Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  “And were his models always similarly perfect ladies and gents?”

  “No-o-o. No, you couldn’t say that—in the nature of things that wouldn’t be likely, would it? Some of the girls was on the game, at least part-time. We wouldn’t use anyone tarty, that wouldn’t be right for the image, but if they was good models we couldn’t be too sniffy about their other activities.”

  “And the men?”

  “Well, some of them was on the game too, to be frank. Or there’d be the odd nightclub bouncer, sportsman, bodyguard, that kind of thing. The sort of person who’s making a living doing a bit of this and a bit of that.”

  “Ye-e-es. Sometimes on the borders between the legal and the criminal, I suppose.”

  “That’s your business, ain’t it? It wasn’t our duty to run along and inform on them.”

  “No, no—I’m just trying to get the picture. Now, what do you think happened yesterday?”

  “Christ, mate, I shudder to think. I’m trying to shove it out of my mind. Thank God that’s for you to find out.”

  “What I meant was, he was doing work for you in the evening, was he?”

  “That’s right. Wednesday afternoons and early evenings (for the convenience of models with nine to five jobs) he was always doing stuff for Bodies. Thursday mornings he was never in, which is what made me suspicious in the first place.”

  “The bodies look as if they have been dead some hours. Say, provisionally, they were killed some time during that session. How long were you here into the session?”

  Phil Fennilow coughed, and then put another fag in.

  “Till abaht quarter to five.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “ ’Eard ’im,” he said. “ ’Eard ’im arrive about half three, or maybe closer to four.”

  “You were here in this office?”

  “That’s right. I was doing the advice column.”

  “That’s mostly medical advice, isn’t it?”

  “Partly.” He became all defensive. “I’ve got this doctor pal I ring up. Anyway, I’ve done it so long now I know most of the answers. I’m a sort of common law doctor.”

  “I see. And you heard Bob Cordle arrive. Did you speak to each other?”

  “He shouted ‘ ’Afternoon, Phil,’ same as usual, and I shouted back. We’d always have a good old confab when he was going through the shots for the next issue, and now and again we’d go to the Green Man and have a drink, but otherwise, he’d go ’is way, and I’d go mine.”

  “Did you hear other people arrive?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I think so. But that was normal, see—routine. I didn’t take particular notice. There was other people there when I left.”

  “Ah—you heard them?”

  “Yes. Well, I heard him talking to them.”

  “What was he saying?”

  Phil considered again.

  “Something like: ‘Put your chin up, darling, then your bos’ll show up better.’ Again, routine, like I say.”

  “A woman, then. No indication of a man being there?”

  “No, but he could easily have been there already. Or of course Bob could have had several sessions lined up. The chap could have come along later, or Bob could have had a solo session with the girl, then an entirely different couple come along later.”

  “In which case I’d definitely like to find the girl . . . ”

  “Sometimes the sessions only lasted an hour. They were pretty experienced models, some of them.”

  “But I suppose you and he were always on the lookout for new bodies?”

  “Oh yes. Then it would take longer. Some of them would just stand there grinning like they was in a ’oliday camp snapshot. ’E was very good with that kind . . . patient.”

  “And of course a touch of amateurism doesn’t go amiss with Bodies, does it? It’s part of the appeal.”

  “Well, yes, in a way. We aim to give the feeling of one big ’appy family. Like it’s a sort of game that everybody can join in. See, lots of blokes like fat girls, so we always ’ave a fat girl somewhere in the issue. Makes ’em feel wanted. The idea is that all bodies are attractive in their way.”

  I was politely refraining from looking skeptically at his own body when Phil, who had been recovering somewhat, suddenly looked at me hard.

  “ ’Ere,” he said, “ ’aven’t I seen you before? ’Ad a confab with you somewhere?”

  “That’s right,” I said, getting up. “Well, they must be finishing in there. I think I’ll go and have a look.”

  Chapter 3

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the door of the studio, near to the head of the stairs, it was clear that the first burst of energy in this particular investigation was coming to an end. The crowd of police was thinning out, and the atmosphere was far less hectic. Soon the scientists would have done their job, and I could begin the investigation proper: data being on record, one could get to the heart of the matter, people. I looked at those four bodies, still in place: the chalk marks around them, and the tape measures left on the floor, somehow made their deaths unreal, reduced their humanity. They looked like models posing for a forensic science lecture.

  I stood at the door and had a word with the newly created Inspector Joplin, one of the youngest in the force, and a bright, sharp, noticing type. I had left him in charge of the studio, to collate all the early information.

  “Anything solid?” I asked.

  “Some very solid bodies,” he replied, nodding his head inwards to the corpses. “But before you have a look at them, will you come and cast your eye at the stairs?” He led me to the top of them, and we looked down towards the door, open on to Windlesham Street. “Now, first, the technical people think the place was cleaned yesterday.”

  “They should take a look at Phil Fennilow’s office,” I said.

  “Ah, but that’s a bit different, isn’t it? There’s lots of people don’t like their offices being touched, and I can imagine that Mr. Fennilow is the sort that has his own messy methods. But the studio is in a way the door to the outside world, isn’t it? The models see it, and the readers see it in the photographs. It seems to have been kept pretty clean, on an obvious level—floors washed, window-ledges and mantelpiece wiped over—that sort of thing. There’s just a very light coating of dust, such as you always get in these old buildings.”

  “Right. And I take it the same is true of the stairs?”

  “We think so, though there’s rather more dust on them, from the street. The door’s open much of the day, apparently. Now—most of these footprints are a bit of a jumble—they’ve been done today by our men, of course, a lot of them. It’s easy enough to eliminate us, and Fennilow, and the four stiffs upstairs . . . and that leaves three or four prints unaccounted for. Nothing surprising in that, and you’ll get details of all of them, naturally. But the prints that rather interested me were those.”

  He pointed to an impression in the dust six steps down, where it was coming away from the jumble of prints in the middle of the stairs. It was a solid, well-defined print.

  “Rather as if he stopped,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought. Stopped and listened, perhaps.”

  “And he was going from the centre, towards the staircase wall, to see if he could see in through the studio door.”

  “Right,” said Joplin. “Which at that point, depending on his height, he probably could do. Then he starts again—see there’s another right-hand shoe on the fourth down, a left one on the third. He’s keeping to the wall, you notice.”

  “But these are a bit lighter, aren’t they? Faster?”

  “They are, and so are those across the little passageway until . . . here. We’re willing to bet that’s the same shoe.”

  He pointed to a smudged and partial impression in the doorway of the studio.

  “And inside?”

  “Nothing. If that was our man—or woman—they just shot them up, and left. There are one or two marks that we think are him charging downstairs.”
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  “Him or her. As you say, it could be a woman. It’s a fairly small shoe, isn’t it? It looks to me as if it could be some kind of jogging shoe.”

  “That’s what the experts thought. In which case the male and female versions are pretty much alike. The size, we thought, was about six or six and a half.”

  “Interesting. You’d expect one of those muscle boys to have bigger feet than that.”

  “Not necessarily. Often they’re not particularly tall, or naturally big. Glamour boy in there only takes seven and a halfs.”

  “Inside every muscle man there is a six-stone weakling crying to come out,” I pontificated. “And he shows through the feet. Right, I presume there’ll be casts of all the interesting prints? Let’s go into the studio.”

  Now that there were fewer CID men around, and now that I could move around without holding my breath, I could get a better idea of Health and Vitality’s studio. It was a good-sized room, perhaps thirteen feet or so by twenty-five, and though it was decorated in a nondescript white, colour was added by the blue satin drape that was hung over the far wall. In a pile near the fireplace were ten or twelve other coloured materials, no doubt alternative drapes. The fireplace itself, an early nineteenth-century job if my eye didn’t deceive me, had been picked out in blue and white in a mock-Wedgwood sort of way, and no doubt it served as a “feature” for occasional poses. The floor was a nondescript lino, but again there were various rugs around, clean and spruce, that no doubt could be used for certain types of shot. There was a large window overlooking Windlesham Street, but it had a white drape pinned over it. Of furniture there was none, though I had registered a door outside that could possibly lead to a storeroom. Surely for some of the shots they might use a sofa, or chairs? The bareness of the room had meant that the models’ clothes had been left in piles on the floor. The man had had a holdall, and had left a tracksuit carefully folded on top of it. The girl had left her clothes piled neatly on top of an Evening Standard. Both had registered, presumably, the slight film of dust on everything.

  “Now, how did they die?” I asked.

  “Bullets from a thirty-two automatic,” said Joplin, reeling it off from his notebook. “This boy here—”

  He pointed to the lanky body behind the cameras.

  “I think his name might be Herbert,” I said.

  “It is. Dale Herbert. We’ve found his student card. He was shot twice. Apparently the first only got him in the shoulder. The girl was also shot twice, though Doc thinks the first in fact killed her. Just finishing off the round, I suppose.”

  “A man who knew how to handle a gun, then.”

  “Certainly no novice. A man with real training, even if not necessarily a hired killer. You’ll get a report on the bullets eventually, but ballistics suspect a rather elderly automatic. One of the bullets went through the girl, and we picked it up off the floor, so they’ve had a good look at it.”

  “Right. Now, who are they?”

  “The only one we’re not sure of is the man. The model, I mean. There’s no name on the holdall, and the only clothes are the track-suit, running shoes, boxer shorts and so on. We reckon he’d been at a track, or a gym. Oh, there is a birthday card in the holdall, with ‘Love from Debbie’ on it.”

  “Some birthday present he’s had,” I commented. “What about the others? The cameraman I take it is Bob Cordle?”

  “That’s it. All the cameras and their boxes are labelled, and there’s a bank card in his wallet. Dale Herbert seems to have been a student at the City of London Poly, by the way, so there shouldn’t be any trouble tracing him. The girl’s a student too, funnily enough.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. Probably post-grad, I’d say, because she’s twenty-four. Name of Susan Platt-Morrison. Apparently a student at Bedford College. There’s also a letter in her handbag from ‘Mummy’—headed notepaper, address in the Thames Valley.”

  “I see. Do you think Mummy in the Thames Valley knew she modelled for Bodies? No doubt we’ll find that out before long. Well, we seem to be getting there. I suppose I’d better have my own look at the bodies before they’re carted off.”

  It wasn’t something I ever liked doing. (Many policemen do, by the way—some in a completely abstract way which springs from the fact that murder cases are for us what high C’s are for a tenor, others in a way that leaves no one in any doubt of the frank enjoyment they extract from the contemplation of violence and death.) Four bodies simultaneously was something new in my experience, apart from my one IRA bomb. These four had all died very quickly, that was clear, but three of them at least had had a second or two of terrified anticipation. Bob Cordle, I guessed, had been crouched behind his camera and had known nothing until the bullet entered his back. Dale Herbert seemed to have turned in the direction of the door, and was presumably shot second. He was—he had been—a long, scruffy, amiable-looking youth. Bob Cordle was shortish, balding and potbellied, wearing a cardigan and old-fashioned grey flannels.

  “There was a notebook in his jacket pocket,” said Joplin. “It looked interesting. The boys will let you have it as soon as they’ve done with it.”

  “Good,” I said. “We may need it to identify the man, if Phil Fennilow doesn’t know him.”

  The models, it had to be presumed, had had longer to anticipate death: not long in real terms, but long enough to them. The girl was full-figured, light brown-haired, with what one guessed had been a very attractive face. It was heavily made up, as probably it had to be, even for that apostle of the natural, Bodies magazine. But the makeup was done skilfully, and there was no suggestion of the tart. I turned over the clothes, which, similarly, were smart and good, not smart and tart. I guessed at a girl who liked the good things of life, but was not extracting enough money out of the Thames Valley to buy them. The man was more difficult. Men always are, but particularly so in this case. Shorts and tracksuit and jogging shoes don’t tell you much, and you could guess he was some kind of athlete from the body alone. The bag held the card Joplin had mentioned, a bodybuilding magazine and a jock strap. The body itself told one little, except that he had dedicated himself to making it beautiful.

  “Mr. Anonymous,” I said. “Nothing but a collection of pectorals and biceps brachis.”

  “You’re not without pectorals and biceps brachis yourself,” said Joplin.

  “Sorry. Was I moralizing? I mustn’t get into the Hamlet syndrome every time I see a corpse. No doubt eventually the young man will acquire a name and a personality. Well then—four bodies and six shots, and nobody reported anything to the police at the time. Isn’t it wonderful? Still, I suppose you could say that was Soho.”

  “Soho isn’t all crooks,” protested Joplin. “After all, it’s fifty percent restaurants.”

  “Whose proprietors take very good care not to get on the wrong side of the crooks,” I said. “They’ll keep very quiet until we go asking—then they’ll have to weigh up which side in the crime war they prefer to keep on the right side of.”

  I drew back the drape from the window and looked along the street.

  “Chinese opposite. Greek three doors down. I used to go there when I was on that Vice Squad investigation.”

  “What a job!” commented Garry Joplin. “Talk about the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in the hole . . . ”

  “You’re not far wrong. What’s on this side? I can’t see.”

  “I thought you might have noticed,” Joplin said, “what was next door to this place.”

  “I was dropped at the door. The next door up looked rather like a brothel.”

  “No, on the other side—this side, in fact. It’s a strip joint called ‘Strip à la Wild West.’ ”

  “The mind boggles. Was it,” I asked delicately, “wild west girls or wild west boys who were stripping?”

  “Girls. Nothing queer about that set-up.”

  “Not that it makes any difference. I gather you’re suggesting that the show would have included guns.�
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  “If you can go by the pictures outside. Guns and whips—which sound pretty much alike. If people in the vicinity had got used to hearing them . . . ”

  “Quite. What’s six more shots between friends? Only these were bullets not blanks . . . Of course somebody in the show might have noticed shots that weren’t part of the act. I might slip next door and ask a few questions.”

  “You take all the desirable parts of the job,” protested Joplin.

  “There is nothing,” I said pontifically, “more anaphrodisiacal than backstage in a strip joint. And while I’m mortifying the flesh in that way, you can go along and have a word with Phil Fennilow. He looked as if he was beginning to feel better by the time I left him. He’ll probably be able to identify Cordle and the Herbert boy, if he feels up to it, and he just may know the models.”

  I stood looking around the studio.

  “Those bloody cameras,” I said bitterly. “Probably-clicking up to the second he died, and they’re not going to tell us a blind thing. Even if they were sound-recording they probably wouldn’t either. Still—get the boys on to developing the film as a matter of priority, will you?”

  “Right,” said Joplin.

  “I’m off to the Wild West.”

  The Wild West was actually off duty at that particular moment, but it announced its first show for the lunch-time trade at one-fifteen, which was hopeful. One went—as one so often does in these places—down five or six dreary steps, and then came to an improvised box office. The black and white publicity stills on either side of the doors showed girls in various states of undress, but the prevailing motifs were Texan hats, riding boots, holsters, guns and whips. A typical pose depicted a dark-haired model in a G-string, sitting on a stool, Stetson-hatted, with a holster slung around her navel, flourishing a whip above her head. The inspiration seemed more Blue Angel than John Ford, but there was something rather half-hearted about the stripper, as if she didn’t mean you any harm. No one ever doubted that Marlene Dietrich meant you harm.

  I descended the steps to that Soho Hades. The box office was shut, and a locked door stopped me from going further. I banged on it, and after a few moments heard footsteps.