David came back, perched himself on the edge of the table and said, “The people you get your heroin from were swindled over the last consignment. They’ll have considerable difficulty in replacing it. In fact, supplies may dry up altogether, for a time.”
“And what has that got to do with you?”
“As it happens, I am in a position to offer you an alternative supply.”
He put a hand into the top pocket of his windcheater and drew out a plastic packet. There was no doubt, now, about the doctor’s interest.
Bad trouble with his patients, David diagnosed. Keep at him. You’ve got him rolling.
“You can test it if you wish. I imagine you have the apparatus.”
“No need for apparatus,” said the doctor. He opened the package, spilled a few grains from it on to a spoon from the table, held it up to the light and examined it closely. Then he touched a grain with his tongue.
He said, “How much are you asking?”
“There, now,” said David, “I like a man who knows his own mind and comes straight to the point.”
“How much?”
“If you weigh the packet you will find that it contains exactly twenty grams of top-grade heroin. The open-market price, I understand, is twelve thousand pounds a kilo. By my calculation that makes this lot worth two thousand, four hundred.”
“You’re talking kerbside prices. I don’t deal in that market. First, I shall have to have the powder converted into regulation hypodermic tablets. That is an expensive process.”
David knew that this was true. A doctor would have a small legitimate supply. But it would be in tablet form. If he dispensed the drug in powder form and it was traced back to him, he would be in bad trouble.
“I’ll give you eight hundred pounds. Not a penny more.”
“That wasn’t the sort of price I had in mind.”
“If you don’t like it you can take the stuff somewhere else.”
“What I proposed,” said David placidly, “was to give you the packet.”
The doctor stared at him.
“In exchange for some information. And a little help.”
“So?”
“I will go further than that. If the information you give me proves correct and your help is effective, I will present you with a similar packet, also for free.”
The doctor, who had been standing, sat down in the chair at the head of the table and closed his eyes.
Just as if he was going to say grace, thought David. “For what we are about to receive—”
After a long pause, the doctor said, “You are prepared to pay so handsomely for this information that it makes me wonder what it is and why you want it.”
“Then let me explain.” He extracted a snapshot from his wallet and laid it on the table. “I’ve every reason to believe that this is a photograph of one of your patients. It was taken some years ago, and the man will have changed a lot by now. But I think, if you look at it carefully—”
The doctor examined the photograph for a long minute. Then he said, “Perhaps.”
“You do know him?”
“If it is a man who looks like a tramp and speaks like a gentleman.”
“Yes, indeed,” said David softly. “That will be the man.”
“What do you want with him?”
“I’ve come a long way to find him.” David put the photograph back in his wallet. “And I want you to help me.”
“How?”
“Very simply. I have observed that you have regular days and times for the patients who visit you in the evenings.”
“Certainly.”
“Then you know when this man will come here next.”
“He comes once a month. He has some allowance, I believe, from a family trust. He collects it in cash and comes here that same day. I sell him a month’s supply in tablets.”
“Which is how much?”
“All he can afford. Sixty tablets of one sixth of a grain each. He will be here next”—the doctor consulted a black covered book on the table—“on October fifteenth. That is in just a fortnight’s time.”
“You’re quite certain?”
“Unless he dies in the meantime,” said the doctor, “which is quite possible. Or if, by chance, he happened to get his hands on some other money, he might try for an earlier appointment, but I think that is unlikely. In the last two years that has happened only once.”
“What is the routine for your patients? I’m sure you are very careful.”
“Very,” said the doctor, with rather a grim smile. “Each patient has a name. Not his real name, of course. A name by which he is known to me and to me only. He speaks it into the answer-phone at the back door, and I can release the door lock from here.”
“Then, as soon as my man speaks his name, turn off your surgery light, keep it off for five seconds and turn it on again.”
“Is that all?”
“Not quite. When he comes in you will explain to him that there has been a hitch in your supplies. You are having to ration all your patients. You can spare him only forty tablets.”
“There’ll be trouble. You don’t know these people.”
“It’s the sort of trouble I expect you can deal with,” said David. “Anyway, that’s the proposition. And let me tell you one thing more. If you take my stuff and don’t keep your side of the bargain, there will be another sort of trouble. My suppliers are hard men.”
The doctor thought about it. Then he said, “I have told you that I cannot absolutely guarantee that he will be here on that date. It is a ninety-five per cent probability only.”
“In the changes and chances of this mortal life,” said David, “how can one hope for more than ninety-five per cent?”
In the fortnight that followed, a close observer would have noted the tiny successive steps in David’s descent from poverty to destitution. The hair growing longer and greasier, the ruinous overcoat which he donned as the weather sharpened, the trousers collapsing at the bottom over boots which had started worn and now sported holes, stuffed with paper, in both toes.
In that fortnight, David explored the kingdom of the tramps. He came to know their enemies and their friends. The police who bullied them, the societies who afflicted them with tracts and prayer and the householders who were good for a cup of tea and an occasional small gift of money. He discovered that certain seats in parks and public places were their preserve and that the routes between them were preordained. When you went from Byland Street to Porthead Road you took the circular route, west of Rotherhithe Park, never the more direct route to the east of the park. Why? No one knew. The procession of the tramps was as immutable as the procession of the planets.
He also discovered, in time, some of their favoured sleeping places. These were closely guarded secrets and were referred to only by indecipherable code names. The Villa, the Blink, Up-and-Under, Calcutta, Rats’ Castle. As dusk fell the waiflike figures would melt into the shadows, moving first slowly and with caution and then very quickly, to reach their secret lying-up places.
On the first night of real cold and rain, David made for a tramps’ lodging house in Stepney which had been recommended to him as a superior doss. After a night between dirty blankets on an iron cot without a mattress, in a room holding twenty-four men, half of whom snored and half of whom coughed and all of whom stank, David decided that he would prefer to brave almost any weather in the open.
By luck, on the very next night, he located the Blink. This was a corner of a bricked-up railway tunnel, the door to which someone had found a way to force. It was a snug place, lined with sacks. David had to fight to establish his right to a bed, but was finally accepted and even became friendly with one of the “owners.” Dai, a fellow Welshman, had one eye and an ingratiating smile. He called himself the Minstrel Boy and made a living by busking the cinema queues in Leicester Square. He instructed David, “When you come into a place like the Blink and no one knows who the hell you are, you don’t just barge in, see. What you do is, you say, ‘Who’s the big man, then?’ Right? Then people know you’re a scrapper and mostly you won’t have to fight. Tramps are peaceful people, see. Live and let live.”
“Why do you call it the Blink?”
“Ah, that’s easy. British Rail is zinc pail. Zinc is blink. Right?”
“Right.”
“It’s easy when you know, isn’t it?”
“Everything’s easy when you know,” said David. But in the days that followed this was the only code name he did unravel.
All of his fellow tramps smoked. He decided that one of the reasons that they shuffled along with their eyes on the ground was so as not to miss the smallest abandoned fag end. Three or four of these could be collected, unravelled and re-rolled. They would drink anything they could get when they could get it. A much-fancied tipple was a well-known brand of cough mixture, which was obtainable on National Health and was said to taste like sherry. “Strengthen it up with a drop or two of paint stripper,” said Dai, “and it’s a real knockout.”
The only drug which was used at all regularly was glue. This could be taken at night with the head inside a plastic bag. Hard drugs were a rarity. The cautious questions that David put out produced no more than the fact that some people knew someone who knew someone else who was a sniffer or a popper or occasionally a main-liner. The point was that people who used such things must have money; and money was the rarest commodity of all in the kingdom of the tramps.
After dark on October fifteenth David was back at his observation post. It had crossed his mind that the doctor might have arranged a reception committee for him, and he had approached with great care, crossing lower down and working his way up the side of the railway. The nettles welcomed him like an old friend.
It was another wet and miserable night. Summer was a distant dream. Five patients came and went, and the surgery light shone steadily out through gusting curtains of rain. David shivered and cursed and wiped the drops from his nose on the cuff of his filthy coat.
Suddenly he stiffened to attention. The surgery light had gone out. He counted—one, two, three, four, five. The light came on again. David jumped down from his perch, moved back to his crossing place lower down and took up the position he had chosen, in the doorway of a shop opposite the lower end of the passage.
He waited for a full ten minutes, and it crossed his mind that his quarry might have taken advantage of the darkness and the rain to leave by Blumfield Terrace. He was wondering whether to risk a dash up to the corner of the main road when the tramp appeared. He materialised, like a shadow, at the end of the passage, and like a shadow he drifted off up the road.
In the hour that followed David realised that the wind and the rain were his friends. On a fine, still night he must have been spotted before he had gone a hundred yards. He had to keep close behind his man. He had the impression that if he took his eyes off him for a moment he would dematerialise. And there were curious variations in the speed of his progress. Sometimes it was very slow, sometimes surprisingly fast. David decided that the pace depended on the street lighting. In the brightly lit main roads, the tramp scudded along as quickly as possible. In the dim side streets he shuffled and loitered.
David had long lost any idea of where they had got to and where they were going. His only guides were the east wind, which blew the rain steadily into his face and a feeling that they were going downhill and therefore must be heading for the river.
“East and south. It’s dockland, for a bet,” said David. “Is the old coot going to wander round all night?”
They were in a long, straight road, which was totally deserted and lit by overhead lights. This forced him to fall back, waiting until his quarry had disappeared into the gloom between two widely spaced pools of light and then sprinting to catch up with him.
Between two lamps, his man had disappeared.
David was sure that he had not passed the second lamp. He could never have climbed the high plank palisades which fenced the road. He must have found some way through.
It took David five minutes to locate the loose plank, during the whole of which time he cursed steadily and obscenely to himself. It would have been unthinkable to have come so far and suffered so much and to have failed at the finish.
As the plank swung inwards under his touch he breathed again. The cinder path inside was easy to follow. It led him, between the heaps of rusting and abandoned machinery and pits of black water, dimpling in the rain, to what had once been Messrs Hendrixsons’ offices and store.
He saw a massive, brick-built, three-sided block, rectangular and open on the fourth side. The back and the right-hand wing had, at one time, been offices. The glass had been smashed, but the iron-framed windows and doors still barred entrance. The left-hand wing was open-fronted and had once been a store. Here it is, thought David.
He felt his way in, treading carefully among the rubble, and found the wooden staircase which led upwards.
His nose told him that he had come to the right place. As he came up through the trap door there was a rustling and whispering among the paper and straw which covered the floor a foot deep, and someone grunted out what sounded like a warning or a challenge.
David said, “Who’s the big man, then?”
There was a moment of silence.
Then the rustling started again, but it was not aggressive. People were turning over and settling back to talk, or sleep if they could.
Taking as much care as he could not to tread on any of the recumbent forms, David made a slow way to the far corner. Here, he found a free place to curl up in. He thought that the less he disturbed the debris the better, but he managed to detach some sheets of newspaper which seemed to be fairly clean and he covered himself with these and settled down, with his back against the wall, to wait for the morning.
To most people it would not have seemed an attractive situation, but David was well content. The shy and furtive little animal he had been chasing for six months was now within a few yards of him. It had been a long, winding, downhill track, but he had touched bottom at last. The thought was so agreeable that he managed to fall asleep. No dreams, this time.
On Monday morning, when Paula arrived at the Rayhome offices, she was surprised to find the door locked. Repeated ringing of the bell eventually produced the lady from the basement, who doubled the jobs of concierge and cleaning woman.