Oh, do get outer the fookin way, you great useless lumper shite. Sidestepping the crowd, Alex was just in time to see Selby, if it was Selby, darting across Greek Street and entering a pub. Respectable enough house it looked, but it would be unusual for Selby to enter a pub, especially unescorted, wine bars were more her line. So could be it wasn’t Selby.
He thought at first he was back in what was the place called again, the Princess of Teck? No, couldn’t be, it was bigger, and anyway they were in a different street. Furthermore, from the Day-Glo menu advertising all-day sunshine breakfasts — £3.75 for a bowl of onion rings, by the left, you could get them for half that price at the Limping Tortoise on Leeds Bridge — it seemed to be called the Sun in Splendour, so that was that. Yet there was Old Jakie where Alex had left him, laid out on the bar counter like lamb and salad, now with fifty-pee pieces over his eyes, and there were the two flymen, together with a huddle of cronies from the Princess of Teck.
They recognised Alex. “It used to be old pennies one time,” said the first flyman, explaining the fifty-pee pieces.
“That’s inflation for you,” sniggered a young man in an expensively cut grey check suit, who looked as if he were no stranger to the racecourse.
“Bitter respect, James, he was a regular here,” said the gloomy Scotch-drinker, who had earlier set himself up as the unofficial archivist of the Princess of Teck, and now seemed to be assuming a similar role at the Sun in Splendour. To Alex he explained: “He was staring, see, and we thought we saw his eyes move. They do, you know.”
“I don’t think so,” ventured Alex respectfully, with his knowledge of morbidity gleaned from Selby.
“No, not that they actually do, but that you think they do.” And to the two flymen: “Like when Nellie went over off her bar stool. I could’ve sworn her eyes were still moving when we picked her up.”
“That’s because she wasn’t dead yet,” said the second flyman. “She died in the ambulance, if you remember.”
“Otherwise they’d never have taken her,” said the first flyman. To Alex he said: “You were right, young man, the ambulance won’t take dead bodies in this day and age. At the death — I’d better put that another way, hadn’t I? — in the end the guvnor had to ring the mortuary to send round a plain van. But apparently they can’t do nothing till tomorrow morning, because they knock off at six.”
It was all great stuff for the lads but one thing was puzzling Alex. “But what’s he doing in here?”
“We’re taking him on a last pub crawl, aren’t we?”
“What he would have wanted,” said the second flyman.
The young man addressed as James scribbled a note on the back of his chequebook. “Great story. Can I get your second names, chaps?”
Blurry hell, must be a reporter. Alex, who had vague aspirations in that direction himself should he fail to make it as a disc jockey, looked at the young man with a new respect. Fresh-faced, he was, looked as if he hadn’t started shaving yet, too pink by far to be taken seriously. Could be a disadvantage in a journalistic career. Or maybe he lulled them by looking all innocent, Alex wouldn’t know. He had only ever once met a reporter before, bloke from the local freebie who’d come to cover the Metro’s annual fun run with Ronnie the Rhino as guest starter, but hadn’t really got to speak to him. Bit of a twat he’d seemed — this guy looked to have more go in him.
“What paper do you work for, mate?”
“Work?” scoffed the Scotch-drinking pub archivist. “Propping up bars from morning till night — you don’t call that work!”
Like a stage magician producing the ace of spades, the reporter flashed a visiting card out of his top pocket and pressed it into Alex’s palm. James Flood, Soho correspondent, London Examiner. “Anything you’ve got, if we can use it we pay.”
“Ta.” Christ, he wasn’t half seeing life. Talk about the fast track.
A flash of green, as Selby — was it Selby? — came up from the ladies’ and crossed the room, heading for the double doors opening into Greek Street. Holy Jesus, with all this hoo-hah over Old Jakie’s corpse, Alex had clean forgotten about spotting Selby, or thinking he’d spotted Selby. Was that a good sign or a bad sign?
Either way he was out of the pub like a bat out of a cave, catching up with the figure in green — for it wasn’t anything like Selby — back on the corner of Bateman Street.
As he grasped her elbow, Christine Yardley, a.k.a. Christopher Yardley, almost wearily wrenched herself free as if being grabbed was a daily occurrence. “Yes, what do you want?”
Husky voice, too much makeup, bit tarty, skirt too tight, and fishnets was pushing it a bit, but fanciable enough if you fancied them like that. But she was not Selby.
“Sorry, luv, I thought you were somebody else.”
“Oh, but I am!” pouted Christine, congratulating herself on her own wit. She got a lot of this.
“Sorry. Man. Dog.” This was rapidly becoming Alex’s saying of the week. With a really fatuous grin he shambled off across the street and back into the Sun in Splendour, simply to get himself out of her eyeline should she be still gazing after him in puzzlement or pity.
As if Alex had never stepped off the premises, James Flood of the London Examiner continued: “Or if you’ve got any useful contacts you don’t mind introducing, there’s always a drink in it for both of you.”
The phrase “there’s a drink in it” was both foreign and distasteful to James, but he had been told it was Soho argot. For himself, he had been brought up in Maidstone, Kent.
While appreciating these handsome offers Alex felt in all honesty obliged to say: “Wrong shop, mate. I don’t know a soul in London.”
“You seemed to know our Christine well enough.”
“Mistook her for someone else, chum.”
“Not the first time it’s happened,” sniggered James, unknowingly echoing Christopher-Christine’s own joke. It was lost on Alex.
The landlady, as she presumably was, swept through the bar, bearing two plates of lasagne, it looked like. “Seventeen, eighteen!” she bawled, and over her shoulder to the two flymen as she plonked the non-steaming suppers down before a couple of Americans who were sipping coffee in an obedient manner at a nearby table: “I’ve already told you, I want that gentleman off that bar and out of these premises. He’s barred, as he well knew and you well know.”
“But he’s dead, Winnie,” protested young Master Flood of the London Examiner. “Even you can’t turn out a corpse.”
“I turn them out by the dozen every closing time, darlin,” said the landlady. “Take him down to the New Kismet if you’ve got to take him anywhere. The state Mabel should be in by now, she won’t know whether he’s dead or just dead drunk. Come on, then, I shan’t tell you again.”
The two flymen had made the elementary mistake of leaving their half-pints on the bar at Old Jakie’s lifeless elbow. Winnie, by way of making her point, scooped them up. With martyred sighs, the flymen prepared to carry the dead body out, one attending to his torso, the other to the lower limbs.
“Could you open them doors?” requested one of them of no one in particular.
As Alex held open the doors and the mini-funeral procession proceeded with due solemnity on its way, James Flood, again producing the chequebook he had been told it was more prudent to use as a notebook in Soho than a notebook itself, murmured to Alex: “Great tale. Dead man banned from Soho pub.”
The sharp-eared Winnie, who seemed to conduct all her observations over her shoulder as she went about her duties, warned as she sailed back into whatever cubbyhole she had emerged from: “You print a word of this, young man, and I’ll have your legs chopped off at the knees.”