Plender Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. I took a sip. “Business good?”
    “You must be joking. It’s wicked.”
    “That bad eh?”
    “Use your eyes. It’s been like this since Wednesday. Appalling.”
    “I thought it was tonight. The weather, like.”
    “I wish it was. I wish it was.” Peggy looked at me. “And just as a matter of interest, what brings you in here on a night like this? It must be business or else you wouldn’t be in here in the first place.”
    “Well, in a way, yes.”
    “In a way,” said Peggy. “Anyway I don’t want to know what it is. You keep it to yourself. The less Auntie Peggy knows about what you get up to the better it is for Auntie Peggy.”
    “Don’t worry, Peggy,” I said. “I’d never shit in your bar.”
    “I know damn well you wouldn’t,” said Peggy. “Otherwise you’d never get past that doorway.”
    I smiled.
    “Give me another drink,” I said. “And have one yourself.”
    “Ta,” said Peggy. “I’ll have a gin and bitter lemon, if you don’t mind.”
    Peggy made the drinks and I gave him the money.
    “And if you don’t mind,” I said, “I’m going to sit in one of your cozy little booths.”
    “Get a better view that way, do you?”
    I smiled and said nothing.
    “Sometimes, Mr. Plender,” said Peggy, “you really give me the fucking creeps.”
    I smiled and turned and walked away from the bar. Peggy knew I used the place from time to time to put the drop on clients but he didn’t care so long as none of his regulars were involved or one of the clients brought the law back with him. Well, there was no danger of that. Not with the people I arranged to visit Peggy’s with.
    I sat down in one of the booths and looked round the bar. It was a depressing place at the best of times, all faded plush and lime green paintwork, but it was worse when it was deserted because you could see all of the décor, all of the lime, in spite of the almost non-existent lighting.
    There were only four other people in the bar; an early evening creeper in clerical grey with his fawn trilby set at its weekend angle; a blank looking Greek sailor obviously in port for the first time; and in the booth opposite the one I was in a man and a girl drinking themselves into an early bed. It wasn’t an uncommon sight in Peggy’s, that. Some blokes thought it turned a bird on, bringing them in to mingle with the gingers. Maybe it did. Maybe underneath all the giggling and the staring the birds cottoned on to the fact that maybe their blokes weren’t so straight after all to want to bring them to Peggy’s; maybe the reasons went deeper. And maybe some sick bitches liked that. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
    I watched the couple for a while. The bird was very young, and she was well away. Not reeling or glazed or anything like that, just giggly in the knowledge that she was all set for the evening’s later coming events. The bloke was sitting with his back to me but even from that angle he was so obviously putting on the Mr. Sincere bit it was painful. There was no need. He’d been home and dry yards back. All I could think, though, was how hard up he must be. Christ, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. What was the point? He may as well have stayed in bed and had a J. Arthur. Because she wouldn’t be worth much more, that was certain. And from what I could see of him it wasn’t that he was a bad looking bloke. He had the gear and the hair. He could have done all right for himself a bit farther up the market. Maybe he was kinky for kids. But he seemed too young to fancy the young stuff. Anyway what was certain was that he was ready for the all off. He’d been drunk up and shuffling ever since I’d come in. Couldn’t wait to get down to it. But she was stretching it out a bit. The cat with the mouse. Playing the sophisticated flirt, or thought she was. She’d decided he was going to get it but she wanted to keep him guessing. It was pathetic, it really was. I went back to my drinking