I had an inkling of what I was looking at, but I still had to ask. “Helena, what is all this?”
“This,” she said, leaning back in her ergonomically designed office chair, “is the newest fad in the underground sex market. Strip poker. Very exclusive, very popular now with the bored upper crust and the nouveaus. The celebrities love it. Roving games—every week in a different location. Has to be that way because a stringer for The Sun heard about one and nearly spoiled everything.”
“I see chips on the table.”
“Yeah, it’ll take a few minutes to explain the rules unless you know five-card draw. As you can see, there’s more to the game than just getting your knickers off. The chips also represent…Well, the twenties are for—”
“You’re kidding me!” I blurted out, having already guessed. “Sex acts? They’re playing for sex acts?”
“The stakes run higher than your average blow job, darling, believe me. This is where the cream mixes with the cream, so these people insist on me and the other organisers ‘clearing’ them through regular AIDS tests and checks for other STDs. Private clinic, very hush-hush. Nobody wants to let in the swinger who also fancies a bit of rough down in King’s Cross.”
She tapped the keyboard to enter a different time index, and three screens for different rooms flicked over to writhing and moaning bodies. Cards were still being dealt while off in a dark corner, a man in a tuxedo shirt was bending a redheaded woman over a billiards table, taking her from behind. I recognised her—a star of one of the new dramas on BBC2. Jesus. Some of the card players were distracted and fascinated, some oblivious.
“How high?”
“The stakes?” Helena smiled, lacing her fingers together. She clicked the mouse on the View menu again and magnified a chip. “That’s a threesome, right there. And that one…Not everyone’s willing to play with that one. That’s F-O-D.”
“F-O-D?”
“Fuck On Demand, darling. You don’t pay up at the end of the game. The winner collects whenever he or she wishes. A woman can be giving a PowerPoint presentation right in the boardroom. She gets the call, and she has to beg off to her colleagues—the dog’s died, her five-year-old’s at the hospital. He can take her there on the desk if he wants, even if it means her job. If a winner shows up at the man’s house, doesn’t matter if his wife is wondering who’s at the door.”
“Christ, who would agree to terms like that?”
“Spice of life, darling. No one plays expecting to lose. What’s sexy is the anticipation of winning. Having the power over a lover.”
“And if somebody refuses?”
“Word gets around they welsh, and they usually don’t get allowed in other games. As I say, very few play with those stakes. And the matter’s usually settled discreetly. These people don’t like to have their habits broadcast.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but…”
“No, go ahead.”
“I don’t understand how you make money out of this,” I said. “Maybe I’m being a bit dim.”
She touched my arm briefly in reassurance. “No, you’re not. The players each put in a hefty entrance fee for the game and their ante. That goes to me for organising it, finding or renting the location and the rooms, and for throwing in a couple of ‘guests.’”
She saw my expression clouding, so she added, “One or two of my boys might play. Remember, the object of the game is still s-e-x, and the more attractive socialites don’t necessarily want to go to bed with the fifty-plus Arab banker who bought his way to the table. So if Fitz or Henry or whoever I’ve got is up for it, those women have something better to compete for.”
I shook my head in amused disbelief. I like to think I’m an emancipated girl. I’ve had a chance to live out one or two healthy fantasies, but this was as if the Borgias got a chance to run the Olympics.
“Amazing.”
“It’s huge out in Los Angeles,” Helena insisted.
“I’ll bet! So what’s your problem? Tell me you don’t need muscle to help enforce an F-O-D marker.”
“No. That’s not it.”
She paused a moment, sighed and pulled open a drawer in her desk. She handed me a folded piece of A4 bond paper. “This was sent to the home address of one of my escorts, Lionel. He took me into his confidence.”
I opened the paper and read:
POKING DRIED-UP OLD BITCHES HAS BEEN PROFITABLE, HASN’T IT? LUCKY AT CARDS, UNLUCKY AT LOVE. YOU’RE GOING TO WIND UP DEAD YOU KEEP SEEING HER
That was it. No typed signature, no pen marks on the sheet or stains from any contact with a coffee mug or water glass. The paper was pristine. When I finished, my eyes met Helena’s.
“You’re going to tell me I should have taken that to the police, aren’t you?”
“No, of course, not,” I replied. “You’d only bring the kind of attention to yourself you don’t need. Besides, there’s not much the Met can do with this. It’s on standard laser printer paper, probably knocked out with a Canon machine you can find in any office. A good guess the only fingerprints on it are Lionel’s, yours and now mine. Did he keep the envelope?”
Helena shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Okay, before I get into what’s written here, I still don’t see your problem.”
The doorbell rang. I was surprised. I wouldn’t think she’d invite other guests over while talking about something so delicate. But Helena wasn’t fazed at all by the intrusion. As we left her office and walked into the hall towards the lounge, she didn’t drop the subject at hand.
“What do you mean?” she asked me.
“I mean somebody bears a grudge,” I answered. “With Lionel. So have him drop out for a while and do something else for extra money. Whoever ‘her’ is, cut her off and ship Lionel off to Bermuda for two weeks for his nerves. And have him move house and get an ex-directory number while he’s at it.”
“No, it’s bigger than Lionel,” she explained, and she dropped her voice to a confidential whisper as she approached the door. “There’s been more than one threat made to someone at the games. The bastard’s gone after one of my clients. An important one.”
“Who?”
“I’ve asked her to come over,” she said.
And she opened the door on Janet Marshall.
I tried to cover my surprise. There she was, a handsome light-skinned black woman of fifty-two with a brush of freckles on both cheeks, her hair up and dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent suit, both hands clenching her handbag by its gold chain. As Helena introduced us, she smiled tightly, her brown eyes reflecting a touch of embarrassed sadness. After all, she could see already that I had more personal information about her than she wanted strangers to know.
Janet Freeman Marshall had been a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs when she was an MP. She did a stint running the BBC and, before that, headed the Commission for Racial Equality. And with the occasional newspaper column in The Guardian and an appearance on Have I Got News for You when the show was still hot, she had cemented her image as a stylish, successful and outspoken role model for black women. The last I heard, she was on the shortlist for the elite post of High Commissioner in South Africa.
And apparently she liked her sex on the wild side.
“Helena tells me you’re a kind of investigator,” she ventured.
I didn’t know how to take that. “Kind of one, I suppose.”
She turned on the charm. “You must be very good for her to bring you into this. She’s told me a little about your adventures. That whole business in Chelsea. And did you really stay with the Darfur rebels in the Sudan?”
“It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” I told her coolly. “I was trying to help a couple of friends and wound up smuggling in medical aid a couple of times.”
“You saved lives, I’m sure.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I drove a lorry.”
“With modesty like that, you’d never do well at po
litics,” said Janet with a smile. “But that’s all right, you get things done while the rest of us wring our hands and blow hot air.”
“I hope that’s not fishing for a compliment,” I answered.
She was taken aback. “Is there a problem?”
“None that I’m aware of,” I said.
“Miss Knight,” she said gently. “Am I to assume you are not one of those who would have voted for me if you lived in my constituency?”
I was honest. “No, you’d probably get my vote.”
“But?”
I didn’t feel like getting into this. She was pushing hard. “Let’s just say I don’t particularly understand the rationale of those who want to send you to South Africa. I suppose from their perspective, any one of us will do. But you’ve made a point in your career of equating black politics with West Indian politics.”
She looked mildly hurt, her mouth a tight line. After a pause, she said, “Oh. It’s that one. Let me guess: you don’t think of yourself as black.”
“I’m not black,” I said. “I’m African.”
In the background, Helena was positively mortified. At least she had the good sense not to try to play peacemaker.
Janet Marshall adjusted her posture. She was all about dignity. “Helena thought you might be able to…help me. All right, you don’t want to do it. May I please ask that you at least respect my privacy?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help.”
Her eyes still holding mine, she slowly nodded. “I understand.”
A relieved Helena made her a drink and led us back into her office.
“I’ve been stupid,” Janet said as we took our seats around my friend’s computer screen. “And careless. Please understand, Miss Knight, I don’t apologise to anybody for my sex life. My husband’s been dead for six years, and—and it should be nobody’s business but my own.” She inhaled quickly, and as she let the air out of her lungs, I could hear the tension and frayed nerves in that long breath. “But…we’re in Britain, and I’ve been such a clot. You fall into complacency, you see. You tell yourself they go after other targets, that you’re simply not that important. But it’s not personal to them, is it? They want to squeeze you for money. Or they like to hurt others.”
I didn’t respond to this, and after a long pause, Helena said, “Janet received a letter in the post. Similar to the one Lionel got.”
“May I see it?” I asked politely.
The great lady reached into her handbag, her eyes glistening, but with a sniff, she resumed her composure and handed me an envelope. Nothing on it, and they told me this is how it came to her house in Notting Hill. “It was slipped through my mail slot first thing in the morning on a Saturday,” said Janet. Another folded sheet, its message printed on A4 standard bond, just like the first one.
TIME FOR YOU TO RETIRE UNLESS YOU WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR SATURDAY NIGHTS. SAD OLD BAG, AREN’T YOU? HAVE TO PAY TO GET OFF. WHAT A JUICY STORY IT COULD BE
“What do you think?” Janet asked me.
I chewed on a cuticle as I held the note in my hand, gently swivelling my chair. Helena’s told me how this makes me look like a bored sixteen-year-old, and I’ve tried to tell her this is my “mulling” face. I’m mulling it over. Let me mull.
“I think,” I said at last, “we could all use another drink.”
“She’s warming up,” Helena reassured Janet.
I clucked my tongue over that one. Warming up? She was dreaming. Tracking down a blackmailer was slightly out of my league. My friend had evidently done quite a sell job on the prospective ambassador. I didn’t know what I could tell them from studying two notes. A few notions were percolating in my brain, but now was not the time to speculate freely. Helena returned with our freshened drinks.
“Have you stopped seeing this Lionel?” I asked Janet.
She looked to Helena, mildly confused. “But I don’t see Lionel. Okay, yes, I slept with him once because I won him in a game, but…To be perfectly frank, I simply didn’t find him that attractive. Or very good.”
Now I was confused.
“Janet has another regular she prefers,” supplied Helena. Janet looked down at her hands as our mutual friend put it as delicately as she could.
“And these are the only two threats that you know of so far?” I asked.
As Helena nodded, I couldn’t resist thinking out loud anymore. Janet was studying me with rapt attention.
“Doesn’t make sense. From Lionel’s note and the one sent to you, you’d think whoever this is believes you’re an item. You’re telling me you’re not. And our blackmailer’s not jealous over you—they want to end your political career. So why the death threat to him? Helena, I think I’m going to need all the surveillance tapes of these games.”
“Certainly,” she said. “They’re all on the computer. But I should tell you, Teresa, I haven’t organised all the games on the scene. I’ve loaned out Lionel and the other blokes a couple of times, and I’m sure, Janet has, um—”
“I’ve gone to more than just the games Helena’s set up, yes,” admitted Mrs. Marshall.
“Well, the ones that you’ve taped can be a start,” I explained.
I got up from my chair and reached for the mouse, clicking on the poker game that Helena had shown me before. There was the redheaded actress, yeah, a distinguished-looking white fellow with silvering hair, Henry, one of the agency’s other escorts, a blonde woman of about forty-five saying how she got slaughtered by the Dow Jones last Thursday before flying home…And yes, Janet was at this one. I hadn’t recognised her before because the eyes can refuse to see what’s there, or who is there. You just wouldn’t think a crusading female politician whose public image has always been about dignity and forbearance would be attracted to a scene like this. Hell, she was as human as the rest of us, with her own needs, and I had no right to judge, especially after cavorting with Fitz in the back of a limo.
I was watching the tape to get an idea of suspects. I didn’t have to speak aloud the shared thought that our culprit must be someone on the inside, most likely a player. But as we watched, Janet Marshall unfortunately took centre stage at the game.
She was already nude at the table, and there was a boisterous cheer as something happened—I’m not sure whether she won or lost a hand. I realised now maybe I was looking at her through a second lens of youth. In the tiny box of the webcam view, Janet stood up completely naked, her breasts full but still firm, her tummy having a mild roundness but reasonably flat, her hips only a little bit ample with the years. She was grinning and putting her hand on her hip, muttering something we couldn’t pick up on the audio, and I thought: I should look that good past fifty.
A black guy—naked to the waist and with his back to the camera—stood up from the table. Then the two of them went hand in hand towards a settee in the background. I still couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face. He was obviously tall—maybe six two or six three. Janet and her partner walked out of the shot of View 1 into View 4 of the sofa.
The Janet Marshall sitting beside us had suffered enough humiliation. In a glacial tone, she said, “I know this part. Helena, do you mind if I use your washroom?”
“Of course not, darling. You know where it is.”
On the computer screen, Janet lay down, her eyes glassy with lust, biting her bottom lip, lifting her knees urgently, and for the briefest of seconds, I saw an engorged brown penis, its girth impressive and veins standing out. Her man guided it like a wand to her fleshy gates, and then a couple of other heads bobbed into shot, the players now voyeurs. As the anonymous man finished mounting her, thrusting himself all the way in, Janet’s head fell back, and we had this vision of powerful sculpted back muscles, the line of a spinal column down to two café au lait hemispheres of sweet perfect ass. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. On the screen, a couple of the spectators were cheering as Janet began to moan.
I cleared my throat and clicked the mouse to bring the green table back into full
view.
“That was Neil,” said Helena. “Neil Kenan. Does modelling work, trying to make it as an actor. He’s quite a good one actually. He’s also one of my best escorts—and Janet’s personal favourite. I’ve had to break them up a couple of times because they conveniently ‘lose’ to each other.”
“Let me guess,” I offered. “You’re starting to see ‘atmosphere’ between the two of them.”
Helena rolled her eyes. “I love Janet dearly and Neil as well, but together, they can sometimes be a pain in the arse. She thinks because she’s paid for sex with him that all his dates through the agency will involve sex. You know not everyone calls us up for that. Sometimes they need arm candy for a function. And I don’t think Neil likes Janet playing the games circuit. I tell him to lighten up, that the poor woman was married for thirty years, raised a daughter who, thank God, is in America while this is going on, and she’s entitled to some fun.”
“Just how jealous can he get?” I asked.
“Neil?” Helena shook her head firmly. “No, no, no, Teresa. You can’t peg him for this. Neil’s the gentlest, most caring fellow I know, and that’s men I know, full stop, darling, including those I feed and care for on this little stud farm.”
I didn’t know Neil. And I wasn’t about to rule him out yet. I looked at the screen, frustrated that no clear view of his face was possible.
“Yes,” said Helena, folding her arms and smiling.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, the rest of him is just as gorgeous.”
“I just wanted to see what he looks like so I can recognise him on the other tapes.”
“Of course, darling.”
I laughed and playfully slapped her arm. “Don’t! I’m mad at you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
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