Lucius the Club | Page 5

was on the take. When I was sure of
the facts I asked Mama what we should do.
She seemed almost pleased. 'Oh,' she said, 'we must sack him. Publicly.
Make a bit of a fuss. Oh, it will be such fun, Lucius!'
It didn't seem like fun to me. I checked and doublechecked, and on the
quiet got another accountant to go over the books with me. It wasn't
difficult - lots of men were happy to do a favour for a woman like
Mama. Nor was it difficult to see what our accountant was doing. He
was just charging outrageous fees for simple work. Keeping money in
his own account and earning interest from it.
Mama wrote a little script for me. And one day, when our man was
having lunch with some key clients, at a rather expensive restaurant, I
marched in with Mama behind me.

The restaurant had a stone floor - it must have been fashionable that
year - and my stick clicked on it as I crossed the room in my
dot-and-carry-one fashion.
We were an odd pair, Mama and I, and everybody stopped talking and
watched as we neared the table. Then I tossed a pile of bank accounts in
among the wine glasses and vegetables.
'Barrington,' I said - I think his name was Barrington, but it's a long
time ago - 'Barrington, you've been stealing money from my mother.
The total sum nicked is £1,545.' Or whatever. 'You've got three days to
pay it back, or your professional association will hear about it, and I
will do my best to have you disbarred.'
And then Mama and I walked out.
Well, as you can imagine, this caused a bit of a stir, and Soho talked of
nothing else for two whole days.
The next morning, Barrington was round with a certified banker's
cheque and a fluent line in babble, but we just took the money and told
him to fuck off.
'That was brains, you see, Lucius,' Mama told me. 'That proved you've
got brains. And that was stage one. This time, we're going to have to
prove you've got balls.'
*
Ah yes. Balls. That really was the central point.
It was one thing to decide, in a cold-blooded and logical manner, that
you really could not tolerate blackmail. And it was easy to rule out
going to the police, or paying the blackmailer - which just left killing
the greedy bastard. It was easy to reach that conclusion. But did I have
the balls to do it? That was what was worrying me.
Overnight, I didn't sleep at all well, and I didn't fancy breakfast much. I

was beginning to feel that tightness in the scrotum, and the sick, vomity
feeling in my stomach that signals a nasty attack of the doubts.
I should have known, mind you, that there would always be trouble.
Jack had warned me, after the accountant affair.
'You did well there, Lucius,' he told me. We met by chance on
Piccadilly and he took me into the Ritz for coffee. 'Handled yourself
well. But be warned. That won't be the last problem you have, and it
won't be the worst.'
'Oh?' I said. 'Why so?'
'Because your mother mixes with bad company. All her father's old
friends. Some of the biggest crooks in London are men she calls Uncle.
And when you mix an attractive woman with hard men like that, what
you get is trouble.'
So I can't say I wasn't told.
Anyway, I put Grandad's rather frightening weapon back in its oily
towel, packed it in an overnight bag, and went down to Sussex on the
train.
When I got to The Farm, I went out into the wood at the back and tried
the gun out.
Quite frankly I very nearly wet myself the first time I fired it. The gun
looked all right. But it was old. God only knew how old, or how long it
had sat there in the cellar.
Eventually I managed to summon up enough courage to pull the trigger,
and no disaster ensued, so I carried out a series of tests. I tried out
cartridges with various sizes of shot, at various distances from the
target, and made quite a mess of several old tree trunks. I learnt how to
brace myself against the recoil, and how to control the muzzle flip.
These tests decided me that whoever had doctored the weapon knew

what they were doing. They had made it short enough to be easily
concealed under a mac or an overcoat, but the barrel was still long
enough to ensure that the shot did not disperse too widely. And a tight
shot pattern is what you want, if you're going to kill someone. The idea
is