Free September Song by Colin Murray

it settled on me that told me she knew what I was thinking and that such intimacy would not be welcome. I suddenly realized that I was wrong. She did know how attractive she was.
    I coloured slightly. At first, because I was a bit miffed that she thought that I was as obvious and predictable as every other man she’d ever been alone with, and then because I realized that she was right.
    I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t as crass or as crude as Ricky Mountjoy and never had been. Not that that would have meant anything to Jeannie Summers.
    Something about young Ricky had been nagging at me for a while, and I suddenly realized what it was. A lad (however likely) from a Leyton family on one of the bottom rungs of criminal activity wouldn’t just have strolled out of Pentonville or Wandsworth and started up a nice little business in the West End. Even Leyton’s most important villains (a category that certainly included the Mountjoys) wouldn’t make it into the robbers’ version of Burke’s Peerage . This was lucrative stuff. And it was dangerous. It was turf that was fought over. Maybe his dad or one of his uncles had moved into the big time and was employing him. But it was far more likely that he’d made some interesting friends on the inside. Either way, there were grown-ups behind him.
    It also crossed my mind that Les Jackson wasn’t going to be too happy to hear that one of the actors he was grooming for success had been slumming it in the Frighted Horse, in the company of some seedy purveyors of little bags of powdered happiness. And it occurred to me that he might blame me. After all, I was supposed to be looking after the little toerag.
    A door banged somewhere above us, abrupt and startling, and then there were heavy footsteps on the stairs that led from the kitchen of the Acropolis down to the alley. We both tensed slightly and stared at the window.
    Miss Summers nervously glugged down enough mother’s ruin and tonic water to slake the thirst of a Welsh front row.
    It’d be one of the Greek kitchen staff with a bucket of potato peelings and fish heads to add to the cats’ cornucopia.
    I attempted a reassuring smile. But my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t feeling very reassuring because I counted three pairs of feet clanging on the iron stairs and I doubted that the Acropolis boasted more than one kitchen boy to wash up and dump the rubbish. On the other hand, maybe it was just the management using the back exit, or the council investigating complaints about the sanitary arrangements.
    I guess that the bash on the head had me looking for people creeping up behind me.
    If that was the case then I definitely had something to thank young Billy Watson for because these guys shuffled around for a moment or two at the bottom of the steps, muttering, and then opened the back door to Pete’s Place. They strode steadily along the corridor, past the office and then stopped and knocked on the next door, which was, I realized, Jeannie Summers’ dressing room.
    She looked at me with wide eyes, and I held my hand up to indicate that she should stay put and moved to the door.
    I listened for a moment, but all I heard was some more muttering and another knock. I remembered all that stuff I learned in the army about never volunteering for anything, always keeping your head down and how discretion is very much the better part of value, then I gave a little mental shrug and, as I’d done so often before, ignored any good advice I’d been offered and slipped out to see what was going on.
    A quick glance confirmed what I already knew. There were three men standing outside the dressing-room door. Well, two, who I didn’t recognize, were standing there, and one, who I had seen before, was propped up against the wall next to it and looked as if he was about to slide down it.
    The two who I didn’t know were hard-looking guys about my age in