Gone Tomorrow (6 page)

Slider gestured to George the barman and did the honours. One-Eyed Billy watched him with slight reserve but no hostility. He had two perfectly good eyes to do it with. His name did not denote any ocular deficiency, but was a sort of patronymic, his father having been known as One-Eyed Harry, a well-known local trader with a pie-and-eel shop in Goldhawk Road. Harry had lost an eye in Korea, having been too young, to his intense regret, to be called up for the Second World War – ‘the real war’, he called it. ‘Korea was a bloody mess,’ he used to say, ‘but dooty is dooty, and I’m proud to have served my Queen and country.’ He always kept a framed picture of ‘Her Maj’ prominently on the wall of his shop and Mrs One-Eye had a large scrapbook of royal family cuttings; they prided themselves
on being old-fashioned honest traders and had given generously to various charitable efforts got up by the police.

So it had been a dreadful shock to them when their youngest son, Billy, had turned out bad. Harry often said they must have dropped him on his head when he was a baby; Mrs One-Eye blamed the sixties. ‘What a world for a lad to grow up in!’ However it happened, Billy had early refused to show any interest in the family business, and had ducked out of helping in the shop. Harry had stopped his pocket money as a quid pro quo – ‘You don’t get anything in this world without working for it, my lad!’ – to which challenge Billy had risen by stealing the sweets and comics he could not now buy.

The dropped-on-head theory gained ground with the gathering evidence that Billy was not just a thief, he was a very bad thief. His career developed, if that was the right word, into a succession of easy cops for the police; his villainy was so petty, so inept and so plain daft it was hard for them to take him seriously, and he was slapped on the wrist more times than was good for him. Slider well remembered the occasion when One-Eyed Harry came, in agony of soul, to ask them not to let Billy off any more. ‘I reckon if he doesn’t get a shock and see where it all leads, he’ll be past hope. Me and Gladys are very grateful for what you’ve tried to do for our boy, but he’s got to learn, the hard way if necessary. He’s bringing shame on the whole family.’

So when Billy stole a Magimix from Curry’s for his mum’s birthday and was caught because he took it back to complain that one of the fixtures was missing, the boom was lowered on him, and he went down. The lesson did not immediately strike home. It took several more years, and sentences to a progressively longer spell in jug, before the shock of his mother’s death (hastened by shame, his brothers said) changed his ways.

He was now employed by an uncle who had a greengrocer’s stall in the Shepherd’s Bush market, and was working off his forgiveness in this world by hard labour and co-operation, when it was asked for, with the police. His quick guilty glance beyond Slider’s shoulder suggested that he was still up to something, but Slider thought it was probably something very mild and on the fringe, like illegal betting or buying hookey fags, which was best left alone. It was not so much turning a blind eye to crime,
but the necessary price that had to be paid to have Billy just on the sticky side of the line that divided the real world from the criminal world, where he could be useful.

The pints came. Billy said, ‘Cheese mite,’ and drank off a good quarter, and Slider said, ‘Well, Billy, how are you keeping?’

‘Straight, Mr Slider,’ Billy answered quickly. ‘Straight as a die, I promise you. Uncle Sam’d kill me if I wasn’t.’

Slider smiled. The guilty man, etc. ‘I didn’t mean that. Are you well?’

‘Gawd, yes. Never been ill in me life.’ He was perhaps a little undersized, but stocky enough, with a curiously young face, given that he must be forty by now. It was smooth, almost unlined; small-featured, and pleasant enough under bristle-cut light brown hair, only a little vacuous, and with eyes that were just too far apart, which gave him a slightly glassy look, like a stuffed toy. ‘Yourself?’ he returned politely.

‘Oh, I’m fine. Busy as always.’

‘Yeah. This murder up the New Park.’ This was what locals had always called it – to distinguish it, of course, from the old park, Wormholt. ‘I’ve been reading about it.’ He gestured vaguely towards the newspaper.

Slider saw that it was the
Daily Mail.
‘Bit up-market for you, isn’t it?’

Billy smirked. ‘I got this young lady now,’ he said. ‘Bit of a looker, she is, if I say it myself. She’s dead posh. Works in that hairdressers on the Green, The Cut Above, it’s called. Qualified and everything.’

‘Good for you,’ Slider said. ‘Thinking of settling down?’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted. Anyway, she wants me to better meself, so she’s started me reading this instead’ve the
Sun.’
He looked at the paper a bit hopelessly, and then said, ‘Well, I never was one for reading. It’s got the racing in it all right, though.’

‘I didn’t know you were a betting man,’ Slider said. ‘Fond of the ponies?’

‘Oh, I always done a bit. It’s an interest more than anything. Me mum didn’t approve of betting, but she liked watching the races on the telly. Liked the horses. Same with me, really. Me uncle Sam what I work for now had a horse and cart when I was a kid, did a round on the White City estate. I used to like helping round the stable an’ that.’

Slider took a leisurely drink of his pint, feeling Billy relax at this reassuring lack of hustle. ‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘this bloke that got murdered in the park, he was a betting man. I wonder if you’ve come across him any time. Unlucky Lenny, they called him.’

Billy chuckled. ‘Unlucky Lenny? Gawd, yes! I’ve heard about him all right. Is that who it was?’

‘Seems so.’

‘Gaw, what a mug! Talk about good money after bad! Always picked the long odds, daft outsiders, mug doubles, you name it. And if he ever did pick a good ’un, it got scratched or fouled or fell down. He ’adn’t got,’ Billy added instructively, ‘no science. If you’re gonna bet on the ponies, you gotter have luck or you gotter have science, one or the other. He didn’t have neither.’

‘And what have you got?’

‘Me? I don’t do much, just a bob or two. It’s more an interest, like I said. What I got is a sort of instinct. It comes over me every now and then, almost like I can see into the future. I look at a certain horse, and I just know. Then I stick a tenner on its nose and sit back. You’d be surprised how often it comes off.’

Slider would have been surprised. It sounded like crystal balls. In his experience betting men forgot their losses almost instantaneously, but remembered their wins for ever – a function which greatly improved their overall statistics and the bookies’
profits. He took another drink and said casually, ‘So about this Lenny – what was his surname?’

Billy shook his head. ‘Now that I can’t tell you. Never knew him personal. Everyone just called him Unlucky Lenny. He used to punt at the shop on the corner o’ Loftus Road. Just up the road from you,’ he added on an afterthought.

‘Yes, I know,’ Slider said. ‘Know anything else about him? What was he up to, Billy? He looked a bit tasty to me.’

‘I dunno exactly, but he was up to something all right,’ Billy said, flattered by the assumption of his omniscience. He desperately wanted to give value for money, and Slider could almost hear his brain creak as he strained to remember something worth delivering. ‘I see him around the estate a bit,’ he said at last.

‘Is that where he lived?’

‘I reckon he did. I dunno for sure.’ A light went on inside his head. ‘What I
do
know,’ he said triumphantly, ‘was he lived with
a tom. What was her name? Tanya or Terry or something like that. No, Tina, that was it. Definitely. I heard some geezers talking about her.’

‘She was a prostitute?’

‘Oh yeah, she was definitely on the game. Lenny knew all about it.’

‘Was he her pimp?’

‘I dunno. Maybe. He wasn’t a professional pimp, I don’t mean that. He didn’t have no other girls. I reckon he just lived with her. Maybe he like organised it for her. And got it for free himself – you know. They say she’s a bit of a sort an’ all. A cracker. Goes like a train.’ He dropped a man-to-man wink. ‘So maybe old Lenny wasn’t so unlucky after all, eh?’

The tailor’s shop was just off Shepherd’s Bush Green – a few yards down a side turning, Caxton Street, which made all the difference to the rent and rates. It also made all the difference to the drop-in trade, but one glance at the window showed that drop-in was not the mainstay of this emporium.

Over the window was the name
Henry Samson
in chipped gold-painted plastic letters screwed to a black fascia. The window was exceedingly dirty and contained no display, only some bales of cloth wrapped in brown paper, a couple of old biscuit tins full of odds and ends, and three plastic roses in a vase
circa
1973.

Atherton pushed the door open, and an old-fashioned bell on a strap tinkled pleasantly. It was dim inside after the sunshine in the street. The shop was tiny, and most of the space was taken up with the shelving round the walls on which bales of cloth were stored. A wooden counter with a glass front was covered in professional litter: scissors, tape measures, boxes of pins and a neglected sea of invoices, orders, correspondence and – probably – final demands from utility companies. The display element of the counter contained cardboard boxes of buttons and zip-fasteners. The tiny unused space in the middle of the floor revealed bare, dusty floorboards and a small square of old carpet on which the customer might stand to view himself in the cheval mirror which stood beside the curtain into the back shop.

The curtain moved now, and the proprietor poked his head out like a stage manager checking the House. The broad, fat, wrinkled old face creased into a smile of welcome, revealing the porcelain uniformity of the National Health’s finest.

‘Mr Atherton! Welcome, welcome! Just one moment and I’ll be with you!’

The curtain dropped, there was a sitcom rustling and thumping of hasty activity, and then it was thrust aside with a rattle of curtain rings, and the tailor came out. His head had first come through the curtain at Atherton’s level, but that was because he did his sewing in the back room sitting on a table (which kept the cloth off the dusty floor). Now he was on his own two legs his head was hardly more than five feet from the ground; but what he lacked in height he made up for in girth. He was wide all the way round, with tiny feet and quick, pudgy hands; rimless half-glasses poised halfway down his nose; surprisingly fine eyebrows, and a scantling of hair combed carefully over his bald top and dyed soot black with a tailor’s vanity. He wore old-fashioned striped morning trousers with a black waistcoat over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The waistcoat glittered with the needles and pins thrust into both fronts, and a tape measure hung round his neck like a garland of honour.

He advanced, beaming, on Atherton, his hand out, and when Atherton gave his, enfolded it in both his own and pumped it up and down rhythmically as if he hoped for water. ‘Good to see you! Good to see you! Are you well? You look well.’

‘I’m in the pink, thank you,’ Atherton said. ‘I don’t need to ask you how you are.’

‘Never better!’ the tailor cried boastfully. ‘I’m never ill, you know. Hard work is the best medicine.’

His name was James Mason (‘No relation!’ he cried gaily on first introduction) but since he had escaped with an older sister from Germany during the war, that almost certainly was not his real name. He admitted to seventy-five, but Atherton would not have been surprised to discover he was eighty-five. With the wrinkles, the vitality and the swift, plump movements it was impossible to tell.

‘So what does my favourite customer want this morning?’ Mr Mason asked, relinquishing Atherton’s hand and drawing the tape measure off his neck with anticipatory relish. ‘Favourite customer’ was less of a hyperbole than usual with such titles. There was a small group of cognoscenti who treasured Mr Mason as he should be treasured, but he eked out a living with alterations and repairs to clothes it pained him to handle. ‘You’ve
come at just the right time, as it happens. I have some cloth here – come, come and see. Let me show you. Just came in this morning, and I thought of you right away.’

He twinkled over to the window and heaved a wrapped bale, with astonishing strength given that it was nearly as tall as him, off the stack and over to the counter, dumping it on top of the clutter with a fine disregard for administration. Quickly he unfolded the brown paper and drew out a length of the cloth. ‘Look, look how beautiful. Feel. Lovely, isn’t it? I wish I could get more of it, but I thought of you first. I said to myself, “Mr Atherton must have a suit out of this. A pair of trousers, at the very least.”’

Atherton stepped forward to finger the cloth. It was charcoal grey with a faint stripe which was not colour but merely in the weave. Mason gazed up into his face, nodding and beaming.

‘Yes? Beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘What is it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘It’s very soft,’ Atherton suggested.

‘But very hard-wearing. It’s a mixture, of course. Wool, cashmere – mostly cashmere – and just a little mink.’

‘Mink?’ Atherton said, bemused.

‘I joke you not. Very hard, mink hair. Cashmere alone would not cope with all the sitting. But mink—!’ His eyes screwed up with anticipation of a coming jest. ‘When did you ever see a ferret with a bald patch?’

Atherton laughed dutifully, and prepared to break his tailor’s heart. ‘It’s very nice, but I’m afraid I didn’t come here for anything to wear.’

Mason took it well. He knew Atherton’s calling. He spread his hands a little and said, ‘Sandwiches I don’t do, it must be information.’

‘That’s right.’ He brought the leather jacket out of the bag he had carried it in, and held it out. ‘I hoped you could tell me where this came from.’

Mason looked serious. ‘Leather? Leather is something else. I am not an expert on leather.’ But he took it anyway, his fingers seeming to do their own examination, separately from his eyes. ‘Nice, nice quality skin. Off the shelf, of course, but the tailoring not bad, all the same. An expensive piece, I would say.’ He turned to the inside. ‘Good-quality wool lining.’ It was tartan,
but of no clan or sept known to Scotland: a mixture of caramel, cream and milk-chocolate shades. Subtle and attractive.