Helga's Web by Jon Cleary Read Free Book Online

be welcome. He suddenly longed for everything to come to a head: the bank to foreclose, Josie to divorce him, Helga to tell him that their affair was over. He would be bankrupt and alone, but it would give him the detachment that he now found he craved.
     
3
    He did not manage to get away from the office as early as he had hoped and when he arrived home Grafter Gibson, Glenda and Father Wrigley were already there. As he pulled his seven-year-old Jaguar into the drive he saw the black Rolls-Royce, so new that he imagined he could smell its leather upholstery from here, parked at the curb, the chauffeur slumped in his seat with his cap pulled down over his eyes. He wondered if Wrigley had come in the Rolls with the Gibsons: it would be just what the smug little bastard would revel in.
    The smug little bastard was pouring the drinks as Savanna came into the living room. “Ah, Mr. Savanna! Your good wife asked me to act as barman. However, your brother-in-law thinks I’m a trifle light-handed with the liquor. He thinks whisky should not be dispensed in the same measure as altar wine.” He giggled, his plump face, smooth as a cake of expensive soap, showing not a wrinkle as he smiled. Unctuous, a product of one of the worst elocution schools, an ambitious man who had decided that doubters never got on in the Church, he was a priest who at the early age of thirty had managed to take on the image of a spinster aunt, a career aunt. He had spent all his priesthood in well-to-do parishes and you knew he would never find himself in a poor district: he was too good a politician for that. “What can I get you, mine host?”
    “How’d the trip go?” Leslie Gibson lolled in Savanna’s favourite chair, one short thin leg crossed over the other, half a dozen inches of bare white skin showing above the black silk socks. He was a small, wizened man, his thick grey hair cut short back-and-sides, his skin mottled with sun cancers, his blue eyes still as bright and shrewd as the day he had first played another man for a sucker. His silk-and-mohair suit hung on him like a Chinese peasant’s pajamas and the ten dollar tie he wore could have been a piece of string for all it did for him sartorially. Glenda tried hard to make her husband look like the millionaire that he was but he remained looking like the New Guinea gold fossicker he had once been. He was fond of quoting that fashion was for fools who had no confidence in their own taste, and did his best to advertise that he had no taste at all. Savanna hated him with that comfortable sort of contempt that is often as good for a mans well-being as a feeling of charity.
    Savanna took the drink Wrigley brought him and sank down on the couch beside Josie. He pressed her knee with his free hand and was surprised when she gently lifted his hand and dropped it on the couch between them. Savanna saw Glenda’s eyes narrow and at once he thought: hullo, you two have been having a little chat about me. On a sudden impulse he winked at Glenda and almost laughed with delight when she straightened her neck in surprise. Then he looked across at Gibson. “It went all right. Except—” he wondered how far he dared go “—except I don’t think your skipper welcomed the idea of having us aboard.”
    “Who was it? Bixby? Wouldn’t take any notice of him. He’s always got shit on the liver.”
    “Les—” Glenda glanced warningly in the direction of Father Wrigley.
    “Oh, don’t mind me,” said the priest, raising his glass. Savanna noticed the level of whisky in it; it hadn’t taken Wrigley long to switch from his altar wine measures. “Obscenity, not brevity, is now the soul of wit.”
    Gibson screwed Wrigley to the wall with a gimlet glance, but the priest seemed unaware of his gaffe. Savanna smiled into his glass and said, “Do you ever go out on the boats, Les?”
    “I won’t let him,” said Glenda. “He’s too old for that sort of thing anymore.”
    She said it with affection and