Over there on the main street a stretch limo pulled up. Bet it has come for him. Just his style, the jerk. Avoiding eye contact while the object of disapproval paused at her elbow, Melanie caught a sidelong flash of designer-stubbled chin jerking at the limo. Doors opened and three men obeyed the summons, one waiting by the car, the others marching forward.
Villains, Mrs. Skeets diagnosed with weary distaste. Running an East End pub had taught her to pick out professional criminals and most varieties of policemen on sight.
Refusing to take any more notice of the crew, she saw that Bad News Man was making for the archway. The phone was still at his ear; evidently he had got through at last because he was talking hard and his free hand was chopping the air for emphasis.
The noise was sharp and a freak of acoustics in the arena brought out its special quality — not particularly loud, but indefinably out of place. It was an ugly rip in the everyday fabric of traffic sounds, voices, and occasional snatches of trills and tunes from those pervasive phones.
Pigeons erupted from the gym’s roof. Mrs. Skeets started violently and spilled wine on her dress. People halted or missed a stride, staring around for the source. The large man reeking of cologne was halfway to the limo, and Melanie had the confused impression that he’d flinched an instant before anybody else reacted, which made no sense.
Suddenly he was falling like a tree, the bodyguards, one kneeling beside the casualty, were shouting and pointing wildly.
Only the unhappy young phonetalker whom Melanie Skeets had pitied was immune to the disturbance. By the set of dark-suited shoulders, misery made him oblivious to anything short of a crack of thunder.
His head turned toward the limo, where his cronies were dancing in indecision, the kneeling thug shouted, “They shot him!” That started a panicked rush for cover.
Melanie Skeets stayed right where she was. Courage didn’t come into it; she was stunned by a revelation. She understood that she had not observed events but interpreted what she was seeing. Conned myself, me and my empathy. What a daft article I can be.
She hoped the police would show up soon. There was urgent need to speak to them. More to the point, she hoped that one of them would listen to her.
The dead man was Ernest “Tasty Ernie” Balch, an abrasive and highly successful dealer in drugs, pornography, and prostitutes. He hadn’t set out to diversify, but one thing had led to another.
Success, as ever, brought personal and professional enemies, both groups noted for vengefulness and contempt for law and human life alike. Two years before working out and then using too much aftershave, Tasty Ernie survived an assassination attempt, but chance favored him. No way should he have got out alive, but the gunman’s revolver snagged on its journey from the shoulder holster, and his target’s reflexes were excellent. Balch ducked the bullet, and ran for his life, literally — those gym sessions had not been in vain.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. The fiasco (in the hit man’s jaundiced view) spurred Mr. Balch to review and tighten up security. In vain, admittedly, but at least he’d tried.
Meanwhile, the police reacted with unusual rapidity and verve. The chief investigating officer took the shotgun option and hauled in dozens of Tasty Ernie Balch’s rivals, associates, and even a few ambiguous friends.
Among them was Nigel Crane — a name generating cruel mirth, but that was much later. Crane’s detention was striking proof of police unfairness and the truth of the Cockney adage, “All coppers are bastards.” He was arrested in a departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, exactly forty minutes after Mrs. Skeets and many, many others heard the fatal shot.
“You are joking. What is this? Can’t I even go on holiday anymore?”
“Sorry, Nige.” The detective constable was an old acquaintance and courtesy costs nothing. Crane was dodgy but always good for a drink. “Can’t be helped, orders from God Almighty. We both know it’s stupid but try telling them that, eh?” The killing had gone down at the far side of London hardly half an hour ago. Unless Crane owned one of those James Bond jet packs, he couldn’t have reached the airport so quickly. Well, slight exaggeration... if Crane had a motorbike waiting behind the new mall he might just have managed it.
Leafing through a girlie magazine in the departure lounge, Nigel Crane had looked serene and a trifle bored, not like a windswept, nearly-bought-it-twice-and-that-was-just-the-first-mile rider or pillion passenger. If he had covered over twenty traffic-heavy miles from the crime scene in just about as many minutes, then he deserved a vacation for nerve.
But he hadn’t done anything like that, the detective was positive. It was Give a Dog a Bad Name syndrome. There were persistent rumors that Crane was a hit man. Informers alleged it, although they couldn’t provide a scrap of proof. “My own silly fault,” he had conceded on one occasion, while admitting petty fraud. “I used to tell birds fairy tales to impress ’em. There’s a certain type that is right morbid, blood on your hands really turns them on. Some day, I’ll grow up and learn sense.”
That had the ring of truth, the detective constable considered. “Somebody will look at the times and do their sums, and you will be on your way, no danger.”
“I’m having a pants year all round, mate. Beyond pants, I can’t win for losing. Been saving for ages to go to Rio — see Carnival and die, isn’t that the saying?”
“Naples is see it and die. Rio, I been there and it’s overrated. Hot and cold running pickpockets and the Sugarloaf, what is that about? It’s a hill, be still my heart.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better about missing the trip.” Nigel Crane smiled wanly. “Appreciate it.”
“Melanie Skeets,” says the detective inspector whom she had cornered that day, “was a very good witness and a bloody awful one.
“She couldn’t describe the man she guessed had been the shooter. She kept on about El Greco, whoever he was — the shooter didn’t look like him, he just put her in mind of some bygone oil painter. ‘I will recognize him if I see him,’ she went. Which she did, no hesitation. Dead fair ID parade too — all were the same general type, and several could have doubled for Nigel Crane if you only knew him by sight.”
Our Inspector, a helpful label given the number of officers involved, admits that Melanie Skeets’s outlandish theory attracted him because it accounted for the unaccountable. He was all for that.
“Three guys were watching Balch on his way from the gym to the car, right? Him, and everybody around him. All three minders insisted the shot came out of thin air. The killer had to have used a long gun, a rifle, from the gym roof or one of the tower blocks on the street behind.
“They were wrong. Balch was killed by a .38 round fired at just about point-blank range. Impossible, the muscle reckoned. Nobody close to their boss had a gun out, or pulled a gun. They’d have seen that, it was exactly what they were alert for, right? They weren’t lying or covering up, either. They loved the guy — no accounting for taste — they’d wanted to keep him alive and they had been heads-up all the while.
“These weren’t standard witnesses, the kind of civilians who walk round in a daze and will tell you rubbish. Like I said, they’d had their eyes peeled, and they were adamant that nobody at ground level could have shot Big Eddie.