by Gregson, J M
Then, at last, he opened the throttle as he moved on to the black tarmac of the fast road. The moment when the power leapt like a wild beast between his thighs was the best of all. He felt the bike move from twenty to sixty in five seconds as he twisted the grip, smoothly, without the snatching which threw kids into skids. Then he was into top gear, the change as soft and soundless as a mother stroking her baby’s hair. Flat against the tank now, man and machine as one, his brain relaying its instructions directly to the magnificent machine it controlled.
The rear bumpers of the cars he overtook came at him quickly, almost as quickly as the backs of the cars in those videos on television, where they put a camera on a Formula One car. He liked that comparison. There was not much traffic in the mid-afternoon. He did not stay in the outside lane, but weaved in and out as he overtook, enjoying leaning low and feeling his mastery of the great machine. He felt like a vast swallow, swooping exactly to the spots he had chosen, master of the element in which he moved.
He glanced regularly at his mirror — the good rider always knew what was behind him as well as what was ahead. You needed to watch for the pigs when you upped your speed like this, though he was confident he had not passed any of them. All he saw were the rapidly receding bonnets of the cars he had overtaken.
He eased the bike up to the ton: he always liked to touch that alluring figure when the conditions were right. The needle crept smoothly to the magic hundred, then stayed there, with the rider perfectly in control of himself and his machine. Even at this speed, he could observe the rev counter and the temperature gauge, registering exactly what they should on each side of the speedo. He enjoyed the frightened surprise which appeared briefly beside him on the face of the woman driving a new red Fiesta. For a moment he sat almost upright to smile at her from within his helmet on the unusually tall bike. Then she was gone, a receding image in his mirror, diminishing to no more than a dot before he swung into a long bend and lost her for ever.
He always enjoyed that bend. It was beautifully cambered for high speed, enabling him to lean gently with it, placing the big Honda on exactly the line he chose and holding it as the road straightened into the long bridge over the river.
He would have liked to go further, to give the smooth-running beast a real run before bedding it down for the night. He liked to think of it like that — it gave him a closer, more personal relationship with the thing he loved. But he knew he must get back to the house. He would have a couple of hours, probably, before the others came. Everton liked having time to himself; time when he could think, and make his own plans.
Once he had left the dual carriageway, he reverted to his cautious mode of riding. It was best to anticipate that there were idiots around every corner. He was not stupid enough to ignore the fact that you were vulnerable on a bike; anyway, the Honda was too precious for him to risk getting it damaged. He had worked hard to get it; and taken certain risks.
He saw the big old Vauxhall as he turned into Jackson Terrace. There were two men in it, but he didn’t look at them as he went past; young black men were safer not showing too much curiosity in these streets. He eased the big machine round the back of the mean houses, moving it over the uneven cobbles of the narrow back entry at not much more than walking pace. He had to get off to open the battered, almost paintless rear door, then mount the machine again to get it into the yard — it was too heavy for him merely to push it through the three-foot gap.
But the trouble was worthwhile — once the machine was in this narrow little flagged enclosure, he felt it was reasonably safe. Left in front of the house, it would have been stolen or vandalized within hours. There wasn’t another bike like it around. Its rider set it carefully on its stand, three inches from the wall as always, where he would be able to check on it through the narrow window of the room upstairs.
He was taking off his helmet when the men arrived, just as he turned to shut the shabby green door of the yard upon the world beyond it. They were dressed in suits: he did not see many people here who dressed like that. If they were villains, they could be big trouble. He moved his helmet to his left hand, but did not begin to remove his leathers; they would provide some sort of protection, if there was going to be violence.
The taller one watched him; the burly one walked over to inspect the bike, running a finger appreciatively over its distinctive twin headlamps. He said, ‘They get better every year, don’t they? Electric starting, a row of instruments like a car. Not like when I used to ride a Royal Enfield: that was a real bugger to start on a cold morning.’
Smith recognized that this was only the prologue; the tone was pleasant, but at any moment this talk could turn into a taunt. He said, ‘Who are you?’ and was surprised how thin and cracked his voice sounded on the words.
The man turned from the bike to look at him, feeling inside the pocket of his jacket. He produced not a weapon but a police warrant card, with a fading picture of himself. ‘We’re police officers. I’m Detective Sergeant Hook; this is Superintendent Lambert.’ The taller man gave Smith a small, confirmatory smile as he turned; his eyes had not left his since they arrived.
Smith felt relief rising within him; at least he was not going to be beaten up in this quiet yard; at least his bike would be safe. He was enough a product of his environment to say disgustedly, ‘Bloody pigs! I knew you were, as soon as I saw you.’ It was not true; his brushes had always been with the uniformed branch, and he had never even thought that these men might be CID. But his aggression was a conditioned reaction, and one they registered as such without feeling much rancour.
Hook merely said, ‘You are Everton Smith, of this address?’
‘Yes. How’d you know that?’
Hook grinned tolerantly at his naivety. ‘We knew about the bike. Makes it easy to identify a man, a nice bike like this.’ He didn’t mention that they had known also about the colour of his skin, judging correctly that Smith would be a little flattered by the mention of his bike as a mark of distinction.
Smith said, ‘My tax is all paid up. I’ve got my insurance and my licence inside, if you want to see them.’ But his mind was already telling him that plain-clothes pigs didn’t visit about things like that. It was Lambert — standing behind him — who said, ‘We’re investigating a suspicious death. We need to ask you some questions. It would be better if we went inside.’
They sat on wooden chairs and looked round the room where he led them. In the heyday of the house sixty years ago, this had probably been called a breakfast-room; there was no division between this space and the tiny kitchen with its square, cracked window overlooking the yard. The wallpaper, what there was of it, had probably been there for most of those sixty years. In the high parts of the room grimy roses stretched towards an incomplete picture rail. Above the battered skirting board, the paper had disappeared altogether, detached in strips by damp and a hundred departed hands. A single unshaded light bulb hung at an angle from its faded purple flex.
There was an ancient and greasy electric stove in the kitchen, and a sink where even the cleaning utensils looked in need of a thorough cleansing. The dish-mop which had once been white was a dark grey; the pan-scrub looked as if it would add more grease than it removed; long streaks of spilled green streaked the sides of the plastic cylinder of supermarket washing-up liquid. There were chipped mugs in a basin of cold water; grease had congealed upon its surface.
Policemen take in the detail of rooms automatically, even when they have other things on their minds. They had ample time to look at this one, for it takes a man quite a time to divest himself of good motorcycle gear. When Smith had sloughed off the black leather which covered his torso, he sat in a chair to peel off the leggings. Bert Hook said, ‘Unusual name, Everton. Support them, do you?’
‘No. My Dad chose the name. After the cricketer. I think he was named after the football team.’
Hook nodded. ‘He was. I played against him once. Only in a charity match: I was never in his class.’
Bert Hook smiled. ‘No. He hit me for three sixes in one over. And not many did that, in those days.’ For a moment he was back a quarter of a century, a young fast bowler in the prime of life, being put to the sword by a cricketing prince who had officially retired.
‘He was good, wasn’t he?’ There was a shy, wondering pride in Everton that his namesake should have done such things.
‘He was the best there was. Until Sobers came along, anyway. I bounced him after the first six, and he hooked me out of the ground. On to it like a black panther he was!’ He could see that lightning movement now, the bat whirling so fast it became a blur, the wide white grin in the ebony face afterwards like that of a delighted small boy.
Smith was out of his leathers at last. He looked suddenly smaller, his small bones almost fragile in the cheap jeans and shirt. Obviously, he reserved his extravagance for the bike and its trappings. Hook said to him, ‘Have you come from work? You’re home early.’
Smith smiled wryly at the thought. ‘I haven’t worked for — for a while now. I’ve been to sign on.’
Hook looked at the narrow staircase which ran up from the shadowy hall beyond the open door. ‘Do you have a room here?’
‘Yeah. A small one. You can see it, if you like.’ He knew now why they were here, but perhaps there was no need to worry about it. He led them up to the room; the boards creaked beneath the big men behind him, though they trod more softly than he.
It was what they would have expected. It had a narrow bed, which they noticed he had made, and a battered, drunken wardrobe. There were no drawers, and no chair; there was scarcely room for them in this tiny cell. But they recorded one important fact — he had the room to himself. Privacy, even of this limited kind, did not come cheap in the world in which Everton moved. This mean house was no squat, as at least two of the others were in this squalid street. Smith had used a key to get in, and even the downstairs bay window was not boarded up.
There was a new little pine shelf near the foot of the narrow bed. There were two photographs here; one was of a young Everton with his first bike, an old Suzuki ER 50 trail bike with patchy red paintwork. The other was of a broad-shouldered black man with his hair greying at the temples, brandishing a beer can at the camera in a cheerful toast. Lambert picked it up and looked his question.
‘It’s my Dad.’
‘Back in Jamaica?’
Everton smiled his contempt. He was happy at the suggestion; he enjoyed the novelty of patronizing senior pigs. ‘In Smethwick. He’d already been there ten years when I was born. Actually, I took that at Edgbaston. When Viv Richards was knocking England around.’
They turned to go back downstairs. Hook said, ‘No mother, then, Everton?’ He knew there would have been a picture on that shelf, if there was.
‘No. She left when I was six.’ He was ahead of them on the stairs. They could not see his face, but his voice was calm.
‘How long since you lived at home, Everton?’
They were back in the bigger room at the back of the house now so that this time they saw the pain on his face. ‘My Dad died last year. He — he got cancer.’ His small, neat features set hard. He would not tell them about the smoking, about how he had pleaded with him to stop. That would be a kind of disloyalty. ‘He was only fifty.’
He sat down abruptly at the scratched table, staring hard at its surface, as if it might reveal to him some of the mysteries of life. The two big men sat carefully opposite him, fearing that the rickety chairs might collapse beneath them. Hook said, ‘How long since you worked, Everton?’
He looked up then, a little spark of fear in his dark brown eyes. ‘A year. Perhaps a bit more.’ The wide vowels of the West Indian speech he had inherited from his father were overlaid with the flat tones of Birmingham; it was a curious combination.
‘How much do you pay for a room here?’
He knew where this was going now; he considered a lie, then rejected it. ‘Thirty quid a week.’ He stared sullenly at the table for a moment, then allowed his resentment to get the better of him. ‘It’s going up to thirty-five next week. Bloody robbery, for what we get!’
‘Will you be able to pay it?’
‘I’ll find it. Have to. Ain’t goin’ back to the squat.’
‘And then there’s your food to pay for.’ Hook glanced across to the unsavoury kitchen, where the tap dripped loud, pacing their conversation like a metronome. ‘Your bike’s all in order, as you said. Taxed and insured. Insurance can’t come cheap on a 750, not for a lad under twenty-five. How old are you by the way, Everton?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Is the bike paid for?’
‘Yes. Well, almost. I’m up to date on the payments. Ahead, in fact.’ His pride in that made him reveal it, even though he knew it was leading him into deeper water.
Hook put in the knife quietly. ‘Lot to support on a Giro, isn’t it, Everton?’
Everton Smith sighed hopelessly. The pigs were always after you, even when they talked about bikes and cricket. How did they expect you to survive, when you were black and without proper qualifications? ‘All right. I do bits of work. Ain’t no thief, though.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. What kind of work?’
The thin, handsome face was perplexed, not able to assess from the sergeant’s impassive face just how deep was the trouble he had waded into. He looked from Hook to the long, attentive face of the man beside him, who had hardly spoken. Without their uniforms, he was not even sure which of these was the senior rank. ‘I do anything that’s offered. Bits of gardening. House removals, when they need an extra man. Work on cars, when I can get it. Decorating — but they don’t think us black bastards have any idea about things like that. We live in tin shacks and play the bongos.’
There was no real bitterness in his words. Whatever prejudice he had come up against, he had long ago accepted it as a fact of life. Like unemployment. Hook said, ‘We know about some of your work, Everton. At Mr Pritchard’s.’
He said sullenly, ‘You gonna book me?’
Lambert said, ‘I shouldn’t think so, Everton. You cooperate with us, which won’t be difficult, and we’ll forget all about the bits of work. We aren’t interested in what you say to the Social Security people; we’re pursuing a murder inquiry. Into the death in suspicious circumstances of Mrs Laura Pritchard.’
Smith looked again from one to the other, wondering what to make of an approach he had never met before. The truth was that he had been softened up. Although he did not realize it, he was not likely to hold back anything now. There was a catch in his throat when he spoke, so that he had to begin again. ‘All — all right. What do you want to know?’
He must have read about the death for he expressed no surprise. He might, of course, have been involved in it. Hook produced a notebook and said, ‘How long have you been working at The Beeches?’
The young man’s forehead creased into a frown. Many suspects adopted the tactic of affecting to give serious consideration to the most innocent of questions, in the hope that their prepared answers for the more important ones would be accepted at face value. But Everton Smith was not yet a serious suspect. ‘It must be about nine months now. I started at the end of last summer, and they kept me on through the winter.’
‘And who offered you that work?’
‘Mr Pritchard. I worked for a few weeks at his golf club in August and September, filling in for the lads whilst they had their holidays. I hoped something more permanent might come of it, but…’ His shrug encompassed the hopelessness of both that idea and life in general.
‘And have the Pritchards been good employers?’
‘Yes. They kept me on all through the winter. Only once a week, but I was glad of that. And now I’m back on twice a week.’ Suddenly, his too-revealing face clouded with anxiety. ‘Will they — will Mr Pritchard — still want me after this?’
‘I’m a
fraid that will be up to Mr Pritchard, Everton.’ He noticed how the face lightened at that thought. ‘Get on well with him, do you?’
‘Quite well. I hardly see him, though. Mrs Pritchard was nearly always there. She used to work with me in the garden a lot of the time. And she always paid me before I came away.’
‘What days were you there?’
‘Usually Monday and Friday. But she didn’t mind if I varied it when I got other work, so long as I let her know.’
‘How did you get on with Mrs Pritchard?’
‘Well enough. She made me coffee, usually.’
They gave him the chance to enlarge on this, but he did not. It was Lambert who said quietly to him, ‘We heard you had a bit of a row with her, Everton.’
He looked a little frightened now. Perhaps he had not expected them to know this. ‘It wasn’t anything much. I pulled out some plants I should have left, that’s all. I thought they were weeds, but they were seedlings, waiting to be planted out. Sweet Williams, I think she said. We rescued most of them. They’re flowering now, in the bed where I planted them.’ There was a little flash of pride in his newly discovered horticultural skills.
Suddenly, there was a sound as of a parrot being strangled, and all three men jumped. Hook pulled his radio out of his pocket; it gave another electronic squawk. ‘No chance of catching anything in here; we’re at the limit of the range, anyway.’ He went out through the front door; he had the keys of Lambert’s car, and would use the car phone if his radio would not receive.
Lambert said to Smith, ‘Annoyed, was she, Mrs Pritchard?’
Everton considered the degree of her irritation. ‘She shouted a bit. Told me what a useless prat I was.’ He spoke without rancour, as one who had long been accustomed to more than his share of shouting.