Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Shut it,’ I hissed, head bent forward. We were like a Dickens tableau. All we needed were striped jerseys and a candle in a bottle and we could have played the Old Vic. ‘I don’t need help, Missus. And no more noisy chat, for Christ’s sake.’

  She wasn’t at all abashed. Just smiled sweetly and waited for Erica to come. Chips, meat pies, beans, peas, gravy. Tea. Even rolls and margarine. Erica’s foot started tapping as Tinker whaled straight into his plateful. Mine steamed reproachfully untouched. I shrugged to Erica. She shrugged coldly back. I get mercy when I’m on my own. With another and showier bird like Moll Maslow sitting opposite I’d get none. I felt the sweat prickle on my shoulders from embarrassment. The rest of the crowd watched, pleased.

  ‘Oh,’ Moll said innocently after about a year or so. ‘How foolish of me. Of course.’ Her blue eyes stayed on mine as she flicked her handbag and brought out a note. I sensed Tinker’s eyes swivel in to the money as Erica took it and flounced off. Talk began again. Moll smiled and patted her hair absently, eyes still holding mine ever so casually. Hello, I thought warily, what have we here?

  ‘Er, I’ll owe it,’ I said in a croak. The aroma of the nosh was driving me mad.

  ‘No need, Lovejoy.’ Moll reached over hesitantly and touched my hand. ‘Partners don’t owe, do they?’

  ‘Partners?’

  ‘Yes.’ No hesitation now. If anything I was being ordered. ‘Anyhow,’ she continued, ‘I don’t expect it will be the first expense we shall incur. Do you?’ There was a pause while Tinker sloshed and noshed.

  ‘What about Tom?’ First things first.

  ‘Tom’s just leaving on a course for two weeks.’ She split my roll and stirred my tea. ‘By then we’ll have settled the entire affair. I have adequate funds.’

  I tried to reason out a quick way of using her money to keep me going without having to take Leckie’s killers on, but her eyes kept getting in the way of my thinking. Women take advantage of people.

  ‘Eat up, Lovejoy.’ She did that mysterious bit with a powder compact and glanced across, smiling. ‘We have so much to do, haven’t we?’

  I avoided Tinker’s gaze and started on my grub, trying not to wolf it. Moll watched me, still smiling. Women like to see appetites, any sort. I have this theory that appetites are the cause of most troubles, especially mine.

  Chapter 7

  ENTERING ANOTHER PERSON’S house is probably quite enjoyable, as long as you’re not an antiques dealer. You can sit and chat, eye the bird and chat her up and see how cleverly she’s arranged the dahlias. For me it’s not that easy.

  First of all there’s suspicion. It strikes straight to your cerebrum: antiques might be here! And when coffee’s up you find yourself crawling all over the crockery looking for Spode or Rockingham ware. You can’t for the life of you focus on anything else. Then there’s the skulduggery bit. As soon as she’s gone for more milk you hurtle round the room fingering chairs and mauling the sideboard to see if it’s vintage. I don’t really mean to pry. It’s just the way we are, because antiques are everything. It’s no wonder I can sense an antique through a brick wall.

  Moll turned out to be one of those women who never stops talking – well, almost never. All the way to her house she prattled. I didn’t bother to listen to the actual words, just kept an ear hole open for the sense. She drove like a scatterbrain, pointing out the sights and occasionally waggling the wheel experimentally for nothing, presumably just to test the universe hurtling erratically past on the other side of the car windows.

  ‘Why do you drive in third gear all the time?’ I’d had to ask.

  She tutted furiously. ‘I have to,’ she complained. ‘So I can hang my handbag on the lever. There’s just nowhere else. These designers!’

  ‘Silly me.’

  But we made it to her home. I could tell she was mentally gauging my face for a sketch while she rushed about brewing up and deciding where I was to sit. Round the room she had other people’s art work, which pleased me, though it was all costly modern stuff and therefore of no possible account. Her furniture was flouncy and feminine, the sort you know has been chosen by a high-spirited woman who usually smiles and will always be one jump ahead. Bright colours, lots of windows with pot plants that didn’t look trapped. By the time she came in with tea I’d resignedly sussed out the furniture and paintings and was all attention while she poured. We sat opposite, across a modern Chinese rosewood low table like chess players at a match. When I was flat broke I’d cut one down and made a Pembroke table. Another dealer bought it. He advertized it as ‘possibly eighteenth-century’ and made a mint (which is quite legal because those words also mean ‘possibly not’). I was innocent in those days. It makes you wonder whether innocence and poverty go together.

  ‘Here you are, Lovejoy.’ Moll was patiently holding a cup and saucer out.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Being in another bloke’s chair makes for difficulty, especially if his wife’s bonny and vivacious like Moll. When he’s in the CID and she’s bent on some daft Robin Hood type of crusade you can’t help feeling even more uncomfortable. All along I’d felt this was not my scene.

  ‘Look, Mrs Maslow –’

  ‘You will call me Moll.’

  ‘Moll.’ I was a second too long. It sounded uncomfortably like an order again. ‘I’m not sure what it is you think we decided, er, but . . .’

  ‘Biscuit?’ She was smiling.

  ‘Er, thanks.’ I cleared my throat and began again, careful as I could. ‘Look. I can’t afford to rub your old man up the wrong way, . Moll. And your brother-in-law’s, er, known for putting the elbow on us antiques dealers . . .’

  ‘Goon.’

  Her gaze was disconcerting, but I found new resolve from somewhere. ‘What I mean is,’ I said, more uneasy with every word, ‘maybe we should drop the whole thing.’

  ‘What whole thing?’ She’d stopped smiling and that exaggerated innocence was back. Talking to women’s like watching a kaleidoscope and trying to guess the next pattern.

  ‘Er, well. Looking for Leckie’s . . . er . . .’

  ‘I take it you want to welsh on our arrangement.’ She rose and crossed to a bureau. I watched her uncertainly. The file she fetched had an awful official look about it.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Why, Lovejoy?’ She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs, suddenly so much calmer and a great deal less innocent. ‘Fear?’

  I swallowed, nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What exactly happened to Leckie?’ For all her new assurance her eyes avoided mine.

  ‘Dunno.’

  She leaned forward for the ashtray, a modern greenish agate. ‘Yes you do, Lovejoy.’ She opened the file. ‘This is the county CID file.’

  ‘File? On . . .?’ The bloody thing had my name on.

  ‘You.’ She nodded, flipping the leaves casually. ‘Want to read, Lovejoy? But of course you’ll know everything about yourself, won’t you?’

  ‘Most of that’s –’

  Moll closed it and interrupted my indignation skilfully. ‘Concocted? Misreported? Biased?’

  ‘Yes. Especially if Maslow’s reports are in there.’

  ‘The trouble is, Lovejoy, that it’s there. Recorded. All about you.’

  I rose, angry at letting myself get put on this way. ‘That does it. I’m off.’

  ‘Not for a moment, please.’

  She sounded so bloody sure of herself I suddenly lost my wool and stood over her blazing. I always finish up doing what everybody else wants.

  ‘Listen here, lady. I admit it – I saw Leckie killed. Two blokes in a black car deliberately crashed him up.’

  ‘I knew it –’

  ‘Shut your teeth and listen for once in your posh smarmy life.’ I was shaking with rage. ‘I can just see you now, that day. What sort of welcome did you give Leckie? Go on, admit it. You were bored. Your cousin turns up, first time for maybe months –’

  ‘How dare you –’ She struggled to rise, her fa
ce pale.

  I clocked her one. She fell back, hand on her face. I knew she was thinking: This can’t be happening. Men don’t clout women of my class. It’s not done.

  ‘Listen, you smug bitch.’ I realized I was wagging my finger at her and folded it away, embarrassed. ‘Leckie came here, and I’ll bet it was all you could do to give him the time of day. He called at an “inconvenient moment” – isn’t that what your kind says when they mean piss off?’

  ‘I’ll report you to –’

  ‘Did he ask to stay?’

  ‘I’m not going to continue this discussion –’

  I shook her wildly till her hands flopped and her teeth clicked. Hearing her neck-bones rattle fetched me to my senses. I dropped her, frightened I’d done damage, but still wild.

  ‘Did he?’

  She was a mess now. Tears poured down her face.

  ‘Yes.’ She sniffed and did those dry hiccups.

  I looked about the room.

  ‘Where did he sit?’ Maybe he’d slipped a message into the upholstery.

  She huddled in the corner of her sofa, sobbing and jerking. Her eyes didn’t meet mine any more.

  ‘He didn’t.’ She could hardly speak for weeping. ‘Please don’t. You’re right. He knocked at the door. It was practically dark. He’d put his car near the garage. The engine was still running.’ She found a hankie.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ I said, ‘partner.’

  ‘Please.’ She was heartbroken, but I’d had enough of all this fencing crap and forced her chin out of her hands, to make her look at me. ‘Please, Lovejoy. He – he just said, “Any chance of a sundowner, old girl?” I . . . I was in the middle of a sketch and said could we leave it till another time.’

  I let her go, trying not to recoil.

  ‘Please don’t look like that, Lovejoy.’

  ‘You didn’t even let him in?’ Dear God, I thought. Dear frigging God. I turned away from the bitch, sick to my soul. It’s not just me. Or me and Maslow. It’s all of us.

  ‘I’d promised the sketch for the morning –’

  ‘Of course,’ I said with vicious politeness. I couldn’t help myself. ‘An important jumble sale, no doubt?’

  ‘Church charities,’ she answered mechanically. ‘He never said. Just shrugged and said fine. I suggested he come round next week instead. He said fine again.’ That was Leckie, politely saying ‘fine’ and ‘not at all’, when condemned to death. I’d have battered my way in screaming for help.

  ‘Did you see –’

  ‘Nothing else. No car lights. The lane’s visible from the door.’

  ‘And then you shut the door on him?’

  She wept again, face in her hands.

  ‘We never had much in common. Cousins aren’t always close. I only thought it odd afterwards, coming over without giving me a ring first.’

  ‘You waved him off?’

  ‘No. I wanted –’

  ‘– to finish your sketch,’ I capped nastily. ‘And now you want me to get rid of your guilt. Well, do your own dirty work.’

  I went to the front door. It had stopped raining. You could see four other houses, the village green at the end of the lane, a church spire. Not a busy place, but not the back of beyond, either. I tried to work it out. Moll had shut the door on Leckie. He’d put the crummy bureau in Tom’s garage, hoping the watching followers would be misled. Some chance.

  Moll was behind me. I felt her arm touch my arm but stepped out on to the little garden. I’d had enough.

  ‘Please, Lovejoy.’ She followed me desperately to the lane. ‘I know you’ll try to catch them on your own. You’ll need help. I have money –’

  I pushed her back into her garden and shut the low gate on her, suddenly exhausted by all these bastards. Some days there are just too many know-alls.

  ‘Keep it, lady. Keep everything. Just leave me alone.’

  ‘I’ll drive you home –’

  ‘I want to walk, or there’ll be a bus.’

  ‘Lovejoy.’ Her voice made me pause and turn. ‘If you do catch them, be careful.’

  ‘Catch?’ I spat sour phlegm on to the unpaved lane’s stones. ‘You’ve read my file, love. Who said anything about catch?’

  ‘But you can’t –’ She hung over the gate, aghast.

  ‘What do your menfolk do when they catch?’ I grated on, irritated beyond endurance. Two neighbours were out in the next garden, obviously in case Moll needed rescuing from this wild-eyed visiting scruff. ‘Two years with remission, isn’t it? Colour telly, central heating, good grub, and books on the good old taxpayer?’

  I gave a grin and stepped back to face her. She put a hand apprehensively to her face. One neighbour exclaimed, ‘I say!’ I waved nonchalantly and called, ‘It’s all right, councillor,’ without glancing his way.

  ‘That’s . . . anarchy, Lovejoy.’ She could only muster a whisper.

  ‘Anarchy’s when the Old Bill can’t make the rules work, love. You can’t blame me.’

  I was several yards away when I heard her say in a bewildered voice. ‘But people aren’t allowed, Lovejoy.’ The eternal cry of the innocent and the dispossessed. I didn’t bother to turn back.

  The old neighbour was still bristling busily as I passed. He didn’t raise his hat to me, but standards of behaviour are falling everywhere. I’ve noticed that.

  Chapter 8

  SOMETIMES YOU WAKE up ready to conquer the universe. You know that rare feeling: everything seems sunny and easy; women are spectacular, available, and money comes in; genuine antiques glow everywhere you drop your eyes. Other days can appear perfect, yet you wake like a sick refugee. The morning after I’d blacked Moll’s eye was one of these; exquisite sunshine with that cool deep crystalline air you only get in East Anglia. I should have been happy as a lark, but I was in a worse state than China.

  All night long I’d had nightmares. You know, the sort you can’t even bear to go over again even though you’re safe noshing breakfast. I’d woken drenched in sweat, with my mind in turmoil. The cottage had seemed full of reproof – but what the hell had I done? An innocent snog – well, almost innocent – in a country lane even with another bloke’s missus isn’t a capital crime, now, is it? Yet that had accidentally started it all.

  I banged and crashed about the place frying breakfast, making myself madder because I only had bread left and I hate fried bread on its own. The milkman had stopped coming before the Jubilee, so I have to use that powdery stuff when I can afford it. The birds were tapping on the window. I suppose it’s my fault for trying to train them away from massacring worms.

  ‘Fried bread, lads. Sorry.’ I chucked them some pieces. My robin came and defecated unceremoniously on the sleeve of my tatty dressing gown. Obviously, a critic as well as a songster. I told it angrily, ‘If snogging with a bloke’s wife was the worst we ever got up to, the world wouldn’t be in such a bloody mess.’ I pushed it off and slammed back inside in a temper.

  Before I was halfway through this young woman with horn-rimmed specs was knocking on the door. Some days it’s nothing but people.

  ‘Good morning!’ She was past me before I realized, wrinkling her nose at the sordid scene. ‘Oh! Still not fully prepared to leap piping into the world, and it’s almost nine!’ Roguish smiles in the early morning are poisonous.

  ‘Don’t misquote Blake to me,’ I growled. She had a clipboard.

  ‘We are here on a health visit,’ she carolled briskly, making it sound like I’d won a prize.

  ‘We bloody well aren’t –’

  ‘Our doctor has put us down for health training.’ She checked her neffie list. ‘Our name’s Lovejoy, isn’t it? Two sessions weekly.’

  I hate officials. ‘Tell Doc Lancaster to sod off.’

  She went all hurt. ‘He’s very concerned at the lack of fitness in his patients in this village,’ she informed me soulfully.

  I snatched her clipboard and scanned the names furiously. I was listed. Doc wasn’t. ‘He smokes, and drinks
like a fish,’ I reminded her. ‘Why isn’t he down?’

  ‘Doctor,’ she informed me distantly, ‘has decided.’ Her aloof tone announced that he was somehow above all this mortality business.

  If I hadn’t been so tired I’d have just given her the sailor’s elbow. As it was I made a fatal mistake, though looking back, how could I have avoided any of the consequences? My mistake was to argue. Never argue with a bird. You start out right and finish up wrong.

  ‘I don’t want two sessions of anything.’

  She was horrified. ‘But you can’t refuse! You’re part of the test group.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ I was on the phone in a flash, bullying my way past Doc’s snotty receptionist by the simple expedient of pretending I was dying. The specky bird tried verbal dissuasion, but since when has that ever succeeded? Doc was his usual poisonous chuckly self.

  ‘Lovejoy,’ I snapped. ‘This bird you sent. Get her off my back.’ She tut-tutted angrily behind me.

  Doc tried to sound professional, but I could tell he was falling about laughing on the other end. ‘I’ve scored you as Unfit.’ He chuckled. ‘We need four hundred of you, and suddenly I’m one short. Don’t let us down.’

  ‘Two short,’ I corrected icily. ‘I’m the second that got away.’

  He went all smooth. ‘Can’t Miss Haverill persuade you?’ He was smiling. ‘She managed to inveigle several recalcitrants in Chase’s control group –’

  ‘Eh?’ Suddenly I was awake. Chase?

  ‘We send her to, er, persuade our male patients –’

  ‘Whose control group?’

  ‘Dr Chase. My late partner.’ He paused, puzzled. ‘We worked this clinical trial out before he died. Miss Haverill’s my coordinator, though she’s based at Six Elm Green. Did you know him?’

  ‘Er, no.’ I paused, thinking fast. ‘Er, well, Doc –’ I cleared my throat, smooth and casual. ‘I’ve reconsidered. Seeing you’ve explained what an, er, important, er . . .’

  ‘Clinical trial,’ he prompted.

  ‘Er, clinical trial it actually is . . .’

  ‘What changed your mind?’ he was asking suspiciously when I hung up.