Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Doc held up his hands to silence the others.

‘Furby’s back,’ he announced (to general consternation), ‘and there’s been an almighty rumpus. Wesley got punched out in a bar by a local man. The girl — Josephine Bean — stepped in and saved him; breaching pretty much every notable Law of Following in the process, God Bless her. Then immediately after, Michael Furby — posing as a doctor — locked Wesley inside a toilet cubicle, gagged him, bound him, and tried to drown him in the pan.’

Doc’s initial words were greeted by a shocked — if appreciative — silence, but by the time he’d finished, derisory snorts and hoots were sounding from all quarters. Ale had been drunk (in prodigious quantities. Even the terrier had partaken — his blood-sugar levels having been soberly calculated, well prior). A game of trumps was still in progress.

‘I’m serious,’ Doc hotly defended his bulletin, ‘the shit’s really hit the fan out there. Wesley smashed Furby into a bathroom mirror — my source tells me that they were in the toilets out the back of the estate agency — gave him thirteen stitches in his forehead, apparently, and now he’s fully intent on pressing charges.’

Hands of cards were placed down onto the table. Shoes had been winning. He placed his hand down last of all.

‘What happened with the girl?’ he asked — he had a special interest in the girl; the nurse. ‘How exactly did she save him?’

At this point Herbie arrived back from the urinal, his white stick tapping firmly into legs and tiles and tables, his free hand still fiddling with his fly.

‘So you finally wound up your little tête-à-tête with the journalist?’ he muttered, having recognised the timbre of Doc’s voice from a distance.

‘I did,’ Doc nodded, ‘it’s been absolute bloody chaos out there. Wesley’s over at the Cop Shop. He got soundly thrashed by a local lad. And Furby’s back with a vengeance. This time…’ there was almost a chuckle in Doc’s voice, ‘this time posing as a medical practitioner.’

Herbie’s face remained blank. He found nothing to amuse him in Furby’s antics. Furby was a pest. At best.

‘Did you think to ask your source whether Wesley plans to press charges himself?’ Hooch enquired, a canny expression enveloping his features.

‘Course I did. He said he didn’t think so — and seemed rather surprised at it — which I was very happy with, as answers go.’

‘But Wesley never presses…’ Shoes interjected.

‘Exactly,’ Herbie turned on him, ‘that’s how he went about testing the calibre of our informant, you cretin.’

‘Ah.’ Shoes looked down, somewhat regretfully, at his hand again.

‘And so you swallowed all that crap he told you about Richard F and the toilet bowl?’ the blind man persisted.

Doc looked up. Herbie hadn’t been party to the earlier segments of his exposition. This meant… He rapidly mapped out the pub’s geography in his mind — distance between the men’s lavatories and the icy back beer patio where his conversation with The Source had been furtively undertaken (waves splashing against the shingle just a few feet behind them).

Hmmn

It wasn’t inconceivable that Herb’d been eavesdropping. He certainly didn’t trust him (forget what he’d said to Hooch, previously. He could be as full of bluster as the best of them. And if a certain level of disingenuousness was the price he had to pay to maintain his seniority — that peerless, nay legendary combination of involvement and fairness, distance and intimacy — then so be it.

Oh yes. It was all very finely judged. It was all riding on a thread. It was all so… so marginal, so tenuous. That was the whole point… that was the very bedrock of intelligent Following).

Doc couldn’t successfully shake the suspicion that Herbie had it in mind — had always had it in mind, frankly — to impose some spuriously… well, crass sense of… of… justice on the whole exquisitely convoluted Wesley equation. To curtail him. To make him comply in some way. To watch him, to oversee, to take an active pleasure in some sort of humbling. A submission. But Wesley would never submit. He just couldn’t. Because that would be the end of him –

The end of everything

(Herb took too much interest — point of fact — in all the money-making crap. The insignificant mechanics of the thing. Way too much interest. Tried to cover it up. Didn’t always succeed. Doc’d seen him interrogating the barstaff about backhanders earlier, under the spurious guise of something more piddling.)

To make Wesley comply. Like some kind of hard-faced but upstanding sheriff in one of those wild west books Wesley took such delight in reading.

But why, exactly? And was he outside the game or inside it?

That was the vital thing.

‘It was the sink, I reckon…’ Shoes interrupted, ‘I bet Furby was holding him over a sink full of water when Wes shot his arse back, unexpectedly, straightened up, and lifted Furby — face-first — into the mirror in front of them.’

Shoes rapidly re-enacted this manoeuvre, nearly knocking over his pint glass in the process. Hooch shot out his hand and rescued it, sucking on his teeth in fury.

‘It has to be that way,’ Shoes didn’t appear to notice, ‘nobody in their right mind hangs a mirror above a toilet. Not even an estate agent’d do that.’

‘Was there a gag?’ Hooch asked (keen to quickly dispel this strangely insidious agent/toilet image from his pristine consciousness).

Doc nodded, ‘A Welshman, an Englishman and some fella of dubious nationality, all locked up in this toilet cubicle together…’

A short, confused silence… then Shoes guffawed. Herbie smiled, thinly. Hooch scowled. Doc put up a hand to his hot cheek –

Cracking jokes now, eh?

Only two pints down…

Peter, Paul and Bloody Mary, that infernal booze must be getting to me

‘Ha very ha, ’ Hooch enunciated crisply.

‘He did say there was tape, actually,’ Doc conceded, ‘brown tape.’

‘That’s classic Furby,’ Shoes purred, ‘that’s him alright’.

‘So he got hit in a pub…’ Hooch had his pad out and his pencil at the ready.

‘A bar. Saks. On the High Street…’

‘But he had a deal with The Smack, didn’t he? Wasn’t this place supposed to be his designated watering hole in Canvey? That’s why we’re all sitting here, after all, forking out wadfuls of cash to cover the astronomically over-inflated beer prices…’

Doc suddenly began talking again, over the top of Hooch’s complaining, ‘About nine o’clock it was. Two punches. Very nasty. Felled him both times, apparently. Wes’d just that second walked in there with the estate agent. The other guy powered in through the door straight after…’

‘ Ouch, ’ Shoes winced, ‘Double ouch, in fact.’

‘So what did you trade with the hack, to get all this stuff out of him?’ Herbie interrupted, feeling the table-top and making his way gradually back to his seat.

‘I told him that the local constabulary had visited Katherine Turpin’s at around nineteen-hundred hours this evening. I said I thought Wes was renting a room from her. I told him I thought it was about some of the stuff that went on in Rye over Christmas. Or maybe something to do with the Van Hougstraten prank in Brighton at New Year. All guesswork, to be honest, and stuff I’d’ve given to the website anyway. But he seemed satisfied with it.’

‘Used to be a local hero, that bloke,’ Herbie said.

‘Who did?’ Hooch appraised him, briefly.