Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’

  A male voice. A voice harsh with cheap authority. And something else, Garvie thought. Anxiety. Or fear.

  That was interesting.

  Garvie sat down on one of the sofas and lit up. Half hidden under the broad leaves of what looked like a palm tree, he sat back to listen.

  ‘I got no time for this,’ the voice said. ‘What are we running here, a charity?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s just this headache—’

  ‘You think I give a shit about your headache? You think the punters out there want to know about your headache?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘You got a face on like Grumpy the dwarf. All right, you’re short. But you can smile, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  A girl in a toga came through the door, wiping her face. She was short. Also unsmiling. She went between the sofas without seeing Garvie, and out of a door on the other side. As it opened there was the brief hum of voices and the clank of slot machines, then quiet again as it closed.

  The voice in the room said, ‘What’s her name, anyway?’

  Another deeper, slower voice, said, ‘Messalina.’

  ‘I mean, what’s her real name?’

  ‘Madonna.’

  There was a short pause suggesting astonishment.

  ‘You’re shitting me. Madonna? Listen, my old man sees so-called Madonna pulling that long face out there, he’s going to first of all rip her head off, which I don’t care about, and second of all rip my head off. Which bothers me. If he looks like he’s getting the hump, I want to know. All right?’

  There was a pause. Then the same voice said, ‘Christ, I hate it when he’s here on a Friday.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Listen.’

  Now his voice was cautious.

  ‘He had another visit this morning. Some rag-head DI.’

  ‘What’s he after?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know. What are they ever after? What I want to know is: we run a pretty tight ship, don’t we?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No splitters.’

  ‘No splitters.’

  ‘What about the tarts? That’s my only worry. See? What about this Madonna? What about that new one? Hannah, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Hannah.’

  ‘Thinks she’s such an independent spirit. What about her? She going to shoot her mouth off?’

  There was another, longer pause, as if dedicated to hard thinking.

  ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I just want to make sure no one’s saying the wrong things.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll have a word.’

  ‘All right. Good.’

  A moment later two men came out of the room. The first was big and bald, dressed like the doormen in over-tight dinner jacket and black bow tie. He went across the lounge with massive shunting movements and exited into the casino. The other man was the manager. Garvie noticed again how young he was. Twenty, twenty-one. He had a raw, moist face and a twitchy expression. And pig-crazy eyes. He followed the big man, stopped suddenly, sniffed, looked all around without seeing anything, swore, and went on into the casino too.

  After a while Garvie finished his Benson and Hedges, dropped the butt in the palm-tree pot and followed them.

  46

  IT WAS A risk. But then, like Chloe, he liked risks. With one eye he kept tabs on the whereabouts of Pig Crazy, and with the other he went searching through the crowds for a girl in a toga. A girl with shoulder-length brown hair, amused grey eyes and winking dimples. He couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the bar or coffee lounge, or around the blackjack or roulette tables, or in the poker or baccarat rooms. In the end he waited by the one-armed bandits, and that’s where she found him.

  ‘Taking a risk, Garvie Smith. You’re strictly verboten. The manager told us to report it if we see you.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Risk’s my middle name.’ He wasn’t sure he’d ever said anything so corny.

  ‘Is it? How funny. Now I know three of yours and you still don’t know any of mine.’

  ‘I could know yours.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’m a very good guesser.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As it happens, guessing is my speciality.’

  ‘And you think you can guess my name?’

  Looking at her, he thought he might just drown in her grey eyes instead, and he pulled away his gaze and said, ‘Best if I warm up on someone else.’ He gestured around the blackjack room. ‘Go ahead, test me. Pick someone. Anyone.’

  ‘All right, Sherlock. Guess her name.’

  ‘Who, the dealer?’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘All right.’ He winced. ‘I have to concentrate for this. Might need a glass of champagne.’

  ‘Guess first.’

  He sighed deeply, pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingertips and fixed his attention on the unsmiling girl with the blackjack decks.

  ‘A girl with problems, clearly,’ he said after a moment. ‘Headaches, I’d say.’

  Hypatia’s eyebrows went up. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Unhappy too. Been crying recently. See how stiff her hair is at the front where she’s been wiping her face? My guess is, the manager doesn’t like her. Most probably he’s been bawling her out.’

  Hypatia looked at him curiously, a half-smile on her face.

  ‘But in fact,’ he went on, ‘she doesn’t really like herself.’

  ‘Really? And why’s that?’

  ‘Wishes she was taller.’

  Hypatia stared at him. ‘OK. Interesting. But what’s her name? You still haven’t told me that.’

  ‘Coming to it. Her name’s ... one of the things that makes her unhappy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Doesn’t suit her. She feels weighed down by it. She doesn’t look like the sort of person to have such a name.’

  ‘Very interesting. But what is it?’

  He sighed. ‘I’m just going to have to take a wild guess.’

  He was silent.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said.

  He beckoned her closer, and leaned in towards her, and whispered, ‘Madonna.’

  For a second she stared at him in wonderment. Then she began to laugh. It was the prettiest laugh he’d ever heard. And when she stopped laughing she punched him on the arm. It was a good punch too.

  ‘Er. Ow?’

  ‘All right, so you must have overheard her name. You get three more minutes of my time. Apart from my name, which is still a secret, what do you want to know?’

  ‘That man there. Mr Pig Crazy.’

  She followed his eyes to the manager, who appeared briefly on the other side of the blackjack table and went away through the coffee lounge.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do I detect a family resemblance to the owner?’

  ‘Another clever guess. Yes, Darren’s his son.’

  ‘And what was it you saw Darren doing?’

  Her face went very still, her large eyes even larger.

  ‘Three weeks ago yesterday,’ Garvie said. ‘Something happened here to a friend of mine. And my third good guess of the evening is that Mr Pig Crazy was involved. He’s a bit highly strung, and he’s frightened of something, and I can’t help thinking that he might have—’

  She put her hand on his arm and he fell silent. Following her eyes, he turned round slowly and found himself squashed against the tightly jacketed belly of a man he recognized as the manager’s meaty sidekick.

  ‘Manager wants a word,’ the man said impassively.

  ‘Kind of him,’ Garvie said, ‘though to be honest I’m a bit rushed at the minute. I wonder if—’

  But the man took hold of his arm and they went together, a little awkwardly, round the blackjack table and through another Staff Only door to the manager’s office.

  It smelled of aftershave. It was a smart room, plush
even, but abused. The exotic plant in the corner had died, there was litter heaped up around the brass waste-paper bin and the dimpled leather sofa was covered with debris: cardboard boxes, bits of equipment, rolled-up promotional posters. The large walnut desk was dusty and stained with water-rings.

  Behind the desk sat Winder Junior, the source of the aftershave smell. His face glistened.

  ‘Member’s card,’ he said, holding out his hand. His hand trembled slightly.

  ‘Not really worth it, to be honest. It’s a fake.’

  Garvie glanced around the room. Meathead was standing behind him, by the door. The cardboard boxes on the sofa were all the same, small and oblong and unmarked. Underneath them, a tripod and photographer’s umbrella were visible. A corner of an unrolled poster showed the words, All you got to. Through the window above the sofa he could see a snippet of black Porsche.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Bet everything matches inside.’

  ‘Shut up, I said.’

  ‘Does your dad let you drive it sometimes?’

  Winder’s eyes bulged. When he spoke, his voice seemed to bulge too. ‘Think you’re a big man, do you?’

  Garvie looked at him sweating behind his desk. ‘Yeah. Enormous. As you can see.’

  Winder tore at his thumbnail with his teeth. He seemed to be trying to chew it down to the knuckle. ‘Think you got the smarts on me, do you?’

  Garvie said nothing to that. No answer was required. Instead he wondered why Winder was so uptight. Generally people are uptight when they’re scared. Scared of something, or someone. Or scared of what they’ve done.

  ‘You won’t be so smart when I have you prosecuted, you fucking schoolboy.’

  Garvie gazed at him sweating and twitching behind his desk. It was interesting how angry he was. Angry people make stupid mistakes. They get themselves into situations and lose their heads.

  ‘Hey? You won’t be so cool about it when I call the police.’

  ‘You’re not going to call the police,’ Garvie said.

  ‘You think I won’t call the police?’

  He made no move towards the phone. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and grimaced.

  ‘You’re fucking right I won’t call the police. I wouldn’t waste my time. I couldn’t care less if you’re not prosecuted. What I care about is keeping over-curious brats like you out of my business. You’re leaving.’ He glanced at Meathead. ‘Now.’

  Meathead shunted forward and took hold of Garvie’s arm.

  ‘Oh, one last over-curious question before we part company,’ Garvie said. ‘How often did Chloe come here?’

  Winder jerked in his seat as if he’d been flicked with a whip, and alarm flashed in his white face. For a moment there was a pause, made ragged by his open-mouthed breathing, then he said to Meathead in a croak, ‘Get him out quick before I break his face open.’

  There was a back entrance with a stiff fire door. The big man used Garvie’s head to open the door, and parts of his shins and knees to check the three concrete steps for tension cracks, before pushing him along, like an inconvenient bit of furniture destined for the tip, into the car park.

  ‘Mind the nice car,’ Garvie said, muffled, from his doubled-up position close to the ground. ‘You wouldn’t want to scrape it with my face.’

  Meathead launched him safely beyond the Porsche, and Garvie plunged onto the concrete with a bone-hard crack and lay there huddled, waiting for the pain in his knees and elbows to subside.

  When at last he rolled over and focused again, he found Meathead still standing there, like an actor waiting to deliver his big line.

  ‘And don’t come back,’ the man said with slow but impressive diction and, turning, went away across the car park with that thickened, shunting motion of his, and hauled himself back up the concrete steps.

  ‘Thank you, then,’ Garvie called after him. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Find your own way home, can you?’

  The man slammed the fire door.

  47

  THE MEDIA FRENZY triggered by news of Naylor’s suicide had led, as predicted, to a full-scale public outcry, and for a long, difficult week Detective Inspector Raminder Singh had cut a forlorn figure in television interviews attempting to answer questions – all of which, in their different ways, asked why levels of police competence had sunk so abysmally low. General opinion was that the mystery of Beauty’s murder would never be solved while the current investigation team was in charge. In a separate development, solicitors representing the family of Paul Johnson had announced their intention to bring legal proceedings against the City Squad on the grounds that their harassment had directly contributed to the suicide of a ‘troubled young man’. There had even been demands for the resignation of the chief constable, a man whose qualities had never been questioned before.

  By the following Monday there was the unmistakable sense within the service that they had only a few days in which to make progress with the case before public pressure forced major changes. Singh was aware of this as he parked his car that morning in the underground car park at Cornwallis Way and walked across the dim concrete concourse towards the exit staircase. Though his uprightness remained, he was haggard with lack of sleep. The last person he wanted to encounter was the chief constable, approaching the staircase from the other direction.

  The chief looked at him lidlessly, and with no other acknowledgement they ascended the steps side by side. The chief said nothing, the silence stretched on, and by the time they reached street level the twitch had returned to Singh’s left cheek.

  Together they went through the main entrance. Together, in the same awkward silence, they went through security and along the corridor, and up in the lift to the fifth floor, and across the open-plan area towards Singh’s office. Where they walked people stopped to look at them, the chief going ahead, silent and grim, Singh lagging slightly behind, pale and taut. The chief’s reputation for brutality with those who disappointed him was legendary. Demotion was invariably accompanied by public disgrace. So the staff in the open-plan area watched with horrified fascination as the two men went towards Singh’s office. Bob Dowell came to a halt by the photocopier, Mal Nolan turned round from the water cooler, Collier looked up from his coffee and followed them with his eyes. When the two men finally reached Singh’s door, the chief stopped and Singh stopped too, exposed to all the watching people, waiting, like them, to be told what was to be done to him. But after a moment, without a word, the chief continued on his way, leaving Singh standing there alone, facing all those still watching him in silence across the long open space. He hardly saw them. Numbly he stood until he felt sweat come into his eyes, then turned unsteadily. His PA had come round her desk and was attempting to talk to him, or perhaps offer him medical assistance – ‘Sir? Sir?’ she said. ‘You ought to know ... There’s a ...’ – but he went past her, hardly hearing what she said, and retreated at last into the safety of his office.

  Where he found Garvie Smith sitting in his chair with his feet on his desk.

  GARVIE SMITH: Come in, Inspector Singh. Glad you could make it. Take a seat. I won’t keep you long.

  DI SINGH [stationary, blinking, looking at Garvie, looking at his office door, looking back at Garvie]

  GARVIE SMITH: You left your window open.

  DI SINGH [looking bewildered at the window]

  GARVIE SMITH: Don’t be soft. We’re on the fifth floor. Michael brought me up. He’s a nice lad, Michael. Knows my uncle. Very friendly and willing to please. I like that in a policeman. Anyway—

  DI SINGH [coming to his senses at last, hastily shutting his office door, striding forward, taking hold of Garvie and pulling him out of his chair]

  ‘All right, all right, don’t lose your blob.’

  In a hiss not to be overheard by his PA outside Singh said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? I told you never to come here again.’

  ‘Yeah, well. There’s new stu
ff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘You know. Shocking discoveries, vital clues. Listen, do you have to keep grabbing my arm like this? I find it off-putting.’

  Singh let go of his arm. ‘We had an agreement, remember?’

  ‘No. My memory’s not so great. Did I sign something?’

  ‘I made it clear that it was over.’

  ‘Tell that to the papers. They think it’s never going to end.’

  For a moment Singh glared at Garvie so fiercely it seemed he was about to push him up against his office wall and clap him in plasti-cuffs. Then he let out a long, exasperated sigh. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’ He went stiffly back to his desk and sat down. Adjusted his turban. ‘Tell me what you want, quickly now. Then you have to leave. The nice young policeman will take you back down.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to tell you. There’s a car you might be interested in. Porsche. Black, as it happens.’

  Singh looked at him for a long moment, deciding what to do. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said at last, with a glance over his shoulder at his shut office door.

  Garvie raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s a bit more definite than last time. Do you have something new to go on?’

  Singh hesitated.

  ‘Come on, man, you can trust me. Besides, I can help you. What’s it look like, this black Porsche of yours? Eighteen-inch sport techno wheels? Carrera rear spoiler? Single oval-tube tail pipes, one each side?’

  Singh said at last, ‘It’s possible. The footage isn’t as clear as we’d like.’

  ‘Where did the CCTV catch it?’

  ‘Bootham Street on Thursday evening. She was picked up by someone driving a Porsche that may match that description just before seven o’clock.’