‘Mr Patrick, Mr Henderson here wants to see you about business premises…’
‘Give him an appointment’, he barked. ‘Have you got the letter for that wog yet?’
She made her hands look busy on the desk. ‘It’s almost done.’
‘Snap it up, Debbie.’ He turned without looking at me once and went out of the room. The girl looked helplessly at me.
‘He’s nice really’, she said. ‘Now when are you free?’
The front door swung open and a man came through. He was tall, dressed in a narrow-cut dark suit: narrow was the word for him, he had a long, thin, swarthy face with a sharp nose, his dark eyebrows grew in a V over his yellowish, slanted eyes. He had close cropped black hair which receded on both sides and grew in a pronounced widow’s peak in the front. His wolfish eyes swept over me as if he was measuring me for a coffin, then he dismissed me.
‘Is Clive in, Debbie?’ His voice was light and, although it sounds corny, musical. It also carried a distinct foreign accent. Debbie looked scared, and nodded mutely. He brushed past me and went down the corridor.
‘Not Mr Skelton’, I said.
She pulled on the cigarette. ‘No, Mr Szabo.’
‘What does he do around here?’
She shrugged and pulled the desk calendar towards her.
‘Don’t bother’, I said, ‘I think I’ll look for a more friendly firm.’ She looked hurt behind her cigarette so I was careful not to slam the door. I scouted the building and established that it had only two exits-the front door and a gate that led out to a lane at the side. I dodged the traffic across to the other side of the road, bought a sandwich and two cans of beer and settled down to watch.
A short, plump man with ginger hair arrived after ten minutes. If he was Mr Skelton he didn’t look any more appealing than the rest of the gang. A bit after that Clive Patrick came out and drove off in a white Volvo, probably to a lunch he didn’t need. Then Debbie stepped out and tottered down the street, she came back with a paper bag, a can of Coke and a fresh packet of cigarettes.
I’d finished the sandwich and the beer and was feeling drowsy when Szabo stepped out into the lane. I whipped the camera up and started shooting. The shots in the lane wouldn’t be much good, the one when he reached the street would be better. He sniffed the air like a hunting dog and looked directly across the street at me; I snapped again and could see him registering the car, my face and the camera and then he was moving. I dropped the camera and turned the key; a bus roared away from a stop and held Szabo up. I was clear and fifty yards away when he made it round the bus; I glanced back at him, wolfish visage and widow’s peak-he didn’t look happy.
I’m about as interested in photography as I am in flower arrangement but, like a true professional, I knew the man to go to. Colin Jones was an army photographer in Malaya; if you could see it, he could photograph it. He worked for The News now and we met occasionally over a beer for me to tell him how much I envied his security and for him to say how much he wished his work was exciting like mine. I stopped in Glebe, phoned Colin at the paper and arranged to meet him outside The News building.
When I arrived Colin was standing there, smoking a cigarette and looking like a poet. The printers were on strike and there were picket lines in front of the building. The pickets were harassing the drivers who were loading the papers which were being produced by scab labour. Colin got me past the union men on the door and took me up to his smelly den.
‘Contacts do?’ he asked as I handed over the film.
I said they would, and wandered around the room looking at the pictures pinned on the walls; about fifty per cent of them were obscene. I used Colin’s fixings to make a cup of instant coffee while I waited; the milk was slightly on the turn and the coffee ended up with little white flakes in it. I fought down the craving for sugar and a cigarette, and did some thinking instead. There wasn’t much to do: Kenneth Silverman had been hanging around the Forbes Realty office one night and he hadn’t been able to take his car away the next morning. That night, a Mr Szabo of that honourable enterprise had been booked for speeding while driving south in Ken’s car, which may have had a bundle in the back. It was looking worse for Kenny every minute.
Colin sauntered in and handed me the prints. The light had been bad and my hands not all that steady, but the long, vulpine mug was there clear enough — identifiable.
‘Brilliant work, Cliff, Colin said ironically.
I pointed at his cigarette. ‘Smoking kills.’
Colin tapped the prints. ‘I’d say this joker could kill, too. When are you going to grow up, Cliff?’
‘And do what?’
He shrugged. I put the prints away and we shook hands. On the drive home I thought about what Colin had said; I was near forty and felt it; I had a house about half paid for, a car not worth a tank of petrol, two guns and some books. I had a lot of scars and some bridge work; on the other hand, no one told me what to do, I had no office politics to contend with and most of the bills got paid, eventually.
Musing like this is dangerous, it means defences are down and self-pity is up. I was still musing when I walked along the path to my house and only stopped when I felt something hard jab into my left kidney.
‘Let’s go inside, Mr Hardy’, a lilting voice said. ‘You’ve taken liberties with me, I think I’ll return the compliment.’
I half turned but the something dug deeper, painfully and I winced and stumbled forward.
‘Take the keys out, slowly, and pretend you’re coming home with the shopping.’
I did it just as he said; the envelope with the prints inside was in my breast pocket and felt as big as a bible. He told me to open the door and I did that too, trying to avoid any jerky movement and cursing myself for not observing some elementary security precautions. A car is the easiest thing in the world to trace and this was just the boy to be getting my registration down as I was driving away in Norton Street. While I’d been exchanging wisdom with Colin Jones he’d been doing his job.
There was no point standing around in the hall. He prodded me with his hand, not a gun. I went, I had no booby traps, no buttons to push to release incapacitating gas; from the way he walked and held the gun I could tell that a sidestep and a sweeping movement aimed simultaneously at his ankle and wrist would get my brains all over my wall. He turned on lights as we went and that put a couple of hundred watts burning in the kitchen. He backed away and I turned around to look at him. His face was like a V-he had a narrow head with a pointed chin; his dark eyebrows were drawn together and down under the hair that receded sharply on both sides.
He moved around a little getting the dimensions of the room straight and then he advanced on me keeping the muzzle of his gun pointed at my right eye. He was good and he’d done all this before. When he was close enough, he kicked me in the knee, and as I bent over he nudged me and I sprawled on the floor. I looked up at him thinking how nice it would be to get a thumb into one of those yellow eyes.
He smiled down at me. ‘Don’t even think about it. Now I see you have a gun under your arm and something interesting-looking in the inside pocket. Let’s have the gun-easy now.’
I got the gun out and slid it across the floor towards him. He lifted the pistol a fraction and I took out the envelope and pushed it across too. I started to pull myself up.
‘Stay there, in fact you can lie on your face.’
I could hear him fiddling with the paper and then I heard a snort.
‘You’re a rotten photographer, Hardy, I’m twice as handsome as this.’
I didn’t say anything; he was either vain or had a sense of humour; either way I couldn’t see what difference it could make to me.
‘Where’s the phone?’ I pointed and he motioned me to get up and go. The knee hurt like hell but it held my weight. The living room has some bookshelves, a TV set and some old furniture, also a telephone. He waved me into a chair and sat there opposite him while he dialled. The hand holding the gun was steady but he glanced uneasily at the photographs a couple of times. He still wasn’t happy.
‘Clive? It’s Soldier, I’ve got Hardy; he’s got a collection of pictures of me taken in Norton Street.’
The phone crackled and Soldier’s knuckles whitened around the receiver.
‘Listen, Clive’, he rasped, ‘you’re in this. If I have to knock off this guy you’re going to be part of it, not like the other one.’
He listened again and when he spoke his voice had lost its musical quality, it was full of contempt. ‘Of course I can’t. We don’t know where he’s been or who he’s talked to. There could be copies of the pictures. It’s a two-
