Baby Love

‘Please don’t make things difficult,’ he said quickly.

‘Things are difficult,’ I said. ‘Um. Thank you for telling me what you want, it’s registered, I’m going to have to think about it. You understand I can’t just say “Yes of course” or “No way”. I have to think about this. I’ll try and think how it can be done. If it can be done. You must think too. This is a big upset, Jim …’

‘I only want to see her, for God’s sake …’

Immediately I knew that that was not all he wanted. This was a first step. This was a softening up. I don’t know how I knew. Because I knew him, I suppose, and knew the way he would apply first sweetly and charmingly and then the moment he was crossed in the tiniest things he would become petulant, stamp his tiny feet, sulk. Then hit out. His nerves did not make him any the less dangerous.

‘I’ll ring in the next few days, Jim,’ I said, making it cordial. ‘I have to speak to some people. I’m not saying it’s not possible—’

‘That’s not actually for you to say, you know.’

‘I’m not saying it, Jim. Just that it needs some thought. You think too. Think on this, for example: she doesn’t know that you are her father. She has only just realized that other children have fathers, and she hasn’t yet registered that she might have one …’

‘All the more reason,’ he said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps. But let’s take it slowly. I’ll call you.’ I was placing my words carefully. ‘Very soon. And we will talk. But this is right out of the blue, Jim. Give a little time please. We’ll speak.’

He seemed not to disagree. I hung up. He knows nothing about children, I thought. Well, that’s probably to my advantage.

*

At lunchtime I went up to the Three Johns in Islington to meet Cooper. I’d always fancied arranging to meet three guys called John there and having a cheap laugh. Anyway. No Johns, just one Ben.

He looked much the same as he always had, plump and benevolent with a very clean neck. He wasn’t in uniform. His idea of plain clothes were the kind that shriek ‘plain clothes’ at you. ‘Slacks’, ‘Sports Jacket’, that kind of thing. At least I assume that’s what they are. Not really my kind of wardrobe. He was there at a tiny round table in the corner, looking almost actively innocuous. ‘Oh, no, don’t look at me,’ his posture cried out, ‘I’m really not interesting at all.’ It makes you wonder how he got as far as he has.

‘Well, hel-lo,’ he said, with a chummy emphasis on the ‘lo’. He made as if to stand up but obviously wasn’t going to. He’d have knocked the table over for one, and anyway he only wanted to make a show of politeness, not actually to be polite. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said. ‘Cider still?’

One of Cooper’s creepiest habits is that he remembers everything, even the tiniest things. It must have been three years since I’d seen him, and he remembered I drank cider. He’d have made a great gossip columnist. It obviously helped in a policeman too.

I sat on a childish urge to order something else entirely – partly because I couldn’t think immediately of anything else to order that wouldn’t carry some other connotation. Anything non-alcoholic and he’d know I had a hangover, and I just didn’t want him knowing anything about me, even that. Vodka? He’d think I’d gone dipso. Beer? He’d think I’d gone dyke. Cinzano? He’d think I’d gone off my trolley. What’s the opposite of cider anyway? And then I sat on an even more childish urge to say ‘No, let me get them’, which would just have made him laugh up his acrylic sleeve to think that it was that important to me not to be indebted to him. Which considering what I’d come for was a bad joke. I had a half of cider.

First he wanted to make small talk. What was I riding now, he said. That uncanny police perspicacity at work again – I’d come in wearing thin cotton trousers, a cotton shirt and lace-up sandals like a Roman soldier’s; no leather, no helmet, no nothing. I told him I wasn’t riding bikes any more.

‘Why’s that then? Trying to lead a clean life?’ he said wittily. Cooper has this idée fixe that owning, riding or even thinking too much about motorcycles is an indictable offence. This despite the fact that he rides one.

‘Doctor’s orders,’ I said. I wasn’t going to point out to him the elongated map of scars on my left leg where many talented doctors had poked their fingers and scalpels and helpful metal pins in an attempt to restore it to something like a useful condition. They did their job well. It works OK now. Pretty much. Nor did I tell him about Lily, and my absolute unwillingness to put her little body, or mine for her sake, anywhere near anything cold or hard or loud or sharp or dirty.

‘Heard you had a smash,’ he said. ‘Would have thought it would take more than that to put you off.’ I smiled. Not a big smile. I’ve been given that line so often that I have no problem at all about feeling absolutely no need to explain myself.

‘Lucky you didn’t smash up last night,’ he continued. Ah. To business. I reined in my impatience and pulled my eyes up to meet his. This was not the time to stand on details like what had actually happened. My dignity was not the point – my licence was.

‘That would’ve cost a lot more.’ He let me stew on that for a moment or two. ‘But as it is,’ he said, pulling himself up on his chair, ‘you’re in luck. This one’s on me.’

I looked at him blankly. If he meant what it sounded as if he meant I didn’t understand. Why would he do that? There could be no earthly reason why he should. There could be no earthly reason that I would be glad to hear about, anyway.

‘HGT 425Q,’ he said. It didn’t help my blankness.

‘Pontiac Firebird,’ he said. ‘Eight-cylinder 455, fully-powered, nineteen sixty-nine or seventy but Q registered …’

A little recognition must have crept into my eyes.

‘… when it was imported from New Orleans in 1986 and still so registered …’

And a little more.

‘… illegally, as it happens, and, as it happens, in your name.’

I couldn’t see why he was interested in dredging up an ancient bit of registration bureaucracy. Of course, if you bring a car in from the States you are meant to have it registered as a Q only until you can find out the exact six months in which it was first registered in the States, rather than just the year which is all they need over there. But nobody ever gets round to it. There are hundreds of vehicles going round on Q plates and nobody gives a damn.

And anyway, I knew the car, but it wasn’t mine. It never had been. Harry Makins had registered it in my name years ago because he had so many old wrecks registered in his own, at his own address, that he was afraid some officious official would work out that he was a dealer and come around demanding to see his insurance and his tax papers and his fire precautions and whether or not he had a window in the room where he kept his electric kettle. Or so he had said. So I had said, of course, register it to me, no problem. I had been under the impression that I was in love at the time, and it had amused me to have a car in my name when the nearest I had ever come to driving anything with four wheels was the dodgems on Shepherds Bush Green. And anyway, he’d junked the car within months, taken the engine out to put it in a classic Oldsmobile – a Rocket 88 if I remember right – and had a breaker’s yard haul away the remains. At least that was what I’d heard. And it hadn’t been parked outside my building any more. I had been living in Clerkenwell at the time: a narrow Georgian house full of despatch riders, a few doors down from Charles Dickens.

But Harry and I had broken up soon after … so what do I know, I found myself thinking.

Cooper was looking at me.

‘It’s all coming back, isn’t it?’ he said kindly.

I put what I hoped was a look of innocent confusion on my face. ‘The Pontiac,’ I said. ‘Of course. I’d completely forgotten. I only had it for, oh … a couple of weeks. Anyway it’s been junked now.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘And when was that?’

‘Eighty-eight?’ I said. ‘Maybe eighty-seven?’

‘Oh,’ said Cooper, in that tone of whimsical sarcastic disbelief that you’d think only policemen on the telly use. ‘That’s funny.’

I wasn’t going to say anything more until I knew what he was getting at. I am not a person who by nature lies to policemen, but I find a quietly uninformative courtesy is normally least trouble to all concerned when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Unfortunately, Cooper seemed to have the same idea. I looked at him politely, he looked at me politely. Mexican standoff at the Three Johns.

Well, all I wanted was to give him the five hundred pounds that was burning a hole in my pocket and get his word that his infallible system for the disposal of unwanted drink-driving charges was on my case. I had no desire to get into a discussion about a car that as far as I knew had been squished into a little metal cube and buried in some slagheap in the Essex flatlands. He looked at me, I looked at him.

‘Eddie Bates,’ he said.

‘Who’s Eddie Bates?’ I said, in totally genuine and relieved ignorance. Whatever it was he wanted, I couldn’t help him. I’d never heard of any Eddie Bates.

‘Of Pelham Crescent SW7,’ he said. Blank.

‘Outside which address Pontiac Firebird HGT 425Q has been observed on twelve separate occasions in the past two months. Averaging one and a half times a week. A regular caller.’

‘Ben,’ I said, leaning over the table in an open and friendly fashion. ‘You’ve lost me. I don’t know anyone rich enough to live round there. I don’t go to Joseph or the Conran shop. The last time I set foot in South Ken I was eight years old, visiting the dinosaurs with twenty of my little schoolfriends. I haven’t seen that car since nineteen eighty-seven and I’ve never heard of any Eddie Bates.’

He gave me his clean, steady look. An innocent-looking look, trying to judge innocence. He decided to believe me. I think.

‘How it works is this,’ he said finally. ‘The reason your little misdemeanour last night is not going to be pressed is because I let on that me and my section just happen to be keeping an eye on you in connection with something else entirely which is none of the business of the little street copper who so efficiently picked you up. Your paperwork comes to me and I open a file in your name and pop the papers in and there they stay till kingdom come or till that other case entirely comes to court, whichever is sooner.’

‘Clever,’ I said. I’d been wondering, actually.

‘But,’ he said.

I looked at him politely.