Belle - Lesley Pearse [93]
Jimmy hesitated. Above the door was a hand-painted sign of a woman’s face half concealed by a fan. There was no name, nothing to say what the business inside was, but he was fairly sure it was some kind of drinking club, probably with dancing girls. Maybe Belle had been brought here if Kent owned the place.
His heart was hammering with nerves, but he pushed the door open a little further and went in. Aware that if he was caught prowling he’d be in big trouble, he decided the only way to behave was as if he had real business there. So he walked boldly down the narrow corridor and up the bare wooden stairs as all the doors on the ground floor had padlocks on them.
At the top of the flight of stairs was another door with a small pane of glass in it. He peeped through and saw the room inside was more or less as he’d expected, large, dingy and windowless and furnished with tables and chairs. The floor was just rough boards. The bar was on the right-hand side, a small stage and a piano on the left. It would have been in total darkness but for an open door at the far end, and Jimmy could hear men talking in there.
He opened the door a crack and the smell hit him like being slapped round the face with a stinking floor cloth. It was a gut-wrenching mixture of stale beer, tobacco, dirt and mildew. He asked himself then whether he was really brave enough to go in, for if he was stopped he couldn’t claim to have a valid reason for being there. But scared as he was, he felt compelled to hear what the men were talking about and see what the room they were in was like.
With a hammering heart, he crept round the edge of the room, staying close to the wall and ready to duck down under a table if anyone came out. All the time his ears were straining to hear what was being said.
‘They said they want two more, but I can’t get the kind they want,’ one of the men said. He was well spoken, so Jimmy thought it was probably Kent.
‘Surely Sly can come up with a couple?’ a man with a rougher London voice answered.
‘No. He’s gone yellow-bellied on me since that other one. There’s a cove over in Bermondsey who I hear can do it, but I don’t know if I can trust him.’
Jimmy crept closer, right up to the door, and peeped through the crack on the hinges side. It was an office, with a big window which looked out on to the Savoy Hotel in the Strand. Kent was standing facing the window, and the other man was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He looked very like the pictures of King Edward, big, bald, with a bushy beard, but he had a vicious-looking scar on his cheek, and he wore a red waistcoat under his jacket and a gold watch chain.
‘We don’t have to fret over whether we trust him,’ the bald man said with a mirthless chuckle. ‘Once he comes up with the girls we can dispose of him.’
Jimmy knew he’d heard enough to be torn limb from limb if he was caught, so he sidled away from the door and crept back round the room on tiptoe. When he reached the outer door he was through it and down the stairs in the blink of an eye, nervous sweat dripping from him.
*
‘You damn fool! What on earth did you think you were doing?’ Garth roared at Jimmy.
He had been annoyed when he got up at nine and found his nephew had gone out, for he had an errand he wanted him to run. But when Jimmy still wasn’t back at eleven he became angry. A delivery of beer was expected, the fireplace in the bar needed clearing