‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘But for God’s sake keep yourself out of trouble. If you need any back-up, call me.’
‘Gladly. How?’
‘You’ve got a point there. Look, I’ve got a portable phone of my own. I’ll carry it as well as my usual communication stuff.’ He recited the number at her and then said. ‘Can I reach you?’
She gave him the number he’d need to put a message on her bleep and he noted it. ‘I can’t use my mobile phone, it’s out of order. But the bleep’ll work well enough.’
‘All right. But take care – and good luck.’
‘I need all of that I can get,’ she said and rang off. Then she stood, thinking. Should she go straight from the hospital? She looked down at herself, at her neat pleated cotton skirt and polo shirt in dark blue, the ideal clothes to wear in summer under a white coat, and shook her head. She’d look like a cabbage in a rose garden dressed that way. It would have to be home first.
While she was changing – and it wasn’t easy to find precisely the right gear for a day as hot as this was, and yet which sent the right messages – her phone rang. She left it, leaving it to the answering machine. If Ellen was checking up on her, she wasn’t going to be caught. She grimaced at herself for reacting like a schoolkid playing truant, even though that was precisely what she was doing.
But it was Gus. She flew to the phone to intercept him as he began to leave a terse message and was just in time to stop him hanging up. ‘Gus!’ she said. ‘I’ve taken the week off.’
‘Eh? What are you up to?’ He was immediately suspicious.
‘No need to get paranoid! It’s just that trying to work at Old East and deal with all this is too much. Old East has to do without my magical presence.’ She wanted to get some sort of response from him that would show a glimmer of the old happy wicked Gus who laughed and joked his way through the most dire of experiences, but clearly he was too deeply sunk in anxiety. All he did was grunt.
‘So, what are you going to do with all this free time?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ she said, suddenly aware of the pit she had dug for her own feet. ‘I just want to be available to do anything that’s useful. You tell me.’
To her gratitude he was diverted. ‘Well, there is something, I suppose. You could get in touch with Monty Ledbetter for me. I’d call him myself but he’s listed as one of my contacts at the nick and it might seem … Well, it’s better if I’m not seen to be going to him. If he talks to you, though, it might be OK. Will you do that for me?’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I was going to talk to him anyway.’
‘You what?’ he said sharply. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I remembered you telling me he knew everyone so I thought he’d be useful. And I also thought the CIB blokes wouldn’t know about him, so wouldn’t talk to him, but –’
‘But you were wrong. It’s my guess they’ll check on all my registered informants and talk to every bloody last one of them. Look, you’d better not call Monty after all. It was a bad idea of mine. You won’t be able to prevent yourself getting too deeply involved, and I don’t want to risk that. It could add to the mess. So lay off. I’ll have to cope on my own somehow. I can’t risk it.’
‘But surely I could.’
‘No!’ He said it loudly and with a good deal of violence, but now she knew it for what it was; a form of panic, and certainly not anger directed at her. It was rage at the frustration of being caught in an iron network and unable to break free at any turn. It must feel to him, she thought suddenly, like being a character in one of those computer games, constantly being knocked back.
‘All right.’ she said peaceably. ‘I’ll do nothing to make problems for you, Gus.’
There was silence for a moment and then he sighed. ‘I know, doll,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I know. Where would I be without you? Maybe what we ought to do is say to hell with all this. I’ll leave the job and sell the business and you dump Old East and we’ll retire to the South Seas, just you and me. We’ll sit in the sun all day and make love all night.’
She wanted to weep again at his bravery. ‘Sounds like hard work to me,’ she said. ‘When would I get my toenails painted?’
He managed the ghost of a laugh. ‘Let that be the least of your worries, doll.’ But then he sighed again. ‘I’m going to Companies House, the way I promised I would, but –’
‘No buts,’ she said. ‘I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Take care, Gus.’ She let her voice show her anxiety for him. It seemed to help because he sounded rather more like his old self when he responded.
‘I’ll look both ways when I cross the road and I won’t take sweeties from any strangers, OK?’
‘OK,’ she said gratefully. She stood listening to the burr of the phone after he hung up, thinking. Was she doing the right thing in going against his wishes? Could it lead to more trouble for him? But she replaced the hand set and shook her head firmly at it. ‘What else can I do?’ she said aloud and went back to getting dressed.
She chose to start in the area where Lenny’s shop was. She’d seen a betting shop almost opposite when she’d gone there, and there had to be more of them around. They were as common as pubs in this part of London, and heaven knew there were enough of those.
When she had plucked up the courage to pass the curtain that hung over the entrance she stopped by the door. She felt a frisson of unease as she looked round. It was a very alien sort of place for her to be in, for she had never had any interest in gambling. This place seemed to be the dreariest advertisement for it she’d ever seen. The walls were painted a dull cream and adorned with handwritten blackboards which carried information she didn’t comprehend in the least, together with half a dozen TV screens, wall mounted, all blank. There were shelves round the walls with pens attached to the edges at intervals by short chains. There were burn marks from cigarettes along the edges of the shelves that gave them a scalloped look, and the place reeked of dead, sour tobacco. At the far end there was a counter set behind a grille pierced with speaking holes, and behind one of them she could see a humped figure. Looking braver than she felt she walked up to the counter.
‘Hi there,’ she said brightly.
‘You’re a bit early,’ the humped figure said accusingly. ‘First race today ain’t till two o’clock at –’
‘I’m not here to make a bet,’ George said hastily.
The woman looked up at her doubtfully. She was about forty, tall and bulky, and had her dark hair pulled back into an incongruously girlish pony-tail. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but George couldn’t quite think what it was. ‘What do you want then?’
George took a deep breath and launched herself on her prepared tale, very aware at the back of her mind of how fluent a liar she had become.
‘My name’s Bridget Connors, you know, and I, like, work for an American company? I’m the London representative. We’re based in Las Vegas and we deal with the casinos there, but I work here. My job is to recruit people who understand the British way of betting, you know, and especially how the horse-racing system works. So I advertised and I’d collected a lot of good people to interview, and the best of them were all listed on a floppy disk on my office computer, you know? And that goddamned computer just went down and I lost the lot! I mean the whole goddamn shebang. If the company finds out they’ll fire me as sure as eggs and I’ll never get another job here on account of I don’t have a work permit for a British firm. And I have a friend here. I just couldn’t bear to leave. I can’t advertise again – the company’d find out, and I’d be in deep do-do. I just have to find the people. So I have this list of names and I thought, like, seeing they’re into gambling, maybe you knew some of the people on it? That way I can pick up where we left off and interview them properly and maybe give them jobs.’
She smiled winsomely. ‘We need some British talent real bad. My company is really hot, too, great jobs on offer. I sure hope you can help. It would just about break my hea
rt if I got fired.’
She smiled again and prayed deep inside her head that the woman, who had sat lumpishly staring at her all through her breathless spiel without showing any reaction at all, would believe her. She had found her accent slipping into a highly stagey Southern drawl as she went on, and could only cross her fingers in the hope that the woman wouldn’t know one American accent from another.
The woman still sat and stared at her and then sniffed. ‘I know all there is to know about British betting,’ she said. ‘Gotta job for me?’
George hadn’t expected that, foolishly, and had to think fast. ‘Well, sure, maybe! Let me tell you about the job. It’s well paid, but we have to ask our people to put in the hours, you know? Lot of hours. The gambling starts at eight a.m. and goes on till around three in the morning. And our company always has the same people all through to watch for cheats. They reckon they pay the rates so they can get folk to do that. You get to live in a dormitory, top of the hotel, with the others. It gets a touch hot in the summer, but folks get so tired they don’t even notice. And it pays good.’
The woman sniffed again and said, ‘Yeah, well, let me know how much, an’ all that, and I’ll think about it. Send me over an application form.’
‘I most certainly will,’ gushed George. She looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. ‘I’ll do it the second I get back to the offices. So meanwhile could I ask you about these folk I have listed here? I reckoned this’d be the best sort of place to find guys who say they regularly bet. Let me see now …’
She reeled off the list of names, most of them filched from the phone book, but with first and surnames carefully mixed up, and dropped Don Greeson’s name in towards the end of it. She read it a little more slowly and with a hint more emphasis than the others and looked up casually at the woman as she read the last of the names on the list.
The woman clearly reacted to Don’s name. She’d been dully looking at the list in George’s hand as it was read to her, but when Don’s name was spoken she lifted her eyes to look at George.
‘Everyone knows one of ’em,’ she said. ‘That Don, he’s been in an’ out of here since the day we opened back in the seventies.’
‘Oh, that’s great,’ George said, trying to sound casual and relaxed. ‘Would he be likely to be in today, do you think?’
The woman sniffed richly. ‘Can’t say. He hasn’t been in in a month or more.’
‘But you said he was in and out all the time?’
‘Sure. When he’s around. But he goes off to the races and stuff, don’t he? You don’t think a serious gambler does all his business in a shop like this, do you? He’s in and out all the time when he’s here.’ She said it as though she were speaking to a half-wit. ‘Like when he stays with his brother what used to have the chippie over the way.’
George lifted her brows. ‘Used to? You mean his brother isn’t there any more?’
‘Nah.’ The woman looked a shade animated for the first time. ‘We were all really pissed off over that. One day he’s here, the next it’s those bleedin’ Greeks. Can’t fry fish to save their lives. It’s all soggy and greasy, and as for chips – they don’t know nothin’ about chips. They gotta have a bit of crisp about them, know what I mean? Not all broke up and greasy.’
‘So he’s gone and you haven’t seen this man – which one did you say? Mr Greeson?’ She peered at her list in a slightly exaggerated way. ‘Yes, Mr Don Greeson. You haven’t seen him either for a long time?’
‘’S right. Not for a month or more. But he’ll be back, I dare say. He always is. Hope old Lenny comes back an’ all. Can’t get a decent bit o’ grub now he’s gone.’
‘Maybe I could go to his house?’ George said. ‘Do you have his address?’
The woman stared at her in contempt. ‘Didn’t I tell you, or didn’t you listen? I can see ’ow you got your stuff all lost if you don’t listen. I told you, he lives over the road with his brother.’
George reddened, allowing herself to be annoyed. ‘You said when he stays with his brother.’
‘Tha’s right. When he’s in London ’e stays with his brother. When he goes travelling to the races and that he stops in places. Hotels when he’s flush and boarding houses when he ain’t. But in London he lives over there with his brother. Likes to see his dog, you see.’
George sharpened. ‘His what?’
‘He’s got a dog,’ the woman said again with the exaggerated patience required for a stupid listener. ‘Bloody great black thing. Mostly he takes it with him when he goes away, but sometimes he can’t. Gets all upset – he’s potty about the thing. If he can’t take it, it stays with Lenny, over the road.’
‘And that’s not been around for a month either …’ George said slowly.
‘I told you!’
‘Yeah, you told me. Well …’ George stowed the list in a pocket. ‘OK, I’ll be on my way, then. If he should come in –’
‘Who shall I say called, moddom?’ the woman said, leering at her. ‘And where do I go to get this great job you’re on about? And who do you think you’re kiddin’, eh?’
George blinked. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I said who do you think you’re kidding? Do you think I don’t know a private dick when I see one? What’s up? Has he dumped some woman again? He’s always doing that. You snoopers is always coming round after him. They go looking for him and much good it does ’em! You tell whoever she is she’s wasting her money. Specially using a detective like you what sticks out a mile and don’t have a sensible cover story.’
‘Oh, shit,’ George said. She turned and scuttled out. And laughed all the way to the next betting shop. Gus would enjoy that story, once she was able to tell him, that was.
When she got there, much the same thing happened, except that the boy behind the counter swallowed her story eagerly and wrote down the fictitious company name and phone number she gave him to seek a job for himself, as did several of the other customers in the place (for his shop, unlike the first, was doing brisk business, even so early in the day). He told her the same thing. Yes, they knew Don Greeson, no they hadn’t seen him for a month or so, and yes he had a big black dog. She found out this time it was called Meff (‘Short for some fancy name for the devil,’ the boy behind the counter told her) and had a bad temper and nasty teeth on it (‘Ought not to be allowed!’ according to an old woman in the corner).
At the next two betting shops she found she drew blanks, but at the fifth she gleaned one extra piece of information.
This place was rather more handsomely turned out than the others and showed signs of being run with a certain amount of attention to decor and ambience. The chairs were not broken down bentwoods but well-made hi-tech chrome ones, and there were tables on which customers could write out their slips, rather than shabby shelves round the sides. There was a small tea bar and the counter where transactions were carried out was shielded by glass rather than wire meshing. There were no blackboards; only the TV monitors showing lists of runners and prices. The clerk here was a very pretty girl in the tightest of short skirts George had ever seen, even this summer, which was easy to see because she was perched on a high stool that ensured every inch of her amazing legs could be seen.
She swallowed the software-loss story without blinking, and talked eagerly about Don Greeson.
‘Well; I must say his ship really has come home, hasn’t it?’ She had a high-pitched nasal voice which emerged from a perfectly painted pair of pouting lips and a tendency to toss her head so that her tumbling mane of blonde hair behaved just as hair did in the commercials for shampoo. ‘First the big money job and now this!’
‘What big money job?’ George said, leaning on the edge of the counter in a confidential all-girls-together mode.
‘Oh, it was wonderful! He likes betting in a few different places, you know. Like he says, if he puts all his business in the same places with the same bookies, everyone else would know as much of his business as he does. He likes to put himself
about a bit, does Don, and why not, good-lookin’ fella like him, and a very snappy dresser. Well, last time he was in – that’ll be the beginning of June, yeah, that’s right – or no, middle, now I think of it, on account it was just after my Mum’s birthday and that’s on June nineteenth, well he told me that he’d been given this great opportunity. He wouldn’t say what it was, but it was big. And as soon as he gets back he thought he might have to go abroad for a while. He even took his dog with him – he loves his dog, a really beautiful one, it is, a sweet thing. So he was over the moon about that, and as soon as he gets back, like I said, he’s taking me out for a real slap-up dinner up west. And a bit more, maybe.’ Again she tossed the mane of hair which was beginning to look to George as though it had been spun out of polyester and viscose. ‘As soon as he gets in touch, I’ll tell him you was looking for him, all right? Just give me the number what he’s got to call.’
George gave her the fictitious number she’d given the rest of them, hoping the unfortunate person whose number it really was wouldn’t get too apoplectic at being called by so many wannabe croupiers, and went.
There was no need to go to any more betting shops, she decided. She was pretty sure that although she didn’t precisely know what had happened to Don Greeson or his dog, there was enough reason to speak of him in the past tense.
21
Kitty slapped the plate down in front of Gus and said sharply, ‘If you don’t eat that, I’ll tell all the other customers it was on account of we gave you a bad bit o’ fish.’
‘You wouldn’t bloody dare,’ Gus said, but there was little spirit in his voice. ‘And I don’t want –’
‘I bloody would and I don’t care what you want. You look as though you haven’t eaten for a week, and it’s not good enough. You tell him, Dr B. I swear to you if you don’t eat I’ll raise such a fuss half your bleedin’ customers’ll get out and never come back. It’s up to you.’ And she flounced off in her tight cotton dress, the apron flaps bouncing against her round bottom.
Third Degree Page 21
