Читать книгу Plain Murder - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 3

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THE three young men sat together at a marble-topped table in the teashop. Their cups of coffee stood untasted before them. The saucer under Reddy’s cup was half full of coffee, slopped into it by an irritated waitress who missed the usual familiar smirk which Morris wontedly bestowed upon her when he gave his order. Reddy had not noticed this bad piece of service, although normally it would have curled his fastidious lip. He flicked nervously at the ash of his cigarette and looked across the table at the other two, first Morris with his scowling brow, his woolly hair horrid with grease, his eyelid drooping and his mouth pulled to one side to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eye, and then Oldroyd with his heavy face wrinkled with perplexity.

“He knows about it all right, then,” said Morris bitterly.

“Certain of it,” said Reddy. “I couldn’t have made a mistake. What would he have said that about Hunter for if he didn’t know?”

“It means the sack,” said Oldroyd. “It does that.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” sneered Morris. “God damn it, of course it does. We know what Mac’s like as well as you do, if not better. The minute he comes back from Glasgow old Harrison’ll go trotting in there, and five minutes after that Mac’s buzzer will go, and Maudie will come and fetch us in to get the key of the street. Mac won’t ever let that by, silly old fool he is, with all his notions about ‘commercial honour’ and stuff like that.”

Morris ended by making a noise in the back of his throat indicating profound disgust; he flung himself back in his chair and filled his lungs deep with cigarette smoke.

“And we’ll be looking for a job,” said Oldroyd. “I’ve been out before and I know what it’s like.”

There was a north-country flavour about his speech: his I’s were softened into Ah’s.

“Know what it’s like? D’you think I don’t know too?” said Morris. “ ‘Dear Sir, In reply to your advertisement in to-day’s “Daily Express” ’—bah, I’ve done hundreds of ’em. God, you’re lucky compared to me. I got a wife an’ two nippers, don’t you forget. An’ a fat chance we’ve got of finding another job. ‘Copies of two recent testimonials.’ What sort of testimonials do you think old Mac’s going to give us? Sacked for taking bribes! We’ll be starving in the streets in a fortnight’s time. Jesus, it’ll be cold. I’ve had some. And all I made out of that damned show was three quid—three measly quid, up to date. Just because that blinking fool, Cooper, couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

He glowered round at the other two, and so evident was the fiendish bad temper which possessed him that they did not dare remind him of the other factors in the situation which oppressed them with grievances beyond the immediate one of prospective dismissal—they dared not remind him that the whole scheme for extracting bribes from Mr. Cooper was of his devising, nor that they had only shared three pounds between the two of them; their rogue’s agreement gave half the spoils to Morris and divided the other half between Reddy and Oldroyd.

Morris’s rage frightened Reddy even more than did the prospect of dismissal; never having been unemployed, and always having had a father and mother at his back, Reddy did not appreciate fully the gnawing fears which were assaulting the other two—hunger and cold were only words to him. Reddy knew his father would be pained and hurt by his ignominious dismissal, but his mother would stand up for him. It might be long before he could buy himself another new suit; it might even mean giving up his beloved motor-bicycle, although such a catastrophe was too stupendous to be really possible; those were realities which lay in the future, while across the table to him was reality in the present—Morris mad with fury, his thick lips writhing round his cigarette and his thick, hairy hands beating on the table.

That may have been Reddy’s first contact with reality in all his twenty-two years of life, for that matter. He was in touch with emotions and possibilities which he had only read about, inappreciatively, before that. It was strangely fascinating as well as terrifying. Morris had always exercised a certain fascination for him, possibly through the contrast of his virility and coarseness compared with his own frail elegance, but now in the hour of defeat the spell was stronger still. Certainly at the moment Reddy felt no regret at having allowed Morris to seduce them into the manipulation of correspondence which had left a clear field for the tenders of the Adelphi Artistic Studio, and had earned them six pounds in secret commissions and their approaching dismissal.

The blind ferocity in Morris’s face changed suddenly to something more deliberate and calculating.

“By God,” he said, leaning forward and tapping the table, “if we could get Harrison out of this business it’d be all right for us.”

“How do you mean?” asked Oldroyd blankly.

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “But if we could——Get Mac to fire him instead of us, or get him out of the way some other way somehow. One of us would get Harrison’s job then—eight quid a week, and pickings if you kept your eyes open. And we wouldn’t be on the street, either. God! If only we could do it! Can’t one of you two dam’ fools think of anything?”

“No,” replied Oldroyd, after a blank interval of thought, adding, for the sake of his wilting self-respect, “And not so much of your dam’ fools, either.”

“Dam’ fools? Of course we’re all dam’ fools to be in this blasted mess. But we won’t be dam’ fools if we get out of it again. Golly, it would be grand if we could!”

“No,” said Oldroyd heavily, “there isn’t any way out. We’ve just got to take what’s coming to us, haven’t we, Reddy?”

Reddy nodded, but he was not really in agreement. He was still gazing fascinatedly at Morris’s distorted face.

“Don’t be a fool and give up the game before you have to,” expostulated Morris, looking sharply round at Oldroyd. “Mac won’t be back at the office until Wednesday. We’ve still got to-morrow to do something about it. Harrison can’t do anything to us on his own. We’ve still got a chance.”

“Fat lot of chance we’ve got!” said Oldroyd.

The time which had now elapsed since Reddy had first told the story of his interview with Harrison had given him time to recover some of his fatalistic composure; so much of it, in fact, had returned to him that now he was able to turn his attention to the nearly cold coffee before him. He gulped it down noisily and replaced the cup with a clatter on the saucer. Morris sipped at his.

“God! I can’t drink that stuff,” he said, and pushed the cup away.

Reddy did not even taste his. Morris looked up at the clock.

“Look at the time! I’ll have to bunk to get the 6.20. Give us our tickets, please, miss. So long, you fellows. Keep your pecker up, Oldroyd, old man. We’re not dead yet.”

And with that he was gone, forgetting his own exasperation for the moment in the flurry of hurrying out, paying his bill, and scrambling through the traffic in the Strand over to Charing Cross Station. It only returned to him while standing in a packed compartment in the train, crawling along through the first fog of the year; by the time he reached home he was in a bad enough temper to quarrel for the thousandth time with his wife.