settled into something of a rhythm and was almost disappointed when Duggan called everyone together and divided them into teams.
Like most youngsters they had a tendency to get drawn out of position and follow the ball, but some of the passing was thoughtful and neat and only luck and some zealous defending prevented a hatful of goals. Dean, in his Beckham shirt, hand forever aloft demanding the ball, was clearly the most gifted but also the most likely to kick out in temper, complain loudly if he thought he’d been fouled.
When he slid a pass through for Esther to run on to and score with a resounding drive, the best he could muster was, ‘Jammy cow!’
Game over, kids beginning to drift away, Duggan offered to buy Kiley a pint. There was a pub on the edge of the park that Kiley had not been into before.
‘So what did you think?’ Duggan asked. They were at a table near the open door.
‘About what?’
‘This evening, you enjoy it or what?’
‘Yeah, it was okay. They’re nice enough kids.’
‘Most of them.’
Kiley nodded. The muscles in the backs of his legs were already beginning to ache.
‘You’ll come again then?’
‘Why not? Not as if my social calendar’s exactly full.’
‘No girlfriend?’
‘Not just at present.’
‘But there was one?’
‘For a while, maybe.’
‘What happened?’
Kiley shrugged and supped his beer. ‘You?’ he said.
Duggan lit a cigarette. ‘The only women I meet are out for a good time and all they can get. Either that or else they’ve got three kids back home with the babysitter and they’re looking for someone to play dad.’
‘And you don’t fancy that?’
‘Would you?’
Kiley wasn’t certain; there were days — not so many of them — when he thought he might. ‘No,’ he said.
Without waiting to be asked, Duggan fetched two more pints. ‘Where d’you meet her anyway?’ he said. ‘This ex of yours.’
‘I was working,’ Kiley said. ‘Security. Down on the South Bank. She’d just come out from this Iranian movie.’
‘She’s Iranian?’
‘No. The film was Iranian. She’s English. Kate. Kate Keenan.’
‘Sounds Irish.’
‘Maybe. A generation or so back maybe.’
‘You’re cut up about it,’ Duggan said.
‘Not really.’
‘No, of course not,’ Duggan said, grinning. ‘You can tell.’
Kate’s column in the Indy questioned the morality of making art out of underclass deprivation and serving it up as a spectacle for audiences affluent enough to afford dinner and the theatre and then a taxi home to their three-quarters-of-a-million-plus houses in fashionable Islington and Notting Hill.
Under Duggan’s watchful eye and with Kiley’s help, the six-a-side team won their next two games, Dean being sent off in the second for kicking out at an opponent in retaliation and then swearing at the referee.
Margaret Hamblin offered Kiley three days’ work checking up on a client who had been charged with benefit fraud over a period in excess of two years.
‘Come round my gaff, why don’t you?’ Tommy Duggan said one night after training. ‘See how the other half lives.’ And winked.
Drained by two lots of child support, which he paid intermittently but whenever he could, Duggan had sold his detached house in Totteridge and bought a thirties semi in East Finchley, half of which he rented out to an accountant struggling with his MBA.
In the main room there were framed photographs of Duggan’s glory days on the walls and soiled grey carpet on the floor. Clothes lay across the backs of chairs, waiting to be washed or ironed. On a table near the window were a well-thumbed form book, the racing pages, several cheap ballpoints, a telephone.
‘Academic?’ said Kiley, questioningly.
Duggan grinned. ‘Man’s got to have a hobby.’
He took Kiley to a Hungarian restaurant on the high street where they had cherry soup and goulash spiced with smoked paprika. A bottle of wine.
‘Good, uh?’ Duggan said, pushing away his plate.
‘Great,’ Kiley said. ‘What’s the pitch?’
Duggan smiled with his eyes. ‘Just a small favour.’
*
The casino was on a narrow street between Soho and Shaftesbury Avenue, passing trade not one of its concerns. Instead of a bouncer with overfed muscles, Kiley was greeted at the door by a silvered blonde in a tailored two-piece.
‘I’m here to see Mr Stephen.’
‘Certainly, sir. If you’ll come this way.’ Her slight accent was Scandinavian.
Mr Stephen’s name wasn’t really Stephen. Not originally, at least. He had come to England from Malta in the late fifties when the East End gangsters were starting to lose their grip on gambling and prostitution up West; had stood his ground and received the razor scars to prove it, though these had since been surgically removed. Now gambling was legal and he was a respectable businessman. Let the Albanians and the Turks fight the Yardies over heroin and crack cocaine, he had earned his share portfolio, his place in the sun.
The blonde handed Kiley over to a brunette who led him to a small lift at the far side of the main gaming room. There was no background music, no voice raised above the faint whirring of roulette wheels, the hushed sounds of money being made and lost.
Kiley was glad he’d decided to wear his suit, not just his suit but his suit and tie.
‘Have you visited our casino before?’ the brunette asked him.
‘I’m afraid not, no.’
One of her eyes was brown and the other a greyish green.
When he stepped out of the lift there was an X-ray machine, the kind you walk through in airports; Kiley handed the brunette his keys and small change and she gave them back to him at the other side.
‘Mr Kiley for Mr Stephen,’ she said to the man at the end of the short corridor.
The man barely nodded; doors were opened and closed. Stephen’s inner sanctum was lined with books on two sides, mostly leather bound; screens along one wall afforded high-angle views of the casino’s interior. Stephen himself sat behind a desk, compact, his face the colour of walnut, bald head shining as if he had been recently buffed.
A few days before, Kiley had spoken to one of his contacts at Scotland Yard, a sergeant when he and Kiley had served together, now a detective superintendent.
‘The casino’s a front,’ the superintendent told him. ‘Prestige. He doesn’t lose money on it exactly, but with all those overheads, that area, he’d make more selling the site. It’s the betting shops that fetch in the money, one hundred and twenty nationwide. That and the fact he keeps a tight ship.’
‘Can you get me in to see him?’ Kiley had asked.
‘Probably. But nothing more. We’ve no leverage, Jack, I’m sorry.’
Now Kiley waited for Stephen to acknowledge him, which he did with a small gesture of a manicured hand, no suggestion that Kiley should take a seat.
‘Tommy Duggan,’ Kiley said. ‘He owes you money. Not a lot in your terms, maybe, but…’ Kiley stopped and
