Night at the London Palladium, met the Prince of Wales. Twice. He’d had his own ITV game show for a while. And a short-lived quiz on Channel 5 in its early days. The contestants were not the brightest, even the simplest general knowledge question seemed to be beyond them. (Question: What was Hitler’s first name? Answer: Heil?)
And now look at me, Barclay thought. Bottom-feeding. (‘Well, Barclay,’ his manager Trevor said, ‘crack cocaine and underage girls, it can be a long road to redemption.’
‘Rumours, Trevor,’ Barclay said. ‘Nothing ever proved.’ And it was the Seventies, for heaven’s sake. Everybody was at it then.
The lights went up again. He could feel the excitement, like a hot vapour rising and filling the auditorium. It was a raucous lot that were in tonight, a couple of hen parties by the sound of it. That was the thing, he was still popular – wildly so, if this audience was anything to go by. Why couldn’t TV executives see that?
He walked out on to the stage and took a moment to appreciate it, his stomach settled now. He waggled a leering eyebrow at a woman in the front row and she looked as if she was going to wet herself. ‘How do you get a fat bird to go to bed with you?’ he shouted to the back row of the balcony. They were laughing already, even before the punchline.
‘Easy!’ he yelled. ‘A piece of cake!’ He was loved.
Time, Gentlemen
‘Well,’ Andy said, ‘I suppose it’s time to get home to the old ball and chain.’ Tommy clucked sympathetically. Andy’s wife, Rhoda, was built to very different architecture from Crystal, whose blueprint was that of a goddess. ‘You would think,’ Andy said to Vince once, out of Tommy’s hearing, ‘that if Crystal had been a glamour model there’d be nudie photos of her all over the web, but I haven’t been able to find anything. I think our Tommy’s telling porkies.’
‘You’ve looked? Vince said, horrified.
‘Course I have. Don’t tell me you haven’t.’
He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. It was disrespectful. He would never be able to look at Crystal again without imagining her naked.
‘That’s kind of the point, Vince,’ Andy said.
The denizens of the Belvedere clubhouse bar made their tardy way home. Mindful of the law, Tommy Holroyd had phoned for a cab.
Andy, as usual, was happy to take his chances of being stopped. The Belvedere was second home to quite a few members of the force who would probably turn a blind eye to his transgressions. He offered Vince a lift to the hovel Wendy had forced him into, but he declined.
If he was going to die – and to be quite honest he wouldn’t be that bothered if he did – then Vince didn’t want it to be with his face in the airbag of Andy Bragg’s Volvo. There were better places for it – deep in the purple-clad cleavage of Heather in York, for example. He could imagine himself plunging his head into her fat balloon-like bosom. Look who’s here, if it isn’t Vince! And then he would—
Andy Bragg hooted at him as he drove past. He slowed and rolled down the passenger-side window. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a lift, Vince?’
‘Nah, I’m all right, Andy. Thanks. I fancy some air. It’s a nice evening. I might drop by the house, take the dog for its walk before bedtime. Haven’t seen Sparky for a while.’
‘As you wish, squire.’ Andy roared off into the night. He lived a forty-minute drive up the coast in his hotel – the Seashell – but Vince knew he would be trying to do it in thirty.
The Seashell. They’d bought Sea View a couple of years ago, changed the name and relaunched it as a boutique hotel. (‘Luxury boutique,’ Rhoda insisted.) It had been an old-fashioned, very tired hotel when they bought it. Red and blue figured carpet, nicotine-stained Lincrusta wallpaper, wall lamps with fringed shades and candle light bulbs. They stripped it bare, made the seven bedrooms en suite, painted everything in muted greys and blues and greens, sanded and whitewashed floorboards. ‘Cape Cod style,’ Rhoda said, although neither of them had ever been to Cape Cod. In a nod to something more British they had called the rooms after shipping forecast areas – Lundy, Malin, Cromarty and so on. Not the weird ones like German Bight or Dogger, which sounded vaguely pornographic.
It was Rhoda’s baby, really. Andy did the ‘heavy lifting’, as she called it – driving to the