Open Writing

I didn't do too well with the free dinner. There were two or three things on the menu I never even got round to tasting. Personally I put it down to impaired vision.

'Whatever have you done to your eye?' said my little barmaid friend Eileen. 'It's terrible red and nearly closed.'

‘Dazzled it is,' I said, slipping on my brogue, 'by your wondrous beauty.'

She cursed the wickedness of men as she continued to pour me a large brandy to be recorded under Newspapers and Periodicals. I was safe enough with her. She was one of those Irish girls who were on the lookout for someone to provide them with a child every year for the next decade. I didn't qualify on either age or strength.

'Let the optician have a look at it tomorrow,' Westlake said, sauntering over.

The bar was nearly empty now. There were only three or four sets of pink jowls soaking up pink gins while lamenting the iniquitous drunkenness of the workers.

'Who was your Mr Tidy?'

Westlake, hands locked behind him like inspecting royalty, said he was a man who worked for some local solicitors, Walsh and Kentish.'He dealt with troublesome clients.

'Not that we have much of that sort of thing round here, you understand,' he said. 'We have a lot of sin but very little crime, eh? Incidentally, he says you attacked him first.'

I couldn't think how to explain to him that a lot of taxpayer's money had gone into training me to react like that. Fortunately I didn't have to. At that moment the door burst open and the biggest schoolboy in the world came bounding in.

I say schoolboy, but at first sight he looked as though he'd stepped out of the Stock Exchange. Tall, around six foot, so solid he packed his expensive pinstripe suit, his black hair was creamed flat to his head and his upper lip bore an immaculate pencil moustache. Stand him outside a stage door and he would have been a Johnny.

But when he spoke—which he was doing as he came through the door—his voice came out in an excited high-pitched babble.
'It's the car! It's the car, that one, you know the one, they've taken everything offit. The wheels and everything, all gone!'

He was waving his thick arms around so much that the trio of gin men had to back off across the bar, shielding their drinks.

'Now calm down, Mr Charles,' Westlake said, laying his hand on his shoulder. He had to reach up to do it. 'Which car are you talking about?'

'That car, you know, the car!' he said, almost shrieking at his inability to explain. He shouted it again. 'You know, that car!'

'Oh, I'm with you,' Westlake said. 'Striker's car. Up in the quarry.'

'That's it!' the big kid whooped, almost breaking into a dance. 'There's hardly anything left now, and if I tell father they'll get into terrible trouble, won't they ...'

'Don't worry about it, old boy,' Westlake said, doing an eye-roll for me and guiding him towards the door. 'We know all about it. Now shouldn't you be getting home, it's after ten o'clock?'

He'd almost got him through the door when one of the pink gins - in a waggish voice that signalled joke - called out, 'Tell us about The Magnificent Seven, Charles.'

He spun round in the doorway, his face alive with delight.

'That's a great film,' he shouted. 'It's a fantastic film, my very favourite, have you ...'

'Not tonight, Mr Charles,' Westlake said, glaring at the man who'd mentioned it and almost heaving him through the door. 'We don't want The Magnificent Seven tonight. Off you go home.'

He rejoined me, mopping his face with a flapping hankie.

'He's no business driving a car,' another pink gin called over.

'I'm sure he's safe enough round here,' Westlake answered. Then, to me, he explained, 'Charles Danby, Colonel Danby's son. Father's a local bigwig, landowner, magistrate, all that. The poor son's brain-damaged, has the intelligence of an eight-or nine-year-old, I'd say. Once saw that cowboy film and can't stop talking about it, poor devil.'

'Was that the blacksmith's striker you mentioned?'

You should've heard the way I did it: dead casual, relaxed, and all that. I was a natural at this detecting stuff.

'That's right,' Westlake replied, a bit surprised. 'Did you know him?'

I said I didn't know him but that I'd been hoping to set up a television programme about him. We were still thinking of doing it. Something along the lines of'Death of a Craftsman'.

Oh, but he'd left here before I came,' Eileen chipped in, polishing the glasses and hanging them above the bar.

'Yes, it's just a year ago,' Westlake added. 'When he began getting in trouble. Cleared off to London, so he told me. Some sort of nightclub job. He'd only been back a few days when he had his crash.'

Eileen stopped mid-polish and her face took on a stunned look. 'He was a real hunk,' she said, momentarily losing sight of her motherhood destiny. Westlake chuckled.

'All the girls liked him well enough. He was a jolly good-looking chap. Black hair, dark eyes, looked a bit Mediterranean I always thought. He used to work with old Ramsden over at the forge - across the square there. He was the blacksmith's striker, the chap who provided all the muscle. You'd have the fire glowing in the corner and Striker with no shirt on under his leather apron whirling this bloody great hammer round his head ... quite a sight, I can tell you.'

'Why did he go?'

Westlake made a doubting noise at the back of his nose. He swished his drink around in his glass before replying.

'Job like that's an anachronism, of course, even in an old-fashioned place like this. And he did get in a bit of trouble with the police. Some say he was . . . well, more or less run out of town.'

One of the gin boys in the corner chipped in then.

'They could always give the job to Charlie. God knows, he's strong enough.'

'He certainly is,' another one said. 'Once saw him drag a hunter across the square. It must've been seventeen hands and he pulled it like a toy dog. Shouting and belting it, he was. He ought to be locked up.'

I got a last brandy to take up to bed with me. Before I went I demanded a reassurance from Eileen that she wouldn't come bursting in on me in the night.

'What do you think I am,' she replied. 'Help the Aged?'

'I say, that's awfully good,' Westlake said.

'You've been mixing with these heathens too long,' I told her, and took myself off.

There were no more Dartmoor escapees awaiting me in Room Four, and the furniture and carpet had been put back in place. Tt was a big cool room, still with free-standing furniture and some individuality. Somewhere there'd be a brewery blueprint with this room split into twenty-two plastic-lined cubicles under the heading of modernisation.

I wondered what Tidy had been looking for. I almost checked the place myself, then I thought that if he couldn't find anything after dismantling the room there wasn't much chance for me. And if he had found it, why bother?

So I had a shower.

Then I lay on the bed and sipped my brandy and wondered why there wasn't a woman somewhere waiting for a call from me.

Then I thought about Striker, the big man with the hammer, standing half-naked in a haze of sparks. Instinctively, I liked him. The idea of him.

And then I performed what is - nowadays at least - the last of the day's pleasures. I reached for my Browning. The nine-millimetre pistol, not the gravy colouring.

I hadn't been totally and completely honest with Cringle about that. In fact, you might say I'd lied about it. But some¬times the whole point of having a gun is that other people don't know you have. And anyway he might've asked how I got it. Would he have believed me when I said I'd bought it from a man I knew only as Jack? Travellers in the second-hand gun trade are notoriously coy about surnames.

He'd picked it up, or so he'd told me, while he was out walking his dog near the Aldershot ranges. The cadets had been having a familiarisation shoot and they often left their kit on the firing point while they went off to the NAAFI wagon for burgers.
Very careless, those cadets. I hope they've been reprimanded.

But not as bad as the last owner. When I put my spare magazine in, I found the old one was crammed with the maxi¬mum thirteen bullets. That meant the spring was under per¬manent strain. Leave them in long enough and the spring doesn't spring any more.

Worse still, they'd been left in the same order. I could tell because the case of the top bullet was rounded and loosen from being continually loaded into the breech. That means the ejector claw can skid off the rounded edge, which in turn means you'd be better off armed with a rolled-up copy of the Glasgow Daily Record.

It's called a hard extraction stoppage. If it happens at a critical moment, a hard extraction stoppage can be very very frustrating.

Even worse, you can get firing-pin bounce — the herpes of the gun business. It only takes seconds, but the consequences are often irreversible.

For now, I just took the bullets out and lined them up on the bedside table, shining in their little brass jackets. It looked like a distant view of Cape Kennedy. Or a display of vibrators for lady dwarfs.

Sex and shooters — it's all pretty much the same thing.