The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  I smiled. It did actually hurt. ‘Some days it seems like I’m magnetically attracted to liars.’ He turned to go but I grabbed his arm. ‘You’re not walking away from this. She’s your friend, remember?’

  He nodded and I removed my hand.

  ‘Is she OK?’ he said.

  ‘For now. But I want to talk about you. There are a lot of reasons people lie, Earl. Even some good ones.’

  ‘What’ve I lied about?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, taking a drink. ‘Don’t double-down on what we both know. We’re talking about why you did it. Like I said, I’ve heard good reasons before.’

  ‘What do you think mine is?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it. My job’s to build cases. Theories. Gather evidence. But motive? You never know that unless someone comes out and says it.’ His expression still hadn’t altered so I said the hardest thing I could think of. ‘Worst-case scenario? You’re a manipulator, wasting police time, fucking around with a girl you pretend to care about and getting off on watching her twist …’ I thought I’d hit a nerve. ‘Either that or you’re the man I thought you were. Someone who doesn’t like to see a friend getting used.’

  He made eye contact for a second.

  ‘If I believed that, I couldn’t care less about you lying to me. In your shoes, I might have done the same thing.’ Earl swallowed. ‘That note never fell out of Sophie’s jacket, did it?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You found it in her room?’

  He nodded.

  I softened my voice. ‘And you know what it means?’

  He lowered his eyes to the bar and nodded again.

  ‘I need to hear you say it, Earl …’

  ‘That she went to meet him,’ he said with sudden intensity.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fucking prick. Cartwright. She went and fucked him.’

  He looked desolate.

  ‘So she didn’t meet him on a night out?’ I asked. Earl didn’t move. ‘Had you really been to a protest outside his building? Or did you just want to be sure I knew who he was when you gave me that note?’ He nodded, covering it all. ‘This wasn’t really about a sex-tape when you called the police, was it? What kind of trouble’s she in?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Cartwright’s in jail, Earl.’ He looked at me. ‘They found a bag of coke in his possession when he got off a flight to Dubai. They’re not big on second chances out there …’

  ‘He’s not the problem, though.’

  ‘So tell me who is.’

  ‘That club,’ he said. ‘That place. Incognito.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t know where Sophie met Cartwright …’

  He shook his head. ‘I went there. Went down there myself when I found the note. When I saw that club, his name, and realized how revolted she was about this guy she’d been with, this tape they’d made, it all clicked.’

  ‘What happened when you went down there?’

  ‘I didn’t even get inside,’ he said. ‘I asked the doorman to speak to the owner. Said I knew what was going on. He laughed at me. Pushed me down and said no Irish, no dogs, no blacks.’

  ‘What’s Sophie’s problem?’

  ‘Money, same as everyone else’s,’ he said. ‘You grow up in a shit town and if you wanna break out, you need a degree. To get a degree, you need money. They’ve got it locked up.’

  ‘I thought she came from a good family?’ He frowned. ‘She told me that’s why she didn’t want to make her complaint official. Her parents would kill her.’

  ‘That’s what I told her to say. All she’s got’s a deadbeat dad she doesn’t see.’

  ‘So why’d you tell her to say that?’

  ‘Because she freaked out. When I told her I’d called the police she fucking freaked out. You were waiting in the next room and she was having a full-blown panic attack. She said I’d landed her in the shit, she’d get a criminal record, go to jail, her life was over. But I couldn’t let that guy post pictures of her on the internet. So I said she should tell you she didn’t want to make it official because her family would kill her. I fucked it, didn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know. You got Ollie Cartwright off her back at least, and stopped him from blackmailing her.’

  ‘But he’s not the problem. Is she gonna go back there? Does she even have a choice?’ He hesitated. ‘She won’t talk to me any more …’

  ‘She won’t talk to me, either.’ I got up. ‘Thanks for the drink, Earl.’

  3

  I crossed the road towards Incognito. The doorman I’d dealt with twice before saw me coming, and stepped in front of the entrance.

  ‘You look like—’

  I headbutted him then stepped over his body, inside the club. When I got to the top of the stairs another doorman approached, one hand on his earpiece. I kicked his knee out from under him and crossed the dance floor towards Guy Russell’s usual seat. I wanted to force my fingers inside his eye sockets. I put my hand on the shoulder of the man sitting there, but when he turned it wasn’t him.

  I walked through the dance floor.

  People were giving me a lot of space.

  ‘Where’s Guy Russell?’ I said to the barmaid.

  ‘He hasn’t been in,’ she said, her eyes drifting up to the doorman’s blood on my forehead. I wiped it with the back of my hand.

  ‘It’s the truth, Detective.’ I turned to see Alicia, Russell’s daughter, watching me. She was smiling and the bottoms of her perfect white teeth looked like pearls against her tanned skin. ‘Perhaps I can buy you a drink …’

  ‘I’m afraid of what you might put in it.’

  She stopped smiling. ‘Then perhaps I can convince you that those days are behind us?’

  We went to an office in the back room. Its furnishings were dark and mirrored, or made from cheap, creaking leather, and the ceiling was so low it felt like it was pressing down on us. It was like sitting in the back of an old limo. Alicia had entirely abandoned the wild neon of our first meeting. Now she seemed more comfortable in a smart black dress and minimal make-up. Her dark clothes made the whites of her eyes look brilliant. It wasn’t just her clothes, though. She was different. She sat and watched me taking the tiny room in from the doorway.

  ‘This is my dad’s idea of cool …’

  ‘He has some strange ideas,’ I said, joining her on the sofa.

  ‘And some good ones.’ I looked at her. ‘Oh, come on. You have to admit that as business plans go, matching well-off, middle-aged men with broke teenage girls isn’t bad …’

  ‘His opinion of it might change after I’ve spoken to him. When are you expecting Daddy home?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘On about the same timescale as Ollie Cartwright. What would you say? Twenty years or so, with good behaviour?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  She regarded me for a moment and slipped off her heels, so she could stand up without banging her head. She went to a small desk in the corner of the room and opened a drawer. When she came back to join me on the sofa, she handed me an envelope with my name scrawled across it. She shifted closer until our knees were touching, as though eager to see what was inside. I opened it and poured the pictures out into my palm. They were the same ones that Ricky had found in The Temple. They showed me leaving home with a bag of cash. Buying drugs, anonymously, at the station, entering Cartwright’s building. When I left I didn’t have the bag any more. The final picture showed me staring, directly at the camera.

  The car that had been parked behind mine.

  ‘You took these?’

  ‘No …’ She laughed. She touched my leg and looked at me with real pity. ‘I don’t find you that interesting.’

  ‘Explain,’ I said, moving her hand away.

  She smiled. ‘After you came to the club screaming sexual harassment, Daddy put a private detective on you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You were a threat, but maybe one he could neutralize. Plus blackmail really turns him o
n. All that power. Anyway, the private dick – that’s what you call them, don’t you? – the dick knew what was up when you bought the drugs, but he didn’t know Imperial Point was where a friend of my father’s lived. He thought you were just some bent cop acting as a middle-man, selling them on. When I saw the pictures I was one up on him. I knew Ollie lived there. I knew you were trying to help Sophie. I knew different …’

  There was a rumble of footsteps from the hallway and I turned to see the two doormen bursting into the room.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Alicia. They stopped.

  ‘Miss Russell—’

  ‘I said fuck off, thanks.’

  They trudged out of the room.

  She took the pictures from my lap and began sorting through. Reinserting them back into the envelope. ‘My mother left when I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘At sixteen, Daddy decided I should become the face of the business.’ She handed me the envelope. ‘The rest of my anatomy followed soon after.’

  I accepted the pictures. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t my pimp,’ she said, impatiently. ‘He just encouraged me to spend time with customers. Get my face out there and make them feel good. As the club got more popular, he got more ambitious. He realized he’d tapped into something here. It wasn’t just the age difference, he said. In a lot of ways that was the least of it. It was the power balance that our customers enjoyed. Things had changed in his lifetime. He said women were more like men now, loud and crass. Premium call girls were a step in the right direction, but watching the men out on the floor, he realized they wanted something deeper. An experience. They didn’t want to hand over old notes in a travel lodge for a dry handjob. They wanted to pay premium membership fees for a club where they could sit down at a table and some pretty thing would join them. Touch their arm and laugh at their shitty old jokes. The question was, where to find the right kind of girl? Young, pretty, naïve and broke …’

  ‘Students,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Economic doom and gloom, exploding tuition fees and a town with three universities in close proximity. Daddy says geography’s destiny. He got girls through the door with free drinks then started to give them credit. Once they were comfortable with that he’d lend them money. Payday loans at 60 per cent interest. When they couldn’t pay, he offered them some work. Sex was never mentioned. Never once. He just let them off their repayments to come here and act natural. He’d give them the names and descriptions of certain men, his gold members, and tell the girls to hang off their every word.’

  ‘And the men paid?’

  She laughed. ‘Happily. What’s a couple of hundred a week when they can come here and have someone half their age fawning over them? They don’t even need to talk to anyone. To set anything up or feel seedy. They just buy a drink and sit in one of our reserved booths. It almost feels real …’

  ‘But some girls did go home with the men.’

  ‘Nothing to do with us,’ she said, holding up both hands. ‘But of course, Daddy knew that a night of drink and small talk would give us a good enough hit-rate to keep things going. He knew some girls would want to make bigger dents in their loans than others. The kind of clients he had were always going to expect more …’

  ‘What kinds of people are we talking about?’

  ‘Businessmen, politicians, press. Even some friends of yours …’

  I frowned and she eyeballed me.

  ‘What’s it worth?’ she said.

  ‘I might not arrest you on the spot.’

  ‘Big words for a man holding pictures of himself planting evidence.’

  Now I smiled. ‘You don’t know anything about me, Alicia.’ I stood, crouching away from the low ceiling. ‘I’ll take these to the police myself before I’ll be Guy Russell’s man.’

  Her lips parted and I heard the strain in her voice. ‘I hoped you’d say that …’ She thought for a moment and stood, went to the desk. ‘This friend of yours …’ She handed me another picture of myself, on the street, talking to Freddie Coyle. ‘He’s a regular here.’

  ‘I didn’t realize your father was so broad-minded.’ She frowned and I explained. ‘Freddie Coyle’s gay.’

  She laughed. ‘If Freddie’s gay then, well, I’m a man.’

  ‘He’s a regular here?’

  ‘Like clockwork,’ she said, drawing closer. ‘And I’d rather you didn’t take those pictures of yourself to the police.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought it was cool, what you did for her.’ She smiled to cover some genuine emotion. ‘I was glad to see it, anyway. Gerry, the private dick, came here the day Daddy was travelling to Dubai.’ She must have seen my face change. ‘You didn’t know? Daddy and Ollie are best buds. They do everything together. I wonder how they’re getting on now? The dick came here while Daddy was at home getting ready. I said I’d pass on the message, the pictures. Must have slipped my mind. I liked your style …’ She looked up into my eyes. ‘I found it inspiring.’ She put her head on my shoulder and whispered into my ear. ‘So I bought a bag of coke, too. I went home to kiss him goodbye and slipped a little something into his suitcase.’

  I stepped back.

  ‘The opportunity of a lifetime. And like he always said, geography’s destiny. So while he’s in a Dubai jail, fighting drugs charges, he’ll have to transfer the business over to me. I see Incognito going in a slightly different direction from now on …’

  ‘So you’ve got nothing to gain from these coming out,’ I said, holding up the pictures.

  ‘I’ve got everything to lose. I just wanted to rattle your chain a bit by leaving them at your local …’ She touched the bruises on my face. ‘I hope you didn’t get yourself into trouble, blaming other people?’

  ‘No trouble,’ I said.

  ‘Good …’ She was right up against me, looking into my eyes. Then she turned dismissively away like it had never happened. She’d got what she wanted.

  ‘The night we first met, when you followed me outside to the street …’ I said to her back.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You weren’t angry that I’d poured a drink on your dad’s head.’

  She shrugged. ‘It looked good on him.’

  ‘You wanted to tell me where Cartwright lived, how to get to him. What happened between the two of you?’

  Her eyes were hard when she turned. ‘A girl always remembers her first time,’ she said. I realized why she didn’t wear the lenses any more. She didn’t need them.

  I looked at the floor. ‘The loans your dad gave out …’

  ‘Cancelled,’ she said. ‘But some of those girls’ll be back anyway. Even when you give people the choice, they get it wrong half the time. Enough to keep the roof over my head, anyway.’

  ‘Are you going to be OK, Alicia?’

  She closed her eyes and nodded. Somehow I thought she would be. ‘If this is our last conversation, then look after yourself, Detective Constable Waits.’

  ‘You too,’ I said, making to leave.

  ‘What happened to you, by the way?’

  I paused in the doorway, touched my face. ‘I was in a fight.’

  She smiled, but genuinely this time. ‘I meant before that.’

  4

  ‘Yeurgh,’ said Sutty, mopping his brow. ‘It’s a drought, all right.’ He was talking to Dispatch as we drove because he couldn’t get a word out of me. ‘I’m just hoping the black cloud over Aidan’s head starts raining soon …’

  I’d collected the pool car for our shift early.

  Sutty despised the sound of music and had something close to a panic attack if the dial ever turned to it. He preferred talk radio and phone-in shows. Cabbies complaining about asylum seekers. He murmured to himself and nodded along, like it was the latest hit. I’d performed my daily routine of changing all the pre-sets to hip-hop and R’n’B stations, something I’d been doing for so long that he thought there was a ghost in the machine. Then I’d gone to collect him and waited
until he turned on the radio.

  I thought he might throw himself from the car.

  Sutty’s appearance in my cell two days before had been perfectly in character but somehow I’d expected more of him. Some kind of gesture towards our partnership. For his part he acted as though nothing had happened, and continued to drawl into the handset about me like I wasn’t there.

  I was driving, on autopilot, when I looked up at the Palace. Sutty’s elegant solution had solved one murder with another. He said the smiling man had killed Blick and vice-versa, for all the sense it made. One body with no name, and one name with no body. Between the two of them we almost had a real person. It was another victory for Sutty’s clearance stats.

  ‘Yeurgh,’ he said, still talking to Dispatch. ‘If he keeps giving me side-eye I’ll go in looking for his cataracts …’

  I looked up at the Palace. Squinted. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, ripped off my seat belt and climbed out.

  I could hear Sutty shouting after me, cars braking and blowing their horns. I crossed through traffic, straight to the main entrance and tried the door. It was locked. I started to bang on it, kicking and shaking it as hard as I could. Finally I heard some movement, the lock opening.

  ‘Yes?’ said Ali, looking out at me. I was surprised to see him back at work.

  ‘I need access to this building now.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Detective Constable Aidan Waits. We spoke in the hospital after you were assaulted.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said, taking a step back.

  ‘Is there anyone besides you in the building, Mr Nasser?’

  I thought I saw a shadow cross his face. ‘No, sir …’

  ‘Then can you explain why the light’s on in room 413?’

  ‘Impossible,’ he said, but I’d already pushed past him and started across the lobby towards the stairs. I could hear him locking the door behind us and following. Shouting after me. There were two enormous flights between each floor, and I was pulling myself up by the bannister. When I looked down the centre of the staircase, I saw Ali, in pursuit one floor behind me. I reached the fourth floor breathing hard, wiping sweat out of my eyes, and went cautiously towards the room.