The Keys to the Street (27 page)

What saved him, he thought afterward, was that he still had the money. He actually had it on him. Of course they could hardly know that it was the same money, but possession of it helped his cause. He was with them for a total of fourteen hours and could, in fact, have taken the dogs out the next day, was prepared to do his afternoon’s duty, only they came back for him. They had found Mussolini.

Another day passed, a day of questions, mockery, teasing, taunting and, from Marnock, outbursts of serious anger. Mussolini had
told them all sorts of things about Bean, they said, which Bean was sure was untrue, for Mussolini, real name Harvey Bennett, couldn’t possibly have known them, could only have invented them. For instance, he had never said, never in his wildest dreams would have said, that he wanted Clancy killed. He had never boasted to Bennett that he had killed a man once but was now a bit past it at his age. When he was told this, the deathbed of Anthony Maddox flashed awfully across his mind, but he had never talked of it, had spoken no word of it to anyone, it was all in Bennett’s imagination.

He had never, as they insinuated, offered Bennett fifty pounds to kill Clancy with another fifty to come when the deed was done. Nor had he sought Bennett out, inquiring indiscreetly in the Globe for someone to do a job for him. His solicitor came back and got nasty with Marnock, reminding him of something called Judges’ Rules.

After he’d spent hours there in a cell they let him go. He never knew why. He wasn’t going to ask, the relief of being free was enough for him, but he felt very shaken. Still, he had his fifty pounds and he knew what he was going to do with that. Buy a new camera.

The shop where the first one had come from, purchased by Maurice Clitheroe some ten years before, was in Spring Street, Paddington. It was still there. He found it in the new phone book, gave them a ring, asked what they’d got and their prices. The shop stayed open till all hours, being bang in the middle of tourist country, so he went over there on the tube after he’d walked his dogs, it was only two stops.

The camera, being secondhand, came to less than he’d thought. The shop manager threw in a film and Bean, doubly departing from custom, bought himself a bottle of whiskey and the evening paper. Even if it was only a piece about the release of a man who’d been “helping police with their inquiries,” he wanted to read about himself. Paddington was a lot shabbier, dirtier, and more litter-strewn than the Marylebone Road and it gratified him that he didn’t live there.

He was coming out of the wineshop when he saw the girl again, the
one who used to come to the house in Maurice Clitheroe’s time that he’d made a face at in Baker Street. She was standing in the doorway of a dingy-looking video shop. He nearly missed seeing what happened and would have missed it if for some reason he hadn’t turned round from taking a photo of a Highland collie, a really smashing-looking dog, that an old woman had out with her on a lead.

A red Mercedes had pulled into the curb and the girl was bending down to talk to the driver. Her clothes were a whole lot more upmarket than the previous time he’d seen her: red sequined top, tight white mini, white stilettos. Whore’s gear but not cheap. Then Bean saw the driver. It was James Barker-Pryce MP and his red whiskery face, for once without the clamped-in cigar, was framed in the window. Bean took a photograph. He took two shots. The car door was pushed open from the inside and the girl got in.

Bean went home and read the paper. There was nothing in it about him, only a long piece by a psychiatrist the paper called famous, though Bean had never heard of him, about crazy street people and Clancy in particular. The psychiatrist said theories had been put forward as to why the dead man collected keys, some suggesting this was for the purposes of robbery, others that they constituted an armor against possible attack. The truth was that in Clancy’s disturbed mind these were the keys to dream homes. Having no home, he had collected keys to the homes of others, keys being the symbol of home-ownership, of possession and of the privacy he could no longer enjoy.

Bean had never read such rubbish. While looking through his collection of dog photographs and selecting negatives for enlargement, he drank rather too much of his whiskey and woke with a hangover. Putting on his baseball cap and a T-shirt patterned all over with pictures of endangered species, he was on tenterhooks lest the police come back for him. After all, they had been two days running, why not today? But no one came and he got to Erna Morosini’s five minutes ahead of time.

She was rather short with him, not asking if he was better but moaning about how exhausted she was, having to walk Ruby herself. It was easy to see the beagle hadn’t been using up enough energy. Like a team of sprightly carriage horses, she pulled Bean up to Park Crescent, puffing and lunging. He exchanged a glance with the Duke of Kent, who didn’t look the kind of man to be intimidated by policemen, before Ruby pulled him on. Valerie Conway appeared at the area door with Boris.

“A Mr. Barker-Something phoned me yesterday to ask what I thought you were playing at. He said he hadn’t had a word out of you and not to put yourself out to come when you did get back. He’s making other arrangements.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He says there’s school-leavers round here panting to do the job for a fraction of what you charge. There was one girl said she’d take Charlie out for free, he’s so lovely.”

Boris padded up the steps, his claws making a patter like the sound of hailstones on the metal treads. Waiting at the top, tied to the railings, Ruby fell amorously upon him, not much deterred by Boris’s low growl and lips peeled back to show yellow teeth. Pity there was no market for dog pornography, Bean thought. He took them into the gardens and through the tunnel under the Marylebone Road. Now Pharaoh was dead, he could do that, and never again feel that trepidation, that tightening of the muscles and tensing of nerves.

In the park Marietta was uneasy, missing Charlie, not inclined to run by herself, but wandering aimlessly and stopping for a scratch. Bean got a shot of her standing on the rings of cobblestones round the Parsi’s fountain, looking soulful. It would be a good picture and it somewhat calmed him. He had been boiling with anger and the injustice of it ever since Valerie Conway told him of Barker-Pryce’s decision. The nerve, after what he’d seen in Paddington!

Two can play at that game, thought Bean.

18

T
he police coming took Hob by surprise. Not their coming, he expected that, but their reason. He must be getting soft in his old age. He’d had a birthday the day before, his thirty-second, or he thought it was his thirty-second, but he couldn’t be sure, it might have been his thirty-third. He’d asked his mum and she didn’t know either. All she’d said was that he was a few years younger than her but not all that many because she’d been just a kid when he was born.

But he was old enough to be losing his grip because he thought the police came on account of the riot. He thought they’d come to
apologize
for all his windows getting knocked out in the mini-riot of the night before. That came of living on the first floor, he’d have been safe higher up. He still didn’t know the cause but there’d been these boys, kids of thirteen or fourteen, running up and down the walkways armed with car jacks and milk bottles, and then it had turned nasty, one of their dads coming out with a crossbow and someone else with what looked like a shotgun.

Hob watched from his window. He’d got some E’s, the yellow tabs, from Lew but he knew he’d get so excited if he took one now he’d be down there with the rioters. They were shouting out something about a boy they said the police had beaten up in his cell, some mate of theirs accused of dropping a concrete block off the top floor onto an old man’s head. Hob didn’t want to get involved.

The first of his windows went while he was out in the kitchen getting himself a vodka as a starter before his main meal of the blow
he’d got for the weekend. It was bricks they were throwing now. Hob picked the brick up off the floor and thought about throwing it back but didn’t. It must have come off that pile the council builders left behind when they built a wall round that raised flowerbed at the entrance to the car park. Pointless really because all the flowers had been torn out overnight and someone had started dismantling the wall. He took a swig of his vodka and wandered toward the settee.

Before he’d even sat down he heard a brick or bottle go through the bedroom window. Someone must have dialed 999, for two police cars screamed in while he was pushing broken glass about with his toe and kicking it into the corner. The police had riot shields. Hob could hardly believe it. Riot shields for a crossbow and a few bricks! He wasn’t in a state but the vodka made him a bit rocky. He smiled at his pun, his joke, and went to his jacket pocket for the red velvet bag.

There was a terrible noise going on out there now. All his windows at the front had gone—good thing the weather was getting so warm. He didn’t care much. He set to work on his ritual, cutting the straw in half, crumbling up the jumbo, screwing on the Imperial Russian Court cap, drawing in at last the life-giving smoke.

It might have been an hour after that that the police came or a lot longer. He couldn’t tell. He’d danced about the room a bit, done some Power Ranger exercises, air punching and karate kicks, and then he’d built a pyramid out of the three bricks that had come through the windows and the broken glass and cut himself in the process but not so’s you’d notice. He must have gone to sleep at one point, for the scratching woke him up. Mice. He lay there listening to the mice and thinking it was a nice sound, nice and peaceful, not like rats, he’d never heard of any disease you could catch from mice, when there came a sound that wasn’t nice at all, a great pounding on the front door.

He looked out of the broken window and saw their car down there. Unmarked, of course, but still recognizable to him as a police
car. They knocked again and he let them in, all smiles, certain this was a routine visit, nothing to worry about, sir, all cleared up now, sorry you’ve been inconvenienced.

They didn’t say any of that, but pushed past him into the flat, looking about them with their noses pinched as if it were a sewer they’d come into. They asked him if he was Harvey Owen Bennett and where had he been on June the something, the night Cahill was killed?

“Here,” said Hob. “On me tod. Where else?”

They pressed him for more than that and he tried to think. A Thursday it was. It was years since he’d had much of a memory. Maybe that was the day he’d talked to his mum on Leo’s phone and asked how old he was and she’d said that about him being younger than her and she’d have to go on account of her and his stepfather going down the boozer for this party they were having for her silver wedding. What silver wedding, he’d said, on account of her only being married for about five minutes, and she’d said, so what, it would have been her silver wedding if she’d not got divorced and the whole family was coming including his dad.

“No, I tell a lie,” he said. “I was at my mum and dad’s silver wedding.”

He hadn’t a scrap of faith in it as an alibi, but he had to say something. They weren’t going to leave him alone to get to a phone, they took him with them. On the way out he saw that the flowerbed was entirely gone, not a brick left, not a handful of earth. Maybe they’d learn now.

It was like a miracle what happened. People who knocked families ought to think before they spoke. His family was one in a million, solid as a rock, supportive was the word he was looking for. He didn’t have to ask them, he didn’t have to say a word—well, he couldn’t, he was in that police car with the driver glaring at him—they came out with it all without hesitation, his stepfather told him on the phone afterward. Of course Hob had been at the party, there
from nine till they packed in when the extension ended at one-thirty and he slept the night at their place. Two of his half-brothers and his stepsister’s ex and the ex’s girlfriend, they all backed him up, and his stepsister’s ex who had an imagination said he’d done a beautiful rendering of “I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” while they were cutting the cake.

“Any time, Hob, you know that,” his stepfather said. “You don’t have to ask.”

He saw that he didn’t.

•   •   •

Effie was up on the hill, drinking the nuns’ tea, and so were Dill and Teddy and the man called Nello. Last time Roman had been up there all the talk had been of Pharaoh and his terrible end, of Pharaoh and of Decker. Who would be next? Would it be one of them? No one talked of it anymore. They were as they had been before, or almost. Roman fancied they were more subdued than usual, more wary. They, who had never been afraid of what people with roofs over their heads feared, the streets, the dark, were afraid of them now.

He had taken to leaving his barrow under the arch at the Grotto. Sooner or later it would be stolen, he knew that, but he didn’t much care. It was a relief not to have to lug it around with him. Every time he saw Nello, who had all the marks of the amiable natural, the village idiot, almost the holy fool, the man would remind him of the risks he ran.