Strangers

by Paul Finch

  ‘Oh, come on, please!’ Pixie wailed.

  ‘Now I can see the lads have already given you a seeing-to, Pix,’ McCracken said, as he donned the protective clothing, ensuring to button the raincoat all the way to the top. ‘But I’m guessing that was because you played hard to get.’

  ‘Mr McCracken, please … I’m gonna get you the money.’

  ‘Oh, I know you are, Pix … otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But …’ McCracken ensured the gloves were a comfy fit by flexing his big, knobbly-knuckled hands inside them. ‘But, you see … I can’t just let you walk away with a busted nose. I mean, what would my reputation be worth if I did?’

  ‘Mr McCracken, please!’

  Pixie writhed in his captors’ gasp, but they held him firm. And as such, he never even saw the right hook that caught him smack-bang in the middle of the face. His nose, which might finally have been congealing from the earlier beating, splattered wide open again. Ruby droplets sprayed over McCracken’s plastic coveralls.

  Pixie gave a choked gasp of agony.

  A left hook followed, slamming into the same spot, the resounding smack of fist on bone echoing across the otherwise empty cul-de-sac. The third blow caught him in the ribs, the fourth under the jaw, the fifth to the left side of the face, the sixth to the right,

  Lucy lost count after that. She withdrew from the hole in the wall, heart thundering.

  It was the gravest problem any undercover officer could face – what to do in the event of serious criminal offences being committed in your presence. Especially when the overriding priority was to maintain your covert status. On the face of it, if the victim was a criminal himself there was perhaps less of an impulse to intervene … but by the sounds of it, this was a savage and protracted beating. Even now it was going on, and the impacts of the blows were deafening. The guy wouldn’t die. That was expressly not their aim. But for a police officer to witness such torture, to stand there and do nothing … and yet what could she do?

  And then another voice intervened. Jayne McIvar’s. By the sounds of it, she too had emerged onto the road from the club’s entry passage.

  ‘Not outside my place, Frank … please.’

  ‘Your place, Jayney?’ McCracken replied, breaking off from his exertions, breathing hard.

  ‘You know what I mean. Anywhere but here, please. It’s bad for business.’

  Lucy went back to the wall and peeked through.

  Jayne, who during the evenings glammed up in make-up, jewellery, an ankle-length cocktail dress and uber-high heels, made an incongruous figure on the grimy backstreet. Pixie meanwhile, still suspended with arms spread between two of McCracken’s goons, but now slumped downward, was a bloody wreck; like a man who’d died on a cross. McCracken himself was sprayed crimson, though of course his transparent plastic coating had protected his expensive suit, if not his face.

  He took care of the latter by dabbing his cheeks and forehead with a silk handkerchief.

  ‘When I tell you how to package high-class pussy, darling,’ he replied, ‘you can tell me how to run my end of the operation. Now why don’t you be a good girl and go back inside?’

  Very reluctantly, Jayne withdrew. McCracken turned back to his victim, from whom there wasn’t so much as a twitch, let alone a groan.

  ‘But … ultimately, I think we are done here.’ McCracken lowered his fists. ‘Take him to that shithole pad of his. Leave him to the tender mercies of his girlfriend. Let’s see if she’s worthy of the name. When he comes round, remind him he’s got a week and that we’re in for two hundred K.’

  The goons hauled Pixie’s lifeless form around to the rear of the BMW. Someone flipped the boot lid open, and they deposited him inside. McCracken peeled off his gory plastic, handed it to Shallicker, then straightened his tie and headed back indoors.

  Lucy backed away from the hole and turned – just as a dark form flashed across the yard towards her from the door; a burly figure, but moving with catlike agility and a frantic clatter of spike-heeled boots. Before Lucy could draw breath, a leather-clad forearm had slammed her backwards against the bricks, and now exerted incredible force as it crushed her windpipe crosswise. In the same blur of speed, a partially gloved hand brought a cigarette lighter to Lucy’s face and spurted out a long tongue of flame, which flickered so close to her left cheek that she was certain she could smell her own skin as it singed.

  She gagged and whimpered and tried to turn her head away, but her captor was larger and vastly stronger than she was, and held her locked in place.

  ‘Who the fuck are you!’ Suzy McIvar demanded in a snakelike hiss. ‘And what the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’

  ‘Nothing, Miss McIvar,’ Lucy stammered. ‘Please, I thought I heard …’

  ‘WHO ARE YOU, I SAID?’

  ‘Hayley Gibbs, Miss McIvar … I’ve only just started here.’

  Suzy continued to hiss but now as she breathed, glaring into Lucy’s face from point-blank range. Bizarrely, her eyes were odd-coloured, one green, one a muddy brown – another testimony to her violent life, no doubt. Her clenched teeth glinted white between tightly drawn lips. ‘What are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Ex-tom, miss. I work on the coats. Sorry, I just …’

  ‘You seem very interested in everything that’s going on here for a coat-check girl!’

  ‘I couldn’t … I couldn’t help it. Please …’

  It wasn’t difficult for Lucy to pretend she was so frightened that her words tumbled over one another, because she was. Nor was it purely down to the proximity of that long, wavering flame, which could surely be no more than a centimetre from her flesh. Partly it was due to the craziness imprinted on the face behind the flame. Up close, Suzy McIvar’s eyes looked glassy, dead – like they weren’t real. The Head of Security resembled her sister, even if she wasn’t identical to her, but there was an icy derangement there that even Jayne the brothel-queen lacked. With effort, Jayne McIvar could pass as a respectable woman, but no matter what fancy feathers this creature donned, she’d always be a street-hoodlum.

  ‘You lie to me, girl, and I’ll blowtorch that pretty nose right off your face,’ Suzy snarled. ‘You’ll spend the rest of your life with two bony holes where the snot comes out!’

  The lighter-flame felt as if it was performing this task already, Lucy’s left cheek flaring heat and pain.

  ‘Just thought I heard something weird,’ she stuttered. ‘I got curious, that’s all …’

  ‘I’ve never seen you around before. Who’d you tom for?’

  Before Lucy could blurt out her reply, another voice intruded. ‘Don’t spoil her face, if you don’t mind!’

  Over Suzy’s shoulder, beyond the tear-inducing glare of the flame, Lucy saw that Jayne McIvar had stepped into the yard. Delilah was loitering worriedly behind her – possibly she’d alerted her mistress to what was happening.

  Suzy snapped her lighter closed, the intense heat instantly extinguished, but continued to bore into Lucy’s head with her weird, doll-like eyes.

  ‘Did you hire this smackhead bitch?’ she replied.

  Jayne’s heels clicked the flagstones as she approached. ‘What’s going on?’

  Suzy still didn’t look round. ‘Came out for a smoke and found this one fixing her beady little gaze on Frank and his team.’

  ‘Sorry, Miss McIvar,’ Lucy said, addressing Jayne. ‘I overheard them … I just didn’t know what it was …’

  ‘This surprises you?’ Jayne told her sister. She too was stony-faced with rage, but apparently her ire was aimed elsewhere. ‘Right fucking pantomime … bang outside our front door! If there was any neighbourhood left here, they’d all have been looking!’

  ‘I said did you hire her?’ Suzy said.

  ‘She checks out,’ Jayne retorted. ‘What’s the exact problem?’

  What seemed like a minute passed, during which Suzy breathed hoarse and heavy like some predatory beast besotted with the scent of blood, her eyes nev
er once leaving Lucy, her prey – until slowly, very slowly, she leaned backwards, dropping her elbow.

  Lucy gasped and coughed.

  ‘Maybe there isn’t a problem.’ Suzy backed off. ‘But Hayley Gibbs … if I catch you sticking your nose where it isn’t wanted again …’ She gestured with the lighter, before ramming it back into her pocket. ‘Well … I’ve told you, haven’t I?’

  ‘I know you’re pissed off,’ Jayne quietly advised her sister. ‘We all are. But taking it out on the help won’t get us anywhere.’

  Suzy chose to ignore that. Instead, she pointed at Lucy one last time before heading back inside, stiff-shouldered and with loud, stumping footfalls.

  Lucy could only lean against the wall and gently knead at her bruised trachea. Jayne walked over to her and irritably fingered the chink in the brickwork.

  ‘Not a very good idea, love,’ she said. ‘Spying on Mr McCracken’s business is the last thing that’ll win you friends round here.’

  Lucy shook her head, struggling to enunciate words that didn’t hurt her throat. ‘I had no idea that’s what I was doing, Miss McIvar … honestly. I don’t even know who this Mr McCracken is.’

  ‘I believe you, Hayley. You know why? Because if you did –’ Jayne placed her fingertips under Lucy’s chin and turned her head sideways ‘– you wouldn’t have been doing what Suzy’s just caught you doing.’

  ‘I was on my break. I thought I heard something bad, I wasn’t sure …’

  ‘You’ll hear a lot of bad things while you’re here, Hayley. If you haven’t got the stomach for that, you’re in the wrong place.

  ‘Yes … erm, yes, miss.’

  ‘It’s understandable you’re curious, of course.’ Jayne frowned, her brows knotting with frustration. ‘Bastard gangsters. They lord it over us like kings. We all have to scrape and bow, even me and Suzy. But at present we also have to know what’s good for us.’ She released Lucy’s chin and edged backward. ‘No damage done there, at least … so you could still make the Talent Team, if ever you’ve got a mind to. But until then, Hayley, follow my sister’s advice … get on with what you are supposed to be doing, and you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Yes, Miss McIvar. Of course.’

  Taking it that the interview was over, Lucy scuttled back indoors.

  Chapter 18

  There were no more dramatic events at SugaBabes over the next few nights, which allowed Lucy to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing. One by one, she learned and memorised the names of the girls, though it was a time-consuming process as most of them never even came downstairs until the club officially opened, at which point they immediately began to entertain customers. As far as she could discern there were none working here, at least none she’d yet discovered, who were even casually referred to by the name “Lotta”, nor any who matched her statuesque description.

  ‘Mr Billworth!’ Marissa called from the vestibule, distracting her from these ruminations. ‘Your taxi’s here, sir.’

  Lucy felt an irresistible prickle of interest, waiting po-faced as a customer ambled into view from the Russian Room. He smiled amiably as he produced his ticket and she handed over his coat and gloves. He was about seventy, with clean-shaved features and long, white, soft-looking hair, and was extremely well-presented in an Armani suit, a pink silk shirt, a pink silk tie and a gold tie-pin. She also noted pearl-studded cufflinks and a Rolex. When she gave him his overcoat she could tell it was richest cashmere.

  As soon as Billworth had left the building, Lucy made an excuse to Delilah and wandered out into the yard at the back, where, having ensured there was nobody else hanging around, especially not Suzy McIvar, she warily moved to the chink in the wall. It felt like madness after what had happened last time, but as before, she wasn’t making any real ground here and proactivity seemed like the only potential antidote to that.

  She didn’t know what she expected to see on this occasion – apart from a man climbing into a taxi – or how this might have any connection with the actual case. On the face of it, it felt like it wouldn’t. But at the end of the day she was still a cop, and Tammy’s weird warning kept echoing through her head. Knowing Tammy, there’d be nothing of great value here – SugaBabes was an illicit operation so, surprise surprise, illicit things were going on – but anything that might at some point give her leverage over the McIvars had to be worth investigating.

  When she peered out through the hole in the wall, Mr Billworth was waiting patiently by the roadside while a vehicle swung through a smooth three-point turn in front of him. This vehicle resembled no taxi that Lucy had ever seen. It was more like a limousine – long, dark and sleek, with tinted windows. It certainly carried no roof light nor any sign of a Council licence plate, but none of that was hugely mysterious. Evidently this Billworth was a rich guy. Doubtless he could easily afford this kind of private, five-star service.

  But then it took a turn for the strange.

  The limousine driver climbed out wearing a grey chauffeur’s outfit, including a peaked hat pulled low and dark-lensed spectacles, which, as it was now late at night, could only have been worn to create some kind of disguise.

  And then it took a turn for the even stranger.

  The chauffeur opened the rear passenger door for Billworth, as one might expect. But before Billworth climbed in, he turned his back on the chauffeur and stood rigidly. The chauffeur, with a near-theatrical flourish, produced a white silk scarf, which he gently tied around his passenger’s head, in effect blindfolding him.

  Lucy watched in fascination as the chauffeur then assisted Billworth into the back of the car, closed the door behind him, climbed in himself and gunned it swiftly out of the cul-de-sac.

  She went back to the coat-check desk in a state of total bemusement.

  The blindfold clearly meant that the client was not supposed to know where he was being taken to, so he definitely wasn’t being driven home. Was that the case with all of them, these guys who only visited SugaBabes for long enough to buy a single drink, and who were really here to use the SugaBabes Taxi Service – for that was surely what this amounted to?

  She wondered where their ultimate destination lay, and why how-to-get-there was a secret kept even from them.

  None of this boded well, and though Lucy fully intended to take Tammy’s advice and refrain from asking any questions on this front, it was plain that no information was going to be volunteered. Whenever a taxi arrival was announced, no member of staff in the club indicated even by their body language that it was anything out of the ordinary. Delilah, who could talk the hind legs off a donkey, made no reference to it – as if it wasn’t even on her radar.

  And maybe it shouldn’t have been on Lucy’s either, even as a police investigator.

  Fleetingly, she was furious with herself for showing such indiscipline.

  She was here to hunt a killer called Jill the Ripper, not take issue with each and every side-racket the McIvars were perpetrating, ominous though they might appear. So instead of trying to puzzle the taxi business through, she decided that she would make a concerted effort for the rest of that evening to get on with her work, to watch, to keep her ears open, and to discuss inanities with Delilah whenever the opportunity arose. But she wondered how long this could go on for. It was nearly ten days in, and she still didn’t appear to be making discernible progress – until another uneventful two hours had passed, and then, rather unexpectedly, there was a development.

  Frank McCracken reappeared in the club, again in company with Mick Shallicker, but now with one or two others as well. One of these, Lucy recognised as “Necktie Nicky” Merryweather, while the rest were apparently their personal guests, though all looked to have been cut from similar rough-spun cloth. As usual, once here the gangsters shifted into relaxation mode, cracking jokes and laughing as they handed their coats over the counter.

  McCracken turned to Marissa and asked her to ‘send Charlie down ASAP’.

  Frank McCracken was not one of thos
e curious customers who only came to SugaBabes to make use of the Taxi Service. Whenever he turned up, he tended to spend the entire evening, each time thus far, with a different girl, some of whom he’d simply socialise with at the bar, others of whom – though not many, admittedly – he would eventually take upstairs. However, this was the first time Lucy had heard him ask for a particular girl by name. It was also the first time she’d heard of a girl working here called “Charlie”. When the new arrivals had ambled off to the Oriental Room, Delilah, ever the gossip, added a helpful explanation.

  ‘Charlie the most expensive girl in north of England,’ she confided. ‘She jewel in Jayne McIvar’s crown, but she only here two days a week. I think she have private clients too.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘She Mr McCracken’s favourite. He want her for girlfriend, I think … but she always play hard to get.’

  When Charlie finally came downstairs, in her own time it seemed, it was easy to understand why she’d be anyone’s favourite. With film star looks, flowing white-blonde hair and a voluptuous figure, and wearing a brilliant green, off-the-shoulder evening gown and backless silver slippers with four-inch heels, she looked almost impossibly glamorous. She walked across the vestibule with an easy sensual sway, stopping only briefly to talk with Marissa, before continuing to the Oriental Room, all the way radiating female sexuality.

  Along with something else.

  Something that interested Lucy even more.

  Physical power.

  In her heels, Charlie was at least six feet tall, while the rippling green material of her gown revealed strong arms, broad hips, firm thighs. Lucy was reminded of top sportswomen; Charlie may have been dressed to kill, but she had a hugely athletic aura.

  Lucy had been looking for an Amazon, and here she was. And then there was that name – Charlie. As a rule, it tended to be a derivation of Charlotte. As was Carlotta, of course.

  And what was short for Carlotta, if not Lotta?

  Lucy slid along the counter to get a better angle on the open door to the Oriental Room. From here, she could see Charlie seated on the bar-stool next to McCracken, her tanned, toned legs neatly exposed through a slit in her skirts, one silver-heeled slipper dangling as she sipped the regulation lime-and-soda. She might be playing hard to get, but she was certainly cosied up to him, reaching out as they spoke, running a teasing finger down the side of his jaw.