London Fields Read Online Free PDF Page B

disappointment. In the carpark she was offered several lifts; she accepted one more or less at random.
    The driver, who was the dead woman's brother's brother-in-law, dropped her off on the Portobello Road, as instructed. Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. She could hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood on the street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had been thinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round between her black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassed herself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She now progressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose name she took a liking to. 'TV AND DARTS' was the further recommendation of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard had been affixed, saying, 'AND PIMBALL'. All the skies of London seemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready to drop its plunger . . .
    She entered the Black Cross. She entered the pub and its murk. She felt the place skip a beat as the door closed behind her, but she had been expecting that. Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that day would never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. She walked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like a bride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately she knew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, that she had found him, her murderer.
    When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purpose and she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’

I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page? When I take on Chapter 3, when I take on Guy Clinch, I'll have to do, well, not happiness, but goodness, anyway. It's going to be rough.
    The moment that Keith Talent saw Nicola Six – he dropped his third dart. And swore. The 32-gram tungsten trebler had pierced his big toe . . . I thought I might be able to make a nice play on words here. Cupid's dart, or something like that. Arrows of desire? But it wasn't desire that Nicola Six aroused in Keith Talent. Not primarily. I would say that greed and fear came first. Going for broke at the pinball table, Guy Clinch froze in mid-flail: you could hear the ball scuttling into the gutter. Then silence.
    While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into the background. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the public house, this pub moment, I'm going to have to keep on coming back to it. Edging down the bar, I was intrigued only in the civilian sense – but powerfully intrigued. Every pub has its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross: he had to step forward to deal with the royal tourist. He had to do it for the guys: for Wayne, Dean, Duane, for Norvis, Shakespeare, Big Dread, for Godfrey the barman, for Fucker Burke, for Basim and Manjeet, for Bogdan, Maciek, Zbigniew.
    Keith acted in the name of masculinity. He acted also, of course,