City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,65

pockets out this time, we know you’ve put it on the fire. And you!’ He’d stopped in front of Ronson Lighter, who thought he had been missed. ‘You’d better come along with us as well. There’s been some malicious wounding, and perhaps you can tell us something more about it. Your friend down there seems to be unconscious, and they think he’s broken some legs.’

‘You bastard!’ Dorothy cried out from the floor.

He didn’t look down, but said to her, ‘We’ll be sending for you, Dorothy, when we want you. Don’t leave London just at present, will you? Come on now, you!’ he said to Ronson. And this boy, though if it was a fight he would fear nothing, like so many of our men when big misfortune falls upon them, was quiet and quite helpless in the copper’s hand.

Inspector Purity stopped by the door. ‘I needn’t tell you all to watch your step,’ he said. ‘There’s not a man or woman here we haven’t got a charge for when the time comes, and we feel like paying you a visit.’ Then he went out with Ronson and the other copper, who had stood there waiting and not said one word.

When the door closed, Dorothy scrambled up, opened it again and cried down the stairs, ‘You bastards!’ Then slammed it, turned to us all and shouted, ‘Somebody’s shopped Billy!’

‘Would it be you, Dorothy?’ I said.

‘Me, Johnny Fortune! Call me a whore if you want to, but I don’t shop nobody. Someone here has spoken with the Law. Somebody’s shopped Billy!’

Faces all looked at faces.

‘Come now, Montgomery,’ I said, when looking from the window I saw the Law car drive away. ‘Is time to go.’

Dorothy and Barbara were weeping on each other’s shoulder. ‘I have my car outside,’ said Ibrahim Tondapo, like some emir. ‘I offer you a lift.’

I made no reply to this vain man, but went with the others down the stairs. This Ibrahim insisted foolishly on our company, so we came up to his limousine. Place in the car was refused by me to Arthur and to Alfy Bongo, who walked away chattering in spite together. The passengers I allowed were Cranium and Montgomery in the back seat, and I by Ibrahim Tondapo’s side.

‘Where to?’ he said.

‘East End for me.’

‘I’ll see you home, Johnny,’ said Montgomery.

‘For me, please, a drop-out at the Trafalgar Square,’ said Cranium Cuthbertson.

Tondapo drove elegantly but too fast, anxious to demonstrate his skill. In the central city we turned Cranium loose, and drove on across the commercial area of the city’s wealth, this Ibrahim trying to make eager conversation with Montgomery and with me. But I silenced my Jumble friend, and would say nothing to this African, for whom I still planned a vengeance for his earlier action in the Sphere. So when we came to the dockside poverty of the Immigration Road, I asked him to take two turnings and then halt.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You welcome, man. Bygone is bygone.’

‘Your tyre is flat.’

‘No, I not think so, man.’

‘I tell you is flat: your motor rumbles.’

We all got out. Montgomery noticed my intention.

‘No, no, Johnny,’ he cried out. ‘Not any more!’

But I had heaved this Tondapo against the wall and battered him. He fight hard and bravely, but had eaten too much throughout his comfortable life. When I had laid him low, I lifted him and put his groaning body in the back seat of his vehicle.

Montgomery was in rages with me. ‘You must learn to control yourself,’ he said.

‘And you! Fighting with two Africans in your nakedness.’

‘That was a misunderstanding.’

‘Let us not argue, Montgomery. There have been arguments enough.’

We walked through the dim and silence of these evil streets: all tumbling: all sad.

‘Who did betray Whispers?’ said Montgomery.

‘It was not you, then?’

‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Johnny. Why should I?’

‘That Alfy Bongo?’

‘I don’t understand that hobgoblin. I don’t think he’s working for the Law … Excuse my asking, but had Arthur anything to do with it, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps so. Or more perhaps is really Dorothy who spoke.’

‘She didn’t act like it.’

‘Dorothy is tired of Billy. Maybe she’s glad to see him go inside for some other charge than laying his hands upon her earnings. If she told the Law about this wounding, and of nothing else, then she will not have to appear in court against him.’

‘Isn’t the simplest explanation that Jimmy Cannibal told them about the attack himself? That Ronson did it, and Billy was behind it?’

‘Could be so. When the court case comes, then