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  A subject for verse, he decided, as all beauty was; Keats was right about that, as about so many things. Sam’s poem about this man would be entitled ‘The Black Pearl.’ He began immediately to cudgel his brain for an opening line, like a painter who sees a subject and wishes to pin down the moment before the light changes. He must surely begin with the exquisite and perfect blackness of the skin. Or should he save the skin and the gender for the end of the first verse, so as to shock the prejudices of those who thought the subject of a poem about human beauty must inevitably be white and female?

  How perfectly formed the man’s ears were, as pure and unblemished as a child’s. Sam was struggling for the right phrase for them when the newcomer spoke. ‘Been here long, have you?’

  His voice, like the banality of his opening query, was a disappointment. It had a trace of the local accent, when this exotic presence should surely have produced something much more memorable. But it would be good to speak with him, to watch his lips move, to pin down a lasting impression of this beauty the poet was going to enshrine in words. Sam said, ‘Not very long, no. Half an hour or so, I suppose.’ He glanced round, seeking for something memorable enough to engage his subject, but finding nothing. ‘It’s fairly quiet tonight. It gets very busy in here at the weekends.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it does. Come here regularly, do you?’

  ‘Fairly often, once a week or so, I suppose.’ For an absurd couple of seconds, Sam wondered if this exquisite man was going to proposition him. It would be embarrassing, but once he’d gently turned him down, he would have the advantage in the conversational exchanges.

  But then the dialogue took a very different turn.

  ‘Good place for dealing, I expect.’

  Sam was shocked. But, still reeling under the impact of beauty upon his poet’s eye, he was not as immediately vigilant as he should have been. ‘I suppose it would be, yes.’ He looked round what he could see of the lounge slowly, then nodded his head vaguely and tried to look puzzled. ‘Dealing in what, exactly?’

  The question was ignored. ‘I might just be interested in some of the commodities you have on offer. If the price was right, of course.’ The black pearl gave Sam a dazzling smile from those sparkling white teeth, as if embarrassed to introduce such a sordid consideration as price.

  Sam could hardly believe his ears. This scintillating presence was apparently prepared to become a customer of his. This beauty could be there to admire and to pin down in words at regular intervals, if he handled this right. It was like a unique model offering himself to a painter for as long as he was needed. His right hand strayed automatically towards the deep pocket of his anorak. What a good thing he had brought extra supplies as usual, in case extra opportunity presented itself. ‘My prices are as good as anyone’s. And the quality is guaranteed.’

  That was a worthless statement. Who could guarantee quality, and what was anyone’s word worth in a seller’s market? But Sam’s supplier had been insistent on that when he took him on, and Sam repeated the slogan each time he had a new customer. The black pearl nodded earnestly and said, ‘Good quality. I’ve heard that.’

  ‘Good cocaine, too. As much as you want.’

  ‘Excellent. And horse. What sort of quantities can you do?’

  ‘Whatever you care to order. I might need a bit of notice for the heroin, but you can have as much as you want, so long as you order in advance.’ Sam tried to keep his voice steady. This promised to be not only pleasurable but highly lucrative. ‘I can do MDMA. And Ecstasy. Even Rohypnol, if you want it. Completely undetectable. Everyone wants Rohypnol, but I can get it. It will cost, but you won’t beat my prices.’

  ‘Interesting. And quite enough, for the present.’ The man’s voice changed a little, became more crisp and businesslike. ‘Samuel Hilton, I am arresting you on suspicion of dealing in illicit Class A drugs. You do not need to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you withhold information which you later intend to use in court.’

  Sam Hilton had never heard the words before, except on television crime shows. They sounded quite unreal, coming from the fastidious lips of his new acquaintance. But the grip that now closed on his upper arm was firm as polished steel.

  The black pearl carried danger as well as beauty.

  EIGHT

  Peter Preston was doing his great man of letters act. He bustled about his study, taking books from the shelves, spreading letters out over his desk to be dealt with in sequence, affecting to be unconscious of his spouse in the doorway.

  Wives are notably impervious to such activity. They have usually seen the signs far too often before to be easily impressed by them. They are often the only audiences available, but in such circumstances it is usually advisable for a man to deny himself a performance. Spouses tend to be stubbornly resistant to exaggerated behaviour that is supposed to impress them. In extreme cases, they may even be heretical enough to view it as posturing.

  Edwina Preston watched Peter for some time before she said calmly, ‘The lawn needs mowing.’

  Although he had known she was there for at least a minute, Peter started extravagantly. ‘How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that?’

  It was the sort of bad acting he deplored in others, she thought contemptuously. ‘How am I supposed to make contact with you? I thought you’d have noticed me by now.’

  ‘You know very well that when I’m involved with serious matters, my concentration becomes absolute. I can’t help it if I’m a slave to the arts.’

  Edwina contemplated this outrageous claim for a moment before deciding against reacting to it. She repeated with deliberate, annoying stolidity, ‘The lawn needs mowing.’ She glanced at the letters and the books so recently assembled upon his desk. ‘The art of horticulture needs your attention. The muse of the garden needs to be propitiated.’

  ‘Denis will be here tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s going to rain tonight. He can’t mow it when it’s wet.’

  Peter sighed heavily. People rarely understood the demands of culture, and wives were the worst of all. ‘I don’t know why we bother to employ a gardener.’

  ‘Denis comes for two hours a week. He does most of the heavy work, but he can’t do everything. You said you liked to do the mowing yourself, now that we have the ride-on and there’s no real effort.’

  That was another thing about wives. They remembered things you’d said and quoted them back at you. They had a knack of remembering the things that could embarrass you and forgetting the ones that proved far-sighted and justified. Peter gestured with a wide arm over the paper on his desk. ‘Can’t you see I’ve got more important things than your damned garden on my mind at the moment, woman!’

  Edwina wrinkled her nose to show him how much she disapproved of that form of address, whilst choosing not to trade insults. ‘You’ll be happy enough to take all the plaudits for the garden when your arty friends are sitting in it with a glass of wine. You’ve said yourself that gardening isn’t a normal hobby; you can’t pick and choose when to take it up and put it down, because nature doesn’t wait for you.’

  Again she was flinging back one of his more high-flown thoughts about horticulture to discomfort him — one which, at the time, he didn’t think she’d registered. Peter said impatiently, ‘I’ll try to get round to it later in the day. No promises.’

  Edwina didn’t go away as he had expected. She looked at the chaos on his desk, noted that the computer wasn’t even switched on, and said calmly, ‘What exactly are you doing?’

  There had been times in the past, better times, when he’d wanted her to ask that, so that he could show off his latest coup in the world of the arts. Now, when he least expected and least wanted it, she was asking for information. ‘A variety of things; I doubt you’d understand them. This damned festival of literature is going to collapse if I don’t rescue it. These local nonentities don’t realize what they’ve taken on.’

  He’d been much more enthusiastic about th
e “damned festival” a few years ago when the first one had been mooted, she thought, when he’d expected to take charge of it and make it his private fiefdom. She had an instant of sympathy for him in his isolation, then thrust it away. Peter wouldn’t take sympathy, if it meant accepting that he was not the towering figure he pretended to be in the aesthetic world.

  The phone in the hall rang as she turned away from him. She looked back expectantly at the phone on his desk, but he said, ‘I’ve unplugged it. I don’t wish to be disturbed whilst I’m occupied with important things.’

  Edwina had to almost run to the hall phone to prevent the answering machine from cutting in. She gave her number rather breathlessly and a cool, impersonal voice said, ‘To whom am I speaking, please?’

  ‘My name is Edwina Preston. I should warn you that we don’t buy anything over the phone.’

  The woman said with the faintest trace of amusement. ‘This isn’t a sales call, Mrs Preston. It’s Oldford CID here. I’m ringing on behalf of Chief Superintendent Lambert. He needs to have a few words with Mr Peter Preston. Is he at home today?’

  ‘Yes, he is. Would you like me to bring him to the phone?’ Let’s see if he’s as high-handed with the police as he is with his wife, Edwina thought. She quite looked forward to listening in on this.

  ‘No there’s no need for that. The chief super wishes to speak to him in person on a private matter. Would one hour from now be convenient?’

  ‘Yes. One hour from now would be fine.’ That gives him an hour to decide. An hour to decide whether he tries to shrug off the police in the cavalier fashion he adopts for his wife, Edwina thought waspishly.

  Sam Hilton was suffering far more than Peter Preston.

  He hadn’t really been able to believe what was happening to him on the previous night until he’d found himself sitting between two burly uniformed coppers in the back of a police car. From that moment onwards the exotic beauty of the black officer who had announced his arrest had been denied to him. He’d been kept in the cells, a routine part of the softening-up process. He’d not slept at all until around three and then only fitfully. From six onwards, a drunk and disorderly from the night before had been bellowing from the next cell that he should be released to go fishing with his small son.

  You were supposed to be able to see material for poetry in all things, but Sam was finding it impossible in this situation. There was verse of a kind beneath the drawing of an impossibly large male organ on the wall beside his narrow bed and unyielding mattress. But you couldn’t call that doggerel poetry. Someone should tell the man who had struggled with ‘cock’ that not all verse has to rhyme.

  He had refused a greasy breakfast and managed only half of the big mug of strong, sweet tea. Sam Hilton didn’t know it, but even his status as a criminal was being diminished in the discussions going on among the professionals two floors above him. He was small fry, they decided, not worthy of the attention of the Drug Squad. Wring him dry of any information he had to offer, then dismiss him with a flea in his ear. As a first offender, he was perhaps not even worth bringing to court. But check all of this out in an interview before he was sent on his way.

  Sam knew none of this. His immediate concern as he was taken to the interview room was to conceal how frightened he felt. The two men who came there to interrogate him were equally determined to keep him on edge. You were in no condition to conceal information if you were apprehensive. Detective Inspector Rushton and Detective Sergeant Hook, they announced to the microphone as the cassettes began to turn. Rushton was thirty-four and the younger of the two, but to twenty-two-year-old Sam Hilton they both looked immensely experienced. They conferred with each other, then Rushton turned on the camera attached to the ceiling. ‘New technology, this,’ he explained to the fearful young man on the other side of the square table. ‘Enables us to recall how you looked under questioning, as well as what you said and how you sounded. Quite useful, sometimes.’

  He didn’t explain how, but Sam felt even more like a specimen under a microscope. He folded his arms, but he couldn’t keep them still for long, and a moment later he slid them beneath the table and on to his thighs, working them softly against his jeans in an attempt to remove the wetness from his palms. The silence got to him as they watched him and said nothing, as they knew it would. He said, ‘This is all a misunderstanding. I really shouldn’t be here at all.’

  Rushton smiled like a cat which has cornered a particularly stupid mouse. ‘Dealing in Class A drugs, Mr Hilton. No misunderstanding there. And the law is very clear, nowadays. A pretty straightforward case, wouldn’t you say, DS Hook?’

  ‘I would indeed. And the sentences are pretty straightforward, too. About five years for dealing. Probably in a high security prison initially, with some not very nice characters for company.’

  ‘I–I’ve been very stupid.’

  Hook nodded. ‘You’re beginning to be more realistic now. That’s a good thing, because we don’t like wasting our valuable time. I’d say you’d been very stupid indeed.’

  Sam nodded, wishing he hadn’t got this camera recording how abject his capitulation was. He wondered what would happen to the video after this. Surely they couldn’t use it in a court of law? He licked his lips and said, ‘Is there no way out of this for me?’

  Rushton raised his eyebrows, as if surprised that a man in his position should even suggest such a thing. ‘Afraid I can’t see one, Mr Hilton. It’s so black and white, you see. Actually offering to sell drugs to a police officer. The Crown Prosecution Service likes things to be black and white; not much room for manoeuvre for the defence counsel in court, you see. I should think in this case they wouldn’t even contest the guilty verdict; they’d probably confine themselves to a plea for mercy on the grounds of your youth. Unfortunately, though, both judges and juries tend to take a very hard line with drug dealers. I can’t see any way for Mr Hilton to help himself. Can you, DS Hook?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. A black and white case, as you say. Plead guilty and beg for mercy will probably be the legal advice. Unless. .’ He let his last word hang in the air, like a fly three inches above a starving trout.

  ‘Unless what?’ The trout was hooked in a flash. The young eyes were wide with appeal and a sudden, desperate hope.

  ‘Well, I suppose if Detective Inspector Rushton and I were able to say that you’d given us every assistance, that you’d seen the error of your ways and given clear evidence of your wish to assist the law, that might just count in your favour. We’d need to be clearly convinced of that before we could offer any such assurance of course. Do you think that might be a possibility, sir?’

  Rushton pursed his lips and looked doubtful. ‘I think the CPS boys would be very reluctant to abandon such a cast-iron case, you know. Lawyers are like that, I’m afraid, Mr Hilton; they hate letting go of an easy case. DS Hook always wants to help, but he can be something of an optimist. Still, if you’re prepared to give clear evidence of remorse, in the form of helpful information, I would certainly be prepared to report as much and put in a plea for you.’

  Bert Hook leaned forward, avuncular and concerned. ‘It’s an evil industry you’ve got yourself entangled in, Sam. But you’re not stupid. You must have realized by now that it’s the bigger fish who make the real money out of drugs. And cause the real damage. I don’t know how much you’ve seen of heroin addicts. They first become scarcely human and then die horribly.’

  Sam had reached much the same conclusion about the trade he’d been practising through the long hours of a night in the cells. He couldn’t agree with them openly, though. At the furthest recess of his mind but increasingly vivid nonetheless, there remained a memory of the final injunction from his supplier, in that briefing which had made it all seem such easy money. “You won’t be caught. But if you ever are, you say bugger all. You keep shtum and give the pigs nothing. If you give them anything, anything at all, you’ll be dead meat. If you forget everything else, boy, remember that!”
/>   Sam looked into Hook’s concerned, experienced face, which was within two feet of his. He wanted to give everything he had, to have this over with and be away, whatever the cost. But that face belonged to a copper; a pig; a piece of shit who would promise you the earth and then laugh in your face once he had what he wanted. Sam tried to summon the worst student and football crowd obscenities about the police to stiffen his resistance. ‘Piss off, pig! I don’t know anything. And I wouldn’t fucking tell you if I did.’

  DS Hook was distressingly unshaken. Apparently he rated this performance disappointingly low in the range of opprobrium he had endured over the years. ‘You’ll please yourself, lad, in the end. We don’t beat people up in the cells, whatever colourful tales you’ve heard. There’s nothing we can do to save you, if you won’t help yourself.’

  DI Rushton nodded and said ‘I think it’s time we returned Mr Hilton to his cell and got on with preparing the charges against him.’

  Sam said desperately, ‘I don’t know anything. I’ve got nothing to give to you.’

  Bert Hook paused in the process of gathering his papers together. ‘Nothing at all, Sam? Not even the tiniest crumb of information that we could cite as evidence of your good intent?’

  Sam shook his head miserably. ‘They don’t tell you anything. That’s the way they work. If you ask them anything, you’re out on your ear.’

  ‘Which in your case would have been a very good thing, wouldn’t it? For a start, you wouldn’t have been sitting here facing very serious charges and a prison sentence. You wouldn’t have been squirming on that chair and trying to account for yourself to DI Rushton and me.’ Hook shook his head sadly.

  ‘I want to help. I can see the sense in what you’re saying. But how can I help, when I really don’t know anything?’

  Hook nodded several times, as if accepting the logic in this. ‘Sometimes people know a little more than they realize. When did you begin dealing, Sam?’ They watched the young, too-revealing face as Hilton struggled with conflicting emotions. Then Hook added in a low voice, ‘I should warn you that if you try to piss us about in this, we’ll throw the book at you.’