“Fuck me,” said the detective. “I’m not surprised he lost the bloody script. With that itinerary, I’m only amazed you both made it down here with your heads intact.”
“My usual beat,” said James Flood modestly.
“No wonder that tight-arsed editress of yours complains you never get any stories. You do get them, but they’ve gone clean out of your mind by the time you reach Kemble’s.”
Kim Grizzard had been furiously scribbling down the list of pubs on a scrap of paper. To Alex: “Now. Opening time tomorrow morning, you and I are going to do a tour of all these pubs.”
“Not me, mate,” said Alex, emboldened by the burly proximity of a policeman. “I’ll be on my way back up to Leeds by then. Important appointment.” At this hour, though, he couldn’t remember what it was.
“You’ll be on your way back to nowhere, my friend. You have even more important appointments with the Coach and Horses, the French House —”
“Leave it, Kim,” soothed the detective inspector. “You can’t make him stay if he don’t want to. Habeas fucking corpus. Anyway, between the two of you, you’d get so pissed you’d forget what you was looking for.”
“Six months out of my life, that’s what we’ll be looking for!” Kim Grizzard favoured Alex with another glower. “All right, get back to bloody Lancashire or wherever you come from, but I shall want your address.”
“Leeds Metropolitan University.”
“Your home address, prat.”
“You mean the house I’ve gotter sell?” asked Alex cheekily.
“Give it to him, laddie,” counselled Detective Inspector Wills. “He’s entitled.”
“We’re talking hardback rights, paperback rights, American rights, foreign rights, film rights, video rights … If I don’t get that script back you could well be paying out for it for the rest of your life.”
Not me, buster, thought Alex. We’re talking about me emigrating to Australia, sharpish, if need be. But he wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. It was just the way they banged on down here. Larger than life, that was the expression.
“What’s this book of yours called again?” asked James, looking the picture of innocence as he tapped Alex on the ankle, at the same time winking at the detective inspector, a practice they seemed to go in for with their peculiar sense of humour.
“Freeze When You Say That, why?”
“It’s just that I thought I heard Ellis Hugo Bell mention a novel of that title.”
“Can’t have done, I’ve never even mentioned it to him after the sod pissed me about over the last one. And then, as we now know, nicked the plot.”
“He could have read it by now, though, couldn’t he?” said Detective Inspector Wills seriously, joining in James’s legpull.
Wild-eyed again, Grizzard stared in turn at the detective, at the reporter, and at the visiting Yorkshireman. He then bounded to his feet, gulped down the remainder of Alex’s wine, and leaped up the stairs, accompanied by appropriate silent cinema music from the shit-hot jazz pianist in the spade hat who, with Grizzard’s exit safely effected, reverted to the Scott Joplin number he had been strumming.
Alex, more out of nervousness than appreciation of the music, began compulsively tapping his foot, although on the offbeat, knowing nothing about jazz except that he knew what he liked, and it wasn’t that fookin modern stuff.
He was also, to a completely different beat, drumming a hand on the table while jerking his head in and out like an agitated terrapin. An embarrassed James Flood, avoiding the musician’s amused eye across the room, said: “If you like jazz, Alex, why don’t we go down the Blue Note?”
“What, at this blurry hour? Will they still be open?”
“They won’t even have started yet,” said Detective Inspector Wills. “They go down there to jam among themselves, after doing a few sets at Ronnie Scott’s and wherever.”
Suited Alex. The longer he fought off sleep the less of a problem it was going to be to find somewhere to lay down his head for what remained of the night. Someone had told him there was a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s in Leicester Square, wherever that might be. Must be near that tube station of the same name that he’d got out at after he’d been dropped at King’s Cross by Dave, seemed weeks ago now. Black coffee, McMuffin, and a few sly zeds before dawn broke or he got chucked out, whichever came the sooner. Then sod it, sod Selby, sod the lorrer them, he was off. Get back somehow, he’d think about it in the morning.
“You coming down, Benny?” asked James ingratiatingly, the reporter sucking up to the law.
“Nah,” the policeman said. “I was in last night. I want to look in at that new lesbo club in Rupert Street.”
“Thought it had been closed down for having no licence?”
“It has. I want to check if it’s still open. Might see you for a nightcap afterwards, down the Waiters Club.”
Nightcap? Fookin hell. Didn’t these people have homes to go to?
“All right, Benny, seeya layer.”
“Seeya layer.”
As Alex rose, echoing, “Seeya layer,” in a worldly way, he saw Jenny Wise threading her way through the room, clutching, as if he were a fairground prize, the hand of a young, handsome and currently rather sheepish-looking actor he recognised from one of the soaps.
As they climbed the stairs, the shit-hot jazz pianist in the spade hat played Jenny a little exit music. “Tomorrow”, from the musical Annie.
Now Alex understood why he’d been played off with the Beatles’ “Yesterday” when he detached himself from Jenny after her brush-off at the bar.
8
So this Barry Chilton was a poet, was he, so what? Alex had met poets before, in fact Leeds was overrun with the buggers. Pub he used to go to, the Frog and Firkin, used to have Monday night poetry readings before they changed the policy and turned it into a Quiz Nite. The poems were mainly by students like himself and he didn’t much reckon them, they were like the ones you used to write at school, wind blowing, leaves swirling, all that kinder shite. He supposed this bugger’s would be the same.
Say this for him, though. First time he’d ever known a poet buy a blurry drink. Probably just sucking up to James Flood, wanted to get his name in the Examiner.
And this was the famous Blue Note, was it? The usual crummy basement. If the Thames came up from wherever it was and So-oh got fookin flooded, the whole district would go bankrupt. Or their insurance companies would; but moster them didn’t look insured to Alex, admittedly no expert in these matters. Coupler dozen punters mebbe, sitting at what looked like old kitchen tables, with candles stuck in wine bottles providing the only illumination. Sprinkling of black guys, they looked like proper jazz buffs. Strong smell of spliffs, Alex wondered what Detective Inspector Wills had made of it when he was in last night. Usual catpiss wine. Over there sat Jenny Wise with that young bloke from the TV soap. Alex wondered if he’d scored yet. Or, perhaps more to the point, if she had.
The set had not yet begun. The saxophonist and the clarinet player, both of them ageing with grey sixties sideboards, unpacked their instruments and began tuning up. While the generous Barry Chilton bought a bottle of wine at the serving hatch that doubled as cloakroom and box office, Alex mused on events since leaving Gerry’s Club.
It had continued to be a curious evening. Curious morning rather, by this time. Falling out of Gerry’s Club Alex was surprised to find Dean Street, at three a.m., as lively, livelier in fact, as it had been twelve hours ago. Few places were open now — itinerant hot-dog sellers, their aluminium carts portable and powerful stench-carriers, had moved in to fill the market gap created by the closed cafés and restaurants. What the punters were doing now was promenading, sauntering about and breathing in the warm air, fresh after the summer rain. Either that or waiting for the taxis that never came. There were touts on the street: mini-cab touts, drug touts, near-beer club touts, hotel touts, pimps, as James knowledgeably identified them. It was a working street stilclass="underline" everybody had an angle.