Gone Tomorrow

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘And was he upset?’

  Speedy gave a snorting laugh. ‘I don’t suppose there was anyone on the base brave enough or daft enough to ask him. He never showed anything, but I reckon he was upset. He never got another one to replace it, anyway. And I’ll tell you something.’ He leaned forward a little. ‘He gave that bird a Christian burial. Put it in a cigar box and buried it somewhere up on the Peak. I’m the only person that knows that. I saw him put the bird in the box and I saw him leave with the box and come back without it; and later someone told me they’d seen him up there, so I worked it out.’ He sat back. ‘Nothing as queer as folk, is there?’

  It certainly was an interesting, if unilluminating aside on the character of Sonny Collins. ‘Tell me about the fight when he lost his eye. What was all that about?’

  ‘Well, I can’t tell you officially,’ Mr Rice said, settling himself back for the long haul, ‘but unofficially a lot of us knew what was really going on. I told you Collins was crooked, but crookedness doesn’t pay when you’re practising it on people you live on top of. So he started to look outside, and it wasn’t long before he built up contacts with the local people. Well, Hong Kong – you ever been there?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Hollis said. ‘More’s the pity.’

  Speedy nodded. ‘It’s a special place, is Hong Kong. I expect it’s different now, of course. Pity we ever gave it back, that’s what I say—’

  ‘Now, Stan!’ Mrs Rice warned.

  ‘I know, I know. Well, as I was saying, Hong Kong is – or was – the best place in the world to set up a bit of business and make a bit of money on the side. Anything you want, they’ll get. And when you’ve got it, there’s a stack of people to sell it to – tourists, service people, ex-pats; boats and planes coming in all the time with new customers, all of ’em with money burning a hole in their pockets. So Crafty gets in with a lot of shady characters. This particular one – can’t remember what he was called – one of those wing-wang-wong names – he was a right wrong ’un, a real cross-eyed ugly little geezer and as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. The local coppers had been after him for years for drug smuggling.’

  ‘Was that what Collins was into with him?’

  ‘I can’t tell you as to that, not as a literal fact. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, thieves fall out, as they say, and one night him and this Chinee start arguing, and before Crafty can get a swing at him, he outs with a knife and stabs him right through the eye.’ Mrs Rice sucked her teeth in protest. ‘The medico said he was lucky to be alive, because a fraction further and it would have gone right into his brain, which is probably what this Chinky was after. But he missed his shot, and Crafty came right back and swung a right hook at him, caught him under the chin and lifted him four feet in the air, so they said that saw it. Flew like a bird. He was dead before he hit the ground. Broken neck, neat as you like. Saved somebody a job, because he’d have been hung sooner or later, the sort he was, sure as eggs are eggs.’

  ‘But Collins wasn’t punished for it?’

  ‘Well, it was self-defence, wasn’t it? There were enough witnesses, and there he was without an eye and the medico saying he was lucky to be alive. Open-and-shut case. The enquiry cleared him, but he couldn’t serve with only one eye, could he?’

  ‘Nelson did,’ Hollis couldn’t resist.

  Mr Rice smiled. ‘Nice one! That’s one to you! But Collins wasn’t no Nelson and the Royal Navy’s a bit different now. So he got discharged on medical grounds. Honourable discharge – funny to think of anything Crafty Collins did being called honourable.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Well, everyone thought he’d go home. That’s what any of us would’ve done. But I suppose old Crafty didn’t have anything to go back to. No, he stopped on and set himself up in business.’

  ‘A tattoo parlour.’

  ‘That’s right. You’ve done your homework,’ said Mr Rice approvingly. ‘Well, where there are sailors, you can’t go wrong with a tattoo parlour, can you? He learnt how to do it off an old Chinee that was going out of business, and bought his needles and dyes and everything, and there he was. Service people and daft young tourists flocked to him. O’ course, tattooing wasn’t all he provided ’em with.’

  ‘Now, Stan!’

  ‘Got to tell him, haven’t I? That’s what he’s here for,’ Mr Rice said indignantly.

  ‘What else did he supply?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘Whatever was wanted. Hashish, cocaine, girls. I dare say he’d find you a watch or camera or pearls if that was all you wanted. But that stuff doesn’t pay as well as the other. It wasn’t long before he had a very nice stash built up. But o’ course that sort of activity attracts attention in the long run. In the end he had to pack up and get out before they clamped down on him, but I reckon he took a good bit back to Blighty when he went. Enough to set up in business.’

  But he didn’t, Hollis thought. He got a job in the licensed trade. He didn’t buy a pub, he got a job as a manager. So what did he do with the stash? Spend it all in one wild debauch? Maybe – except that he didn’t seem like the debauching kind.

  ‘Did you,’ he asked casually, but with great anticipation, ‘ever know a man called Trevor Bates?’

  ‘What, Crafty’s friend?’ Mr Rice said, little knowing what joy he brought to a policeman’s calloused old heart with those three words. ‘Well, I didn’t know him personally, o’ course, but I knew of him.’

  Thank you, God! Hollis offered inwardly. ‘Tell me about him,’ he said aloud, settling himself comfortably to listen.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Susie Wrong

  ‘Boss,’ said Swilley as he crossed the office on his way back from the loo. He changed direction towards her. She was looking extremely fetching in a skinny powder-blue top that consolidated her assets magnificently. He was about to conclude that Tony was a lucky man when he remembered that Tony was at home alone in his slippers reading the papers while his new wife was here with them, which wasn’t so very lucky after all.

  ‘Life’s a bitch,’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You don’t know what I’m going to say, yet.’

  ‘It was a general observation. Go ahead.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll be pleased. I’ve found out about Susie Mabbot, and I know now why we had trouble tracing her.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, my God, not another one!’ Slider sank into the vacant seat at Anderson’s desk, next door.

  ‘No, no, it’s all right, she’s been dead for ages. Before we started.’ She spread out the sheets of paper under her hands for him to see, and walked him through it. ‘She was pulled out of the river. She was right down at Creekmouth – that’s the opposite bank from Plumstead Marshes – but they reckoned she’d gone in a lot further upstream. You know how far bodies can be dragged if the tide’s set right. There was nothing on her to identify her, but fortunately one of her girls had reported her missing, and she got matched up as soon as they checked Mispers.’

  ‘And how was she killed?’

  ‘It was a bit strange and nasty,’ Swilley said, turning down her mouth. ‘I’ve got the PM notes and the inquest report. Apparently they found a whole lot of tiny holes all over her, only a couple of millimetres deep and so small in diameter they were hardly visible to the naked eye. The pathologist said they looked like the marks left by acupuncture needles.’

  Slider frowned. ‘Acupuncture’s hardly life-threatening. You’re not telling me the water rushed in through the holes and drowned her?’

  ‘No, her neck was broken. The pathologist concluded it was some kind of sex game, because there was evidence of penetration, and semen in the vagina, but no sign of force having been applied, apart from the death blow. PM report said her head was probably pulled sharply backwards by someone standing behind her – which of course could be part of it. Naturally once they found out she was a tom they concluded she did it for a client. I me
an, being stuck full of needles would be uncomfortable but they do worse things for their money. And then he got carried away and killed her.’

  ‘So if it was a client, I presume they were able to find out which one?’

  ‘No, that’s the odd thing. No-one was ever charged. They questioned all the girls, but none of them had anything to say, not even the one who reported her missing. Her evidence says she was worried about Susie being missing because of the nature of their work. Later, with a bit of pushing, she said she knew Susie had a client who was into some weird stuff. Susie had apparently told her she was seeing him that night – the night before she was reported missing – and was apprehensive about it. Here, look, her words: “Susie said this bloke gave her the willies. I said to her, well, don’t do it then, and she said it’d be the worse for her if she didn’t. She said he wasn’t a bloke who took no for an answer.”’

  ‘But she never said what it was the bloke did?’

  ‘No. She said she didn’t know – Susie never told her.’

  ‘And no idea who the bloke was?’

  Swilley shook her head. ‘They hauled in quite a few of the customers but cleared them all. Well, they had a DNA sample from the semen so they could be fairly sure about it, and most of them were well known to the girls and just ordinary punters. Susie ran an expensive house. They were respectable (ha-ha) businessmen, most of them.’

  ‘I bet that enquiry ruined a few lives,’ Slider commented. ‘Did the locals suspect anyone, even if he wasn’t charged?’

  ‘Nope. Not a clue. I rang Dave Tipper and he asked one of the officers who was on the case. They’ve never come near to looking at anyone. Of course, they ran the DNA but there was no match on the database. They’re now thinking that the killer must have been either a foreign businessman or someone from outside London who visited occasionally and went to Susie for his jollies, went too far and had to dump the body. She was dressed when she was found in the water, so they reckoned he could have got her into a car by “walking” her with her arm over his shoulder and his round her waist, so that if anyone saw they’d think she was just drunk. But apparently no-one did see.’

  ‘Yes, it’s amazing how people don’t see things,’ Slider said. But of course a lot of the time they did see things, and simply wouldn’t say. And there was, he knew, a stratum of thought that whatever happened to prostitutes was their own fault.

  ‘So what do you think, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘I mean, all this acupuncture business, and Everet’s boss being called the Needle – do you think there’s something in it?’

  ‘It’s certainly very suggestive,’ Slider said. ‘Whoever this boss is, his people are afraid of him, afraid enough not to grass him, and apparently Susie Mabbot was too afraid of him to refuse sex or to tell anyone his name.’

  ‘But she’s dead and it doesn’t really get us any further forward, does it?’ Swilley said gloomily.

  ‘Oh, it does,’ Slider said. ‘For a start we’ve got a DNA profile now, so if ever we do arrest someone we’ve got something to check against.’

  ‘It’s a big if,’ Swilley concluded. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Get a picture of Susie Mabbot and take it over to Neville Coulsden, see if he can identify her as the Susan who came to help his daughter move her things. Take one of her in life, if you can. I’d rather not have that poor man faced with a mortuary mugshot.’

  ‘Sure, boss. And if she is the same?’

  ‘One step at a time,’ Slider said. ‘There’s every chance she isn’t – or he won’t be able to say one way or the other.’

  ‘But if she is—?’ Swilley insisted.

  ‘Then we know that she knew Everet, who worked for a man called the Needle and might well have introduced her to him.’

  ‘Or vice versa.’

  ‘Whatever. It comes out the same. And as she was killed with those particular marks on her, it is very suggestive that her killer and the Needle are one and the same.’

  ‘But we still don’t know who the Needle is,’ she pointed out with fatal logic.

  ‘There is just that small thing,’ Slider agreed. ‘But link by link we’re forging a chain.’ And eventually, he thought, it might be long enough to trip somebody up.

  When Swilley had departed – with a ‘publicity’ picture of the ex-madam – on her way to Harlesden, Slider took the papers on Susie Mabbot into his own room and went through them again, settling the facts into his head. When he got to the statements of the other girls in the house he slowed, then paused. Then he rummaged amongst the photographs, pulled one out, studied it, and smiled.

  ‘Sassy Palmer, as I live and breathe,’ he said. Toms were notorious for using false names, of course, but at the end of every string of aliases, like the crock of gold at the end of a rainbow, was a set of fingerprints and a birth certificate. The employee of Susie Mabbot who described herself as Suzette Las Palma had been pinned down by the patience of the Notting Hill squad as Suzanne “Sassy” Palmer, and Slider knew Sassy. What was more, he knew where to find her. That level of the underworld rarely moved far from its origins, and though Notting Hill came under a different borough, its station and his own were a bare mile apart.

  He looked at his watch. This time on Sunday morning she ought to be in bed and asleep after her Saturday night exertions. Just the right time to catch her with her guard down and ask her a few questions.

  ‘Trevor Bates,’ said Speedy Rice. ‘That was a queer thing, now, the way Crafty Collins took up with him. You wouldn’t have thought they had a thing in common. I mean, Crafty, he had enough upstairs. He wasn’t stupid by many a long mile. But this Bates bloke, he was college educated and everything. Smart as a whip. Well, he was an engineer – and I don’t mean he was a greaser,’ he added sternly, as if Hollis had expressed doubts.

  ‘Electronics engineer, wasn’t he?’ Hollis said, to show he was on the ball.

  ‘That’s right. Motherboards and solder, that’s as dirty as he got his hands.’

  ‘How did they meet?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘Well, as I understand it, this Bates wandered into Crafty’s tattoo parlour because somebody had told him that was where to go for a spot of the doings, know what I mean? He worked in one of them tower buildings on the island, you see. Anyway, him and Collins struck up a what-d’ye-call—?’

  ‘A rapport?’ Hollis offered.

  ‘That’s the thing. Like love at first sight, kinda thing, only this was more of an un’oly alliance. They were thick as thieves. They made quite a team, too. Collins had the brawn – and the violence – and Bates had the brain. He was a skinny runt of a feller, was Bates, until Crafty took him in hand. Like the bloke that gets sand kicked in his face in the advert. Sickly white, too, and with that red hair – not ginger, but more like Rita Hayworth, know what I mean?’

  ‘Auburn,’ said Mrs Rice, without looking up from the jumbo EastEnders crossword. Seven letters with two f’s in the middle? What the blazes was that?

  ‘If that’s what it is,’ Mr Rice conceded. Anyway, Collins showed him body-building techniques, acted like his personal trainer, not that they’d invented them in those days. Bates wasn’t half badly built by the time Crafty’d finished with him. No Mr Atlas, but he looked the goods.’

  ‘And what did Collins get out of the relationship?’

  ‘Well, now,’ Mr Rice said thoughtfully, ‘as to that, I can tell you what I think, but it’s only my opinion. I remember that little bird, you see. I think Crafty was fascinated by Bates. I think he sort of – loved him, in a way.’

  ‘Now, Stan!’

  ‘I don’t mean in a queer way, not that,’ Mr Rice amended hastily. ‘But he protected him, looked after him just like he did that little bird. ’Course, he was older than him, Collins was, older than Bates. Maybe it was like an older brother thing, I dunno. Anyway, he kept him from being beaten up or killed,which he quite likely might have been, moving in the sort of circles they moved in. Anyone even looked cross-eyed at him, Crafty’
d sort ’em out so’s their own mothers’d have to look twice at ’em. On the other side, I reckon it was thanks to Bates that Collins stopped getting followed about by the police.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘Well, Bates tamed him, kind of – taught him to keep his temper, or at least to use his violence a bit more cleverly. Bates was an organiser, and he thought things through the way old Crafty never had. Bash first, think later, that was Crafty. And Bates was clever – inventive, always thinking up new things. Collins was just a doer, know what I mean? Together they could get up to four times as much mischief – and they did, from what I heard. Well, Bates was a bit of a scholar and he got on well with the Chinese – into all the philosophy and Chinese medicine and them eastern therapies and everything. He kind of understood ’em, and they trusted him, so he could do business with ’em without ’em giving him away. That’s how Collins made himself a nice fortune without getting caught by the authorities. If you want a solid reason for him liking Bates, that’s what he owed him, keeping him out of legal trouble like he kept him out of physical trouble. But that wasn’t what it really was, not to my mind. Bates was that little bird to him. He was his soft spot.’

  Mr Rice shook his head slowly, gazing in wonder down the telescope of memory.

  ‘I’ll tell you an example,’ he went on, ‘of how soft Collins could be with this Bates bloke. Have you ever seen him – Collins, I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hollis.

  ‘Well, you might have noticed a tattoo round his neck, a dotted line right round the bottom of his neck.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen that.’

  ‘Well, it was Bates did that to him. I told you he went to Crafty’s shop first of all for some of the other things he sold, but the story I heard was he’d never been in a tattoo parlour before and he was fascinated by the needles and the dyes and the stencils and all that. That’s how it all started. He might have gone away with his spot of hash and that would’ve been that. But he hung around to watch Collins working the needle, and kept coming back to watch some more, and they got friendly.’