Kiss Me Quick

by Miller, Danny

  Not slight enough to escape Markham. ‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’

  ‘I don’t, sir,’ he replied, underestimating his folly with the Queen. But, after what he’d been through, he deserved a laugh.

  He’d recently spent twenty-three days in a coma. The doctors were surprised at this, as the head injury had not been that severe. No lasting physical damage to the cranium, the surrounding tissue or the brain itself. A little blood draining to relieve some pressure from a ‘dent on the bonnet’, as the surgeon called it. And that was pretty much it from the sawbones. Four weeks of observation and further testing in the hospital, then three weeks of rest and getting his strength up at a sanatorium on the Kent coast. He’d lost weight, suffered muscle loss, felt as weak as a baby, so he had exercised in the gymnasium every day to get it back. Push-ups, press-ups, sit-ups, dumbbells, medicine ball and callisthenics.

  A private Harley Street psychologist who specialized in head trauma had taken an interest in his case and volunteered to oversee his recovery. His name was Dr Hans Boehm and, as quacks go, he was straight from the Rank Organization’s central casting. He reminded Vince of the professor in the Donald Duck cartoons, quack, quack! He had wild grey hair, a long beard, and spoke in a thick Viennese accent. You couldn’t have made him up.

  It was while talking to Boehm that Vince remembered what he had seen in the projection room, and then the figure at the door. Boehm didn’t seem to judge Vince negatively, but Vince could tell that he didn’t seem to believe him either. He explained to Vince how his version of events had played out in the dark, always a fertile playground for the imagination. Stripped of sight, the most powerful sensory guide, the imagination tended to run riot. The eye is merely a lens, for it’s with the brain that we see. And just because the lens was temporarily switched off, the brain would keep on seeing – but it sees what it wants to see, no longer refracted through the lens but through the power of the imagination. With a beaming grin and in a thick Viennese accent, he reminded Vince that ‘It is only in the night that things go dump, no?’ Vince assured him he wasn’t scared of the dark.

  Boehm then adopted a more prosaic approach by asking Vince if there was any history of epilepsy in his family. Vince said there wasn’t. When asked if he himself had ever been prone to blackouts, seizures or time loss, he said he hadn’t. When the good doctor then inquired about any history of schizophrenia in the family, Vince felt like chinning the quack. But, realizing this would just add fuel to the fire, he solemnly and unanimously informed him that there was no such history. Dr Boehm gave Vince some pills for the sporadic headaches he was suffering and reassured him it was just his brain ‘rewiring’ itself after the coma. He was then given a clean bill of health.

  But Vince was far from happy. Bang on the head or no bang on the head, he clearly remembered what he’d seen at the Peek-A-Boo Club on Wardour Street. In the projection room. The girl being raped and beaten on the screen. The knife held above her. The figure at the door. The man slamming the door shut. Then the big blackout.

  Then, as Vince viewed it, the lies that followed. Eddie Tobin had filed his report, and everything was as it was. Tommy Ribbons corpsed out on the deck with a fuck-off carving knife through his pump (the killer nicked two days later was his brother-in-law, as it seemed Tommy had been cheating on his wife with his sister-in-law). A club hostess with the mostest from Luton not seeing a thing. Duval the proprietor not seeing a thing. Colin the unconvincing bantamweight bouncer not seeing a thing, because he was out buying pastries in Frith Street when it all happened. Oh, one thing missing: the handing over of an envelope from Duval to Tobin. But, as no one saw a thing, why waste typewriter ribbon on such details?

  Then Tobin’s report really did slip on to the bestseller list. After Detective Treadwell failed to return with Colin the doorman, Tobin and Duval had climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where they found the young detective sparked out in the … storage room. Not a projection room, of course, because, according to all involved, there was no projection room. Because there was no private cinema club.

  As soon as Vince read Tobin’s report, which was withheld from him until he was fully recuperated, he went back to the Peek-A-Boo Club. He climbed the stairs, entered the room and found a … storage room. Just mops, buckets, brooms, empty boxes. Vince wanted to get a warrant to tear the place apart, scrape off the wallpaper to reveal the fresh plaster used to cover the hole in the wall – to cover up the lies. They said no, so he went next-door to a building, also owned by Duval, and which he believed had housed the private cinema club – only to find it was a newly converted, empty office space.

  And the figure framed in the doorway, the man Vince thought to have been the projectionist? No one saw him. No one knew him. He didn’t exist.

  And Vince’s head wound? He must have got it when he fell. Tripped over something in the dark. A bump in the night.

  For Dr Boehm, Eddie Tobin, Chief Superintendent Markham, and everyone else involved, what Vince experienced that night in the Peek-A-Boo just did not happen. His brain was rewiring itself and playing tricks on him. To Vince, however, it was just a big fat cover-up.

  But even with the weight of evidence against him, and the facts written up and signed off in the file lying before him, Vince couldn’t concede what he felt to be the truth. Just like he couldn’t save the girl on the silver screen. To give in would be to say that she didn’t exist. As he convalesced in the sanatorium, he painted a picture in his mind of the sad junkie life that had led to her starring role. Vince reckoned she must have suffered more than enough of not existing, or barely registering in life, and ultimately being seen as disposable. So it was left to him to keep her image alive, to conjure her up. To let her simply go would be to lose himself, lose his reason for becoming a policeman. The girl became his measure; his sense of value and belief system. And Vince knew that one day he would return to that case and prove it. Justice for the girl would prevail, and he would destroy the men who did it to her.

  ‘Where do you stand on the current anti-establishment fad, Treadwell?’

  Vince’s ears pricked up. Anti-establishment? Hardly just a fad, he thought. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Have a taste for subversive humour?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, sir.’

  ‘I do wonder. I believe a television programme with Mr David Frost is popular amongst some of the younger officers in the canteen.’

  ‘That Was The Week That Was.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘I have watched it, sir.’

  ‘Mocking Harold Macmillan and other public servants. Who’s next, the Queen?!’

  ‘Let’s hope not, sir,’ said Vince, smiling satirically. ‘I’m much more a fan of Mr Tony Hancock and Steptoe and Son – and, of course, Dixon of Dock Green. As for the Queen, I always stand up just before the telly finishes for the night.’

  Markham leaned forward on his desk, threading his hands together to make a steeple, his thumbs acting as a chin rest, the tips of his forefingers just touching the end of his nose. With his narrowed eyes locked on to Vince’s, he gave him a penetrating and knowing look. Being caught in Markham’s crosshairs spooked Vince enough for him to shift from cheek to cheek in his seat, and to indulge in a nervous clearing of his throat.

  Markham took his own sweet authoritative time, letting a weighty silence fill the room, as if to expunge the atmosphere of the trivialities that had just passed between them, and get back on to the sure-footing of police business rather than show business.

  A slight smile quivered then parted Markham’s lips, and he said, almost lasciviously, ‘I know what you want, Treadwell. You want Murder.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Vince with a cut-glass authority to match the Chief Superintendent’s tone, and the Queen’s, for that matter.

  Markham’s furtive smile broadened once the apple had been taken, then snapped again into cold composure as he sat back in his chair. ‘’Course you do. Murder Squad. Who doesn’t? That’s
not a question, it’s a statement of fact. You’re from Brighton, aren’t you, Treadwell?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Got something for you, then. Kill two birds with one stone. You’re owed some holiday, and I think this is the time for it.’

  ‘Sort of itching to get back to work, actually, sir. And I don’t really consider Brighton a holiday destination.’

  ‘Treadwell, been watching Mr Alan Wicker, have you?’

  Vince didn’t answer. Better safe than sorry. And Markham wasn’t listening, anyway. He had his plans for Vince sorted out before the young detective had stepped through the door.

  ‘It would be a dereliction of my duty, Treadwell, if I did not inform you of the hostilities felt from certain quarters towards you as a result of your accusations regarding Detective Tobin,’ said Markham methodically. ‘Edward Tobin leaves us in three weeks. Retirement, bungalow in Bournemouth, I believe. Good luck to him. Best keep out of his way, and let this thing blow over. Don’t want any unpleasantness meanwhile. For those three weeks, you will take a well-deserved break. Some rest and relaxation, visit your family. And this,’ Markham opened his desk drawer and pulled out a case file, ‘should keep the grey matter ticking over.’ He shunted the file across the desk.

  Vince opened it.

  ‘I know you took an interest in the case when it first came up,’ Markham continued, getting up from behind his desk in readiness to usher the young detective out. ‘I contacted the Superintendent in Brighton. He said they’d be happy to have you, though it’s not officially being handed over to Scotland Yard. And you’d only be down there in an advisory capacity. But it’s a murder case, so a step in the right direction. A foot in the door.’

  Vince looked at the grisly morgue photos featuring a decapitated body. But the image that really caught his eye was a small browning mugshot taken some thirty years ago. He found himself looking at the face of Jack Regent.

  With his eyes still fixed on the photo, Vince said softly, and meditatively, ‘A foot in the door. Thank you, sir.’

  Vince closed the file, stood up and shook Markham’s hand. As he did so, he looked up at the Queen. Wham bam, thank you, Ma’am!

  CHAPTER 3

  BRIGHTON

  Victoria Station was busy with the Whitsun bank-holiday crowds pouring down to Brighton to escape The Smoke. For Vince, Brighton held little seaside appeal or escape from the city. It was a town, but with the feel of a city. A city by the sea. The built-up tenement flats and tightly terraced rows that climbed their way up to the race hill; the white-walled Regency squares offering a facade of symmetry and order to a place that Vince knew was more like a tangled web; the two hulking hotels, the Grand and the Metropole, which sat imperiously on the seafront; the paving stones and corroding blue railings of the promenade that led you down to the beach itself.

  And then the stones. Lots of them. And broken glass, tar and gnarled, desiccated seaweed that scratched you like rusted barbed wire. There were no sand dunes to play in, no soft landings in this town. To Vince, it was a city like London, just smaller. In London, if you went too far south you got depressed; in Brighton you just got wet. Seagulls ruled the air, not pigeons. Someone once said it was where the debris meets the sea – and that went for the people as well as the place. Vince’s relationship with his home town was a two-fisted affair: Love and Hate.

  He bought his ticket and boarded the packed train. With his second-class ticket, he sat in the first-class carriage; just a flash of the badge and the ticket clippy usually gave him the nod, like there was some sort of affinity in uniforms. Clippies and coppers, all trying to keep things running in a good orderly direction, and on time. The train was ten minutes late pulling out of the station, due to ejected drunks.

  Three weeks, Markham had suggested, so Vince had packed accordingly. Two suits, five shirts, two knitted ties, three Fred Perry tennis shirts, a couple of pairs of summer slacks, a light-blue seersucker jacket, a dark-blue skinny-brimmed straw trilby and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses for when – or if – the sun ever came out. He also threw in a couple of paperbacks, and a signed hardback copy of the book Dr Boehm had just had published, The Conceit of the Narcissist: A Long, Lingering Look at the Dangerously One-Track Mind in the Mirror.

  Vince had cooled on this case since Markham had assigned it. He now looked at it for what it was: keeping him off the scene until Eddie Tobin had cleared his desk, collected his mantel clock, and fucked off down to Bournemouth to get some sand in his crab-paste sandwiches.

  It might be a murder case but, as far as the ID of the perpetrator was concerned, there seemed to be little mystery involved. It was not so much a Who done it? as a Where is he? and here’s how it had played out. Eleven weeks ago, the body of a male Caucasian in his mid-forties was washed up on Brighton beach. Wrapped in tarpaulin, it floated up smack-bang between the two piers. A major feature of the corpse was that its head and hands had been removed. And, as fingerprints and dental records were pretty much the alpha and omega for tagging stiffs, that made it next to impossible to identify the victim.

  He didn’t match any missing persons within the time-frame of death given by Pathology. His blood type, O positive, was as common as muck. No tattoos or real distinguishing marks. The carving knife that had been used in the massacre was wrapped in air-tight cellophane and taped to the body. There were fingerprints, or partial print traces, still on the knife. All in all, making for a nice police package. Too nice a package, Vince reckoned. And, to top it off, an anonymous caller had tipped off Scotland Yard that Jack Regent was the killer. But for every murder there’s half a dozen confessors and a baker’s dozen of accusers; usually telephone thrill-seekers getting their long-distance kicks.

  Markham contacted the Chief Supe in Brighton, and Jack Regent was nicked. Only he wasn’t, because he’d skipped town. And so had his fingerprints. It seemed there were no copies of Jack Regent’s prints on record. Or, if there were, they’d disappeared. As for the mysterious anonymous phone call nailing Jack Regent for this murder, it was commonplace. Regent’s status in the town was almost that of celebrity, but for all that he was enigmatic, publicity-shy and as seldom seen as Garbo. But everyone knew the name, knew the legend.

  Vince opened his case and took out the Jack Regent file. Some fact, some fiction, but mostly accumulated speculation. Because, in his long criminal career, Jack Regent had only been brought to book once. A seven-year stretch for the malicious wounding of a bookie almost thirty years ago, reduced to eighteen months after he had saved a screw from a serious beating during a prison riot. And nothing else – but no surprises there. For shit, thankfully, has a downward trajectory, so there were plenty of others who had taken the fall for Jack Regent.

  Vince read on and pieced together Jack’s personal trajectory. Little of the early life of Jack Regent’s, neé Jacques Rinieri, was known. No known documentation or records, just hearsay, and here’s what it said. Born in Corsica, he came to London in his late teens, and settled in the slum area of the Seven Dials. But he then made his rep in Saffron Hill, London’s Italian quarter in Clerkenwell. Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini and his Italian mob were the prevailing force at the time, holding sway over Soho and clubland. But their biggest racket, in fact the biggest racket during the twenties and thirties, was conducted at the racetracks.

  Sabini’s razor gang ran the racecourses in England. The top coppers and judges of the day were rumoured to all be in his pocket and, with the money he was making, his pockets were deep and plentiful. The racetrack rackets were like any other protection racket. If a bookie wanted to set up his ‘pitch’ and lay bets at the races, he had to pay someone for the privilege. Protecting the bookies and taking a percentage of their earnings could bring him in twenty grand in a day. For a big meeting like the Epsom Derby, it could go up to fifty grand. In the twenties and thirties, that was big, big money. And control of the racetracks meant you could control every street-corner bookie, spieler, betting and lay-off parlour in London.

&
nbsp; A young Jack (or Jacques as he was still known then) was recruited by Sabini when his gang went to war with the Brummigan Boys. The rival gang from the Black Country was headed up by William Kimber, a Birmingham-based bookmaker. Young Jacques Rinieri fitted the bill: though not Italian by nationality, he had enough hot-headed Mediterranean blood coursing through his veins to find an affinity with Sabini. And Sabini liked young Jacques, saw something of himself in him. He treated him like a son and renamed him ‘Jack’. And so it was that young Jack went about his work for Sabini with a diligence and enthusiasm that, along with his club foot, marked him out from the others. Jack was soon leading from the front, cutting, beating and shooting his way to a reputation of fearlessness.

  The battles on the racecourses, involving gangs of one or two hundred, made a day at the races a dangerous place to be for the average punter in the late twenties. But Jack didn’t just wait for the race meetings to show his supremacy; he took the fight to them. Ambushing the Brummigan Boys in their pubs, clubs, spielers, train stations or on street corners. When dead bodies started turning up, this new type of organized violence made front-page news, and questions were soon asked in Parliament. An elite group of tough coppers known as the Ghost Squad, with the authorization to fight as dirty as the gangsters themselves, was put together to crush the gangs. It all came to a head in a fierce battle at Lewes racecourse. The Sabini mob, with Jack leading the fray, beat Kimber’s Brummigan Boys, but the game was over and his men were rounded up. At Lewes Assizes, forty of Sabini’s men were handed heavy sentences of up to twenty years each.