The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  Fred wasn’t so sure. Richard had never seen Pony-Tail.

  He thought of Zarana’s snake dance – and had an inkling that her reality might live up to what he could imagine. At least he had something to look forward to.

  “There’s so much surplus emotion around here,” said Richard, “strewn like used paper tissues. It’s a wonder these things don’t spontaneously generate all the time.”

  The cube cracked. Someone swore.

  “It’ll be closed casket,” said Fred.

  Dark, silent figures joined the crowds, members of the Festival. They watched the cutting-crew extricate the former meat-man from his car. The rally in Soho Square was over. To the faithful, it must seem as if Lord Leaves’ prayers produced impressive instant results.

  A banner unfurled, proclaiming the wages of sin as death.

  “The most interesting thing about our go-go golem,” said Richard, “is that there’s someone inside.”

  “A dog-handler, setting the beast on its prey?”

  “There is such a person, undoubtedly. A summoner. We’ll get to him or her later. But what interests me just now is that some personality persists inside our Mr Sludge. An earthbound spirit, doing the summoner’s bidding. It’s not easy to get a ghost to follow orders. There has to be some sort of shared purpose. You can’t just invoke, say, Henry the Fifth, dress him in ectoplasmic armour, and send him out to murder the Bay City Rollers for offences against humanity.”

  “But you could get him to fight the French?”

  “Precisely. You’re learning.”

  “It rubs off after a while. So, you’ve got His Bloody Lordship, who hates the porn barons . . .”

  “And dresses like a high initiate in the sort of religion with a solid track record in revenant-raising.”

  Fred remembered Lord Leaves’ stern, aged features as he sang or hosed. And his wife’s ecstatic excitement. These people loved smiting more than they hated sin.

  “So who’s he raised up? Some old-time Puritan book-burner?”

  “That’s a thought. Mrs Grundy or Dr Bowdler? I think not, though. No point going to all the trouble of ensouling an amorphous mass of power if all it’s going to do is sing hymns or write complaining letters.”

  Fred thought about the crimes. He set aside the method – the weird stuff – and tried to concentrate on the motive. Maybe thinking of the golem as a plain old crim would help.

  “What about a nutter? Someone ‘down on whores’ like that nutcase who threw ammonia in porn cinemas. He hated it that the films turned him on, but couldn’t stop himself being in the front row every night. He was looking to blame someone else for his own ‘urges’.”

  They were outside the Dog and Duck pub now. There was a buzz about an “accident” in Greek Street earlier, and a grumbling persisted regarding the Festival’s hosepipe habits. But things were getting back to Soho normal – shrill laughs, loud music (Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” from the Dog versus Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” from the Crown and Two Chairmen up the road), busy fillies getting close to sozzled blokes, shills from the strip-joints inviting passersby, plods looking the other way.

  Richard considered Fred’s Ripper theory and decided it wouldn’t do. “Our victims have both been men. The higher-ups. The inadequates you’re talking about go after women – strippers, models, prostitutes, usherettes. Our killer has been precise about who gets hurt. The girls in Gates’ car got away with damage only to their dignity.”

  “So, we’re scouting the afterlife for someone who hates bent coppers and cockney ponces?”

  Richard spread his hands.

  “Neither of the dead men had fan clubs, mate,” said Fred.

  “I can think of two Soho disappearees who might have motive for doing away with Mickey Gates. We can rule out Pony-Tail, the patron saint of strip-tease. Our golem is definitely a feller. Shaped like a former wrestler, bouncer and strong-arm man. ‘One of those man-mountain types’, you said. Droppeth the penny?”

  “Grek Cohen?”

  Richard snapped his fingers. “Of course, it would be peachier if Cohen had some grudge against Booth.”

  Fred bit his lip. “Very sharp,” he said. “In ’63, Booth was a rising DC, already knee-deep in Soho rackets. They say he brokered the deal between Schluderpacheru and Gates. It’s what set him up for . . . well, for life. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who snatched the girl, to lure Grek. Then, afterwards, he . . . thwick!” He cut his throat with a thumb.

  Richard’s brows narrowed. “It occurs to me that Mr Schluderpacheru might, at present, be a worried man.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.”

  “Come come, now now. We frown on killing people with the Dark Arts, no matter their character defects. There are often unhappy consequences. It’s proverbially difficult to get the genie back in the bottle.”

  That was not a comforting thought.

  VIII Lord Soho

  Back at Skinderella’s, Fred learned Zarana had done her snake dance to an audience of precisely two paying punters, plus malingerers from a clean-up crew the Yard sent round to remove Booth’s body and seal his files. The ghost at the feast was Inspector Roger “No Mates” Macendale, who had annoyed someone once and been cursed with the job of investigating police corruption cases. Macendale had avoided the OPS mess for years; now, in Booth’s office, he was literally treading in it.

  Boddey was trying to make himself helpful, hopping from one foot to the other like a playground semi-outcast trying to get in cosy with bullies by directing their attention to even more marginalized kids. Busy hoped to cast himself as a heroic whistle-blower, soldiering on in an impossible job, never taking so much as a penny from the Vice Lords who’d suborned his guv’nor. It was going to be hard to explain away the Jaguar in the garage of his family villa in Surbiton, and the equally high-maintenance, luxury model girlfriends in rented flats from Belgravia to Hampstead.

  With the corpse removed from the premises, Richard had commandeered the phone and was making calls. The Ruling Cabal had pull from the House of Lords to the councils of gangland. Richard used it to solicit backstory on the Festival of Morality, the Big Soho Carve-Up of 1963, the box-office records of Imperial Anglo-British/John Bull Films, Ltd (Graf Konstantin Hermann Rezetsky Bolakov ze Schluderpacheru, prop.), golem-raising rituals, the presumably late Immanuel Cohen (“Grek” was from his wrestling style, “Graeco-Roman”) and the legal tangle of the Obscene Displays act.

  Fred sat in the bar, skim-reading Confessions of a Psychic Investigator. He had slipped the book into his pocket earlier and, what with the excitement, forgotten it until now. Chapter One, “The Ghost Gets Laid”, introduced medallion-wearing open-frilly-shirt magician “Robert Jasperson” and his cheeky cockney wide-boy sidekick “Bert Royale”, who ran a cleaning service to get rid of unwanted spooks. Their first big case was a summons to a posh school where a succubus was molesting older girls and younger teachers with “midnight gropings and tonguings”. Fred was miffed to discover that the gormless Bert spent all his time peeping through keyholes, getting “hot and bothered” as the apparently irresistible Jasperson enjoyed “rampaging rumpy-pumpy” with the French and Biology mistresses, the girls’ netball team, his “tantric sex magickian” assistant Clitoria, and a passing district nurse. At the climax, the randy git solved the case by converting the “heavily-knockered” ghost girlie (a nun walled up centuries earlier for instructing the novitiates in “Mysteries of the Orgasm”) to “proper hetero shaggery” with vigorous application of his “mighty shaft”. Lesley Behan (which Fred suspected wasn’t her birth name) made Jasperson out to be the sort of psychic detective who couldn’t so much as take out an anemometer to read a cold spot in a haunted house without being pounced upon by suburban housewives, high society nymphomaniacs, teenage virgins, Dutch au pair girls, or two-way bike chicks.

  “Losin’ yourself in a good book?”

  Fred looked up from a scene involving an “Or
gy of Bubastis” and saw Zarana, in her civvies.

  “Not exactly,” he said, folding the book and hiding it in his back pocket. “You heard about Gates?”

  Zarana cringed. “Some of the girls from Dirty Gertie’s were in after it happened. We’re all worried about bein’ out of jobs. A lot of us are considerin’ other lines of work. Actin’, mostly.”

  “Including you?”

  She looked glum. “John Bull Films has a company to compete with Hammer, Gruesome Pictures. I’ve done three-day bits for them – wenches chewed by werewolves, maids bitten on the nipple by vampire queens, dollymops gutted by Reg the Ripper. They couldn’t afford Jack, apparently. I don’t much fancy gettin’ killed over and over again. And those are Popeye’s ‘respectable’ pictures. He also makes the Sexploits films . . . you know, Sexploits of a Long-Distance Lorry Driver, Sexploits of a Merseyside Meter Maid, Sexploits of a Quantity Surveyor. You don’t get in those unless you turn up at his palace for bun-fights they call ‘trade shows’ and go upstairs with fat, baldin’ men who own provincial cinemas and stink of stale Kia-Ora. I’d rather work in a biscuit factory in Barnet.”

  “There are other film companies.”

  “Not if you’ve got a John Bull brand on your bum. Popeye can get you blacklisted. So I ain’t goin’ to be a Bond girl or a wife of Henry VIII. It’ll be back to modellin’.” Zarana held up her hands, made gestures in the air, turned her wrists.

  “Glamour modelling?”

  “Hand modellin’. Close-ups of washin’-up liquid bottles bein’ squeezed. Fingers brushin’ a freshly-shaved manly chin.”

  She brushed his chin, reminding him that he wasn’t freshly-shaved. “Don’t you think I have delectable digits?”

  “Absolutely, Queenie.”

  “You’re a love, Freddy Friday. The mitts are too big for the rest of me, but in close-up no one notices.” She stuck a kiss on the side of his head, tiny tongue slipping into his ear.

  Fred realized he was doing better on this case than poor old Bert Royale. Still, Zarana wasn’t like the paper cut-out birds in the book. And, after two appalling crime scenes in one day, he doubted whether he’d be able to raise the enthusiasm for “rampaging rumpy-pumpy”.

  “I’ll get by,” said Zarana. “I’m gettin’ too old and tired for strippin’. It’s murder on the plates.”

  Fred thought she might be about twenty-four.

  Richard slid out of the darkness and took a stool next to them, squeezing Zarana’s hand in greeting. Fred, for once, was sensitive – Zarana liked Richard, but fancied Fred. One in the eye for Robert Jasperson, Mighty Shaftsman.

  “Here’s a funny thing,” said Richard. “Where do you think Lord Leaves of Leng hangs his hat?”

  “Some Georgian pile with half Hampshire around it?” ventured Fred.

  “And a dinky pied-a-terre in Kinghtsbridge,” added Zarana, “handy for Harrod’s so his wife can shop her little heart out?”

  Richard smiled in triumph. “That’s what I thought, but – no – Algernon Arbuthnot Leaves resides right here, in Soho. It’s a Georgian, all right. A town house in Golden Square, about five minutes away from this fleshpot. You notice he didn’t have his rally outside his own front door and tick off the neighbours. Konstantin Schluderpacheru is one of those, two doors down. According to Screen International, John Bull Films have a more or less permanent party going on there. Top folk from showbiz getting zonked, dollies draped around the furniture, hospitality free-flowing, cut-throat deals signed in blood in the bathrooms.”

  Fred noticed Zarana shuddered. He remembered what she’d said about “trade shows”.

  “Gates lived on three floors above the Hot-Lite, in Dean Street. DI Booth had a split-level mews flat off D’Arblay Street for which he didn’t pay rent. Fred’s old classmate Harry Boddey makes do with five spacious rooms and a rooftop garden in Ramillies Street. Soho is the place to live, it seems.”

  “I share with two other girls in Falconburg Court, off Soho Square,” said Zarana, unashamed. “Handy for the clubs.”

  “Undoubtedly. But it’s His Lordship who stands out, as it were.”

  “That explains why he’s so worked up about smut,” said Fred. “What with him being local. Probably worried about his wife getting a shock every time she pops out for a pinta. The place fills up with blokes out looking for . . . well, you know. A decent woman isn’t safe.”

  “I doubt Lady Celia does her own popping, Frederick. Folk like the Leaves have people to do that for them.”

  Fred felt a full-bore glare aimed at him. Zarana was furious. He hadn’t thought through that ‘decent woman’ remark and dug a hole it would take a lot of fancy footwork to get out of.

  “No woman is safe,” he amended, which actually didn’t make things better.

  Those model’s hands made knuckly fists.

  “You know what I mean,” he said exasperated, fending her off. “You must get as much unwanted aggro out there as anyone.”

  Zarana cooled and decided to let him off with a vicious pinch. “Fair point. When I walk home, if I can’t get a bouncer to see me to my door, I wrap up in an old coat that makes me look like someone’s grandmother. Even then, idiots give me stick. They see you naked and think they know about you.”

  “Besides, there’s something weird about Leaves’ wife,” said Fred. “Did you see her face? She might be against filth and fun, but she’s charged-up about something.”

  “Yeah, I know,” admitted Zarana. “Among his other earners, Gates puts out – used to put out – a spankin’ mag. You know, ‘it’s six of the best ’pon your quiverin’ buttocks, Fiona!’ Lady Leaves looks like a Strict model. One of the thrashers.”

  Fred liked the idea of Lord Leaves flicking through a porn mag before writing his next morality song and seeing wifey’s bright little eyes staring up from a fladge lay-out. Under her wimple and robe, Lady Celia could easily be wearing black leather and straps. He tried to stop thinking of that. It was all Lesley Behan’s fault, for warping his mind.

  “I’ve looked over some of Lord Leaves’ recent speeches,” said Richard. “He continually harps on the theme of himself as the last moral man in Soho, surrounded by a rising tide of obscenity, crying halt! to the advance of corruption. He sounds like someone who wants something back. This whole square mile.”

  IX Private Files

  Boddey was in handcuffs, being eased firmly towards the door and a waiting Black Mariah. About time too, thought Fred.

  “What are you doing him for, sir?” he asked DI Macendale.

  “Tampering with evidence, for a start.”

  “Freddo, it weren’t me,” pleaded Busy.

  “Files upstairs have been filleted,” said Macendale. “We’ve got enough to hang Booth and a whole lot more, but choice items have been spirited away . . .”

  Richard was interested. “What, specifically, is missing?”

  Macendale looked glum. “Hard to say. But gaps are obvious.”

  “Constable Boddey,” said Richard, “have you any ideas what ought to be there but isn’t?”

  “I didn’t touch it!”

  “I didn’t say you did,” said Richard. “I asked you if you knew what it was.”

  “Will it help me?” Busy asked, tiny spark of cunning twitching the corners of his mouth. It was the ghost of his smirk.

  “It will help us,” said Richard, gesturing to keep Busy’s attention.

  Macendale shook his head. He wanted to get home to his cocoa and be up early tomorrow to swoop on high-ranking bent coppers. He would already have Busy down as grass-in-training, and ready to cut a deal to get the higher-ups named. The people who’d let Booth get away with it all these years.

  Busy swallowed. He had got more tear-streaked throughout the day.

  “I’d have to look.”

  “Under no circumstances . . .” began Macendale.

  Richard unfolded a document and presented it to the inspector. Macendale’s lips moved and his eyes swivelled from side to
side as he read. Richard kindly pointed out official seals and signatures.

  “Uh, carry on, Mr Jeperson,” said Macendale, fuming.

  Richard took back the precious document, and slipped it into an inside pocket.

  “Let’s take Constable Boddey upstairs,” he said.

  Busy shrank with terror. Macendale at least got enjoyment from that, and manhandled his prisoner up to Booth’s office.

  A door that looked like a broom cupboard led to a tiny space lined with metal filing cabinets. Locks were smashed. Richard took an interest in the damage, which could have been done with a sledgehammer. He scraped dried scum from a shiny dent in the dull metal and showed it to Fred.

  Only two people at a time could get in the room, and they found it cramped if any drawers were pulled out. Richard withdrew and let Macendale supervise Busy as he went through the files. The inspector kept a close eye on the miscreant – as if expecting him to grab and swallow something incriminating. At that, Fred wouldn’t have put it past him.

  Richard took Fred aside. “Our Mr Sludge has subtler habits than we thought,” he said. “Smash-kill-grind-crunch is one thing, but filching evidence from locked cabinets in a hidden room suggests a lighter touch. That’s where our summoner comes in.”

  “Still think it’s Leaves?”

  Richard considered. “Booth’s files would interest a moral crusader. In addition to protesting against the mere existence of licentiousness, I assume Lord Leaves agitates against folk who profit from immorality, encouraging their prosecution on criminal grounds. I imagine that’s why Booth was first on the to-kill list – it should have been his job to pursue Gates and the like for what I assume were many, many infractions of the letter of the law.”