‘His manner is too immediately threatening and intimidating. I had to assault my way past him to get in here. Then he pulled a knife on me which I had to take off him, then I had to break his wrist to stop him punching me in the face. He brought it all on himself. He’s not very bright. I’d think about replacing him if I were you.’
‘Hm. So how does one become a private investigator nowadays? Is there a college course that one can attend? In a polytechnic? I must say, I can smell police, or ex-police, a mile away and you don’t have the odour. There’s nothing wrong with that odour, of course. It can be quite bracing under the right circumstances. Little Viola Raleigh. My memory isn’t as good as it was, you know how things can slip away.’
He smiles sweetly at me, but his eyes have a steely look which tells me he won’t be giving out any information without a struggle. That’s fine. I’ve got all day.
‘You don’t have to prevaricate with me, Mr Novak. I don’t care what you do or what you’ve done. I’m just trying to track her down. She was reported as a missing person two years ago. She popped up on the grid again three weeks ago after someone else reported her as missing. I need to know if it was you or one of your associates.’
He adjusts his position so that he’s sitting more upright, sliding a cushion behind his back. There’s a small cupboard next to the bed with a drawer at the top. He keeps glancing at it. He thinks I don’t notice.
‘Three weeks ago! I have not had any business dealings with Ms Raleigh for some considerable time – certainly not as recently as three weeks ago. Nor would I want to!’ he says petulantly, peering once more at the drawer.
There’s a noise coming from inside the kitchen. It has to be Jeremy. I hear a key rattling inside a lock and a door opening. It’s going to be difficult for him to get used to using his left hand for things from now on. The door squeaks. Not used much. Novak sees that I’ve noticed and he acts quickly, his hand reaching for the drawer and opening it.
Unfortunately for him, I anticipated this action thirty seconds ago. I lean forwards and slam the drawer on his hand, twice, then pull it out completely and remove the Ruger P semi-automatic that he was over-optimistically reaching for. God Almighty – why are there so many guns about? Novak checks his hand for damage and looks dismayed and disappointed, as if he’d expected more of me under the circumstances.
Jeremy appears in the doorway, furious, his face bloody from his recent nose break and his remaining good fist balled in anger. I aim the gun at the centre of his head, holding it in my left hand so that I can slap Novak’s mouth with my right if need be. ‘Tell him!’
‘All is well, Jeremy, all is well. I think you should just sit down in the corner so that this gentleman can keep an eye on you and we’ll see what he has to say.’ He looks up at me with an expression of near admiration. ‘You broke his nose! I absolutely love it! Should his hand be quite at that angle? You have been in the wars, Jeremy, haven’t you?’
Jeremy sits down as requested, but he’s still tense and angry. If he saw an opportunity to take me down I know he’d use it without any hesitation, broken wrist or no. I should have searched him. I move my chair a few feet back from Novak and sit down once more, the gun still in my hand. I take the safety off and can tell by the weight that it’s loaded. I’m waiting for Jeremy to make even the slightest twitch. This guy is a proper heavy and a damaged wrist won’t stop him.
‘OK,’ I say, keeping both of them in my vision. ‘This is going to be easy for both of you if you play your cards right. I’m going to ask some questions and when I feel they’ve been answered to my satisfaction I’m going to leave. Is that clear enough?’
Jeremy grunts and Novak gives me an oleaginous grin.
‘If either of you two do something I don’t like, I’ll just shoot you. Believe me, Novak, I can make it look like he did it with his good hand and then turned the gun on himself. Or vice versa. Understand?’
How the hell did this get so aggressive and complicated? It’s just a few questions, for God’s sake. Novak stretches and clasps his hands on his belly over the sheet.
‘Of course, dear fellow. And may I say how humbled I am to be in the presence of such a professional and ruthless individual.’
‘Shut up.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Tell me how you first came across Viola Raleigh.’
‘Viola, Viola, Viola. Yes. A very disturbed girl, and believe me I’ve seen a lot of them in my time.’ He raises a hand and cleans food debris from each corner of his mouth. ‘Now how old was she when I first encountered her? Doubtless early twenties, though I never asked for her birth certificate. We didn’t have heart-to-hearts, of course, but I divined some trauma or traumata had gone on in her pampered past.
‘She was buying very low quality heroin from somewhere, but it wasn’t delivering her to the oblivion that she craved, so she was recommended to me, which is as it should be. I take pride in my work, Mr Beckett, as I’m sure you do, and it offends my sensibilities when I hear of such a powerful and effective drug being watered down for the consumption of the foolhardy. Or should that be powdered down?’
‘So the stuff she got from you was considerably stronger and of superior quality.’
‘The stuff, yes. I see you know your drug terminology, Mr Beckett. As I said, what she had been on before we became acquainted was cut with all sorts of rubbish. She brought me a sample. I almost fainted when I saw the results of the analysis. Among other things it contained toffee and brick dust. Can you imagine what must go through the minds of these people? I didn’t want her to go straight on to a more powerful variant. Not immediately, anyway. I wanted her to be a long-term and regular client. She plainly came from money and so was worth cultivating.’
I can see Jeremy starting to rise very slowly from his seat. I catch his eye and give him a look that says ‘no’. It’s all very well threatening someone like I had threatened Jeremy, but when they’re as dim as he is, they’re often compelled to do something stupid and dangerous, no matter what the consequences might be to themselves and others. He looks pale and clammy, and I know that wrist must be hurting like a bastard. He slowly licks the sweat that’s gathering on his upper lip.
‘So you got her hooked with due regard to your health and safety regulations and management policies,’ I say.
‘Nicely put! Yes. Yes. She was a nice little customer and things went very smoothly for several months. She would arrive here every week with her money, we would have a cup of tea and a lightweight chat and then she would go to whatever she called ‘home’ to jab the stuff into her veins. I thought it would go on like that forever, or until she OD’d in some public lavatory or squat or bus station or wherever these young people go to have fun and die nowadays.’ He scratches the side of his face and looks bored, but I know his mind is racing.
‘But it didn’t go on forever.’
‘No it didn’t, my dear fellow. It certainly did not. I knew something was amiss when she failed to give me two payments, one after another. Now I’m a very generous man, and her credit was good with me. I liked her, in my way. She had a very good speaking voice and a wide vocabulary. As I say, we didn’t do much apart from small talk, but I surmised she had been the recipient of an expensive education of some type, rather like myself.’
‘So what did you do when the money flow was interrupted?’
‘I have strict rules which I always – always – adhere to. The first time someone fails to make a payment, I will give them their goods in good faith and expect to be reimbursed the next time they see me. This I did with dear Viola. I can…’
He pulls himself up short suddenly and looks alarmed. ‘She’s not dead is she?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Oh. Oh good. On an aesthetic level, she was a delightful looking creature. She got a bit ratty-looking as time went on, of course.’
‘What happens the second time they don’t pay you?’
‘Then that is it. They are no lo
nger my customer. I had – and still have – a little network of people in the same business. I will put the word out to this network if a client is unable to pay for goods they have received. They will then be fucked, Mr Beckett. They’re only junkies, after all. It’s simply good business for everyone. I would expect the people in this little network to do the same for me under similar circumstances.’
‘But you’ve got ways of making your female clients pay off their debt and maintain their habit,’ I say.
He looks shocked that I should say this and is probably wondering where I got my information from. I hope that he doesn’t make the connection with Taylor Conway, but it’s always a possibility. Well that’s tough. On the other hand, we’re talking about ancient history here and it’s unlikely he knows where Taylor lives, though if it was an effortless job to go and break Taylor’s legs, I’ve no doubt he’d do it, or get Jeremy to do it for him.
‘Well, well, well, Mr Beckett. You are a well-informed young man, aren’t you? I wonder how much more you know about my personal affairs and business peccadilloes.’ He looks straight into my eyes for a few seconds and all the bonhomie is gone. ‘I wonder what would actually happen if I commanded Jeremy there to come over and give you a little talking to. Would you really use that gun? Jeremy was a boxer, you know. He was a boxer, then he was a builder and now he is a bastard. Isn’t that right, Jeremy? The three Bs!’
I smile at him. ‘I wouldn’t trouble yourself with considering anything as foolish as that, Mr Novak. Your whole life would change.’
He stares at me a little longer and the humour comes back into his eyes, accompanied by a faint, pained smile. ‘Hm. Yes. I can see that it would be a bad idea. I have met a number of private investigators in my time, Mr Beckett, but none of them have been capable of giving me the scrumptious little frisson of fear that I felt just then. How curious.’
‘Besides, Jeremy’s right wrist is broken in a pretty serious way. He’s going to pass out fairly soon and I’d advise a visit to the hospital when I’ve gone. They may be able to help him use his hand again. That nose may need popping back into position as well.’
He turns to Jeremy and gives him a sympathetic little moue. ‘Am I going to have to give you your cards, Jeremy?’
‘So let’s hear it about your prostitution racket.’
He takes a deep breath and sighs. I’m sure he wouldn’t have chosen the indelicate phrase ‘prostitution racket’, and the words may make him burst into tears with their vulgarity, but now I’m needling him for my own amusement.
He scratches his head and his eyes dart from left to right. He’s trying to find somewhere to start, some way of explaining everything that won’t give too much away, won’t incriminate him and won’t leave him open to blackmail from someone like me.
‘Well, as I’m sure you’ll understand, I’m not a hands on person as far as my companies are concerned. Like all good company directors, I delegate. But ultimately, all executive decisions are mine.’
Such pretension. Such delusion. Pathetic.
‘During our little chats, Viola had mentioned that she had, in the past, offered herself in exchange for drugs, shall we say,’ he says, sounding pleased with his own sentence.
‘With people she knew.’
‘Yes. Some she didn’t know that well, but the principle was the same as the girls who worked for me at that time. It’s simple barter, Mr Beckett. You want something; you have to give something in exchange. I talked her into it, I rationalised her into it, I flattered her into it, I cajoled her into it and I drugged her into it. Viola seemed to have a very casual attitude to amatory matters in the first place, I must say. I wouldn’t declare she was a great romantic heroine whose sensibilities would be offended by such occurrences. I would, in fact, suggest that the sexual life was not of much interest to her in the way it seemed to be to some young ladies of my acquaintance. So it was but a tiny step she had to take to become one of my, one of my…’
He pauses, trying to find the right word or phrase.
‘One of my bitches!’
He spits the word out, with joy and malevolence, laughing with his mouth open and giving me a view of his black fillings. He waggles his stumps up and down under the sheet once more. This time, the drumming is faster than on the previous occasions. It’s quite disturbing. I fear that he may be very slightly unhinged.
‘Yes, Mr Beckett. My bitches, for that is what they are. My whores. My sluts! Pretty Viola was a little reluctant at first, it had to be said, but the strength of her addiction had got the better of her. But I couldn’t just put her out there, you understand. She had to be put through a vigorous training regime. The most vigorous there was. She had to be trained to show enthusiasm. She had to be trained in many different arts and skills. She was an amateur and it was my task to turn her into a professional!’
‘And how…’
‘How did I do that? Is that what you’re about to ask? Well obviously I wasn’t going to charge people to fuck the silly little bitch straight away. That would not be good business. My clients are not top drawer, as it were, but they still like to see a little enthusiasm in their whores. They like variety, they like perversion, they like the girls to take them to places they have never been to before, or at least take them to places that they have thought about visiting but have never dared to go to. This requires training, sir. This requires training and discipline.
‘First of all, they have to understand that they can never turn down a client. They have to deal with men who they may personally find utterly repugnant. So with that in mind, my first act was to give her to Jeremy here for a week. Jeremy, as you can see, is a revolting, fat, brutish specimen with appalling personal hygiene and a stupid, boorish personality. He’s a malodorous thug with the IQ of a lizard and that is an insult to lizards. He hates all women and is prone to inflicting callous, ferocious and savage violence against them. He is a degenerate slime bucket of the first order.’
‘I think you’re being too sympathetic. Are you trying not to hurt his feelings or something?’
‘Very good, Mr Beckett. You have a dry wit that I wholly appreciate. You know what Viola looks like, I assume. Jeremy, as you’ll probably surmise, would never get a woman as good-looking as that in a million years. She would be, as they say, totally out of his league. So you can imagine the fireworks when he fell on her for the first time. You can imagine what he did to her, hour and after hour, day after day, night after night. He was like an animal, a beast, a monstrosity. He was remorseless, vulgar and pitiless.
‘His tastes in outlandish hard core pornography have given him an edge, shall we say, when it comes to entertaining the ladies. After that week, Mr Beckett, there was nothing that the lovely Viola had not experienced. She had been totally and utterly debauched. Why, he even introduced her to several of his chums from the snooker club he belongs to. They fully enjoyed themselves with her, believe you me! No doors were closed, if you get my drift.
‘My reasoning, you see, Mr Beckett, was if that if Viola could show enthusiasm and be pliant with a noxious specimen such as Jeremy, then she could do the same with anyone. If she could entertain Jeremy and his uncouth mates without a break for three or four hours, then the world would be her oyster. A Park Lane hotel room filled with Arabs would be a walk in the park for her, do you see? It would be a lovely day out at the seaside eating an ice cream!’
Park Lane? Really? I can’t imagine that Novak would be the first person you’d contact if you were procuring for oil-rich sheiks, but I’ll allow him his little delusion.
I want to take a deep breath and swallow, but I don’t want to show that this is beginning to get to me. It isn’t sympathy for Viola I’m feeling, but hatred for these two freaks. And here I am with a pistol in my hand and both of them at my mercy. Novak plainly loves holding forth like this, so I’ll nod my appreciation and hope he produces something useful.
‘So presumably you were present at Viola’s induction.’
‘
I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Mr Beckett. Far more entertaining than the television is nowadays. I’m old enough to remember the golden age of television and today’s rot certainly falls short in the quality department. The induction, as you exquisitely put it, wasn’t done here, of course. I have some lowly premises in Willesden where the training takes place. It used to be used by a gentleman who made copper piping, so it is conveniently soundproofed. I would sit in my wheelchair and observe. I treated myself to a ringside seat, as it were. I gave her valid criticism. If she was not enthusiastic enough, I would give her a sharp slap on the bottom with my riding crop. If there were techniques that she was unfamiliar with, I would instruct her.
‘Sometimes, it was easier to watch a pornographic film instead of using words. She was a bright girl, though, and she picked up most things pretty quickly. You should see some of the girls I’ve had to work with. You have to explain things about fifty times before it gets into their thick skulls.
‘I also taught her to use some of the choicest, spiciest language. She became very good at that, eventually. It sounded marvellous coming out of her mouth with that refined accent of hers and Jeremy here was most enthused by it and so were his snooker chums. They used to call her ‘Her Ladyship’, which I found most amusing. Sadly, I am yet to pimp out a genuine member of the aristocracy, but I live in hope, Mr Beckett, I live in hope. They are about, I have heard. Some quite close to the top, if you get my drift. Some much loved by the general public, God bless them.’
‘So then what happened? She went out for money to real clients.’
‘Yes. Yes. I must mention that she was dependent on me for her supply of heroin. It had to be that way. I had to have her under the strictest control. I am a whoremaster first and a drug dealer second. If some top businessmen were in town and wanted her, I couldn’t afford to have her nodding out like some hopeless smack hound in mid-orgy. I have my reputation to consider.’
‘Of course you do, and I respect that. So you kept her heroin habit under control.’
Kiss Me When I'm Dead Page 10