‘You’ve got a nice bird at home. Why d’you want to be out there paying for it?’
‘Yeah. Well.’
‘And this ain’t the first time there’s been trouble, is it, mate. I don’t understand people like you. Your live-in. You bat her about and all?’
Clint said, ‘No way. Never do that.’ But he was keeping his head down.
‘Well you got to make good.’
For the second time in eighteen hours Clint had before him an itemised bill of sale. But this invoice did not consist of fancy favours, of costly caresses … ‘A grand for the clothes?’ he said, leaning back. ‘I bunged them in a flowerpot in the passage. They be okay.’
‘Never mind the clothes. It’s the distress and the humiliation you’re paying for, boy. You should be glad you’re dealing with me and not with her two brothers. Izzat and Watban.’
‘Okay, mate. Deal. Look uh, no hard feelings, all right? And I want you to know, Mal mate, that on the other matter …’
Clint trailed off, and they were silent. Then Mal said, ‘Yeah — that. It don’t … It ain’t sitting well with me, that.’
The Avenger was so high off the ground that Mal chose to clamber down rear-forward. Clint, who had been within to fetch the cheque, wondered at the great natural sweep of Mal’s backside, which seemed to rise up from the middle of his thighs and then proceed to the third or fourth notch of his spine. This gluteus maximus: it was the base of all Mal’s operations; every decision would be referred to it. And Clint? Despite the man’s size, his heavy-boned mass, there was just a vacuum, and an apologetic fold or flap, in the rump of his chinos (and not having a backside didn’t mean that he didn’t have spots all over it). In the mirror, when he looked: it was as if his buttocks belonged to a much smaller man who kept them emphatically clenched.
‘What happened here, mate?’
‘Uh, at Basildon I come off the A13 and cut through the Bends. This sheepdog shot out at me. I swerved …’
‘A sheepdog? That ain’t a dog. It’s a sheep. Look.’
‘No it was a dog. With curly white hair.’
‘What, like a poodle. A poodle in the Bends?’
‘I don’t know. Not a sheep. Just a dog.’
‘… So you’d rather kill a dog than a sheep.’
‘Don’t know about rather.’ But, yeah, Clint found he had subliminally assumed that a dog was inferior to a sheep. Which didn’t make a lot of sense. Analogously (perhaps) he noticed that he wasn’t sure whether this or that woman was attractive or not-so-attractive. He could spot the difference between a centrefold and a Reader’s Richard, but he was none too clever, he thought, on the gradations in between.
‘Why, because a sheep is man’s best friend?’ pursued Mal. ‘They have sheepdogs. They don’t have dogsheep, do they. You got a sheep in there, have you, that fetches your slippers? Or guards the back door? Clint: you take care.’
Clint gestured farewell to the stern of Mal’s elderly German saloon. I don’t know, mate, he said to himself. I just don’t know …
The mist had lifted; out to sea a wildhaired wave collapsed, not all in one piece but laterally, from left to right, like a trail of gunpowder under the torch.
Bet that sheep, thought Clint — bet that sheep … The sheep had been standing on the verge, like an old country personage wise (by now) to the ways of cars. On the verge in its drenched white woollie.
Bet that sheep felt it when I come up on it. Boof.
‘The Walthamstow Wanker’, said Desmond Heaf, ‘has alas emerged from his coma, and we’ve had a pretty stiff letter from Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice, no less. In your report, Jeff, you said he was ogling a party of little girls in the public pool. Well, according to this, you can’t even see the swimming-pool from the gallery in question. It’s over some squash courts which were not in use at the time. I don’t suppose you happened to check.’
‘Check?’ said Strite. ‘Course I didn’t check. I got it from my boy at the cop shop, Chief. Since when do we check?’
‘Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice have also taken exception to our tone.’ Heaf held up the clipping. ‘“So if you’re passing 19 Floral Crescent, and you’ve got a spare brick on you, or a bottleful of petrol, then you know where to fling it.” An incitement to violence against the family of an innocent man in Intensive Care.’
‘Innocent? He was having a wank in public,’ said Strite indignantly. ‘What’s innocent about that?’
‘Says here he was massaging his sore hip when Mrs Mop burst in on him. And she’s seventy-eight and half-blind.’
‘Then why’d he do a runner? With his trousers round his ankles. If you’ll excuse me Chief, I’ll get back to my boy.’
Clint looked on judiciously as Strite left the conference room. He also wanted to get out of there — and into Back Numbers. Arriving at his workstation, with his latte and his brioche, Clint had found a new message from Kate: ‘well, u r an importun8 1, & no mistake! i appeared in the pp of your estimable sheet on the following d8.’ Which she gave: well, month and year. ‘it was in the “casebook” feature opposite the “ecstasy aunt”. u’ll no which 1 is my 1: the 3 principals r called brett, ferdin& & sue. go & have a look c, & let me no if i’m “up 2 snuff”.’ Ah, yes: Casebook, thought Clint pitilessly. For there were few things that Clint relished more than a powerful Casebook. And now he would set eyes on the woman with whom, he increasingly felt, his destiny was somehow entwined. He said,
‘No disrespect to Jeff, Chief, but I always thought we were baying up the bum bonsai on Pervs Him Right.’
‘Please elaborate, Clint.’
Jeff Strite came back in. He looked vindicated, redeemed.
Clint shrugged and said, ‘He’s a wanker.’
‘Who’s a wanker?’
‘The Walthamstow Wanker.’
‘You mean he’s a reader?’
‘No, Chief. I mean he’s a wanker.’
‘And he is a wanker and all,’ said Strite. ‘My boy said they’d taken some “erotic material” off him. Got it stored down in the basement somewhere and he’ll be looking it out.’
‘There you are,’ said Clint, folding his arms. ‘Unless it was Nonce Monthly he had on his knees …’
Heaf said, ‘I don’t quite follow you, Clint.’
‘He’s not a paedophile. He’s just a wanker. And wankers are the people the Lark‘s on the side of. Wankers are what we’re all about.’
The Chief had a cornered look. Most of Clint’s really radical brilliancies, he found, took several days to sink in. ‘So we should … support him? No, no, Clint, I think you do our … our real wankers a definite injustice here. There were certainly grounds for suspicion that he was a paedophile. You’re forgetting the enormous groundswell of wanker response to our Nuke the Nonces campaign.’
‘You keep saying that, Chief. But as Mackelyne has often pointed out, the response to Nuke the Nonces was virtually undetectable … It’s Mrs Mop we should have gone after.’