by Colin Watson
“You a member, sir?”
The question was unnecessarily loud. The headless spectators around the tables undulated slightly as if moved by a sudden current through the waist-deep darkness in which they stood. And Ross glimpsed, at the far end of the counter, another movement. The old sailorman, quick as a lizard, had taken off and replaced his jaunty cap.
Ignoring, for the moment, the steward, Ross gazed full at the flag-seller and was treated to a wink that threatened to expel the old man’s eye like a black pip. Before Ross turned away, he had seen that the collecting tin standing beside the tray of flags on the counter now lacked its slotted lid.
“A member of the club? No, I’m not, as it happens.”
“If you’re looking for someone, perhaps I could...” The steward’s voice had resumed normal pitch.
Ross looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t think he’s here at the moment. The light’s not terribly good, though.” He stole another glance at the sailorman. The top was back on his tin.
“Well, tell me his name; you’ve only to tell me his name.” The voice was tired, querulous. Small fry, thought Ross: the easily exasperated are never allowed deeply in. He said: “There’s nothing against my hanging on for a bit, is there?”
The steward looked dubious. Ross felt that he wanted to consult with a look the one-legged man but dared not. Finally he shrugged and returned to his newspaper. “Just as you like...”
The atmosphere in the hall, though cold and stale, had something of a soporific quality, deepened by the gentle rumble of the balls and the constant clicks of impact. Ross, his eyes half closed, drowsily contemplated the silent perambulation of the players and amused himself by judging from isolated jackets and ties and hands the characters of the faceless watchers. Among them were a few, a couple, one only perhaps, of the painfully, carefully cultivated contacts of Hopjoy, little studs of sensitivity along the line of F.7. But which? And by what sign would he divine them?
“P’raps you fancy a game, sir?”
Beside him was the bellows face of the mariner. The old man bore a smell compounded of raspberry jam and oil stove.
“A game?” Ross had been unprepared for an approach quite in this manner. “I’m not a member, you know.”
The other waved a hand disdainfully. “What’s that matter?” It sounded like ‘wozzard-madder’. Twelve miles south-west of King’s Lynn, calculated Ross. He took his hand from his pocket. “All right, then.”
The Norfolkman gave two light taps with his crutch against the counter. Without looking up, the steward reached behind him and flicked a switch. “Number five”, he muttered. “There’s a set on.”
Ross reached across the counter and selected a cue from the rack. The steward offered him no assistance but instead, still without taking his eyes from his paper, stooped for a black japanned cue case evidently kept in custody for the sailor’s personal use.
“I can’t play, mind,” asserted Ross’s opponent, unlocking his case and withdrawing the cue with the relish of a fencing master challenged by a splenetic woodcutter.
“In that case,” said Ross, “we’ll just play for the table, shall we?”
The sailorman looked shocked. “Oh, I don’t say I mind losing a little. Just to make it interesting.”
“A pound?” Ross sounded as though injecting interest into the encounter were beyond his power or concern. “Five? Anything you like—within reason, you know.” He bent and blew a flake of ash from the cloth.
“A quid, then. I’m not much to beat. I told you.”
Ross smiled inwardly at the man’s predictable mendacity. He would prove, undoubtedly, formidable by small town poolroom standards. But mere shilling-catching competence was of no avail against the expertise acquired at a guinea a point in the basement of Harding’s in Rangoon, or at Billiards-Bee, behind Rue-des-Ecoles, where Charpentier had had the slate beds of his tables faced with leaves of topaz.
The sailorman spun a coin. Ross called.
“You can break, matey.” Ross had not been shown the coin, but he obediently took sight and sent the cue ball with enough spin to rebound from the end cushion, kiss the corner of the triangle of reds, and roll, via two more cushions, snugly behind the brown.
“Ah, very crafty,” said the sailorman. “I reckon this is where I give some away.” He handed Ross his crutch, hopped with astonishing agility round the table, and propped himself into position to take a quick, powerful, and apparently aimless stroke. The white rocketed to one cushion after another, missing everything on the board until it finally crashed into the group of red balls, which disintegrated like a poppy in a gale.
“By God, that was a fluke, matey. I do believe one’s gone down.”
“Three, to be exact,” corrected Ross.
“Three? You don’t say!” He leered at the scattered spheres, then sighed. “That’s my lot, though; there’s not a colour that’ll go.” Off-handedly he nominated black, made his stroke, and looked away. The cue ball hit the black fully, then curled back and came to rest tight in a pocket angle. The blue lay between it and the only accessible red.
Ross handed back the crutch. Almost kneeling, he introduced the tip of his cue through the mesh of the pocket net and delivered a sharp upward stroke. The white rose six inches into the air, sailed over the blue and struck in turn four reds, the last of which cannoned off yellow and trickled into a centre pocket.
“I reckon you’ve played before, matey.” The compliment was tinged with anxiety. Several watchers at the next table turned and shuffled nearer.
Ross smoothly sank the black, another red, black again. A third red lay an inch from the pocket mouth. The cue snaked forward a fraction left of centre of the white ball to impart side. Incredibly, it slid off and veered to one side with a rattle; the white rolled foolishly into impact with the pink.
“Oh, hard cheese! Bloody hard cheese, matey!”
Acknowledging this jubilant condolence with a shrug, Ross glanced at the tip of his cue. There glistened upon it a few tiny bubbles of saliva.
The sailorman, propelled around the table by the noiseless spring of his single leg, wielded his cue like a compensatory natural limb. With every stroke, the swiftly changing pattern of brightly coloured orbs was diminished.
As Ross watched the great bounding barrel, he sensed the satisfaction of the silent audience, one of whose fingers, deftly spittled, had stolen from the dark to cut short his own success. He was no more resentful of that malicious intervention than he would have been of the secretion of a bomb in his car boot. “Unfair,” Ross knew perfectly well, was a word with meaning only for cowards and failures. The game, of course, was lost, but winning or losing in so trivial a context concerned him not at all. His attention was riveted upon a point just behind his preoccupied opponent’s right ear (that point, by quaint coincidence, at which a firmly driven ice pick or bradawl would reliably produce immediate loss of consciousness and rapid death).
Protruding beneath the greasy band of the man’s cap was the corner of a slip of paper,
Ross wasted no time speculating on whether the paper could be surreptitiously tweaked away, even in a moment of contrived confusion. It would have to be snatched audaciously and run off with. And luck would be needed: most of the score or so of taciturn onlookers were unquestionably the man’s allies. The fact that he could not see their faces gave him no hope of their being pacific or infirm.
There remained only blue, pink and black upon the board. The sailorman hoisted his trunk on the table’s edge and drew back the butt of his cue. Ross moved closer behind him. The white ball flew to the blue, dispatched it slickly into an end pocket and rolled obediently back to within three inches of the cushion. The sailorman grunted, levered himself upright and took a rearward hop.
Before he could bend to take aim at the pink, there flashed to his neck the hand of Ross, who was already half-turned for flight.
With a bellow, the one-legged man dropped his cue and grasped the back of his h
ead as if stung by a wasp. Ross already was three strides nearer the swing doors, bearing with him the man’s crutch.
Escape seemed open. Ross plunged for the doors. Then, unaccountably, his legs scissored upon something hard and slim. He spun helplessly off course and crashed to the floor, pain ballooning in his thigh.
In the darkness, a man drew back his cue and assured himself it was unbroken. Then he stooped quickly and picked up the crutch.
Ross rolled under the nearest table to recover his breath. He glanced at the doors. Half a dozen heads were silhouetted against the glass. There would, though, be emergency exits. He thrust the captured piece of paper into his cigarette case and crawled out into the gangway.
The sailorman, his incredible mobility restored, was stumping to and fro near the spot where Ross had been brought down. After a while, he began to move from table to table, systematically, feeling for his quarry with sweeps and jabs of his crutch. Ross, bending low, crept away from the sound of his exploratory advance. He wondered how long it would be before the steward, by now doubtless assigned some part in the hunt, switched on all the lights.
Or was the persistent gloom an agreed precaution against identification?
Apparently not. There was a click, followed by another and another. Soon the bulbs over every table were blazing.
Ross lay flat. He was now nearly in the middle of the hall, in one of the patches of shadow immediately beneath the tables themselves that were still deep enough to give him concealment.
He looked quickly around. The legs of the hunters in the gangways were plainly visible. They moved without haste. Now and then a pair of legs bent and the outline of an inverted head descended. Unexcited murmurs and mutterings reached him.
Above them, a voice rose loud. “Come on, matey. Stand up and stop playing silly buggers. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Ross snaked across to the shelter of the next table. He had spotted a red painted door in the centre of the nearer wall. If he could cross three more gangways, he would reach it.
“I want to talk to you. Stop farting about, damn you.” The probing crutch crashed against a table leg. Ross made another shuffling sortie on hands and knees. He gained five more yards.
For some seconds, the place was absolutely silent. Then he heard a curious trundling sound. It quickly grew louder, diminished with the same rapidity, and ended in a distant crash.
Again it was quiet. Then the noise was repeated. This time it seemed louder, nearer. Ross tried to interpret it, but in vain. Once more the swift, menacing rumble passed through the hall, climaxed with a great hammer blow.
At the instant the noise began for the fourth time, Ross realized what was happening. His adversary was trying to bowl him out of hiding—or, more likely, incapacitate him—with one of the heavy, flint-hard snooker balls that he was sending in vicious under-arm volleys along the floor.
This fourth missile, Ross knew with certainty, was bound straight for its target. He knew too that the tiny fraction of time that remained before its violent arrival would permit of not the slightest self-protective movement. The immediately impending pain could not be begged off. Embrace it, then, his brain commanded; lumpenly absorb the agony and store it as a fuel of retaliation.
In the path of the hurtling ball, Ross became limp as a new corpse. The incredibly effectual mental annealing processes of Course Five were now being proved. His mind was a calm, dark void, prepared for pain’s fertilizing penetration.
It did not come. Three feet short of Ross’s head, the ball rose miraculously and shot past his ear.
Wonderingly, Ross reached out and groped for what had saved him. His fingers met an angular fragment. It was the vestige of a cube of billiard chalk.
The bowling went on methodically. But the particular danger it represented had passed with the diversion of the sailorman’s attention to other rows of tables. Looking back along the floor, Ross saw that the followers of the attempt to drive him to a view were moving in a group behind the bowler. They seemed in general a good deal less anxious to mount an offensive than the earlier intervention of the man with the cue had suggested. Ross decided that his best course was open retreat, coupled with the risk of the red door’s being locked.
He crawled swiftly across the last two aisles and rose to his feet, lifting the door’s catch bar at the same time. He pushed. The door remained shut. A hoarse, angry cry signalled his having been seen. As he heaved against the unyielding door he heard the rapid thumping of the enemy crutch. He put his foot against the bar and kicked. This time the long-disused bolts jumped from their corroded sockets. The door swung back and Ross leaped into blinding daylight.
He was in a passage comfortingly filled with the noises of the street at its end. In a few seconds Ross stepped out into the Corn Exchange.
No one had followed him.
Chapter Nine
In the Neptune kitchen, a waiter reached up through the warm, savoury steam and pulled a bottle of 1953 Beaune from the rack. He tossed it jocundly from hand to hand a few times, twirled it in the dust box, and cradled it. Just before he passed through the service doors into the restaurant, he stiffened his unexceptional face into the lineaments of omniscient superiority and drew back his shoulders. Then he glided to the table of Gordon Periam and party, bearing the wicker basket as if it contained the last surviving fragment of the True Cross.
Periam looked up. “Ah.” He reached out and touched the bottle. “Is it cold?”
The waiter winced. “You did ask for a Beaune, sir. A red wine.” He drew back the basket and stared with pained incredulity at Periam’s finger marks in the dust.
“You would wish me to decant it, sir?”
“You’d better, yes.”
Back in the kitchen, the waiter briskly uncorked the bottle between his knees and tumbled three parts of its contents, merrily gurgling, into a jug. The remainder, thriftily, he swigged.
While the waiter contrived, in comfortable wine-warmed scrutiny of the Daily Mirror, an interval suitable to the delicacy of his supposed task, Inspector Purbright took stock of Mrs Periam.
She would be, he estimated, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, although an almost offensively inept hair style—plaits coiled into round pads over her ears—gave a first impression of mid-thirties. In the plump white face, brown eyes looked out with an alert directness which might have been adjudged a token of honesty; Purbright was not quite sure, though, whether their frankness was unalloyed with pleading, a hint of nymphomania. He resisted the suspicion partly because he felt it to be unfair at such short acquaintance, partly because of his awareness that the self-flattery of the middle-aged too often takes the form of a fancied discernment of sexual irresponsibility in younger women.
Nevertheless, a certain physical lushness about Doreen Periam was undeniable. It was rendered the more disturbing by the paradoxical prissiness of her dress. The frock she was wearing, for instance, was an outlandish affair in heavy, dark blue silk, that seemed to have been designed to constrict her bust into prudish formlessness. Its actual effect was to squeeze up into provocative cloven prominence at the base of her neck the breasts that a less ‘modest’ garment would have accommodated quite unspectacularly. From the long, tightly cuffed sleeves emerged small hands as white and delicate as potato shoots. Their continual movement might have been merely a symptom of genteel nervousness. But as they strayed over the dark silk, they seemed to be exploring underlying areas of erotic ache.
“I think we can acknowledge quite frankly between the three of us,” Purbright was saying, “that until recently you were a particular friend of Mr Hopjoy, Mrs Periam.”
She glanced apprehensively at Periam, who nodded. “I told the inspector about that, darl. He understands how things were.”
“It’s just that he wasn’t...wasn’t the right one. It does happen, you know.” The bright, brown eyes had widened.
“Of course. I’d like to know, though, whether he accepted that view. Was he reconciled to
your preference having changed?”
“Oh, I’m sure he was, really. I mean a boy’s bound to be upset when someone else comes along, but mostly it’s his pride that’s hurt. Don’t you think so?”
Purbright declined to endorse the sentiment. He was wondering whether Doreen were as simple as she sounded. “Jealousy, Mrs Periam, isn’t altogether a matter of hurt pride. From what your husband has told me already, I’d say that Mr Hopjoy took the affair rather badly.”
“Our barney in the bathroom, darl,” interjected Periam. “Remember I told you.”
“Oh, that...” She looked down at the cloth and absently edged a fork from side to side. “I suppose I was a bit of a beast to him, really. Brian was so happy-go-lucky, though; I never thought he’d come the old green-eyed monster.”
Periam took her hand. “It was my fault. We should have broken it to him sooner.”
The waiter, priest-like, was at Periam’s shoulder. He administered a sacramental sample, then straightened to stare gravely into the middle distance. Purbright was reminded of a well-bred dog owner awaiting the conclusion of his animal’s defecation in a neighbour’s gateway.
