‘Why not?’ I replied.
‘See if we can liven the evening up,’ he said.
‘Any livelier and we’ll be dead,’ remarked Jo.
‘Just about average for a Saturday evening, eh Algy?’ I asked.
‘Just about.’
He drove us up West and we spent the rest of the night in a confusion of neon and alcohol. We clubbed it until the last club closed and then we went to a club that catered for club workers and ladies of the night that didn’t open until the last club had closed, and that suited us just fine. At nine a.m. we were the last drinkers in the place except for an old grandmama dolled up like Regent Street on Christmas Eve and who only had eyes for Algy.
In the best tradition we made our excuses and left, weaving drunkenly into Sunday mid-morning.
Algy offered to drive us home but we declined and fell asleep in the back of a black cab somewhere near Vauxhall Cross to the sound of church bells.
22
O
wing to lack of interest the rest of Sunday was pretty much cancelled.
Jo and I slept until two and she crawled down the road for any papers that were left and some aspirin. I was sitting in bed nursing a hangover and a cup of unsweetened black instant, half-watching the bumper edition of ‘EastEnders’ on the tube when the phone rang and I spilled half the hot liquid down my bare chest.
I fielded the phone and juggled it under my chin ‘Sharman,’ I barked. ‘And this better be good.’
‘Nicholas,’ said an effusive voice. ‘Chris Kennedy-Sloane. Sorry to bother you at the weekend but I’m off to sunnier climes on the morrow and won’t have another chance for a chin-wag for a while.’
‘I’m ill,’ I said.
‘You might get iller.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose you’ve heard.’
‘What exactly?’
‘The Divas are opening McBain’s accounts to an expectant world.’
‘I heard.’
‘Well, be careful.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Use your noggin, old boy. Mogul Incorporated are not pleased with you. Not one little bit pleased.’
‘So why are they prepared to spill the beans?’
‘Nick I didn’t say which accounts they’re opening. They’re buying time, that’s all.’
‘For what?’
‘For you, my dear. That’s the reason for this call. I like you Nicholas. You have a wry sense of humour and seem to be a cut above some of the others in your profession that it has been my misfortune to meet. If indeed one can honour it with the word “Profession”.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Don’t mention it. I also heard about young Steven’s - how can I put it? – slight misfortune in the waterworks department, and I must confess it raised you highly in my estimation. It’s good to hear of a reptile of that ilk getting his just rewards. But beware, my friend, he won’t forget the incident in a hurry, and I’ve heard that some of his methods of revenge are barbaric in extremis.’
‘Fuck his luck,’ I said.
‘Precisely. Anyway, enough of all this. We must meet for a sherbert upon my return and you can tell me the whole story.’
‘Don’t mention sherbert to me.’
‘Heavy night?’
‘And morning.’
‘That bad?’
‘Algy.’
‘Ah, the animalistic road manager.’
‘He’s OK,’ I said.
‘Have it your way, but I don’t really see him as the ideal companion for an evening’s soirée.’
‘Do you ever use one word when three will do?’
‘Rarely. Oh my, I just did.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Quite, and there I go again. Now when I get back I’ll give you a bell and if you’re feeling better, as I’m sure you will, I’ll treat you to a small lemonade and a bite of lunch.’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ I said.
‘Cheers then, and I repeat, be careful.’
‘Cheers,’ I said and dropped the phone back onto the receiver and fumbled a cigarette out of Jo’s packet and lit it. I felt nauseous as the smoke bit and swallowed some coffee, then shrugged. I heard Jo shuffling up the stairs and hoped that everything would turn out all right. What else could I do? And that was that for, I suppose, a fortnight, when I finally got a twinge of conscience about just sitting around and decided to go out and chase up some business. So one chill morning I put on my prospector’s hat and took a tour round to see what I could see.
It was a quiet morning and no one seemed to need anything in the debt-collecting or detecting line. It seemed that everyone was paying their bills on time and only sleeping with their own wives.
In a pig’s ear, they were.
I stopped off at lunchtime for a small lager and a microwaved one hundred per cent pure sawdust burger then pointed the car towards home.
23
I
got back to the office around two. I’d left the gas fire on for the cats and all the windows were steamed up. I had my key in my hand, but the door was already unlocked. I froze with one hand on the door handle and one on the key in the lock. I left the key where it was and pushed the door gently open. I stood outside for a moment. Everything seemed quiet so I sidled in and stood in the doorway.
Someone had hung Cat up from the light fixture with a length of thick piano wire. She swung almost imperceptibly to and fro above my desk. The wire had tightened around her throat and pulled up a tiny ruff of fur under her chin. A solitary ruby bead of blood shivered under one nostril.
I stood and looked in sheer disbelief. I gripped the door frame hard to regain some feeling of reality and choked back a cry or word or something, I can’t remember. What can I say, except I’d grown very fond of that damned cat.
I looked around for the kittens. They’d been kicked into a bloody heap under the desk. When I touched them they were already beginning to stiffen.
I cut Cat down with a pair of pliers and cradled her body in my arms. I don’t think I’d ever held her so close when she’d been alive. Her fur felt cool and damp. I stroked her head for the last time, then laid her on the desk and went into the back room to get a black plastic garbage sack. I put Cat and her kittens together in the sack and secured the neck with tape. I went out and across the road to some council workmen digging a hole, and asked to borrow a shovel. They acted as if they thought I was going to steal it, but a couple of pound coins soon straightened them out. I went back to the office and let myself out through the back door into the handkerchief-sized yard. There was one spot where the sun touched at noon in the summer. Some wild flowers straggled there in defiance of the stony ground. I dug deep and buried Cat and the kittens that had never even been named. I didn’t say a prayer. Who needed it? It was just a stray cat and some bastard mongrel kittens. Not worth a toss, except to me. I tapped down the earth firmly and returned the shovel. The way the workmen looked, I think for another couple of quid I could have leased the generator they were using to drive their pneumatic drill.
I went back to the office and sat and stared at the insides of the misted windows and wondered who had killed the poor bloody things. But really I knew from the moment I’d seen Cat’s body.
I don’t know how long I sat there nursing a slow burning fury before I heard a rustle and squeak from behind the filing cabinet. I went round to investigate. Jammed in tight between the cabinet and the wall was a live kitten. It was the little black-and-white runt of the litter. I couldn’t believe it. It was just a scrap of fur crying for its mother but it was warm and alive.
I gently lifted it from its hiding place and tucked it inside my shirt where I could feel its tiny heart beating next to mine, locked the office and took it home. I went back up to my flat and mixed some warm milk and water and fed the little thing from the finger of a rubber glove with a tiny hole poked in the end. The kitten seemed to enjoy its feed and soon fell asleep on one of my pillows stuffed into the bottom of a brown cardboard box. It wasn’t ideal but would have to do until something better came along.
I wandered the carpet, running the event through my mind. I wanted to be sure I was right in my suspicions but there had been no hint at the office, no scribbled note or mysterious telephone call. But I knew. I just couldn’t prove it. I should have done something about it then, but I didn’t. I just kept wandering the carpet and drinking too much vodka and shed a tear for the poor dumb thing that had befriended me and, like every friend I’d ever had, came to a tragic end. So in the end I did the worst thing I could have done. I did nothing.
24
I
didn’t know what to tell Jo about Cat. What the hell do you say to someone who’s father is a Mafia Don when your only pet has been hung up like a side of salt beef. I’d seen The
Godfather,
twice in fact, and I remembered the horse’s head in the bed, and all of a sudden it wasn’t so filmic somehow. It was bloody real and it bloody scared the shit out of me.
And it wasn’t funny, not one little bit, but somehow, thinking about it as I made a groove in the carpet, it had the taste, the tinge of the blackest of black comedy.
As I walked and as I drank I had a brainwave about what to do about the surviving kitten. When I was on the squad cars I’d been called in on a burglary at a terraced house round the back of Brixton Prison. The victim had been Wanda something or other, but my partner and I had nicknamed her Cat Woman. The house was overheated to the point of tropicality, and on the ground floor all the interior walls had been knocked out to make one big room. All sorts of exotic plants thrived in the heat, climbing the walls and hanging down from the ceiling. She had cats like other people had cockroaches. They sat on every available surface and the noise of their purring was like the sound of waves breaking on a sandy beach.
Wanda was an ex-actress who’d married well and divorced better. She was well-loaded, well-built and just this side of being totally round the twist. I think the temperature she kept her living quarters was about equal to her blood heat as within twenty-four hours of the robbery taking place she’d managed to get my oppo into her bedroom and out of his uniform trousers. He told me that the weirdest experience he’d ever had was waking up in a darkened room and discovering he was sharing a bed with one woman and her fifty pussies. Although the affair had been short-lived we’d all got pretty pally and I suspected that she might have had a little yen for me. I knew I had her number somewhere in one of my old address books and I dug them out and there it was. I crossed my fingers and gave her a call. Luckily she still lived in the same house and after a bit of prompting remembered me. She was as good as gold when I explained the situation.
‘Orphaned kitten,’ she said, ‘bring the poor little bugger round.’
So I did.
I stuck the little cat under my shirt again and drove through the back doubles to where she lived. She opened the door right away. She was just as I remembered her and so was the house. Inside it was as hot and damp as a South American rain forest, carpeted wall to wall with furry backed moggies. I paddled in, shin deep and she closed the door behind me and handed me a quadruple gin in one smooth motion.
‘Nick,’ she said, ‘you’re as handsome as ever, give me a kiss and let me look at you. Give me two kisses and an old woman will die happy.’
‘Less of the old,’ I replied and pecked her on the cheek. When she seemed to want the kiss to take on Hollywood proportions I pulled back and said, ‘Don’t squash this.’ I pulled the kitten from inside my shirt and handed it to her.
‘So this is the beast,’ she said. ‘Is it weaned?’
‘Hardly,’ I replied. ‘Does it matter?’
‘No problem. I’ve got a couple of nursing queens in the back and I’ll just plug this one onto a spare nipple.’
I refrained from making a joke about ‘Nursing queens’ but said instead, ‘I want it back.’
‘I’m not going to steal your cat. I’ve got enough of my own to be getting along with.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What happened to the mum?’ she demanded.
‘Bit of an accident.’
‘Sorry to hear it. Why don’t you take a pew?’
She chased a bunch of cats off a leather chesterfield and I sat down.
‘Mind your trousers,’ she warned, ‘it’s a bit furry on there.’
‘Not to worry,’ I replied. ‘You don’t know what a big favour you’re doing me.’
‘It’s a pleasure. I’ll take good care of the little thing,’ she said. ‘Now drink up and have another gin.’
The mixture of heat and alcohol was beginning to get to me and she loaded me up with more ice and gave me a good view down the front of her loose sweater as she filled my glass.
‘Come on Wanda,’ I said. ‘Give me a break.’
‘It’s the gin and the loneliness,’ she said, striking a theatrical pose. ‘And the heat. It can drive a woman mad.’
‘Turn the thermostat down a bit then,’ I advised. ‘And I bet you’re not so lonely.’
‘That may be so, but these days one has to be so careful, and you look like just the kind of young man who always carries a condom in the corner of his wallet.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What, a condom?’
‘No, a wallet,’ I said. ‘Or a condom for that matter. Now leave it. Stop taking the piss.’
‘As if I would,’ she said sulkily. ‘But when you come back to collect your cat there might be some rent due.’
‘Cash?’ I asked.
‘Or kind.’ She whispered with a lascivious grin.
I grinned back and she poured me another gin. When I’d finished my drink I told her I had to go and I waded through four-legged friends to the door.
‘Cheers Wanda,’ I said as she opened the door for me. ‘I’m sorry I’m not in a terrific mood tonight.’
‘There’ll be other times,’ she said.
‘Goodnight then, and be good.’
‘No chance to be anything else round here.’
‘I still don’t believe you,’ I said, kissed her again on the cheek and walked down the front path back to my car.
25
I
had a date with Jo and though I was well out of sorts I mooched the Jag in the direction of her flat and went to see her.
I arrived at her flat at about eight and she sussed me out right away.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked as she let me in the front door. ‘You look like you lost a dollar and found a nickel.’ That’s when I told her the first lie.
‘Cat died,’ I said. Just that. ‘Cat died.’ No details, no explanations.
‘Oh Nick, I am sorry. What happened?’
I expanded the lie. ‘She just died. I guess she was too old to have kittens.’
‘And what happened to them?’
I shrugged. ‘They were too young to survive, except one I managed to save – I’ve left it with someone I know who’s an expert with cats. She says it should be OK.’
‘She?’ asked Jo.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘she’s no competition.’
‘Sorry sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I know you must be upset and there’s me being silly.’
‘I’d hate it if you weren’t,’ I said, changing the subject. She sat me down and hugged me up and I responded like a man should, but I hated myself for lying and I hated myself more for not getting right up and going out and letting the bastards who killed my friend know that they weren’t going to get away with it.
But you see I’m human and someone had waved the brass ring in my face and I wanted to grab it. I had visions of the ten per cent McBain had promised me and I let it turn me chicken shit. I sat there and held Jo and told her lies and the Devil perched on my shoulder and whispered sweet nothings in my ears about all the good things that money could buy, and I listened. And Jo whispered in my other ear that I shouldn’t take it too hard and I never gave her the chance to tell me straight what I should have done. Because I knew that if she knew the truth she’d never let me have a moment’s peace until I’d exacted revenge.
No, I sat there with her and I let her and the Devil convince me to forget about all the bad things and enjoy life.