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.It was something he had to do in person.In the Job, a man’s snouts are sacrosanct; generally they would not talk to anyone else in any case.He had already tried a few phone calls to his usual informants, with no result.Now it was time to spread the net wider.He bethought himself of One-Eyed Billy, a small-time thief who had latterly managed to pull himself together and go straight.He lived in one of the tiny Victorian terraces in Ethelden Road, but this time of day he ought to be at work; or rather – he checked his watch and registered with routine surprise that it was lunchtime already – in the British Queen having a pint of Bass and a pork pie.This, indeed, was exactly where Slider found him, sitting up at the bar with the paper folded open at the racing pages, pie and pickle part consumed, pint glass usefully almost empty, down to a golden half inch at the bottom and a white line like soapsuds marking the level before his last swig.‘Hello, Billy.What is it?’He looked up sharply, registered Slider’s presence and the absence of anyone at his shoulder, and answered the nod in the direction of his glass.‘My usual, ta very much.Pint o’ Bass.’Slider gestured to George the barman and did the honours.One-Eyed Billy watched him with slight reserve but no hostility.He had two perfectly good eyes to do it with.His name did not denote any ocular deficiency, but was a sort of patronymic, his father having been known as One-Eyed Harry, a well-known local trader with a pie-and-eel shop in Goldhawk Road.Harry had lost an eye in Korea, having been too young, to his intense regret, to be called up for the Second World War – ‘the real war’, he called it.‘Korea was a bloody mess,’ he used to say, ‘but dooty is dooty, and I’m proud to have served my Queen and country.’ He always kept a framed picture of ‘Her Maj’ prominently on the wall of his shop and Mrs One-Eye had a large scrapbook of royal family cuttings; they prided themselves on being old-fashioned honest traders and had given generously to various charitable efforts got up by the police.So it had been a dreadful shock to them when their youngest son, Billy, had turned out bad.Harry often said they must have dropped him on his head when he was a baby; Mrs One-Eye blamed the sixties.‘What a world for a lad to grow up in!’ However it happened, Billy had early refused to show any interest in the family business, and had ducked out of helping in the shop.Harry had stopped his pocket money as a quid pro quo – ‘You don’t get anything in this world without working for it, my lad!’ – to which challenge Billy had risen by stealing the sweets and comics he could not now buy.The dropped-on-head theory gained ground with the gathering evidence that Billy was not just a thief, he was a very bad thief.His career developed, if that was the right word, into a succession of easy cops for the police; his villainy was so petty, so inept and so plain daft it was hard for them to take him seriously, and he was slapped on the wrist more times than was good for him.Slider well remembered the occasion when One-Eyed Harry came, in agony of soul, to ask them not to let Billy off any more.‘I reckon if he doesn’t get a shock and see where it all leads, he’ll be past hope.Me and Gladys are very grateful for what you’ve tried to do for our boy, but he’s got to learn, the hard way if necessary.He’s bringing shame on the whole family.’So when Billy stole a Magimix from Curry’s for his mum’s birthday and was caught because he took it back to complain that one of the fixtures was missing, the boom was lowered on him, and he went down.The lesson did not immediately strike home.It took several more years, and sentences to a progressively longer spell in jug, before the shock of his mother’s death (hastened by shame, his brothers said) changed his ways.He was now employed by an uncle who had a greengrocer’s stall in the Shepherd’s Bush market, and was working off his forgiveness in this world by hard labour and co-operation, when it was asked for, with the police.His quick guilty glance beyond Slider’s shoulder suggested that he was still up to something, but Slider thought it was probably something very mild and on the fringe, like illegal betting or buying hookey fags, which was best left alone.It was not so much turning a blind eye to crime, but the necessary price that had to be paid to have Billy just on the sticky side of the line that divided the real world from the criminal world, where he could be useful.The pints came.Billy said, ‘Cheese mite,’ and drank off a good quarter, and Slider said, ‘Well, Billy, how are you keeping?’‘Straight, Mr Slider,’ Billy answered quickly.‘Straight as a die, I promise you.Uncle Sam’d kill me if I wasn’t.’Slider smiled.The guilty man, etc.‘I didn’t mean that.Are you well?’‘Gawd, yes.Never been ill in me life.’ He was perhaps a little undersized, but stocky enough, with a curiously young face, given that he must be forty by now.It was smooth, almost unlined; small-featured, and pleasant enough under bristle-cut light brown hair, only a little vacuous, and with eyes that were just too far apart, which gave him a slightly glassy look, like a stuffed toy.‘Yourself?’ he returned politely.‘Oh, I’m fine.Busy as always.’‘Yeah.This murder up the New Park.’ This was what locals had always called it – to distinguish it, of course, from the old park, Wormholt.‘I’ve been reading about it.’ He gestured vaguely towards the newspaper.Slider saw that it was the Daily Mail.‘Bit up-market for you, isn’t it?’Billy smirked.‘I got this young lady now,’ he said.‘Bit of a looker, she is, if I say it myself.She’s dead posh.Works in that hairdressers on the Green, The Cut Above, it’s called.Qualified and everything.’‘Good for you,’ Slider said.‘Thinking of settling down?’‘Maybe,’ he admitted.‘Anyway, she wants me to better meself, so she’s started me reading this instead’ve the Sun.’ He looked at the paper a bit hopelessly, and then said, ‘Well, I never was one for reading.It’s got the racing in it all right, though.’‘I didn’t know you were a betting man,’ Slider said.‘Fond of the ponies?’‘Oh, I always done a bit.It’s an interest more than anything.Me mum didn’t approve of betting, but she liked watching the races on the telly.Liked the horses.Same with me, really.Me uncle Sam what I work for now had a horse and cart when I was a kid, did a round on the White City estate.I used to like helping round the stable an’ that
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