Martin Edwards: All the Lonely People

Gallimore started to rise from his chair. “I don’t mean anything to you, Mr. Devlin. The one link between us has gone. Now why don’t you go home and start putting your life back together again? That’s something we all need to do.”

“Sit down.”

Harry took the gun from his jacket. It was a 9mm Mauser automatic, short-barrelled but, Peanuts confirmed, effective enough at short range. Harry had pressured the pimp first to admit that he still kept an unlicensed firearm as a souvenir of his days as a hard man who handled tricky jobs for the proprietor of a Caribbean night spot, then to lend it to him for the night.

Peanuts had been reluctant. “Man, you don’t know the damage this thing can do. Okay, people call it a ladies’ gun, but you can bet it’ll still cut a big man down. And if you open up some guy’s stomach, I sure as hell ain’t gonna help you beat the rap.” But Harry had persisted, calling in all his owed favours, and at length his client had given in and handed over the gun. “You going to use this, man?” Peanuts asked after showing how to cock the pistol. Harry had said simply, “I need to be prepared.”

So now he was prepared and Tony Gallimore sat down again, mesmerised by the Mauser. Slivers of sweat shone on his forehead.

“Okay, let’s hear it. When did you first meet Liz?”

Gallimore kept the Mauser under an unwavering gaze. He was breath|ng rapidly. “Three months ago. She was here one night alone. Coghlan had disappeared somewhere, up to no good as usual. Some men were bothering her. I sorted the problem out, the lads on the door made sure their feet never touched the ground. We got talking. That’s how it began.”

“And you became lovers “ Harry squeezed every last trace of emotion out of his voice. He might have been a newscaster on Radio 4.

That night. I simply couldn’t get enough of her. She was beautiful, warm, vivacious. Not like some of the plastic dolls we get here. She was a real woman.”

“And Coghlan?”

“He terrified her,” said Gallimore, still watching the gun. “I told her not to worry — I had some connections. You don’t survive in this business without knowing one or two rough people. But it wasn’t a straightforward situation. There was my wife, too. She’s a jealous woman. I told Elizabeth we had to be careful, for both our sakes. It was our secret. Elizabeth liked that, it seemed to add to the excitement for her. She took a job at the shop where she used to work in town, it was handy for lunchtimes and gave her an excuse to be out if Coghlan ever got nosey. We moved round the hotel circuit.”

“When did you decide to make it permanent?”

“There were difficulties,” said Gallimore. He twisted a little in his chair, as if to illustrate what he was saying. “I needed her, of course I did. But I didn’t want to leave my wife, nor the club. I’m not a rich man, and Elizabeth had no money of her own. Coghlan had a tight grip on the purse-strings. She had found out that he was short of ready cash. The money that went on his gambling was criminal, she used to say.”

He mustered a wry grin, his first attempt to try on Harry the charm-the-pants-off-you style that Trisha had said was his stock-in-trade. Harry tapped the Mauser impatiently on the surface of the desk. Running the tip of his tongue over his lips, Gallimore continued, “I asked her about divorcing you, but she said you couldn’t afford heavy alimony. Besides,” — again a hint of a winning smile“ whoever made money out of suing a solicitor? She said you weren’t a fat cat, more like Robin Hood in an old suit from C amp; A. All the same, she kept pressing me to make something happen. That was how she came to cut her wrist.”

Harry leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“I’d arranged to meet her, we’d booked a room at the North Atlantic. She was just getting into the bath. She’d already sliced through one wrist, there was blood all over the carpet.” He half-closed his eyes. “Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage done. I got her to a doctor who was able to stitch her up without asking too many difficult questions. She spun some cock-and-bull story to Coghlan, although she said he was so bound up in his own affairs that he hardly noticed. She thought he had another woman. And she said she’d tried to kill herself because she couldn’t see us ever getting together. Said she was depressed and couldn’t carry on. She was trying to push me into a corner, force me to leave my wife. Oh, yes, I understood how her mind worked. But I didn’t intend to lose her.”

“No?” Harry didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.

“No. Whatever you may think, Mr. Devlin, we cared deeply for each other. And in any case, we were overtaken by events.”

“She announced her pregnancy?”

“Yes. At first, I wondered whether I should believe her. She might have been making it up, I wouldn’t have put it past her. But she showed me the confirmation from the testing centre. Admitted she’d been careless, hadn’t taken proper precautions. So, you see, I had to make up my mind and choose.”

“And?”

“And I chose Elizabeth,” said Gallimore. “She was wild, unreliable, at times untruthful — I don’t have to tell you that. But she was everything a woman should be. God forgive me, I had to have her. Somehow I broke the news to my wife. It’s the worst task I’ve ever had to undertake. If I hadn’t loved Elizabeth so much, I could never have hardened my heart to resist the tears, the pleading in her voice.” A remote look, another excerpt from his seductive repertoire, came over the tanned, blemish-free face. “You may think you loved your wife, Mr. Devlin, but I–I worshipped her.”

What chilled Harry most was the memory of how heavily Liz had fallen for this man, with his soap opera rhetoric and over-rehearsed mannerisms. He skewered Gallimore with his gaze. “Did you know she was being followed?”

“You heard about that? Yes, she told me. I found it hard to understand. God forgive me, to begin with I thought she might have invented it, perhaps she hadn’t believed me when I said we would soon be together and she would be free of Coghlan. She told me he’d put one of his men on to her, she was sure that he’d realised she was seeing someone else and was determined to get the proof. I tried to reassure her. If he had a new girlfriend of his own, why would he bother? It didn’t make sense to me. Again I couldn’t be sure she was telling the truth. But I knew she was afraid of him, said how ruthless he could be if someone got in his way.”

A security guard in East London had discovered that to his cost, thought Harry. “Did she recognise the man who followed her?” he asked.

“No. He wasn’t one of Coghlan’s usual hangers-on, she said. Eventually she caught the man off guard and came close enough to see that he’d been in a fight recently. His cheek had been badly scratched. When I learned about that, I knew who the man was.”

Gripping the Mauser tightly, Harry said, “Go on.”

Gallimore waved at their surroundings. The happy faces of the artistes in the photographs beamed back at him. “One of the regular punters here. He was always hanging around backstage as well, though I’d noticed he took care to shift whenever I came anywhere near. A hard man. People called him Joe. I never heard his second name.”

“Rourke.”

“Is that it?”

“So what did you do?”

The reply was a non-commital movement of the shoulders. Gallimore was beginning to relax. Perhaps he had decided that Harry would never use the gun. “I told her not to worry. I didn’t believe anything would come of it. It isn’t unknown for men to follow attractive women around. Perhaps he had a thing for her, I didn’t know. She thought he’d been sent by Mick Coghlan to spy on her, but I couldn’t see that. What would have been the point? Coghlan wasn’t short of female company by all accounts. I said she was working herself into a lather over nothing.”