They nearly had to retrieve the little manager from under the table after this witticism. Still spluttering with flattering mirth and mopping his eyes, he performed the introductions himself.
‘Joey the Jock,’ he said, extending a tiny brown paw across the table. ‘Otherwise Joseph Aloysius O’Daley, but you can call me Joey.’
‘Sergeant MacGregor,’ said MacGregor in his turn, shaking Joey’s hand.
Joey the Jock? Dover sighed. Could be Evans the Post for all he knew, or cared. He finished his whisky.
‘You’ve not changed much, Mr Dover, sir,’ said Joey, smiling to show that the observation was meant to be complimentary.
Dover sniffed.
‘I was wondering if you’d still recognize me,’ said Joey, ‘after all these years.’
‘Never forget a face,’ said Dover solemnly. ‘You can’t afford to in my job.’
‘I heard you was in town,’ said Joey, signalling for more drinks.
‘Did you?’ said Dover.
‘Come about Hamilton, have you?’ said Joey idly, handing round his cigarette case.
‘Hamilton?’ said Dover, wondering what the dickens they were talking about now.
His reply sent Joey off again. Sobbing with laughter, he even rested his head on the table to relieve his aching sides. Dover regarded the heaving shoulders with distaste while MacGregor smiled wisely as though he knew what it was all about. The ten girls and the two waiters just looked.
‘Well,’ said Joey when he had at last recovered his powers of speech, ‘that’s what he was known as when he come to live up here. After all, even in Wallerton, you can’t go around calling yourself Sunny Malone and not expect the neighbours to look at you sideways, can you?’
‘Sunny Malone?’ MacGregor looked at Dover for guidance and explanation.
‘Bit before your time, Sergeant,’ said Joey kindly. ‘Though I don’t doubt you’ll have heard of him. He was one of the first of the big boys, just after the war. He’d got Barking and Dagenham and Ilford tied up so tight you couldn’t change your mind without paying him his percentage.’
‘Oh, yes.’ MacGregor nodded his head. ‘I think I’ve heard of him. Protection racket.’
‘That’s the boyo!’ said Joey with approval. ‘You’re not as thickheaded as I thought you was. Damn sight brighter than the local flatties, at any rate. They still don’t know who Hamilton really was – not unless you’ve told ’em, Mr Dover.’
Very portentously Dover shook his head. If there was one sure thing amongst all these shifting sands it was that he had not revealed to the local police the true and notorious identity of the late Mr Hamilton.
‘How did you spot him, Mr Dover?’ asked Joey, not a man who could leave well alone.
Dover scowled at him reproachfully. ‘Professional secret,’ he said lamely.
‘Garn!’ laughed Joey. ‘Now pull the other one! It’d be a photograph, wouldn’t it? Ah, I thought so. They showed you a photograph of the corpus derelictus and you recognized it. That’s what comes from having a trained mind.’
‘I pride myself,’ said Dover, putting a bold front on it, ‘on never forgetting a face. Or a name.’
MacGregor choked over his whisky.
‘Don’t I know it!’ chuckled Joey with rueful appreciation. ‘ What do you think made me tuck myself away in Wallerton?’ he asked MacGregor. ‘Because your Chief Inspector made things too flaming hot for me in the Smoke, that’s why! Eyes like a hawk, he had, and him hardly dry behind the ears in those days. Taking the bread out of my mouth, that’s what he was doing.’
MacGregor, now thoroughly bemused, looked somewhat incredulously at Dover and then, receiving no enlightenment there, directed his gaze back to Joey. Joey beamed at him. There was some justification for MacGregor’s scepticism. Joey the Jock may have been motivated by fulsome flattery or it may have been that he just had a bad memory; whichever way it was his rosy picture of Dover as a keen young cop was totally erroneous.
MacGregor, in any case, had no stomach for sitting there patiently while Dover’s praises were being sung, and he redirected the conversation rapidly. ‘Why did Hamilton leave London in the first place?’ he asked.
Joey shrugged his shoulders. ‘He got like a lot of us, old and fat and lazy.’ It was a pure coincidence that he was looking at Dover when he made this remark. ‘ The Tallahassee Brothers moved in. You remember that mob, Mr Dover? Nasty lot, they were. Sunny Malone could see the writing on the wall same as anybody else. If he’d hung around and argued the toss he’d have been lucky to get away with a chiving. And they’d have carved up his missus, too, soon as look at her.’
‘Chiving?’ said MacGregor, suddenly becoming very alert and watchful. He glanced at Dover to see if that master mind had got the point. The Chief Inspector, however, was fully occupied in gazing fixedly at his glass, which happened to be empty again.
‘Not half,’ said Joey. ‘ There were terrors with a razor, those Tallahassee lads. Some of the things they did was horrible, proper horrible.’
‘Where are they now?’ demanded MacGregor, leaning steely-eyed across the table.
‘Search me, mate! Laying flat on their backs with a tombstone on their chests, I hope!’
‘Hamilton,’ said MacGregor, ‘this Sunny Malone, what was he doing in Wallerton?’
Joey looked uneasy. ‘I told you. He retired. Come up here to live quiet on his ill-gotten gains.’ He managed an unconvincing laugh.
‘Come on,’ snorted MacGregor, ‘don’t give me that! He was back on the old game, wasn’t he? Back on the protection racket?’
Joey shifted about in his seat and looked appealingly at Dover. Dover pushed his still empty whisky glass idly round the table.
‘Aw, come off it,’ said Joey, eyeing MacGregor warily. ‘Give a fellow a chance.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me about it, Joey,’ said Dover, coming at last to the rescue. ‘ Just the two of us.’
‘That’s right, Mr Dover,’ said Joey eagerly, and mopped his brow. ‘I don’t mind doing a bit of singing, for old time’s sake as you might say, but I don’t want to give a blooming recital.’
‘Quite,’ agreed Dover smugly.
‘Here, Alicia!’ Joey
