Crown public house, he saw Jacey's battered Morris pull up. He sprinted across the road, opened the car door and slid in.
'Back to your place, Jacey.'
'Wait a mo',' Jacey said. The street light lit up his aged, rat face. 'W'ot's on the move?'
Fennel gripped Jacey's thin wrist.
'Back to your place!' he snarled.
Jacey caught a glimpse of the vicious twist of the mouth and the half mad expression of contained rage. He grunted, engaged gear and set the Morris in motion.
Ten minutes later, the two men were in a small, shabbily furnished room, lit by a dusty, shadeless lamp that hung precariously from the dirty ceiling.
Jacey put a bottle of Black & White on the table and two glasses. He poured two stiff drinks and cradled his glass in his dirty hands while he regarded Fennel uneasily.
Jacey was a bookie's clerk and did any odd job for the lesser tearaways to earn extra money. He knew Fennel to be a major tearaway. He had met him in Parkhurst jail when they were serving sentences: Fennel for robbery with violence: Jacey for trying to pass badly forged ten shilling notes. When they had been released, they had kept in touch and Jacey had been flattered to have a big man like Fennel interested in him. But now he was sorry he had had anything to do with Fennel. He had heard through the underworld grapevine that Fennel had talked and five of Moroni's men had walked into a police trap. He knew Moroni had put the death sign on Fennel, but he was too greedy to pass up the chance of earning twenty pounds.
Fennel took out Mimi's roll of ten pound notes. He pulled off two and tossed them on the table.
'Freeze on to those, Jacey,' he said. 'I'm staying here for a couple of days.'
Jacey's ferret-like eyes widened. He didn't touch the money on the table.
'Can't 'ave you 'ere for two days, Lew. Ain't safe. They'll carve me if they find out you've been 'ere.'
'I can carve you too,' Fennel said softly. 'And I'm here.'
Jacey scratched his unshaven chin. His eyes darted about the room while he considered the situation and the risks. Moroni was probably in bed, asleep, but Fennel was here. Fennel could be as dangerous as Moroni.
'Okay, then . . . two days . . . not an 'our more,' he said finally.
'In two days, I'll be out of the country,' Fennel said. 'I've got a job. Maybe, I won't be coming back.' He finished his whisky and then walked into the inner room and over to the battered couch that served Jacey as a bed. He kicked off his shoes and lay down.
'You sleep on the floor, and turn that goddamn light off.'
'Go a'ead,' Jacey said bitterly. 'Make yourself at 'ome.'
He reached up and turned off the light.
A week previously, Garry Edwards had seen in the Daily Telegraph the following advertisement:
He had re-read the advertisement and had brooded over it. He liked the two words unusual and exceptional. He was looking for unusual work and badly needed exceptional money, so without telling Toni, he had written a letter to Box S.1012, setting out the details of his past career which was as full of lies as a colander is full of holes. He had enclosed a passport photograph and had mailed the letter.
A week had passed, and he now had given up all hope of any exceptional remuneration and any unusual job. On this cold, wet February morning, he sat in Toni's small, untidy sitting-room with a cup of Nescafe by his side while he searched the Situations Vacant columns in the Daily Telegraph.
Garry Edwards was a tall, powerfully-built man of twenty-nine years of age. He was handsome in a rugged way, with humorous brown eyes and dark-brown hair worn fashionably long to his collar. His mouth could laugh easily or tighten to a dangerous thinness. As he sat on Toni's broken down settee, dressed, in a white beach wrap, his long narrow feet bare, the wall clock showed the time was 08.45 hrs.
Having searched the Situations Vacant columns carefully, he dropped the newspaper to the floor in disgust. Well, he would have to do something pretty soon, he told himself. He had exactly one hundred and thirty pounds, five shillings and seven pence before he had to ask Toni to support him, and this, he told himself without much conviction, he would never do.
He had run into Toni White on the Calais—Dover channel boat. Happily, she had been in the bar when he had embarked with two tough-looking French detectives who remained with him until the vessel was about to sail. When they had gone, and after Garry had waved cheerfully to them as they stood on the rain-swept quay to see the vessel leave the harbour — a wave they had stonily ignored — he had gone down to the first class bar for his first drink in three years.
Toni had been sitting on a bar stool, her micro-mini skirt scarcely covering her crotch, sipping a Cinzano bitter
