her a sharp look and I wondered if they really were sisters.
I smiled.
‘Very nice.’
Jacque turned back to the mirror, wetting her finger and smoothing an imagined ruffle in her eyebrow.
‘Hadn’t you better tell us what it is you want?’
I opened my arms like an old-time ringmaster and said, ‘Which one of you lovely ladies would like to be my assistant?’
Jacque laughed. Shaz shook her head then reached over and took the bottle from me, tilting it to her lips.
‘You must be mad.’ She passed it to Jacque, who tipped a measure into her glass. ‘Bill would go crazy if we came down early. It’d spoil the big surprise.’
‘Is he your manager then?’
The word ‘manager’ came out wrong and both girls shot me a frown. Jacque’s voice was flinty.
‘We manage ourselves.’
‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I’m in a bit of a bind. The trick I want to do relies on the help of a lovely lady and the audience seems to consist entirely of ugly coppers, so there’s no point in asking for a volunteer.’
The blonde girl aimed a weary look at me.
‘You rely on a pair of tits to stop the punters noticing if you make a balls-up?’
‘Not quite how I would have put it… ’
‘But, yes?’
‘Glamour’s an element of the show, yes.’
‘Ask chubby downstairs, I bet she’ll do it for fifty.’
Shaz laughed.
‘She’d do it for twenty.’
Shaz giggled again when I asked if they were related and put her arm around the blonde girl, posing as if they were about to have a portrait painted.
‘You might not have noticed, but we look a bit different from each other. Ebony and ivory together, sometimes in harmony.’
She ruffled the blonde girl’s curls and I thought maybe I understood what they were to each other.
‘Hey, multiethnic Britain, no reason why you couldn’t be related.’
‘Only through drink.’
Jacque slapped Shaz’s hand lightly and set to repairing her hair. I gave the room a last glance, taking in the scattered clothes and makeup, the rumpled bed with its tired candlewick and said, ‘If you ladies want to make a quick escape I’d recommend you pack up your gear and leave it at the door.’
Shaz had started painting her nails the same flame red as her lipstick. She looked up at me.
‘Don’t worry. You may be the magician, but there’s not much you could teach us about vanishing acts.’
I could tell from the rumble of male voices that reached me as I went down the stairs that the lounge had grown busier. I searched out the door girl; it turned out her name was Candy, though I doubt she’d been christened that. The girls had been right. She was eager to help me in a surly kind of way. I explained what I wanted her to do, then went back through to the lounge. Bill wasn’t the only one required to mingle with the invited guests.
The disco lights glowed hazily through the sheets of cigarette smoke that shelved the air. The room smelt of alcohol, testosterone and sweat. There were about twenty of them. They’d ignored the booths that lined the walls, choosing to congregate in the centre of the room, knotting together like a fragile alliance that da break ranks for fear of treachery.
I sloped over to the bar, ordered a double malt and looked for Bill. I soon spotted him talking to a small man seated at a centre table. Bill was angled away from me, but he had the peripheral vision of a sniper. He turned and met my look, holding up three fingers, indicating he’d be with me soon. I nodded and raised my glass to my lips, letting the whisky do its slow burn down my throat, surveying the crowd.
A casual observer would have got an impression of cohesion, a solidarity of spirit. But as I slid amongst them the divisions started to come into view like the fractures in a jigsaw. They showed in the tilt of the men’s bodies, a half-turned back, the block of a shoulder. Their clannishness crossed age boundaries, but it showed in the style of their dress, the cut of their hair.
Near the centre of the room was a tight knot of dark business suits, the type you see crushed into the tube early in the morning reading copies of the Telegraph, though commuters generally had fewer buzz cuts and broken noses. Grouped around them were louder tables where the camaraderie seemed stronger. These guys were quickest to their feet with the fresh rounds. Their colour was higher, cheeks shinier. These were the ones to watch, men out of their depth who wore their smart casuals with the self-consciousness of people used to wearing a uniform. I spotted a glass or two making their way from them to the suits. The exchange seemed one way, but perhaps I’d just missed the reciprocating rounds. Furthest from the centre tables were the men I labelled serpico wannabees. These guys were dressed with a scruffy trendiness that spelt money. Their laughter had a superior edge. If I had walked into a bar in a strange town and seen this assemblage, I would have gone in search of somewhere else to drink.
The room had gone from silent to the edge of boisterous. I had a special routine for macho crowds. An unfunny string of jokes Richard had encouraged me to buy as an investment from one of his down-on-their-luck comics. I hated them, smutty schoolboy gags that no one finds funny but everyone laughs at, all lads together. I silently rehearsed, then amused myself by deciding which line of crime these men would be best suited to.
The man sipping lager near my left would be perfect old-time bank robber material. No finesse, just a sawn-off shotgun and a stare that said he was mad enough to use it. The sly-faced weasel next to him would surely be a pickpocket. The broad-shouldered grunt behind Bill’s companion would be ideal for strong-arm stuff. I identified conmen and drug dealers, pimps and burglars, then turned my mind to the man Bill was talking to. He was compact for a policeman, surely just within the height regulations. Mid-fifties, dressed in a slate-grey suit, with a blue shirt and a pink tie that matched his eyes. What would he be? It was obvious. The Boss, the mild-mannered gang leader who wore conservative suits, drank VSOP brandy and executed his enemies with a nod of the head.
Bill began making his way towards me, shaking hands, squeezing shoulders, smiling a crocodile smile that was all teeth. He patted me somewhere near my elbow in a gesture an anthropologist would probably describe as dominating, then offered me another drink.
‘No thanks, one helps, two hinders.’
‘Maybe afterwards then.’
I wanted to escape before the girls started their act, but I smiled and said, ‘If you like. So who’s the birthday boy?’
‘Detective Inspector Montgomery, the man I was talking to. Him and my dad went way back, he made himself useful at a difficult time.’ Bill smiled dryly. ‘I used to call him Uncle Monty, so I’ve got a personal interest in his send-off.’
‘Young to be put out to pasture.’
‘Law
