was leaning in her doorway, dressed for the part in black leather and black fishnet stockings, watching Johnston wave people to the minicabs, directing the drivers – the usual scene on this pavement from mid-afternoon till twelve or one in the morning, as people came from theatres and restaurants, when she saw a man she did not like the look of come up to Johnston, confront him. Johnston was afraid, she knew. In her experience trouble always started like this: a man appeared from nowhere with a certain look about him that said, ‘Look out!’ – and then something bad happened. When this man had taken himself off, she saw Johnston sweating, leaning on his cubbyhole counter, taking quick gulps from a bottle kept there. Then he saw her, took in her concern, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Reet.’
That night she made sure the door on the street that led up to her room was locked, and invited Johnston up. She lay on her bed, propped against pillows, one leg dangling – a pose she had evolved to excite customers – smoking, and watched Johnston shifting and fidgeting on his chair. He was smoking, and took frequent mouthfuls from his whisky flask. The stale smoky air was making her cough.
She knew his story – most of it. He had run away at fourteen from a bad home. He had done a spell in borstal, then lived rough, kept himself by shoplifting and thieving. A year in prison. That over, he went straight for a time, but a sentence for robbery with violence took him back. He had finished that five years ago. Wheeling and dealing, at first just ahead of the law, but then in deep, and deeper, involved in a dozen scams, which became increasingly dangerous, he was aided by the skills he had learned in prison and because he was known in the criminal community. The minicab business did well enough, but it had never been much more than a front. She was not surprised that he was in trouble, and when he said, ‘I’m in a trap, Reet,’ imagined a debt or two, perhaps blackmail. But now, as he began to tell her, strengthening himself with large gulps of whisky – he was a bit drunk – she sat up on the edge of the bed, and stared at him.
‘What are you saying? What are you telling me?’
He had been persuaded by a man on the fringes of respectability to try his luck on the stock exchange – futures. You couldn’t lose, this friend said. There was money, if you kept your head. Well, they had kept their heads but not their money.
‘You’re telling me you owe a million pounds?’
‘That’s nothing, Reet. A million’s nothing to that lot.’
‘Well, it’s a lot to you.’
‘True,’ he said, and drank.
‘So. You’re afraid of going back to prison?’
‘Right on. That’s what I’ll be doing, if I can’t get some real money.’
‘Let’s get this straight. You owe a million, or the two of you together?’
‘He owes much more. He was in deeper than me. He did me a bit of a favour really, he let me in – but now if I don’t give him a million he’s going to shop me and I’ll go down.’
She lay back again, and coughed. ‘Fucking pollution,’ she said. ‘Sometimes this room’s so full of stink from the street I can’t breathe.’ The cigarette smoke thus being neatly excused, she lit another, and threw Johnston one.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t get away with this cocaine deal, if they catch you, you’ll go down anyway. For life probably.’
‘That’s right, but I’m going to get away with it.’
‘So before you even start to get some money for yourself you’ve got to pay back a million?’
‘When the stuff arrives in Nice, that’s the million paid. And the rest is for me.’
‘Nothing for Ben?’
‘Oh, I’ll see him right.’
‘And how about me?’ she enquired. ‘Aren’t I taking any risks?’
‘You won’t know what’s in those cases, Reet. I’m going to make sure of that.’
‘When they nab Ben, and ask him where he got the stuff, he’ll say from me. Because he knows me better than he knows you, and he trusts me. So he’ll say it was me.’
A silence.
‘But he knows that he is taking something from me to a friend in France.’
A silence.
‘From me, Reet.’
‘But I’m in it too, aren’t I? Ben doesn’t know enough to lie well. We can’t count on him. He’ll say it was me and you.’
Johnston cut this knot with, ‘You just tell me something. How do you see yourself, Reet? You don’t fancy this life – so I’ve heard you say, haven’t I? Well, you stand by me in this and I’ll see that you get out of this life, for good.’
‘You’ll see me right, like Ben?’
Now Johnston leaned forward, waving away swathes of cigarette smoke, and spoke to her – she saw clearly enough – from the heart. ‘Look, you and I have gone along together – how long now, Reet? Three years? I haven’t let you down ever – well, have I?’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well then?’
He continued to lean forward, all drunken appeal, desperate, his reddened eyes wet – from the smoke? From tears?
‘It’s such a gamble,’ she said. ‘You’re taking such a chance.’
‘I’ve got to, Reet. If I get away with this, then I’m clear for the rest of my life.’
She lay back again, this time with her two legs straight in front of her, and stared at him, and thought she didn’t know which of them she was more sorry for, Johnston, who she knew had it in him to be better than he was – she knew because this was true of her, too – and who had such a power to impress people, looking as he did like Humphrey Bogart – well, most of the time he did, a little at least, but not now when he was drunk and stupid – or Ben, who was being sent off into such danger, to save Johnston. But when she came to think of it, and she was thinking hard now, she owed more to Johnston than to Ben. She supposed she could say Johnston was her man: she didn’t have another, after all. And it was true, he had been good to her. And what he said was true, that she hated this life and had several times thought of doing herself in. ‘Better do myself in before some sex maniac does it for me.’ She knew she probably wouldn’t last long, anyway. She was unhealthy. Her skin was bad. Her hair when not dyed silver-blonde was a coarse limp black mess: you had only to touch it to know she was sick. When she was not made up, not dressed for the kill, she looked at herself in the glass – and put on her make-up as fast as she could.
Now she thought, Right! Suppose they do catch Ben and send me down, it couldn’t be much worse than this life. And she decided to help Johnston. In every way she could.
And now Johnston took Ben through what would happen at the airport. When he was finished, Rita repeated it all, again and again.
Everything was going to depend on Johnston’s ‘friend’ – ‘I knew him in prison, Reet, he’s all right’ – he would be with Ben at
