'The colour of your eyes,' Mr. Corkery interjected thoughtfully and with a touch of nostalgia. He said: 'Couldn't we now just go for a while on the pier, Ida?'
'Yes,' Ida said. 'The pier. We'll go to the Palace Pier, Phil,' but when they got there she wouldn't go through the turnstile, but took up her stand like a huckster facing the Aquarium, the Ladies' Lavatory.
'This is where I start from,' she said. 'He waited for me here, Phil,' and she stared out over the red and green lights, the heavy traffic of her battlefield, laying her plans, marshalling her cannon fodder, while five yards away Spicer stood, too, waiting for an enemy to appear. Only a slight doubt troubled her optimism.
'That horse has got to win, Phil,' she said. 'I can't hold out else.'
Spicer was restless these days. There was nothing for him to do. When the races began again he wouldn't feel so bad, he wouldn't think so much about Hale. It was the medical evidence that upset him: 'Death from natural causes,' when with his own eyes he'd seen the Boy... It was fishy, it wasn't straight.
He told himself that he could face a police enquiry, but he couldn't stand this not knowing, the false security of the verdict. There was a catch in it somewhere, and all through the long summer sunlight Spicer wandered uneasily, watching out for trouble: the police station, the Place where It had been done, even Snow's came into his promenade. He wanted to be satisfied that the cops were doing nothing (he knew every plainclothes man in the Brighton force), that no one was asking questions or loitering where they had no reason to loiter. He knew it was just nerves. 'I'll be all right when the races start,' he told himself, like a man with a poisoned body who believes that all will be well when a single tooth is drawn.
He came up the parade cautiously, from the Hove end, from the glass shelter where Hale's body had been set, pale, with bloodshot eyes and nicotined finger ends. Spicer had a corn on his left foot and limped a little, dragging after him a bright orange-brown shoe.
He had come out in spots too round his mouth, and that also was caused by Hale's death. Fear upset his bowels, and the spots came: it was always that way.
He limped cautiously across the road when he was close to Snow's: that was another vulnerable place.
The sun caught the great panes of plate glass and flashed back at him like headlamps. He sweated a little passing by. A voice said: 'Well, if it isn't Spicey!'
He had had his eyes on Snow's across the road, he hadn't noticed who was beside him on the parade, leaning on the green railing above the shingle. He turned his damp face sharply. 'What are you doing here, Crab?'
'It's good to be back,' said Crab, a young man in a mauve suit, with shoulders like coat hangers and a small waist.
'We ran you out once, Crab. I thought you'd stay out. You've altered.' His hair was carroty, except at the roots, and his nose was straightened and scarred.
He had been a Jew once, but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered that. 'Afraid we'd lamp you if you didn't change your mug?'
'Why, Spicey, me afraid of your lot? You'll be saying 'sir' to me one of these days. I'm Colleoni's right-hand man.'
'I always heard as how he was left-handed,' Spicer said. 'Wait till Pinkie knows you're back.'
Crab laughed. 'Pinkie's at the police station,' he said.
The police station: Spicer's chin went down, he was off, his orange shoe sliding on the paving, his corn shooting. He heard Crab laugh behind him, the smell of dead fish was in his nostrils, he was a sick man. The police station j the police station: it was like an abscess jetting its poison through the nerves. When he got to Billy's there was no one there. He creaked his tortured way up the stairs, past the rotten bannister, to Pinkie's room: the door stood open, vacancy stared in the swing mirror; no message, crumbs on the floor--it looked as a room would look if someone had been called suddenly away.
Spicer stood at the chest of drawers (the walnut stain splashed unevenly): no scrap of written reassurance in a drawer, no warning. He looked up and down, the corn shooting through his whole body to the brain, and suddenly there was his own face in the glass: the coarse black hair greying at the roots, the small eruptions on the face, the bloodshot eyeballs, and it occurred to him, as if he were looking at a close-up on a screen, that that was the kind of face a nark might have, a man who grassed to the bogies.
He moved away: flakes of pastry ground under his foot; he told himself he wasn't a man to grass: Pinkie, Cubitt, and Dallow, they were his pals. He wouldn't let them down even though it wasn't he who'd done the killing. He'd been against it from the first--he'd only laid the cards; he only knew. He stood at the head of the stairs looking down past the shaky bannister. He would rather kill himself than squeal, he told the empty landirig in a whisper, but he knew really that he hadn't got that courage. Better run for it; and he thought with nostalgia of Nottingham and a pub he knew, a pub he had once hoped to buy when he had made his pile. It was a good spot, Nottingham, the air was good, none of this salt smart on the dry mouth, and the girls were kind. If he could get away but the others would never let him go: he knew too much about too many things. He was in the mob for life now; he looked down the drop of the staircase to the tiny hall, the strip of linoleum, the old-fashioned telephone on a bracket by the door.
As he watched, it began to ring. He stared down at it with fear and suspicion. He couldn't stand any more bad news. Where had everybody gone to? Had they run and left him without a warning? Even Billy wasn't in the basement. There was a smell of scorching as if he'd left his iron burning. The bell rang on and on. Let them ring, he thought. They'll tire of it in time; why should I do all the work of this bloody gaff?
On and on and on. Whoever it was didn't tire easily.
He came to the head of the stairs and scowled down at the vulcanite spitting noise through the quiet house.
'The trouble is,' he said aloud, as if he were rehearsing a speech to Pinkie and the others, 'I'm getting too old for this game. I got to retire. Look at my hair. I'm grey, ain't I? I got to retire.' But the only answer was the regular ring, ring, ring.
'Why can't someone answer the bloody blower?' he shouted down the well of the stairs. 'I got to do all the work, have I?' and he saw himself dropping a ticket into the child's bucket, slipping a ticket under an upturned boat, tickets which could have hanged him. He suddenly ran down the stairs in a kind of simulated fury and lifted the receiver* 'Well,' he bellowed, 'well, who the hell's there?'
'Is that Billy's?' a voice said. He knew the voice now. It was the girl in Snow's. He lowered the receiver in a panic and waited, and a thin doll's voice came out at him from the orifice: 'Please, I've got to speak to Pinkie.' It was almost as if listening betrayed him.
He listened again and the voice repeated with desperate anxiety: 'Is that Billy's?'
Keeping his mouth away from the phone, curling his tongue in an odd way, mouthing hoarsely and crookedly, Spicer in disguise replied: 'Pinkie's out.
What do you want?'
'I've got to speak to him.'
'He's out, I tell you.'
'Who's that?' the girl suddenly said in a scared voice.
'That's what I want to know. Who are you?'
'I'm a friend of Pinkie's. I got to find him. It's urgent.'
'I can't help you.'
'Please. You've got to find Pinkie. He told me I was to tell him if ever ' The voice died away.
Spicer shouted down the phone. 'Hullo. Where you gone? If ever what?' There was no reply. He listened, with the receiver pressed against his ear, to silence buzzing up the wires. He began to jerk at the hook, 'Exchange. Hullo. Hullo. Exchange,' and then suddenly the voice came on again as if somebody had dropped a needle into place on a record. 'Are you there? Please, are you there?'
'Of course I'm here. What did Pinkie tell you?'
'You got to find Pinkie. He said he wanted to know.
It's a woman. She was in here with a man.'
'What do you mean a woman?'
'Asking questions,' the voice said. Spicer put down the receiver; whatever else the girl had to say was strangled on the wire. Find Pinkie? What was the good of finding Pinkie? It was the others who had done the finding. And Cubitt and Dallow: they'd slipped away without even warning him. If he did squeal it would be only returning them their own coin. But he wasn't going to squeal. He wasn't a nark.
