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Mr Love and Justice

Page 17

by Colin MacInnes


  Edward explained that all he wanted from the ponce was this: to lead him to Frankie Love. The ponce, after suggesting, helpfully, the Kilburn flat and appearing surprised that Edward should think Frankie might not be there, said courteously that he was very sorry, he could be of no further assistance to the officer.

  Edward half sighed, put down his glass, and bringing his face closer to the ponce’s said very softly, ‘Look, I’m sorry too, son, but it’s this way. The heat’s on at the station to find this boy, I’ve got to make an effort to do so, and you’re the only man I know in town I’ve ever seen him with. So don’t you see until I get hold of him, I’ll just have to hold on to you. And I do mean hold, son. I’ve been looking up your file just recently, and I’d say you’re about due for another spell inside. So it really is up to you to help me in my enquiries if you want to avoid anything of that nature – which, and I do mean this, would happen to you immediately if you don’t.’

  ‘Officer,’ the star ponce said, ‘I’m really very sorry but I don’t know where this boy is and I cannot help you.’

  Edward smiled, sighed again, got up and said, ‘Well, come along.’

  Not rising, and raising his voice slightly so that it could be heard at neighbouring tables, the star ponce said, ‘Are you arresting me, officer?’

  ‘That, we’ll see.’

  ‘No, I mean now. Because if you’re not arresting me and bringing a charge against me that you think can stick, then I’m sorry, but I’m just not coming: not coming, I mean, merely to help you in your enquiries I know nothing of.’

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ said Edward sadly.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Suspected collusion. Assisting a wanted person in an attempt to evade arrest …’

  One could have heard an ice-cube drop. Nobody moved, everybody watched.

  ‘Dear!’ said the star ponce to the girl behind the bar. ‘Will you make a few phone calls for me, please?’

  The girl nodded, the star ponce rose (looking more glorious even than when seated), and the pair departed amid a silence distilled of hatred, fear and alcohol.

  Edward hailed a cab, and on the journey to the station neither man said a word – except over the paraphernalia of cigarette lighting. For the cigarette, in the twentieth century, is often the ultimate offering of deadly enemies just prior to a fatal issue.

  At the station Edward parked the ponce in a small room for twenty minutes chiefly to let him ‘get the atmosphere’. The star ponce shrank gradually and visibly, and his splendid clothes (like elegant mufti on a raw recruit) became increasingly inappropriate to their setting. In spirit, however, the ponce, who’d seen all this before, remained calm and buoyant.

  Then Edward collected two colleagues skilled in these matters (always take two – for safety and as witnesses of each other) and removed the star ponce to a distant cell. As the door clinked to, Edward made his final, reasonable appeal. ‘Feller,’ he said, ‘here is the spiel. You take me to this boy and that ends that. If not, you’re going to leave this place just crunched a bit though unmarked in any way that will be provable; furthermore I promise you a pouncing charge, with all the trimmings, within twenty-four hours from this very moment.’

  Inwardly in his turn, the star ponce sighed. It wasn’t that he was a coward: not in a fight, anyway; and even unarmed and sober – unlike so many of the boys. But if they’d got the heat turned that hot on poor old Francis they’d get him even if they waited fifty years. He looked at the three officers – Edward watching him earnestly, the other two eyeing him with frank amusement – and he said, ‘I’m not going to make a statement, officer. And whatever you may say I’ve said in court I shall deny it, please understand. All I’m prepared to do is this: give me a piece of paper and I’ll write an address on it: that’s all.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Edward, handing to the star essential stationery.

  The two colleagues stood back a bit bored by this development, as the star ponce inscribed block capitals. Edward took back the book, looked at it carefully, said thank you and signalled his colleagues to open the door and go.

  The star ponce also stood. ‘I’m in the clear?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Edward said calmly. ‘You’ll stay here for just a little while.’

  The door closed and the star ponce subsided on the wooden bench-cum-bed with the built-in lavatory pan.

  MR LOVE

  Awaiting the departure of his plane which left late at night, but sure somehow already that he wouldn’t be on it, Frankie went out into Stepney to have a drink: both because his Mahometan host didn’t keep alcohol and Frankie disapproved of Indian hemp (well, just didn’t like it), and because he was determined, even at the risk of being caught, that he wasn’t going to hide from anyone: be very careful, yes, and use his loaf, but not lose his self-respect by lurking.

  In Stepney the licensing hours, though their existence is politely recognised, are dexterously evaded in a number of cordial speakeasies: where after the club below has closed at the well-regulated hour with much clanging of bolts and ritual cries of, ‘Last orders, please!’ selected guests proceed to upper rooms to eat, drink, embrace their girls or gamble. To such an establishment Frankie now repaired and was soon ensconced beside a whisky bottle in a second-floor room, and in the company of various citizens of the outlying countries of the British Commonwealth of nations.

  Here his meal of chicken-and-peas was interrupted by an insistent summons, from the proprietor, to a public call-box insalubriously situated beside an appalling bi-sexual lavatory. The voice at the far end, agitated and thus more incomprehensible than usual, was that of the excellent Bengali: who told him ‘one law man’ had called at the house just after he’d left and made enquiries concerning him; that he, the Bengali, had revealed absolutely nothing and the law man had now departed; and that Frankie must take ‘well care’ not to return to the house as ‘the eye’ was certainly put upon it; and finally – in a torrent of the most urgent assurance – whatever happened he, Frankie, could absolutely rely on him, the Bengali, to safeguard all his property and hide it: as he had already done with his packed travelling bag by stuffing it, the very moment he’d heard the untoward soft knock, inside the communal dust-bin out the back.

  Frankie expressed thanks and assured his friend of his total belief in his integrity (he meant this). He then hung up and without returning to the festive communal room went quickly downstairs to the street. At the door he tapped himself to check on the presence of his passport and his money: the luggage, such as it was, could be abandoned.

  He set off through the Stepney streets but in an easterly direction. What they’d be expecting him to do, he calculated, was go to the west end of the city to an air terminal. Instead he’d make for London docks, try to get a ride or even stow away, and if he failed travel overland to an eastern port and reach the Continent of Europe. Ships, after all, were his affair and more reliable. Diagnosing thus he saw again, approaching on the further pavement and this time on night duty, the young officer who had arrested him, earlier on, over the absurdity of the bag.

  In their feeling for persons they have succeeded in convicting, the officers of the Force fall into three chief types. There are those who feel that any convicted person is a ‘client’ who should return from time to time for treatment: if you do harm to a man, you should prove how right you were by harming him again. Then those who feel in an almost friendly fashion, well, he’s done his lot, good luck to him, he’s stale stuff now, let’s look round for someone else. And then those (a very minor group) who just feel nothing in particular: it was ‘a case’.

  Unfortunately the officer now approaching Frankie belonged to category one; and recognising his former victim (though regretting that on this occasion he didn’t appear to be carrying a suspect bag) he crossed the road obliquely (and warily, too), his boots sounding like metal (as was indeed the case), and there he stopped a few feet from the pavement by which Frankie was advancing, in as safe-and-sound
a position as seemed possible for the encounter.

  But this time Frankie knew the danger; and approaching steadily as if he saw nothing untoward, he suddenly hurled all the small change in his pocket at the copper’s face, turned abruptly down one of the eighteenth-century courts which in this section of Stepney intricately abound, and loped off fairly silently yet at considerable speed. A whistle blew, a torch shone, and feet came clanging.

  Without much difficulty Frankie outwitted his pursuer by entering, while still some way ahead, one of the bombed buildings which, a generation after the end of World War II, still rot and crumble in the capital; and there he settled himself quickly down upon a pile of fairly comfortable rubble and abandoned furniture that lay timelessly dissolving in a distant corner.

  ‘Fuck off!’ said a voice.

  Quite unaware, Frankie had stumbled on what was to the detritus of the floating population of the borough, their trysting-place; and the position he had selected within a few feet of those who in more pastoral surroundings might be described as a ‘courting couple’. This couple clearly wanted to get on with their courting without uncouth interruption.

  ‘Take it easy, mate,’ said Frankie softly. ‘I got to stay here a moment.’

  The male – who by his tones and truculence Frankie observed to his dismay was drunk – repeated, ‘I said, fuck off. You got no respect for privacy?’

  Frankie risked a throw. ‘You a seaman like I am?’ he said.

  ‘No!’

  It would be a landsman. Frankie tried again. ‘You like a pound-note, mate? I got to stay here a while – it’s a bit urgent.’

  From the rubble and his invisible (though audibly grunting) consort, the erotic landsman rose like an angry phoenix. ‘Now, look!’ he cried very much too loud for Frankie’s liking. ‘Just make away or I have to thump you.’

  Frankie got up, biting his rage, said, ‘Okay, mate,’ and started slowly towards the light. Unwisely from every point of view the landsman tried to help him on his way with a parting shove. Consequently both men stumbled, and several hundredweight of miscellaneous London ruins and garbage collapsed with a resounding, thudding clatter.

  A bit bashed on the head and dazed, Frankie staggered up knee-deep in obstacles as several lights came on in surrounding buildings, accompanied by cries and sleepy murmurs. As he struggled to the exit a torch shone blank-flash in his face – a startling experience at the best of times. Ten minutes later, filthy and rather battered, he was lodged in the adjacent headquarters of the Force where an interested sergeant was examining his passport and several envelopes crammed with currency.

  MR JUSTICE

  Edward, having done his duty – no more, no less – by tracing Frankie to his Stepney hide-out, and after taking the routine precaution of warning the local station that a wanted man was now at large among them, had returned to his own headquarters to draw up a nil report and – an even more pressing matter – discover what had passed, if anything, between his girl and the all too astute Detective-Sergeant.

  She was waiting for him in her eternally patient way amid the bleak décor of the junior officers’ canteen. He sat down opposite her beneath a single shaft of strip-light, and with two coffees in paper cups from the automatic urn. ‘Well, dear, let’s hear what,’ he said.

  ‘The Detective-Sergeant believes your story.’

  ‘How? What?’

  ‘The story you told him, Ted dear. That you were going to hand in the box and hadn’t even had a chance to see it before it was stolen from me.’

  ‘And what did he say about the man who stole it?’

  ‘Nothing. No, we didn’t mention him at all.’

  ‘So he’s satisfied I’ve done no wrong.’

  ‘About that, he is … But, Edward. Now, dearest, don’t be angry with me – but he got it out of me.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘He said it was for your good in your career, and mine.’

  ‘What did you say? Tell me what.’

  ‘About Dad: he knows Dad has a previous conviction.’

  ‘Yes? Oh.’

  ‘He asked me if I had and I said of course not, and he said he believed me though he’d check, but there’s one thing he doesn’t like about it.’

  ‘That I didn’t tell him, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes: and that you did tell him I was a copper-hater and not that my father’s been in jail. Did you really have to do that, Ted?’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. I’m very sorry – that was a big mistake. I was harassed and … well, I made a big mistake.’

  ‘Yes, Ted. Another one you made, it seems, was to tell me you’d told him that you had no girl at all.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know I said that to you …’

  ‘No, Ted, I know: it was only to me you lied.’

  ‘Yes. Dearing, I’m sorry – do try to understand! But him. Was he very vexed when he discovered?’

  ‘Not so much about that, Ted … about something else. That you made me pregnant before you got the whole thing settled.’

  ‘Well! What business is that of his?’

  ‘He said it was for two reasons, Edward. First, that he didn’t like it because it wasn’t right to me. Then …’

  ‘To you! What does he care about you?’

  ‘Well, Edward, I agree with him.’

  ‘Oh, do you!’

  ‘Yes – I do. I think he’s right. He was like a father to me, Ted.’

  ‘A father! If you only knew him! Well, what was the other thing?’

  ‘Well, dear, you won’t like this, but he says your application may go through if Dad leaves fairly soon, but it won’t if I have a child before we marry, and he doesn’t see us being able to do that before the application is approved.’

  ‘It takes that long?’

  ‘He says so.’

  Edward looked at her. ‘Well, there’s only one thing,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to have a miscarriage.’

  His girl looked back. ‘I don’t want to now, Edward.’

  ‘But you said you were willing to.’

  ‘I did, yes, but I’ve thought of it, and it’s got so much bigger here, and Ted, I’m going to have my baby.’

  ‘Oh, you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He reached for her hands across the table, delved for them and held them. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘do think of this. If you have the child it seems I’ve got to choose between the Force and you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought of that.’

  ‘And what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘You’ve got to decide, Ted. I suppose it all depends on how much you think you love me.’

  Another shaft of the strip-light came on as an officer, entering suddenly, called out, ‘It’s okay, Ted – we’ve got him.’

  MR LOVE AND MR JUSTICE

  Edward was now faced by that most exhausting and complicated moment in a copper’s life – the conduct of a full-scale interrogation of a prisoner. In this affair both parties have considerable tactical advantages, provided each knows what they are and how to use them.

  First, the surroundings. The very word ‘cells’ has, to most ears, a sinister and forbidding ring. And these places are, to be sure, rebarbative enough … the nastiest thing about them being not that they have locks and bars, but that they are so utterly, fundamentally utilitarian. In them arrangements are made for prisoners to eat, sleep, and defecate: and for absolutely nothing else whatever. A man in prison is reduced to his physical essence.

  From the copper’s point of view the cells have the advantage, obviously, of making escape impossible to the prisoner and of filling his soul with lonely terror and foreboding. But they have this psychological disadvantage that in one very real sense, they are the prisoner’s and not the copper’s home: yes, home. The copper may lord it in his office, and of course does so over any visitor he may entice there. But in the cells the visitor in one sense is he, the copper, even though he has put the prisoner inside them. And if the priso
ner be a man of intelligence, will and courage, the very presence of these four confining walls does help to sustain his spirits. It is he who is on the defensive, he who is fighting back. And he may well detect in even the most arrogant aggression of the interrogating copper, a hidden fear of the place of a very different kind from his own: the fear of something with which in the most final sense, he is unfamiliar.

  When it comes to the actual interrogation the copper has, of course, the enormous advantage of seeming to personify the fact of prison itself, and the whole vast Force of which he is the representative. He will also possess, through skill and long practice, all the interrogator’s essential arts in which the prisoner may be quite unversed. But: in this very unfamiliarity, there resides also a great strength. An adult questioning a child about a misdemeanour often finds himself exhausted by his own superior guile, and defeated by the instinctive simplicities of the apparently weaker party in the struggle. So it may be said to be with prisoners. And they also have – once again if men of indomitable stamp – one absolutely unbeatable trump card which is the fact that they are, in this circumstance, alone. If you are alone, you can never be betrayed; and in dealing with the many others who may confront him, the prisoner is the only person among the whole assembly who really knows all that everyone has said and done.

  Frankie’s opening gambit to his captor Edward, was in the finest tradition of the pugnacious victim: ‘You’re a nice bastard,’ he said, as Edward carefully closed the cell door behind him.

  Edward smiled slightly and looked interrogative.

  ‘I gave you the way out,’ Frankie continued, ‘I gave your girl the box and all you had to do was to collect. And then you shop me. Why?’

 

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