Bootlegged Angel

by Ripley, Mike

  You could buy silver in any form imaginable short of pieces-of-eight with genuine pirate’s teeth marks, though I never actually checked that you couldn’t. I had no idea that there were so many things you could have made in silver, from a toothpick to a football trophy as well as a host of items you probably wouldn’t give house room to. I knew that the old liveried guild halls in the City – Ironmongers’ Hall, Saddlemakers’ Hall, Brewers’ Hall and so on – always produced their silverware for formal dinners. This was indeed ‘the family silver’ amassed over the centuries and you were expected to look at it and be impressed by the antique wealth of the sugar shakers and the mustard bowls and the things nobody was sure quite what they were for. You could look and admire and even have a guess at the value, but the one thing you could never do was touch.

  I had gone down there to scope the place for Amy’s photographic session and homed in on one of the shops in the centre of the Vaults which had ‘Sloman and Son’ stencilled ever so discreetly on its bulletproof glass door. The reason it caught my eye was that it was the only shop manned (and I do mean ‘manned’ as there wasn’t a female in sight) by anyone under the age of sixty-five.

  His name was Reuben and he was about forty-five years under sixty-five and looked like a computer nerd rather than the great-grandson of a skilled silversmith.

  ‘Models? Girls modelling clothes? Here?’ he had said when I broached the idea with him. ‘Oh, I don’t know whether we do things like that down here in the Vaults.’

  ‘A shame,’ I had said, ‘because it is all about promoting silver. The girls are really only there to show off the silver thread sewing. They just . . . fill things out.’

  He had paused at that and his eyes had wandered to a small office, no bigger than a cupboard, at the end of the shop. The door was open and I could see a small desk and a high stool and on the desk were a pile of magazines, a can of Diet Pepsi and a packet of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. I could hear his mind working.

  ‘They’ll need somewhere to change, won’t they?’ he had said and at that moment he was mine.

  When I got back to the Silver Vaults from Stuart Street, Reuben Sloman should have been cursing the day I had wandered into his shop. Half his stock had been piled in cardboard boxes and pushed to one side, Amy’s photographer had set up lights which made the temperature in the place almost unbearable and there were a dozen people in a space where normally three customers would be a crowd. Amy was using a solid silver tulip vase as an ashtray and having a row with Nigel, her art director.

  The six models stood around looking bored, but they were models so it came to them naturally. They were dressed uniformly in short houndstooth check skirts, black shiny tights and black shoes. They were also undressed uniformly in that above their skirts, they wore only their bras – two black, four white, one of them an uplift.

  ‘Can I get anyone another drink?’ Reuben was asking, moving in and out of the models like a bemused sheepdog. ‘Hi again, Angel. It’s going great.’

  He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, not to mention grateful. It was nice to be appreciated.

  ‘This is a farce,’ hissed Amy, switching her venom from Nigel to me just because I was nearer. ‘You never said it was this small.’

  ‘I did. Well, “cosy” was probably the word I used.’

  ‘Cosy is right. We could sell tickets.’

  She was right about that. Most of the dealers from the other shops, several legitimate customers and a couple of security guards were loitering in the aisles outside trying to get a peek into the shop.

  ‘Why the strip show? The tops not arrived?’ I asked her, trying to show an interest in her career.

  ‘No.’ Her voice went down a half-octave, which meant sarcasm was coming. ‘They’re all allowed thirty minutes free boob-tanning under the lights before we shoot. It’s in their contracts.’

  ‘That’s nice. Can I check, see if they’re done?’

  ‘Don’t even think it. They can’t wear them until we’re ready to go because the lights make them sweat like pigs. Not the look we’re after and Nigel’s been having the vapours about it for the last hour.’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ I said, looking at Reuben, who gave me a big, cheesy grin in return.

  ‘Yeah,’ drawled Amy, ‘I think we’ve got a hormone overload on our hands.’

  ‘Don’t even think it, darling,’ I said sweetly. ‘He’s far too young for you.’

  She flashed me a killer look so I tried to be helpful.

  ‘Why not kill the lights? Use fast film and a flash?’

  ‘Because,’ she said slowly in full patronise mode, ‘all this fucking silver bounces the flash and reflects everywhere. We took some Polaroids and it looked like the girls were standing in the Planetarium boldly going through hyperspace.’

  ‘So why not go for that? Really do it. Get him to put two or three remote flashes on so you get a reflection in every piece of silver in the place. “All that sparkles really is silver.” Something like that as a theme. Could work.’

  She thought about this for all of five seconds but I knew it was going down well from the way the little vein in her neck throbbed.

  ‘You might have half an idea there,’ she said quietly. ‘But I’ll have to get Nigel to think of it.’

  ‘Is that a problem for you?’

  She grinned at that, looking at the back of Nigel’s head as if it had a bull’s-eye target painted on it.

  ‘Nope. He won’t feel a thing. Where’ve you been anyway?’

  ‘Just popped over to Hackney, collect the junk mail, see if anyone was around.’

  ‘And was anyone?’

  ‘No, not a soul, but I did get a message.’

  She gave me one of those looks which suggested that she still didn’t trust me for some reason.

  ‘From whom?’ she asked primly.

  ‘A woman called Veronica Blugden. I used to know her a couple of years ago.’

  The before I met you hung in the sticky air along with the smell of sweat, tobacco and silver polish.

  ‘She wants to see me and pick my brains on something.’

  ‘Just your brains?’

  ‘You don’t know Veronica.’

  ‘Yeah, well, get your appetite where you can, just remember you eat at home.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I’d heard that one before. ‘It’s purely professional. She just wants my help with a job she’s got.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She’s a private detective.’

  Amy threw back her head and roared with laughter.

  ‘You? A private detective?’

  Suddenly I burst out laughing as well.

  ‘You think that’s funny? You should see Veronica!’

  2

  When I had talked to Veronica from Stuart Street, I had established two things before agreeing to meet her. Firstly, that she was still based in Shepherd’s Bush in the office she shared with Stella Rudgard and secondly, that Stella wasn’t around when I planned to call. I didn’t mind Amy having suspicious thoughts about Veronica; all she had to do was see her and they would disappear immediately. Thirty seconds with Stella, on the other hand, would put the hairs on the back of her neck up and I could live without that.

  Veronica had sort of inherited the detective agency from an ex-policeman called Albert Block who, if he hadn’t exactly broken the law on occasion, had certainly bent it. I had met her on her first solo case when she attempted to hijack the cab I was driving.

  Admittedly, ‘hijack’ is a bit strong. I was driving an Armstrong in those days, a black Austin FX4S London taxi; the sort you see on hundreds of postcards, tins of toffees and calendars issued by the London Tourist Board. That was the original Armstrong. Nowadays I drove Armstrong II (when I was allowed), a Fairway, though only experts could tell them apart unless they noticed the word ‘Fairway’ in red script on the boot. Suffice it to say that the Fairway, with its improved engine, was the last in the line of
the classic black cabs. Shortly after it appeared, we had the ugly and angular Metrocab and now the streets are crawling with the new generation of smaller, rounder TXs or ‘Tixilicks’ as they are referred to – though always behind the driver’s back.

  Veronica, in those days, could just about tell the difference between a black cab and a Number 13 bus. As it happened, there wasn’t a Number 13 bus in sight but I was and she’d jumped in the back – whilst I’d been parked up on Wimpole Street, minding my own business – and yelled, ‘Follow that cab!’

  There had been a time when I would have just gone for it and hoped she wouldn’t notice that where the cab’s meter should have been was a cassette deck. When that had happened in the past, I had always wheeled out the excuse: ‘Sorry, guv, I forgot to put the meter on. Call it a fiver, shall we?’ You’d be amazed at how many people coughed up, though there was always the wise guy who legged it, thinking they had put one over on a genuine cabbie. But the vast silent majority simply took things at face value. A black cab cruising London was a black London cab, part of the scenery, unremarkable, perfect camouflage. Or at least I hoped so. That was why I liked driving one although the hackney cab licensing authorities frowned on delicensed cabs being sold to civilians within metropolitan London, on the basis – heaven forfend! – that someone might take advantage of the situation.

  The problem when I met Veronica was that I tried to play the stand-up guy and explain things to her. By the time I had got her to understand that I wasn’t touting for a fare, the person she was supposed to be tailing had disappeared round the corner in a real cab and she had promptly burst into tears.

  Even though it was the worst attempt at following somebody I had ever seen – she used the Homer Simpson Defence: ‘It’s my first day’ – I took pity on her and helped her, one way or another, to solve her first case.

  As far as I knew, that had been her only case but she said she was still in business and, even more surprisingly, still in partnership with Stella, the very person she had been trying to follow when, of all the taxis and all the minicabs in all the world, she had dropped into the back of mine.

  I had always regarded Stella as at least one sandwich short of a picnic and only a healthy and totally amoral love of physical sex kept her just this side of psychotic. But then, I hadn’t known her for long. Neither had Veronica when they had teamed up and formed Rudgard and Blugden Confidential Enquiries. I had been sceptical of them being able to work together and whether or not the business would ever turn a profit, but I had approved of the name. ‘R&B Investigations’ was just eye-catching enough to pick them out from all the other private detective agencies in the London phone book, most of whom thought that by calling themselves the ‘A’ or ‘AA’ agency, they would pick up business alphabetically. For most people, and in the absence of a Which? consumers’ guide to private eyes, the name they hit first was the one they rang. At least ‘R&B’ sounded vaguely cool and, anyway, they discounted my other suggestion – ‘Aardvark Enquiries’ – as somebody had already done it.

  Round in Shepherd’s Bush Green, the plastic printed sign saying ‘Rudgard and Blugden’ was still on the door. Even if they had been doing well, there was no point in moving upmarket to a brass plaque in that area, it wouldn’t have lasted a week. Most of the churches around there were technically classed as ‘environmentally friendly’ these days – lead-free, that is.

  The push-button intercom was still there and still seemed to work, so I announced myself. A distorted voice answered:

  ‘Angel? Come on up. You behavin’ yourself?’

  The voice, female, didn’t wait for an answer and the lock buzzed and the door opened.

  Even through the cheap electronic crackle I thought I recognised it. I knew it wasn’t Veronica and she had promised me faithfully (and Veronicas don’t lie) that Stella wasn’t around. So it puzzled rather than worried me as I started to climb the stairs to the first floor where R&B had their offices. But not for long.

  ‘Are you behavin’ yourself? I asked if you were behavin’ yo’self.’

  ‘Doing my best, Mrs Delacourt,’ I said as somewhere at the back of my head one of the few remaining unraddled memory chips snapped into action. ‘Doing my best in a hard world.’

  I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  Mrs Delacourt was certainly doing well, if appearances could be relied upon. I knew she must be pushing sixty but she had lost ten years thanks to a smart dark purple trouser suit, a frilly white blouse and a gold chain around her neck which matched the gold chain strung from her gold-framed glasses.

  I used to knock about with her eldest son Crimson and once, when she thought he was in a spot of bother, she had approached Albert Block’s (as it was then) agency for help. She couldn’t pay to hire a detective so she offered to do a couple of days a week cleaning in the office. That was just the time when Veronica found herself inheriting the business and I recalled hearing that she had employed Crimson’s mum as an undercover cleaner on jobs where there was petty theft going on from an office or the odd spot of industrial espionage. From the way she was dressed and the fact that she seemed to have her own office, that side of the business looked to be booming.

  ‘You’re looking well, Mrs Delacourt,’ I said, turning on the smile at full wattage. ‘In fact, you’re looking well handsome. You behavin’ yourself?’

  ‘I intend to live long and prosper,’ she said seriously, but her stern black face was letting the glint of a smile through.

  ‘That sounds like a plan,’ I said. ‘How’s Crimson?’

  ‘Got himself married and two children in twenty months. You credit that?’

  ‘Sounds like he’s doing something right.’

  ‘But at least he’s got a steady job now. He’s not done as well as you, though, Mr Angel. I hear you’re –’

  ‘Is Veronica in, Mrs D.? She said she wanted to see me quite urgently.’

  She looked at me over her glasses and made a ‘Mmmmm’ sound deep in her throat. Then she looked at the digital switchboard/fax machine on her desk to check there were no lights flashing.

  ‘She’s off the phone now. You can go in.’

  She nodded towards the end of the corridor. There were three doors to choose from but unless they had remodelled the building, I knew one was a kitchen and the other a toilet.

  As I passed her, she said: ‘Nice suit. I suppose you get them trade these days.’

  I gave her trouser suit the once up-and-down and fingered the lapel of my jacket.

  ‘You can’t beat pure wool, Mrs D.,’ I said bitchily, conscious of the fact that working in the fashion business was rubbing off on me. But it didn’t cut much ice with Mrs Delacourt.

  ‘You’ll thank the Lord for Lycra when you get to my age,’ she said, turning back into her office. And I couldn’t argue with that.

  But I wish Veronica had.

  She was wearing white stretch leggings (never white, darling, they just scream ‘fat’) with the foot straps over a pair of red high heels (red shoes only in strobe lighting unless you’re on the pull), but she had made an effort with a dark red TALtop rigged as a round-neck. I didn’t know we did a size 16 (Euro 44) in that shade.

  ‘Angel,’ she said, businesslike, stepping from behind her desk, hand outstretched, ‘thank you for coming so quickly.’

  I ignored her hand and wrapped her in a hug so that she couldn’t see me bite my tongue to suppress a giggle.

  ‘Veronica, my dear, you’re looking extremely well. Are you working out?’

  ‘You can tell?’ she whispered into my ear.

  ‘It shines out, Von, shines out. You’re looking well fit.’

  I hadn’t the heart to tell her I had spotted the Adidas sports bag on the floor behind her desk. She hadn’t zipped it fully and I could see the heel of a Reebok and more leopardskin leotard than my imagination could handle.

  ‘I only do two sessions a week,’ she said, disengaging delicately and putting the desk between us. ‘It’s
difficult to find the time what with the amount of work we have on.’

  ‘That’s good to hear. Crime is one of the few growth industries left in this country, so cash in while you can.’ I sat down in the low, metal-framed armchair reserved for visitors. ‘Was this Stella’s idea?’

  ‘What?’ She was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Having the client’s chair lower than yours so they have to look up to you.’

  ‘I didn’t. . . . I never . . .’

  No, you wouldn’t have, but Stella would.

  ‘I’m not complaining, Vonnie, I approve. Good psychology, especially when you tell them your daily rate.’

  Even better if they could see Stella’s legs through the knee-hole in the desk. The last thing they would think about would be the daily rate. But this was Veronica.

  ‘Contrary to the pulp fiction you read,’ she recovered well, ‘we mostly meet clients on site. The work of the modern confidential enquiry agent is more to do with security advice and systems for premises, to combat fraud or pilfering or shoplifting. That’s why we don’t usually quote a daily rate like you seem to think. Most of our work is tendered, full-contract installation or weekly or monthly rates for observational jobs, both overt and covert.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ I said, and I was – very impressed that she’d learned that entire Mission Statement by heart without resort to prompt cards. ‘So you basically sell people security cameras, closed-circuit TV, burglar alarms, that sort of stuff?’

  ‘Mostly . . .’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Which you get from where?’ I said it as if I was genuinely curious.