“Sorry,” I said putting my mein host smile on, “we’re not open yet.”
“You are for me,” he said, slamming the door and pulling a chair over to wedge it shut. “Chopper sent me round. Said to send his best regards for your little launch night and make sure I keep an eye on the place so he gets his cash first thing Monday.”
From behind me, I heard a cork pop and my heart sank.
Chapter Seventeen
“Christie,” said the squat lump of threat, as he swaggered over to the bar and helped himself to the glass of fizz that had just been poured for me. “Jimmy Christie,” he expounded, as though the name should mean something to me. He fixed a squinty little stare on me and took a slug of the booze.
“Christ,” he twitched his head like an angry pigeon and cast a glance round the bar. “You’ve not exactly gone to town on this, have you? Looks like it hasn’t been redone since before I ran it.”
Perhaps, when he ran it, the place was a bare knuckle cage fighting den or something.
Christie continued to let his beady little eyes roam around the room, finally settling lasciviously on Caroline. He grinned at Caz, who returned a brief yet flirtatious smile and slid a bowl of nuts closer to his fat little mitt.
“Found one,” cried Jenny, brandishing an ice bucket. She stopped dead when she caught sight of the lecherous dwarf.
“’Ello darlin’,” Christie switched his attention from Caz to Jenny, reached his left hand out, shoved it into a bowl of crisps and shovelled a whole fistful of cheese and onion into his fat face. I caught Caroline giving a surreptitious glance at the bowl of nuts and casually moving the half emptied bowl of crisps out of Christie’s reach.
“Come an’ talk to me,” Christie leered, nodding his head towards an empty barstool beside him and sliding a champagne glass across the bar to sit in front of the empty stool.
“Um,” Jenny dumped the ice bucket on the bar and hesitated.
“This is Mr Christie,” Caz said.
“Jimmy,” Christie leered, showing more teeth than a chorus line of big bad wolves.
“Mr Christie is the – um – owner’s agent. He was just telling us how he used to run this venue some time ago.”
“Yeah,” Christie gestured around the room, splashing champagne up the sleeve of his pleather jacket. “Kept the place ship shape for Mr F. You wouldn’t have got no riff-raff here in my day.” The way he looked at me when he said riff-raff left me in little doubt as to his views on the type of clientele I was hoping to attract.
“So what happened?” I asked. “Why don’t you run it for him now?”
Christie shrugged, bobbed his head and swallowed noisily all at the same time, “I went up in the world, didn’t I?”
At that point, Ali re-entered the bar and, seeing Christie, stopped dead, the blood draining from her face.
“Morning, Jimmy,” she said, quickly covering her surprise and obvious discomfort by filling a shelf with bottles of mixers.
“Jesus,” Christie growled, his lip curling, “you still ‘ere, then. Thought you’d have been carted off by now.”
Ali blushed, muttered something about needing a quiet word with me and fled to the end of the bar.
“You wanna watch ‘er,” Christie growled at me, as Caz refilled his champagne glass. “She’ll ‘ave the place filled with darkies and poofs,” he caught himself and sniggered. “Well, she’ll up the darkie contingent anyway. An’ rob you blind...”
I’d had enough and opened my mouth to protest, but was silenced by a pointed glare from Caroline as, in seeming slow motion, we watched the little thug fill a mitt with green-tinged cashews, lift them to his face and shovel a whole handful into his mouth in one go.
He chewed once. Twice. And then stopped, a sheen of sweat breaking out on his Neanderthal brow.
His head bob-twitched again, more violently than before as he swallowed noisily and choke-coughed, tears springing to his eyes.
Caz and Jenny, almost in synch, each reached a hand into the bowl and withdrew a nut, popping them into their mouths and crunching on them, a slight twinkle in their eyes, as Christie continued to twitch, sweat, cry and cough.
“I do like these wasabi nuts,” Jenny said to Caz, as she reached for another. “They are rather moreish.”
“Mmm,” agreed Caz, as she selected another and popped it into her mouth, “and they don’t half clear the sinuses too. Now, Mr Christie, what were you saying?”
I slid to the end of the bar. “Sorry about that,” I addressed Ali, nodding my head at the still choking Jimmy Christie.
“Him?” Ali shot a poisonous look at his back and shrugged. “He’s never going to change. Always was a nasty little shit. But he’s lying, you know.”
“What about?”
“I’ve never taken so much as a packet of crisps out of this place without paying.”
“Ali,” I reached out a hand and placed it over hers, “I know that. I trust you entirely.”
“You don’t know me,” she answered, her gaze dropping to the bar as she pulled her hand away. “And a nasty little shit-stirrer like Jimmy Christie could change how you think about me.”
“Between you and him,” I said, “I know which one I’d be likely to believe.”
“Good,” she said, “cos I’ve got some bad news.”
“Uh-oh.” She leaned forward conspiratorially, cast a glance towards the other end of the bar and, lowering her voice, dropped the bombshell.
“We’re missing a couple of bottles. One of gin and one of vodka.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Clear spirit. Eighty proof. Two litres thereof,” she clarified. “Missing. Gone. No longer there.” She raised her eyes and locked her gaze with mine. “Pinched.”
“Pinched?” I had a mental picture of Dash and Ray downing shots and banished it; they were more alcopop drinkers.
“Thing is,” Ali was whispering, flicking an unhappy glance at Christie’s back, “I don’t want no accusations getting thrown around. I know what it’s like to have someone making snide little remarks about you.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said, my frown growing.
“It was in a box in the hallway back there,” she jerked her head behind her. “And it was all sealed up a half hour ago.”
I nodded, some realisation beginning to surface. “Go on.”
“The last one through was Lyra and after she’d gone back upstairs, the box was opened and the bottles were gone. Truth is, I think that she’s had ‘em away.”
Chapter Eighteen
I went through the doorway into the hallway.
From behind me, I could hear Jimmy Christie trying to impress the girls whilst downplaying the agony of consuming a fistful of wasabi. “I love a vindaloo, me. Spicier the better, eh girls. I bet you like it spicy, don’t you?”
Christie’s boss was a man known, for reasons I had always been too frightened to enquire into, as Chopper Falzone.
My deal with Falzone was that he would receive a certain percentage each week from the pub’s tills, with a guaranteed minimum and in return I would have free rein to do whatever I wanted, so long as I covered Chopper’s take, ensured that the law never had reason to pay too much attention to the place and didn’t endanger his reputation.
Mind you, being indicted as a war criminal was about the only thing that I thought likely to damage his already filthy rep and, even then, only in certain quarters.
Now I had his left-hand man trying to chat up my mate, whilst the woman who was supposed to ensure that I could pay Falzone was drinking herself into oblivion.
This could not be happening.
I tip-toed up the stairs, listening out for – what? The clink of bottle on glass? The thump of shitfaced diva hitting the floor? But no sound came to me.
At the top, the landing stretched away. The dressing room door was firmly closed. There was only one thing for it: I was going to have to go along there, knock on the door and politel
y but firmly inform Lyra that I had reason to believe she had alcohol in the room and would she please return it to me.
She would, of course, return the bottle, no doubt with some explanation to cover both our embarrassment at the situation and all would be returned to normality.
Yeah, that’ll work...
I stepped forward, the scene unfolding in my mind’s eye. There’d be begging, I knew; doubtless there’d be tears and acrimony and foul oaths and epithets. I wondered how Lyra would react.
Then a funny thing happened: from behind Lyra’s door I heard low but urgent voices. One was Lyra’s and though I couldn’t hear what she was saying the tone suggested she was not particularly happy.
The other voice murmured back, the tone seeming to be insistent rather than argumentative and Lyra was silent for a moment before responding. Something was clearly wrong and the presence of the other person in the room, for some reason, bothered me.
Morgan had left the pub via the front door and hadn’t come back in that way, but I wondered whether he’d remembered to lock the back door after he’d had his ciggie. Had he re-entered that way and made his way back to his wife’s room? Was he, even now, pleading with her to put the bottle down?
Suddenly, I was overcome with embarrassment. By now, I was standing outside the dressing room and was moments away from pressing my ear to the keyhole. At which point, of course, either the door would be opened, or one of Lyra’s entourage would come up the stairs and discover me eavesdropping.
So, in order to ensure that I wasn’t discovered in such a hideously unpleasant situation, I did the only thing I could do: I ducked into the next room, closed the door and pressed my back against it.
I was standing in a room that once doubled as the pub’s ‘office’. The curtains – a pair of filthy floral bits of fabric – were pulled, plunging the room into a murky half-light and the huge bulk of the pub’s old safe, pressed solidly against the outer wall of the building, was the only piece of furniture.
To my left was a door which I knew connected up to what was now Lyra’s dressing room and I knew that I could press my ear to this one to listen with far less fear of discovery; nobody was likely to come into this room and the connecting door itself was jammed shut so neither of the inhabitants of the other room were likely to suddenly walk in on my Peeping Tom act.
I stepped over, dropped to my knees and peered through the keyhole.
I could see a little of the room and there was no sign of the bottle of vodka. What I could see, however, was Lyra, standing up with her back against the dressing table, her cleavage a little overexposed and a slightly wild look in her eyes.
“I wish I could,” she was saying, “but it’s not as easy as you think.” She sighed. “Everything just seems to be so much more difficult these days.”
“It’s as hard as you make it,” said a man’s voice as his back stepped in front of me and Lyra’s arm snaked around his waist and pulled him closer.
“Oh darling,” she murmured, “I like to make things as hard as I possibly can.” Her other arm came around, cupped his arse and then both arms came up to his shoulders, pulling him closer to her.
The man moaned wordlessly.
“Come on,” she murmured once more, “you know what you came for and you know you can have it.”
“Wait,” he whispered, pulling back from her till her hand came up behind his head and pulled him forward, “wait...”
Suddenly there was a shove, a squawk, a cry of “What the fuck?” from Jenny Foster; and Dominic Mouret – for it was he – fled the room.
“You never heard of knocking?” Lyra growled.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Jenny demanded, storming into the room and coming briefly into my keyhole-sized viewing area.
“Jenny,” Lyra’s voice seemed to have a smile in it, “Dominic and I were discussing chapter sixty-nine in the biography. One of my favourite chapters.”
“Keep your hands off him.”
“Hands?” Lyra’s tone, even from where I sat, had a sneer in it. “Oh, I promise not to put my hands anywhere near him. Can’t promise what’s gonna happen with various other parts of my anatomy, mind you.”
And then all hell broke loose. From my vantage point I couldn’t tell who slapped whom first, but suddenly there was a crack, a squawk, a cry of “Bitch” mingled simultaneously with “Slag” and the sound of a selection of cosmetic bottles being knocked over.
I stood and was gripped with existential angst.
Any moment now, I was sure, somebody would step in and separate the two hellcats; tear them bodily apart and...
Bullshit; nobody was coming. Story of my fucking life.
I walked in on them as Jenny had Lyra flat on her back. The older woman’s knee was firmly embedded in her stepdaughter’s chest as the younger woman strained to make the most of her grasp on her stepmother’s throat.
Lyra thrashed a hand out and slashed at Jenny’s face, removing two fingernails in the process and eliciting a grunt from the straining figure, who dodged left, avoided the knee, settled right on the diva’s surgically enhanced chest and closed both hands around the throat that was costing me a week’s bar takings.
Lyra squawked, kicked, thrashed back with her claws and spat obscenities.
“Alright Love,” I roared, in my best bouncer’s baritone, “you’ve ‘ad enough.” I hooked both arms under Jenny’s armpits and unceremoniously dragged her backwards.
“Everything,” the girl squawked, “you take everything. Why? Why?”
Lyra, freed from the death grip, stared up at the girl, a triumphant smile curling her lips and said “Because I can.”
Which was not, perhaps, the verbal equivalent of oil on stormy waters.
Jenny – who’d been half upright at this point – suddenly screeched, pitched forward and pulled me with her so that she ended up with her face embedded in Lyra’s crotch whilst my head was slammed into the diva’s bosom.
I righted myself, pulled the still spitting and slashing woman upright, put the screamed “I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking bitch” down to youthful high spirits and dragged her from the dressing room, as Lyra staggered to her feet, cackled like a fishwife, cried “Get to the back of the queue, bitch,” and ordered me to send up some ice.
“And a lemon, if you have one, in this dump,” she added, as her stepdaughter wrenched herself free of me and stalked off down the stairs.
Chapter Nineteen
“Blimey,” Christie sniggered, as the door slammed shut on the still ranting Jenny. “Hope the rest of the night’s a bit quieter. Any more drama and the punters’ll fuckin’ riot!” He sniggered into his champagne as his mobile suddenly began to play Smoke on the water.
He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at it, blanched, straightened up, coughed and answered it. “’Ello sir. Yes. Yes, all well. Yes.”
Christie put the glass on the bar, slid off the barstool, nodded at me and left the bar.
“Well,” Caz announced, ditching the champagne flute and pouring herself a half pint of Moet, “it’s all going very well, isn’t it?”
At which point the ASBO twins tottered out of their lair.
“Awright Lady C,” Dash called. “This do?”
I turned my head and gaped.
The two – blond and bronzed and displaying the easy smiles and natural muscle tone that only the very young and the very beautiful can – were, apart from the tightest white underwear, as naked as the day they’d been born.
My jaw dropped, as Caz slipped from her seat and oozed round the bar, handing each a glass of fizz.
She leaned close in to Dash. “You did your own brows,” she stated.
“You said…” he responded.
“I did,” she interjected, producing a pair of tweezers and plucking at the very edges of his brow line, “and you’ve done wonderfully. Not too ‘polished’, a little edgy. Perfect.”
She stood back, appraised him as though he were Africa and she w
ere one of her colonialist ancestors – lingering rather too long on what I can only describe as his Sahara Desert – and nodded approvingly before transferring her attention to Ray.
“Oh dear,” she frowned, “pop back upstairs, there’s a dear and re-shave that chest. It’s looking a bit sandpapery.” Her gaze slid downwards and her frown deepened. “And,” she murmured, “you can remove the padding. You appear to have overstuffed the, um, lower chamber”
Ray frowned back, blushed and admitted “I was gonna pad, just like you said, but it was a bit tight already…”
Caroline pursed her lips, reached out and tweaked the boy’s fringe. “Are you wearing the medium sized pants?” she enquired.
He nodded, uncertainly.
“Forget the chest,” she instructed. “Put on the smalls and charge every customer at least two quid more than the list price.”
She turned back to me. “Barmen. We need hot, sexually desirable barmen.”
I was unsure how comfortable I was with describing what were, roughly speaking, my nephews, as gay bait, but the pride with which both boys were comporting themselves made me think they were at least enjoying their objectification.
Ali – with the bionic hearing that any barmaid needs – suddenly appeared, took one look at the duo clad only in their scanties and removed the glasses from their hands. “Here to work, boys,” she announced. “Bubbles later. Right now, them shelves need stocking. But first,” she said, waving a few tenners, “one of you needs to get dressed, take five of these tenners and get change.”
One of the twins shrugged and reached for the cash. As he did so the door swung open, presenting the waxy moon face of Leon Baker looking like Munch’s The Scream in a cagoule.
“Is Lyra still mad at me?” He enquired pathetically.
“Right, that’s it,” Ali announced, shooing him out. “We are not open for the paying public. I’m locking this front door; it’s in and out the back door from now on. Anyone’d think this place was ready for business.” She shot me a dark look and I knew exactly what she meant.
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