Philip McCutchan
Gibraltar Road
CHAPTER ONE
The summons had come by telephone, early, just as Shaw was finishing breakfast in his West Kensington flat, and he’d known what it was before he’d picked up the receiver. This was partly because he had slept badly the night before, and had dreamed that the bullet had come for him out of the dark, with a flash and a hint of a woman’s laughter and the tail-end of a well-remembered scent; and partly because the only person other than Carberry likely to ring him so early was Debonnair, and she’d had to hop across to Paris on business on behalf of Eastern Petroleum for a couple of days, so almost certainly it wasn’t her. The sudden ring had made him start, and afterwards he’d had to mop up the coffee which had split all over the bachelor-bare table, with its marmalade-pot all sticky, the Demerara sugar in the blue packet, damply clinging, the butter still in its wrapper on a dish… Shaw wasn’t lazy, but he had too much on his mind, and he just couldn’t be bothered with the prosaic details of looking after himself properly.
He answered the phone quickly, to stop the strident ring which seemed in some way to bring the essence of danger into the quiet flat. “Hullo?” he said cautiously. “Shaw here.”
Button A was pressed. There was a clatter of metal, and a voice said, “Morning, Esmonde, morning! I say — you doing anything this morning, old man?”
Shaw ran a hand over his long chin. His glance wandered round the room, and there was a strained look in his eye as he answered, “Nothing that can’t wait.”
“Oh, good — fine! I just thought we might have a natter over a noggin — might be able to put a spot of business in your way, old boy!” Carberry always seemed to speak expansively and in exclamation marks, which was why he was known as The Voice in the outfit, and many of his expressions had firm war-time roots even now. “If you’d care to come along at, let’s say, eleven-thirty?”
The voice, which held a perpetual and rather childish note of eagerness, was so cheery that it often struck Shaw as being almost inane. Its owner wasn’t in the least inane— except on the surface. Shaw knew that Carberry was clever enough to disguise his brilliance, and to hide the fact that he knew he was tipped to succeed the Old Man one of these days. And there was something else which Shaw knew: an invitation to a natter over a noggin with The Voice really meant a command to report to the Old Man in person at the time specified and not a minute later, and the spot of business meant pretty well what it implied, so he just said:
“All right, I’ll look forward to that. Be along at eleven-thirty.”
“Good — fine!” boomed The Voice, sounding fat and jovial — Carberry in the flesh was actually thin, ascetic, dried-up. Shaw sometimes thought the voice had been acquired by way of compensation for its owner’s physique. “Bye-bye till then, old boy!”
There was a click. Frowning, Shaw jerked the hand-set back on to its cradle, grey-blue eyes gazing unseeingly across the untidy room into the road and a cloud-filled sky. He was seeing something very different, and he didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t want any more of those experiences; he hated the killings, necessary though they might be at times, hated the betrayals and the subterfuges and the lies he was forced to tell to decent, kindly folk… this time, he promised himself, I’m really going to have it out with the Old Man and tell him I’m packing it in.
He dealt with the spilt coffee, and then, sitting down, he made himself finish a piece of dry toast. He poured out another cup of coffee. After that, compressing his lips a little, he reached into a pocket and put a couple of Dr Jenner’s tablets in his mouth, for the pain was coming on again as it always did on these occasions. A moment later he got up, chucked the breakfast things together on a tray which he carried into the tiny kitchen. Then he went out into the little hall, and because it was a coldish day for summer and looked like rain he pulled on a navy blue raincoat; shoving a dark green pork-pie hat on the crisp brown hair, he let himself out of the flat into Gliddon Road. It was early, but it was a long walk and he liked walking, preferred it to Tube or bus or taxi, liked the hurrying, everyday crowds in Kensington High Street, the children being wheeled out into Kensington Gardens, the sense of normality all round him. It was a long way, but it would do him good, maybe settle his nerves so he could really talk to the Old Man and get all this over and done with for good, and go back to sea. He examined the lowering clouds with a weather-wise eye; the rain would come before he got there, sure enough, but he could always hop on a taxi en route.
The Dr Jenner’s began to wither in his mouth, and he felt a little better. He cursed his nerves, the way they played him up like this. Surely they were a good enough excuse to get him out of this racket, he thought. But he knew that wouldn’t wash, really, because the Old Man was only too damn well aware that his nerves never let him down once things got moving.
Walking briskly, he turned down Gunterstone Road.
From a window a little way along Gunterstone Road a typist watched from behind net curtains. The typist was young, she was pretty, and she was going to play truant from that beastly old office again. Mum, protesting as usual in her weak and fussy way, would ring up Mr Silvers to say Joy was poorly and wouldn’t be coming in to-day. The typist would hear Mr Silvers’s loud voice snapping down the phone: “What, again?” Mum would look distressed, as though Mr Silvers knew she knew he knew she was telling a lie, but she wouldn’t say anything, and Mr Silvers would bang the phone down, and that would be that… The reckoning would come to-morrow, but meanwhile the typist watched from the window as she had so often done before, because she’d seen the interesting-looking man coming down the road. He nearly always went out about this time, though there were unexplained absences, sometimes quite lengthy ones, when he didn’t appear at all. She’d followed him one morning when she’d been ‘poorly’; it was ever so romantic, she’d thought at first, but all he’d done was to walk to the Round Pond and sit and watch the kiddies for a while and then he’d walked back home. He’d caught her eye and had given her a tired, shy smile, and somehow she’d felt he knew he was being followed. She wondered what he did for a living… by his appearance, he might have been almost anything, she decided, though had she been more observant (and a little closer) she might possibly have noticed something about the deep-set eyes which spoke of a man who’d spent a few years looking out over blue water from a ship’s bridge. Having no experience of the sea, nothing of this sort occurred to the typist, and now, as Shaw came towards her window, all she saw was a tall, angular, very slightly stooped man with a long chin and with directness and determination in a thin, keen face — a face brown and rather deeply lined; the mouth large and firm but looking as though it could smile a lot, though there was something about the face which made her somehow aware that this man hadn’t often very much to smile about. Beneath the navy blue raincoat his body seemed thin, though probably wiry and tough, and somehow he looked as though he didn’t eat enough.
The typist’s scarcely awakened maternal instincts stirred… she’d never seen him with a woman, and so she assumed he was a bachelor, and that made her feel sorry for him, sorry and warm and tender. He was so much nicer to look at than Mr Silvers, who was short and fat and undistinguished and bald (was the man bald under that hat? she wondered. She didn’t think so, because he was greying ever so slightly over and in front of the ears). Mr Silvers was soft and white and irritable, with well-kept pudgy hands which looked as though they were perpetually restraining themselves from pinching her bottom.