take anything off him?’ Mossy’s concerned face peered into mine.
I told him about the dressing-table set. His forehead creased into its usual frowns. ‘How much you give him?’ Then he got to his feet and said, ‘I’ll have a word wi’ that young man,’ and went straight off to the phone booth in the entrance-hall. Then he came back and said, ‘He’s coming round now, tout de suite. I’m going to have to sort him out afore he gets into real trouble.’
Then he drew heavily on his pint and said, ‘The young’s a great problem, these days, Mr Morgan. The old rules don’t mean nothing to them. I give him a straight simple job to do, but can he do it? No, he has to have ideas of his own. If it wasn’t for his mother’s sake, I’d have kicked him out years ago. He’ll be the end of me. But his mother won’t hear a word agin him.’
I just drew on my own pint with a sage nod. Mossy’s relationships I did not wish to go into . . .
Finally, the youth came in, saw us and threw himself into a chair at our table, with a look of sullen nervousness on his face that made me want to kick him.
‘A tugboat an’ a lightship,’ said Mossy heavily. ‘Thanks for telling me, Spud.’ The youth gave me a look of frank dislike, but otherwise said nothing.
‘And I hear you’ve been bothering Mr Morgan here with some of your own rubbish.’
‘Weren’t rubbish.’
‘Let me tell you something, son. Mr Morgan here’s a friend of mine. A good friend. An’ I don’t want my friends bothered. Right? Now where’d you get that stuff? Police looking for it?’
‘Nah,’ said the youth. ‘Came from the same place, dinnit? Them old suitcases. Went back after and had a look in them. Weren’t much . . .’
Mossy relaxed. ‘That’s all right then. It’s not dodgy, Mr Morgan. It won’t cause you no trouble.’
But, on the contrary, a vague unease was niggling at the back of my mind. ‘That suitcase you got the dressing-table set from . . . what else was in it?’
‘Just some tart’s stuff. Ponged horrible. Foreign tart.’
‘Why do you say foreign?’
‘There were some letters . . . mebbe in French. Not in English, anyway. French . . . French letters!’ He grinned, as if he had made some superb joke. Nobody except him found it funny.
‘What else?’
‘Oh, bras an’ stuff. A couple of books in French. And some kid’s stuff . . .’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, bootees, little cardigans.’
The skin over my spine crept. Right there, in that warm sunny pub, I came out in goose-pimples.
Mossy gave me a worried look. ‘Was she a friend of yours, Mr Morgan?’ Oh, how many relationships can the word ‘friend’ cover?
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to have a look in that suitcase sometime.’
Mossy jerked his head at the youth. ‘You heard what Mr Morgan said . . .’
‘What, now? In broad daylight?’
‘For Gawd’s sake,’ said Mossy. ‘Shove on a long brown coat. Hold a clipboard in yer hand. Tell anybody who asks you’re from the council investigating a complaint about rats . . . use yer bloody loaf. Go on, get moving. We haven’t got all bloody day. And fer Gawd’s sake bring the right bloody suitcase.’
I glanced around the public bar nervously. But no one was taking a blind bit of notice of us. All too busy talking, swanking about the next car they were going to buy. Or how they were going to make a killing, once business improved . . . still, it was an uneasy half-hour, before the youth came back and jerked his head towards the door.
‘In the back of the van.’
‘Let’s go then.’
We left one of the back doors of the tattered van half open, for light. I knelt and undid a leather strap. The two heavy brass catches on the suitcase thumped back against the leather with reports like a gun going off. Mossy’s eyes watched me, in the gloom. Curious, genuinely worried for me and yet . . . discreet.
The odour of woman’s stuff was still strong, but gone sour, stale. Among the rumpled female garments, something glass showed. I pulled it out.
A baby’s feeding-bottle. Unwashed. Still with some pale green sediment in the bottom. And there were the little bootees, grubby, unwashed. Some bits of white terry-towelling, that on closer examination turned out to be nappies. A dried-out bottle of gripe-water.
Books. Paperbacks that I could see at a