Page 15 of The Impossible Fortune
‘This and that,’ says Elizabeth, as the bus pulls away.
Joyce nods. Elizabeth notes that her friend has got so much better at not asking unnecessary questions. The two friends sit in silence for a while, Elizabeth adapting tothe world whizzing by and Joyce leaning a flushed cheek against the cool of the bus window. Joyce looks over at her.
‘You’re not hungover?’ You drank just as much as me.’
‘The moment I got in I drank two raw eggs with Tabasco sauce,’ says Elizabeth.
Joyce nods. ‘I ate some wedding cake, then had a Baileys.’
Elizabeth wonders why she has taken Joyce with her today. Nick Silver had approached her in confidence, had asked her to come and see him. She could easily have done that alone. Probably should have, in all honesty. Have a chat with the man, see what was what and find out exactly what those codes are hiding. Let it all filter through her mind and come up with a plan.
Perhaps there’s nothing in it? If that is the case, it’s simply two old women enjoying a day trip to the seaside. But what if there is something? One hopes so, one really does. The pictures of the bomblookreal enough. She knows someone who’ll know for sure.
Should Elizabeth really be worrying Joyce about all this? Nick Silver is friends with her son-in-law after all. Is it fair to Joyce to involve her? If Elizabeth has finally chosen to dive back into trouble, that’s her business, but why involve her friend when she doesn’t need to?
Elizabeth looks over at Joyce, who is morosely chewing a dried apricot.
‘How much do you know about Nick Silver, Joyce?’
Joyce removes her cheek from the window and swallows her apricot. She breathes out slowly in the manner of someone not entirely convinced they’re not about to be sick.
‘Paul met him at university. Paul did Sociology, but I think Nick did a proper degree. Maths or something.’
‘And they set up a business?’
‘No, Nick has a business with another one of their friends; Paul just put some money in at the very beginning.’
‘Holly Lewis?’
‘Holly something,’ says Joyce. ‘I’ve never met her. You’re asking a lot of questions.’
She is asking a lot of questions, Elizabeth has to admit that. And then, of course, she understands exactly why she has asked Joyce to join her today. Because, however much Elizabeth has missed trouble, she has missed Joyce more.
‘Fairhaven,’ calls Carlito from the front of the bus. ‘I see you here at three. Don’t die, no refunds.’
As they file out, Carlito takes Elizabeth’s hand.
‘It really is nice to have you back,’ Carlito says. He tilts his head towards a photograph on his dashboard. Carlito and a woman, both smiling, the photo and the fashions a little faded. From ten years ago perhaps? ‘It never gets better, but it gets easier.’
Elizabeth squeezes his hand and follows Joyce out of the minibus. Time for them to get the measure of Nick Silver.
9
Ron, eyes firmly shut, is taking a little trip down memory lane.
He is remembering a very specific afternoon in the early seventies, when he had been engaging in some choice words with a young probationary police officer on a picket line in the West Midlands.
What Ron was doing in the West Midlands, he forgets. What the picket line was for, who knows. What he does remember is that after having a frank exchange of views with the officer, during which Ron questioned the officer’s parentage, and the officer had offered an alliterative take on his view of Ron as a cockney, Ron had goaded the officer into striking him with his truncheon.
There was a press photographer nearby, and Ron thought it would make a good picture. The officer had demurred for a moment, so Ron then made an allusion to a shared romantic past with his mother, and Ron was struck, hard and clean, on the left temple. Bingo. He heard the click of the camera shutter moments afterwards.
Ron had a very solid head in those days, and was fêted for his ability to take a truncheon blow and continue his business with the minimum of fuss, so this wasn’t uncommon. It made him look a hero and the police officers themselves enjoyed it, so everyone was happy. If Ron everleft a picket line unhit, he couldn’t help but consider it a wasted trip.
In fact, if anyone were minded to write a university thesis on the transition from wooden to aluminium truncheons in British police forces, they could do a lot worse than speak to Ron Ritchie. He had taken a lot of hits to the head in the late sixties and early seventies. He still had the odd scar, which barbers had to work around, but, other than that, no lasting damage had been done.
On this particular occasion, however, the officer had not thought that one hit was enough, and rained down four or five more blows on Ron’s head (aluminium truncheon, springier but more durable), and even Ron had felt the need to fall to the ground. You never fell to the ground unless you absolutely had to, as a point of both pride and self-preservation. As Ron curled into a ball and felt blood trickling from his temple into his eyes, he consoled himself that the press photos were going to be spectacular. But, when Ron raised his head in the absence of further blows, he saw the officer swinging his baton at the press photographer’s camera, and then at the press photographer himself. They were different times. Pluses and minuses.
Ron had picked a bad day to be a hero. The West Midlands Police were in no mood to let a large cockney with a West Ham tattoo lie about bleeding on their concrete. Ron found himself half hauled to his feet by two other officers and dragged to a blacked-out police van, truncheons whipping the backs of his knees all the way. Interestingly one of the truncheons had been wooden, and the other aluminium, making it a fascinating case study. Ron hadbeen thrown head-first into the van, now coughing up blood, and with the knee injury he now blames for walking with a stick when no one is looking.
