“Look, lads, if you don’t mind, I think I’m gunner sit this one out. I’ve supped enough for one day and I reckon it’s time I was hitting the road.” The tube must be running again by now, or if it wasn’t it soon would be. Go as far north as possible on that Northern line, then start hitching lifts.
“Doing a runner, are we?” said Barry Chilton nastily. He could be a belligerent bugger on the quiet.
“No, why should I, what have I got to run away from?” demanded Alex with fine indignation.
“Detective Inspector Wills,” said James Flood.
Oh, well, worth a try. Alex found himself being escorted — hustled, he could have said — down the standard rickety stairs into the standard rickety basement room, furnished with the standard fire-sale cheap Formica-covered tables and wobbly cane chairs. There was a bamboo bar, obviously bought from some failed establishment similar to the one they were in, dispensing cans of beer, dishes of China tea and soft drinks. At the far end of the room a bunch of Chinese kitchen staff, still in their uniform of blue cotton chequered trousers and soiled white bibs, were playing some kind of Oriental dominoes. Three or four Italian waiters, slouched at separate tables, shouted to one another in rough dialects across the smoke-wreathed room. A couple of taxi drivers drank mugs of coffee over early editions of the tabloids. Christ, was it tomorrow already?
James had got the beers in. “Sorry, Alex,” he said firmly. “But before Barry and I get dragged any further into this, you’re going to have to come clean to Benny Wills.”
“Come clean about what?” demanded Alex, aggrieved. “I haven’t spoken a word to the bugger. It was you two doing all the talking. Why,” aggressively, to Barry Chilton, “did you have to tell him that someone came in and said there’d been a murder in Hog Court?”
“Because they did,” pointed out Barry Chilton. “It was yow, kid.”
Well, if he wanted to put it like that. Nonetheless: “So why did you both take it into your heads to cover up for me? I didn’t ask you to.”
“You didn’t ask us not to,” said James Flood. “You’re in Soho, Alex. Nobody ever gives anything away about anybody, firm principle. It’s like being in Wormwood Scrubs. Grasses unwelcome. Why do you think it’s so difficult to do my job on this beat?”
It seemed to Alex that James enjoyed saying “on this beat”. Touch of the Humphrey Bogarts.
“Yow can’t say you haven’t got a story today, anyway,” said Barry.
“True, and I’ve got to write the swine and make it good,” said the Soho correspondent of the Examiner. “So talk among yourselves for half an hour, will you?”
“Bit late to get it in the Examiner this morning, isn’t it, Jas?” asked Alex, anxious to be friendly. “So what’s the hurry?”
“Who said anything about the Examiner? This is going to the Evening Standard, first edition.”
Alex whistled. “Christ on crutches, she’ll have your balls for breakfast!”
“How d’you spell transvestite?” asked James Flood, formerly of the Examiner, smugly.
“Cross-dresser,” said Barry Chilton.
While the two supernumaries to the reporter’s work exchanged aimless chitchat, Alex allowed his mind to drift back to the cock-up they had made between them of the interview with Detective Inspector Wills, and from that to the subject of the interview herself. Himself, he should say. Poor cow. Or poor sod as it would translate a few hours hence, when London read James’s story. Alex had the greatest difficulty in thinking of Christine as a man — which, he told himself, was how Christine would have wanted it.
Who would have wanted, wished, needed to murder her, and in such a vicious way? There was that little runt he’d seen scuttering out of Hog Court, but he hadn’t looked as if he had anything to do with Christine’s crowd. Christine’s crowd, though — what was that? Lotter cross-dressers like herself, few gays, maybe some young guy wet behind the ears who’d taken a shine to her, like Alex himself. Could be wunner them crimes passionel you used to read about. Or it could be that she’d been up to a bit of cock-teasing and it’d got out of hand. How would Alex know? It was as much not his world as it wasn’t that little bloke’s. None of it was his world. He wanted to go home. He hoped the police weren’t about to give him a hard time, for after all he’d done nothing, only left old Else to carry whatever can there was to be carried.
These ruminations were brought to a halt by the abrupt cessation of the Chinese domino game. “It’s all gone quiet over there,” murmured James, looking up from his notes. No one had come down yet — it must have been instinct. Then Alex noticed the barman adjusting an overhead angled mirror that clearly gave him a view of the stairs and landing. He would have given the Chinese gamblers the nod. As betting counters were scooped into pockets, Detective Inspector Wills and the other plain-clothes man who had been making notes earlier slowly came down the stairs, taking them one at a time as they solicitously helped old Else to descend. Oh, fook. Alex was in for it now.
“So which one of them was it, Else?” asked Detective Inspector Wills as he and his sidekick took the adjoining table.
Else, remaining standing, peered myopically at the three and then pointed a grimy finger at Alex. “This young gentleman here. I’m very sorry, young man, but you shouldn’t have run away like that, it was very naughty of you. Now if you’ll all excuse me, I really must go and have a widdle.”
“Now then, James,” said Detective Inspector Wills heavily, lighting a cigarette. “I’m going to allow you to bribe Sergeant Bone and I with a cold Tiger beer apiece, then we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty.”
Oh, shite. So this was it, then. What was the offence? Withholding vital evidence or what?
He would soon know. The beers arrived. The detective inspector raised a can to his lips. “Cheers. Now I could have the three of you nailed to the cross, you realise that, don’t you? Wasting police time. Making false statements.” He glared at Barry. “And in your case, Barry Chilton, trying to fuck up my case — a very serious charge indeed.” In a vicious mockery of the poet’s Birmingham accent, he mimicked: “’Ow, sumone cyme into the Blue Nowt and said there’d been a murder, but Oi down’t know who it was.’ I could have had four men tied up all night on that wild-goose chase, do you know that?”
“Sorry, Benny,” mumbled Barry.
“So what the fuck were you playing at?”
“He was shielding me,” Alex thought he’d better say.
“Shielding you from what, son?”
“Well, he knew I wanted to get back up to Leeds today, so he was trying to keep me out of it.”
“The nearest you’re going to get to Leeds today, my young friend, is Vine Street police station. Now this Christopher or Christine Yardley, as we’ll go on calling her. How well did you know her?”
“I didn’t know her at all.” Well, it was true. Just because he’d bought her a drink, it didn’t mean to say he knew her.
“Never seen her before?”
“No, never,” said Alex recklessly. He saw James Flood frown, and remembered how he must have seen him rushing after Christine from the pub in the belief it was Selby.
“So you didn’t see her in any of these pubs and clubs you’ve been gallivanting around all night?”
“Not that I can remember.” And oh, shite, this Detective Sergeant Bone was writing it all down.
“Oh, you’d remember all right. Everyone remembered our Christine. Now what about old Else? How well do you know her?”
“I don’t know her either. I’ve only been here a day, remember.”