I’grinned. ‘Mrs Dorothea Pannier thinks you’re a great guy.’
‘Yeah?’ He moved his head in pleasure, nodding. ‘Not such a bad old duck herself.’
‘Did you know she’s in hospital?’
His good humour vanished, ‘I heard some bastard carved her up.’
‘I’m Thomas Lyon,’ I said. ‘She gave me your name.’
‘Yeah?’ He was wary. ‘You’re not from that son of hers? Right turd, that son of hers.’
I shook my head. ‘Her brother Valentine left me his books in his will. She told me she’d trusted them to you for safe keeping.’
‘Don’t give them to no one, that’s what she said.’ His manner was determined and straightforward. I judged it would be a bad mistake to offer him money, which conferred on him saintly status in the modern scheme of things.
‘How about,’ I said, ‘if we could get her on the phone?’
He could see nothing wrong in that, so I used the mobile to reach the hospital and then, with many clicks and delays, Dorothea herself.
She talked to Bill Robinson in his heavy leather gear and studs, and Bill Robinson’s face shone with goodness and pleasure. Hope for the old world yet.
‘She says,’ he announced, giving me my phone back, ‘that the sun shines out of your arse and the books are yours.’
‘Great.’
‘But they aren’t here,’ he said. ‘They’re in the garage at home.’
‘When could I pick them up?’
‘I could go home midday in my lunch hour.’ He gazed briefly to one side at a gleaming monster of a motorbike, heavily wheel-chained to confound would-be thieves. ‘I don’t usually, but I could.’
I suggested buying an hour of his time at once from his boss and not waiting for lunch.
‘Cor,’ he said, awestruck; but his boss, a realist, accepted the suggestion, and the money, with alacrity, and Bill Robinson rode to his house in my car with undoubted enjoyment.
‘How do you know Dorothea?’ I asked on the way.
‘My girlfriend lives next door to her,’ he explained simply. ‘We do errands sometimes for the old luv. Carry her shopping, and such. She gives us sweets like we were kids.’
‘Er,’ I said, ‘how old are you, then?’
‘Eighteen. What did you think of my bike?’
‘I envy you.’
His smile was complacent, and none the worse for that. When we reached his home (‘Ma will be out at work, the key’s in this thing what looks like a stone’), he unlocked a padlock on the solid doors of a brick-built garage and revealed his true vocation, the care and construction of bikes.
‘I buy wrecks and rebuild them,’ he explained, as I stood inside the garage gazing at wheels, handlebars, twisted tubing, shining fragments. ‘I rebuild them as good as new and then I sell them.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said absently. ‘Do you want to be in a film?’
‘Do I what?’
I explained that I was always looking for interesting backgrounds. Would he mind moving some of the parts of motorbikes out of the garage into his short driveway and getting on with some work while we filmed Nash Rourke walking down the street, thinking? ‘No dialogue,’ I said, ‘just Nash strolling by and pausing for a second or two to watch the work in progress. The character he’s playing will be walking through Newmarket, trying to make up his mind about something.’ I was looking for real Newmarket backgrounds, I said.
‘Nash Rourke! You’re kidding me.’
‘No. You’ll meet him.’
‘Mrs Pannier did say you were the one making the film they’re talking about. It was in the Drumbeat.’
‘The tyrannical bully-boy? Yes, that’s me.’
He smiled broadly. ‘Your books are in all those boxes.’ He pointed to a large random row of cartons that announced their original contents as TV sets, electrical office equipment, microwave ovens and bread-making machines. ‘A ton of paper, I shouldn’t wonder. It took me the whole of Saturday morning to pack it all and shift it here, but Mrs Pannier, dear old duck, she made it worth my while.’
It was approbation rather than a hint, but I said I would do the same, particularly if he could tell me which box held what.
Not a snowball’s chance, he said cheerfully. Why didn’t I look?
The task was too much, both for the available time and my own depleted stamina. I said I’d wrenched my shoulder and couldn’t lift the boxes, and asked him to stow as many as possible in the boot of the car. He looked resignedly at the rain but splashed backwards and forwards efficiently, joined after hesitation by my driver who buttoned his jacket closely and