‘What with Stephen? I want to keep as far away from him as possible. I don’t want the Old Bill turning up on my doorstep. And that’s the other thing – you’ve got these coppers going through Stephen’s life with a magnifying glass and they’ve turned up hundreds of people and yet I’ve never had a visit. How do you explain that?’
‘They can’t know everything … be everywhere. Just think yourself lucky, mate.’
‘Suppose so, Nick. But then who was it who turned my place over and who are the geezers in the Black Humber?’
‘They’re not coppers.’
‘I know that … but who are they?’
‘They’re people who know a lot more about Stephen than the flat-footed coppers do, that’s who they are. Kim Philby could probably tell you all about them. Security. That’s who they are.’
‘That’s chilling.’
‘It is.’
My appetite disappeared there and then as the mousaka arrived.
6
Algo Bueno
It’s an accident I got anything to do with history, you know?
– Benny Harris (1965)
SATURDAY. I was up early and like I do every morning now I peek out from behind the curtains to see if the Humber is still there. Today it was gone. It had driven away. All that remained was the mute testimony of a large patch of leaked oil.
This news put me in a good frame of mind for the rest of the day and as custom was pretty slow at Modern Snax after lunch I closed the place at 3 p.m. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll go down one of the clubs and have a drink and thus I found myself climbing the narrow steps of the Colony Club, or Muriel’s as it is better known, in Dean Street. Muriel herself was sitting on a stall at the near end of the bar. She looked at me like I was a dollop of dog shit.
‘Here’s Sir Tim!’ she said to the bloke behind the bar. ‘He’s finally got tired of staying at home and playing with himself!’
‘Hello, Muriel.’
‘I’ll have the same again, if that’s all right with you?’
I told the barman to fill Muriel’s glass up and give me a gin and tonic.
Muriel swivelled around on her perch and eyed me up and down again.
‘You look like you’ve been eating out of Christine Keeler’s lap. Do you want something to take the taste away?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Good, dearie. And you shall have it. Now toddle down to the end there and be a good little cunt. If I want to talk to you again I’ll send Ian down with a message.’
I had two or three gin and tonics in rapid succession. The place was beginning to fill up but not with any faces I knew. Muriel’s piercing laughter echoed about the place. I ordered another drink and an arm bearing a crisp new fiver appeared in front of me and I heard the words, ‘Make it two and I’ll pay for them.’
I turned. It was Sonny. Sonny in an expensive three-piece suit looking like a Super Pimp from Harlem (or, failing that, King Shit, the mythical reefer dealer all the young black hoods aspire to be).
‘Sonny, how good to see you!’ I said this impersonating Stephen’s plausible insincerity. It was lost on Sonny.
‘Good to see you too.’
‘I didn’t know you were a member.’
Sonny pulled his waistcoat down and said, real cool like and unruffled, ‘I didn’t know you were a member.’
‘Yeah. You look really prosperous.’
‘I’ve wisened up to a lot of things. I’ve got all sorts of things on the go now.’
‘You must have.’
‘Yeah, I do. What about you?’
‘Not a lot. I’m still down at Modern Snax. Not much else.’
‘Still making films?’
‘Not lately … the train pulled away without me.’
‘Uh-huh. It’s the sixties now, man. The sixties. Things are different all the way down the line. You got to remember that. The sixties now.’
There was something about the way he kept on saying the sixties that irritated me. Fuck, I know it is the sixties all right. What’s he telling me that for? But there was something else about him. We used to be good mates together. Two guys on the make. Now it was as though there was a pane of glass between us. Sonny was in the money and I wasn’t. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded about the way it was?
‘How come you’re here this afternoon, Sonny?’
‘I like it here. I often come by. Today I thought I’d celebrate Cassius Clay beating the living shit out of Henry-fucking-Cooper.’
‘Did you see the fight?’
‘I had tickets. I was there at Wembley.’
‘You didn’t listen to it on the radio then?’
‘Two good seats I had. The best five rounds I’ve ever seen in my life.’
We had a couple more drinks and talked aimlessly. It wasn’t so much a conversation as two interweaving monologues winding in and out and above and below each other and drifting nowhere. I sensed Sonny was tense. There were other things on his mind. Our chat eventually petered out after about twenty minutes. There was just silence punctuated by Muriel’s guffaws and the hum of the other dedicated drinkers.
‘Do you want to come to a party, Tim?’
‘Is it going to be a good party?’
‘Sure is. Upper class. Plenty of drink. Good-looking women.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where?’
‘Hitchin.’
‘Hitchin? Where’s Hitchin?’
‘North up the A1. Off the A1. An hour’s drive.’
‘Out in the country?’
‘Where the fields are.’
‘How do we get there, Sonny?’
‘In my car.’
‘I didn’t know you had one.’
‘I got two.’
Sonny’s two-year-old Ford Consul was parked on Dean Street a few minutes from the Colony. All bright and polished with shiny chrome. He opened the nearside passenger door first and waved me in.
‘You’re going for a ride in black-man’s car.’
‘Indeed I am.’
Sonny got in and the car started up right away. He pushed the gearstick into first and we moved off down to Old Compton Street, took a left, and then up into Charing Cross Road. Sonny was a better driver than I would have given him credit for. He slipped from one gear to another effortlessly and was mindful of the other traffic. Who’d have credited it? Sonny said he got the car second-hand about three months ago. He’d spent a few bob on it to get it in tip-top shape. His other car was an MG Sports that was currently having a new engine fitted.
Whence the spondulicks that paid for all this?
‘A bit of this and a bit of that. Some hefty drug deals to begin with. Charge at first. Then I moved to stronger stuff. Cocaine is where the money is. Cocaine people ain’t like the street riff-raff. They got money and class. They’re discreet. They ain’t going to cheat you none. So I did really well out of that and made a bit. Then I started to diversify, man. This is the sixties and that’s what you gotta do. I got an interest in a dress boutique on Portobello Road and I’m the manager of some rock groups. You heard of the Beatles? Well, the Maybellines are gonna be bigger than the Beatles ever could be. They’re some real cool black kids from Tottenham and they are gonna make me a millionaire. This is the sixties. You gotta diversify and swing with the mood. That’s what I’m doing.’
We drove through Camden Town and past Swiss Cottage on to the Finchley Road. A mile or so up we took a left after the Blue Star garage and headed down the Hendon Way and then on to the A1 that would, if we just kept going, take us all the way to Edinburgh.
We’ve left grimy crowded London behind us now and the semi-detached suburban villas soon give way to fields and woods.
How long has it been since I last saw a hedgerow?
Sonny is getting twitchy and says he could do with another drink. I want to take a slash. So we pull in at the first pub we come to – a 1930s road-house of a pile called the King’s Arms that’s s
ituated by a roundabout somewhere just inside the border of Hertfordshire. Before Sonny gets out of the car he reaches under the steering wheel and produces a brown carrier bag which he carries into the pub. The place has only just opened and is virtually empty. Sonny gets the drinks while I go for a slash. When I come out of the Gents Sonny is nowhere to be seen. The drinks and a packet of crisps are on a table by the entrance, but no Sonny. I sit down, sip my gin and light a cigarette and wait. I wait about ten minutes and then a door opens on the far side of the bar and Sonny walks through clutching the carrier bag. No, he strides through it and strides over to me. He sits down and picks up his glass and empties half the contents in one gulp. He’s hot and sweating and very anxious about something.
Sonny says, ‘Good drink, man … and a nice evening, huh?’
He is manifestly agitated but he’s not saying anything. He can’t be as dumb as to think I haven’t noticed, can he? Or can he?
‘Where did you get to?’ he asks.
‘Where did I get to?’
People always throw back a question to you when they want to buy some time to think up a plausible alternative to the truth. Where did he get to? Where could he have got to?
‘I thought I’d lost you.’
‘No. No. Had to make some phone calls.’
‘Just looking after business?’
‘Yeah. Business.’
‘And how is business?’
‘Good and bad.’
Sonny wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were darting everywhere except at me sitting on the opposite side of the table. Sonny starts swinging his arms in time with some music that’s being played over the pub’s loudspeakers. The carrier bag sits on his lap.
We finished our drinks and the crisps and left. On the way out I noticed that there was a public telephone just inside the main doors. But Sonny hadn’t been there. He’d come through a door on the other side of the pub. Is this phone out of order and is there another one behind the bar? I wondered about that. I also wondered whether I wasn’t getting a little ‘paranoid’ as they now call it.
Sonny carefully places the carrier bag somewhere under the steering wheel.
I tease him: ‘A little bit of business in there?’
‘A big bit of business,’ he replies.
So what’s Sonny doing now? Supplying cocaine to the leisured country classes?
‘Why don’t you drive now?’ says Sonny. ‘I’m a bit tired, man.’
‘OK.’
We get out and swap places. I haven’t driven for a few weeks, in fact, about six weeks. I drove over to Bromley in Mr Calabrese’s van to get some spares for the Gaggia coffee machine. That was the last time I was behind the wheel.
I pull out of the pub’s carpark and get back on to the Al going north. It’s a fine summer evening with a warm breeze and there’s not much traffic about. I drive leisurely and keep at around 50 m.p.h. The fields on either side stretch to the horizon, rich dark greens and golden browns. There’s another 1930s road-house here that looks like an enormous thatched barn, and then the road is lined with poplars on either side like you see in France.
More fields, more ribbon-development bungalows, a road-house or two and now we’re going through Hatfield and past a pub called the Comet (complete with a model Comet aeroplane on a plinth).
After an old coaching pub (that’s what it looks like) called the Red Lion the road starts a sinewy descent down a wooded hill and soon we’re driving through some country village that has a White Hart and a Greene King but no people and then we’re out in the country again and the road meanders through the fields.
Sonny isn’t saying much and he doesn’t strike me as someone who much wants to go to a party. But perhaps he’s not going there for pleasure but for business: the business in the paper bag. He’s lying back in the seat nodding off. This businessman has got a lot of worries.
We drive through a straggly village and then we’re out in the country again with vast open fields on either side and no hedgerow or fence to separate them from the road. The road twists and turns and seems to be unsure of its course. High yew hedges spring up from nowhere and enclose the road and to the right I catch a flash of something that looks like the entrance gate to a vast medieval castle, but the trees envelop it and then it’s gone.
The ground gently rises on either side here and is well wooded. The breeze has increased to a wind and has become chill. There are dark clouds above, rain clouds. I wind the window up. Signposts with odd names point down sunken lanes that are not much wider than a cart-track. Little sheltered communities here unaware of the Big City and its vices (unless, of course, Sonny is on callout).
‘We’ve passed it,’ says Sonny. His first words for a good few miles. ‘We’ve passed the pub.’
‘What pub?’
‘The turning was back there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was the turning on the left before the Royal Oak we wanted. There’s the pub … so we’ve passed it.’
This Royal Oak didn’t look like my Royal Oak in Porchester Road. This was a rambling farmhouse of a place, a sort of coaching inn, miles from anywhere. You could almost smell the straw and the horse shit.
I pull up, reverse the car into a field entrance and take off back in the direction whence we had come.
Sonny points to a narrow country lane on our right that is signposted to some village called St Paul’s-something-or-other.
I head down it. The trees and hedges on either side grow up high and almost meet above the road. It’s dark now with the rain clouds, time to switch the headlamps on.
I can see Sonny out of the corner of my eye shifting about on his seat. He can’t settle down tonight. He’s nervous. There’s something on his mind.
‘Pull over here, man. I gotta take a piss.’
‘Can’t you wait?’
‘I’m bursting.’
The road is descending here down the middle of a valley. There’s dense woodland on either side and nowhere to stop. Then ahead on the right I see a muddy lay-by to the fore of a three-rail gate that leads into the woods. I pull over.
Sonny jumps out and says he won’t be a minute. He climbs the fence and disappears into the undergrowth.
I light a cigarette and gaze ahead. It is quiet here. Very quiet. Quiet and still. Just the wind in the tree tops, a gentle rustling murmur. No other traffic. Not even any birds. I look down the valley ahead of me with the towering mature hardwoods on either side and think the view must have been unchanged for centuries. You could bring back some sixteenth-century farmer, show him this, and he’d know where he was.
I look down and see that the carrier bag Sonny has been clutching is partially pushed under the front seat. I’m curious what’s in it? Dope? Can’t be anything else. Should I risk a peek? No, forget it. I don’t want to know.
I laughed to myself at the thought of the police suddenly appearing here and searching the car. I’d have a tough time explaining the shit away: ‘I wonder if you could hold on for a few minutes, officer. My black dealer friend is in the woods there taking a piss. He’s the chap you need to speak to.’
‘Certainly, sir. You are obviously completely innocent. We’ll wait over there until the black gentleman reappears. We’re sorry to have troubled you.’
‘Not at all, officer. Any time.’
A tough time indeed!
I flick the end remains of the cigarette out the window and lazily yell to Sonny to get a move on. There’s no reply. What’s he doing? Has he got a stricture or something?
I get out of the car and stretch. I’ve got a slight ache in my lower back so I lean forward and touch my toes a dozen times. That always gets rid of it. I light another cigarette and go over to the wooden gate.
‘SONNY! SONNY!’ No reply.
I can see some distance into the wood in most directions. There’s no sign of Sonny anywhere. How far does he have to go before he feels it’s safe to take a leak? Half a mile? What a dumb black fucker!
I climb the gate and sit on the top rail facing the car and the road. I puff on the cigarette and wait. I look up the road in the direction we just came. Still and silent. I look down the road. Still and silent. Everything’s still and silent. I’m the only thing here … I’m the only thing here. I’m the centre of the universe. It’s just me … and the car … and the dope.
But what about Sonny?
Sonny wasn’t coming back. This thought swept through me with such certainty I shuddered. Sonny had gone. I was here alone. A sitting duck. A patient sitting duck.
There was a sound coming from back up the hill. An urgent sound. I could hear it but I couldn’t identify it. An urgent sound getting louder … getting nearer. Racing. It was a speeding car. It was two speeding cars. It was three.
I threw my cigarette away, swung my legs over the gate, jumped down and began running through the undergrowth and through the bracken. The only sounds I could hear were my heavy breathing and the crash of my feet. I stumbled and fell several times but I was on my feet again before I hit the deck. Onward. The ground begins to rise steeply and more of an effort is needed to maintain my pace. I crash and careen through the bushes. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Just keep going.
Then I’m out of the wood and fall on my face. I’m in the middle of a narrow lane, my face hard against the road surfacing. Tar fumes filling my head. I can hear my heart beating like a kettledrum. I can also hear a car far off. Several cars. I can hear shouts. Dogs barking.
I’m up and on my feet again. I’m running again. I’m running through a gap in a hawthorn hedge and then I’m racing through a field that skirts another wood.
Any moment I expect a hand on my shoulder and some copper saying, ‘That’s far enough, son.’ Any moment now it is going to happen. It really is.
I steady myself against a massive pollarded oak tree. I take some deep breaths. The sweat is pouring off me. I don’t know what to do except keep moving.
I can hear muffled shouts and muted dog barks coming from far below in the valley, borne up on the evening wind. And then I hear a sound nearer. Much nearer. A car comes to a violent halt in the lane behind me. I hear more men and dogs. There are shouts. The vehicle’s doors are slammed. I listen. Who’s there? What are they doing? What’s going on?
London Blues Page 19