The Garrison was smaller than it looked on television.
That was the first thing. On a screen it had been a set — a long bar, a snug, a piano, room for a crowd. In life it was a corner pub on a corner street with a floor that had been mopped with something that hadn't been water for a while, and at eleven in the morning it had six men in it, and all six of them looked round when Arthur pushed the door.
Then five of them looked away again, because Arthur was Arthur.
The sixth kept looking at me.
I knew that one, too, from the memories. Not the name — the name wouldn't come — but the fact that I'd owed him money once and he'd never been paid, and he'd decided some time ago that I was the kind of man you could look at like that.
I looked back until he stopped.
"Harry," Arthur said.
The landlord came down the bar wiping his hands. Behind him, at the far end where the glasses were kept, a woman was drying them one by one and setting them on a cloth, and I'd been in the room four seconds and already knew exactly who she was.
I made myself look at Harry.
"Mr Shelby. And — Jack. Feeling better, are we?"
"I'm upright."
"Ha." He didn't laugh. "Tommy's through the back. Said to send you in when you came."
When, not if.
Arthur went first. I followed, and on the way past the end of the bar the woman looked up, and I got the whole thing in one go: fair hair pinned back plain, a good dress made to look like a cheap one, hands that had never carried a tray for a living. She had a smile ready. It was a pleasant smile and there was nothing behind it at all.
Grace.
I knew her name. I knew where she'd come from and who'd sent her and what she was for. I knew she'd stand in this bar for weeks pouring drinks for the men she was informing on, and I knew what it would do to the family, and I knew what it would do to Tommy. I had, standing there with my hat in my hand, more information about the woman drying glasses than any person in Birmingham except Campbell himself.
And I could not do a single thing with it.
If I told Tommy, he'd want to know how I knew. If I told Arthur he'd kill her and the police would come down on Watery Lane like a roof. If I said nothing, I was lying to my family from day one — and I noticed that I'd thought my family, and let it go, because there was no time to unpick it.
"Morning," she said. Irish, and not from Dublin. "You'll be the other brother."
"I'll be one of them."
"Grace." She set a glass down. "I'm new."
"I heard."
"You're the twin, aren't you?" Her eyes went to the cut over my eyebrow and back. "I've been told you don't say much."
"That's right."
I put my hat back on and went through into the snug. She'd got my face, the cut, a sentence to remember me by, and I'd got the satisfaction of being rude to a woman who'd done nothing to me yet. That was the whole exchange. I noticed, on the way past, that Tommy was at the hatch, and that he'd been watching her rather than me.
The snug had four chairs and Tommy was in the one with its back to the wall.
"Sit."
I sat. John was already in, boots up on the bench, a cigarette going. Arthur stayed by the door.
"Arthur says you're looking for work."
"I said I'd take some."
"That's not the same thing." Tommy turned his glass a quarter turn on the table. He didn't drink from it. "Fridays used to be yours. The collection round, Digbeth end. You did it three years and never came back short."
"I remember."
"Then you started coming back short."
I didn't say anything. There was no version of that I could argue with — I had the memories, and they were exactly as bad as he was implying. A man on a step, holding out coins. Me, or the man I was wearing, taking them without counting. Then a pub. Then nothing.
"I'm not asking why," Tommy said. "I know why. The whole street knows why. What I'm asking is whether you're stood in my pub this morning because you've had a good sleep and feel like a change, or whether you're here because you're actually here."
"I'm here."
He looked at me the way he had at the table — long enough that I felt it, not long enough to be called a stare.
John took his boots off the bench. "Tommy—"
"I know."
"He couldn't find his own front door on Saturday."
"I know, John."
"So you're giving him the round."
"I'm giving him a round." Tommy took a folded paper from inside his coat and set it on the table. "Six shops, two pubs, and Kaplan's old pitch behind the Marquis, which is being run now by a man called James who's come up short two weeks together." He pushed the paper an inch toward me. "You'll take Scudboat and Lovelock. You'll get what's owed. And you'll find out why James is light, because a man doesn't come up short twice by accident."
"And if he has an explanation?"
"Then you'll hear it and bring it back to me."
"And if he doesn't?"
Tommy picked up his glass now, and drank, and put it down.
"Then you'll use your judgement," he said, "and we'll find out what that's worth."
I read the paper in the bar with my back to the wall and a drink I hadn't asked for in front of me, because Harry put one there and it would have looked wrong to leave it.
Six shops. The names meant something, again in the hands — a bell over a door, a man with flour on his forearms, a woman who kept the money in a tin under the counter and always made you wait while she found it. Two pubs. And James, written in Tommy's small square hand, with no surname, which told me Tommy didn't think he needed one.
Arthur came and stood over me.
"He's testing you," he said. "You know that."
"I know."
"Fridays was always yours, till it wasn't. And now it's Thursday and he's handing it back." Arthur put a hand on my shoulder, and it was heavy and it was kind, and it made me want to be somewhere else. "Don't fuck it up, Jacky boy. I mean that as your brother."
"I won't."
"You said that last time."
He went. John didn't come over at all. He stood at the bar with his back half to me, talking to Harry, and when I looked he was watching me in the mirror behind the bottles and didn't look away when I caught him. That was John. Arthur wanted me to be all right. John wanted to see it first.
At the end of the bar, Grace was pouring for the man who'd looked at me when I came in, and she was laughing at something he'd said, and I watched her do it and thought: she's going to be here every day. She's going to know every name and every face and every man who's short, and she's going to hear things in this room that Campbell would give his pension for. And the only person who knows it is a man who can't say so.
I finished the drink.
It was cheap and it was warm and I was going to have to get used to it.
The paper went into my inside pocket. Six shops, two pubs, a bookmaker who was light. It was a day's work and it was a test and it was, as far as I could tell, the only route to thirty-five points that didn't involve doing something stupid in front of Tommy.
Only I'd already worked out that quiet wouldn't move a number. So the question was what I did on that round that people would talk about — and whether I could do it in a way Tommy would call judgement rather than the other thing.
I stood up. The room stayed level this time.
Reputation: 15 / 50
That was all it gave me. It didn't open, didn't offer, didn't remind me about the money. Just the two numbers, small, at the edge of my sight, as though it had noticed me leaving and wanted me to know it was still counting.
I went to find Scudboat.