The End Game Read Free Page A

excuse for drinking. I’ve always found it quite easy to do it without any reason except that I like it. Which reminds me. You’re coming to dinner with us tonight.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Susan is a perfectionist. Her masterpieces of the culinary art never appear on the table before nine o’clock. So we shall have time for a drink beforehand. Or possibly for two drinks. Do you know the Coat and Badge?”
    “No. What is it? Another of your pubs?”
    “How can you speak so lightly about that great, that immortal, that unique institution, the English tavern? Suppose the Mermaid Tavern had never existed. Should we have had the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson?”
    “All right,” said Hopkirk resignedly. “I’ll buy it. Where and what is the Coat and Badge?”
    “No mere description can do justice to it. You shall see it for yourself.”
     
    “Not bad,” said Hopkirk. “How did you find it?”
    “I have a nose for such places. I was walking past, in the street, when instinct awoke. It said, David, there’s something down that passage that you ought to investigate. And the instinct was sound.”
    The Coat and Badge was tucked away at the foot of one of the alleys which runs down from Lower Thames Street to the river. It had a small public bar, a smaller private bar and a very small garden, with an iron table and some iron chairs in it.
    They took their second pints into the garden, where they drank for some time in silence, looking across the river at the back cloth of wharves and spidery cranes on the South Bank.
    Morgan said, “Blackett. Randall Blackett. He’s a large slice of our cake, isn’t he?”
    “Sixty-two companies. It might be sixty-four. They grow so fast you can hardly keep count of them.”
    “And it was his partner, Colonel Paterson, who got killed in that accident.”
    “That’s right. Why the sudden interest?”
    “I always take an interest in my work. Are we accountants and auditors of all Blackett’s companies?”
    “As far as I know.”
    “Have you ever met him?”
    “I’ve talked to him on the telephone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. Sam Lyon does most of his stuff. I expect he has to meet him from time to time.”
    “A Napoleon of finance,” said Morgan. “A Genghis Kahn of the business world. A king tiger in the jungle of industry. And I’ll bet his wife bullies him.”
    “He’s a bachelor.”
    “Ah! A man of good sense.” Morgan got up, went into the building and reappeared with a tray containing two further pints of beer and two glasses of whisky.
    “The old Scottish custom of the chaser,” he said. “It improves both the beer and the whisky.”
    “Steady on,” said Hopkirk. “We don’t want to turn up stinking.”
    “What a truly horrible expression. In the days of the Regency, if a man happened to have consumed rather more alcoholic liquor than was wise, he was said to be glorious. ‘Stinking,’ indeed. How we have debased the language of drinking. You’ll be talking about ‘blotto’ next.”
    He swallowed the whole of the whisky and half the beer. Gerald Hopkirk followed suit, but more slowly.
    “Stop looking at your watch,” said Morgan. “We’ve lots of time. . . . April weather. I’m getting cold. Let’s have a last one inside.”
    The public bar had a dozen customers now. A dozen made it seem crowded. Three men in executive suits, two middle-aged and one young, were occupying the three stools at the bar.
    “The three bears,” said Morgan. “Father Bear, Mother Bear and Baby Bear.”
    This was unkind, especially to Mother Bear.
    “Were you talking about us?” said Father Bear.
    “I was talking to myself,” said Morgan. “It’s a terrible weakness I have. Two more of the same, please, Sidney.”
    “I think you were being bloody rude,” said Mother Bear.
    Baby Bear said, “He’s just a bloody Welshman.”
    “That’s right,” said Morgan, “a bloody Welshman.” He sounded pleased. “There’s just one thing wrong with