A Prospect of Vengeance

To make the best of an unprofessional job, and in order to see right up and down Cody Street, he pushed himself all the way in, letting the curtain drape round his shoulders like a cloak. It had rained since he had come out of the premature half-light of the evening, and the street lamps reflected a million points of light in every drop of water trapped in the unevenness of the road surface. Then he looked back towards her, frowning.

'Well?' Her face was chalk-white, emphasizing the dark smudges under her eyes and the remains of her lipstick: with her accustomed falling-down hair she looked even more like the wreck of the Hesperus than usual. And more beautiful to him than ever.

'There isn't anything — is there?' Something of the original Jenny returned as she clenched her jaw.

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'There isn't anything there, Jenny.' He couldn't lessen her humiliation. Whatever she'd thought she'd seen, there was nothing now in Cody Street — not only not the scene of carnage he'd been half-expecting as he'd parted the curtain from the wall . . . but actually nothing, other than the reflection of the wetness on the street and the cars parked in it; and, most of all, no Mitchell and no Volvo — the man and the car had slipped away into the night together and quickly, without fuss, unheard against the Taj Mahal clatter.

'No. There wouldn't be.' She subsided into the chair, gripping its arms. 'I'm hungry — ' She pushed herself up, straight-backed, and picked up her glass from the table ' — I haven't eaten anything since breakfast. You're always telling me that I don't eat enough ... In fact, I'm bloody starving, Ian. So let's have one of Abdul's specials, eh — ? Ring the bell, darling.'

Excuses? But . . . excuses — from Jenny? 'What else did you see, Jen?'

'I didn't see anything, darling. Ring the bell.' She pointed at the bell-push by the light-switches at the door. And then picked up his beer, from where he had put it down beside her glass and offered it to him. 'You haven't touched your drink, darling. And . . . knowing you . . . did you have lunch — ?'

He reached for the glass automatically. But, as he did so, there came a sound from behind him: not so much a knock, as a finger-tapping scraping noise on the door-panel — quite unnatural, because it was quite different from Mr Malik's sharp-knuckled signal.

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Jenny spilt beer over his hand as the door opened, and a hideous apparition appeared in the gap.

'Ullo there!' said Reg Buller.

7

There were so many things outrageous about Reginald Buller's appearance that the fact that he very obviously wasn't deceased was almost the least of them.

Most obviously, he wasn't deceased because the newly-dead had no need of large theatrical beards. Or, if they did, they had no need to pull such beards down to reveal their faces as they came to haunt the living. Or, if such a revelation was part of the haunting, they had no call to grin quite so happily before releasing the ridiculous growth so that it sprang back slightly askew, under one ear.

And, anyway, in the next moment, Reg Buller was all-too-abundantly flesh-and-blood as he removed the equally-ridiculous trilby from his head, and then unhooked the beard, finally adding his voluminous Sherlock Holmes cape to them on the chair beside the door.

'That's better!' Reg Buller nodded to Jenny, and then advanced on Ian, larger and cruder than life, and took his glass from his hand, momentarily holding it up. 'And that's even better! Untouched by human lips — ?' He drank noisily.

'Gnat's piss! But, like the bishop said to the actress, ' my need dummy2

is greater than thine!'' He finished off the beer, and returned the glass to Ian with exaggerated courtesy. 'Is there a back way out of here?'

'Mr Buller — ' Jenny hissed the name ' — Mister Buller . . .

don't you ever do that to me again!'

'Do what, m'lady?' Buller caught Ian's eye, and nodded at the bar in the alcove before coming back to her. 'It was you at the window, wasn't it — ? Very careless, that was . . . But — you knew it was me?' He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and then gestured towards the heap in the chair. 'That's a disguise, that is — twenty-five quid's worth ... if I get it back tomorrow, anyway. And cheap at the price — seein' as what I got with it.'

Ian observed her weaken. Of all the men Jenny knew, gilded and ungilded, she could resist Reg Buller least. 'What did you get with it, Reg?'

'I got professional advice, Mr Robinson. Which is worth more than gold-dust.' Buller nodded at the bar again hopefully.

'And I got the lady who gave it for free.'

'What lady, Mr Buller? What advice?' The colour was coming back into Jenny's face. 'I thought you only knew barmaids?'

'Theatrical costumier — ' costumier' — ?' Buller tried to will Ian towards the bar. 'She's only a barmaid part-time, in the evenings . . . And she said, 'What you are, Mr Buller, is unobtrusive — you move like a shadow in the night ... So, they'll be looking for shadows- in-the-night, the blue-bottles dummy2

will be. So we'll make you a bit of local colour — like an actor from the Hippodrome, down the road, where they've got the music-hall on ... And I'll walk with you, on your arm, an'

they'll look at me, not you!' — she's got a heart of gold, that woman has.' He concentrated on Jenny. 'But how did you know it was me?'

But Jenny wasn't looking at Buller. ' Is there a back way out of here, Ian?'

Her stare caught him struggling with more important matters. But then, maybe they weren't more immediately