‘I’ve nothing to say, sir.’
‘That was correct?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why did you do this, son?’
‘I needed money, sir: to help my girl’s father emigrate like I told you.’
‘You needed money! Really, lad, you are a bloody fool! You really are!’ The Detective-Sergeant looked at him. ‘With a man like our colleague suffering with his ulcers on the same case with you, you thought you’d under-cut him? A sharp bastard like that? Really! Have you no brains in your head at all?’
‘I think I’m learning, sir.’
‘Well, I do hope so. Now, please in the future do be sensible and don’t be greedier than your rank and length of service warrants.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Right. That’s forgotten, then. You understand me?’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you very much indeed.’
‘Okay. Now, as to the thieves who are no longer thieves. I’m turning the girl loose as I’ve nothing to hold her on. But I’m going to bring a charge against the man.’
‘What charge, sir?’
‘What do you think, son? Poncing. He’s about due for his first experience and it might as well be now.’
‘Excuse me, sir. Who will you get for witnesses? I don’t think the girl will speak against him …’
‘For witnesses? Well, I can think of two … Our friend the star sleuth, when he recovers, will be number one and number two, lad, will be you.’
‘Me, sir?’
‘Naturally. You’ve both kept observation on the flat – in fact you, you’ve been living on the doorstep – you’ve both seen clients come and go and there’ll just be the little matter of saying that on several occasions you saw her hand him over considerable sums of money.’
‘How, sir?’
‘How? I dunno! However you like! You saw it through the window – in a club or pub – in the full light of the broad highway, if you prefer: I’ve known magistrates believe that … and funnily enough, in my experience it’s even happened. These ponces get over-confident after a while and take unbelievable chances.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Eh?’
‘I want to ask you take me off this case, sir.’
‘Oh, do you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The senior officer looked very hard indeed at Edward. ‘Tell me,’ he said quietly. ‘When you saw this ponce alone in the cells, did he make you any promises?’
‘Such as what, sir?’
‘Now – be very careful. I’ve gone with you a long way, but please don’t start getting cheeky. Has he made any promises of payment later on?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you quite positive of that?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s offered me no money, and I’ve not agreed to accept any from him.’
‘Oh, I see. But you did discuss the matter.’
‘We spoke of money in a general way: but no arrangements were made of any kind, sir.’
‘Did you make him any promises?’
Edward – enticed by the fatal mistake of liking the Detective-Sergeant and of wishing to be entirely frank with him – said, ‘I did promise, sir, if this theft charge had gone through, to try to make it lighter for the girl than him.’
‘Why?’
‘He wanted it that way, sir.’
‘Did he! So this man wants to get inside the nick – is that it?’
‘Not on a poncing charge, sir, naturally.’
The Detective-Sergeant paused, looked at Edward in an absorbed, impersonal way then said, ‘Constable, this is it. You’re chief witness for the prosecution against this man – or else.’
Edward replied in a low voice, ‘I wish to submit to you, sir, my resignation from the Force.’
‘I can’t accept it,’ the Detective-Sergeant instantly snapped back. ‘You can forward it through channels, naturally, if you wish, but until it’s agreed to or refused by the proper authorities you’re still bound by your oath and still under my direct orders.’
Edward, without asking for permission, sat down on a chair. ‘Don’t force me to do this, sir,’ he said.
The Detective-Sergeant looked at him, then sat down slowly also at his desk. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I just can’t make you out. This man hasn’t got at you, you say. I don’t believe he’s offered you his woman, or you’d want her if he had. And you like your work – I mean you enjoy it, don’t you?’
‘There’s nothing I like better, sir.’
‘And you know personal feelings count as nothing when there’s a job to be done?’
‘I know that too, sir.’
‘You’re not against ponces going to jail by any chance, are you?’
‘No, sir. That’s where they belong. But I can’t do it, sir, because of my girl I’m going to marry.’
‘Oh? I thought I was helping you straighten all that out?’
‘Please listen, sir,’ said Edward carefully. ‘She’s pregnant, as you know. She also loves me a great deal. She knows how much I want to stay on in the Force, but that if she has the child I may be refused permission to marry her.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m afraid she might try to do away with it – an abortion, sir.’
‘But look, Constable! I understood you’d both decided to go ahead and take a chance on the permission coming through in time to rectify the situation.’
‘Yes, sir, I know. But I’m afraid she won’t believe we will get permission, and she’ll destroy the child to safeguard my career. And if she does that for me, sir – then I think I’ll lose her.’
‘Why?’
‘She’ll cease to love me, sir.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ The Detective-Sergeant leant back reflecting, then said, ‘You know, Constable, it’s you who’s behaving a bit like a ponce now, isn’t it?’
‘Sir?’
‘Hiding behind a woman’s apron-strings? Protecting your livelihood by swinging your sex life on me?’
Edward was silent.
‘And another thing,’ said the Detective-Sergeant. ‘Why has this business of a pregnancy and all this talk of resigning only come up when I gave you your orders about this particular poncing case?’ Edward still said nothing and his senior pressed the point hard home. ‘Why didn’t you mention resigning earlier on if you’d decided? It must have been in your mind …’
Edward said quietly, ‘I only came to the decision then, sir.’
‘Yeah?’ The Detective-Sergeant frowned and pondered. ‘You’re trying to lead me off the track,’ he said. ‘There’s something at the bottom of all this – something to do with that fucking ponce.’
Edward was still silent.
‘Look, boy,’ said the Detective-Sergeant who was really getting quite a bit exasperated. ‘This thing has gone quite far enough. Here, as I see it, is the situation. I’ve given you an order and you say you don’t want to obey it. Well! Resign by all means if you really think you want to. But meanwhile either you obey my order or, I’m sorry, but I’m going to suspend you.’
Edward got up, stood at attention and said, ‘Then please suspend me, sir.’
The Detective-Sergeant’s face hardened. He also rose. ‘In one minute from now, Constable,’ he said, ‘I’m going to do just that. But before I do I want to make one thing very clear indeed. If I suspend you for disobeying a direct order, there’ll be an inquiry. And if there’s an inquiry there’ll be a lot of things I’ll find I have to say that I’ve been overlooking for you hitherto. Very well. Now, if this inquiry should go against you – as I think it will – it won’t be resigning you’ll be doing. It’ll be dismissal, and perhaps even maybe worse. And a man dismissed from the Force, Constable – well, he’s the lowest of the low. He’s lower than that ponce that you’re so fond of.’
Edward stood rigid but at ease, still saying nothing.
‘You’re suspended, Constable,’ the Detective-Sergeant said. ‘Report to the Station-Sergeant now accordingly.’<
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MR LOVE
Frankie, released on bail from the charge of living off immoral earnings, and waiting while his lawyers hoisted his case from the rough justice of the magistrate’s court to the dangerous impartiality of a judge and jury, had met his former girl for a chat about it all at the drinking-club now fashionable in ‘the game’: the other having suffered an eclipse as these clubs do, rising and falling with the fickle inclinations of their clientele and the slow-grinding machinery of the law. She was as desirable as ever though perhaps a shade more elderly – a bit wiser to a world about which she was already far too wise. He was relaxed, resigned, and saddened as only those born innocent can be when by folly or misjudgement they have behaved in some way that violates this quality of their natures.
‘My chances?’ said Frankie, summing up the situation. ‘Slender, but they exist. After all’ – he pressed her hand – ‘I won’t have the principal witness in the box against me.’
‘If only your lawyers would let me speak for you, Frankie. Say you were a handsome, silly boyfriend who knew nothing and I never gave you anything. You sure that’s no use to you at all?’
‘Dear – who’d believe it? And they say the sight of a – excuse me – common prostitute speaking up for me will damn me as a ponce at once with any jury.’
‘Yeah, I know. But I’m scared of that copper’s evidence, honey, when you come up at the Sessions. It’s always so thorough and so damn convincing.’
She drained her B and S – a drink which, now banished from stately clubs and homes where it so flourished in Edwardian times, survives in our day as a favourite of this very Edwardian profession. ‘Which cops will it be, I wonder? That bastard who got the box, and I suppose the Kilburn kiddy.’
‘He’s bound to speak against me, honey. After all why shouldn’t he? It’s his graft.’
Frankie rose and leant over to work the cigarette-machine behind her back. She reached for her bag, said, ‘I’ve got florins,’ but he smiled, bent down and clicked the bag shut, then undid the packet standing close beside her stool in the tenderly sexy posture of bar lovers: girl’s face level with boy’s belt. She took her fag, held it unlit, looked up at him and said, ‘You really think, dear, you couldn’t try to skip?’
‘We’ve been into that. They’ve got my passport and they’ll be watching me this time. I’ve thought of trying: stow away and get duff papers – it’s not that difficult, I know. But it seems this thing is coming to me and I might as well take it on the chin.’
‘The nick’s the nick, dear, don’t forget. And with a previous conviction for that, they can whip you in for nothing and get a judgement on you till the day you die.’
‘I’ve thought of that.’
‘And – can you travel, after? I mean, go anywhere? Once you’ve got a record, honey, you’ve got a record.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Frankie! I believe you want to go inside!’
‘No … you think I’m crazy? But I don’t mind telling you, baby, I do think it’s written in my book.’
‘Fuck that! And when you come out, dear. There’ll be some loot?’
‘Oh, sufficient. Though the lawyers are getting most of what I’ve had …’
‘There’ll be me, too, honey. I’ll be your banker, never fear …’
Frankie looked at her and smiled. ‘Never again,’ he said. ‘Baby, I’ve thought it over and it seems I’m really not the type.’
‘No? Well, darl, they all say that. They all say “never again” the first time they get nicked, and they all head straight back to the chicks when their bit of trouble’s over.’ Frankie was silent. ‘You know, dear,’ she went on, ‘there’s only one thing does really trouble me a bit. I believe if I’d had that kid of ours you really might have grown to love me.’
‘D’you think so?’
‘Yes, I do. I think you’re the type of man who never loves a girl but loves a mother.’
‘I don’t know about mothers, babe,’ he said, giving her a lipstick-avoiding kiss, ‘but I do know you’ve been great to me – a good chick in bed, yes, but in many ways just like my flesh and blood – my sister.’
‘Oh, thank you! Do you mind? Your sister! Well – what next?’
Frankie went over to replenish glasses, and glancing round the room he felt for the first time in what seemed so long a while quite different once again from all these people there: a non-ponce, in fact: a man whose sex life was once more his own absolute and undisputed property. Not that he judged them in the slightest, being no hypocrite, nor given by nature to imagine that to judge one’s fellows has anything much to do with having a real sense of justice. But he did feel altered: and he had, for the first time in his life, an informed opinion on the easy-money boys.
Looking up, he saw one of them who entered and seeing him, withdrew. This was the star ponce whom Frankie, quickly abandoning the glasses on an indignant table, caught up with at the stairs. ‘Hullo, man,’ he said. ‘Where you been hiding yourself? I’ve been looking for you.’
‘Hi, Francis. And you, man! Where you been, feller – have you been away?’
‘Not yet,’ said Frankie. ‘But it seems I’m going to just because someone who got scared felt they had to speak up out of turn.’
‘Oh, yeah? That so? That really so?’
‘That really so. Without that one man’s coward’s word I’d be in Africa or South America by now.’
‘You would? Well now, Francis! Please don’t stare at me like that, old-timer. Why! The way you stand there, making insinuations and just threatening a bit, anyone who didn’t know might take you for a copper!’
The star ponce (in whose life this scene had occurred more than once before) knew exactly what he had to do: and that was get his blow in first. The wronged and righteous party in a quarrel often makes the capital mistake of forgetting – if it’s going to come down to a set-to – that the villain, being such, is likely to be quicker off the mark because to counteract the power of towering indignation, he has only speed and swift decision. At least six seconds before Frankie got in his knock-out punch the star ponce had bent, pulled the blade from its plastic sheath inside his nylon sock, and stabbed Frankie neatly in the groin.
MR JUSTICE
Preferring for reasons best known to himself (no doubt financial) to travel like the emigrants of old by sea, Edward’s father-in-law-to-be set sail (seen off by Edward not so much to shed a parting tear as to make sure he went) from the grubby and antique shores of Fenchurch Street railway station. Though his departure now seemed so much less important the thing, once set in motion, could not be stopped because his girl’s dad had grown fond of the idea, and neither Edward nor she regretted it. The older man was in high spirits, haloed already with the aura of a tropical remittance-man; and only subdued, as Edward was much more so, by anxiety about his daughter’s critical condition: the night before, attacked by sudden pains, she had been carried off to hospital. ‘Send me a radiogram, boy,’ the father said, ‘as soon as ever they tell you what it is. And if it’s serious, even if I have to get off the ship at the first port of call – well, rely on me, I’ll face the journey back across old Biscay.’
‘I hope that won’t be necessary,’ said Edward.
‘Me, too. But note down my cabin number all the same.’
Edward reached by long habit for his little book, took it out, looked at it, and wrote the number there.
‘Well,’ said the expatriate, ‘I won’t keep you any longer: I know you’ve got to fly back to your headquarters. Well, lad, there it is. Cheerioh! All the very best! And thanks for all you’ve done for me and all you’re going to do.’
Repressing with great difficulty an overpowering desire to say, ‘Farewell, you old bastard, and whatever you do, don’t come back,’ Edward said (using the word for the first time), ‘Good-bye, Dad, and good luck.’
The men shook hands, waved and separated, and Edward made off to the underground. At the foot of the escalator he dropped the black no
tebook, after looking at it once again, in the litter basket there provided. As he travelled west the docile public in the carriage, massed in long-suffering wedges of impatient and resigned humanity, now seemed to him as they had often done since his suspension not the them they used to be, but us: an us he still disapproved of in so many respects and still mistrusted: a great, confused, messy, indeterminate ‘us’ in need of regulation, guidance from above and order.
He had made in the past weeks several visits to the station on routine matters concerning his three rather contradictory appeals (to resign, to get married, and against unjustified suspension), but had no longer been admitted to the inner chambers of his erstwhile protector the Detective-Sergeant. But to see him an imperative summons had now come; and so after a brief, fruitless telephone call to the hospital where his girl had just been taken, he walked up the breeze-block stairs and knocked, at exactly the appointed hour, upon the door.
Within he found the Detective-Sergeant and, now restored to health, his own Iago, the star sleuth. The Detective-Sergeant, most unusually for him, was in uniform which somehow made him look, though more official, less redoubtable. The star sleuth was in neat, expressionless plain-clothes. ‘Sit down,’ said the Detective-Sergeant.
He picked up a file, then putting on spectacles (giving him the appearance of a modern British general) he said to Edward, ‘I don’t want to see you just at present, Constable, and I dare say you don’t want to see me. Unfortunately, though, we’ve both got to. It’s about this ponce. He’s been involved in an affray in addition to being on bail on a much more serious matter. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of it yet, but as it was a quarrel between ponces I don’t suppose it very much matters either way. At all events, as he’s out on bail and subject to the jurisdiction of the courts we’ve had him put into a hospital where we can keep an eye on him, so as to be ready for him when he’s ready to face either of these charges.’
Edward and the star sleuth, neither looking at the other, preserved a silence of the kind that indicated all this had so far registered.
Mr Love and Justice Page 19