Jack Carter's Law by Ted Lewis Page B

because as she speaks she turns away and rolls down the window and lets in the sound of the rushing wind.
    “Been down here long?” I ask her.
    “Have you?”
    “Long enough. I think it’s a shit-hole.”
    “Rather depends on the life you lead, doesn’t it?”
    I laugh and then I say to her, “I expect you think it’s
all right.”
    “Have you ever been to Grimsby?”
    “Only when Scunthorpe were away to them.”
    “Up the bleeding Mariners,” she says and looks out of the window. We don’t speak again until we get close to Baker Street.
    “Do you know Crawford Street?” she says.
    “I know Crawford Street.”
    “Well, that’s where I live.”
    I turn in to Crawford Street and drop my speed.
    “Just over there,” she says. “Beyond the antique shop. The corner where the pub is.”
    I draw the car in to the curb but I keep the engine
running.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says and gets out.
    I switch the engine off and I get out as well.
    The block where her flat is is a postwar piece of architecture, flat-roofed and ocher-coloured. There is an open access to a flight of tiled steps illuminated by dim lights on the ceiling too high for anyone to smash. There is also a slight smell of urine. I follow her up the stairs and we climb three flights until we get to a landing that has two doors and she goes over to one of them and takes her key out and pushes it in the lock, puts her knee against the door and the door swings inwards. She goes inside without looking behind her. I follow her through the door but she’s already disappeared from the hall. I follow her perfume and I find myself in a long narrow room divided in two by a five-foot-high antique folding screen. In the first half of the room there is a very nicely restored chaise longue and a matching button-back low chair and there is a sheepskin rug on the floor. The walls are painted Prussian blue and the off-white covering of the chaise longue and the chair and the colour of the rug contrast nicely with the walls, as do the framed, pale modern drawings arranged on the walls with perfect carelessness. The carpet is Prussian blue as well and between the carpet and the walls the white baseboard is gleaming and streamlined. I walk over to the screen and look beyond it. There is an aluminum-and-glass dining table with half a dozen matching chairs ranged against a window covered by full-length gray-and-pale-blue patterned curtains. There are dozens of bright-coloured cushions scattered all over the floor and an enormous picture covering most of one wall, painted in two colours: red and red. The only other furniture in this half of the room is a stripped Welsh dresser but instead of crockery on the shelves there is the best selection of drinks I’ve seen in a long time. Next to the dresser there is an open door and through that door I can see the corner of a bed and beyond the bed a wall that is just one big mirror reflecting the salmon-pink glow of a single table lamp. The carpet in the bedroom is white and so is the bed cover. Draped on the bed is the coat that the girl has just been wearing, its dark colour stark against the cover’s whiteness. Then Lesley appears in the doorway, blotting out the view. But I don’t mind that because she’s taken off the remains of her dress and slipped on a mohair cardigan over her shoulders, which she hasn’t bothered to fasten. She is still wearing her tights and her pants.
    “Now you can see what Hume didn’t get round to revealing,” she says. “Or would you have rather torn off the rest yourself?”
    “Very nice,” I tell her. “Does Hume pay for the central heating as well? Or can you afford to be out of work with pneumonia?”
    “I can afford to be out of work,” she says.
    “I’ll bet,” I say, looking round the room. “I didn’t know there was that much money in what you did. What was it you said you did?” She doesn’t answer that one.
    I go over to the dresser and take a glass and