Gone Tomorrow (16 page)

‘What’s that, sweetheart?’

‘Can I take fencing lessons?’ she repeated with the huge, elderly patience she often assumed when talking to him. She already had that habitual eye-rolling exasperation that marks out young womankind. ‘At school.’

‘I didn’t know you were interested in fencing.’

Matthew roused himself from his matutinal torpor. ‘She’s not. She just fancies the fencing teacher.’

‘I do not!’

‘Yes you do. Mr
Brierly,’
Matthew mocked, as though Brierly were an intrinsically ludicrous name.

‘And I suppose you’re not in love with your precious Mrs Wolfton!’ Pleased with herself, Kate expanded. ‘Oh, Mrs Wolfton, Matthew’s so in
lurve
with you. He wants to
marry
you.’

Matthew blushed richly, bringing his spots into high relief. He was going to be a nice-looking boy once his skin settled down – not handsome, any more than Slider himself was, but just nice-looking. Girls would like him. But at the moment he was going through the worst period in a man’s life: he was a war zone of rampaging hormones, and his face was the visible battlefield. Slider wanted to jump in and defend him, but that would be to hurt his pride. Instead, neutrally, he asked, ‘Who’s Mrs Wolfton?’

‘Violin teacher,’ Matthew muttered.

Kate bounced harder. ‘I don’t know why you want to learn stupid old violin. It’s so
dorky.’

‘It is not!’ Matthew retorted.

‘It is. It’s stupid. Only a pathetic saddo would play the violin.’

‘What about Nigel Kennedy?’ Slider said mildly.

‘Oh, puh-lease! He’s an ancient, boring old saddo! All violinists are nerds!’

‘You shut up!’ Matthew said with sudden fury, swivelling round to make a menacing face at her. She stuck her tongue out as far as it would go, and then, apparently satisfied, reverted to her normal tones and the previous question.

‘So can I, Daddy? Take fencing?’

‘What does your mother say?’ Slider hedged.

Kate cut to the chase. ‘It’s
extra,’
she said succinctly.

Slider blenched. This fee business was a minefield, what with male pride, and Ernie’s income being twice Slider’s. ‘Oh. Well, we’ll see. I’ll talk to Mummy about it.’

‘I suppose that means no,’ Kate said, but without grief. They had turned into the road where her school was, and her attention was on the other girls being dropped off. ‘There’s Melanie,’ she said suddenly. ‘Let me out here, Daddy.’

She ran off, bag over her shoulder, with that strange impervious completeness of little girls, perfect miniature grown-ups as boys never were. In seconds a group of them had their heads together: all alike with their long straight legs and glossy hair, like foals. It tweaked at Slider’s heart with the devastating accuracy of a cat pulling a thread out of fine suiting.

He drove off. Now he had just a few minutes to devote to Matthew, and perversely could not think of anything to say. After a moment, however, Matthew spoke, seemingly from the depths of a long train of thought.

‘Dad, are you and Joanna – you know?’

‘Am I and Joanna what?’

‘Well, is she – you know – coming back?’

Matthew was staring straight ahead and his blush, though less violent than before, evidently came from the same cause. There had been more going on earlier, Slider realised, than mere sibling teasing.

‘She’s coming back today,’ he said.

‘Yes, but that’s just a holiday, isn’t it? I mean—’ He struggled with his unwillingness to name demons. What Matthew wanted to know was whether her and Slider’s relationship would survive the distance now between them.

Slider would have liked to know that too. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said. Matthew moved restlessly, thinking he was being fobbed off, and Slider said, ‘Really. I just don’t know.’

‘I like her,’ Matthew said, surprising Slider. Matthew was at the age when any expression of affection was exquisite torture. But all was explained as he went on painfully, ‘Mum said it wasn’t surprising Joanna went, that no-one could live with you, because of your job.’ His spots flared anew.

‘She didn’t say that to you.’ Slider knew that much about Irene.

‘No, she said it to Ernie, but we heard. Kate and me. We were just coming into the kitchen.’

All was now explained. A great protective sadness rolled over Slider for his son, who loved him, as painfully and perilously as Slider loved him back. He was not like Kate, who skated lightly and scornfully through life. Matthew’s world was a minefield of angst. He expected every step to blow up in his face; he feared for those he loved as much as for himself.

‘That’s not why Joanna went,’ Slider said. ‘We didn’t quarrel or anything. It was just her job.’

Matthew hunched lower. ‘But she might not come back?’

Slider turned into Matthew’s school road. ‘We’ll work something out,’ he said. ‘Somehow.’ He hoped he sounded surer than he felt.

He found a space and pulled in. Matthew reached over to the back seat for his bag and began to get out.

‘G’bye then, Dad. Thanks for the lift.’

‘Have a good week,’ Slider said. ‘And – Matthew?’ The boy paused and turned his face to his father, with all the troubles of the world on his shoulders. It was a bugger being a teenage boy. Girls had no idea. ‘You don’t have to take sides,’ Slider said. ‘Mummy and I are all right now. She didn’t mean anything bad.’

‘Kate’s an idiot,’ Matthew said, jumping a stage of logic; but his face had lightened.

‘She’s just a little girl. She’ll grow out of that.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ Matthew said. He grinned suddenly, letting Slider see for a moment what he would look like in five or six years’ time (how that smile would melt the girls!) and then was gone.

As soon as Slider was alone, his mind snapped him instantly from his domestic into his professional persona. When he was engaged with either one, the other always seemed slightly
fantastic. Which was real life, he wondered? He knew what Irene thought. Probably all police wives – unless they were in the service themselves – resented the Job. He shoved the thought away and concentrated on finding the fastest route through the morning traffic back to Shepherd’s Bush.

Billy Cheeseman had not only gone off the boil by the time Slider got back, he had gone off.

‘I couldn’t keep him,’ O’Flaherty said. ‘Said he’d to get to work.’ He raised his eyes ceilingwards. ‘To think I’ve lived to see the day when Billy One-Eye says he’s to get to work. But he’s left his mobile number, says you’re to ring him. Every man and his dog’s got a mobile these days,’ he added, shoving the piece of paper across. ‘Sure, when you think o’ the crap floatin’ about the airwaves – and they say no sound ever dies. What they’ll make of it all out on Neptune …’ As if to illustrate the point, he let out a ripping fart, one of his specials, born of last night’s Guinness and his wife’s famous steak-and-kidney pudding. Some bug-eyed monster would be swivelling his finger round in his antenna over that one in about 4.18 hours’ time, thought Slider, heading for his room.

When One-Eyed Billy answered, there was a babble of background noise which Slider identified, with the aid of a Metropolitan train bashing past on the viaduct, as Shepherd’s Bush market.

‘Hang on a sec,’ Billy said, and there was an interval of indeterminate noise, together with the whistling of Billy’s breath, and then at last a low, cryptic, ‘Hullo?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘I’ve gone round the back for a bit of quiet,’ Billy explained. ‘I’ll have to be quick, only Uncle Sam’ll be after me.’

‘So what have you got for me?’

‘Well,’ he said, obviously deeply reluctant, ‘about this Lenny bloke what got offed in the park. I don’t like getting mixed up in it. My young lady wouldn’t like it. Dead posh she is. But me dad said I’d got to help you, so I been asking around.’

‘Good for you.’

‘But you got to promise to keep me out of it, ’cos of my young lady.’

‘Keep you out of what? Spit it out, Billy. What’ve you got?’

‘This geezer what I know, knows Lenny,’ Billy murmured, and Slider could imagine the hand cupped round the mouthpiece for security. ‘Knows what he was into. It was somethink heavy. He’s scared shitless, this geezer. He won’t come in the nick and talk to you. So it’s gotter be a meet.’

‘All right. Where and when?’

‘It’s gotter be off the manor. He’s scared someone’ll see him.’

Slider sighed. ‘This had better be the goods, Billy. If I find you’ve been wasting my time—’

‘It’s the goods all right,’ Billy said, faintly resentful. ‘I’m tryin’ twelp, like me dad said. But this bloke’s scared for ’is life.’

‘All right, so where?’ Slider said again. Off the manor? He hoped it wouldn’t be anywhere too exotic.

‘You know the Dog up the North Pole?’

Slider translated this encryption effortlessly. It was a pub called the Dog and Sportsman (or as Atherton called it, the Dog and Scrotum) on the corner of North Pole Road. It was only surprise that checked him. North Pole Road was about three-quarters of a mile from the White City. If that was ‘off the manor’, the unknown informant had a very parochial standard of geography.

‘Yes. I know it,’ he said.

‘I’ll get him in there,’ said Billy. ‘’Smorning, about eleven. I got to go up Willesden for me uncle, so he won’t know. All right?’

‘All right,’ Slider agreed.

‘But you gotter come alone,’ Billy said. ‘He’ll talk to you, ’cos I told him you was straight, but if you bring anyone wiv you he’ll scarper.’

‘All right, Billy. I’ll be there,’ Slider said. All told he was getting off lightly. It could have been midnight under the railway bridge in Huddersfield, with all its attendant problems. But if the unknown informant really was scared, wouldn’t he have wanted somewhere a bit more private and a lot darker than a pub on a main road at eleven in the morning?

Before heading out for the ‘meet’, Slider snatched a moment to ring Irene to let her know he had dropped the children off
as arranged, otherwise she’d be ringing and accusing him of thoughtlessness and not caring about his children’s safety. Materially she was very comfortable with her new man, but he had found that the less she had to worry about at home, the more she sought out a
casus belli
with him. He supposed it used up her spare energy – and Irene was one of those whiplash-thin women who never sit still. It was a pity Ernie Newman had a cleaning-woman: Irene had no Hoovering to do any more to work it off.

‘Oh, by the way, Kate was asking me about taking fencing lessons,’ he said.

‘Fencing?’ Irene sounded blank.

A lifetime’s knowledge made him familiar with her thought processes. He smiled. ‘With swords. Not garden fencing.’

‘Oh! Well, I know they do teach girls woodwork these days … Fencing? They say it’s good for the figure,’ Irene dredged up from the wide-ranging sagacities of ‘Them’. ‘It makes you graceful. As good as ballet, that way.’

‘She can hardly be said to
have
a figure yet. Anyway, I just thought I’d warn you, so she didn’t take you by surprise.’

‘Why, are you against it? It must be all properly supervised or they wouldn’t offer it.’

‘I’m not against it. Fencing’s a big thing in the Met – a lot of coppers do it. But it’s Extra.’

‘Oh! Well, that’s—’ She stopped, and Slider divined from the intonation that she had been about to say, ‘That’s all right, Ernie can afford it,’ but caught herself just in time. ‘I expect it’s just a passing fad,’ she said instead. ‘You know what she’s like.’

‘If she’s really serious about it …’

‘We’ll see,’ Irene said comfortingly. ‘She’ll probably have forgotten by the time she gets home.’

Which meant, he translated when he had hung up, that if Kate really wanted to take fencing, Ernie would cough up and they would all try not to mention it to Slider. His former marriage had become like a game of bridge, where you had to translate codes to discover the true state of your partner’s hand. He thought fencing would be good for Kate, but he simply couldn’t afford it on his screw. That was a fact. Now all he had to decide was whether he minded more denying her the pleasure, or
letting Ernie Bloody Newman be Father Christmas – again! Life! he thought. Hate it or ignore it, you can’t love it.

The Dog and Scrotum was unreconstructed fifties, an arterial road giant too large for its clientele now that they all had more comfort at home and didn’t need to seek it outside. In defiance of the national trend it served no food but crisps and pork scratchings, so at the lunchtime session it was the haunt of equally unreconstructed old keffs of the sort who wore a cap indoors and rolled their own cigarettes, plus a sprinkling of undesirables who had been banned from all the other pubs in the area.

The Dog occupied a corner spot, with two doors, one in each street. One-Eyed Billy and his friend were sitting at the table beside the main door, a position in which, on account of the way the door opened, they could see anyone coming through before
they
saw
them,
and could also keep an eye on the subsidiary door onto the side street. This positioning did not escape Slider’s notice, and he was very sure it could not have been Billy Cheeseman’s idea. His friend, then, had something of the pro about him.

Billy waved Slider over and introduced the other man with a hint of awe. ‘This is my mate Everet Boston. Him and me was at school together.’

‘Yeah, for one year. Long time ago, Bill,’ the other said, as if distancing himself from that happy time. His eyes scanned Slider and darted away to check the rest of the pub again. He was a tall black man who, if he was a contemporary of Billy’s, looked a lot younger than he was. He could have passed for mid-twenties, and had an air of flexible slenderness which was belied, on closer inspection, by the power in the arms and chest.

Beside him on the seat was a very fine suede jacket which Slider could smell was new. He wore his hair in four long dreadlocks caught into a bunch behind, his clothes were casual but sharp and expensive, he had the obligatory gold crucifix and chain round his neck, and he sat at an angle with one leg crossed over the other, clasping the ankle with the hand that was not occupied with his smoke. The word ‘cool’ sprang to mind, and then slunk away, acknowledging its inadequacy. No wonder they were meeting ‘up the North Pole’.