Kim Grizzard was without a glass, that was the first thing Alex noticed. Nonner the buggers joining other people’s tables ever seemed to have glasses. In Leeds, pubs, clubs, anywhere, if you joined a mate, you brought a glass over with you, you didn’t expect him to get one in for you.
Kim, however, did not seem to have a drink on his mind. Glowering at Brendan he demanded: “All right, shitface, when are you going to review my last fucking novel?”
Brendan, unperturbed, said: “I’m doing you a favour in not reviewing it. It’s unmitigated crap.”
“Good quality crap, though, admit it.”
With a formal sweep of the hand, Brendan said: “Kim, I should like you to meet my young friend Alex. Alex, this is Kim Grizzard, the failed novelist.”
Alex wondered why no one ever put one on the cheeky sod. Or maybe they did. On the other hand, he was a beefy bugger. Looked as if he could take care of himself.
Without in the least acknowledging the introduction, Kim Grizzard, a self-obsessed berk in Alex’s view, as moster them seemed to be in here, plonked down a fat, much-annotated typescript and said, not without pride: “This is the next one. If you don’t review this I’ll never speak to you again.”
“You go on making these promises, Kim, but you never keep them. Under what title is it to be remaindered?”
“Freeze When You Say That, it’s called. Guy locks his wife in the deep freeze because she’s frigid.”
“Ah. An allegory.”
“A thriller. She gets out and goes after him.”
“The Ice Maiden Cometh. But why are you dragging the manuscript about London? Can’t you find a publisher?”
“I have publishers beating a path to my door, but having had the one by way of celebration, I left it too late to get copies run off at Kall-Kwik.”
“That’s how you propose to distribute it, is it?”
“Copies for my agent, berk!”
“A bit hard on Waterstone’s, is it not?” enquired Brendan blandly. “To have another Kim Grizzard thrust at them before the last one has been pulped?”
“You do come out with them, don’t you, Brendan? All been used before, but you still come out with them.”
Brendan Barton bowed acknowledgement at the jibe, and allowed Kim Grizzard to change the subject.
Looking around the room and sniffing ostentatiously, Grizzard asked: “What happened to the rancid pong I detected when I came in? I didn’t see Libby with the air freshener.”
“Taken itself down to the bog, I imagine.”
“Home of bad smells.”
“Probably hoping to find something snortworthy down there. Ever the optimist, our Ellis Hugo Bell.”
“He’ll be lucky. What’s he doing, or claiming to be doing?”
“Oh, setting up an Oscar winner, as always. He’s looking for a screenwriter, if you’re at all interested.”
Alex, shrewdly for him, judged that Kim Grizzard, who in his early thirties or so did not look particularly well nourished, was interested although feigning otherwise.
“Why, what kite is he flying this time?”
“Christ knows. Care for a drink?”
“Scotch, please. None of your small ones.”
Oh, Christ. Alex might just as well go down into the bog and flush all his money down the loo. Funny how one minute they could be sitting there insulting one another, kinder thing you’d be invited to step outside for at the Leeds Metro Union, and the next be demanding large drinks off one another. Or rather, more to the point, off Alex, since there was no way of dodging his round.
Rigidly raising an arm and keeping it raised until he attracted the waitress’s attention, Brendan continued: “From what I gathered, it’s based on that case two or three years ago where a woman in somewhere near Los Angeles deliberately set out to get herself murdered.”
Kim Grizzard, who like just about everybody else in the room had been agitatedly jerking his right leg up and down as if working an invisible treadle sewing-machine, brought this compulsive activity to an abrupt halt.
“It’s what do you say?”
“Or on some kind of treatment based on the case, since he didn’t seem to have heard of the true-life story. But he did ask me if it was conceivable that somebody could deliberately get themselves murdered for kicks.”
“I’ll fucking kill him,” said Kim Grizzard very quietly, as in a trance.
“Why, are you claiming copyright? Come to think of it, I suppose it is the kind of crappy idea you might have used in one of your novels, Kim.”
“Did you say he was downstairs?”
“One imagines so. Search parties have not been sent out.”
The waitress was hovering. Alex had idly picked up a bar tariff card from the butler’s tray table. Club whisky, six quid a shot. Jesus wept.
“Libby, my young friend and I will partake of two further glasses of your fifty pee Chardonnay, but this gentleman has a murder to commit, so he begs to be excused.”
“I’ll commit it when the thieving swine comes back up here. A public execution, this is going to be. Double Scotch, Libby, no ice. In fact make that a triple Scotch.”
Hellfire. Alex had a sudden urge to go to the lavatory. He rose stiltedly and in clumsy imitation of Ellis Hugo Bell’s exit said: “Dog. Bog,” and departed.
Long before reaching the bottom of the stairs to the gents’ he had worked out the price of the round. Triple club whisky, eighteen quid, two glasses Chardonnay nine pounds, no way dare he ask for change out of thirty quid. Of course, there was always the possibility that Brendan might pick up the tab, but why the hell should he, he wasn’t a charitable institution, and anyway, he wasn’t working these days, was he? Alex determined to have his pee and slink off, having cut his losses. Not that, thank Christ, he had run up any losses so far, but he was getting the feeling he could be at a pickpockets’ convention.
He found Ellis Hugo Bell of Bell Famous skulking in the lavatories, peering out of one of the cubicles. “Is that prat in the corduroy suit still here?”
“Yeh yeh, he’s talking to your mate Brendan Barton, he reckons he’s off to kill you for some strange reason,” offered Alex helpfully.
“He’s insane.”
“I reckon you’re all fookin insane,” observed Alex, zipping up. Time he wasn’t here. Sod paying thirty quid for a rounder drinks, anyway they were all nutters. He dried his hands, went upstairs, and left the club, ignoring the saucer of change, and there half-way down Frith Street was Selby, turning briskly into the cross-street.
3
Or at least he was ninety per cent sure it was Selby. Same hair, same ankles, same arse end. All right, so she was wearing a green jacket sorter thing he’d never seen before, but it wouldn’t be Selby if she’d spent ten minutes in London without getting out her Switch card.
She was cutting along at a rate of knots, as if she were meeting someone and was late for it, along this side street called Bateman Street, leading into Greek Street as it would turn out. Hurrying after her, but refraining from calling her name in case he alarmed her and she made a run for it, Alex found himself obstructed by a mob of Americans as they seemed to be, at the vortex of which was Len Gates, rigidly holding up a furled umbrella with a stiffly raised arm in the manner of Brendan Barton summoning a waitress.
“… Now the hostelry you see across Bateman Street, the Dog and Duck, goes back to 1734 when gentlemen could shoot snipe in Leicester Fields nearby. Even earlier, there was another public house of the same name back there in Dean Street …”