The Toff And The Toughs by John Creasey

Author:John Creasey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime
Publisher: House Of Stratus
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

HEADLINES

Rollison slowed down as he neared the open gates leading from Birdcage Walk, then pulled into the side of the road, switched off the engine, hitched himself round in his seat, and smiled at the girl. She was looking at him intently, almost imploringly, and he knew that she was desperately anxious for a soothing answer. He did not really know what to say. He could imagine Jolly, almost beside himself with impatience, saying that this girl’s problem wasn’t his, and up to a point that was right. If Rollison asked questions—how old she was, where her parents were, that kind of thing, she would take it for granted that he was being patronising; he needed the answers to the questions but had to find them out for himself, without her knowing. She was holding his hand very tightly, and that betrayed the tautness of her nerves. He remembered how calmly and coolly she had lied to Nicholson, and the possibility that she was fooling him came back to his mind. He did not reject it; he simply did not dwell on it.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “If the boot had been on the other foot, if I’d been grabbed by a really handsome, sexy, voluptuous female and made to think that she and I were the only two people in the world, I wouldn’t have hated it. Twenty-five years ago I might have been a bit scared, but I would have echoed Jonas, brayed ‘good-o!’ and put her to the test.”

“Put her to— oh, I see what you mean. Taken her to bed!”

Rollison chuckled.

“Or let her take me. And why assume that that’s the only way of finding out whether a girl’s for a man or a man’s for a girl?” He paused for a moment, and then went on: “Scared by your own reaction, Doris?”

“I suppose I am, a bit.”

“That’s a healthy sign, surely. The man who worries me is the man who never gets frightened of himself. We all ought to, at some time or other. Now, let’s see how things are. There’s bound to be some kind of trouble after this, of course. If I know the Slob Mob, they will hit out pretty soon and somewhere unexpected, because they’re on the crest of a wave. I don’t quite know the internal set-up yet, but I think that a man named Pyne is pushing Ginger for all he’s worth, and that Pyne is what we call a bad influence. I hope to find out more, very soon. What I don’t want is another gang battle. If Jonas runs wild again— and I’ve never seen anyone fight with more guts—he could make trouble for a lot of your student friends, and I can imagine it going to their heads. Then they’d want nothing less than a pitched battle, which would be lunacy. It might be exciting while it lasted, but dozens would land in a police cell

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