Beggars Banquet (collection) Read online

  Now Daintry, his title would be something like Last Hope Cash Dispensation Executive. Or, in the old parlance, a plain money lender. Nobody remembers Daintry’s first name. He shrugged it off some time back when he was a teenager, and he hasn’t been a teenager for a few years and some. He’s the guy you go to on a Friday or Saturday for a few quid to see you through the weekend. And come the following week’s dole cheque (or, if you’re one of the fortunate few, pay packet), Daintry’ll be waiting while you cash it, his hand out for the money he loaned plus a whack of interest.

  While you’re only too happy to see Daintry before the weekend, you’re not so happy about him still being around after the weekend. You don’t want to pay him back, certainly not the interest. But you do, inevitably. You do pay him back. Because he’s a persistent sort of fellow with a good line in colourful threats and a ready abundance of Physical Persuasion Techniques.

  I think the chief reason people didn’t like Daintry was that he never made anything of himself. I mean, he still lived on the same estate as his clients, albeit in one of the two-storey houses rather than the blocks of flats. His front garden was a jungle, his window panes filthy, and the inside of his house a thing of horror. He dressed in cheap clothes, which hung off him. He wouldn’t shave for days, his hair always needed washing… You’re getting the picture, eh? Me, when I’m not working I’m a neat and tidy sort of guy. My mum’s friends, the women she gossips with, they’re always shaking their heads and asking how come I never found myself a girl. They speak about me in the past tense like that, like I’m not going to find one now. On the contrary. I’m thirty-eight, and all my friends have split up with their wives by now. So there are more and more single women my age appearing around the estate. It’s only a question of time. Soon it’ll be Brenda’s turn. She’ll leave Harry, or he’ll kick her out. No kids, so that’s not a problem. I hear gossip that their arguments are getting louder and louder and more frequent. There are threats too, late at night after a good drink down at the club. I’m leaving you, no you’re not, yes I am, well get the hell out then, I’ll be back for my stuff, on you go, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction, well stay if you like.

  Just like a ballet, eh? Well, I think so anyway. I’ve been waiting for Brenda for a long time. I can wait a little longer. I’m certainly a more attractive prospect than Daintry. Who’d move in with him? Nobody, I can tell you. He’s a loner. No friends, just people he might drink with. He’ll sometimes buy a drink for a few of the harder cases, then get them to put the frighteners on some late-payer who’s either getting cocky or else talking about going to the police. Not that the police would do anything. What? Around here? If they’re not in Daintry’s pocket, they either don’t care about the place anyway or else are scared to come near. Daintry did a guy in once inside the club. A Sunday afternoon too, stabbed him in the toilets. Police came, talked to everyone in the club – nobody’d seen anything. Daintry may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. Besides, there’s always a reason. If you haven’t crossed him, you’re none of his business… and he’d better not be any of yours.

  I knew him of course. Oh yeah, we went to school together, same class all the way from five to sixteen years old. He was never quite as good as me at the subjects, but he was quiet and pretty well behaved. Until about fifteen. A switch flipped in his brain at fifteen. Actually, I’m lying: he was always better than me at arithmetic. So I suppose he was cut out for a career as a money lender. Or, as he once described himself, ‘a bank manager with menaces’.

  God knows how many people he’s murdered. Can’t be that many, or we’d all have noticed. That’s why I thought all the information I used to give him was just part of his act. He knew word would get around about what he was asking me for, and those whispers and rumours would strengthen his reputation. That’s what I always thought. I never took it seriously. As a result, I tapped him for a loan once or twice and he never charged me a penny. He also bought me a few drinks, and once provided a van when I wanted to sell the piano. See, he wasn’t all bad. He had his good side. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d never have shifted that piano, and it’d still be sitting there in the living-room reminding my mother of the tunes Dad used to play on it, tunes she’d hum late into the night and then again at the crack of dawn.

  It seemed strange at first that he’d want to see me. He would come over to me in pubs and sling his arm around my neck, asking if I was all right, patting me and ordering the same again. We’d hardly spoken more than a sentence at a time to one another since leaving school, but now he was smiles and reminiscences and all interested in my job of work.

  ‘I just dig holes.’

  He nodded. ‘And that’s important work, believe me. Without the likes of you, my car’s suspension, would be shot to hell.’

  Of course, his car’s suspension was shot to hell. It was a 1973 Ford Capri with tinted windows, an air duct and a spoiler. It was a loser’s car, with dark green nylon fur on the dashboard and the door panels. The wheel arches were history, long since eaten by rust. Yet every year without fail it passed its MOT. The coincidence was, the garage mechanic was a regular client of Daintry’s.

  ‘I could get a new car,’ Daintry said, ‘but it gets me from A back to A again, so what’s the point?’

  There was something in this. He seldom left the estate. He lived there, shopped there, he’d been born there and he’d die there. He never took a holiday, not even a weekend away, and he never ever ventured south of the river. He spent all his free time watching videos. The guy who runs the video shop reckoned Daintry had seen every film in the shop a dozen times over.

  ‘He knows their numbers off by heart.’

  He did know lots about movies: running time, director, writer, supporting actor. He was always a hot contender when the club ran its trivia quiz. He sat in that smelly house of his with the curtains shut and a blue light flickering. He was a film junkie. And somehow he managed to spend all his money on them. He must have done, or what else did he do with it? His Rolex was a fake, lighter than air when you picked it up, and probably his gold jewellery was fake too. Maybe somewhere there’s a secret bank account with thousands salted away, but I don’t think so. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t think so.

  Roadworks. That’s the information I passed on to Daintry. That’s what he wanted to talk to me about. Roadworks. Major roadworks.

  ‘You know the sort of thing,’ he’d say, ‘anywhere where you’re digging a big hole. Maybe building a flyover or improving drainage. Major roadworks.’

  Sure enough, I had access to this sort of information. I just had to listen to the various crews talking about what they were working on and where they were doing the work. Over tea and biscuits in the canteen, I could earn myself a few drinks and a pint glass of goodwill.

  ‘How deep does that need to be?’ Daintry would ask.

  ‘I don’t know, eight, maybe ten feet.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Maybe three long, the same wide.’

  And he’d nod. This was early in the game, and I was slow catching on. You’re probably much faster, right? So you know why he was asking. But I was puzzled the first couple of times. I mean, I thought maybe he was interested in the… what’s it, the infrastructure. He wanted to see improvements. Then it dawned on me: no, what he wanted to see were big holes. Holes that would be filled in with concrete and covered over with huge immovable objects, like bridge supports for example. Holes where bodies could be hidden. I didn’t say anything, but I knew that’s what we were talking about. We were talking about Human Resource Disposal.

  And Daintry knew that I knew. He’d wink from behind his cigarette smoke, using those creased stinging eyes of his. Managing to look a little like his idol Robert de Niro. In Goodfellas. That’s what Daintry would say. He’d always be making physical comparisons like that. Me, I thought he was much more of a Joe Pesci. But I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t even tell him that Pesci isn’t pronounced pesky.

  H
e knew I’d blab about our little dialogues, and I did, casually like. And word spread. And suddenly Daintry was a man to be feared. But he wasn’t really. He was just stupid, with a low flashpoint. And if you wanted to know what sort of mood he was going to be in, you only had to visit the video shop.

  ‘He’s taken out Goodfellas and Godfather 3 ’. So you knew there was trouble coming. Now you really didn’t want to cross him. But if he’d taken out soft-core or a Steve Martin or even some early Brando, everything was going to be all right. He must have been on a gangster high the night he went round to speak with Mr and Mrs McAndrew. In his time, Mr McAndrew had been a bit of a lad himself, but he was in his late seventies with a wife ten years younger. They lived in one of the estate’s nicer houses. They’d bought it from the council and had installed a fancy front door, double-glazed windows, you name it, and all the glass was that leaded criss-cross stuff. It wasn’t cheap. These days, Mr McAndrew spent all his time in the garden. At the front of the house he had some beautiful flower beds, with the back garden given over to vegetables. In the summer, you saw him playing football with his grandchildren.

  ‘Just like’, as somebody pointed out, ‘Marlon Brando in The Godfather.’ This was apt in its way since, like I say, despite the gardening Mr McAndrew’s hands were probably cleaner these days than they had been in the past.

  How he got to owe Daintry money I do not know. But Daintry, believe me, would have been only too happy to lend. There was McAndrew’s reputation for a start. Plus the McAndrews seemed prosperous enough, he was sure to see his money and interest returned. But not so. Whether out of sheer cussedness or because he really couldn’t pay, McAndrew had been holding out on Daintry. I saw it as a struggle between the old gangster and the new. Maybe Daintry did too. Whatever, one night he walked into the McAndrews’ house and beat up Mrs McAndrew in front of her husband. He had two heavies with him, one to hold Mr McAndrew, one to hold Mrs McAndrew, either one of them could have dropped dead of a heart attack right then and there.

  There were murmurs in the street the next day, and for days afterwards. Daintry, it was felt, had overstepped the mark. He was out of order. To him it was merely business, and he’d gotten the money from McAndrew so the case was closed. But he now found himself shorter of friends than ever before. Which is probably why he turned to me when he wanted the favour done. Simply, he couldn’t get anyone else to do it.

  ‘You want me to what?’

  He’d told me to meet him in the children’s play-park. We walked around the path. There was no one else in the park. It was a battlefield, all broken glass and rocks. Dog shit was smeared up and down the chute, the swings had been wrapped around themselves until they couldn’t be reached. The roundabout had disappeared one night, leaving only a metal stump in place. You’d be safer sending your kids to play on the North Circular.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ Daintry said. ‘I want you to get rid of a package for me. There’s good money in it.’

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘A hundred.’

  I paused at that. A hundred pounds, just to dispose of a package…

  ‘But you’ll need a deep hole,’ said Daintry.

  Yeah, of course. It was that kind of package. I wondered who it was. There was a story going around that Daintry had set up a nice little disposal operation which dealt with Human Resource Waste from miles around. Villains as far away as Watford and Luton were bringing ‘packages’ for him to dispose of. But it was just a story, just one of many.

  ‘A hundred,’ I said, nodding.

  ‘All right, one twenty-five. But it’s got to be tonight.’

  I knew just the hole.

  They were building a new footbridge over the North Circular, over to the west near Wembley. I knew the gang wouldn’t be working night-shift: the job wasn’t that urgent and who could afford the shift bonus these days? There’d be a few deep holes there all right. And while the gang might notice a big black bin-bag at the bottom of one of them, they wouldn’t do anything about it. People were always dumping rubbish down the holes. It all got covered over with concrete, gone and quite forgotten. I hadn’t seen a dead body before, and I didn’t intend seeing one now. So I insisted it was all wrapped up before I’d stick it in the car-boot.

  Daintry and I stood in the lock-up he rented and looked down at the black bin-liner.

  ‘It’s not so big, is it?’ I said.

  ‘I broke the rigor mortis,’ he explained. ‘That way you can get it into the car.’

  I nodded and went outside to throw up. I felt better after that. Curried chicken never did agree with me.

  ‘I’m not sure I can do it,’ I said, wiping my mouth.

  Daintry was ready for me. ‘Ah, that’s a pity.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets, studying the tips of his shoes. ‘How’s your old mum, by the way? Keeping well, is she?’

  ‘She’s fine, yeah…’ I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing. Let’s hope her good health continues.’ He looked up at me, a glint in his eye. ‘Still fancy Brenda?’

  ‘Who says I do?’

  He laughed. ‘Common knowledge. Must be the way your trousers bulge whenever you see her shadow.’

  ‘That’s rubbish.’

  ‘She seems well enough, too. The marriage is a bit shaky, but what can you expect? That Harry of hers is a monster.’ Daintry paused, fingering his thin gold neck-chain. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he took a tap to the skull one of these dark nights.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He shrugged. ‘Just a guess. Pity you can’t…’ He touched the bin-bag with his shoe. ‘You know.’ And he smiled.

  We loaded the bag together. It wasn’t heavy, and was easy enough to manoeuvre. I could feel a foot and a leg, or maybe a hand and arm. I tried not to think about it. Imagine him threatening my old mum! He was lucky I’m not quick to ignite, not like him, or it’d’ve been broken nose city and hospital cuisine. But what he said about Brenda’s husband put thoughts of my mum right out of my head.

  We closed the boot and I went to lock it.

  ‘He’s not going to make a run for it,’ Daintry said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ I admitted. But I locked the boot anyway.

  Then the car wouldn’t start, and when it did start it kept cutting out, like the engine was flooding or something. Maybe a block in the fuel line. I’d let it get very low before the last fill of petrol. There might be a lot of rubbish swilling around in the tank. After a couple of miles it cut out on me at some traffic lights in Dalston. I rolled down my window and waved for the cars behind me to pass. I was content to sit for a few moments and let everything settle, my stomach included. One car stopped alongside me. And Jesus, wouldn’t you know it: it was a cop car.

  ‘Everything all right?’ the cop in the passenger seat called.

  ‘Yeah, just stalled.’

  ‘You can’t sit there for ever.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If it doesn’t start next go, push your car to the side of the road.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ He made no move to leave. Now the driver was looking at me too, and traffic was building up behind us. Nobody sounded their horn. Everyone could see that a cop car was talking with the driver of another vehicle. Sweat tickled my ears. I turned the ignition, resisting the temptation to pump the accelerator. The engine rumbled, then came to life. I grinned at the cops and started forwards, going through an amber light.

  They could probably arrest me for that. It was five minutes before I stopped staring in the rearview mirror. But I couldn’t see them. They’d turned off somewhere. I let all my fear and tension out in a rasping scream, then remembered the window was still rolled down. I wound it back up again. I decided not to go straight to the bridge-site, but to drive around a bit, let all the traffic clear along with my head.

  I pulled into a bus-stop just before the North Circular and changed into my work clothes. That way I wouldn’t look suspicious. Good thinking, eh? It was my own idea, on
e Daintry had appreciated. I had a question for him now, and the question was: why wasn’t he doing this himself? But he wasn’t around to answer it. And I knew the answer anyway: he’d rather pay someone else to do dangerous jobs. Oh yes, it was dangerous; I knew that now. Worth a lot more than a hundred and twenty-five nicker, sixty of which was already in my pocket in the shape of dirty old pound notes. Repayments, doubtless, from Daintry’s punters. Grubby money, but still money. I hoped it hadn’t come from the McAndrews.

  I sat at the bus-stop for a while. A car pulled in behind me. Not a police car this time, just an ordinary car. I heard the driver’s door slam shut. Footsteps, a tap at my window. I looked out. The man was bald and middle-aged, dressed in suit and tie. A lower executive look, a sales rep maybe, that sort of person. He was smiling in a friendly enough sort of fashion. And if he wanted to steal my car and jemmy open the boot, well, that was fine too.

  I wound down my window. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I think I missed my turning,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me where we are, roughly?’

  ‘Roughly,’ I said, ‘roughly we’re about a mile north of Wembley.’

  ‘And that’s west London?’ His accent wasn’t quite English, not southern English. Welsh or a Geordie or a Scouser maybe.

  ‘About as west as you can get,’ I told him. Yeah, the wild west.

  ‘I can’t be too far away then. I want St John’s Wood. That’s west too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, not far at all.’ These poor sods, you came across them a lot in my line of work. New to the city and pleading directions, getting hot and a bit crazy as the signposts and one-ways led them further into the maze. I felt sorry for them a lot of the time. It wasn’t their fault. So I took my time as I directed him towards Harlesden, miles away from where he wanted to be.