Gone Tomorrow (9 page)

‘Oh, I don’t know. These overripe types who fancy themselves often think they can’t be caught. He might lie low for a bit, but if he’s got good scams set up round here he won’t want to abandon them.’

‘If he’s that cocky, he’ll probably turn up at the pub again, once his black eye’s gone down.’

‘Yes, but that could be four or five days. It strikes me that Sonny Collins probably knows more about Eddie Cranston than he’s letting on. I think we might get him in and lean on him, see if he creaks.’ Slider frowned in thought a moment. ‘Run him through the system, will you, see if he’s got any form.’

‘What, Collins? Righty-o, guv.’

‘Anything will do. Parking tickets, smoking in the lav. And someone can go round and have a chat with Karen Peacock –though if she’s as wet as Nikki says she is, she probably won’t know anything about Eddie worth knowing.’

It was common wisdom that women preferred to unburden themselves to other women, but Slider had always begged to differ. It was one thing for a female to Tell All to her bosom chum, but in his experience they had a basic animal suspicion of women who were complete strangers, whereas they would spill the most astonishing intimacies to a strange man if he were sympatico enough. Atherton said it was all to do with sex, and proved that women, even more than men, were always potentially on the pull. ‘At least men stop for football,’ he pointed out.

So Slider didn’t send Swilley to interview Karen Peacock. He toyed with the idea of sending Anderson, who was a nice, unthreatening family man, but remembering her penchant for handsome bastards, plumped in the end for Atherton.

‘I suppose you mean that for a compliment,’ Atherton said.

‘It’s all to do with sex,’ Slider said serenely.

Karen Peacock lived in Evans House, almost opposite the park and a plastic pint glass throw from the Phoenix. Atherton tried not to get too excited about this fact. Nowhere on the estate was
that
far from the Phoenix. He trod up the stairs like a cat avoiding something spilt, and found Karen Peacock in. She was a depressed-looking woman who was probably in her early twenties but looked older because of her draggledness. Her face was pale, her eyes defeated, her hair dyed black with a luminous red streak, which defiant punkery went with the rest of her appearance like liver and custard. She was not more than usually overweight, but everything about her seemed to droop baggily, from her face to her shoulders, her bust, her belly and her clothes, as if they were all despairingly giving up the fight and sinking to the ground. She was dressed in unforgivable Lycra leggings and an enormous mauve teeshirt, her bare feet in flip-flops revealing chipped burgundy varnish on the toenails. She had three silver studs in the rim of one ear, and three small children, the middle one of which had obviously been sired by a black man and didn’t match the other two. Atherton wondered which one was Cranston’s. He supposed the youngest, unless the man was unnaturally forgiving, or merely businesslike.

If Cranston was as tasty as reputation had him, Atherton expected difficulty in getting anything out of one of his women, but when Karen opened the door to him she looked up at him with a mixture of fear and submission, and it only took a moment or two of smiling charm before she invited him in. Soon he found himself sitting on her dreadful sofa in her clean and tidy but dreadful lounge. For the purposes of furthering their relationship he expressed an interest in her children, though unfortunately attention only encouraged the eldest, Bruce, a boy of four, to show off, and their subsequent conversation was punctuated by shouts, loud bangs as he whacked furniture with various blunt instruments, and weak pleas from his mother not to put his toys down the toilet or torture his little brothers.

Atherton’s charm worked on Karen so well that her submission was soon tinged with a fluttery sort of pleasure rather than fear. She responded to his generous labelling of Cranston as her husband by saying, ‘Well, we’re not actually married.
Not as such. Really, I’m still married to Vinnie’s father – that’s my middle one – but Eddie is Eric’s father – that’s my baby.’

‘He’s a lovely little boy. Does he look like Eddie?’ This line removed the last traces of Karen’s reserve. It also prompted an offer for Atherton to hold the baby, but he supposed that was a small price to pay. Baby Eric was placid enough – indeed, almost inanimate, like a large lump of flesh that had been excised from somewhere or other. It sat on Atherton’s knee and stared at nothing. He thought of his trousers and prayed its nappy was leakproof.

After this diversion, Atherton brought the conversation back to Eddie. ‘But he does live here with you?’

‘Well, not as such. You see,’ she looked sidelong, almost coyly, at Atherton, ‘you get more from the social if you don’t live together. Eddie’s got his own place.’

‘I see. But I expect he’s often here.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, but her eyes filled with tears. A bit more probing and she spilled it out, that Eddie had other women –well it was only natural, he was so handsome and everything –but it was her he loved really. ‘He’s told me so, ever so often.’
This was the clincher, Atherton mused with a sort of sad disgust. If he said it, it must be so.

‘What about this fight he had with Lenny over at the Phoenix?’

‘Oh, that was terrible!’ she said. ‘Lenny give him a black eye. I mean, Eddie! He’s got such beautiful eyes.’

Eddie had been with her that evening. He’d dropped in around nine, nine-thirty. He’d come to bring her some things he wanted washing. She did his hand-wash for him, his nice jumpers and that. She’d been putting the kids to bed. She’d made him something to eat – a fry-up, that was what Eddie liked, with baked beans, and then one of them jam roly-polys and custard that you do in the microwave. Eddie had bought her the microwave. He got it from a pal of his, cheap. She used it a lot. It was really useful for warming up the baby’s bottles and that.

Where had Eddie been before he visited her? She didn’t know. She never asked Eddie where he’d been or where he was going. He didn’t like her to ask questions. He just liked her to be ready for him whenever he dropped in. After he’d had his supper he watched telly a bit and then he went. He said he was going
over the Phoenix for a drink. That would have been about a quarter past ten. No, he hadn’t come back afterwards. He hadn’t said he was going to so she didn’t expect him. In fact, she hadn’t seen him since.

‘But you heard about the fight? Do you know what it was about?’

Now for the first time she seemed reluctant to answer. But after a pause, she whispered, ‘It was about a woman.’

‘That must have been really upsetting for you,’ Atherton sympathised. Bruce, the eldest child, was standing behind his mother amusing himself by pulling faces at Atherton. He was using both hands to get some of his effects. Atherton made an effort and shut him out of his consciousness. The application of a little more lard soon eased Karen out of her shell, and her long-buried sense of grievance surfaced.

Eddie, she confessed as much to herself as him, did not just see other women on a casual basis. She wouldn’t have minded that – much. After all, men couldn’t help themselves, could they? And when he did have women like that, it never meant anything to Eddie. He said so.

What hurt was that he had other women like her, regular, settled women like wives, and at least one of them had children by him.

It must have shocked her when she realised, Atherton crooned. How it must have hurt! To know he had treated her so badly, lied to her, double-crossed her—

Oh, but he still loved her, Karen cried hastily, leaping to the defence of her tormentor in time-honoured fashion. It was just he was so good-looking and everything, women wouldn’t leave him alone, and she supposed he’d got trapped and that.

Some natural tears she shed – or at least, her eyes moistened. She blew her nose dismally and he eased her back to the fight outside the Phoenix.

Eddie had found out this Lenny was bothering some of his other women. That’s what he had gone over the Phoenix for, ’cause he knew Lenny was going to be there and he wanted to have it out with him. And they’d started arguing, and that Sonny had chucked them out, and then they’d got into a fight outside and Lenny had give Eddie a black eye.

How had Karen found all this out?

Because that cow Carol Ann had told her. She was one of Eddie’s women. She claimed to be his real one, but Karen knew better. It was her Eddie loved; Carol Ann was nothing. She was just a slag. But Carol Ann had phoned her up the Tuesday to tell her about the fight and that Eddie had gone to her after, as if that proved anything.

Where did Carol Ann live?

‘I don’t know,’ Karen said crossly, ‘and I don’t want to know. He doesn’t live with
her.
He’s got his own place. He told me. Because of the social money.’

‘What’s Carol Ann’s other name?’ Atherton asked. But Karen didn’t know that either. It was Carol Ann Lying Cowface as far as she was concerned.

‘And what about Lenny? Where does he live?’

She had never met Lenny. She’d only heard Eddie talking about him Monday night, that was all. She didn’t recollect hearing his name before, but Eddie didn’t talk much about his friends or anything. He didn’t talk much at all, really.

Atherton could see in his mind’s eye the amiable Eddie dropping in for food, sex and washing, taking the first on the settee in front of the telly and the second probably in seconds, a practical thing like blowing his nose. His idea of foreplay was probably, ‘Brace yourself!’ No, conversation would be way, way down on his list of wants from his woman.

Outside again, and anxiously inspecting his trousers for damp, Atherton wondered how Eddie had known that Lenny would be at the pub that night if he was not,
apud
Sonny Collins, a regular. He also reflected that if Eddie had gone to Carol Ann Cowface after the events of the evening, she would probably know whether he had killed Unlucky Lenny or not. She would probably be required by Eddie to provide his alibi, and she would probably know who Lenny was too. She was an extremely important part of the jigsaw. Unfortunately, like everyone else in this case, she came without the basic courtesy of a surname. He sighed. Like ants, they were, shifting a mountain of sugar grain by single grain.

Sonny Collins was not a happy rabbit. His barely contained rage swirled round the interview room like a tiny tornado in a bottle, and his good eye moved about so much it met up with
its partner only rarely, like a frightfully mismatched pair of ballroom dancers.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ Slider offered daintily.

‘I haven’t got time for all that,’ Collins snarled. ‘You asked me to come here, and I’ve come. I’m a busy man and I haven’t got time to mess about. So what do you want?’

‘Eddie Cranston,’ said Slider.

‘What about him?’

‘Oh, you know who he is? Last time I spoke to you, you said you didn’t know his surname.’

‘Maybe I’d forgotten it.’

‘And maybe you hadn’t. So let’s have a bit more co-operation now. Tell me everything you know about him.’

‘He comes in my pub. That’s it.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘I dunno.’

‘You said he was local.’ Sonny shrugged. ‘What’s he up to, Mr Collins? What’s his scam? Where does he get the money to buy his nice clothes?’

Both eyes fixed on Slider for once. ‘Is that what you dragged me in here for? I told you I don’t know him. All right, I know his name, but that’s it. He comes in my pub two-three times a week and I’ve heard him called by it. Why should I know anything else about him, or any of my customers? I’m a publican, not a bloody lonelyhearts agency.’

Time for the thumbscrews, Slider thought. He held out his hand to Atherton, who gave him, with a nicely judged solemnity, a buff wallet-file, from which Slider extracted a piece of paper, allowing a glimpse of a not inconsiderable wad of other papers within. It was the file on the long-defunct Shepherd’s Bush Nick football team (osp) but Collins was not to know that.

‘So, you’re a publican, are you? For how much longer, I wonder.’

Collins tried not to look as if he was looking at the file. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that my colleagues in uniform have had their eye on the Phoenix for some time. Drinking after hours is only the least of the things that worry them.’

‘Rubbish!’ Collins snapped.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Slider said, running his finger down the page in his hand. ‘You’ve been under observation. Dates,
times, number and description of people seen drinking in your fine hostelry after closing time
and,’
he tapped the sheet with his fingernail, ‘the names and addresses of those who’ve been apprehended leaving your premises at inappropriate times. Would you be willing to place a small bet on the likelihood that they wouldn’t give you up to save their own skins?’

‘That’s total bollocks,’ Collins said calmly; but suddenly he was beginning to sweat. Slider could smell it; and his bald crown was shining. ‘If you’ve got anything on me, charge me. Otherwise—’

Slider shook his head. ‘As I said, that’s the least of your sins. Observation suggests there’s a great deal going on that we’d like to know about.’ All this he had from Nicholls, the uniform sergeant in charge of the observation. The file might be bogus, but the suspicions weren’t. ‘People passing drugs to one another. Illegally imported cigarettes—’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Collins interrupted. His voice was still calm, but the tension in his body was almost tangible. Slider was afraid he might blow apart any minute, filling the room with thousands of tiny cogs and springs. ‘If people take drugs, I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said with broad sympathy, ‘but if it happens on your premises you’re still responsible. It’s a bugger, isn’t it? Now so far we haven’t pushed the investigation because, frankly, you’re fairly low down on our hit-parade of villains. But you can always be moved up the list—’

‘You can’t prove anything against me.’

‘And,’ Slider went on as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘it wouldn’t take a moment to send off this list of after-hours offences to your brewery. Have you got a second career lined up, Mr Collins? Any other job you’ve always had a secret desire to try out?’