“Not when you’ve been thrown off the Examiner, there aren’t,” said Detective Inspector Wills. Then, glancing towards the stairs, he added to James Flood: “Here’s a bit of a tale for you, Jas.”
James looked up to see the two flymen coming down into the club, but without the burden of their lately departed friend. The jazz pianist obligingly played a snatch of the Dead March from Saul as they reached the bar. “I was with them earlier,” he said. “She’s not interested. Wouldn’t know a human story if it came up and bit her in the crotch.”
“How earlier is earlier? You know they were nicked tonight, don’t you?”
“For what?” asked James Flood, livelier now.
“Good question. Last I heard when I checked in, the duty desk sarge was trying to frame a charge for them.”
“Frame being the operative word, eh, Benny?”
“Watch it, James,” advised the policeman, without rancour.
The two flymen, clutching a bottle of beer each, shoved their way through the throng to James’s table. Addressing Detective Inspector Wills, the first flyman said: “Tell you what, Benny. That canteen bacon you dish up at that nick of yours is pigshit.”
“Right animal, anyway,” said Detective Inspector Wills. “Don’t blame me, it’s all done by a private catering firm since you were last banged up. So what are you doing out, then?”
“Police bail,” said the second flyman. “All the cells are taken. We’re up at Marlborough Street tomorrow.”
“What charge?”
“Obstruction. And sunnink to do with the London Transport laws.”
“Taking a dead body on the tube?” said James. “I didn’t know that was illegal.”
“It is if he didn’t have a ticket,” the detective inspector pointed out.
“But he did have a ticket,” protested the first flyman. “He had his old people’s travel pass, didn’t he?”
“Ah, but it’s invalid if he’s dead,” said Detective Inspector Wills. “The conditions of carriage clearly state that when the pass expires, or in this case the passholder expires, it has to be handed in.”
“How could he hand it in when he’s flaming dead?” demanded the exasperated second flyman.
“I dunno, mate. He should’ve thought of that before he kicked the bucket.”
“What have you done with Old Jakie, anyway?” asked Alex. Another for the lads, this.
“They confiscated him,” explained the first flyman. “He got stuck as we were getting him through the ticket barrier. They had to call the fire brigade to cut him free. Then they handed him over to the wossname, council environmental health service, poor sod.”
“So how come it’s us that’s charged with obstruction?” asked the aggrieved second flyman of the detective. “It was Old Jakie causing the flaming obstruction, not us.”
“You were aiding and abetting,” said Detective Inspector Wills solemnly. “Comes to the same thing. The beak might take the view that it’s even worse. You were inciting him to commit an offence.”
“So what do you reckon we’ll get?”
With a broad wink at James and Alex, the detective inspecter said: “Could be six months, could be two years if the Stipe’s in a bad mood.”
“You’re pulling our pissers!” said the second flyman uncertainly.
“On the other hand, if he’s in a good mood, you might just get away with a twenty-quid fine.”
With a sigh of relief the first flyman said: “Worth every penny, for the sake of giving him a last night out at the Shamrock Club up Camden Town. Only it’s a good thing he didn’t get stuck in the ticket barrier going out instead of coming back, cos he really enjoyed himself up there.”
“Seemed to,” said the second flyman. “I’ll swear there was a smile on his face when we bought him that last pint of Guinness.”
“What did you do with it?” asked James Flood, with a journalist’s curiosity.
“Oh, opened his gob and poured it down his throat. You’d’ve thought with all he’d got down him in one place or another it would’ve come up again, but it didn’t. Mebbe it did later, over the social workers. With any luck.”
Cackling, the two flymen drifted away to greet friends. Alex noted jealously that they seemed to be best mates with half the telly stars in London. And them only blurry scene-shifters. You couldn’t say it wasn’t democratic down here.
The shit-hot jazz pianist in the spade hat broke off from his rendering of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” to interpolate a snatch of silent cinema chase music as a wild-eyed Kim Grizzard came charging down the stairs. It seemed to be the pianist’s policy to introduce selected club members with their own theme tune.
Grizzard, having spotted James Flood’s corner table from the half-landing, barged his way through to it.
“He’s not here,” supplied James hastily.
“And if he was,” said Detective Inspector Wills, “I should have to take you in for — lemme see, what do you want to do to him, assault and battery or GBH?”
“It’ll be murder when I catch the bastard,” snarled Grizzard.
“Well, you certainly won’t find him down here, because he’s barred. He’ll be in bed at this hour I should imagine, stoned out of his brains.”
“No, he isn’t, I’ve just been round to his place and kicked the door in, and he’s not there.”
“Shouldn’t’ve told me that, Kim,” tut-tutted the policeman, with another owlish wink at James. “Breaking and entering, malicious damage, you name it.”
“He won’t lodge a complaint, Benny, because he knows what he’d get if he did. Anyway,” and here Kim Grizzard fixed a baleful eye upon Alex, who had been hunched up in his chair, doing his best to look inconspicuous, “as it happens it’s not him I’m after at this immediate moment in time. All right, you, where is it?”
“Where’s what?” piped up Alex in the high-pitched voice that seemed to visit him in moments of stress.
“The manuscript of Freeze When You Say That. The only bastardising copy.”
“I haven’t got it,” confessed Alex. With a policeman present he felt on reasonably safe ground for the time being.
“Then you’re in deep shit, man. I left that script with you for safe-keeping.”
“I didn’t ask for your blurry script — it’s nowt to do wi’ me!” Not only did Alex’s voice rise in times of stress, it slipped into the broadest West Yorkshire, the accent he had grown up with.
“Tell him, Benny,” sighed Grizzard, full of despair and weariness.
“Civil matter,” adjudicated Detective Inspector Wills.
“All right, so it’s a civil matter. Tell him he’s going to have to sell his house.”
“I don’t have a house,” volunteered Alex.
“Then you’d better fucking buy one, because if that script doesn’t turn up you are in double doo-doo, my friend. Now where do you think you lost it?”
“I haven’t lost it, I’ve just left it somewhere,” Alex thought he’d better say.
“All right, where do you think you left it?”
“I can tell you where I didn’t leave it,” said Alex helpfully. “And that’s that Kemble’s Club, because that’s where I noticed it were missing. But I definitely had it when we left that Eyetie restaurant, Baldini’s is it?”
Here Detective Inspector Wills took charge of the proceedings. Now sounding like the copper he was, he said: “If you’re sure you had it when you left, it don’t matter a fuck whether it was Baldini’s or Burger King. Now where were you between Baldini’s and Kemble’s Club?”
“A lorrer pubs. He’ll know better than me.” Alex inclined his head towards James, who had nodded off.
Snapping out of a light doze upon the question being repeated, James recited: “Coach, French, Pillars of Hercules, Blue Posts, Three Greyhounds, Admiral Duncan, Wellington Arms.”