Gone Tomorrow

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Too late today. I’ll talk to Mr Wetherspoon, get something in the morning papers, and arrange an item on the early evening news tomorrow. The local.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What d’you feel about doing it?’ Porson asked unexpectedly.

  ‘Doing it?’

  ‘The broadcast. I know we’ve got a press officer, but the journos always want to talk to a warm body. A real copper. Plays better in the one-and-nines.’

  ‘Me, sir?’ Slider looked his horror. ‘But you always do the broadcasts. I’m not – I’ve never liked cameras.’

  Porson looked annoyed. ‘Do you think any of us do it for fun?’

  ‘I always thought you looked such a natural, sir.’

  ‘What, seeing myself plastered all over the screen like a blasted Spice Girl? I shake like an aspirin, every damn time! But needs must, laddie. Only this time, what with this cold and—’ He paused. ‘Other considerations – I’m not really up to it. You’ve got a nice, friendly face. You’ll look good on camera. You might find you like it – being the sinecure of all eyes.’

  ‘Atherton’s a handsome chap—’ Slider tried in a last-ditch defence.

  ‘No bon. You know it’s got to be a DI or better. No, you’re it, Slider.’

  ‘Is it an order, sir?’ Slider asked.

  ‘No, it’s not an order, it’s a request,’ Porson said, growing impatient. ‘But if you refuse a perfectly reasonable request from your senior officer, I’ll have to make it an order, won’t I?’

  ‘In that case, I’ll do it,’ Slider said glumly. As long as I know where I stand. I never craved the limelight, the fierce doo-dah that beats upon the thingummy, but if that’s the way the runes fall, it is a far, far better thing and so on. Joanna always said he ought to go on the box; and the children would be thrilled. They were of the generation that felt nothing was real until the TV validated it. But he had never wanted anything about himself to be public property. To him it was a violation. He didn’t even like to see his name in the telephone directory. And anonymity was not just a personal preference, it was one of the tools of his trade. He was the Alec Guinness of Shepherd’s Bush Nick.

  ‘Brace up, laddie,’ Porson said, reading his face. ‘Most people gape at the telly with their mouths open and their brains in neuter. You’ll slip in one side and out the other. It’s deceased they’ll be interested in, if at all.’

  True, thought Slider, but not much comfort to the reluctant performer.

  Atherton put his head round Slider’s door. Anything else before I go?’

  Slider came back from a long distance. Are you off?’

  ‘It’s after seven.’

  ‘Is it? Blimey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?’

  ‘Everyone else has gone. Why not have an early night? You look tired.’

  Slider shrugged. ‘I don’t sleep well in that bed when Joanna’s away. It needs a new mattress. It’s like the slopes of Mount Etna. Strange, though, somehow I never notice the lumps when she’s there.’

  ‘Sleep on the sofa,’ Atherton suggested. Slider got the impression he wasn’t taking his plight seriously.

  ‘What are you doing this evening?’ He didn’t like to ask, but if Atherton invited him back for a meal he wouldn’t say no.

  But Atherton said breezily, ‘Oh, I’ve got plans. Well, if there’s nothing more, I’ll be off. Night!’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Slider said, concealing his disappointment as Atherton whisked away. He stared at the empty doorway a moment, and then turned to look out of the window. A warm, slightly hazy evening was spreading its buttery light over the streets, quiet in this time between commuting home and going out on the town. In the old days, he and Atherton would have gone for a pint in a pub with a garden, and maybe for a curry afterwards. Now women had come between them; which was fair enough when the women were all present and correct. But all that beckoned him now from his desk was an empty flat and, he was pretty sure, an empty fridge.

  Oh, well, he thought, there are plenty of restaurants in Chiswick. He pictured them – a long and varied row, French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Black Tie, new British, Old Greek, Middle Eastern – and wondered what he fancied, trying to whip up some enthusiasm for the notion of a meal out alone. Or he could take fish and chips home and eat in front of the telly like a sad divorcé. He so rarely watched it, he hadn’t the faintest idea what was on. And if he had known it wouldn’t have helped much. All television was a bit like a serial, he thought; or like science fiction, based on the assumptions of everything that had gone before. If you didn’t keep up with it, you couldn’t understand what they were on about, and lost interest.

  And then the thing that had been bothering the back of his mind swam to the forefront. Atherton had said, ‘I’ve got plans.’ Not, ‘We’ve got plans.’ He wondered if it meant anything, or if it was only a slip of the tongue. He hoped the lad wasn’t up to something.

  When he got outside, he thought better of the whole idea of going home. He left his car where it was and walked up Abdale Road. The air was warm and still, and there was a smell to it, not entirely unpleasant, but a little used and smeary, like the smell of one’s own bedsheets after they’d been slept in. The houses in Abdale Road were terraced cottages, two storeys with the tiniest front gardens – you could have leaned across from the street and knocked on the window. They had been built for Victorian workmen but owing to the increasing desirability of Shepherd’s Bush they were being gentrified out of all recognition. You could tell the ones that were now in middle-class hands: they had freshly painted front doors, lots of pot plants, and no net curtains.

  Round the corner in Loftus Road the houses were much bigger, three storeys plus a basement, with steps going up to the front door over a wide, well-lit ‘area’. By an odd reversal of fortunes these houses, which had been built for the servant-employing class, were now on the whole occupied by people lower down the social scale than were the tiny cottages in Abdale. They were mostly split up into flats and bedsitters, and were shabby and peeling. One or two, however, had been spotted for their potential by the newly affluent and were being done up regardless. Skips, scaffolding and contractors’ vans marked them out for work in progress.

  There was one, towards the end of the road, in which the process was complete. Its sooty brick had been cleaned back to the original pleasing London yellow; new double-glazed sash windows, new paint, new roof slates, even new railings proclaimed its status as a beloved object. The time-nibbled edges of the steps up to the front door had been repaired so that they were as sharp as the day they were born, like a freshly unwrapped bar of chocolate; the area had been paved with expensive Italian tiles. Slider slowed his pace so that he could look appreciatively as he passed. It was a pleasure to see an old house properly taken care of, and it just showed what good houses these could be. The Victorians knew how to build all right. Someone had sunk a lot of dosh into this one, but they had got a fine and very large property out of it, which would probably have cost them three times as much in Fulham or Notting Hill.

  Loftus Road was a cul-de-sac, but there was a cut-through into South Africa Road through the courtyards of Batman Close –one of the later additions coeval with the Phoenix. It was very quiet everywhere. Hardly anyone was about. The door of the pub was open, and the subaural thump of its background music issued forth like a dragon’s heartbeat. In the small flight of shops the newsagent was still open and a couple of kids on bikes were hanging around the door, evidently the best use they felt they could make of the golden hours of childhood. Two men were in the launderette, reading newspapers at opposite ends of the bench before the row of machines; and there was a queue of three in the fish-and-chipper. The smell of frying, sharpened with vinegar, drifted out on the warm air. Slider’s stomach growled a warning. He hadn’t eaten since a meagre egg-and-cress sandwich Anderson had brought him in at lunchtime. He felt grubby from the day’s work, and his feet felt the pavement too keenly, as though his shoe sol
es had got radically thinner since this morning.

  He was heading for Buller Close – all the blocks of flats were named after Heroes of the Empire, the estate having been built on the site of the old Commonwealth Exhibition. Who was Buller, he wondered as he trod the chewing-gum-pocked pavement, trawling his schoolboy history lessons. The name Redvers Buller sprang to mind, but it came with no information attached and pretty soon sprang out again.

  The flat was on the first floor. There was a long pause after he had knocked on the door, and he turned his back to it and leaned on the balcony wall, staring down at the yard and wondering where all the children were. It was the great advantage of the estate that it was ideal for ‘playing out’ – enclosed yards, large greens, no through-traffic, and the blocks were low-rise enough for even a top-floor mum to shout down to her children and be heard. But the yards and greens were deserted. All indoors watching telly, he supposed sadly.

  Behind him there was a sound, and he turned quickly to find an eye peering at him through the merest thread of a crack. At the sight of his face, the crack widened enough to reveal most of a face and a hand clutching a pink dressing-gown at the neck.

  ‘Hullo, Nichola,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, it’s not trouble. I’m alone.’

  Nichola Finch opened the door fully. Her face looked puffy and creased as if she had been asleep, but otherwise she was a pretty girl, wafer-slim, with full lips, big brown eyes and thick, curly dark hair. With her smallness and slimness she looked at first glance almost like a child, but on closer inspection – at least in daylight and without make-up – the ravages of time were apparent. As far as Slider knew, she was in her late twenties or perhaps early thirties. She admitted to nineteen; but that was not surprising in a person who spelled her name Nikki on her calling-cards. He thought she had probably admitted to nineteen since she was fourteen.

  ‘You woke me up,’ she complained.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Slider humbly.

  She was instantly mollified. ‘S’all right. I had to get up anyway. What j’want?’

  ‘Just a talk.’

  Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What about?’

  Slider made a small outwards gesture of his hands. ‘Do we have to do it here on the balcony? Can I come in?’

  ‘Have to do what on the balcony? ’Ere, have you come for a freebie?’

  ‘I’m a happily married man. I just want to talk.’

  ‘Most of my customers are happily married men,’ she said with unusual acuity. She yawned right back to her fillings, closed down with a smack of the lips, and said, ‘I need a coffee.’ She turned and went in, leaving the door open – all the invitation he was going to get.

  In the tiny, chaotic kitchen she fumbled about for the kettle, shook it to gauge its fullness, and switched it on. She sorted through the dirty crockery for a mug, waved it at him in enquiry, and when he shook his head, shrugged in reply. A woman of few words, was Nichola. She rinsed the mug meagrely under the cold tap, put it down by the kettle, spooned in powdered instant out of an industrial-sized tin, added sugar, and settled down to wait, folding her arms across her chest as women do when comfort is their priority rather than allure.

  ‘So, what’s it all about?’ she asked, though without much invitation.

  ‘I want to pick your brains,’ he said.

  ‘Not a bloody gain,’ she said with huge exasperation, rolling her eyes theatrically.

  ‘Come on now, Nichola, I haven’t seen you for months.’

  She tacked off, easily distracted. ‘Why ju always call me that?’

  ‘It’s a pretty name.’

  She stared at him, trying to fathom whether he was being ironic, or kind, or had some other devious ploy too subtle for her to grasp. In the end she gave it up and said, ‘You’re a funny bastard, you are.’

  He smiled. ‘But I’m okay,’ he suggested, as if that would have been her next sentence. She only shrugged. ‘I looked after you all right when you had that bit of trouble—’

  ‘And you never let me bloody forget it!’ She responded again with the disproportionate, withering sarcasm that seemed to be the only mode of communication with girls like her. He supposed it must come from the soap operas, and perhaps the tabloid headlines – a continual artificial outrage whipped up about the most trivial of ‘offences’. Slider had always got on well with prostitutes, having cut his teeth on Central Division, which covered Soho, but the younger ones were hard to talk to. Apart from the automatic stroppiness, they seemed to have huge and baffling areas of ignorance about quite basic things, so that at any moment a perfectly ordinary conversation suddenly became the equivalent of discussing the fine detail of a Test cricket match with a middle-aged farmer from Iowa who’d never left his home town.

  ‘So you’re all right now?’ he pursued. ‘You haven’t had any more trouble?’

  ‘No, he’s buggered off. Much you’d care!’ she added, as if afraid she’d been too gracious. ‘So what j’want, anyway?’

  ‘Some information.’

  ‘I ain’t the bleedin’ Yellow Pages.’

  ‘You know the estate and you know lots of people. And you’re a clever, noticing sort of person.’ He was afraid he might have gone too far with this, but she didn’t react. ‘You’ve got what you might call specialist knowledge.’

  She tilted her head a little sideways, and smiled. ‘You don’alf talk funny,’ she said. ‘But you got a nice voice. I always said that, din’ I? I always said you got a sexy voice.’

  She never had said anything of the sort, but he saw she was building a scenario for herself in which she would help him, so he went along with it.

  ‘We were always good friends,’ he said. And that’s what friends do, help each other.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. The sentiment sounded right to her, and she had no concept of logic. The kettle boiled and clicked off, and she turned away to make the coffee, and then, taking up the mug, said much more pleasantly, ‘J’wanna come and sit down? It’s a bit of a tip in there, but—’

  Given the kitchen, he could imagine. He said, ‘Whatever you like. I’m all right here, but—’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, settling again to lean against the work surface, folding one arm and propping the other elbow on it so that the mug was within easy reach of her mouth. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘There was a man murdered in the park on Monday night,’ he began.

  ‘Oh, yeah, someone said,’ she agreed. He remembered she didn’t read newspapers. Come to think of it, he had no evidence that she could read. She had had eleven years of progressive education at a State school, after all. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ she said.

  ‘No, of course not. But not long before that, Monday night about eleven, this man had a fight outside the Phoenix with—’

  ‘Eddie Cranston, yeah,’ she finished for him.

  Slider managed not to jump as the missing surname was provided so easily and casually. ‘Oh, you know about the fight?’ he said.

  ‘People are talking about it. I never knew it was this bloke what got murdered, though. He give Eddie a black eye.’ She grew enthusiastic. ‘Eddie’s ballistic about it. He fancies himself rotten, and he thinks it spoils his fabulous good looks, know’t I mean? That’s why he’s not been out of the ’ouse since. Lying low until his eye goes down. Plus, he don’t like being made a fool of, and this bloke’s got the better of him, en’t he? I mean, Eddie’s picked a fight with this bloke to show ’im who’s boss, and he’s come off wiv a black eye, and this other bloke’s walked away wivout a scratch, right?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ Slider said. ‘The other bloke’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Her eyes widened and the mug was arrested on its way to her lips. ‘Yeah,’ she breathed, ‘you’re right. You reckon Eddie done him in, then?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Slider said. ‘So tell me about this Eddie Cranston.’

  ‘He’s a git,’ she said simply. ‘He thinks he’s God’s gift, know�
�t I mean?’

  ‘And is he?’

  ‘What, God’s gift? Well, he’s good-looking, I give him that,’ she said grudgingly. Slider made an enquiring noise and she responded, ‘Tall, black hair, suntan. Sharp dresser. He’s all right-looking, but he’s a total bastard.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Treats you like dirt,’ she replied shortly. She sipped her coffee, her eyes over Slider’s shoulder, as if the interview was finished.

  ‘So where does he live, this Eddie?’ he tried next.

  She snorted so hard she did a nose job with the coffee and had to wipe her face on her dressing-gown sleeve. ‘Where doesn’t he live?’ she said eventually.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Slider asked patiently.

  She put the mug down, the better to tackle his ignorance. ‘Listen, he’s got this scam. He’s got women all over the estate, all round Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘You mean they’re working girls, like you?’

  ‘Nah!’ Huge withering scorn. That’d be too much like hard work for Mr Eddie Bloody Cranston! No, they’re all on benefit – most of ’em have got kids – and he just comes round and takes his cut.’

  ‘Why do they give it to him?’

  ‘Why j’think? Cause he’s a smooth-talking bastard. They all think he’s their bloke. It’s love, innit? Plus, he’d knock their teeth in if they didn’t.’

  That covered the bases, Slider thought. ‘How do you know about this?’

  ‘I know one of ’em, Karen. She used to be a mate at school. I’ve told her, I’ve said you’re dead stupid, you are! But she says he’s the farver of me kids – well, one of ’em. She says she loves him. I’ve told her, I’ve said to her you ain’t the only one, you know. I’ve told her he’s got women all over. But it don’t make no difference. She thinks it’s her he really loves, and he’ll give the others up one day and settle down. Gaw!’ She rolled her eyes skywards at the stupidity. ‘I said to her, I said at least I get paid for it. And I don’t have to have’m hanging round afterwards. Quick in an’ out and cash in me ’and, and the rest of me time’s me own. But she pays him, the dozy cow. Cuh!’