The Man Who Won the Pools

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Verra pleased to meet you – yes?’ Mr. McLeod said. He had an accent reeking of kilts and heather. ‘Richt guid luck you’ve been having – no?’ He bobbed his head up and down, so that a lot of black hair on it stirred sluggishly. It was funny, Phil thought, the way he ended his sentences. Not like Ginger Grant, him of the Wee St George. But then Ginger’s Scottish family, although no doubt impoverished, hadn’t been an old one.

  McLeod had small feet in very pointed shoes, and his hands were much paler than his face and had small pudgy fingers with rings on them. And now he was turning with a sort of waddle on his small feet like he might be an out-of-condition penguin, and was pointing with his fat little hands at some bulging chairs round a little table in a corner of this white and gold and red lounge. There was coffee, and a box of cigars, and three of these enormous bubbles of glass with brandy again – so that it seemed just as if McLeod had been waiting for them. Phil looked at all this and had a dim feeling that things were coming a bit clearer in his mind. Colonel Hannay looked too, and appeared to think that comment was necessary.

  ‘Ah,’ he said in his satisfied Brigadier’s voice. ‘One of my secretaries must have got a message through to your secretary – eh, Colin my boy? So you’re prepared for us. Capital! And how did your little negotiation with the President go?’

  A long white slit appeared in McLeod’s sludge-coloured face. He was beaming like as if he’d forgot that dour Scottish character he’d been born with.

  ‘Verra weel,’ he said – and as he sat down he rubbed his hands softly against each other in front of his stomach. ‘It was a graun’ meeting, Colonel, although I say it misel’. The President laddie tipped the lines.’

  ‘Toed the line, did he?’ Hannay said loudly. ‘Very good, Colin. It’s no more than I expected of you. You said, I hope, that we’d close only at a round million?’

  ‘Aye – and wi’ commission. But ye’ll be after considering Mr. Tombs’s affairs – yes?’ McLeod turned to Phil at this with a smile like he wanted to flog him a couple of carpets or some art photos. ‘You making investments, no?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Phil said. ‘I’m not making anything.’ He was going to add, following his earlier thought, ‘Not even water in a joint like this.’ But curiosity was pricking him. So he said only: ‘Nothing but inquiries, like, at the moment.’

  ‘Quite right!’ Hannay chimed in emphatically. ‘We have to proceed, my dear Colin, with the utmost circumspection. Tombs’s—um—funds are substantial, but they are not unlimited. We must be cautious. My old friend Arthur Prendick will expect it of us. It is a matter of finding openings. We must take the utmost advantage of our knowledge of the markets – of our top contacts and inside knowledge. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Aye, we maun be canny, nae doot,’ McLeod said – and added abruptly to Phil: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Phil said.

  McLeod nodded seriously. He picked up one of the glasses from the little table and raised it towards Phil.

  ‘Jeers,’ he said, and drank a considerable quantity of liqueur brandy.

  ‘And jeers to you,’ Phil said with a certain satisfaction. But he made no more than a pretence of sniffing at the brandy.

  ‘The first question that comes into my mind,’ Hannay said, ‘is this. Shall we consult some of our more intimate associates at once? Colin, what do you think? Shall we run Tombs into the City and have a word with the Lord Mayor? A very sound fellow. A shade lacking in experience, perhaps, so far. But I have a great respect for his judgement.’

  ‘Or the Governor of the Bank of England, no?’ McLeod asked.

  Hannay pursed his lips. He frowned. ‘Ye—es,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But would you say that he is quite the man to bring in on this occasion? Of course, a certain respect is due to his position. Sooner or later, Tombs should be introduced to him. All that sort of thing. But – well, strictly between our three selves – is he altogether sound? I hold a certain reserve in the matter, I confess. Remember, my dear Colin, the unfortunate affair of the poor Duke’s Hampshire estates. Consider that unlucky move over the corner in diamonds. Do they leave one’s confidence in the Governor as unflawed, you know, as Tombs has a right to expect in regard to anybody we bring into conference in his affairs? Have a thought, Colin – have a serious thought.’

  There was a moment’s brooding silence. Phil looked at his brandy and decided the mere smell of it would make him sick. And then he looked at these two crooks. They weren’t merely crooks. They were plodding, slow-motion crooks, putting in far too much time on the softening up. They needed prodding.

  Phil, knowing he was being crazy, suddenly sat up and looked fixedly and obtrusively over their shoulders.

  ‘Odd thing, like,’ he said. ‘Why should there be a couple of plain-clothes dicks in that corner?’

  The heads of both Hannay and McLeod swung round in an instant. And they so anxiously scrutinised the recesses of the lounge that Phil had no difficulty whatever in dividing his brandy precisely between their glasses. When their glance turned back to him he was looking rather wistfully into an empty bubble.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ Hannay said. His expression might have been described as one of dignified relief. ‘Not that I have much acquaintance with that branch of the police, I need hardly say.’ He picked up his glass and gulped largely. ‘Colin,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you’re not drinking. And Tombs’s glass is empty.’

  McLeod, whose muddy mug also expressed relief, answered this by picking up his own glass and draining it.

  ‘Another brandy?’ he asked Phil.

  ‘Thanks a lot. I don’t mind if I do.’

  He’d spoken in the most off-hand way. And now he watched with satisfaction the arrival of the three further brandies. He was really beginning to enjoy himself. Which wasn’t, perhaps, very nice. But – he thought to himself – what the hell? Wasn’t he bloody but unclobbered? Wasn’t he out for experiment? Well, he’d do a bit of experimenting now.

  But Hannay and McLeod still went a bit slow. Phil – feeling wicked like he was – did his best to move them along. He gawped and gaped at anything they suggested. He asked fool questions, like he might be one of the Babes straight out of the Wood. But there must be something in him, he saw, that puzzled these two. Not that he wasn’t puzzled by them. He wondered what, in the end, it was going to be that they’d try to sell him. Perhaps it would be the bleeding Spanish Armada, with its galleons bottomed with beaten gold, just asking to be dredged up somewhere off the west coast of Scotland. He’d heard of that one – and of the Crown Jewels of Imperial Russia, which could be infallibly traced on the expenditure of a mere ten thousand nicker. Or there were what you might call more prosaic baits: oilfields going cheap among ignorant blacks, and uranium some chap had noticed lying around when he was taking a stroll in central Australia, and the way to break the bank at Monte Carlo which could be explained to anybody it was really worthwhile to explain to. Yes, Phil had heard of all of them. But somehow he didn’t think it was quite that sort of thing that was Hannay’s and McLeod’s line.

  They were pretty smart, he thought as he listened, or didn’t listen, to Hannay talking about cement. Having Prendick’s porter in their pocket and nipping in on a sucker with this yarn that they were Prendick’s pals – it was clever to have thought up that. Not a word of truth in it, he saw. A chap like Prendick, making a packet every week out of human folly – Phil Tombs’s included - would be the last man to let himself venture within a mile of human crime. Not that these two need represent exactly what you’d call crime. He doubted whether they were con-men – that was the phrase – in the strict sense of the term. He had an idea they really had something solid to sell. But it wasn’t cement.

  It wasn’t, for that matter, cement that Hannay was now talking about. He’d got on to roadhouses and country clubs. And McLeod – who was about as much a Scot, Phil had decided, as any other Wog type that had sailed in a fo’c’sle up or down the Clyde – McLeod was sitting quiet a
nd observant like it might be warming up. And there wouldn’t be any harm in applying a little more heat himself. He did this business of looking over their shoulders again.

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘if that isn’t Prendick! Let’s bring him in.’

  It was a comedy, how they swung round on that one, and he could hardly keep a straight face when he said No, he’d made a mistake, and it was just a fellow like Prendick had gone straight through the lounge. Both their hands went out to their drinks like you’d expect, all right. Phil, of course, had done his pouring trick again. So in about thirty seconds there were three empty glasses on the table.

  ‘Another brandy, yes?’ McLeod asked, mopping his brow with a handkerchief that matched his tie.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Phil said. ‘One more would be just the job.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  And now they were surrounding him. Although there was only Hannay and this cheaper crook who called himself McLeod, that was how it felt – that he was in a little closing circle of knees and faces and brandy glasses, and with cigar smoke to breathe instead of air. Perhaps they were all alone now in this great gaudy cave of a lounge, or perhaps there was the same sort of dirty work going on in the other corners of it. Phil wouldn’t know. He was in a queer sort of daze that had nothing to do with alcohol, and he’d have liked to know whether he was playing the crooks or the crooks were playing him.

  ‘Them country clubs now,’ he said with a yokel’s gawp at Hannay, ‘how would there be big money in them, like?’

  Hannay grinned as if he was a teacher with a promising pupil coming on. His clock was still the affable Brigadier’s, but you felt now that if you passed a sponge over it there’d be something quite different underneath. He still spoke like he was at his old pal the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, but there was something in his voice that would make any Lord Mayor snap out an order for locking up the gold plate. As for McLeod, probity and Bonnie Scotland had faded out on him altogether. His voice had gone soft like the rest of him, and he was sweating as if he was back in Alexandra – no, Alexandria – or Port Said or whatever Wog place had vomited him.

  ‘Money, undoubtedly. Whether there is still big money is gravely open to doubt.’ Hannay, although his hand was shaking now, managed his weighty City manner. ‘The fact is that people – substantial people – are more and more taking that sort of—ah—discreet holiday on the Continent.’

  ‘Holiday with a bit of fun, like?’ Phil asked. He had a feeling that his own fun was turning perverse as he spoke. But he enjoyed a kind of quick hiss that came from McLeod, as if the bleeder was reckoning they’d made a trick.

  ‘Quite so—quite so.’ Hannay, as he came near to the nub of the matter, contrived a nod as respectable as a bishop’s. ‘There’s endless money there, you know. Like it or not, Tombs, we live in an expense-account world. And men in responsible positions have to—um—recruit themselves. But the fact is that England is deuced small for the purpose. You’re always rubbing up against the other fellow, so to speak.’

  ‘Not what you want to be rubbing up against at all, like,’ Phil offered.

  ‘Exactly.’ Hannay, who had looked startled for a moment, gave a kind of cackle that Phil appreciated as a new stage in the affair. ‘The truth is that we have to go after the hoi poloi. A useful Greek phrase. But I speak comparatively, you understand. Faceless men, let us say. Do you realise that two hundred and twenty thousand prosperous provincial males come into London for a stay of less than twenty-four hours every day?’

  ‘No,’ Phil said, ‘I don’t.’ He came out with this quite the wrong way, figures being something he had a respect for. But Hannay was unchecked.

  ‘It’s a sober fact, my dear fellow. And the time-factor is the whole thing. That right—um—Colin?’

  ‘That is right. You understand time-factor, yes?’ McLeod leaned forward on his bulging hips and laid a hand on Phil’s arm that he could feel the clamminess of right through the honest tweed protecting it. ‘Three hours – two hours – one hour for the good time. Then the Manchester train, the Leeds, the Birmingham train, and back to domesticals, yes?’ McLeod gave a sudden leer like he’d taken his pants off. ‘Back to ma and the kiddies, no?’

  There was a kind of small voice in Phil’s head, telling him that he’d had his joke and that this was where he walked out. But the voice, somehow, was a bit too small to get him moving.

  ‘So what?’ he said.

  McLeod took a quick furtive look round the lounge. He licked his lips with a tongue that had a nasty point to it. Again he leaned forward.

  ‘Greater London Sextettes,’ he said. ‘You put your money there, no? We double it in twelve months.’

  ‘Sextets?’ Phil said. ‘I can’t say I’m all that musical, I can’t. Not that I don’t like a good chune, like.’

  This imbecility shook them – but not, perhaps, as much as Phil was shaken himself. He was walking, he guessed, straight into the sort of temptation that his auntie, and Artie Coutts, and for that matter the Primitive Methodists in New Street would have promised him. Sextettes rearing their ugly heads. For he wasn’t so dumb he didn’t see that McLeod felt he’d thought up a good crack with that one. Corny, Phil would call it.

  ‘Small sexy shows—see?’ McLeod, in spite of a warning nod from the more cautious Hannay, had come clean, sure enough. ‘A whole chain of them. High class Rue Pigalle stuff – and one within reach of any guy with a bit of time and money anywhere round town, yes? Girls, gags, giggles. But mostly girls.’

  ‘Of a refined type,’ Hannay said. ‘Um—stimulating and all that sort of thing. But artistic. Continental artistes.’

  McLeod nodded. There was a bead of sweat running down his nose, and his eye that was on Phil had gone like a snake’s.

  ‘You ever had Continental girls, no? I got six coming in from Hungary next week – if I can find the cash. Always I can feed girls through – with finance, Mr. Tombs, with finance. So there’s our offer. Controlling interest, you can have, Mr. Tombs. Stay as much in the background as you like, and no risks attached. Only privileges, no?’

  ‘Privileges?’ Phil said. He found that he was trembling all over. It was that, perhaps, that prevented him a second time from getting up and walking out.

  ‘We mustn’t hurry Tombs in this important matter.’ Hannay, as he said this, stood up. ‘He will want—um—to inspect some of the enterprises on offer. And in actual operation. Come along.’

  Phil found that the daze he was in had a real grip on him. Almost he wondered whether brandy did something to you just by evaporating near your nose. For he was going along. All three, they were making their way out of the lounge.

  ‘In operation?’ he said, rather feebly. ‘At this time of day?’

  McLeod took him by the arm.

  ‘Permanong,’ he said. ‘You seen that in the Pigalle? All day and every day. We’ve got some way to go, but we’re working towards that. Les Sextettes Permanongs de Londres. Good, no?’

  ‘Bleeding good, man.’ The devil had suddenly entered Phil again, and he spoke as if he’d drunk all the brandy that he hadn’t. He wondered if they had something up their sleeves that would really fix him – a Mata Hari waiting on a tiger-skin, or perhaps some way of compromising him that would get him feeling he’d been put on the wrong side of the law. You read about such things, and here he was in the middle of them. ‘Permanong,’ he said, and managed to sway slightly on McLeod’s arm. ‘Double entong. Topical song.’ He glimpsed McLeod and Hannay exchanging a swift glance. They were wondering whether they hadn’t got him too badly jarred, and he saw it was with relief that they were through the swing-doors of their sodding Grand Excelsior and tumbling him into the waiting car.

  ‘Number Four, Joe,’ Hannay said to Hotchkiss – who wasn’t holding a rug this time.

  ‘Okey-dokey,’ Hotchkiss said familiarly. And they drove off.

  He’d better have a drag, Phil thought, and felt in his pockets. And what his hand came on was that packet he’d bought
on Friday in Melchizedek’s. It was crumpled but there were still two or three fags in it, and when he fished one out it was like a hundred years ago. Twenty Camels, please. A hundred houris. Or just six Hungarians. He had a panic feeling that he didn’t know about himself. Not a thing.

  The car swung into a shabby street and then into a shabbier one. It was queer how in London you got posh places and plain sodding squalor on top of each other. He was accustomed to mean streets but these mean streets alarmed him. He remembered that he had nearly fifty pounds on him, and it came into his head that what they were perhaps really after was robbing him. Naturally he knew in a second that such an idea was nonsense. Hannay mightn’t be the big shot he made out – in fact it was certain he wasn’t – but at least he must operate in what you’d call a middling large way. Going about in a car like this as he was, anything Phil had in his pockets couldn’t mean a thing to him. But then Phil had another notion that a bit scared him. These crooks might be kidnappers, mightn’t they? He’d read how millionaires sometimes get their kids stolen – and as Phil hadn’t any kids himself perhaps Hannay and this lot had decided to nab him. Perhaps they’d hold on to him, and even torture him, until he agreed to let them have his money. Phil had just managed to tell himself this was as silly an idea as he’d had yet, when the car stopped and he found himself tumbling out of it.

  This time, Hotchkiss didn’t make even a pretence of assisting. He was sitting back and lighting a cigarette. It seemed to be taken for granted that it was now reasonable to drop a lot of the eye-wash. Phil would certainly hear nothing more about Hannay’s chumminess with Prendick. The crooks were reckoning they had him on a hook now – the strong hook of sexual curiosity – and that soon they’d be landing him pretty. Which was nonsense, Phil told himself. But he followed Hannay and McLeod.

  He had no notion of his whereabouts, and a quick look up and down certainly revealed no landmarks. There were just small shops, and a couple of street barrows, and a dog nosing at some garbage. But there was a rumble of traffic from quite close by, so it was reasonable to suppose they were just at the back of some considerable thoroughfare.