Free GBH by Ted Lewis

to myself. It was one way of getting onto the machine.
    I insert a coin and press the button that sets up the five ball-bearings and then for no reason at all I think there was something about the girl that was vaguely familiar. I look up from the machine in the direction that the girl had gone. And that’s it. She’s gone. Nowhere to be seen. Out into the night and all that. Anyway, why shouldn’t there have been something familiar about her? The town is full of girls. Why should I even care she seems familiar? I shrug my shoulders, like a dog shaking off rain. I’m obsessive about everything these days. I need a new obsession like I need a win on Littlewoods.
    I pull back the spring mechanism and start the game.

THE SMOKE
    T HE DAY ON WHICH I was going to have a talk to Mal Wilson, I had lunch with my lawyer, James Morville. As usual, it was pleasant and relaxed. As long as you allowed him a half an hour to discourse on his two hobbies, opera and the movies, James was happy to spend the rest of the allotted time meandering through any subject you cared to slide at him, giving gentle exercise to a mind that was as sharp as his exterior was smooth. He was forty-two years old, and extremely wealthy. He enjoyed taking out girls but not on a regular basis. Perhaps his legal mind was a disadvantage to the naturally advantaged young ladies in which he specialised; like a chess player, he was always the requisite number of moves ahead of whatever the young ladies had in their minds. But he was much loved by them; on the other hand he was much hated by the Law. It was ironic really; there was no better criminal lawyer in the country. It wasn’t only his courtroom performances that made him unique; it was his backroom tactics that had all that could afford him knocking on their doors for him to let them out. And this was the area at which the Law’s hatred was directed, and not only the straight law. It was as if the immaculate public presentations of his backstage deals, deals which not only saved the faces of his clients but the faces of the Law themselves, it was as if this very perfection got up their noses most of all; it was similar to the money syndrome. The debtor never forgives the person who is the source of his credit.
    And there was nothing James didn’t know; perhaps this was why they hated him most of all. There was nothing he didn’t know about the villains, either, and that knowledge made him safe; he had no family to threaten. Only his own life was on the line. And if any derailment were ever effected James had made it common knowledge that his will provided that the Attorney General received the key to the safe deposit box that contained his memoirs. There would be more about me in that little box than I could ever remember myself. I often used to say to him, if he ever retired, he should take up biography. There was a big market in biographies.
    Nothing he didn’t know, nothing he couldn’t find, nobody he couldn’t locate. He had his ways, just as I had mine.
    He was a member of the best clubs, and his appearance would have graced the Opposition front benches in the House. And he really loved his work, and the knowledge that he possessed. There was very little I hid from him; and as my lawyer, the more he knew, the better it was for me, should the unforeseen happen. He wouldn’t thank me if it was only while he was standing up in court he discovered I’d sold him a dummy.
    So he already knew of the fates of Philips and Carpenter and Butcher. I’d told him all about it over lunch.
    “Yes,” he said, considering the wine in his glass, “you were quite right. Nothing else you could have done. Not that I can see.”
    He drank some of his wine, savoured it.
    “Farlow’s such an idiot,” he said. “Can’t understand the fellow, screwing it up the way he did. One can only put it down to megalomania. Sheer megalomania.”
    “Well, it’s tough at the top,” I said.
    James smiled and said, “I saw