Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The bowler-hatted jobsworth looked me up and down, but that’s what jobsworths do. He showed me to Bentinck’s table.

  Bentinck gave me the merest glance.

  “Golden Boy.”

  Who? Me?

  “My old dad would always bet on any horse with the word gold in his name.”

  “Not exactly scientific, then?”

  “No, lost more often than not.”

  The eyes came off the racing pages to meet mine. They were soggy eyes, the eyes, I thought, of a deeply sad man. The face was jowly and red – a joyless red, a red that might have been acquired in good times that were long, long gone and now was merely a painful reminder, glimpsed in the mirror while shaving.

  “When were you born?”

  I hadn’t even sat down yet.

  “29 August 1951. It was a—”

  “No. You’re not supposed to tell me. Ruins the bloody game. It was . . . hang on . . . it was . . . a Wednesday. Am I right?”

  “Yes. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. My mother was forever quoting that at me.”

  “And are you?”

  “No. I’m a cheerful soul.”

  This made him laugh. I pulled out a chair and sat down while he sniggered.

  “American?”

  “Yes?”

  “Draft dodger, I suppose. All you blokes are draft dodgers aren’t you?”

  I said nothing to this. It didn’t seem to require an answer.

  “Of course, in my day you’d have been shot.”

  I tacked away. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “The trick with the birth dates.”

  “Oh that would be telling. But it is just a trick . . . a simple mental . . . algorithm. Yes, that’s the word. Now who do you fancy in the 2.30?” He shoved the racing pages across to me.

  That was okay. I like a challenge. I am up for what is new.

  We walked down to the members’ enclosure near to the winning post. I got a good look at him for the first time. He was a head shorter than me, stout to fat. A sheen of sweat across his face that made him look very unhealthy. I’d put him at a well-worn, lived-in sixty. A sixty looking as though it would not make sixty-five. Breathless and baggy. Gung-ho and world-weary at the same time.

  “You own a horse?” I asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Owners’ bar? Members’ enclosure?”

  “There’s an English notion you need to grasp, dear boy. Ligging. The noble art of bullshit. Everybody here thinks I own a racehorse because I act as if I own a racehorse. So many things in life are pretence. Nothing wrong with it. It’s not a moral issue . . . It’s just the way things are.”

  I wondered about what I had just heard. The manifesto of a spy schooled in deceit or of a con man as likely to pretend to be a racehorse owner as a spy? The former was easier. A big pair of binoculars, a bespoke suit worn incongruously with a crumpled felt hat, and a racing paper folded under your arm. What were the props of a spy? Would a spy ever say he was a spy? Was anyone who did say he was a spy least likely to be one?

  Any question I might have posed was drowned out.

  Racing was like all sport: a bit of a thrill, followed by prolonged boredom. A kid in high school once tried to explain football to me as being like chess. Big guys in armour crashing into one another is like chess? Right. And many a London pub bore has attempted to entice me into an appreciation of soccer . . . or cricket . . . and all I can say is that both move marginally faster than baseball or glaciers.

  No problem with speed at Newmarket, but it is arcane stuff requiring study or feigned interest. Having no knowledge at all, I opted for the latter. Bentinck had the knowledge, Bentinck studied “form” . . . firm going, soft underfoot, trained by X, ridden by Y, had won the last Z times out and so on. I bet whenever he bet and as he bet and came back £479.50p richer. And not once did we bet on a horse with “gold” in its name. He hooted, he cheered, he waved his fat little arms in the air and he gabbled at me in incomprehensible fervour.

  What he didn’t do was mention a book. Or the possibility of a book. And the saggy sadness in the eyes never once matched the waving arms or the throaty cheering.

  I went home bookless and richer, secure in the knowledge that I would never go to the races again and that I would never hear from Roger Bentinck again.

  The Hon. Syd returned from Libya.

  “Got me knees brown for the first time since 1943.”

  I thought I’d have to bring him up to speed on anything and everything, only to find Vera had already done it.

  “Who’s this Bentinck character?”

  I told him.

  “D’ye reckon he’s kosher?”

  “No. He’s ligging.”

  “Ligging?”

  “A word I just learnt. He’s a freeloader. I think he’s someone having fun playing a game with Fleet Street and with me. He probably spun Tony Marks a line in exchange for free drinks all evening. He acts like a spook, so people think he’s a spook. He’s the most unlikely-looking spy I’ve ever met.”

  “Not that you’ve met all that many,” said Syd. “But what does he look like?”

  “Toad of Toad Hall,” I said. “He looks like Mr Toad.”

  “Poop-poop!” Syd replied.

  A week passed.

  Men in suits still asked me where the photocopier was.

  Vera Buckett called me a twat at least twice a day.

  Roger Bentinck rang.

  “Lunch, Thursday. Meet me at my club.”

  Club? What fucking club?

  “Guards in Piccadilly. Did it never occur to you to look me up in Who’s Who?”

  I kicked myself. It had not crossed my mind to find the fat fraud in any work of reference. It was another English notion I needed to grasp, an absurdly English notion. The antediluvian hippie in me silently subscribed to the other notion, that anyone who was really anyone would not be in Who’s fuckin’ Who.

  Syd had Who’s Who (and for that matter Who Was Who) for every year going back to 1938 in his office.

  He didn’t even look up from his desk.

  Just said “Who’re you after?”

  “Bentinck.”

  “If you find him, read him out to me. The potted version.”

  Who’s Who is nothing if not potted. Life reduced on the simmer plate.

  “Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck. CMG. Born 1925. Younger son of George Bentinck and Laura née Cholmondoley elder daughter of Viscount Cholmondoley of Callow. Sherborne, a year at Keble, Oxford, reading Geography, volunteered for the Coldstream Guards in ’43. Just caught the tail end of the war. Ended it as a captain. Discharged 1946. Bit blank on anything since. No mention of wives or children. Clubs, Guards. Hobbies, racing and Meccano. What’s Meccano?”

  Syd ignored the question.

  “A Cholmondoley, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve heard of his grandfather. Mad Mike Cholmondoley, led an absolutely suicidal cavalry charge in the Boer War. If Tennyson had been around there might even have been a poem about it. Alas the old boy had gone to Poets’ Corner by then, so all Cholmondoley got was a court martial and no verse. It would have paid him not to survive the charge, but there you are. Dead heroes, living idiots. Two sides of a coin.”

  “Syd, does any of this make you think he might be, as you said, ‘kosher’?”

  “Perhaps. The silence after 1946 is telling. That’s when they’d have recruited him if they did recruit him. There are people I can ask.”

  Syd, at that time, represented Marcus Frey, acclaimed writer of spy novels under the nom de plume James McVey. All McVeys went to number one. A good half dozen of them had been filmed. He alone would bankroll Hawes Greene if every other client dried or died. And, of course, Marcus Frey was “kosher” – his real name was an open secret and the books sold as being the work of an MI6 insider. The secret was that Syd ran every book by MI6 before even the publishers saw them. Hence no controversy, no comeback, not even a hint of cen
sorship. All done, as Syd would have said, on the nod. A few discreet phone calls. Nothing on paper.

  “Leave it with me,” he said.

  I was . . . I was . . . antsy. That could be the word. By Thursday morning I was antsy. Once more on the whirligig with Bentinck and not a word from Syd.

  Ten minutes before I was due to leave, he came into my office and looked around as though despairing of the décor.

  I pointed to the long Plimsoll line of dirt three feet off the ground along the side wall.

  “Used to be the photocopier room,” I said.

  “Good Lord. Must get you something for the walls. A book or two wouldn’t go amiss. Now. Roger the Lodger. He is the real thing. Ran our chaps out of Berlin in the forties and Vienna in the fifties. Been on the retired list since ’66. Picked up his gong the year after. One hundred per cent kosher.”

  Hell. I had rather hoped he wasn’t and that perhaps this would be my last outing with him.

  “So maybe there’s a book at the bottom of all this?”

  “It may well be there’s one hell of a book at the bottom of all this.”

  I played the straight.

  I wore the suit.

  I had not asked Vera.

  Another jobsworth, another fleeting moment of utter disdain. I was shown to the bar of the Guards Club on Piccadilly.

  Bentinck was perched on top of a bar stool with his back to me. Not an item of furniture that favoured his particular morph. He looked like a toffee apple on a stick.

  He swung around, slopping his whisky and soda, and said, “Y’little shit. You’ve had me vetted!”

  If I had any doubts about Bentinck the spy they just flew out and splashed down as fast as his whisky. He was kosher. I knew he was kosher. He knew I knew he was kosher.

  “How d’ya do it?”

  “That would be telling.”

  Hard to tell when a red man is about to explode with anger. The wheezing rising in his throat presaged something, but as seconds ticked by I wasn’t certain whether he would erupt in rage or laughter.

  The wheezing rose half an octave, a tad shy of whining; he slipped from the bar stool, clapped me on the back and I realized that this was as close to laughter as Bentinck got.

  “Let’s eat. I’m fair famished.”

  At lunch I learnt why Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck was the size, shape and hue he was. He loved his grub. I come from what might be termed the muesli generation. Rabbit food, my father used to call it, glaring at me across his plate of ham ’n’ eggs. I have eaten muesli for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Never in my life had I sat down to beef Wellington. Bentinck was insistent. It was what the club did best. It would be criminal not to try it.

  Have you ever seen beef Wellington? The look alone is worth a hundred words. Suffice it to say it is the nearest thing you will ever find to Desperate Dan’s cow pie. It is beef, expensive beef, wrapped in layers of pâté and mushrooms and encased in pastry. No need to leave the horns on the side of your plate. The Guards club would never have been so vulgar as to leave the horns on.

  And . . . and . . . it is disgusting.

  All the same, it explained the teetering on the edge of aneurysm and apoplexy that was by now the natural condition of Roger George Cholmondoley Bentinck.

  I picked, trying not to show revulsion.

  “Hippie, eh?” Bentinck said in precisely the same tone he had said “draft dodger”. “Give it here.”

  And he speared the remains of my beef Welly with his fork, hoicked it on to his plate and with his free hand beckoned to the sommelier for a second bottle of claret. Most of the first had gone down him, not me.

  “I’m wondering,” he said. “Can I work with a chap like you?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Can’t tell a three-legged nag from a Derby winner. Drinks like a girl. Eats like a bird. What more do I need to say?”

  “How about that I can turn Post-it notes into polished prose and pitch you to the best editors in London? Or I could if you ever got around to mentioning a book.”

  He munched. Staring at me. Flakes of puff pastry showering down like the first delicate snow of an early winter, dusting the napkin tucked into his waistcoat like a bib. Always the mark of a serious trencherman.

  “You cheeky little bugger.”

  “My point remains. Cheeky or not.”

  “Well, I’m hardly going to blab about it here, am I?”

  “I’m asking myself: is he going to blab at all?”

  Silent munching ensued.

  He finished his plate with dedicated elbow work, and a swift though delicate action on the fork that put me in mind of watching Muhammad Ali float like a butterfly.

  “Tell you what. We’ll have pudding and adjourn to my place. If it’s blabbing you want, it’s blabbing you’ll get.”

  I had a 3.30 meeting with Graham Garside, a first novelist fresh out of Leicester Polytechnic, who had written a “promising” novel depicting his life and hard times growing up in a suburb of Nottingham. My first real client. Clutching a real kitchen sink. I wasn’t going to pass that up for more Bentinck blather. I had yet to learn that “promising” is one of the most unreliable terms in the English language.

  “I have to work this afternoon.”

  “O’course, wage slave. I do hope it’s worth it. Tell me, how much do you rake in? Twenty-five grand a year? Thirty?”

  Thirty grand was more than twice what Syd was paying me. Yet the tone in which Bentinck uttered the word implied it was peanuts to him.

  “I get by.”

  “Well get by my house at seven-thirty tonight.”

  He flipped a card across the table.

  A house in the Boltons. No wonder thirty grand was peanuts.

  “Now,” he said. “To matters of state, to cabbages and kings . . . to pud.”

  A waiter set dessert menus in front of us.

  I opened mine and read nothing. I wasn’t going to eat another mouthful. Bentinck rolled his eyes down the page and muttered, “The things I do for England.”

  And when he looked up he was smiling, and a friendly light seemed to flicker in those saggy eyes.

  “Call no man unhappy with a pudding menu in front of him.”

  Graham Garside was twenty-two. He’d have been about fourteen by the time punk penetrated Nottingham Profond. And if there was one thing he hated in life it was hippies. What was it? Could he smell patchouli on me? I had washed off the last residue round about 1967. Whatever . . . his lip curled at the sight of me. A sub-Elvis sneer that conceded that he might just let me represent him, a quiz on who I read and liked (utterly irrelevant) . . . leading to undisguised contempt when I replied “Iris Murdoch”.

  After twenty minutes with him I was almost looking forward to the sneers and contempt of Bentinck. They at least were accompanied by a modicum of curiosity.

  He’d get back to me.

  Of course.

  I held out a hand for the kid to shake. He looked at it as if I’d presented him with a cold kipper.

  “It’s been a pleasure, Graham,” I lied.

  “It’s Gaz.”

  “Okay, it’s been a gas.”

  “No, I mean I’m known as Gaz. Only my dad calls me Graham.”

  Well, that was me put in my place.

  I thought at first I had misread his address, but I checked the card. I was in front of the right house, possibly the only house in the Boltons, that hugely expensive loop of Chelsea real estate, in need of paint and joinery. A three-storey house of flaking stucco and rotting window frames. God, the neighbours must hate Bentinck.

  I pressed the bell. No sound of ringing. Where the Victorian knocker had once been was a deep scar in the paint. I pushed. The door drifted in and music drifted out.

  At this point in my life I had long forsaken the Grateful Dead – once the LSD wore off, who didn’t? Not much had replaced them. Music was that stuff happening in the background. Happening everywhere, elevators, coffee bars . . . I cou
ld not even get a haircut without some MOR pap burbling away from tinny speakers in the ceiling. Free champagne, sir? Free coffee? Free ear-ache? Most of London’s public places left me craving silence. After Jess left I’d unplugged the record player. Nothing would induce me to turn it back on. And I could not have told you if the crackly sound coming from the back room of Bentinck’s house was Mozart or Messiaen.

  I reached the end of the corridor, opened the door into a small back room aglow with western light, crammed with furniture. Bentinck was slumped in an armchair that had suffered a volcanic eruption of stuffing. There was a tumbler half full of whisky next to him, and a can of tinned custard, most of which was spattered down his waistcoat. His eyes were shut. He was humming along with the music.

  “Do you like Brahms?” he said, eyes still closed.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “This is the Third.”

  “Third what?”

  The eyes opened.

  “Oh God, do you people know nothing?”

  He got up with some difficulty. Noticed the custard dribbles down his front, muttered “shit” a few times and shuffled across to the record player.

  I’d never seen anything quite like it. A turntable over a foot across, a strobe read-out, an arm counterweighted with pre-decimal silver coins, a yard of wires trailing from pre-amp to amp and a 78 rpm record spinning.

  “Brahms’s Third Symphony, Berlin Sinfonia, 1946. First recording they made after the war. Among the first violins you’ll hear Klaus Boehm. Talented young chap. I ran him in ’48 to ’49, right through the airlift. Till the Russians tumbled to him, that is. Left him hanging from a lamppost in the British sector. They broke his fingers first. Bastards.”

  At last . . . a fact. The merest shred of spooky-doo.

  He turned the volume down a fraction. Found a second tumbler, blew off the dust and handed it to me with a nod towards the open bottle of Bells.

  “Lend an ear. On the last side. Over in a jiffy.”

  I lent the ear. I looked around.

  It began to dawn on me that there was more than one Roger Bentinck. The dapper if somewhat gross man who had bought me a gourmet lunch, and the slob who got shit-faced in the afternoon, ate cold custard straight from the tin and appeared to live in a haze of dust and cobwebs in the back room of a huge and neglected house in one of the most prestigious streets in Chelsea.