September Song by Colin Murray Read Free Book Online Page B

across very many – only one, in fact – but I did know that he could stare in languid fascination at the sole of his boot for hours.
    â€˜He’s probably just lost track of time,’ I said.
    â€˜Yes.’ She nodded her head. ‘He does that.’
    I looked at Peter Baxter. ‘Anyone here I should talk to?’ I said.
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘We’re completely clean here.’
    â€˜And you don’t know anything?’
    â€˜No, and I don’t want to.’
    I raised my glass to Peter and tossed down the brandy. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I know a few places close by where I can ask. I’ll try and be back in an hour or so.’ I looked at Peter. ‘You won’t try and charge me to come in again, will you?’
    He laughed. ‘If you come back with Lee, you’ve got free entrance for life,’ he said.
    I put my glass down on the desk. ‘Deal,’ I said.
    As I passed her, Miss Summers put her hand on my arm and breathed, ‘Thank you.’ The wedding band on her third finger suggested that she and Lee perhaps had more than a professional relationship.
    I walked back into the club to tell Jerry I was disappearing for a while, and I realized what I’d been missing. Digs! Jeannie Summers wasn’t American at all. She was English.
    As I ran up the steps to Frith Street, I ruminated on the fact that my day seemed to have filled up with missing persons, and I ran through the few places in the immediate vicinity that Lee might have gone to. There were only three I could think of, and one of those was a very long shot. But it was the nearest. And the sleaziest.
    Rainer, the German addict I had come across in Berlin when I was stationed there as a bean counter after hostilities had ceased, told me that junkies had no self-respect and no shame but they did have an amazing ability to home in on junk. I remembered his pinched face as he shivered in spite of the vast army greatcoat that enveloped him, his hands shiny with dirt, as he pleaded with me for money. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen and almost certainly didn’t make it to twenty, and he had the look of an elderly monkey, but he was clever and spoke excellent English. I let him sleep in the living room of the dusty, decaying apartment that had been requisitioned for me for a few weeks and tried to help him a little. But he didn’t want food or a bed. He wanted junk, and I couldn’t give him that, so one day he went out and never came back. Funnily enough, he didn’t take anything of mine with him. A few of my colleagues wondered why I’d given him house room, and, to be honest, I don’t really know the answer to that. Certainly, I never got any thanks. But I did get a small insight into the ways of the drug addict.
    So, it was to the nearest and sleaziest place I went.
    The Frighted Horse is just a hop, step and a jump from Pete’s Place and is not a pub for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached. I’ve always assumed that there are only two reasons the landlord keeps his licence. The first is that half of the police in Soho are completely bent and money changes hands. The second is that the less corrupt members of the force are well advised to be complicit.
    The bar itself, though not exactly inviting, is not, if you ignore the sad, careworn whores, the stick-thin, seedy alcoholics and the cold-eyed, over-the-hill toughs all waiting for something to happen, that much worse than some other Soho hostelries. But it’s the two upstairs rooms where the action is.
    Nobody looked up when I went in. Eye contact is not encouraged in the Frighted Horse. The smell of unwashed bodies, old urine, sour beer, bad feet, stale cigarette smoke and harsh cleaning fluids caught at the back of my throat, but I fought back the desire to gag and marched swiftly to the counter.
    I risked a surreptitious look around. There wasn’t much of a crowd in. There were a