Shepherd and Barnes. He agreed to do it, but I suppose he’s got cold feet.’
‘Vince? I wouldn’t rely on him. He was never the toughest kid on the block.’
‘No.’
Fry finished the call and gestured to Cooper. He ambled over, too slowly for her liking. She felt like telling him he was in the city now. People here moved at a pace that was a bit faster than a ruminating sheep.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘To a little bit of Ireland.’
The Irish Club stood in a prominent position on Deritend High Street. Here, the River Rea formed the dividing line between Digbeth and Deritend. At Deritend Bridge was the very spot where Birmingham had first developed. Someone once told her that the early settlers had just called this stretch of water ‘the river’, and nothing more — ‘rea’ was a word meaning river in Anglo Saxon. That was good Brum, calling a spade a spade.
Drum and accordion music drifted from an open fire door at the Chapel House Street entrance of the club. There was a dance going on in the main hall. Fry glimpsed middle-aged couples swinging each other around the floor.
In the lobby, old Gaelic Athletics Association posters were framed on the walls. Carroll’s GAA Allstars of 1974. A bit of nostalgia there, definitely. Posters in the windows advertised wrestling matches and concerts by two singers called Sean Nenrye and Mick Flavin. In their publicity photos they looked so similar they could have been twins. The same Irish twinkle, the same hazel eyes.
‘Want me to go in and ask?’ said Cooper.
‘What? Do you think you’ll pass as Irish?’
‘Better than you will,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you might want to keep an eye out front here, in case he legs it.’
‘Legs it? Like he’s a suspect?’
‘Well, I’m just thinking — nobody else seems to want to talk to you at the moment, Diane. Mr Doyle might be no different.’
Fry nodded. ‘Okay. Let’s do that.’
Standing at front of the club, near the pedestrian crossing, Fry looked towards the city centre. The clean light after the spell of rain lit a panorama of contrasting buildings — the blue sheen of the Beetham Tower, the Paradise Circus multi-storey car park, the spire of St Martin’s in the Bullring, the Rotunda, the shimmering aluminium curve of Self ridges.
Cooper came out a few minutes later.
‘They know Eddie Doyle pretty well, but he’s not here at the moment. They suggested trying a pub called the Connemara.’
Well, the Connemara wouldn’t feature very highly in the tourist guides to Birmingham. It stood a few hundred yards too far east to be part of the gay scene, and it hadn’t quite made enough effort on its food or decor to attract the cultural crowd from the Custard Factory. And from what she’d heard, all the really beautiful people went to the Rainbow in Deritend High Street anyway. So the Connemara was left with the flotsam and jetsam, the type of hardened drinkers who still gravitated to old-fashioned back-street pubs, no doubt for their own good reasons.
When Fry worked in the West Midlands, there had been a thousand pubs like the Connemara, magnets for petty criminals and prostitutes, the scenes of regular Saturday-night brawls, and the occasional all-night lock-in. But there weren’t many of these places left now, even in Birmingham. Times had changed, and people wanted more than a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pint of Double Diamond on a damp beer mat. Customers expected food and cocktails, and a bit of an ambience. If they didn’t adapt to changing demands, these back-street pubs were doomed. During the past few years, they’d been closing down faster than teashops in a street full of Starbuck’s.
There was a reason she hadn’t remembered this pub at first. It had changed its name a few times. Leaded windows and ornate Victorian brickwork, red and white, with a top storey like a half-timbered Elizabethan addition. Spotlights. Above the hanging baskets, a CCTV camera enclosed in a steel cage to protect it against vandalism.
‘Let’s do it the other way round this time,’ she said.
Cooper shrugged. ‘Whatever you like.’
‘Give me five minutes. If I don’t come out, you can follow me in.’
‘Sure.’
Fry walked through the door, and the atmosphere hit her immediately. Stale beer and body odour, no longer masked by cigarette smoke. Or was it?
My God. It was the second decade of the twenty-first century, and she still felt uncomfortable going into a pub on her own. Well, going into the Connemara she did. It was probably something to do with the distance she’d put between herself and civilization the moment she walked through the door. She caught the powerful odour of spilt beer, sour as if it had been spilled last week and no one had bothered to wipe it up. And wasn’t that cigarette smoke she could see hanging in the air in front of the dartboard? Maybe she should just pretend it was a trick of the light.
She asked at the bar, and a man sitting on his own in the corner was pointed out to her.
‘Eddie Doyle?’
He jumped as if he’d been shot.
‘Jesus and Mary! Who the Hell are you?’
Fry sat down across the table from him.
‘A bit jumpy, sir?’
He wiped a splash of whisky off his shirt.
‘You don’t creep up on people like that around here. Jesus.’
Eddie Doyle was small and flabby, and had grown a brown moustache in an attempt to make his face look more interesting. It wasn’t working. The sly look in his eye was more reminiscent of a salesman, calculating the odds, weighing up his chances of closing a deal.
He reminded Fry of a part-time college lecturer she’d dealt with once. He was some kind of expert on the history of the industrial revolution. He’d spent a lot of his time poking around in the back streets of Digbeth, admiring the contour of a factory wall, excited by a line of brickwork on a railway viaduct.
The lecturer had been a heavy drinker, too. He’d run an elderly woman over in his car on a pedestrian crossing, his blood test showing that he was nearly three times the drink-drive limit. He’d got a custodial sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. He might still be in Winson Green now.
Doyle peered at her through watery eyes.
‘No, I don’t know you. Are you on the game? You don’t look like a tart.’
‘I’m looking for William Leeson,’ she said.
Doyle took another drink. ‘You still haven’t told me who you are.’
Fry drew further away from Doyle. Stale alcohol seemed to leak out of his skin in place of sweat.
‘I don’t need to tell you anything,’ she said.
‘Snap.’
‘You don’t sound very Irish, Mr Doyle.’
‘I’m third generation, which makes me practically royalty among this lot.’ He nodded at a crowd of men round the bar.
‘Look at these plastic paddies. Listen to them all, over there in the Irish Club, singing their pathetic rebel songs. They think the old country is some kind of romantic paradise. Tir na nog, the land of the ever young. A Shangri-la out in the west, on the edge of the world. My God. Have you been to Ireland recently?’
‘Yes, as a matter fact.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘A lot of pink bungalows, and new shopping developments,’ said Fry.
‘Exactly. And it’s as bad out west in County Galway as it is in Dublin. The Irish government got a shedload of European money, and they spent it building as much tat as could be fit into Ireland.’
Doyle was smiling at her, which she didn’t like. Fry was starting to wish Cooper would appear. How long had she told him to wait? Could he actually tell when five minutes were up, or was he still on country time?
Taking advantage of her silence, Doyle leaned closer.
