Jago Browne watched from the bench. The young man, the leader, strode to the door. Another followed him and the third stayed outside, between the car and the door. His hand was inside his loose coat as if a weapon was hidden beneath it. He watched. What would Jago do? He didn’t know and told himself he couldn’t make decisions on hypothetical actions. Put it off. The investigator had told him to get a life and look the other way, which was not what his mother had done when the issue was the phone she had bought for him.
Jago said, ‘I’ll see how it pans out. No harm in that.’
Punctual, but without the buzz of enthusiasm that had once been his trademark, Carlo left for work.
His home, rented, was down a lane, a century-old cottage of local brick. That Carlo had three suitcases’ worth of clothes inside the house was remarkable, considering the state of his finances. He paid half the rent and Sandy paid the rest. He sent money to Aggie, his first wife, living in Bristol with a near-delinquent son, who might be Carlo’s and might not; another slice of his income went to Betty, his second wife, who was in Essex, with squatter’s rights on the marital home. He was lucky to have found Sandy. She wasn’t at the door, when he set off. Sandy bred Labradors and spaniels, and seemed not to notice whether he was there or not, which suited him. Not many fell on their feet, third time round, but he might have.
It would take him twenty minutes in the rain to get to the parking bay beneath his office. Had Sandy been at the door, with the tribe at her knees, nudging her hands for titbits, she might have asked what time he would be home.
‘The usual. Not expecting anything new – not scheduled anyway.’
She might then have suggested a hook-up with some friends of hers for the weekend: a walk on the beaches by Orford – let the pack have a run – then a picnic lunch, rain or shine.
‘Can’t see why not. No panic that I know of.’ He might have added, more grimly, ‘And when was there last a panic?’ But she had gone for her morning trudge.
Carlo was reputed to smoke and drink heavily. She seemed not to care about that, or about his moustache. She didn’t want to hear his stories about the good old days with the Investigation Unit or about his Rome attachment. And Sandy, bless her, never said she knew his favourites by heart – such as the one he claimed had made him an icon at the Custom House: the ‘fight’ and the ‘visit’. They had been the Immortals: they had worked from a big room in the Investigation Unit, which housed two teams. All were perpetually exhausted from the long hours they put in and were watched over by a legion of bureaucrats, who had no comprehension of the traumas of front-line work. A mood had snapped and a fist fight had broken out. Grown men, mostly middle-aged, belting each other when the newly installed director of investigations had walked in. Shock horror. But, as someone had pointed out breathlessly, ‘You can’t put lions on the street and expect kittens in the office.’ He loved that one, told it most weeks. But Carlo was no longer a lion, and no longer on the street. He did kitten work now.
What he would most have liked in his life was the unpredictable: getting up in the morning and not knowing what would have hit him by the evening, the raw excitement and the fear of falling short.
He drove towards Felixstowe Docks – and maybe a seizure, another that was not worth him getting into.
The young man came out, sauntered across the pavement and held up a wad of notes so that the goon who had stayed outside could see that the pizzo had been paid. They waited for the other. Perhaps he’d gone to the toilet. The money had gone into a pocket and the two embraced. The pizzeria man was at the far side of the door and Jago thought he was crying – the back of his hand went twice over his eyes. He didn’t know what to do so he did nothing.
‘Bent by name and bent by nature.’ He rather liked that, thought of it as a compliment because it meant they were talking about him.