Good Bait by John Harvey Page B

say.’
    â€˜The fuck they do.’
    â€˜I could show you the transcript,’ Karen offered.
    â€˜I’ll show you a fucking transcript.’ Martin was half out of his chair. ‘I’ll transcript you into the middle of next fucking week.’
    â€˜Sit down,’ Karen said. A voice that broached no argument. ‘Sit down and answer the question now. Either that or I can have you hauled down to the local nick and let you stew for an hour or so before you answer the same questions there.’
    Martin tugged at the front of his shirt, hitched up his trousers and sat back down with a shake of the head.
    â€˜Okay, okay. You’re just winding me up, I know. But I tell you, dealing with those people, it gets to you. It really does.’
    Lowering his head, he pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then looked back up.
    â€˜Trying to get some factory owner to realise if he doesn’t up his output without hiking his prices, he’s going to lose every ounce of his work to fucking China before he can turn around. Jesus!’ He shook his head, more vigorously this time. ‘To think we used to have a textile industry in the country served two-thirds of the fucking world. Now look at us. Having to import every pair of bloody women’s knickers from Eastern Europe or the depths of the Third fucking World on account of we can’t make jack shit.’
    Costello looked impressed; he hadn’t been expecting a lesson in world economics. Karen gave it five seconds and repeated her question.
    â€˜That evening?’ Martin said, Mr Reasonable, ‘I went down the pub, didn’t I? What else? Wife’d thrown a wobbly over nothin’ and gone stalking off, God knows where. Me daughter’s been lying to her back teeth, giving her arse away to some drug-dealing little shite from just about the poorest country on the globe outside fucking Africa. Went down the Four Hands and got stinking. Christmas piss-up on so it weren’t a problem. Someone must’ve poured me into a minicab in the small hours, ’cause I can’t remember getting home at all.’
    â€˜And you were there all evening?’
    â€˜When I arrived to when I left.’
    â€˜So there’ll be witnesses to that?’
    â€˜I suppose so. It was busy, rammed, I don’t know.’
    â€˜That’s not very helpful.’
    â€˜The bloke whose shoes I threw up on in the khazi, you could ask him for starters.’
    â€˜He have a name?’
    â€˜Jimmy. Jimmy something-or-other.’
    â€˜I thought it was your local. Regular, anyway.’
    â€˜So ask the landlord, why don’t you?’
    â€˜We already did. Said he remembers you coming in, not leaving.’
    â€˜Makes the two of us, then.’
    â€˜No memory of seeing you after ‘round eleven, eleven thirty.’
    â€˜Like I said, it was busy. Wall to wall.’
    â€˜Leave there the right side of midnight, cab across London, Hampstead in forty minutes, tops. Half an hour.’
    â€˜And why’d I want to do that?’
    â€˜You tell me.’
    â€˜I don’t know, do I?’
    â€˜Keep the appointment your daughter had made with Petru Andronic.’
    â€˜You’re joking. You are joking.’
    â€˜Teach him a lesson.’
    â€˜No way.’
    â€˜You’d already warned him what would happen if he tried to see Sasha again. And there he was, going behind your back. Getting his hands on your daughter. This – what did you call him? – drug-dealing little shite. And by the way, why drug-dealing?’
    â€˜Why? Cause it’s what they do, isn’t it? Not the Poles, the Poles are okay, they know how to do a day’s work. Not now, mind you, they’ve clocked the writing on the wall an’ buggered off back to Warsaw an’ wherever else it is they come from. No, it’s the rest of them. Your Bosnians and Albanians, Moldovans and fucking Romanians.