The Black Rose (Joe Dylan Crime Noir, #4)

by James Newman

  Jesus. Bounty. Christ.

  I turn away and listen to the chorus of grunts of pleasure as Bounty finds his rhythm and whimpers of pain from the boyfriend as he burns in his acid.

  “You like it don’t you, ya fackin like it.”

  Bounty. Christ. Jesus.

  Its over in a few beats.

  Bounty, spins back around shooter in his hand and points it at the rest of the old geezers. Some of whom are smiling – like they had just watched the latest crime flick.

  Some of them probably got off on it.

  Saved it in the spank bank.

  “Shit. Let’s fackin do one.”

  “Looks like we got little choice.” Bounty says turning to the rest of the punters. “When the law asks we were a couple of guys from up North. Yorkshire accent trying our luck. You think you can remember that.”

  A few nods.

  A fat guy gives him the thumbs up.

  “If not we will fucking find you,” Bounty adds.

  I take the money and stuff it into the bag like a scene from crime-watch.

  “Let’s fucking do one, like now.”

  Then the bookies and the streets are behind us.

  Along with the plan.

  I learnt one thing that day.

  Never trust Bounty with a cap gun.

  LONDON CALLING

  now

  Crime-watch.

  Don’t have nightmares – please sleep well.

  Miss Jones recognized Jimmy, well the boy that acted his part.

  Valentino.

  Taken into care.

  The child was all she could see, that gifted child running out the bookies with a negro and a bag of cash.

  A robbery.

  Rape.

  Crikey!

  The large seven bedroom house she had inherited from her father’s wife and she had somehow made her own. A house full of memories, books, ornaments she recalled as a child. The old rocking horse, a gramophone. She puts away the groceries in the large kitchen larder that stood next to the oil Aga oven that she rarely used. Along with the house came the money. Money that her father, following her mother’s death, had piled away in the house. Hidden to avoid inheritance tax. Hidden from her step-mother. He was a wise old badger, her father, Irish and good with money, unique in many ways. She walks over to the study and sits at the desk. She shakes the mouse to bring the computer screen to life. She logs onto the national records depart online. Ancestry being her main hobby since she had given up teaching and moved to the large old house in South London. It takes little more than an hour to find what she needs. The birth certificate. She opens a drawer and takes out a business card and calls the social worker who she had spoken to all those years ago. A few more phone calls, shifts from one department and then she finds the social worker and tells her about Jimmy. The social worker sighs, it was a long time ago, but she can remember the name of the town his father had gone to. A town name like that was not easy to forget.

  Fun City.

  She turns on the television to catch the local news again. Two men robbed a bookies, one raped a woman at the crime scene.

  Miss Jones begins to cry, slowly at first and then weeps. She recovers with a stiff gin and walks back to her desk. She could call the police, tell them the boy’s name. But he belonged with his father not in a prison cell. Instead she looks on the internet and finds the website of a cheap private detective.

  JOE DYLAN

  INTERNATIONAL PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  Joe Dylan, private eye, was nursing a Bloody Mary in Fun City’s Blackout bar. The alcohol was dying inside him like a hungry animal. It was his tenth and he was beginning to reach that stage where hungoverness parked her ugly ass into drunkenness. He downed the glass and spoke to the barman. “Give me another.”

  “You’ve had enough, Joe.”

  “My money not good enough for you?”

  “Your money’s fine. Drinkers are good business for a bar. Drunkards are bad business,” the Scotsman said. He was a huge brute and Joe had not the time nor the energy to make him see sense. He had switched to the booze to take the edge off the skag turkey. Kept drinking since he had met Hale. Figured he was in a better place, but that’s what drinkers think when they’re drinking. There was also a better place. A new bar, a new girlfriend, a new part of town, another town. There was always somewhere better, but with the bottle a new place was never better than the bottle in hand.

  Never a smart move.

  The geographical they called it.

  The phone call pulled him out of it.

  He hardly remembered he had it on him. An old Nokia, he thought for a moment of Hale with his smart phone and his GPS, his new list of clients, clients that would have once of been his.

  Well, Hale was welcome to them.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Ding a ling-ling.

  Picked it up.

  “Is this Joe Dylan Private Investigator.”

  The call had that crackling sound of a long distance overseas call. A job. “Yeah,” he slurred.

  “I’m calling from England. We have a young man named James Taylor here, and well, it’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  He was sure in fact, that was all he had.

  Time.

  She kept prattling on.

  “It appears that his father left the child under the assumption that he was drowned in the Tonbridge Canal. We have reason to believe that his father a Mr Taylor is living in the area you cover. And I thought maybe you could find the father. Tell him about this, erm, situation and bring the child and father back together. Reunite them.” The voice was educated. Hard to place. Partly Irish and partly Southern England, London.

  “You do, huh?” Joe said.

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you want me to do about it?”

  “We want you to come over to the UK and talk to the young man, he’s, in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I can’t explain over the telephone. But I can deposit five thousand pounds into your bank account and arrange a flight to London.”

  “London?”

  The concept hit him like a slap around the face.

  “Yes.”

  “No. Too many ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “But the father must know at least. At least you can find him”

  “I could find him,” Joe said. He could just take the five grand and live it up for the next few months. Find a stash and hole up in the apartment until the monsoon rains stopped. Or he could return to the city. “Give me your email, I’ll send over the banking details.”

  She gave it to him. He noted it down on his hardback pocket note book and switched off the telephone.

  Looked at the brute behind the bar. “You’ll regret not serving me that last glass, big boy. I just won the lottery.”

  THERE’S NO OTHER WAY

  THE CASTLE pub. We count out the money.

  “Nine hundred fucking quid.”

  That’s four fifty each?”

  “We buy some coke knock it out and reinvest.”

  “I know you – you’ll stick half of it up your hooter?”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll snort the other half. Helps me think.”

  So we buy an ounce of coke and head to the West End.

  What would you do?

  Begin a career in graphic art?

  Go to university?

  Get a degree?

  So an ounce of coke it was.

  CAUGHT BY THE FUZZ

  SERGEANT SWIFT switched from the animal porn he had recently uncovered and looked at the betting shop footage. There was something similar about the two. Just animals. Yet he compared it with images from Millwall football violence – they looked familiar but it was hard to tell. A chav and a black. They weren’t exactly in short supply. Like dogs and horses at the tracks he gambled away his paycheck at they all
looked the same. He needed evidence and nobody on the scene was talking.

  Now this.

  Swift was anything but. The large body of a pie and real ale man with large fore-head and features heavier than a street whore’s crack habit. His hands were small, legs short. Pace wasn’t his strong point.

  He stood and made it to the door of his basement apartment turned the key and out into the cold damp London night, streetlamps dully lit the street casting long shadows of parking meters and the perimeter fence of the church and the surrounding graveyard, tombstones, naked skeletal trees, dark fearsome hands.

  He decided the Golden Goose might have the answer. The pub was one he used often in his younger years. Sometimes it helped. A pint that was – to clear the memory. And the job came with the tiredness. It was strange that alcohol acted as a stimulant not a depressive for Swift; he needed a bite here and there to get through the day. He watched the film again in his mind and flicked through the local records from memory. Neither of them had a record, a prosecution, and there wasn’t exactly a lot of people speaking.

  Across the bar a thin pock-marked red faced Irishman mumbled to himself making gestures both patently obscene and incomprehensible to the complacent cigarette machine. The drunk moved up to Swift and pointed one boney finger at the copper’s nose.

  “You,” he said and then began to laugh hysterically in a mocking splutter of old cigarettes and tired whiskey. “Haven’t got a chance,” he carried on in his patter. The rank smell of stale animal sweat and broken dreams.

  “Move along, old man,” Swift said, flashing his warrant card.

  “Oh, a pig,” the drunk said. “A pig that will be pricked by a Rose,” again that laugh, mucus bubbling in the back of his throat.

  Swift downed his pint and grabbed the drunk by the collar dragged him out of the pub and out onto Fenchurch. Slammed him against the wall.

  “What you talking about?”

  “Oh nothing sir, sometimes I see things, a gift, a seer, they called me, sir, no offence. Woodlands, a Rose. A flower of a girl. A shame about your wife, sir. And with a friend, too.”

  Swift let go of the man and stumbled back towards the panda car. A sudden dizziness took ahold of him.

  He made to the car and reached into the glove-box. Took out a bag and opened it. Vallium blue. Ten milligrams. Let the tablet dissolve on his tongue. Washed the taste away with a good hit of Bells from a pint bottle.

  Gypsies.

  Drove east along Fenchurch, Houndsditch and took Petticoat Lane, a left, a right, another left.

  A curry.

  Brick Lane was not what it once used to be. It had changed for the better. Especially since the law allowed him to stop and search any suspect without a reason.

  Drove the police car and got out into the hustle and bustle of the street. Noticed two youths sharing a joint. Walked over flashing his warrant card.

  He smiled slowly and compassionately like he’d just caught his own son masturbating.

  “Lad’s, hand it over now and they’re be no grief.”

  The kids were from out of town, up north somewhere, and one said to the other, “Just give him the gear.”

  A bag was handed over. About an eighth of skunk.

  “Now move away from here and don’t let me see you in town again.”

  Walked back to the panda, opened the glove compartment and took out a pack of rizla. Swift rolled up a joint of neat skunk and smoked it down to the butt.

  Now he was ready for his curry. A Madras or, to hell with it, a Vindaloo would do.

  Extra hot mate.

  As he tore a piece of nan bread and wiped it into the sauce a thought occurred to him.

  What if Byron had arranged for the meatheads to steal the merchandise and the cash and he was simply playing the police and Jimmy?

  Things began to make sense as he drained the rest of his Kingfisher and paid the bill.

  BABY JAMES

  JOE WALKED up to Taylor’s apartment room. It didn’t take long to find him. They were on a case together concerning a seventies pin-up model once known as The White Flamingo, her wayward son, and the murder of four of Fun City’s women of the night. The call should have come as a surprise but surprises were limited in Fun City. The city was located in the Far East and had a climate that was hot all year apart from the months the monsoon came and flooded the city, washed away all the filth and the dust down into the drains where the rats and the pythons dwelt. The town was one long beach road with a filthy beach and sickly looking palm trees spread along a boardwalk. It wasn’t the swimming nor the nature that millions of tourists flocked to Fun City for. The tourists were mainly Western, Americans, Europeans, Russians who spent their hard earned currency on cheap hotel rooms and companions to accompany them inside these squalid dens. The companions were farm girls and boys from upcountry, transsexual prostitutes, old toothless hookers. Everyone had a price in Fun City. A city built on money, greed and the pleasures of the flesh. How Taylor and Joe found themselves there is another story.

  The door opened. Taylor looked like he had just awoken. A man in his fifties with a pronounced Roman nose. His long hair was matted and his eyes squinted as if the light offended them.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad?” Joe said, easing himself into the apartment.

  “With you, Joe, the news is always bad.”

  “Well depends on which way you look at the news. But whether its good or bad I recommend one thing.”

  “What?”

  “That you sit down before I tell you.”

  Taylor slumped into his lazy-boy chair and Joe took the psychiatrist’s couch that sat in front of a row of books, two of which Taylor had written.

  “I had a call from London,” Joe said.

  He told him about the teacher, about the gypsy camp, the school, about Jimmy.

  “Jimmy lived?”

  Taylor massaged his temples, found it difficult to swallow, stood, dazed.

  “Still living,” Joe replied.

  “I can’t believe it.” Taylor took a walk towards the drinks cabinet and poured them both a stiff one. “To think all this time I’ve been...”

  “You weren’t to know. Those gypsies aren’t the type to play fair. Those hoops are too small for the pins at the funfair. The big-wheel is all rusted. The goldfish die after three days. I once had a sister who...”

  “Forget your sister,” Taylor growled.

  “Look. They probably couldn’t even read the newspaper reports. Probably use newspapers to wipe their assholes. Line the elephant cage. Whatever.”

  “I can’t go...It’s too,” Taylor struggled for the word. “Emotional.”

  “My assignment is to go see the kid and bring him back here. If the money’s real. If you want me to go...”

  “Promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You tell me what kind of trouble he’s in. Bring him here. Once he’s here. We will leave town together. I have money, the book...”

  “The White Flamingo?”

  “It sold. I can take him anywhere, Switzerland, France. Anywhere but here or England.”

  “I hear you. But for some this town is a difficult one to leave. The kid might want to stay.”

  The monsoon rains began to fall slowly at first and the sky cracked open and the downpour begun.

  “Let’s hope he can swim,” Taylor said looking out the window.

  “Tell me Taylor, how does it feel to be a writer?”

  He let the thought dance and swirl in his mind like lit baileys on top of a B-52. “How does it feel? It feels like you’ve been on a ten year drinking spree with nothing but shaky hands, insomnia, and a deep urge to drown oneself in a river of sludge. It’s like trying to mold a statue from a heap of manure and then setting fire to it and listening to the chattering and mumblings of thousands around you. It’s like carving a sand sculpture and then watching the tide wash it away. The doing it is the best part. The lonely hotel rooms, the cafes the pub
s, watching those around you and spying on them. The ending is like selling a deformed baby to the highest bidder. Then some mad scientist gets to experiment on him. Many say the shit smells bad. Some like the smell of it. But if one out of ten likes the smell of that burning crap then you have yourself a bestseller.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you try to go on that ten year drunk and make out with beautiful women who only want a piece of intelligence or money or warmth or a father for their child. You ask me how it feels to be a writer. I ask you how it feels to be a man?”

  “You just described it.”

  “Thanks. Now find my boy whilst I disappear for a few days into a bottle of whiskey and a novel or two. The thing with being a writer is that you have to read. And reading gets in the way the same way drinking gets in the way. If I had my way I would spend the next year in bed reading, telephoning out for pizza and sucking Tiger Sweat out of a tank.”

  “I’d rather you write than drink if it is okay of me to say.”

  “You’re so clean cut yourself? Shooting up every-day and pretending to be kind of bullshit private eye. Get on the plane and find him. Bring him back here.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you do. What if he’s dead?”

  “Buy some flowers. Just find out the truth. You know when I was in my late teens I left home and went on the hippie trail.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “This was back in the days when Afghanistan was somewhere you didn’t bomb. Anyway, five years I was away for, never once telephoned home. Arrived back bolder, with more energy, wanted to tell my parents about the whole adventure. Wanted to tell the milkman and the old lady at the post-office. Well the milkman – the last time he went abroad was to kill Nazis and didn’t like it much.”

  “And the lady at the post office?”

  “Deaf as a post. But that’s not the point I went home. And you know what happened,” he took a long hard bite on the juice.

  “Tell me.”

  “I knocked on my front door and it was answered by a man I’d never seen before. This man was obviously gay. I mean that in a totally non-homophobic way. What I mean was he was as charming a man as I had ever met, therefore I came to the somewhat juvenile conclusion that he wasn’t wholly one. A man, that is. Well dressed in a pressed pair of trousers, a brilliant white shirt and I swear to the Lord above, a cravat. I promise as the day is long he may have even had a monocle, but the image fades. Mid-thirties, hair side-parting, warm smile. He invited me in. And it was like walking into a different house with all the furniture had been changed. The older man told me, they, my parents, had moved away three years back, he didn’t say where.”