by Joseph Knox
‘Thought you’d be a woman.’
I stopped. ‘What kind of service were you expecting?’
He snorted, took a step closer and lowered his voice. I could smell the mint in his glass. ‘I called about my friend. And she doesn’t know that I did. Thought they sent women for girl stuff …’
‘Girl stuff?’
He nodded. ‘Said when I called. You all not on speaking terms?’
‘Dispatch aren’t as articulate as you are, Mr …?’
‘Earl.’
‘That a first name or a surname?’
‘Only name you’re getting. What do they call you? To your face, I mean?’
I smiled. ‘Waits.’
He looked at me for a second. Thought about it. ‘Heavy,’ he said, finally. He led me into a kitchen-cum-communal space. ‘Park here, I’ll find Soph.’
I could hear ambient sounds from the hallway, a steady hip-hop beat, but there was no one else in the room. Because it was dark outside and the lights were on, I could see myself reflected in the black mirror of the window. On the table there were trays of crushed ice, mint, sugar and lime. There was a row of jelly glasses and a wet bottle of rum.
Through a door I heard a girl say: ‘What?’
I sat there, beneath the blazing fluorescent lights, and waited. A minute or so later, Earl came back into the kitchen, went to the trays and began fixing a strong drink without looking at me. He had the practised movements of a professional cocktail maker, even going so far as to spin the rum bottle in his hand.
He saw me notice. ‘I mix in The Alchemist,’ he said. A celebrated Spinningfields bar where you could do permanent damage to your body and bank account. ‘Here.’ He slid me the glass he’d been working on. A mojito.
‘I’m on the clock,’ I said, catching it.
‘Not for you, Sherlock. Maybe she needs one?’ He walked out into the hallway, nodded at the door he’d come from and then went to his own room. I picked up the glass, so cold that it hurt my hand, went to the door he’d indicated and knocked.
I didn’t know what to expect.
‘Hello,’ said a shaky, southern voice. The room smelt faintly of suntan cream and the girl inside it was young. Sitting on the bed in denim cut-offs and a vest. Her shoulders were starting to turn red from the weather but the rest of her skin glowed from weeks of vitamin D. She had freckles about her eyes and a heart-shaped face, and as her desk fan strafed the room it tousled her hair, brown with the tips dyed blond. There were some bruises on her legs but I was glad to see she didn’t look upset or in distress. Just a little embarrassed. A little put out. She closed a laptop and pushed it to one side.
‘I expected someone older …’ she said.
‘I’ve got the liver of a man twice my age.’ She almost smiled and I handed her the glass that Earl had given me. ‘My name’s Aidan Waits, Detective Constable.’
‘Sophie,’ she said.
‘We could talk in the kitchen if you like, Sophie?’
She considered me for a moment. ‘Here’s fine. Would you close the door, though?’
I did, then motioned to an absurd pink chair at her desk. ‘May I?’ She nodded and I sat down. ‘Sounds like your friend out there’s worried about you.’
‘Earl’s a good guy …’
‘Tight-lipped, though.’
‘I was surprised he called you at all. He hates the police. I mean—’
‘Don’t worry, I basically agree with him. We do have our uses, though. I’m guessing if he picked up the phone it’s something serious. Why don’t you tell me about it from the start?’
‘Well, I’m a first year …’
She said it like it explained everything else.
‘No crime there. What are you studying?’
‘English lit?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Probably not much use in the real world.’
‘Sometimes the real world’s not much use itself …’
‘Yeah.’ She put the glass to her forehead for a second, rolled it from right to left and then took a drink. ‘So, last week I went to a club. Actually.’ She reached over to the desk and handed me a crumpled flyer.
Incognito.
The picture was of a young woman, dressed in school uniform. The copy pitched hard to entice freshers to a club night. Free entry (pardon the pun). Free birth control, too, as the rumour went. Most girls went once, 100 per cent in on the joke. They took the free drinks, absorbed the heated stares of the regulars and then left. You still heard the odd horror story, though. Entry for men was twenty quid a go and most of them wanted their money’s worth. I’d seen the queues, sliming their way down the street.
I handed back the flyer. ‘I’ve heard of that, too.’
‘I met a man, Ollie. Older but, y’know, nice. Well dressed and stuff. He seemed like a big deal in there, anyway.’ I had a good idea of what a big deal in Incognito might look like. Sophie rubbed her palms, unconsciously, on the bed. ‘We went back to his flat …’
‘We can have a female officer here if you’d prefer?’
She shook her head. ‘We slept together, it was fine.’
‘Those bruises?’ I said, referring to the marks on her legs.
‘Oh, no, I’m a cyclist. It’s one of the things I love about it here.’ She paused. ‘Look, the night was fine, it’s just that he filmed us—’ She stopped abruptly, looked down at the bed.
‘And now he’s holding it over you.’
She blushed, nodded. ‘I didn’t know people actually did that.’ She took another mouthful of her drink. ‘He said,’ she stopped. ‘He implied that if I don’t see him again he’ll leak it on to the internet.’
‘I take it you don’t want to see him again?’
She shook her head.
‘Do you have a surname for Ollie?’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll talk to him.’
‘Now?’
‘There’s no time like the present.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late, though?’
‘The later the better, it might give him some idea of how serious this is.’
‘… And is it serious?’ I could see that she was trying to talk herself down.
‘Your friend out there seems to think so. I think I agree. Ollie’s trying to blackmail you into doing something. For some men it’s the only way they know.’
‘I didn’t get his surname.’ She looked away. ‘God, you must think—’
‘I don’t think anything. Can you describe him?’
‘Older than you, maybe mid-thirties? And, I guess, he was a little chubby. He had sort of light red hair, like it was losing its colour.’
‘And he got in touch with you about the video. Did you swap numbers?’
She shook her head. ‘In the morning I got up and bolted. Stupidly, I left my jacket with my student ID in. He messaged me today.’
‘Where did Ollie live?’
‘The Quays. I’m not sure which building, though. I think the big one.’
‘Can I see the message?’
She made eye contact for a second. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ It was the first time she’d sounded anguished, and I was glad Earl had made the call.
‘It’ll be a big help if I know the nature of the threat. If I know everything you do.’
‘So, is this official already? It’s just, I didn’t call you, Earl did.’ She paused. ‘My parents would kill me.’
I thought about it for a second. ‘If you show me the message, I’ll know as much as you do. If I can find him, I can have a word informally if you like.’
‘There’s a picture.’
‘It’ll stay between us.’
‘You don’t look much like a priest. No offence …’
I sat back, gave her some space. ‘Nicest thing anyone’s said to me in months.’
She made up her mind. Opened the laptop, turned the screen towards me and then stared at the wall. Loved your debut, think you could be a star.
Should the world see this, though? Maybe you can come back around and convince me otherwise ;) xxx
Beneath the text there was a gif. It repeated one second of video on a loop. In it, Sophie was naked, sitting on a bed laughing. I thought she looked high. I turned the screen back towards her, got up and left my card on the desk.
‘Leave it with me.’
4
I went back to the car and climbed in. I could smell the disinfectant that Sutty had wiped the surfaces down with, and when I picked up the radio it was slippery in my hand.
‘Complainant doesn’t want to make a formal statement at this time, over.’
That closed the case as far as Dispatch was concerned.
‘How’d it go?’ said Sutty, stirring. ‘Think you can finger a suspect?’ I opened a window so I could breathe, started up and pulled out into the road. ‘Let me guess. She had a face like a boiled arse but says some bloke risked his liberty to kiss it.’
I just drove.
Sutty had no family and no friends that I knew of. The rumour was that he’d once been a promising detective, before he became addicted to human tragedy and was slowly seduced by the night shift. That had been a decade ago. Now it was all that he lived for. Ours was essentially a patrol duty, prowling around looking for trouble. This gave the shift the illusory promise of real detective work. The chance to see something through to the end. This promise was generally broken by our handing cases over to the day shift. Often we inherited them back the following night impossibly transformed, or with basic follow-ups not done. We were plain-clothes detectives, officially reporting to CID, but they rarely acknowledged it. Uniform treated us with the minimum amount of respect that they could get away with. I was here because I had to be.
But Sutty was in love with it.
He was at once attracted to, and repulsed by, the people. The boys were all snowflakes and fuckwits, the girls were easy or, worse, feminists, but he’d happily sit in cells, listening to them all night, he’d even drive them home when they were lost or drunk or both. To the untrained eye, these instances could look like sympathy, but in truth he enjoyed seeing people cast low.
In truth, he encouraged it.
He’d routinely let the names of informants slip to violent criminals, he’d drop young girls working as escorts in the worst parts of town. He told me he’d once attended an AA meeting, poured a bottle of vodka into the free coffee and waited, watching, as people got drunk. ‘Took this blue-haired slag home afterwards,’ he’d said. ‘Screwed her until the hair dye was running down her face.’
Our partnership was a war of attrition.
He openly despised me, but any obvious reciprocation seemed to feed something inside him. So I tried to keep the condemnation out of my voice. He’d say and do outrageous things and I’d smile back, swallow them, refuse to give him the satisfaction.
Although he was a large man, and although we often disagreed, I’d never been physically afraid of Sutty. He enjoyed our status quo too much to change it. Mentally, though, it was a different matter. Once, we’d been parked in the lay-by of a car accident hot spot, our lights out as we watched the road for speeders. It was three or four in the morning and he’d been talking, idly, about old cases. Finally, he got around to his first go at the night shift. He’d responded to a disturbance at a dog shelter.
‘So there’s this witch at the entrance, yeah? Long black coat, fingerless gloves, the whole bit. Except she’s twitching like someone put a thousand volts through her, listening to the ghosts in her hair or whatever. And the voices are especially vicious tonight. Three-part harmony from Hitler, Ho Chi Minh and Fred fucking West.
‘So I go up the path, Mr Nice, and get up alongside her. She starts giving me all this Jesus stuff, asking if I’m saved. Says he’s coming back, he’s on his way, etcetera, etcetera. I said I think he’s outta town tonight, sweetheart.
‘Anyway, turns out she’s broken in, given the dogs their first holy communion or something. Wait here, I say. I get halfway down the hall and the smell’s killing me, just unbelievable. Every cage I look in, the dogs are sodden, I mean soaking wet.’ He laughed. ‘She’d only gone and baptized ’em in petrol. Then I see her at the door and she’s got her back to me, shuddering. I realize she’s striking matches. Mad bitch has put us on God’s guest list.’
Sutty lost his eyebrows and most of the hair on his head before he got outside. He collapsed on to the lawn, coughing his lungs up, listening to the dogs howling, barking, burning alive in their cages. At first light he’d traced the woman’s footprints. They went one hundred feet into the trees and stopped suddenly. As far as he knew, that was the last anyone saw or heard of her. The story wasn’t remarkable in the context of the night shift, which is filled with haunted people and impossible dead ends.
It was Sutty’s reaction to it that disturbed me.
‘That’s when I saw it,’ he’d said. ‘All the famine and war and children in need. We’ve been born right into the end of it, Aid, straight into the death throes. The whole race is suicidal, it’s hardwired into us and something’s flicked the switch. We’re the last generation there’ll ever be.’ As he talked, I realized that he was being sincere. Worse, that he was in love with the idea.
The night shift meant different things to different people. To our superiors it was a demotion out of sight, almost out of reality. To me it was an act of cowardice. Somewhere I could hide out from my own life and let it pass me by. But to my partner it was life itself. It was his front-row seat to the end of the world and he was on his feet, applauding, in standing ovation.
5
‘What did I tell you?’ said Sutty, dowsing himself, face, neck and chest, in sanitizer. ‘The window-lickers are out in force tonight.’
Incognito ran out of a loft bar off Piccadilly, and we watched the line of men, oozing outside the door and round the corner. They were standing in packs, smoking and swearing, driven half-mad by the neon and the heat. By the girls in their summer clothes who didn’t even notice they were alive. Most of the men wore sharp buzzcuts and shapeless going-out shirts, and they seemed to share one low, booming voice that happened to possess them at different times. ‘Yeurgh,’ said Sutty, opening the glove compartment. He found his wet wipes and leaned over me to clean the steering wheel I’d just taken my hands off. ‘Someone really let one go in this gene pool.’
Although he was including me in his dim assessment of the men, looking out at the line it was hard not to agree. It was like watching one personality, stretched paper-thin across twenty people.
‘Fancy a walk?’ I said.
He balled up his wet wipe and threw it out the window.
‘I could stretch my legs, yeah. Ever met the guy who runs this place?’ We climbed out of the car and I shook my head. ‘Bloke should’ve been a handjob. A real beauty. Looks like the singer off a cruise ship that hasn’t docked in a decade.’
Two girls walked, arm in arm, to the front of the queue. The men nearby stopped braying for a second and drank them in. The doorman winced like he’d just done a shot, then stood to one side so they could pass, watching as they went up the stairs. His hair was shaved so closely that I could see the veins, gripping his skull. Any shorter and I could have seen what he was thinking.
He looked at Sutty. ‘Back of the line, darling.’
‘Try Detective Inspector. And get it right first time.’
All emotion drained out of the doorman’s face. ‘Apologies, Detective Inspector. How can I help?’
‘We want to talk to the owner …’
He didn’t move. ‘There’s a few heads with a stake in Incognito. Let me know which you’re after an’ I’ll make an appointment.’
Sutty was laughing again. ‘An appointment with Guy Russell? That’s not a little black book I want my name appearing in.’ The doorman still didn’t move. ‘Come on, you know the bloke. Personality like a contraceptive. Hairpiece that could place runner-up at Crufts. I know he’s here and I know you haven’t been ID
-ing those girls tonight, so best we talk to him off the record, eh?’
‘Pat,’ said the doorman to a colleague. ‘Work the line a minute, yeah?’ He gave us a dull, gold-toothed smile that sent the veins pulsing across his skull again. ‘Right this way, gents.’ We went inside, across the sticky, fly-trap floor and up the stairs. The doorman walked ahead, easing people out of our way with one arm. The blending smells of perfume and alcohol felt intoxicating, and the air throbbed with bass and thick, numbing heat. We emerged next to the bar, in a half-lit loft space with around a hundred people in it.
‘Wait here,’ said the doorman. I looked at Sutty, his eyes caressing the men and women in the room. It was almost an even split between them. Most stood separately, some cautiously mingled, and one or two had paired up on the dance floor, grinding into each other with the music. The real action took place in the booths lining the room. You’d see four or five girls crammed into one side and two men on the other. Nothing between them but gleaming steel buckets, filled with cheap bottles of prosecco and ice.
The doorman emerged from the dance floor. ‘Mr Russell can see you now.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ said Sutty, eyes bobbing from table to table. ‘Secure the bar.’ When the lights caught his face he looked like a spoiled, sweating chicken.
The doorman led me across the dance floor, to a booth in the corner. A man in his mid-forties was sitting beside a young girl. He was staring at me while she scrolled idly through her phone with one finger. The man perfectly matched Sutty’s description. Carefully dressed, but strangely out of time. His black shirt was tight and had the top four buttons open, creating a long V shape beneath the neck. He gave me a practised, peroxide-white smile and motioned to the seat opposite him. I slid into the booth. The girl, who hadn’t looked up from her phone, wore clothes that seemed designed for the room. Wild colours that caught ultraviolet lights at suggestive angles. She wore frosted eye-liner and atomic pink lipstick, and she must have been twenty-five years younger than the man beside her.
‘Someone looks thirsty,’ he said, over the music.
I didn’t say anything.