Blood Never Dies

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  She frowned. ‘If he was taking all these measures to disguise himself, he must have thought what he was doing was dangerous. So if he took a copy of his notes, he would have hidden it – don’t you think? Deposited it in a safe place?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and waited for her to complete the sequence, as he knew she would, being an intelligent woman.

  ‘But he would have told someone he trusted where it was. “If anything happens to me, open this letter” – that sort of thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘So who would he trust?’

  ‘Me. His father. Jennifer. I’d have thought, any of the three of us. Danny, his agent, perhaps. Some old friends. I don’t know who his new friends were. But whoever it was, they haven’t come forward?’ She reached the end of the reasoning.

  ‘No,’ Slider said. ‘Which leaves us trying to follow in his footsteps.’

  ‘And always a step behind,’ she added quietly. Slider’s only comfort was that she didn’t say it as an accusation.

  Hollis was waiting for him when he got back to his office. ‘Guv, we’ve had a call about Flynn on Wensdy night. This bloke saw all the guff and the picture in the paper, and rang in to say Tommy Flynn was in Missie’s in Earl’s Court Road with a female.’

  ‘Missie’s?’

  ‘It’s newish, guv – cocktails, cult films, pool, live music, DJs an’ dancing – got a good reputation so far, no trouble, and very popular wi’ the kids. Opens five in the afternoon till two a.m., Wensdy to Sat’dy. Bloke who phoned in’s a bouncer, name o’ Derek Ademola, saw Tommy come in the club around midnight with a woman, saw ’em leave again maybe about half one.’

  ‘He’s sure it’s the same man?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Yes, guv. Soon as he saw the picture in the paper and realized it was the same guy, he asked one of the barmen that’s a friend of his, and this barman says he remembers him too. Had a lot of double vodkas, and danced with the woman very smoochy.’

  ‘What about the woman? Do they know her? Can they describe her?’

  ‘Barman says he never got a look at her close up. It was Flynn’at come up to the bar and bought the drinks. Says when they were dancing he noticed she had a nice body, wearin’ a tight black dress, but that’s all. Ademola says she had black hair, kind of square cut like a Chinese girl’s, but he never really saw her face because as they went past him she was fishing in her handbag for something, and coming out he only saw their backs. I’m getting ’em both in, just in case, see if they can put anything together between ’em, but it don’t look hopeful.’

  ‘How was Flynn, did they say? What was his mood?’

  ‘Ademola says he was in a right happy mood, grinning like a monkey, dead pleased with himself. Had his arm round the woman, and coming out he looks back and gives Ademola a big wink, like, “I’m gonna get it tonight”. That’s why he remembers him so well.’

  ‘Well, he got it all right, poor fish,’ Slider said.

  ‘At least he died happy, guv,’ said Hollis. His marriage was on the rocks, so perhaps he could be forgiven.

  Swilley appeared at his door. ‘Boss?’

  ‘Come in. Sit down – you look tired.’

  ‘No, I’m all right, thanks. Been sitting all day.’ She was wearing high-waisted camel-coloured slacks that made her look even taller and slimmer than she was, and a cream blouse, and with her thick blonde hair she was a symphony in coordination. If it wasn’t for her rather blank, doll-like features, she’d have been distractingly good-looking. In fact, most of her male colleagues had been distracted at one time or another – to no purpose: she was unattainable, and had a range of searing looks in her armoury that could have taken paint off ships. Slider she had always treated like a father, and he had often wondered whether to take that as a compliment or not.

  ‘I’ve had a chat with Joyce Finnucane – Guthrie’s sister?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well, the whole dancing thing is genuine all right. He went to the Arkady Stage School in Tottenham Court Road. Took a lot of stick for it – you know, Billy Elliot style – but there was one teacher there that thought he had talent and took him under her wing. And it was apparently her that got Guthrie his first break, with a touring company doing Starlight Express. He was with the same company for quite a while, but then apparently this same teacher got him into Les Miserables. I’ve rung the theatre company and checked, and they say he was in the chorus for just over two years, but he left of his own accord, and quite suddenly. Guthrie’s sister says he left Les Mis for the Asset Strippers job, but I’ve rung the Asset Stripper’s management team, and the date he started with them means there was a gap of about six months between the two jobs. And when I asked them how he came to get the job, because there’s always a lot of stage-struck kids hanging around who’d love to be a gofer for their favourite band, they said it was someone at UniDigital – that’s the Asset Strippers’ record company – who asked them to take him on.’

  ‘Who, at the record company?’

  ‘His name’s Ed Wilson, and he’s Product Manager, which doesn’t sound like much, but apparently he’s responsible for marketing and promotion strategies for a number of acts. He has to coordinate all the press and promo around record releases and live events, and run the acts’ media campaigns, so he’s quite important enough to get them to take on a new gofer if he wants it. But why he’d want it I don’t know. Why Guthrie’d want it, come to that. It doesn’t pay very well, but I suppose it’s a lot less work than hoofing for your living.’ She looked at Slider, eyebrows raised. ‘Want me to find this Wilson and ask him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider, after a moment’s thought. ‘It’s an odd sort of intervention, and it doesn’t sound as though Wilson and Guthrie were cut from the same cloth, so how did they know each other?’

  ‘Might have been childhood buddies,’ Swilley said. ‘Life can change a lot from when you’re eleven. I know mine did.’

  It was a tantalizing opening, but sadly Slider simply didn’t have time. There was too much to do. He waved her gently away, and got his head down, trying to complete various bits of paperwork before he had to leave to keep the appointment he’d made to see his old friend from Central days, John Lillicrap.

  FIFTEEN

  The Get in

  The Asset Strippers were on the road and Swilley learnt that Ed Wilson was with them, but fortunately they hadn’t gone very far. Saturday would see them in the NEC arena in Birmingham in a line-up of top names, but they were doing a Friday night gig at a stadium on the way, where they would top the bill and give the good burghers of Luton a sniff of the high life, and incidentally conjure an income of half a million quid or so out of their vocal cords and pelvises.

  Swilley arrived in the middle of the ‘get in’, to an organized chaos that brought to mind a kicked ants’ nest. Vast artics were being unloaded of lights and staging, and tough-looking road crew were sweating it amid the clanging of spanners, the whining of fork-lifts, thumps and crashes and spine-tingling curses. There was so much writhing black cable underfoot it looked like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. There were vans unloading crates of beer and Australian champagne, pies and Pepsi, flowers and fruit, racks of costumes, sound boxes and drum kits. Catering caravans pumped out the smell of chips and sausages to add to the fizz of oil and diesel and sweat on the air – shut your eyes and add sawdust and you could be smelling a fairground. Smart PAs and fixers, technicians, publicists, caterers, cleaners, management legs, make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses and gofers darted everywhere like mayflies; arena staff and health ’n’ safety officers clutching clipboards wandered among them looking worried. Nearly everyone had either a radio or a mobile to his ear.

  And then there was the security contingent: huge, bald men with gold chains and rings on their knuckles like pile drivers, and tattooed, shaven-headed women in big boots. Swilley was tough, and she had the law on her side, but still she reckoned the only reason she got past them was that the limos contai
ning the Asset Strippers and the other acts had not yet arrived. And also she only wanted to see Ed Wilson, the git from the record company – nobody important. She was passed into the care of a small, thin gofer who had been surgically grafted to his radio, and hurried behind him through the ferment to an indoor Portakabin where a sharp-suited, over-cologned middle-aged man, with a permatan and thinning hair carefully eked out to hide the fact, was talking to someone who was so obviously a reporter from the local paper that Swilley felt sorry for her.

  Wilson, learning who Swilley was in a breathless gush from the gofer, smiled very whitely and said, ‘I’ll be with you in just one second,’ and finished rather abruptly with the reporter, who looked almost relieved to be let go – and probably not just because of the aftershave. If she could blend in with the frenetic activity outside she might get a glimpse of the Asset Strippers themselves before security spotted and ejected her.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Wilson said, giving Swilley another flash of the teeth. They were so white he’d have been useful to have around on a rocky shore in the fog. ‘How can I help you? I’ve got a lot more press coming, and I have to be there when the girls arrive, so it’ll have to be quick.’

  Swilley detached her mind from the problem of whether he was wearing make-up and took his mind back to the distant time two years ago when he had persuaded the AS’s management to take on Jesse Guthrie as a gofer.

  His frown of thought was so exaggerated he might have been demonstrating it to an acting class. ‘Jesse Guthrie?’ he pondered.

  Swilley didn’t want her allotted time to run out into the sands of prevarication. ‘Died a few months back of an overdose. Surely you haven’t forgotten him already?’ she said nastily.

  He snapped out of it. ‘Oh, I remember him all right,’ he said hastily. ‘I just wondered why you were asking about him. It’s not about the overdose business, surely, because you can’t think that has anything to do with me. We at Modern—’

  ‘Modern?’

  ‘That’s our record label. We’re a subsidiary of UniDigital,’ he informed her kindly. ‘And all of us at Modern and Digital are very anti drugs. Digital contributes extremely handsomely every year to various programmes, and we are zero tolerance of any employees who—’

  ‘But Guthrie wasn’t your employee,’ Swilley interrupted, in the interests of not falling unconscious from the boredom of the corporate homily. ‘So no one could hold you accountable for his death, could they? What I want to know is, why did you get him the job?’

  ‘It was a favour for an old friend,’ he said warily.

  ‘What old friend?’

  He licked his lips. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t know the kid was going to overdose, did I? It’s the last thing I’d want, bad publicity like that.’

  ‘Just tell me everything,’ Swilley invited, almost motherly.

  A smartphone with a girl stuck to it came through the door, and he said sharply, ‘Not now, Tiffany. In fact, I can’t see anyone for ten minutes. Make sure I’m not disturbed.’

  When they were alone, he perched himself on the edge of a table, folded his arms defensively across his chest, and said, ‘All right. I got Jesse put on as a favour to an old friend. Well, I say friend – he and I were at school together, and I never much liked him then, but I bumped into him again by chance years later in Canary Wharf and, you know how it is, we went for a drink, got chatting, and he said there was this young friend of his needed a job, and could I get him something. So I did. End of.’

  ‘That’s not half a story,’ Swilley said. ‘Who was this old friend, for a start?’

  ‘His name’s David Regal.’

  ‘The solicitor?’ Swilley said calmly.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know of him,’ she said, as if indifferently. ‘And what was his interest in Guthrie?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ She stared him down. ‘All right, look, I don’t know, but I gathered that David butters his bread the other side, all right? And I suppose Jesse was his – friend. Jesse was over age, it was his business – their business – nothing to do with me. It’s not illegal, is it?’

  Swilley kept up the stare. ‘What is it you’re not telling me? Come on, it’s better to get it off your chest, otherwise I’ll keep asking and you’ll never get rid of me. Why did you do a favour for this bloke you hadn’t seen for years and didn’t like anyway?’

  Wilson hugged his arms closer, his feet fidgeted on the floor, his face looked drawn. ‘It’s . . . I don’t want . . .’ He dithered. ‘If it got out . . .’

  ‘It’s not you I’m interested in, if that helps,’ Swilley said. ‘Just tell me everything and I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again. C’mon, what did you do? It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It would be if it got out. Look, the fact is, I had to do David a favour.’

  ‘He blackmailed you?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘How did he manage that if you hadn’t seen him since schooldays?’

  He blushed. ‘Well, that wasn’t quite true. I’d met him a few times. He had an office not far from mine. I was just out of my first divorce, I was at a loose end. David seemed to have a pass to all the clubs. It was better than sitting at home being miserable. Then one night after work he invited me to this party at a private flat, one of those converted warehouses. It was hot stuff. Shedloads of booze and charlie. Everyone got pretty spaced. There were girls – and boys.’

  ‘Are you into boys as well?’

  ‘No! I told you, I was married. Twice. But I had a thing that night with a couple of the girls. And then there was a raid.’ He looked at Swilley resentfully. ‘I don’t know why you lot can’t leave people alone. We weren’t doing anyone any harm.’

  She ignored the bait. ‘Go on. What happened?’

  ‘David got me out. There was a fire escape at the back. The police were down the bottom, in the back yard, but he took me up the stairs, and we hid at the top until they’d gone. Damn near froze to death, but it was better than getting arrested. In my business, that would have been curtains for me. It was in the papers the next day, and a couple of businessmen got photographed coming out still in bondage gear. UniDigital would have had my guts for garters if it’d been me.’

  ‘So you were grateful to him?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. But I’d learnt my lesson. I stopped meeting him, made excuses when he rang, and after a bit he stopped asking. I didn’t see him for about a year. Then I bumped into him, like I said. Except, looking back, it may not have been accidental. Anyway, he said come for a drink, so I did, reluctantly, and then he said he wanted to ask me a favour. Get a job for this young man. When I hesitated – because I didn’t want to get involved – he said I owed him, and it would have been easy to get out himself that night and let me take the rap. And he said he could still tell the story if he wanted to. I said he had no proof, but he said on the contrary, he had photographs, and my employers might be interested.’

  He looked at her in a drawn way.

  ‘So it was blackmail,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t put it like that. When I got angry with him, he said it was just a favour for a favour, and I’d never hear from him again if I did this one thing. He said he wanted the boy in the Asset Strippers team, but it could be something lowly, like a gofer. He wanted him to have plenty of spare time, he said. Well, you can never have enough gofers, but when you’ve got plenty of them, they can take time off. Not that any of them usually want to – they do it for the bands, not the money. Anyway, I did it – got him the job. I can tell you, I felt sick about it – it’s horrible being manipulated – and I kept thinking, what’s coming next? Because I couldn’t believe that was all he’d ask. But in fact I haven’t heard from him since.’ He shuddered. ‘But it hangs over you, you know. Like a shadow. Waiting for the blow to fall. And every time I saw Jesse, it was like it was David watching me, like a death’s-head saying, I’ll be coming for you – today, to
morrow, sometime.’

  Too much imagination, Swilley thought dispassionately. It made him easy to work on. And even yet she was sure she hadn’t heard the all of what he had done that was blackmailable. But it didn’t matter. ‘What do you know about Jesse?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. Never met him before, don’t remember ever speaking to him afterwards. Saw him around, that was all. I’d got him the job, that was all I wanted to know. Then I heard he was dead. End of.’

  Swilley hated that expression. ‘And what do you know about David Regal?’

  ‘More than I want to.’

  ‘What sort of solicitor is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never really talked about it. But I imagine its commercial or corporate law, not your high-street wills and conveyancing because he makes a shedload of money. Fabulous suits. Big house in Highgate, Bentley convertible. He backs shows, owns a couple of racehorses. I know where it goes, all right, but not where it comes from.’ He laughed, and then heard how inappropriate it sounded, and stopped. ‘Look, is that all? Because the girls will be here any second and if I’m not on hand it could be my job.’

  Swilley nodded. ‘All right. That will do for now. I might have to come back, so don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Where would I go? Unless you get me sacked.’

  ‘I don’t mean to do that. I’d like you where you are.’

  She had reached the door when he said, ‘Bit late, asking about Jesse now, aren’t you? It was months ago he died. What gives?’

  ‘Just clearing up a few details,’ she said.

  She was half way out of the door when he added, ‘He’s married, you know. David. Lovely woman. I’ve seen her in the glossies at premieres and so on. So the boy thing can’t be exclusive.’

  ‘Regal’s office is in Leadenhall Street,’ Swilley said.

  ‘So, not notably close to Canary Wharf,’ Slider said.

  ‘Which sounds as if the meeting was engineered,’ said Atherton.

  ‘Or he was in Canary Wharf for some other reason,’ Slider concluded.