In the still determinedly dutiful, cold and uncompromisingly unpleasant rain Police Constable Peter Lassington, gloved hands thrust into his coat pockets, marched through the Soho streets again. By now the narrow pavements were thick with people pushing along in the sombre hunt for something to eat at a competitive price. Men with folding mackintoshes and old briefcases jostled girls with heads encased in folding rain-hoods. Sometimes they jostled by mistake, sometimes on purpose. Elderly female shop assistants with iron-crimped hair under small but stout umbrellas made their way purposefully to the exact spot they had determined on as giving the best value in hot lunches. Grubby little men without briefcases paused in the slogging rain for a few restful moments in front of the photographs outside a strip club.
The sights and sounds were depressingly familiar to Peter. He must have passed by the restaurant trade clothier’s with its ever-smiling dummy in white apron and tall chef’s hat a hundred times. The barber’s shop a bit along the street, painted a dull green and with a dust-covered scatter of birth control packets in the window, was the place where once a fortnight he got his hair trimmed to the regulation shortness. The pawnshop round the corner had never, to his knowledge, changed its display of massive silver sporting cups, candelabra and punch bowls. They gave the establishment its air of respectability: they served.
Even the Star Bowl ballroom on the edge of Soho was a sight he knew as well as his own front door. He had inspected the big, bright posters advertising the Miss Valentine contest for the first time three weeks before. Their every detail was now utterly familiar to him, except that a thin sticker had been pasted across each one with the repeated words ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’.
In the shelter of the porch roof a few well-soaked passers-by were standing, trying to make up their minds to face the full unpleasantness of the day again. Presiding over them, resplendent in a deep orange uniform with midnight-blue tassels, was a doorman.
Peter knew him as well as he knew the posters.
‘Mr Pariss here?’ he asked him confidentially.
‘I’ll say he is,’ the doorman answered.
He turned his eyes up to the low grey sky. There was meaning in the look.
‘Tell me something,’ Peter said. ‘You didn’t happen to get a note for him this morning – from a big, fat old girl, bit short of breath?’
‘Cor. Her,’ said the doorman.
‘Has Mr Pariss had it yet?’
The doorman chuckled.
‘Lord, no,’ he said. ‘You should see it in there. He’s got no time for letters. We’ve got the girls in.’
Peter made a face, as much as to say he understood.
‘What would have happened to a note like that then?’ he asked.
‘Secretary took it off me. I showed her where it was marked “Private”. “I won’t open it,” she said. Hoity-toity.’
‘Think I’ll step in,’ said Peter.
‘Have to unlock for you then,’ the doorman said. ‘It’s like a zoo in there. Only you have to keep the animals out as well as in.’
It was a duty he appeared to relish. With a smile ready to burst out the moment onlookers went away, he took out a key and surreptitiously unlocked a side door in the big array of swinging glass which made up the ballroom entrance.
‘Thanks, mate,’ Peter said.
In the deep-blue carpeted foyer, which when the Star Bowl was open set off so well the dark orange of the doorman’s uniform, Peter paused for a few moments. He let the warm, moistureless air dry off the outer layer of wet on his mackintosh, hat and gloves. Then he set out to locate the owner of so much plush luxuriousness.
It was not difficult.
Down a thickly carpeted corridor, through a pair of swing doors and there he was.
Unmistakably.
In the huge ballroom with its immense, bare, glossy floor and its distant, high, wide stage there could be no looking elsewhere. Though there were people in plenty about, ranging from the cluster of twenty or so girls pressed together against the far wall of the stage to an odd scatter of overalled workmen busy with hammers and paintbrushes, one figure alone compelled attention. In front of the stage there was a narrow raised pathway about four feet high coming out into the ballroom and back in a flattened loop. In front of this was a heavily draped judges’ table. And in front of the judges’ table was Teddy Pariss.
His feet were wide apart. His hard, bulbous body in its sporty Prince of Wales check suit was held back at an angle. The two bulges of flesh at the back of his neck were strained outwards. His bullet head was tilted. And he was shouting. Shouting with all his might at the would-be Miss Valentines.
‘Now, for the fifty-thousandth time, will you listen?’
The girls pressed even harder against the blue draped curtains which hung at their backs. It was plain that behind the curtains the wall was unyielding.
‘Well,’ Teddy Pariss yelled, ‘are you going to listen? Are you going to do what you’re told? Or do I have to come and bloody well make you?’
The threat had its effect.
‘Yes, Mr Pariss,’ one of the braver girls managed to say.
‘All right, then,’ Teddy Pariss shouted. ‘Now, when the music starts you come out one by one on to the catwalk. You come out in your right order. Any girl too stupid to count?’
And he waited, expecting an answer.
‘All right, then,’ he went on, without the least slackening in his commendably hectoring tone, ‘all right, then, look at the discs on your wrists.’
On the shallow stage the girls glanced down at the big white plastic discs strapped on their right wrists. Some shyly, some sulkily, some slowly, some quickly. But none quickly enough for Teddy Pariss.
‘Come on, come on, we haven’t got all day. I want some bloody lunch at some time or another. Now, hurry up, you stupid lot. Into line, in order.’
He stood looking at them as they shuffled into line. Watching like a great tom-cat ready to pounce.
‘Seven. You, Seven. You dumb cluck. Since when has seven come before six? Move. Move.’
The girl with the number seven disc on her wrist, a small plumpish dark-haired bewildered-looking creature, scuttered into place at last.
‘All right, then? Right. When the music starts, off you go. One, you go right away. Two waits till she gets to the turn of the catwalk and then she goes. Then three and so on. Right. Let’s try it. Charlie.’
Only on this last word did he swing away from the almost mesmerized bunch of beauty queens. Charlie, a sparse-haired, worried man, lifted up his hands and brought them crashing down in an opening chord on the battered rehearsal piano. Up on the stage the girl called One looked nervously from side to side, received a slight push from Two and started off.
‘Sam. Sam, are you timing this?’ Teddy Pariss shouted.
‘Yes, Mr Pariss,’ called a frowsty-looking little fat man nursing a stop-watch in a corner by himself.
The piano thumped out a weary tune. One by one the beauties left their safe huddle, ventured on to the exposed outwalks of the catwalk, smiled down at the indifferent judges already sitting at their table, completed their lonely circuit and regained the comparative haven of the stage.
When the last of them had rejoined the bunch Pariss turned to his timekeeper.
‘What did they take, Sam?’
‘Eleven minutes, nine, Mr Pariss.’
‘Eleven, nine. Eleven, nine.’
He rounded on the girls up above.
‘What the hell do you think you are?’ he yelled. ‘A lot of bleeding double-decker buses? They won’t want to see all that much of you tonight. Don’t you kid yourselves.’
He turned to the worried-looking piano-player.
‘Charlie, it’s your bloody fault. I told you to tighten that tempo, and what do you do? Damn all.’
‘It’s the girls, Mr Pariss, honest it is. They won’t listen to the music, so I have to slow it down to fit in with them. What else can I do?’
‘You ca
n make them listen to the music,’ Teddy Pariss snarled back. ‘Make them. And if you can’t, I can find some other cheap musician who can.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘You’d better. Now we’ll do the whole thing twice more . . .’
Peter Lassington, who had quietly made his way down the length of the great, glassy ballroom snaked over with black electric cables, took a last quick look at its owner and then darted through the inconspicuous door he had already spotted leading through to the back-stage area.
‘Got you, me lad.’
A pair of hands grabbed his two elbows and held him fast. In the sudden darkness after the bright lights of the ballroom he could see nothing. There was only the two sets of hard fingers digging into his arms.
In a moment he recovered his wits.
He flung himself forward in a single, quick lunging movement.
The grip on his elbows broke. From behind him there came a roar of fury and despair like a great walrus suddenly bereft of its young.
He wheeled round.
‘Bert Mullens. What the hell do you mean by that?’
A pace away Bert Mullens, the stage-door keeper, blinked at him in the half-light.
‘Who – Who is it?’ he said.
‘It’s me, Pete Lassington. Constable Lassington, you silly old fool.’
‘Oh. Oh.’
For a little Bert Mullens could think of nothing to say. He stood blinking away at Peter from under his drooping eyebrows, breathing heavily.
‘What do you want to go doing a thing like that for?’ Peter said. ‘I might have clobbered you.’
‘I thought you was an intruder,’ Bert Mullens replied lugubriously. ‘Special orders I got against intruders. You don’t know what it’s like, this Valentine business.’
He groaned.
‘Oh, I shan’t half be glad when it’s over,’ he said. ‘You’d think them girls could be smelt out, the way the young layabouts hang around. Like moths, or something. They can scent ‘em from a distance.’
Peter, with the sweat of fear drying all the way down his back, laughed.
‘Smell ‘em out, can they? It wouldn’t surprise me. But tell me something. Mr Pariss, has he got an office here?’
‘Well, no,’ Bert Mullens answered cautiously.
‘But I thought. . .’
‘Not a proper office, he hasn’t. We’re all at sixes and sevens with those dratted girls everywhere. Manager’s office, that’s been turned into a judges’ room. That’s that door there.’
He pointed along the wide passage running behind the stage to a door at the far end.
‘And then next to that there’s a little old junk room,’ he went on. ‘At least that’s what it was. Only I had to spend two days clearing it out. That’s where Mr Pariss has his office. He’ll be out of it tomorrow, I dare say. And I’ll have to move all the lot back in.’
‘It’s a hard life,’ Peter said. ‘And where did you say it was, this junk room?’
‘Round the corner past the manager’s office. It’s the only door round there except into the yard. You can’t miss it.’
Peter set off at a sharp pace.
‘He’s not there, mind,’ Bert Mullens called.
‘That’s all right,’ Peter said vaguely.
He walked along the broad passage and turned to his left by the door of the manager’s office. As Bert Mullens had told him, there was only a short passage in front of him with a room off it on the right and a pair of doors with an iron bar across at the end.
A few quick steps brought him to the office door. He tried it. It opened easily. He stepped in.
The room was small and showed clear signs of how it had been pressed into hurried service for its distinguished occupant. There was a curious mixture of the luxurious and the utilitarian. A thick square of deep red carpet covered only part of the dusty concrete floor. There were no curtains at the main window but underneath it there was an enormous electric fire, close cousin to a cinema organ. In a corner an ancient kitchen chair with one rung missing at the back rested drunkenly against the wall. But at the desk there was a shining, puffy black leather swing chair of the utmost newness. The desk itself was a shabby, scored office table dragged up from heaven knows where. But on it there had been placed, with fitting reverence, a small collection of choice objects – a heavy silver tray containing a couple of dozen well sharpened pencils and a gold-handled paperknife, a leather-covered tape-recorder and a blotter of a solidity and over-ripeness to grace a royal palace.
The only other piece of furniture was a bright, bouncy divan in unsmirched contemporary colours.
Peter Lassington finished his rapid survey, made sure that the door, which seemed to have no lock, was firmly shut and cautiously approached the desk.
And at once he saw what he wanted. A pile of opened letters was laid out ready to be looked at and on top there was a single still-sealed envelope. It was as big as an envelope could be, pale lilac in colour and a bit grubby. The writing was unmistakable, large, sprawling and clumsily elaborate.
Peter glanced back at the door and stood for a few seconds straining to detect any sound. From the stage, muted by the distance and the closed doors, could be heard the steady thump of the tune that the would-be Miss Valentines were parading to. Otherwise there was silence. Not a voice, not a step.
Peter picked up Fay’s letter and stood looking down at its pale lilac between the dark stained leather of his gloves. He held it up to the torpid light of the uncurtained window. But the paper was thick and it was impossible to make out in the least what the envelope contained.
He tried pressing the edges to make the flap come away.
The late Fay had sealed it with industrious energy and it remained firmly stuck along the whole of its length. He lifted it up and breathed hard on it. The faint hope that the warm moisture of his breath might affect the gum seemed to be working out. A tiny wrinkle appeared on the gummed edge.
Peter leant forward and puffed again with all his might.
Behind him the door clicked sharply open.
3
Peter wheeled round, thrusting the big lilac-coloured envelope, the last missive of the late Fay Curtis, behind his back. At the open door, a hand still on the handle, stood Teddy Pariss, recipient of the late Fay’s last communication, as yet unread.
And Teddy Pariss’s cold toad eyes were gleaming with pallid pleasure.
‘Don’t I know you?’ he said. ‘Constable?’
Still holding the big lilac envelope behind his back, Peter licked his lips a little.
‘Well, I know you, Mr Pariss,’ he answered.
‘I should bloody well hope so,’ Teddy Pariss replied. ‘I don’t spend heaven knows how much a year getting my name into the papers for nothing.’
‘I have been on duty here once or twice when you’ve had a big do,’ Peter said. ‘I expect you saw me then.’
‘So I did. I never forget a face.’
Teddy Pariss looked pleased with himself.
Peter let his rigid back muscles relax. With luck the conversation was moving in the right direction.
He smiled a little.
‘That’s pretty good,’ he said. ‘Most people only recognize a bobby when he’s in uniform. You can go up to them in civvies and they think they’ve never set eyes on you in all their life.’
‘Civvies,’ Teddy answered. ‘You out of uniform, now? Got yourself into the C.I.D., eh?’
His protuberant toad eyes flicked hastily round the room.
‘Oh, no. No need to worry,’ Peter said. ‘I just happen to be off duty.’
‘No need to worry. Why should you think I’d worry at the sight of a C.I.D. man? If any worrying’s to be done you’re the one to do it, Constable.’
Peter went taut again. He swallowed.
‘Trespassing in your office, is it, Mr Pariss?’ he said. ‘Dare say I’ll get sent down for eight years P.D. for that.’
The jocularity sounded very forced.
> But Teddy Pariss was not listening. The cold eyes were elsewhere.
‘Bloody chilly in here,’ he said at last.
He waddled towards the cinema-organ fire, bent down till the Prince of Wales check of his trousers was stretched to bursting point and clicked on a switch.
He straightened up with a grunt.
‘That’ll warm it up in a tick,’ he said. ‘Bought it specially. There’s no sense in being uncomfortable, that’s what I say.’
He stood, fat little legs apart, in front of the long fire.
A tight smile pushed its way on to his puffy face.
‘Caught you out there all right, didn’t I?’ he said.
Peter grinned ruefully. He had contrived, while Teddy Pariss was switching on the fire, to slip the big lilac envelope on to the desk three-quarters tucked under the heavy silver tray.
‘Yes,’ Teddy went on with deep satisfaction. ‘I changed my mind. Meant to go on rehearsing those damned girls till lunch-time. But I got so fed up with the stupid bitches I decided to come in here and have a bit of a lay down.’
He glanced over at the springy divan and trotting up to the desk unlocked a drawer. From it he took first a bottle of whisky and two glasses and then a piece of white card about a foot square.
He twirled this in the air.
‘Know what it is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Peter.
He was unable to prevent himself sounding suspicious.
Teddy Pariss laughed.
‘It’s nothing to be frightened of, lad,’ he said. ‘Look.’
He held the card steady for Peter to see.
On it was written in angry capitals the two words ‘Keep Out’.
‘It’s what you might call a vital piece of office equipment,’ Teddy said. ‘I hang it on the door when I feel like it. And I take bloody good care everybody knows it means just what it says. You can stick it up on your way out.’
He tossed the card on to the desk in front of Peter.
‘Yes, I suppose there are times when you want a bit of peace,’ Peter said.
For want of anything better to say.
‘There are times when I want a bit of peace,’ Teddy answered, ‘and there are times when I want a piece of bit.’
Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal Page 3