Cruel as the Grave

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Interesting,’ Slider said. ‘Getting involved in a charity doesn’t tally with what we know about him so far.’

  ‘Yeah, boss,’ said Hart. ‘She said she thought he was trying to get her involved, like help with a campaign or cough up some dosh or something. But thinking about it afterwards, she reckoned he was just trying to get off with her. She’s quite a good-looking babe. She reckoned it was just a pickup line. All events, he never followed up on it.’

  ‘Would a man that attractive need a line?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘Humour me. My dating days are long behind me.’

  ‘Well, it never hurts. Women like men to have a sensitive side, as well as looks. Like you, boss,’ she added with a cheeky grin. ‘You care about people. That’s really hot. Caring is the new macho, right?’

  Slider gave her a discouraging look. ‘He seems to have got on all right just treating women badly.’

  ‘What, Kelly-Ann and her lot? Well, there are always dumb females just asking for it. Maybe he was trading up, going for a better class of date. Or maybe he always did both.’

  ‘Yes, probably that. A man of voracious appetite would have to spread his net wide. He might not have a “type”.’

  Hart grinned. ‘There’s some blokes whose “type” is horizontal but still breathing.’

  ‘Needlessly cynical, sergeant,’ Slider said sternly.

  She was unabashed. ‘Ask Jim Atherton.’

  ‘I’m still waiting for the bank and the credit card companies to send copies of his statements,’ Swilley said. She had recently had a very short haircut, which entirely failed to make her look boyish. Slider had always had a thing for short hair on women, anyway – it made them look somehow vulnerable, which made him want to protect them. Hot damn, I’m so sensitive! he thought. At the very least, with the current fad for long straggling locks it made a woman stand out like a rock in a kelp bed.

  ‘He banked online,’ she went on, ignorant of how her shorn poll was affecting him – or was she? – ‘but without the passwords it’s easier to wait for the bank. I’ve got a good contact there, so it shouldn’t be long. Meanwhile, I’ve had a look at the rest of his online history. He doesn’t have much of a presence – no website or Facebook, didn’t seem interested in Twitter. He posted a lot of pictures of himself on Instagram – muscle poses.’ She gave an eye-roll. ‘Nothing untoward in his emails so far. I just wish we had his mobile, so we knew who was contacting him at the end.’

  ‘That’s why the murderer swiped it, obvs,’ said Lœssop, pausing in passing. ‘We know it had to be someone he knew, because there was no break-in, and the fact that it happened in the bedroom.’

  ‘Not necessarily. They might have been talking in the living room, he went into the bedroom to get something and the killer followed him in,’ Swilley said.

  ‘But then, what about the mirrors?’ said Lœssop. ‘He’d see them coming in the reflection. And they’d have to go past him to get to the weights rack. He’d have asked what they were doing, he’d have been on his guard, there’d at least have been a struggle or some defence wounds.’

  ‘So you think it must have been a woman? Someone he was having sex with?’ Slider asked.

  ‘The seven hundred pounds under the pillow,’ said Swilley. ‘If he was being paid to have sex, that makes him a prostitute.’

  ‘Not necessarily sex. His mats and equipment were all in the bedroom. It might have been someone he was giving a home training session to. That could have been what he charged for private training. And then the killer would have every reason to pick up one of the barbells.’

  ‘True,’ said Slider.

  Lœssop liked the encouragement. ‘My idea is that someone wanted him made away with, arranged a private training session at the flat – probably rang him up to arrange it, which is why the murderer had to take the phone away.’

  ‘But we can get phone records from the providers,’ Swilley objected.

  ‘Yes, but not everyone knows that. So if we find somebody who had a grievance against him—’

  ‘Or if it was a sex partner, it could have been a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Swilley said. ‘A sudden row.’ She looked at Slider, who nodded. Among people who were emotionally volatile and not very bright, a quarrel could easily lead to violence. They had seen it again and again. ‘They go into the bedroom to do the nasty, words are spoken, offence is taken, she grabs one of the weights and lets him have it. And he doesn’t defend himself because he’s taken by surprise. He doesn’t expect that from her. Maybe he’s even laughing at her while she’s threatening him. And that tips her over the edge.’

  ‘And what about the seven hundred?’ Lœssop put in.

  ‘That could have been there from earlier. We don’t know it’s anything to do with the killer.’

  ‘Well, either way, we have to find out who came to his flat, which means finding out who his friends and enemies were,’ Slider said. ‘The usual grind.’

  ‘I’ll make a list of his contacts from his laptop,’ Swilley said.

  ‘Atherton’s following up one of them right now,’ Slider said, and told them about Pex Muscle Gym.

  Swilley looked horrified. ‘You sent Jim to an iron-pumping club?’

  ‘He can handle himself,’ said Slider.

  ‘It’s other people handling him I’m worried about,’ she muttered.

  Atherton hadn’t thought you could get louder music than at Gillespie’s. In a way, he was right. The music at Pex was so deafening it had passed beyond normal aural ranges into a realm of harmonics where the distinction between the different senses was eroded, where sound became feeling and, as your eyeballs bounced to the beat in their bony sockets, sight too.

  Smell was otherwise fully engaged and hadn’t attention to spare for the pounding music. Smell was already having to deal with rubber mats, machine oil, rubbing liniment, various ultra-manly colognes and deodorants, feet – a biggie, that one – and sweat. Lots and lots of sweat. Atherton wasn’t at all sure that testosterone wasn’t also nasally detectable. One sniff inside the gym, and the hair in his nostrils took on a growth spurt.

  Everything was black and chrome and so stern and manly it made the Imperial War Museum look like a princess tea party. And despite being a weekday and in normal working hours, every infernal machine was occupied, and everywhere slippery bodies were heaving and groaning and straining like the damned in a tenth circle of Hell. Atherton stared in bemusement. He was obliged as a policeman to maintain a certain level of fitness, and for his own vanity he didn’t want to be fat and flabby, but this! Well, it was more like some very, very obscure form of sexual perversion.

  He was brought back to earth by the realization that as he stared at them, one or two were starting to stare back at him with equal bemusement. He was quite glad when a man who detached himself from the torment and came to ask if he wanted anything turned out to be very short – though extremely wide at the shoulders – and friendly.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’ asked the short one when Atherton asked for Jack Gallo.

  ‘Probably not, but it’s a friendly visit – just looking for some information,’ Atherton said, showing his warrant card.

  ‘Righty-oh, he’s in his office. It’s this way.’ He led the way, rolling a little in his walk because his leg muscles were so hugely developed, his inner thighs were no longer within touching distance of each other. He was so muscled and so short, he looked like a cube of flesh. Atherton was still wondering why anyone would do that to themselves when he was shown into Gallo’s office.

  It was an office fit for a man of action – small, scruffy, undusted, with the cheapest of furnishings, and nary a pot plant in sight. And at the first sight of Jack Gallo, Atherton ceased to wonder why anyone ‘worked out’. He was taller than Atherton by an inch, but much bigger in mass, and not one ounce of that volume was fat. And it was not the ludicrous, overblown, veiny balloons of the Mr Universe contest, but beautiful, proportionate, usable m
uscles. He was wearing a clinging cutaway training vest and black Lycra trunks, so it was all on display, and it was impressive. His man-breasts looked like two turkey crown roasts, nicely browned. This was a powerful man. Even his chin had muscles. He looked as though he could do press-ups with his tongue.

  It didn’t hurt, either, that he had thick, glossy, near-black hair, the smooth natural tan of the Mediterranean type, and gold-brown eyes so arresting you didn’t immediately notice the rest of his features. Atherton saw a resemblance to Lucy of the antique shop. He began with: ‘I’ve just been talking to your sister.’

  ‘About Erik?’ Gallo said. ‘Yeah, that’s a bummer. D’you wanna sit down?’ He said it as an afterthought – sitting down probably didn’t feature much in his life. Atherton declined in favour of leaning against the wall, figuring that Gallo was more comfortable standing. He chose the wall by the window where the light would fall on his subject.

  ‘Tell me about Erik,’ he said. ‘You two were friends for a long time.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know how long. Years, anyway.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was all right.’ Real men didn’t go into details about their friendships, but Atherton just nodded and waited, knowing that most people feel impelled to fill in a silence. Eventually, Gallo went on. ‘We hung out, you know? Had a few laughs. He was OK company. I mean …’ He ran out of steam.

  ‘You got him the job at Shapes,’ Atherton said to wind him up again.

  ‘Yeah. Well, it’s not a job, like a job. It’s all freelance. But it gets you contacts.’ Atherton waited, and Gallo shifted his weight and splurged. ‘You see, he’d been doing all right where he was, but it wasn’t enough. He’s good, Erik – a really good trainer. He knows how to get the best out of people. He’s better at that sort of stuff than me. I’m good at power lifting, weight training, strength development, that sort of thing. I like working with men. I haven’t got the patience for all that feel-good business, all that motivation and empathy and stuff you have to do with women. Like, we both did a psychology course, and Erik totally aced it, but it was …’ He passed his hand over his head, four inches above it. ‘You got to know where your strengths lie, right? Erik, he can do all that “I feel your pain” bollocks. He can do sincerity till the cows come home. And the women love him – I mean, love him. He can get work out of them that … Well!’

  He’d stalled himself again. Atherton said, ‘So why did he need the job at Shapes?’

  ‘He wanted to build up his private work. The pay at a gym’s all right, but that’s it, right? If you take on private clients, the sky’s the limit. Especially rich people, and Shapes’ clients are some of the richest in London.’ Atherton nodded receptively, and he went on. ‘He was ambitious, Erik. He wanted to be the best, he wanted to be famous, he wanted to be the name when people asked who they should go to. Like, Gillespie’s, it was started by a trainer, David Gillespie, and now it’s a chain, it’s a name everybody knows. Erik wanted that.’

  ‘And money?’

  Gallo gave a goes-without-saying shrug. ‘I mean, he needed money to start up his own gym, lots of it. I started up Pex, and I think he was jealous of that. Not in a bad way – but he wanted the same, only better. I got backing for my start-up, and my backers own half the business, but he didn’t want that, he wanted it all. So he’d need a lotta money – I told him that. But it wasn’t only for the business. He loves the lifestyle money gives you. I mean, you’d want to see his clothes.’ He puffed his lips and rolled his eyes. ‘Suits, shoes – I mean, I don’t care about that stuff. You’re clean, you’re smart, that’s enough, right? But he had to have the best. He wanted everyone to see he had money – even when he didn’t. He just … loved money.’

  ‘And sex?’

  Gallo gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, that too. I mean, we all like it when we can get it, am I right?’ Atherton declined to comment. ‘But Erik was like, a sex addict. He had to have it all the time. I swear, if he didn’t get his rocks away every couple of hours, he’d get antsy.’

  ‘Did he have sex with his clients?’

  Gallo hesitated, as if being asked to break a confidence. Atherton folded his arms and nodded to convey that he was here for the long haul and all avenues were to be explored. Some more encouragement was obviously needed, so he said, ‘The clients he met at Shapes, for instance?’

  He yielded. ‘Well, that was part of it, part of why he wanted to get in there. You see’ – he looked keenly at Atherton to see if he did see – ‘it’s an expensive place, Shapes – exclusive. People who want personal, tailored attention, and they got the money to pay for it.’

  ‘Attention including sex?’

  He looked away for a moment. ‘You got to understand, there’s all these rich women. Some of them are young birds married to rich old guys who maybe can’t get it up any more, or not often enough. Or it might be an older woman, she’s bored, got nothing to do but go shopping, husband’s always away a lot on business. They get attention from a personal trainer, one-on-one attention, it makes ’em feel good, feel wanted. And if they get a massage as well … You do a good, strong training session, then you get a massage to relax you afterwards, from this good-looking guy who seems to like you, and – well …’

  ‘One thing leads to another?’ Atherton offered.

  He shrugged. ‘What’s the harm? No one gets hurt. The husband never knows. The trainer’s not going to break up the marriage, all right?’

  ‘So do a lot of trainers do that?’

  ‘Not all. Quite a few.’

  ‘You?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘Once or twice, in the early days. Not now. Like I said, I work with men mostly. I’m not in that area any more.’

  ‘But Erik was.’

  ‘He did massages, he was good at it. And he liked sex.’ He gave Atherton a frank look. ‘I tell you this, I don’t think you could do that – service clients – if you didn’t enjoy it. I’ve known some rent boys in my time – they come to trainers to improve their bodies – and the successful ones are the ones who don’t have to pretend. It’d break your spirit, otherwise.’

  ‘OK,’ said Atherton. ‘And there’s money in it – the extra services? The trainers take money for sex?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ There was a touch of defiance in the tone, but only a touch. ‘You’re giving the client what they want, they’re loaded, why wouldn’t they give you a little present, a bonus, whatever you want to call it?’

  ‘How little is a little present?’ He shrugged. ‘How much did Erik get, for instance? For having sex with a client?’

  ‘I don’t know, all right?’ He tried to sound indignant. Then, yielding, he added, ‘It’d vary, wouldn’t it, depending on the client.’

  ‘Give me an idea. He must have found it worthwhile.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Maybe five hundred? On top of the normal fee. That’d be an average. Some of them would give more, depending on how much they liked the guy. Could be a thousand. Maybe for a special occasion. Or it might be a present, like a nice watch. Look, these women have got money to burn, so much they don’t know what to do with it. A thou to them’s like a tenner to us. They’d barely notice it.’

  ‘And it would be cash, would it?’

  ‘Of course. Out of their pocket money. Not a cheque their husband might find out about.’

  ‘So Erik was getting the contacts at Shapes, to do private training sessions, plus extras – in their homes? Or his?’

  ‘Oh, theirs,’ Gallo said with a short laugh. ‘They wouldn’t want to go slumming. Or be seen going into another guy’s pad. These are not women looking for a divorce, you get me?’

  ‘I get you. He does private training sessions with rich women, gives them a massage, and boffs them, and gets a nice fat bonus on top of the fee. He must have been making a lot, then?’

  ‘I suppose so. Like I said, he was saving to set up his own place.’

  ‘He must have been grateful to you, then, for gett
ing him in in the first place.’

  Gallo’s face darkened. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I? You knew he wanted the chance to have sex with rich women in return for presents. He wasn’t springing any surprises, was he?’

  ‘He can have sex with every woman in the country for all I care. He can have sex till his dick drops off. But when he messes with my little sister!’ He stopped abruptly, reddening.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Atherton said. ‘Lucy told me. You’re not giving anything away.’

  He stared broodingly at his hands, which were clenching and unclenching. ‘What makes me so fucking mad is that I introduced him to her in the first place. She was just a kid, he was her big brother’s friend, that’s how she saw him. That’s how he treated her. But then when she gets old enough to be interesting, that dirty dog goes and – he goes and …’ He didn’t want to say the words.

  ‘How old is Lucy?’

  ‘She’s only twenty now,’ Gallo said, and sounded almost tearful. ‘I know that’s supposed to be adult, but it’s not, not when it’s your little sister. See, when our parents died, I had to look after them all, I was the oldest. Lucy was the baby. I’m thirteen years older than her. She was fifteen, sixteen when I met Erik. He met all my family. He knew them. I thought I could trust him, but then he goes and messes with Lucy, sleeps with her, breaks her heart. It’s not on. It’s not bloody on.’

  The words were mild but the tone and the expression weren’t. This was a big man, Atherton reflected. Bashing Erik Lingoss’s head in wouldn’t make him break a sweat. And yes, someone who wanted him dead would go back and finish him off when he realized the first blow hadn’t done it.