Mr. Love and Justice (16 page)

Edward’s interrogation of the ponce Frankie’s girl had been brief and colourful. Yelling at him and calling him improper names (so that he’d had to summon the assistance of a copperess, a thing no male cop likes doing), she’d stuck to her story that the box had been a gift freely given, and when asked about her ponce had said she’d never used the monsters – and if they thought she’d got one why didn’t they try to find him?

She further volubly made a point that seemed to Edward (as it might well do to many reasonable persons) a very good one: if they doubted her story, why didn’t they go and ask the distinguished client who had given the box to her? Why did they always go for the girls and never for the men who prostituted them? Well – mark her words – they’d better: because if they brought this case against her she’d bloody well have this client subpoenaed
– even if she had to use an Asian or an African lawyer who wouldn’t be afraid of going for a colleague in the legal profession.

Left to himself Edward, of course, would have turned the girl loose, restored the box rewardless to the Madam, and have forgotten as rapidly as might be about the business. But now this was impossible: the star sleuth’s report was in, and his own position, in relation to his girl, was poised in a delicate, precarious state of crisis. No: the only thing to do was ram home the charge quick and try to make it stick and get this bloody woman out of the way. As for the ponce, if he had any sense he’d skip, and Edward wouldn’t try all that much to hinder him: although, to comply with the direct order of the Detective-Sergeant, he must now go through the motions of trying to find Frankie.

To do so he knew it would be pointless, almost, to go to Frankie’s Kilburn flat (at any rate initially), and he decided instead to conduct his faint-hearted pursuit through the medium of the star ponce. Although this man’s name was not yet known to him, from enquiries among his colleagues, and a glance through the photographic albums, he was soon identified; and armed with sufficient damaging particulars to force the star ponce, unless he was an imbecile, to betray his friend, Edward set out for the drinking-club where the star and his colleagues were well known to foregather.

The news of the arrest of Frankie’s girl had already spread by the ponce-prostitute bush telegraph to the confines of the club (rather as, in Pall Mall, a disaster
to a senior civil servant would be known long before it hit an inside bottom column of the top people dailies). Edward, who (unlike several of his colleagues) was not a member of the club and thus not entitled to buy drinks there, adopted the sensible and conventionally acceptable tactic of going straight up to the bar (followed by twenty-eight or so pairs of eyes) and saying, ‘I’m an officer on a routine check-up. I wonder if you’d let me have a drink?’ This was instantly forthcoming (his offer of payment being accepted, with a slight smile, as the politer of the two alternatives), and holding the beer glass like a shield, Edward took a slow look round the room.

Seated with an air of bland wariness and attired in a superb Italianate confection which accented, just sufficiently, the superb formation of his limbs, the star ponce lightly held a brandy glass with a slim, solid hand on whose wrist delicately dangled a thin gold chain. Like two who have an unspoken agreement for a rendezvous, the ponce and Edward Justice now came together.

Edward explained that all he wanted from the ponce was this: to lead him to Frankie Love. The ponce, after suggesting, helpfully, the Kilburn flat and appearing surprised that Edward should think Frankie might not be there, said courteously that he was very sorry, he could be of no further assistance to the officer.

Edward half sighed, put down his glass, and bringing his face closer to the ponce’s said very softly, ‘Look, I’m sorry too, son, but it’s this way. The heat’s on at the station to find this boy, I’ve got to make an effort to do
so, and you’re the only man I know in town I’ve ever seen him with. So don’t you see until I get hold of him, I’ll just have to hold on to you. And I do mean hold, son. I’ve been looking up your file just recently, and I’d say you’re about due for another spell inside. So it really is up to you to help me in my enquiries if you want to avoid anything of that nature – which, and I do mean this, would happen to you
immediately
if you don’t.’

‘Officer,’ the star ponce said, ‘I’m really very sorry but I don’t know where this boy is and I cannot help you.’

Edward smiled, sighed again, got up and said, ‘Well, come along.’

Not rising, and raising his voice slightly so that it could be heard at neighbouring tables, the star ponce said, ‘Are you
arresting
me, officer?’

‘That, we’ll see.’

‘No, I mean
now
. Because if you’re not arresting me and bringing a charge against me that you think can stick, then I’m sorry, but I’m just not coming: not coming, I mean, merely to help you in your enquiries I know nothing of.’

‘You’re under arrest,’ said Edward sadly.

‘For what?’

‘Suspected collusion. Assisting a wanted person in an attempt to evade arrest …’

One could have heard an ice-cube drop. Nobody moved, everybody watched.

‘Dear!’ said the star ponce to the girl behind the bar. ‘Will you make a few phone calls for me, please?’

The girl nodded, the star ponce rose (looking more
glorious even than when seated), and the pair departed amid a silence distilled of hatred, fear and alcohol.

Edward hailed a cab, and on the journey to the station neither man said a word – except over the paraphernalia of cigarette lighting. For the cigarette, in the twentieth century, is often the ultimate offering of deadly enemies just prior to a fatal issue.

At the station Edward parked the ponce in a small room for twenty minutes chiefly to let him ‘get the atmosphere’. The star ponce shrank gradually and visibly, and his splendid clothes (like elegant mufti on a raw recruit) became increasingly inappropriate to their setting. In spirit, however, the ponce, who’d seen all this before, remained calm and buoyant.

Then Edward collected two colleagues skilled in these matters (always take two – for safety and as witnesses of each other) and removed the star ponce to a distant cell. As the door clinked to, Edward made his final, reasonable appeal. ‘Feller,’ he said, ‘here is the spiel. You take me to this boy and that ends that. If not, you’re going to leave this place just crunched a bit though unmarked in any way that will be provable; furthermore I promise you a pouncing charge, with all the trimmings, within twenty-four hours from this very moment.’

Inwardly in his turn, the star ponce sighed. It wasn’t that he was a coward: not in a fight, anyway; and even unarmed and sober – unlike so many of the boys. But if they’d got the heat turned that hot on poor old Francis they’d get him even if they waited fifty years. He looked at the three officers – Edward watching him earnestly, 
the other two eyeing him with frank amusement – and he said, ‘I’m not going to make a statement, officer. And whatever you may say I’ve said in court I shall deny it, please understand. All I’m prepared to do is this: give me a piece of paper and I’ll write an address on it: that’s all.’

‘Very well,’ said Edward, handing to the star essential stationery.

The two colleagues stood back a bit bored by this development, as the star ponce inscribed block capitals. Edward took back the book, looked at it carefully, said thank you and signalled his colleagues to open the door and go.

The star ponce also stood. ‘I’m in the clear?’ he said.

‘No,’ Edward said calmly. ‘You’ll stay here for just a little while.’

The door closed and the star ponce subsided on the wooden bench-cum-bed with the built-in lavatory pan.

Awaiting the departure of his plane which left late at night, but sure somehow already that he wouldn’t be on it, Frankie went out into Stepney to have a drink: both because his Mahometan host didn’t keep alcohol and Frankie disapproved of Indian hemp (well, just didn’t like it), and because he was determined, even at the risk of being caught, that he wasn’t going to
hide
from anyone: be very careful, yes, and use his loaf, but not lose his self-respect by
lurking
.

In Stepney the licensing hours, though their existence is politely recognised, are dexterously evaded in a number of cordial speakeasies: where after the club below has closed at the well-regulated hour with much clanging of bolts and ritual cries of, ‘Last orders, please!’ selected guests proceed to upper rooms to eat, drink, embrace their girls or gamble. To such an establishment Frankie
now repaired and was soon ensconced beside a whisky bottle in a second-floor room, and in the company of various citizens of the outlying countries of the British Commonwealth of nations.

Here his meal of chicken-and-peas was interrupted by an insistent summons, from the proprietor, to a public call-box insalubriously situated beside an appalling bi-sexual lavatory. The voice at the far end, agitated and thus more incomprehensible than usual, was that of the excellent Bengali: who told him ‘one law man’ had called at the house just after he’d left and made enquiries concerning him; that he, the Bengali, had revealed absolutely nothing and the law man had now departed; and that Frankie must take ‘well care’ not to return to the house as ‘the eye’ was certainly put upon it; and finally – in a torrent of the most urgent assurance – whatever happened he, Frankie, could absolutely rely on him, the Bengali, to safeguard all his property and hide it: as he had already done with his packed travelling bag by stuffing it, the very moment he’d heard the untoward soft knock, inside the communal dust-bin out the back.

Frankie expressed thanks and assured his friend of his total belief in his integrity (he meant this). He then hung up and without returning to the festive communal room went quickly downstairs to the street. At the door he tapped himself to check on the presence of his passport and his money: the luggage, such as it was, could be abandoned.

He set off through the Stepney streets but in an
easterly
direction. What they’d be expecting him to do,
he calculated, was go to the west end of the city to an air terminal. Instead he’d make for London docks, try to get a ride or even stow away, and if he failed travel overland to an eastern port and reach the Continent of Europe. Ships, after all, were his affair and more reliable. Diagnosing thus he saw again, approaching on the further pavement and this time on night duty, the young officer who had arrested him, earlier on, over the absurdity of the bag.

In their feeling for persons they have succeeded in convicting, the officers of the Force fall into three chief types. There are those who feel that any convicted person is a ‘client’ who should return from time to time for treatment: if you do harm to a man, you should prove how right you were by harming him again. Then those who feel in an almost friendly fashion, well, he’s done his lot, good luck to him, he’s stale stuff now, let’s look round for someone else. And then those (a very minor group) who just feel nothing in particular: it was ‘a case’.

Unfortunately the officer now approaching Frankie belonged to category one; and recognising his former victim (though regretting that on this occasion he didn’t appear to be carrying a suspect bag) he crossed the road obliquely (and warily, too), his boots sounding like metal (as was indeed the case), and there he stopped a few feet from the pavement by which Frankie was advancing, in as safe-and-sound a position as seemed possible for the encounter.

But this time Frankie knew the danger; and approaching steadily as if he saw nothing untoward,
he suddenly hurled all the small change in his pocket at the copper’s face, turned abruptly down one of the eighteenth-century courts which in this section of Stepney intricately abound, and loped off fairly silently yet at considerable speed. A whistle blew, a torch shone, and feet came clanging.

Without much difficulty Frankie outwitted his pursuer by entering, while still some way ahead, one of the bombed buildings which, a generation after the end of World War II, still rot and crumble in the capital; and there he settled himself quickly down upon a pile of fairly comfortable rubble and abandoned furniture that lay timelessly dissolving in a distant corner.

‘Fuck off!’ said a voice.

Quite unaware, Frankie had stumbled on what was to the detritus of the floating population of the borough, their trysting-place; and the position he had selected within a few feet of those who in more pastoral surroundings might be described as a ‘courting couple’. This couple clearly wanted to get on with their courting without uncouth interruption.

‘Take it easy, mate,’ said Frankie softly. ‘I got to stay here a moment.’

The male – who by his tones and truculence Frankie observed to his dismay was drunk – repeated, ‘I said, fuck off. You got no respect for privacy?’

Frankie risked a throw. ‘You a seaman like I am?’ he said.

‘No!’

It
would
be a landsman. Frankie tried again. ‘You like
a pound-note, mate? I got to stay here a while – it’s a bit urgent.’

From the rubble and his invisible (though audibly grunting) consort, the erotic landsman rose like an angry phoenix. ‘Now, look!’ he cried very much too loud for Frankie’s liking. ‘Just make away or I have to thump you.’ 

Frankie got up, biting his rage, said, ‘Okay, mate,’ and started slowly towards the light. Unwisely from every point of view the landsman tried to help him on his way with a parting shove. Consequently both men stumbled, and several hundredweight of miscellaneous London ruins and garbage collapsed with a resounding, thudding clatter.

A bit bashed on the head and dazed, Frankie staggered up knee-deep in obstacles as several lights came on in surrounding buildings, accompanied by cries and sleepy murmurs. As he struggled to the exit a torch shone blank-flash in his face – a startling experience at the best of times. Ten minutes later, filthy and rather battered, he was lodged in the adjacent headquarters of the Force where an interested sergeant was examining his passport and several envelopes crammed with currency.