Chapter XXIII

As soon as I left the CCAN Bistro I went to bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best suit to CCAN, leant against the bar and spent five pounds on a bottle of English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were up and coming and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he tells me that he is making a hundred pounds a day and has set up a girl who is very serious and never smells of garlic.

I spent a day wandering about Sneinton, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this day that Charlie told me about the death of old Pinchbeck the miser, who had once lived in Sneinton. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.

Pinchbeck died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Sneinton, but the people in the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to the Victoria Centre Market every morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat's meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack--all this with half a million pounds invested. I should like very much to have known him.

Like many misers, Pinchbeck came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat scheme. One day a man appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into Derby on the Red Arrow. It is easy enough, of course, to buy cocaine in Sneinton, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is always some spy who betrays the plan to the bus driver. It is said that this is often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the hands of a large syndicate, who do not want competition. The man, however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Birmingham, not through the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with Pinchbeck through a young artist, a student at Nottingham Trent, who was going to put four thousand pounds into the scheme if Pinchbeck would put six thousand. For this they could buy ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small fortune in Derby.

The man had a tremendous struggle to get the money from between old Pinchbeck's claws. Six thousand pounds was not much--he had more than that sewn into the mattress in his room--but it was agony for him to part with a penny. The student and the man were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty thousand pounds' profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he couldn't do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six thousand pounds.

The man delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fuss Pinchbeck had made, the affair had been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

Pinchbeck and the student were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The student was for throwing the stuff out of the window, but Pinchbeck would not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from Pinchbeck he clasped it to his breast and struggled like a madman, although he was seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

At last, when the police were searching only one floor below, somebody had an idea. A man on Pinchbeck's floor had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on Pinchbeck's table, as though there there were nothing to conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search Pinchbeck's room. They tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins on the table.

'Ay up,' he said, 'have a look at those tins. I hadn't noticed them. What's in them, eh?'

'Face-powder,' said the student as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant Pinchbeck let out a loud groaning noise, from alarm, and the police became suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Pinchbeck and the student began swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested and led off to Sneinton Police Station on the Dale, followed by half the quarter.

At the station, Pinchbeck and the student were interrogated by the Police Detective while a tin of the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Pinchbeck made was beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the student all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost burst with laughing at him.

After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.

'This is not cocaine, sir,' he said.

'What, not cocaine?' said the Police Detective. ‘then--what is it, then?'

'It is face-powder.'

Pinchbeck and the student were released at once, entirely exonerated but very angry. The man had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.

The student was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand pounds, but poor old Pinchbeck was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes yelling out at the top of his voice:

'Six thousand pounds! That’s my fee for writing Down and Out in Paris and Sneinton! Six thousand pounds!'

Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead--of a broken heart, Charlie said.