‘Yeah,’ Charlie said.
Although Sally had a ten-month-old daughter, Amanda, at her breast she said, ‘There something I can do for you, Charlie?’ and she nodded toward the bedroom.
Charlie shook his head. ‘The knee’s still bad. But I’m hungry.’
Sally lifted Amanda slightly. ‘When’s she’s done I’ll cook you something.’
‘Na,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll go down the chipper. I’ll take Tommy. Get some for him too.’
‘Suit yourself. You know where to find him.’
Charlie made his way into the living room where Tommy, Sally’s eleven-year-old son, sat lolling on a couch in front of a television set.
‘Wakey wakey,’ Charlie said as he sat down.
Tommy looked up sleepily. Charlie took a chocolate bar from his pocket and passed it to the boy. Tommy accepted the chocolate wordlessly and began to unwrap it. As he did so, Charlie turned to the television set and tried to work out what was happening to the cartoon figures who were dashing about on the screen.
After a few minutes Charlie said, ‘I’m going for fish and chips. You coming?’
Tommy said nothing, but he rose from the couch and followed Charlie back to the kitchen where Sally was laying Amanda in her cot. Charlie said, ‘Heard from Stinger?’
‘Na,’ Sally said.
‘Only another twenty-seven months,’ Charlie said.
‘With good behaviour,’ Sally said, ‘and when was that fucker’s behaviour any bloody good, eh?’
After leaving Tommy, Charlie went to King’s Cross. The first few girls he asked said they’d never heard of Beverley and that cheered Charlie up. But as he moved closer to Gray’s Inn Road a black-haired woman in a leopard-skin T-shirt said, ‘I saw her over there half an hour ago,’ and pointed. As Charlie’s eyes followed the woman’s finger he saw Beverley for himself, leaning against cast iron railings and looking unsteady.
He watched as two men walked towards her and slowed down. She, in turn, straightened and spoke to them. The men laughed and walked past. Beverley called them names that Charlie could hear all the way to where he was standing with the leopard-skin woman. Behind the men’s backs Beverley gave them the finger, but neither of them turned to see it.
Then, as the two men approached the leopard-skin woman said, ‘On your way, Dad.’
Charlie left, leaving both Beverley and the leopard-skin woman to business.
The robbery at Leonard Slaughter’s did not go as planned. For a start, nothing inside the house at the address Lorna had given was where it was supposed to be. And when it came to details, like the cash in the screw-off top on the corner of the wooden bedstead, not only did none of the bedstead’s corners screw off, they weren’t even wooden.
Another thing was that the house did not belong to Leonard Slaughter.
And the last thing was that waiting inside the house was the fat policeman and he was carrying a truncheon. When he revealed himself the fat policeman said, ‘I hope you’re going to make a run for it. I really hope you will, because I love the sound this thing makes when it hits a head. Go on, son, run. Make my day.’
The next morning Leonard Slaughter was in a very good mood. After a leisurely breakfast in his sumptuous flat, he went to the Balham High Road office and waited for the expected visit from the fat policeman. The fat man was due at two but even when he hadn’t arrived by three, Slaughter was not unhappy. He poured himself and Lorna another drink and he decided to have her tell again the story of what she had said to Charlie.
‘The old scum,’ Slaughter said. ‘He hadn’t brought anything worth having for weeks. Definitely losing his touch. Definitely expendable.’
‘You should have seen his face,’ Lorna said.
‘You said you was an out of work actress when we met,’ Slaughter said, ‘but I never believed it until now.’
Lorna had just about got through the story when the fat man finally arrived. He looked grave.
The fat man needed only ten minutes to tell the story of the arrest and subsequent events. His anger increased each minute. “I know I said any body,’ he said with fury, ‘But I meant a body I could count. Someone I could point to and say, “Look that clears up twenty or thirty burglaries, so we can concentrate on something else again.” I did not mean an eleven-year-old kid, even if he did look sixteen. And I certainly did not mean an eleven-year-old kid who had a thin skull.’
Before the ten minutes were up the fat policeman made it clear that when he’d sorted his own problems out he would return. He made it clear that his past arrangement with Leonard Slaughter was at an end. That what should have continued as a simple and secure arrangement was now a fucking mess and anything that came out of it was no more than Lennie Fucking Slaughter fucking deserved.
Neither Slaughter nor Lorna knew what the fat policeman was talking about, and made attempts to say so. But the fat policeman’s ten minutes didn’t run to it. When he was finished he stormed out of the room because he was due back at the station to begin the internal investigation procedure.
But the fat policeman did not get to tell his side of the story to the internal investigators. He barely got as far as the stairs.
From the shadows on the landing Charlie stepped out as the fat policeman left Slaughter’s office. With a tyre iron he broke the fat policeman’s head open with a single blow, just as the fat policeman had done to Tommy. Like Tommy, the fat policeman was dead before he hit the floor. Unlike tommy for the fat policeman the floor was at the bottom of the flight of stairs.
The noise of the fall was loud enough to be heard inside Slaughter’s office. Lennie Slaughter opened the door and came out onto the landing to see what had happened.
In a matter of moments he followed the fat policeman in all particulars except that at the bottom of the stairs his body did not land on the floor. It landed on the fat policeman. Neither Slaughter nor the fat policeman knew who had hit him. Or, of course, why.
Inside the office Lorna’s fate was different. She, at least, knew who. She was even able to protest, to scream. But of course nobody came to her assistance and in any case they would have been too late.
Back at the nick the senior officers waiting to interview the fat policeman grew angry when he did not arrive and they thought he was being obstructive. Colleagues who knew him better thought chances were he’d done a runner. Both, of course, were wrong, but it was not until a down-and-out tried the handle of the dirty, unlabelled door on
Balham High Road that anybody found out what had actually happened to the fat policeman. As soon as he saw the bodies inside the unlocked door the down-and-out ran away. Three people passing on the pavement saw him run. All three went to investigate.
Later one said he had heard the fleeing man scream. But none of the three witnesses could describe the down-and-out in any detail.
AND SHE LAUGHED by LIZ HOLLIDAY
I reckon it took all the luck in the world to get me this flat,’ Jane Martin said. ‘Probably means I’ll never get another job, or win the pools, or anything.’
She was sitting in the darkness in the hall, with the telephone receiver cradled on her shoulder. She took a piece of meat from the kebab open on the floor in front of her. ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘how many other single people do you know who have council flats to themselves, Paula?’
Her friend’s voice crackled down the line at her, saying something congratulatory, but Jane’s attention was on the cans of paint she had bought that morning: painting the whole flat white wasn’t really cheap, just cheaper than any other idea she had been able to come up with.