Kiss Me Quick

by Miller, Danny

  ‘What the fuck’s so funny about it?’ he snarled.

  ‘Laid out like that, looks sort of staged. A theatrical depiction of a murder victim.’

  Tobin shook his head in mild disgust, major annoyance. ‘What is this, then, some of your poncified university humour? What they call it – satire? Beyond the Pale?’

  ‘Fringe, Eddie. Beyond the Fringe,’ replied the young detective thoughtlessly, as he knelt down for a closer look at the body.

  ‘Smart-arsed bunch of disrespectful public-school irons, the lot of them.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, Eddie, but you wouldn’t get this going on in the Establishment Club.’ He continued inspecting the body.

  ‘Talk straight, Treadwell.’

  ‘OK, how’s this? The knife obviously stopped his pump straight away, accounting for the small amount of blood around the wound and hardly any on the floor. No signs of a struggle. His tie’s still in place, so doesn’t look like he’s been in a fight. No cuts to the hands or arms, suggesting he didn’t raise them to protect himself. Probably didn’t think he had to. And by the time he did, it was too late. I’d say not only did he know his attacker, but he trusted him.’ He glanced up at Tobin. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Nice way to start the New Year,’ interrupted Lionel Duval, emerging from the beaded curtain that separated the back room from the main club. Sleek as a shark in a slate-grey suit, his perfectly coiffed silver hair put him in at around fifty; his smooth boyish features put him in at under forty; and the gold-framed tinted glasses that covered those cold dead eyes put him in as a night-time operator. ‘The Fourth Estate will love this shit. That Duncan Webb of the People, he’ll be all over it like a bad case of the pox. Always looking for intrigue, that man.’

  The irony wasn’t lost on the young detective. As he stood up to greet Duval, he couldn’t help but smile. ‘A scarred-faced gangster found with a knife practically nailing him to the floor of a Soho clip-joint isn’t exactly “cat stuck up a tree” material, Mr Duval.’

  Duval was a study in indignation. ‘Clip-joint? Eddie, who’s the adjunct?’

  ‘This is Detective Vince Treadwell and …’ Before Tobin could finish, Duval had reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a wedge-heavy manila envelope. Tobin cut dead Duval’s indiscretion by dipping his brow into a furrowed frown, raising his voice and putting him straight. ‘Otherwise known as “Vinnie Clean Face”.’ Not subtle but effective. Duval went into reverse and slipped the envelope back into his pocket.

  Tobin then felt the need to clarify the nickname, ‘We call him that on account he’s so young and fresh faced. A college boy.’

  It was an apt description of the young detective, but a risible explanation of the moniker. Vince registered the point with a small cynical laugh, accompanied by an equally disdainful shake of his head.

  ‘Oh, nice to meet you, Detective Tread …?’

  ‘Treadwell. Detective Vince Treadwell.’

  ‘Tread-well. Detective Vince Treadwell,’ Duval echoed, making a show of committing it to memory. Satisfied it had sunk in and been stored away, he pulled a big convivial grin, showing rows of expensively capped teeth. ‘And please call me Lionel. All my friends call me Lionel.’

  ‘You need Murder Squad, Mr Duval.’

  Duval understood the message, but kept on grinning.

  ‘So how come you called DS Tobin?’ continued Vince.

  Duval looked at Tobin for a lead, but none was forthcoming. Tobin wasn’t that fast on his feet – not even in his boxing days.

  ‘I called Eddie here because, well, he’s an old acquaintance. And I knew he’d follow the correct procedures, deal with it in the proper manner. Murder Squad, Vice Squad, they’re all much of a muchness to me. All you boys in blue, pinstripe, houndstooth or Harris fucking tweed for that matter are, like I said, Vince, friends of mine.’ Laughing now, Duval offered Vince his hand.

  Vince pointedly ignored it, gestured to the body and asked, ‘So what happened here?’

  The continued snubs appeared to be water off the shark’s back. Duval’s grin stayed fixed as he replied, ‘Well, from what Colin told me—’

  ‘Who’s Colin?’

  ‘The doorman,’ replied Tobin.

  Vince took out his notebook and started writing.

  ‘Tommy Ribbons came in with two mates,’ continued Duval. ‘Maltese guys – dark, swarthy-looking buggers from all accounts. Nattering away in their lingo, ten to the dozen, you know how they do. They sat in the booth.’ He pointed to the booth. ‘Then they ordered some drinks off one of our lovely hostesses, the only one on duty at the time as it thankfully happens. When she returned with the drinks, the two swarthy fellas were gone’ – Duval glanced down at the body ‘– and only he was left.’

  ‘Where’s the girl?’ asked Tobin.

  ‘I sent her home. She was in floods. In floods, she was, poor cow. She’s new and she comes from Luton. Never seen a dead body, let alone one like this. Nice introduction to the bright lights, eh?’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to her,’ said Tobin, ‘and see if she got a good look at the dagos.’

  Duval tut-tutted and shook his head, not in admonishment but simply to rectify that last statement. ‘They were Maltese, Eddie. Dagos are Italians.’

  ‘I thought Italians were wops,’ replied Tobin. ‘What’s the difference?’

  It was Vince’s turn to shake his head. ‘Nothing, Eddie. I think Mr Duval is just looking after you, wanting you to get your racial epithets right.’

  Duval issued a mirthless laugh, then looked Vince up and down, reappraising the young detective. ‘Oh, you’re cute. Whippet-smart, and good-looking, too,’ he said, nodding in wary admiration. ‘Double cute.’

  Vince ignored all this and carried on studying the stiff, kneeling again to take a closer look at the weapon that had put him there. ‘Big knife, not the kind you’d carry around with you,’ he said, looking up at Tobin, who knew Soho like the back of his fist. ‘There’s a hardware store on Greek Street sells kitchen supplies, right?’

  Tobin nodded, his slitty eyes showing no enthusiasm for what Vince was saying.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t planned. They saw Tommy, went and bought the knife, invited him for a drink somewhere dark and empty,’ he continued, switching his attention to Lionel Duval. ‘Somewhere not too many questions get asked, because they don’t like the publicity, and they killed him there.’

  ‘What’s the adjunct saying, Eddie?’

  Vince stood up. On its second mention, the word ‘adjunct’ had lost its charm.

  Tobin raised two placating hands. ‘He’s saying nothing, Lionel. Just speculating.’

  ‘Any other witnesses?’ asked Vince. ‘Punters?’

  Duval shook his head, then qualified the gesture with, ‘No, we’d only just opened. We don’t attract the normal theatre crowd. We cater for a later clientele. A more adventurous punter, shall we say.’ Again with the big convivial grin, topped off with a wink. ‘All good dirty legal fun.’

  ‘So I hear. Got any of it on film?’ Vince asked.

  Duval’s grin turned into a grimace as he fixed Vince with a hard stare. ‘Litigious little fucker, ain’t he, Eddie?’

  The club owner had himself recently made front-page news in the People, when a party at his Suffolk mansion had predictably enough turned into an orgy. But, more unpredictably, it was rumoured to have been filmed, with two-way mirrors and hidden cameras all over the gaff. Some fuzzy black-and-whites of a peer of the realm and a Russian diplomat being serviced by a rent boy and one of Duval’s ‘hostesses’ had surfaced on Fleet Street. But the papers couldn’t publish them – lots of arse shots but no faces.

  ‘All good dirty legal fun,’ echoed the smiling young detective, breaking off the staring competition with Duval and turning his attention to the booth where Tommy Ribbons had sat with his killers.

  On the table, a candle stub was stuck in an empty wax-encrusted Mateus Rosé bottle but, like all the other candles in the joint,
it hadn’t been lit yet. Dark as it was, Vince reckoned the hostess must have seen Tommy Ribbons cop for the knife, but then Duval had straightened her out with a few quid to keep her mouth shut. Because that’s what you do in Soho: look the other way and keep shtum. Killing a man in a Soho club was as safe a proposition for the perpetrator as using an empty back alley in a ghost town. Vince also figured, for what it was worth, and considering the ‘keep shtum’ policy that pervaded Soho, that Colin the doorman would have been standing by the neon-lit entrance, and therefore must have had a good look at the men.

  He asked Duval, ‘Where’s Colin?’

  ‘Out front, probably.’

  Tobin to Vince: ‘Why don’t you go and fetch him. And call the incident in, whilst you’re at it.’

  Vince knew that Tobin wanted him out the room so he could finally pocket his envelope. He gave a slow, knowing nod to the two men, making his disapproval of the exchange clear.

  Vince had been working Vice Squad, West End Central, for three months, now, and knew that envelopes were all part of the game. Like tips for the bin men at Christmas, that’s how it was explained to him. But it was Christmas all year round for the Vice coppers in Soho, as the clubs, clip-joints, pimps, prostitutes and porno peddlers paid up every week. Just to ensure that they weren’t hassled every week. It was a sweet deal, and Soho had been pretty much wide open since the Messina brothers (three Sicilian white-slavers who had exerted a stranglehold over vice and prostitution in the West End for a good fifteen years) got pinched and deported in 1955.

  Since then, the nefarious activities of the West End vice rackets had separated into lots of little parcels. Which is just the way Detective Eddie Tobin and his cohorts liked it, because those little parcels soon turned into lots of little envelopes. The envelopes provided insurance for men like Duval, the largest player in Soho. So when a curtain was pulled around a private booth at the Peek-A-Boo Club, and a hostess administered a blow job to a visiting Unilever business man, a Chancery Lane barrister or a Westminster politician, a Scotland Yard policeman wouldn’t suddenly pop his head around the curtain and say, ‘Peek-a-boo!’

  Vince dutifully went off to get Colin the doorman, then that call to Murder Squad. Thus he let Eddie Tobin collect his regular envelope off Duval who, as dirty as he was, was not a true villain – he was too busy legitimizing himself through buying up his own little parcels of land in the lucrative square mile of Soho.

  The club’s reception area was small. Black-and-white glossies of the hostesses, in bikinis and various stages of undress, were tacked to the varnished, pine-panelled walls. Behind a small counter with a cash register on it, a flight of steep, narrow stairs wound their way up through the tall building. But no sign of Colin.

  There was a distant cracking sound, with enough force and surprise that Vince’s eyes darted up towards the ceiling. It seemed to emanate from somewhere at the top of the building. Vince suspected a door slamming shut. He stepped over to the stairwell to investigate, noticing an axe and a cosh secreted under the counter. He pressed a light switch on the wall, but the stairs remained dark.

  Climbing to the first floor he encountered two doors, both of them locked. On the next landing up he could see a light. On the second floor, a shadeless light bulb on its last legs intermittently illuminated the windowless landing. A card inscribed ‘Artist’s Model’ was tacked on to a door and he could hear both the artist and the model at work. Breathless grunts from the artist, and fake groans of pleasure from the model.

  Hand gripping the rickety wooden banister, he carried on climbing to the third floor, where the stairs then twisted up to a narrow landing. The knackered light bulb in the hallway below didn’t have the strength to make its way up alongside him. Vince gave an involuntary shudder and he was glad Tobin wasn’t there to see it. You never lose your fear of the dark, something deadly hiding in its layers. He stood stock-still for a moment, waited for his eyes to adjust and the blackness before him to dissipate, but finally saw there was nothing on this landing, not even a door.

  He cautiously climbed the narrow stairs to the next level, where he could hear the whirring of a machine. It produced a soft but steady hum, as he reached the landing. There was a sliver of smoky-white light filtering through the gap under the door. The whirr of the machine seemed to emphasize a deep silence – then, from inside the room, came the sound of a girl screaming.

  Vince tried the door handle, found it was locked. Working on the logic that, if the rickety banisters were anything to go by, the door should be a doddle. He focused on a spot just below the lock, and stepped back against the wall for maximum impact. He then lifted his right leg, pulling it back so his knee was just inches under his chin, then shot the heel of his shoe backwards into the door. The door splintered and cracked along the jamb, then burst open.

  He stepped over the threshold and into a small room. On the metal shelves lining it were stacked canisters, containing reels of film. A projector sat on a tall metal table fitted with castors, as the machine projected a beam of white light that cut through the darkness and through a hole in the wall – down to where the girl’s screams were growing louder and more desperate.

  Vince made his way towards the cavity and peered through it to see a private cinema, containing just three rows holding about twenty seats. Wall-to-ceiling carpeting served to insulate and deaden the sound as about ten men sat transfixedly staring up at the silver screen.

  On the screen cavorted two men, either black or blacked up, their faces obscured by crazy-looking wigs and masks. Kitted out like B-movie savages, they were having brutal sex with a young white girl. She was bleach-blonde and junkie-thin, with needle tracks clearly dotted along her opaline arms. Her sun-starved skin displayed a mottled spectrum of pain in shades of black, blue, brown and yellow. Her red-rimmed eyes were vacantly doped up to the full.

  The two men clearly weren’t satisfied with the reaction they were getting off their zombie blonde, as they now began to punch her. Their punches weren’t pulled, for there was real venom in their blows, real pain in her cries of distress. And Vince saw genuine fear trying to break through those glazed eyes, so he knew that this raping and beating wasn’t just the usual pornographic play-acting. If it wasn’t for the mocked-up jungle scenery – painted foliage, hanging ropes for vines, African shields and spears resting against a wall – it could have been happening live on a stage right now, and not through the filtered past of the movie screen …

  All the stuffed envelopes in the world didn’t cover this level of degeneracy, thought Vince. This wasn’t one of the conventional blue movies and stag films that did the rounds of the private cinema clubs of Soho … He suddenly turned numb as he watched one of the men raise a knife …

  Vince couldn’t take his eyes off the screen, but he felt helpless to save the skinny girl. All he could do now was to stop the projector – but even that was too late, for her horrifying narrative had already run its course. This was just a record of it, and he was powerless to intervene as the inevitable played out before him. Nausea invaded his guts and started twisting and churning. Sweat prickled along his spine, and his whole body felt overwhelmed.

  He was about to break the trance and heave the projector on to the floor, when he noticed a tall figure framed in the doorway.

  The girl on the silver screen gave a final scream that trailed off into nothing.

  The door slammed shut.

  Then blackout.

  CHAPTER 2

  GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

  10 May 1964. Scotland Yard.

  ‘That’s not what happened, sir.’

  ‘Are you in dispute with me, Treadwell?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The man sitting across the desk from him was Chief Superintendent Ian Markham. Stiff and starched in his beribboned, inky-blue uniform, hands clasped before him, he represented authority exuding authority. Markham had an open file laid before him, and the Queen behind him. How’s that for backup? thought Vince.

&nb
sp; ‘You clearly are in dispute with me. And saying you’re not just puts you further in dispute with me.’

  ‘Sir.’ Vince didn’t put a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ in front of his response, because he didn’t want to risk further dispute by either agreeing that he was in dispute or denying it.

  ‘Good. Then the case is closed,’ said Markham, also closing the file to emphasize the point.

  Vince imperceptibly shook his head in resignation to the fact that what was written in black and white on that report would soon be filed away as the truth. But it wasn’t the truth, and he could never resign himself to the lies. He felt it burning and bubbling up inside him and just couldn’t help himself blurting out, ‘Eddie Tobin takes an envelope from Lionel Duval every week because he’s bought and paid for and would do anything Duval wants him to, because that’s where his loyalties lie.’

  Markham’s face was set rigid as he took stock. Then leaned forward, hands clasped again, tightening, white knuckles. ‘Edward Tobin has served the Met with distinction for twenty-five years,’ said Markham. ‘I’ve no need to inform you of our disbelief concerning your judgement in this case.’

  Markham unclasped his hands and leaned back, elongating his already long body against the back of the tall chair, as if stretching his authority before the young detective. He didn’t stop there, but Vince had stopped listening, and focused instead on the portrait of the Queen behind him. Demure in her long black robe, she seemed to be smiling at him. She looked a little coquettish, comely and come-hither. He thought he might … she looked good. He wasn’t giving serious thought to it, but all things considered, he would rather have been doing anything right now than be sitting opposite Markham, who was currently building up a head of steam and sounding as if he was about to erupt at any moment.

  Vince stopped thinking about the Queen and focused his attention back on to the Chief Superintendent. What with Markham’s thick, effulgently brilliantined and suspiciously black hair, the black-robed Queen behind him looked like an extension of his head. As if she was growing out of him? No doubt Markham was waiting for the moment when Her Majesty really did stand over him, as he knelt before her to finally have the working-class chips knocked off his shoulders with her ceremonial sword. Arise, Sir Ian, thirty years of loyal service to Queen and Country. And what of the young detective? Off with his head for servicing the Queen! The thought brought a slight smile to Vince’s lips.