The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  ‘’Ellow, Puck, ’ow is you?’ The familiar voice seemed to come from nowhere and my heart sank – rather like a block of marble falling into the River Irwell. There was never any point in correcting him with the name thing, he did it with everybody. When I turned, it was to see the same dirty yellow check suit, gold pince-nez, and cigarette ash hair; a mix of game show host and dodgy antiques dealer.

  ‘I’m okay thanks, Mel, how about you?’ I tried to disguise the sigh.

  ‘Owe, not three bad.’

  Mel Dickson was a mystery, and one I never really wanted to solve. I’d worked with him before – three years previously – here in the north. I’d done a crazy year working for a ‘design and build’ company, he’d been their senior designer. He was cleverer than he looked. The Cockney patois was ridiculous. Oh, he was from London alright, but rather like an actor forcing himself into character he’d crafted the rhyming slang when he’d moved north.

  ‘… Like the whistle, Mellow.’ I winced at my own insincerity, and he peered back through his pince-nez knowing damn well I was bullshitting. ‘… Still working with Foxton?’

  ‘Nah, ’im brahn bread mate…’ Given both of their social connections I felt it was best not to enquire further. I didn’t need to ask.

  ‘It was a Pulman emblem.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I knew you was in The Smoke, so what you doing in The Mouth then?

  ‘GI Group, office refurb. What you up to?’ I could feel myself adopting his mannerisms.

  ‘’Nother club for ’Is Nibs – yer know, Hoodie. Come and have a look.’ He’d forgotten the ‘butchers’! ‘…Just dah’n the frog-n-toad…We can ball-n-chalk it from ’ere.’ I found myself laughing, he was absurd. He could also be dangerous, I would have to watch my step but I had one advantage, he liked me because he thought I was harmless. I had an hour before my train, and it was on the way so, why not see how the other half lived?

  He may have liked me but I can’t say I could return the compliment, but though his behaviour occasionally veered towards the sociopathic he at least inhabited the real world; had a wife, two children, and lived in a Barrett house in a respectable suburb. The same did not apply to the man for whom he was working; Mr Hood – ‘owns ’alf the city if you want to know.’

  Hood lived in a fifteen-bedroom house which stood in twenty-eight acres, and the fact that it was located in one of the wealthy villages outside the city didn’t prevent the odd dead body from turning up in the vicinity. Usually an amateur crook he’d had ‘pacified’. The police could never pin anything on him, and it was even rumoured that he and the law worked in harmony to maintain a healthy balance in the community.

  His victims would often exhibit signs of prehistoric ritual; an eye or finger missing, evidence of sudden – and no doubt involuntary vasectomy, or occasionally discovered Hilti-nailed to the ceilings of deserted factories. I hoped that Hood would not be there.

  At six foot three Dickson had developed a stoop, but his strides were massive and I had to trot to keep up. He loped along, Samsonite briefcase dangling from left hand; his varicoloured jacket – which he wore unbuttoned – was swinging in regimental manner, and the rattling coming from his pockets was audible even above the traffic noise.

  ‘Just take a butcher’s at the fireman’s hose on that,’ he motioned with his right hand towards a turbaned man coming towards us. Politically incorrect, downright offensive at times, a part of me couldn’t help thinking he was value for money. Dickson’s hand formed a salute, the man ignored him, dignified and determined.

  A young businessman approached us struggling to consume a hotdog with one hand only, the other on the handle of his briefcase.

  ‘You’ll get ghastly writer’s enterwrist you will, mate!’ Dickson’s finger wagged an inch from the frankfurter. The man carried on stolidly.

  As we crossed at the station traffic lights a white van was waiting, engine idling, windows down. Inside were two young men with flat-top haircuts, heads nodding to a sound which was like scaffolding falling off the back of a flatbed truck.

  Dickson paused, stretched out both arms while holding up his briefcase like an overenthusiastic Chancellor of the Exchequer on budget day, stamped his feet, and wriggled his hips. Shit, he was embarrassing. He was the kind of guy that if you saw him in the street and didn’t know him you’d give him a wide berth, but he was like a vaudeville firework and I relished the constant danger of him going off pop.

  The club he was designing was in a railway arch beneath the station. We passed through maroon-painted railings the height of three men, clattered our way across granite setts, and headed towards the filthy brick of the railway arches. I followed his yellow check into the mouth of one of the tunnels. There was a roar from above and the hot stink of plumbers welding. To my left I could see a solid door and a dirty yellow-lit window.

  He bullied his way through the door, turning the handle but simultaneously kicking it with his mustard-coloured brogue. Inside was the kind of office you associate with all-night taxi services, a sub-human concoction of cork, lino and damp tobacco. Eight-foot strip lights, wood grain laminate on the walls, all sticky to the touch.

  ‘Aiindrea, just the little lady I need to see.’ A petite young woman with sculptured blonde quiff was seated at a shiny sapele desk and holding a telephone receiver to her right ear.

  ‘Ellaur Mellaur, lots of porrst ear for Mister ’Ooud. Wants ya to tek it round ta Brazzers as soon as ya can.’

  Dickson’s grey brows furrowed. ‘’Ear that, Puck? ’Is Nibs calls.’ His voice was low and throaty.

  I followed him as he walloped open another door and kicked his way along a dimly lit corridor. He stopped abruptly, as if to sniff the air around him, and groped with his hand against a door on his right, as if he were checking that it was sound. There was a squeak as his hand squeezed the aluminium handle, opened, and poked a light switch on the left-hand wall.

  ‘’Is Nibs’ office…’ he announced, ‘…one of many… One in each of his establishments if you want to know.’ I did. I remembered, though I would perhaps have preferred to have forgotten.

  The room into which I followed him was windowless, little more than a cupboard. Behind the door was a grey steel filing cabinet, while opposite the door was a wood and metal desk with three red plastic telephone handsets standing in line. Three piles of mail – each six inches high – had been placed in the centre of the desk. The wall where one might expect a window to be, was covered with a noticeboard crammed with business cards, Post-it notes, and messages scrawled on scraps of lined paper torn from hand-sized pads. Dickson began to rummage.

  ‘’Oodie don’t like junk.’

  I stood in the centre of the room, my eye travelling over the crazy montage on the wall. Some of the stuff must have been there for years… Neat as the desk – and Hood’s hatred of junk mail – might be, it was evident that he didn’t like to throw things out, inanimate things that is. I was losing interest and about to suggest that I went upstairs and got my train when I was conscious of a pinging sensation in my brain… Not exactly a Eureka moment but something along those lines. On one of the yellow Post-its I could see the word FREIA.

  Given that there hadn’t been a day over the last month that I hadn’t thought about that name it was understandable that I should take a proprietorial interest… None of my business, but before I could help myself my left hand went out and brushed aside the neighbouring note. There it was, handwritten capitals FREIA LLOYD LEWIS, all on one line, nothing else, no message, no number; nothing. Dickson saw me stroking the noticeboard.

  ‘’Ear, Puck, a thou out of place and ’Is Nibs will notice.’ His face was dark with warning, ‘…and it’ll be my gonads ’e ’as for garters.’ I could well imagine that. It felt like a dangerous moment.

  ‘Sorry, Mel, you know me – I’m a curious being.’ There was a silence as he fanned
the envelopes as if he were shuffling for a round of poker. His lips pursed in an idea.

  ‘Tell you what, Puck. What we are going to do now, is to have a little ride in my jam jar.’

  Ten

  I knew Mel Dickson well enough to know when he was being melodramatic. My hand movement against the office noticeboard had been quite casual and it was unlikely that it could be interpreted as anything but innocent. Meanwhile, however, a complex psychology had been set in motion. First and foremost, my mind was going quietly bonkers. Bells were clanging, anvils hammering, and pennies were poised waiting to drop. I was hoping that none of them could be seen or heard by anybody but me.

  Dickson on the other hand clearly had a different agenda; Mr Hood’s mail had to be dealt with, sharpish. There was no time to look at this club.

  ‘You never saw Brazzers did you?’ He caught me looking at my watch. I had two choices, i) to walk upstairs and get my return train to London which would be leaving in twelve minutes, or, ii) get into Dickson’s car and let him drive me for the ten minutes it would take to get to Brazzers; ten minutes looking at the club, ten back and I would get the next train. It was no contest, my mind had to have more information ‘…one of many, one in each of his establishments if you want to know’.

  I followed Dickson back out of the dankness of the railway arch. He turned left, going deeper into the Victorian catacombs that ran under the railway station. My feet tapped across granite setts, crunched across a floor of cinders to where a ghostly pale blue metallic saloon was parked diagonally. With its long bonnet it seemed like a beacon of hi-tech modernity set against the Piranesi world of charred and leprous brick.

  ‘… Still got the Starship Enterprise then, Mel?’

  ‘Owe you mean the Sitter-on… Never leave ’owme without it,’ he tapped the side of his nose twice… I knew, it was incongruous that a man who styled himself as an antiques game show host should drive something like this, but Mel Dickson was a tangle of contradictions.

  ‘Hydro-pneumatic integral self-levelling suspension; remember, Puck?’ I did – only too well.

  His right hand touched the ignition, on went the headlamps and I witnessed the spectre of the car bonnet rising and the lamp beams hitting the brick walls. Down here, beneath the railway station it was a world of darkness lit only by the lights of Dickson’s car. All was monochrome; it reminded me of the moon landings.

  Outside the station Dickson headed east. He was driving fast and menacing nice people in Morris Minors. We tore past a slim girl on the pavement wearing white flared trousers.

  ‘Jeezus, look at the Lionel Blairs on that!’ He was driving like hell, down street after street of desperate pink terraces, past high walls which looked as though they encircled prisons. Through a wasteland of demolished buildings, past factories with castle-like towers, under cranes, towards smoking fires. I could see the moors in the distance and I felt a sudden need to go to the lavatory.

  Abruptly he veered left and I heard/felt the tearing of coke cinders under car tyres – heard the ratchetting of the handbrake.

  Outside looked like a disused coalmine pithead. There was a tall rusted steel frame with a giant wheel, rows of lock-up containers, scratched, decayed and diseased. The building he had parked next to was eight storeys of black brick, punctured at regular intervals with windows. It had a tower which rose grimly into the air like a Schloss Lichtenstein. The car bonnet sank slowly like an oversized metallic cushion deflating itself.

  ‘Brazzers!’ He pursed in apparent satisfaction, nodding like a proud dad watching his daughter perform in the school play. He eased himself out of the driver’s seat fanning the wad of post in his right hand while his left slammed the door. The central locking system made that little sucking sound. This time the Samsonite briefcase stayed on the back seat of the car.

  ‘Follow,’ he grunted. I did so down a flight of calcined stone steps, along a subterranean corridor of saliva-coloured glazed brick. Perhaps there was a toilet here.

  He yanked open a steel-panelled door. Inside there were people… a kind of office, desks, cork noticeboards, and paper – wads of it. Like the one at the Station Club it was lined with wood grain formica, at least it felt normal.

  There was a girl sitting at a sapele desk, bottle-red quiff – shiny green fat-shouldered jacket.

  ‘Do you have a toilet I can use?’ As I headed for the jakes I could see Dickson out of the corner of my eye, on tiptoe, competing for height with the girl’s big hair. He looked like an artful schoolboy his hands behind him concealing the fan of letters.

  I felt better after a pee.

  ‘No time for pointing Percy, Puck, come!’ I followed to where I could smell wet plaster, my shoes were sticking to lino, and I could see Dickson hovering in front of me in the glare of the fluorescent, his hand doing the smoothing ritual, this time with a drippy-painted grey door. His fingers closed over the handle and pushed it open. As he did so I noticed that although the door was unlocked it had a keyhole.

  Inside it was a dismal replica of the place we’d been in less than fifteen minutes previously. Dickson began arranging envelopes on top of the desk like an obedient child playing patience with oversized cards. Feeling almost sick with excitement I moved across the room to the noticeboard, my eye flitting backwards and forwards between the mass of names, messages and memorabilia and Dickson’s hunched head and shoulders. Every so often I caught him eyeing me over the top of his pince-nez. It was like playing Stare-Stare.

  At last I saw it. I knew it would be there. Even so, when I did I nearly jumped out of my skin; FREIA LLOYD LEWIS 01-2… the last six digits were obscured by a photograph of a black jazz saxophonist. The photograph was fixed to the noticeboard with white mapping pins – but only at the top. Trying to appear as casual as possible I lifted the bottom of the photograph with my thumb and finger.

  ‘Come on, Puck. Mr Hood calls!’ I had no more than a fleeting glimpse of the number. Insufficient to commit it to my muddled memory. I let the photo drop back against the notice board. There was nothing I could do, no trick, nothing – too risky. I turned and followed Dickson out of the room.

  Was it all a coincidence, was I getting myself into a tizzy over nothing? My head was asking the questions but my viscera were giving the answers. There were three possibilities; i) it was a different Freia Lloyd Lewis, ii) she was either an acquaintance – or had done business with Hood, iii) behind the name and number had been a plan of intent by a third party, and it was this last alternative which was gripping me… A plan of intent, involving criminal offence? Come on, Pulse! Nobody would be mad enough to leave evidence like this.

  But Hood wasn’t ‘nobody’, nor was he normal. ‘One of many, one in each of his establishments if you want to know.’ The noticeboards were ‘show and tell’, they were trophy cabinets, they were his twisted curriculum vitae, his warped showreel. If the law ever made it as far as one of these dens it would be, ‘yes Mr Hood, no Mr Hood, and thank you for the information, Mr Hood.’ The chain of command would be long, stretching so far away from Hood that it would always be easy for him to sever its last few links.

  I followed Dickson through cave-like spaces. At first the rooms were tall and of white-painted brick, but soon we were passing through low chambers of raw rough render and galvanized steel where the smell of drying mortar became more intense. I could see moving lights ahead of me and the air seemed warmer. There was that resounding echoing feel that you get when you’re crossing from a small space into a very large volume, and all at once everything felt huge as if I’d suddenly dropped into a giant sinkhole.

  Dickson was standing in front of me so my view straight ahead was blocked. On either side of me stretched rows of small tables and chairs, hundreds of them. There were those bloody awful gig lamps he’d always used in schemes, and fake candles on the tables. There were woody-looking alcoves with upholstered banquette seating, shelves of phoney
books… and stuffed owls… his idea of sophistication.

  On the edges of the giant circle in which I was standing I could see the twinkle of three bars; slicker, shinier, black and red with lots of chrome. Dickson stepped sideways and made a gesture as if he was inviting me to step on stage. I had a proper view now, straight down across the dance floor. It was massive. You could get two thousand people on it. Xenon? … Nothing like this. Stringfellows? … Tiny. The Hacienda? … Pokey. This was Roman, an amphitheatre. It was bread and circuses.

  Overhead was a steel spider’s web of lights, gantries, and rigs. Lacelike non-structures and patterns of light and shadow were slowly wheeling across the smooth gunmetal floor. I was aware that the whole dance floor was slowly rotating, moving clockwise, while the DJ console was leisurely travelling the opposite way.

  ‘’Ellow, Mellobydick, how is you?’

  I could see where the voice was coming from, a man standing in the centre of the console. He’d had his back towards us until now, but as the console rotated a face came into view. The head, backlit by one of the overhead spotlights, seemed to generate an aura of evil.

  I’d met Hood once before but I hadn’t forgotten. The long head with its oddly cherubic appearance, like that of Henry Spencer in the film Eraserhead. Hair cropped back and sides rising darkly from the crown. Features childish – the eyes unruly like the police mugshot of Brady taken less than eight hours after he’d killed.

  I followed Dickson onto the dance floor and came to a stop three metres from Hood. I could see the scar running vertically from his upper lip, over his chin, and sliding in and out of the dimple. The dimple was the only human thing about him.