Dirty Game

him?

‘Is William Black in?’ asked the plainclothes copper, ignoring Ted’s aroma of stale sweat. The man looked as if he hadn’t shaved or washed for days.

Ted looked truculent. ‘Billy? Who wants him?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Fielding.’ He flashed his warrant card. ‘This is Constable Lightworthy.’

Fucking hell, thought Ted. What had the simple sod been up to now? But he was relieved. At least they were after the loon, and not him. He always thought of Billy as the loon.

‘Who is it, Teddy?’ roared a female voice over the din coming from the telly.

‘Police, Hild,’ said Ted, opening the door wider. ‘Well, you’d better come in I suppose.’

The two coppers were escorted into a shabby fug-filled front room where a fat, grey-haired woman and a vacant-looking, hump-backed man were watching a black and white television. The woman watched them with malevolent eyes.

‘What d’you want with Billy?’ she demanded. Then she turned to her son and cuffed him hard around the ear. Billy cowered back. ‘You been up to no good again, you little shit?’

‘No need for that, Mrs Black,’ said the detective in distaste. ‘Billy’s been helping us with our enquiries. We just want to ask him a few more questions, that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ The jowls quivered, the mean mouth set in a line. ‘Well you’d better get on with it then.’

‘Is there another room we can use, Mrs Black?’

‘No, there ain’t. Anything you got to say to Billy you can say in front of me.’

Ted sank down into his armchair and resumed his telly-watching. Billy rubbed his ear and looked up at the policemen warily. Every surface was covered with dust and bags, the coppers noted. Gingerly they picked their way through the mess to get to where Billy was sitting. They couldn’t sit down, there was no room. The constable took out his pencil and notebook. Over the din of the television and under the hate-filled eyes of his mum, they talked to Billy.

‘You helped us out grandly with the Bailey case,’ said the detective.

Billy looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like to think about what he’d done to Annie, but he’d had no choice in the matter. He’d done what was right. He nodded warily.

‘And we were wondering what you know about Max Carter,’ said the detective.

Billy’s mum looked at him.

Billy shrugged. ‘I know him. Everyone around here knows Max Carter. But I don’t know anything about him,’ said Billy.

‘Is that the truth, Billy?’ The detective knew it was a lie. He knew that Billy did the milk run around the parlours and halls for the Carter mob, slipping easily around the harder areas of the streets because everyone knew he was harmless and under Max’s protection. The detective knew that Billy was always hanging around on the periphery of Max’s other business dealings; he must have seen things, heard things, that could be useful.

‘He just said he didn’t know nothing, didn’t he?’ snapped Hilda.

‘So he did, Mrs Black. Perhaps it would be better if we continued this conversation down the station.’

‘Don’t you go starting that!’ stormed Hilda, slapping her pudgy hand on the arm of her threadbare chair. Dust plumed up. The constable thought of his mum’s house, neat as a new pin. You could eat off the floor. Fuck it, if you ate off the table in this pesthole you’d be asking for the squits.

‘Then please don’t interrupt, Mrs Black,’ snapped the detective. ‘I’m here to talk to Billy, not to you.’

She huffed and turned her attention back to the telly. Billy was looking at the floor, one arm wrapped around his upper body as if to shield it from a blow.

‘Billy,’ said the detective. ‘Tell us what you know about Max Carter.’

‘I don’t know nothing about Max Carter,’ said Billy, looking up to watch the constable writing that down in his notebook.

Billy had lots of notebooks. He liked keeping notes. It was one of his little compulsions, he couldn’t help it. He thought of them all, years’ worth of notes, all hidden away up in his room in an old brown suitcase of his dad’s. Lots of things about Max and the boys in there. But things that would never be told to a soul. He was daft, but he wasn’t as daft as all that. He knew you didn’t rat on the Carter boys. You did that, there’d be trouble. Max would be upset.

Fielding looked at Constable Lightworthy. They’d had a long day. They were still looking into the department store robbery, trying to pin it on one of the big firms. Everyone knew the Carters and the Delaneys hated each other, and this had happened on Delaney turf. So the Carters were favourite. But try proving it.

Billy had given them some hope. He had been prepared to rat on Annie Bailey, who was known to have been Max Carter’s sister-in-law and his mistress too. The next step was to get him to spill the beans on Carter himself.

He was digging away at it all, patiently. The department store’s manager had been badly traumatized by the event, but he had said he had seen one of the men’s faces. They had pieced together an Identikit of the man they wanted to question. He didn’t bear any resemblance to Max or Jonjo Carter, or to any of their henchmen. It was frustrating, but still he kept with it, digging further.

The store job had been nicely done, you had to admit that. None of the missing cash had been found as yet. Personally, it looked like such a professional job that Fielding doubted the cash would ever come to light. Neat as anything. He’d been over it time and time again, the way the alarm had been disabled and finally he had thought to himself, wait a fucking minute.

Whoever did the job disabled the alarm by getting into the frame room and accessing the phone lines. He’d had a chat with some Post Office boys and they thought that only a skilled GPO engineer would understand the workings of a frame room. So maybe the man whose face had been spotted was a telephone engineer?

Maybe he’d even done work in the store before and was familiar with the line layout. Detective Chief Inspector Fielding had chatted it over with his superior, who had nodded and smiled.

‘Yes. All well and good, but how many thousand GPO engineers are there in England? Five? Six? That’s the ones that are working. What about those who are retired?’

It was a bugger. But Fielding was like a terrier. He didn’t ever let go. He was quietly confident of a result. There was also the question of whether or not an insider had been involved. He had his chaps checking that even now. Who’d moved on unexpectedly, who was suddenly flashing a lot of cash about, whose bank accounts had received an unexpected boost.

All in all, Fielding was satisfied with progress. Big strides were being made, but not big enough. The long reign of the powerful career criminal, much feared and much admired, might soon be over. Slipper of the Yard was getting quite a name for himself, and Fielding was feeling jealous. He was within two years of retirement, and he wanted to leave on a good note.

He wanted to go for the hat-trick.

He wanted to send down two big East End crime clans.

He wanted to nick the Carters, and the Delaneys.

‘Come on, Billy lad,’ he said. ‘Let’s get down the station and have a proper chat.’

Billy shuffled off to get his coat. Hilda glowered at the two men but stayed silent. She was a bully, and easily cowed if you called her bluff. They’d met plenty like her. Ted carried on watching the telly. It wasn’t his arse on the line, so what did he care?

It was only when they got down the station with Billy in tow that they heard about the shooting at the Palermo.

60

Ruthie was in the drawing room at the Surrey house with a glass of vodka and orange halfway to her lips when Dave barged in looking keyed up.

‘Can’t you knock?’ she snapped, embarrassed at the way he looked at her, the way his eyes lingered on the glass in her hand.