Essex Poison. Ian Sansom

      Half an hour later, entirely refreshed and dressed, I said goodbye to Berrak and stepped back out onto London’s streets. Klein’s had worked its magic. My mind was clear.

      No sooner did the big scarred metal door of Klein’s bang conclusively shut but two men instantly approached and fell into step behind me.

      ‘What date is it, Mickey?’ asked a voice.

      ‘The eleventh, the twelfth?’

      ‘The thirteenth I thought, isn’t it? October the thirteenth?’

      ‘The thirteenth, well, well. Unlucky for some, eh, Sefton?’

      It was my old friends Mickey Gleason and the Scot MacDonald.

      ‘There’s someone who’d like to see you,’ said MacDonald.

      ‘Very much,’ said Mickey. ‘You’ve been missed, Sefton.’

       CHAPTER 3

       THE RENDEZVOUS

      Smoke rings slowly spooled and unspooled around Delaney’s smooth fat brilliantined Irish head as he sat by the window overlooking the Windmill Theatre, which extended its chest out over Great Windmill Street and bellowed in neon, ‘CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE’, ‘REVUDEVILLE’, ‘THE ONLY NON-STOP SHOW IN THE WEST END’.

      As usual, Delaney wore a suit the colour of whipped cream and a large diamond ring that might more properly have graced the fingers of some shrivelled, pale-skinned dowager duchess. He was a plush Miss Havisham: the two of them would have got on well. He sat perfectly still. He didn’t move, except to touch his cigar to his lips, slowly and leisurely, as though silently blessing it: Delaney was the sort of man who had time to kill; he was the sort of man with cigars silently to bless. He was a man with wide margins, broad horizons and narrow sympathies. A man who knew the power of being still.

      Traffic sounded outside, though it was by now perhaps three or four o’clock in the morning – long past the witching hour. If you are awake and you are in Soho and it’s three o’clock in the morning it’s probably safe to assume that you’re looking for trouble, or that trouble has already come to find you. The sky was as black as your hat, or the devil’s arse – depending on what kind of company you keep. But it was also orange and flashing red from the Windmill. It was set-lighting from hell.

      We had been talking for some time. I had been trying to explain to Delaney what had happened to a package of his that I had accidentally-on-purpose picked up at one of his clubs, and why I’d had to make a quick exit without paying my gambling debts. It was a complicated conversation, made all the more complicated by the fact that I was accompanied by my old International Brigade chums, Mickey and MacDonald, who were flanking me like guards, standing heavily at my shoulder as if I were on trial, while Delaney, in contrast, was sitting opposite me, accompanied by an attractive brunette, perched happily on his lap, perhaps twenty years his junior, perfectly proportioned, and dressed in nothing but a corset underneath her silk robe. Her eyes were half shut, out of pleasure or boredom or something else it was difficult to tell, though I was pretty sure that if Delaney had stroked her any more she’d be purring.

      The odds were definitely against me.

      The room, like many of Delaney’s clubs, was all red plush and cheap-opulent upholstery. Gas-lit, potted palms, reproduction art in gilt frames, and with a day-bed big enough to accommodate at least three blondes. Thick-set filing cabinets sat obediently under the windows, and an inconveniently large desk boasted nothing on it but a telephone. It was a room, like Delaney, that suggested big business and low life. This was Soho and this was exactly the sort of place and the sort of carry-on that had made Delaney such a success in Soho.

      ‘You are a normal healthy young man, Mr Sefton, are you not?’ asked Delaney. ‘A normal red-blooded young man?’

      ‘Yes.’ I had the strong feeling this was going to be a trick question.

      ‘It must be difficult for you then, to have to be explaining yourself in the presence of our innocent young friend Grace here.’ Grace wriggled innocently in his lap.

      ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

      ‘Difficult for you both.’

      ‘It’s OK, Mr Delaney,’ said Grace, in a voice like Betty Boop’s.

      ‘Run along, Grace,’ said Delaney, and innocent young Grace got up and ran along. She glanced at me as she walked out and I thought perhaps I saw some hint of fellow feeling, but I may have been mistaken. It’s easy to misread the glance of a half-dressed, half-bored, half-drugged beautiful woman. Much of Delaney’s business was based on exactly such misunderstandings.

      Delaney allowed more smoke to gather around him before he spoke.

      ‘Are you a religious man, Mr Sefton?’

      My guess was that ‘yes’ was probably the right answer. To say ‘no’ might have led to serious problems. ‘Yes’, as always, opened up possibilities. It kept my options open.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Catholic or Protestant?’

      I was neither, but I knew that Delaney was from Kerry and I was banking on the average Kerryman being of the Catholic persuasion.

      ‘Catholic,’ I said. Wise gamble.

      ‘Good. So. I am myself a devout Roman Catholic.’ I could feel Gleason and MacDonald behind me nodding in approval at this announcement, as if Delaney had revealed that he were in fact the Holy Father, or indeed the Son of God himself. ‘You’ll doubtless agree with me then that theft is a sin. A grievous sin.’ More grievous a sin, I was given to presume, than his own activities as the owner of illegal drinking clubs, brothels, and as a wholesaler, distributor and retailer of drugs, drink and women.

      I nodded.

      ‘The only question then is how you might go about putting things right between us, Mr Sefton. What’s upsetting is not only that you stole from me but that you stole that which I might willingly have given.’ Or sold, he might more properly have said. As well as his clubs, Delaney controlled a large part of many of the other businesses that kept Soho so … lively. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘we could of course go to law over the matter.’ He laughed to himself at the thought of this clearly ludicrous suggestion. Going to law with a complaint about my own modest misdemeanour would only lead to questions about his own vast empire of sin. We would not be going to law over the matter. ‘Fortunately for you I’m not a man who believes in punishment, Mr Sefton. I believe rather in making amends, in restitution. In making good.’ He took up his cigar from the ashtray and applied it delicately to his lips, producing a few more pale rings of smoke. The tip glowed like the neon signs outside. ‘I like to think of myself not so much as a businessman, more as a problem solver.’ Again, Gleason and MacDonald nodded vigorously at this generous self-assessment. ‘And the good news is, I think I have a solution to our little problem.’ I feared as much. Beware big men in fancy suits offering simple solutions: this was not, I think, one of Morley’s maxims, one of his proverbs or wise sayings, though it might have been. The closest I can find in Unconsidered Trifles (1934) is from Horace, faenum habet in cornu, longe fuge, ‘stay away from the bull, he has hay on his horns’. What can I say? Delaney had a lot of hay on his horns.

      In Spain I had gone ‘absent’ once for a few days, having been unable to reconcile what was happening all around me with what I thought was going to be happening in a true people’s republic. When I was caught trying to board a ship in Barcelona