He stood for a moment in the corridor outside, than went past the door clearly marked ‘Gentlemen’. He moved on to the last door on the same side of the passage, which he knew led outside. The cool of the air struck immediately through the thinness of his jeans, but the isolation was a relief after the rowdy hilarity he had left. In this enclosed space, he couldn’t feel the breeze he had felt on the quay, but he saw it moving the clouds across the patch of sky he could see above him. He caught a glimpse of stars between the clouds, but had no sight of the almost full moon he knew must be present beyond the high wall on his right.
He waited only three minutes, but it felt much longer than that, as he fought to control the tenseness gathering in his limbs. Then the door he had used himself opened briefly, revealing for an instant a shaft of orange light from the crowded world of the pub. His eyes were used to the darkness now, yet he saw no more than the dark shape of a man, appearing bigger and more threatening as it moved nearer to him. He didn’t say anything; he’d made that mistake before. You waited until you were spoken to by this man.
The new presence glanced back towards the door he had just used, waited whilst the silence dropped back over them like a blanket in the darkness. Then, ‘You shifted what you took last time?’ He didn’t use names; Sam knew neither the surname nor the forename of this man he had already met four times like this.
‘Yes. No bother.’
‘You want the same again?’
‘No. I want twice the coke and twice the Rohypnol. The horse can stay the same.’
‘Coke’s no problem. I can only do you the same Rohypnol as last time. Same price for the coke. Rohypnol’s up twenty.’
‘Can’t you do any more? I can move it easily enough.’
‘Use it yourself, do you, you randy little sod?’ A flash of teeth in the darkness showed the burly man was grinning. He corrected this lapse into the personal as suddenly as it had arrived. ‘No can do, my friend. Everyone wants the date-rape drug. Sign of the times, son.’
‘All right. I–I thought the coke might be a bit cheaper, if I doubled the order.’
‘Preferential rate for the learner-dealer, that was. You now need to double the quantity to keep the rate the same, which is what you’re doing. Sellers’ market, son. Take your custom elsewhere, if you can. You won’t beat our rates and our quality.’ He allowed a harder edge to sharpen his words. ‘You’d be very foolish to try that, mind you.’
‘I’ve no intention of going anywhere else! I wouldn’t know how,’ said Sam hastily.
‘Wise lad. I’ve got what you say you want here. You got the money?’
‘Yes.’ Sam glanced round furtively, but it was no more than an instinctive reaction as he brought out his money in this silent place.
Three hundred pounds. His supplier flashed a pen-torch briefly and expertly over the fifties and twenties on the low wall, ‘Another eighty, lad.’
Four more twenties, new and crisp, were slid across. The man felt into the deep pockets of the long coat he wore, produced the packages of coke as though he had had them ready, as though he had anticipated this doubling of the order, though Sam knew he could never have done that. From some other section of that all-concealing garment, he produced the Rohypnol and set it on top of the neatly packaged cocaine. ‘Quality as previous: the best. We only supply the best.’
‘I know that. I’ve no complaints.’ Sam Hilton wanted to be on his way more fervently than he had wanted anything in his life.
‘Glad to hear it son. Remember that and don’t sell too cheap. Want you to have a good mark-up. Don’t want you to become the sort of dealer who has to sell to feed his habit. They don’t last long, that sort.’
It was the nearest thing to advice he ever offered. He looked unhurriedly round at the high wall between them and the outside world, at the cloud scudding across the small patch of sky above them, at the hostelry with its muted noises which they must both re-enter. ‘Usual arrangement, son. You go first. I follow in two minutes, unless I hear anything to suggest I shouldn’t do that.’
Sam Hilton didn’t hesitate. He thrust his new supplies into the pockets of his anorak and slipped without a backwards glance through the door and back into the busy hostelry. The pint and the coldness of the yard were insistent in his bladder. He needed urgently to turn into the gents and discharge its contents into one of the urinals. But he needed even more urgently to be away, to be out of the pub into the darkness outside, and then back to the street in the centre of the city where he had parked the old Focus.
Thirty minutes later, he was back in his flat, peeing at last for what was surely the longest ever time into the lavatory bowl, groaning the exquisite pleasure of his relief. The profits when he sold this stuff on would be good, even ridiculous: almost a forty percent mark-up on even the excessive rates he was sure he had paid. And tomorrow, or at least on the next day or the day after that, the strain of acquiring his supplies would not seem so great.
But at this moment the price of being a poet seemed almost too much to bear.
SIX
Christine Lambert was surprised by the phone call. The caller wasn’t unexpected; when you were on committees, it was quite usual for the chairperson to ring you up about committee business. What surprised her was that Marjorie Dooks sounded uncertain, even vulnerable; she had never encountered that before.
‘Mrs Lambert? Are you on your own, Christine? Something has come up. I don’t quite know what I should do about it. I’d welcome your advice.’
‘Of course. I’m happy to say what I think, if you believe it will be any help.’
‘Thank you. Not on the phone, though. Could I come round and see you? I think that would be better than you coming here. During the day. Today, if possible.’
The staccato phrases were fired off as if Marjorie was thinking on her feet. That was a shock to Christine Lambert, who was used to the formidable Mrs Dooks being so measured and prepared.
‘I’ll be happy to give you whatever help I can. Perhaps I should say that although my husband hasn’t agreed to appear on the platform with David Knight yet, I’m fairly confident that-’
‘What? Oh, it’s not about that. It’s something quite different, and rather odd.’
Christine was intrigued. It must be something very odd indeed, to throw the formidable Marjorie Dooks so completely out of her stride. ‘I have to go out this morning. Would three this afternoon be all right for you?’
‘That would suit me admirably. You — you will be alone, won’t you?’
‘Yes. We won’t be disturbed.’
Christine put down the phone and stared at it thoughtfully for a moment. Intriguing. What could be so private that Marjorie didn’t want John Lambert around when it was discussed?
She took her friend for her hospital appointment as arranged, then drove home and snatched a quick sandwich lunch. She left herself time to vacuum and plump the cushions in the sitting room before her visitor arrived. Marjorie Dooks wasn’t the sort of woman you ushered into an untidy room. She was flicking a duster over the top of the television when the lady’s silver Peugeot swung into her drive.
Marjorie surged through the politenesses of a first visit quickly and abstractedly, as though they were some tiresome rites that had to be observed as a prelude to genuine communication. Christine made a pot of tea, then watched her visitor refuse biscuits and sip abstractedly at her cup, as if it were just another distraction set in front of her to prevent her coming to the point of her visit. ‘Something very odd has happened,’ she said abruptly.
‘Really? And what is that?’
Mrs Dooks looked automatically around the room, as if she thought some hidden listener was there to be discovered. ‘I’ve had a strange letter. I’ve never received anything like it before.’