Spy Hook. Len Deighton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ daughter.

      Gaskell was talking again. ‘Lovely vehicle. A dark green Mercedes. Gleaming! Waxed! Someone is looking after it, you could see that. You’d never get a lady polishing a car. It’s not in their nature.’

      ‘Where did she go, Mr Gaskell?’

      ‘I told her the best car park for her would be Elephant and Castle.’ He went to the map on the wall to show me where the Elephant and Castle was. Gaskell was a big man and he’d retired at fifty. I wondered why he hadn’t found a pub to manage. He would have been wonderful behind a bar counter. The previous week, when I’d been asking him about the train service to Portsmouth, he’d confided to me – amid a barrage of other information – that that’s what he would have liked to be doing.

      ‘Never mind the car park, Mr Gaskell. I need to know where she’s meeting me.’

      ‘Sandy’s,’ he said again. ‘You knew it well, she said.’ He watched me carefully. Ever since our office address had been so widely published, thanks to the public-spirited endeavours of ‘investigative journalists’, there had been strict instructions that staff must not frequent any local bars, pubs or clubs because of the regular presence of eavesdroppers of various kinds, amateur and professional.

      ‘I wish you’d write these things down,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Do you know where she means? Is it a café, or what?’

      ‘Not a café I’ve heard of,’ said Gaskell, frowning and sucking his teeth. ‘Nowhere near here with a name like that.’ And then, as he remembered, his face lit up. ‘Big Henry’s! That’s what she said: Big Henry’s.’

      ‘Big Henty’s,’ I said, correcting him. ‘Tower Bridge Road. Yes, I know it.’

      Yes, I knew it and my heart sank. I knew exactly the kind of ‘informant’ who was likely to be waiting for me in Big Henty’s: an ear-bender with open palm outstretched. And I had planned an evening at home alone with a coal fire, the carcass of Sunday’s duck, a bottle of wine and a book. I looked at the door and I looked at Gaskell. And I wondered if the sensible thing wouldn’t be to forget about Lucinda, and whoever she was fronting for, and drive straight home and ignore the whole thing. The chances were that I’d never hear from the mysterious Lucinda again. This town was filled with people who knew me a long time ago and suddenly remembered me when they needed a few pounds from the public purse in exchange for some ancient and unreliable intelligence material.

      ‘If you’d like me to come along, Mr Samson …’ said Gaskell suddenly, and allowed his offer to hang in the air.

      So Gaskell thought there was some strong-arm business in the offing. Well he was a game fellow. Surely he was too old for that sort of thing: and certainly I was.

      ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Gaskell,’ I said, ‘but the prospect is boredom rather than any rough stuff.’

      ‘Whatever you say,’ said Gaskell, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

      It was the margin of disbelief that made me feel I had to follow it up. I didn’t want it to look as if I was nervous. Dammit! Why wasn’t I brave enough not to care what the Gaskells of this world thought about me?

      Tower Bridge Road is a major south London thoroughfare that leads to the river, or rather to the curious neo-Gothic bridge which, for many foreigners, symbolizes the capital. This is Southwark. From here Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury; and a couple of centuries later Shakespeare’s Globe theatre was built upon the marshes. For Victorian London this shopping street, with a dozen brightly lit pubs, barrel organs and late-night street markets, was the centre of one of the capital’s most vigorous neighbourhoods. Here filthy slums, smoke-darkened factories and crowded sweat-shops stood side by side with neat leafy squares where scrawny clerks and potbellied shopkeepers asserted their social superiority.

      Now it is dark and squalid and silent. Well-intentioned bureaucrats nowadays sent shop assistants home early, street traders were banished, almost empty pubs sold highly taxed watery lager and the factories were derelict: a textbook example of urban blight, with yuppies nibbling the leafy bits.

      Back in the days before women’s lib, designer jeans and deep-dish pizza, Big Henty’s snooker hall with its ‘ten full-size tables, fully licensed bar and hot food’ was the Athenaeum of Southwark. The narrow doorway and its dimly lit staircase gave entry to a cavernous hall conveniently sited over a particularly good eel and pie shop.

      Now, alas, the eel and pie shop was a video rental ‘club’ where posters in primary colours depicted half-naked film stars firing heavy machine guns from the hip. But in its essentials Big Henty’s was largely unchanged. The lighting was exactly the same as I remembered it, and any snooker hall is judged on its lighting. Although it was very quiet every table was in use. The green baize table tops glowed like ten large aquariums, their water still, until suddenly across them brightly coloured fish darted, snapped and disappeared.

      Big Henty wasn’t there of course. Big Henty died in 1905. Now the hall was run by a thin white-faced fellow of about forty. He supervised the bar. There was not a wide choice: these snooker-playing men didn’t appreciate the curious fizzy mixtures that keep barmen busy in cocktail bars. At Big Henty’s you drank whisky or vodka; strong ale or Guinness with tonic and soda water for the abstemious. For the hungry there were ‘toasted’ sandwiches that came soft, warm and plastic-wrapped from the microwave oven.

      ‘Evening, Bernard. Started to snow, has it?’ What a memory the man had. It was years since I’d been here. He picked up his lighted cigarette from the Johnny Walker ashtray, and inhaled on it briefly before putting it back into position. I remembered his chain-smoking, the way he lit one cigarette from another but put them in his mouth only rarely. I’d brought Dicky Cruyer here one evening long ago to make contact with a loud-mouthed fellow who worked in the East German embassy. It had come to nothing, but I remember Dicky describing the barman as the keeper of the sacred flame.

      I responded, ‘Half of Guinness … Sydney.’ His name came to me in that moment of desperation. ‘Yes, the snow is starting to pile up.’

      It was bottled Guinness of course. This was not the place that a connoisseur of stout and porter would come to savour beverages tapped from the wood. But he poured it down the side of the glass holding his thumb under the point of impact to show he knew the folklore, and he put exactly the right size head of light brown foam upon the black beer. ‘In the back room.’ Delicately he shook the last drops from the bottle and tossed it away without a glance. ‘Your friend. In the back room. Behind Table Four.’

      I picked up my glass of beer and sipped. Then I turned slowly to survey the room. Big Henty’s back room had proved its worth to numerous fugitives over the years. It had always been tolerated by authority. The CID officers from Borough High Street police station found it a convenient place to meet their informants. I walked across the hall. Beyond the tasselled and fringed lights that hung over the snooker tables, the room was dark. The spectators – not many this evening – sat on wooden benches along the walls, their grey faces no more than smudges, their dark clothes invisible.

      Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked ‘Staff’ and went inside.

      There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the СКАЧАТЬ