The Last Card Read Free

hope.’
    ‘No, Matt, it wasn’t one of Bev’s, it was one of mine. And it was grey.’
    This was not the male patter that Matt was expecting and he remained silent while he finished cutting through the tape on H’s right hand. Moments later, flexing his freed fingers, H dunked the hand into the bucket in front of him. It was two-thirds full of iced water. Matt began to cut his way through the tape of the left hand.
    ‘It gets us all in the end, mate. When the grey ones outnumber the black ones,’ Matt continued ‘that’s when you have to worry. You’ve got a few years yet, sunshine.’
    H cast him a withering look. ‘I need a holiday.’ He said the words as though the idea had just occurred to him. It had. ‘I need a holiday,’ he said again, more conviction this time.
    Matt looked at him with surprise. ‘I’m not trying to be funny, H, but … you don’t even have a job!’
    H rose abruptly, wincing from the pounding his ribs had taken, and walked over to his nearby kit-bag. The battered old leather holdall was chained to the coat rack with a huge bicycle lock. H pulled out his mobile. He had a text message from Beverley. Later for that. Ignoring the text H found the number and dialled.
    ‘You’re right, I don’t have a job,’ H said to Matt, listening to the telephone ringing at the other end. ‘But, man … I’m really tired.’
    ***
    The Mercedes was gun-metal grey. It was a 1973 model, a classic, the bodywork in mint condition. H parked it and then eased his bruised body out, pausing before deciding whether he should lock it after him. One of the few things that actually worked properly in the car was a cheap cassette deck. If anyone wanted to steal it, it was better to leave the car unlocked rather than risk a window getting smashed. But something about leaving his Mercedes unlocked offended H’s sense of ownership. He did what he usually did; he left the car unlocked, turned and walked down towards Oxford Street.
    It was a cool, clear, spring night, just after half-past ten and the centre of the city was teeming. Clubbers, tourists, the gay crowd, trendies, workers, drinkers, diners, streetwalkers, theatre-goers, cab drivers … the list was endless and it was one of the things H loved about the city. Whatever the nature of London’s unpredictable weather, the city teemed with life. As he strode purposefully towards Blackie’s shebeen, wearing his lucky suit, H momentarily felt a part of all that was good about London.
    Truth to tell, H did indeed look good. He had on his one good suit, a two-piece, charcoal grey, one-hundred-per-cent wool affair, made by the black designer, Derek Lilliard. It was his lucky suit, the suit that he wore on his special gambling holidays. For that’s where H was going, into the throbbing, underground heart of the gambling shebeens of Soho.
    H turned off noisy Wardour Street, into the quieter Broadwick Street. He paused outside Agent Provocateur before crossing the road and heading into Duck Lane. Duck Lane finished in a dead end, but a little way before that H came to a plain, metal door. He rapped on it twice. Almost immediately, with the slow grinding squeal of metal on concrete, the door opened.
    H entered a dimly-lit hallway. In front of him, leading the way, was a short, dumpy, doughy-faced, Chinese woman. She led him up two flights of stairs, both barely lit, and then into the room where the gambling went on. It was Spartan and dark. In the centre of the room stood a large green baize gambling table, and eight wooden chairs. On either side of this were two smaller tables. The far end of the room was a small kitchen area and on the kitchen counter were sandwiches and drinks.
    High on one of the walls, a silent TV was showing a fight. H’s eyes immediately turned to it: there was Mancini; in the middle of an elimination bout H knew would earn him a crack at the world title. In a packed-out Albert Hall Mancini was putting the final touches to the destruction