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my money, has opted for somewhere slightly less grand.’
    â€˜I’ll walk you round there.’
    The two Americans went out of the pub together, but Charles needed a pee. Having not been since lunchtime, he’d needed one when he first arrived in the pub, but not for the first time alcohol had diverted his intentions. By now, with two double Bell’s inside him, the need was quite urgent.
    He crossed the bar from the Gents, giving a half-hearted wave to the barmaid, who didn’t notice the gesture. He was about to leave when something he saw through the bubbled glass of the window made him stop.
    It had come on to rain and the seafront of Eastbourne looked particularly drab and Novemberish. Protected from the rain by the awning over the pub’s door stood Kenny Polizzi and his agent.
    Lefty was giving something to his boss.
    It was a semi-automatic pistol.
    Within seconds it was hidden in Kenny’s coat pocket and the two men were walking away.

THREE
    FIRST BROKER’S MAN: I’ve just read a book about three holes in the ground.
    SECOND BROKER’S MAN: Well, well, well.
    FIRST BROKER’S MAN: Yes, that was the title.
    C harles picked up a tuna sandwich from a convenience store on his way back to his digs. The accommodation, recommended by the Empire Theatre, had been described as ‘self-catering’, but Charles wasn’t much of a one for cooking. He rarely aspired beyond a tin of baked beans on toast. That evening a tuna sandwich would do him fine … so long as he’d got a bottle of Bell’s by way of accompaniment. And he was confident there was one back at the digs.
    In spite of the rain through which he splashed, the front at Eastbourne still retained the Victorian elegance which had once seen it called ‘the Empress of Watering Places’. Lights still shone from the pier, with its blue and white paint, its Victorian Tea Rooms, its Atlantis night club at the end. Charles loved the tacky charm of English seaside towns out of season.
    He felt sure he’d come to Eastbourne with his wife Frances when their daughter Juliet was tiny. Hadn’t they travelled on the trackless Dotto train with her along the seafront? Or was that in Hastings? Whichever, it had been a good memory. Mixing an actor’s life and marriage had seemed very simple then. That reminded him – he must ring Frances.
    By the entrance to the pier he turned away from the front, towards the shabbier hinterland of the town where his digs were. And as he did so, Charles thought about the scene he had just witnessed outside the Sea Dog. He felt pretty sure that the handover of the pistol followed on from what Lefty had said to Kenny, ‘I got what you asked me to get you.’
    Charles also remembered Kenny saying on
The Johnny Martin Show
that he felt naked without a gun. Maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe, as someone with such a high public profile, Kenny Polizzi was genuinely worried about crackpots and stalkers and carried a gun for self-protection.
    Charles concluded that there probably wasn’t anything sinister about what he had just witnessed. And it wasn’t his business, anyway. But he couldn’t completely clear his mind of the memory.
    The tuna sandwich he found when he got to his digs wasn’t very nice. Though the label carried that day’s date, it tasted like it had spent rather longer on the refrigerated shelf than it should have done. It had certainly had time to get very soggy. Hard to tell where the brown bread stopped and the tuna started.
    Perhaps he should have stayed in the Sea Dog after Kenny and Lefty went, ordered something to eat there. It was a decision Charles had to make quite often in his life. Though some of his meals were boozy, boisterous affairs with other actors, his chosen lifestyle meant that he usually ate on his own. Over the years he’d had a lot of sad sandwiches and melancholy microwaving in his Hereford Road flat