Obscure out loud. The only sound from our table was the continual slow munching of Doncaster Dave's jaws. His mouth doesn't have any gears, it's on automatic. You put food in, engage 'drive', and it won't slip into neutral until the plate is empty.
But it looked as though we were about to get something else on our plate. It was definitely our table that Moxon and Stubbs were wandering towards. Behind them, there were smiles of relief. Three or four customers took the opportunity to slip casually out of the pub, hoping they hadn't been noticed. This was just what Baggy was afraid of. There went the blokes whose bail conditions said they had to stay away from licensed premises, the ones who didn't want to be seen in the wrong company, the ones who simply weren't supposed to be in the area just now.
But the deserters were too late, of course. In those first moments, as he and his sidekick stood in the doorway, Moxon had no doubt logged the identity of every single customer, his evil little eyes sending a stream of messages to his evil little brain.
I've seen him do this before. I reckon he uses one of those 'pegging' techniques they teach you on management courses. You know the sort of thing - every number from one to ten has a peg, and you hang a mental picture on it. So it's 'two - zoo' and you imagine a picture of Stones McClure swinging from a rope next to an orang-utan. Not difficult. Then 'three - key' and there's a picture of Slow Kid Thompson with a bunch of skeleton keys in his hand.
Moxon could remember all of our names that way, plus what we were wearing and exactly what order we were sitting in at the table. He probably downloads the contents of his brain onto a computer when he gets back to his office. Maybe he slips a floppy disc out of his ear and logs onto the mainframe for a quick virus check. Let's have Inspector Morse back, that's what I say. That lad would have been too busy weighing up what beer was on draft behind the bar and whether Joanne the barmaid was the type who fancies older men.
"McClure." Ah, here was Moxon himself practising his pronunciation. They hadn't given him elocution lessons at his grammar school, so he had to keep trying to get it right. "Underwood." He swivelled his head slowly. "And Thompson."
Full marks, three out of three. This bloke was good. Only Donc acknowledged his name. Or maybe he was just belching.
"Nice to find the three of you together. Saves a bit of trouble," said Moxon. "We can kill three birds with one stone, eh, Wally?"
Wally Stubbs laughed. This might suggest he has no sense of humour. But we know he must have, to be wearing a tie like that.
"Are you buying the drinks then, Inspector? Baggy knows our order."
"Hey, get me a packet of those spicy nut things while you're at the bar, man."
Dave chortled, rattling his fork on his plate,
"Yes, you might be able to help me," said Moxon, just as if someone had been stupid enough to make the offer. He pulled over a chair that someone on the next table had suddenly vacated and sat down between me and Slow Kid. Stubbs hovered in the background, blocking out the sunlight - presumably so that it didn't fall on his boss and turn him into dust.
Moxon looked from one to the other of us, amending his mental identikit pictures slightly where he found that Slow's hair had been shaved a bit shorter at the sides, or Donc had put on an extra six pounds since he'd last seen him. I knew Moxon couldn't have anything on us, because I'm very careful, like my mother always told me to be. But his presence made me a bit uncomfortable, like I was sharing a table with Mussolini - after he'd been hanged from the lamp post, that is.
"We were wondering, you see, whether any of you gentlemen could assist us with a little bit of information."
Moxon said 'information' precisely and carefully, pronouncing each syllable distinctly, as if he thought it was a word we might not have heard before. The flickering lights of the Trivial Pursuit game were glinting off his glasses, and I couldn't see his eyes.
"We're always glad to help," I said, smiling genially into the glare of his spectacles. Notice that I didn't specify who we were glad to help.
"Delighted to hear it, McClure. So tell me where you were last night at around, say, eight o'clock."
"Oh. That sort of information."
"Yes, please. What else did you think?"
"I thought you might have wanted to have a go at Trivial Pursuit. I'm really hot on Countries of the World. Just ask me the currency of Brazil."
"Eight o'clock last night."
"It's the real. And did you know the capital was only built in the 1960s? And Dave here - he's our expert in foreign languages, I think. I can't tell what he's on about ha
lf the time anyway."
"It's much pleasanter asking you here. But if you want to play Mastermind, I'm sure we could find a chair and some nice spotlights back at the nick."
He waited expectantly while I thought about this. "I believe I was out with a couple of mates. Had a meal, a few drinks, a bit of a chat, you know the sort of thing mates do. Or perhaps you don't."
"What mates?"
"Ah. I thought you wouldn't."
Moxon looked at Slow Kid and Doncaster Dave. They looked at me.
"Was there a point to these questions?" I asked. "Were you getting round to asking me to lend you a quid for the machine?"
"I'd like to know whether you had any dealings with somebody called Les Rawlings."
"Rawlings? Goodness me. Wasn't that the bloke who tried to sell us some trainers out of the back of a van, Slow? We didn't buy anything from him, of course. You never know whether you can trust these people, do you?"
"Quite."
I got the feeling that Moxon had more that he wanted to ask me, but either he wasn't sure how to phrase the question, or he didn't want to ask me in front of the other two. It was a bit unnerving to see him struggling, but I wasn't about to help him. His hesitation made me feel more confident. Superior even.
Stubbs shuffled from one foot to another, and we could hear conversations getting back in full swing around the pub. Dave and Slow were beginning to relax. They thought I had the situation under control as usual. But they were wrong.
"I thought that would be your answer," said Moxon. "But I had to ask. Thank you very much."
I nearly choked on my tequila. Had Frank Moxon just thanked me?
"One more thing," he said.
"Hit me with it."
"We had a very upset French gentleman in the station yesterday. A lorry driver."
"Pulled him in, had you? Some of those foreign lorries are really dangerous. If you blokes are managing to get some of them off the road, you've got my full support, no worries."
"This particular gentleman had his lorry stolen."
"No?"
"Oh yes. And then, he says, he was kidnapped."
"Sounds like a bleedin' crime wave."
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