“I’m not open yet,” said a voice through the door, which had opened a fraction. “It’s half an hour to the show, and my heavy’s not arrived yet. Come back in twenty minutes.”
“Police,” I said, pushing my card through the crack.
“My, you boys in blue do like the boots and whip routine, don’t you?” He was being facetious. The door had opened further, and I saw he was a small cock sparrow of a man, formed for being facetious. “Just my joke, Superintendent, though we do have the pleasure of entertaining some of your boys in their private capacity from time to time. Colin Burney. My friends call me Col. What can me and my girls do for you? Is it the business next door?”
“Ah, you know about it, do you?”
“Give me credit, mate. Wiv about fifteen police cars having come and gone in the course of the morning, it doesn’t take much up ’ere to get the idea that something’s happened.”
“And do you know what’s happened?”
“One of my girls did talk to one of your Detective PCs she happens to be friendly with. All he’d say was ‘multiple murder.’ Sounds like something the press could work up an interest in. A good story like that can’t be bad for trade. Still, I’m surprised it should have happened at Health and Vitality. Not at all good for the old image. Was it by any chance a shooting?”
“Yes, it was. How did you know?”
“Well, most of my girls are here . . . Oh, here’s another. Hurry up, Angie—you’re late, girl. Don’t expect me to lace up your boots . . . Well, as I say, they’re down there, dressing like, and they was talking about all this police activity, and Karen said . . . would you like to talk to Karen, though? Hear it from her in her own words, like?”
“I would, yes.”
“Anything to oblige the law. You never know when they might come in handy. Karen, love!”
The cry was taken up by female voices behind another door, and after a minute or two Karen appeared. She looked about as much like a Scandinavian as Ingrid Bergman looked like a Spanish peasant in For Whom the Bell Tolls. She was raven-haired, fleshy, and heavily made up. Any touch of Scandinavian there had been in her life had been from Norwegian sailors. Still, she seemed a willing enough girl, if several years older than her photograph outside the place had suggested.
“Yes, well, like I was just telling the girls, it was last night,” she said, clutching around her an off-white dressing-gown stained all over with stage make-up. “It was the six-fifteen performance, and I’d done my opening routine . . . You haven’t seen the show, I suppose?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Well, I’d better explain,” she said, putting her hands on her ample hips and thrusting out her bosom professionally. “I start the show with a long routine on my stool—like the pic outside. Lots of shooting and whip-cracking and that, and quite artistic, though I do say it myself. Then I go off and the others come on—filling in,” she hissed, sotto voce, for the doorway through which she had come was filled with dressing-gowned drabs, who were listening to the recital with what I took to be the lethargy of their tribe. “They do various acts in ones and twos, and I don’t come on till the finarly. That gives me time for a fag, to adjust my make-up, and put on my costume, which is a fringed suede Annie Oakley sort of skirt—all fringe, actually, and nothing on underneath. Then I come on for the big number that ends the show, with all of us on stage, and me in the centre twirling the whip over everyone’s head, and them all firing shots around the room—the theatre—and all of us singing, and the pianist wishing he’d got a few extra fingers. It’s a cracking number.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“Anyway, that starts about twenty to. Well, last night I’d finished my fag, and was adjusting my costume—I think it’s very important that it is well adjusted—when I heard these shots, and I thought ‘That’s funny,’ because there isn’t any shooting in the middle part of the show. It can get too much if you have it all the time, you see.”
“What time would this be?”
“Well, see, I’d normally go on for the finarly about twenty to. But last night Colin here—” Colin, by her side, smirked—“come running along to say that Bet had forgotten to put on her raw-hide bra, silly cow, and as a consequence her strip was three minutes shorter than usual, and the pianist was cursing blue murder, and I’d be on in half a minute. So I dashed off, and soon, what with all the shooting and stuff on stage, I forgot all about what I’d heard off stage.”
“I suppose you would.”
“I didn’t even bother to ask the girls what it’d been. But I think I half guessed it was outside. I suppose the time must have been . . . what? about twenty-five to seven, or a minute or two later.”
“How many shots was it you heard?”
“Oh, five or six. Was that it? Was that what’s happened next door?”
“Yes,” I said. “I rather think it must have been.”
Chapter 4
“STRIP CLUBS!” said my wife Jan, when I popped into the flat in Abbey Road for a cup of coffee, on my way from Scotland Yard to talk to Dale Herbert’s father. “It’s disgusting the way women are forced to degrade their bodies like that. I can just imagine you and your mates having a finger-licking time. Anyway, why aren’t there any male strip shows? Why shouldn’t we watch men taking their clothes off?”
There seemed to be an inconsistency in her argument, but I didn’t say so. Even in these post-feminist days it is more than one’s life is worth to mutter the phrase “women’s logic.” More than mine is worth, anyway. I contented myself with saying:
“Actually, there are male strip clubs, for women-only audiences. Would you like me to book you a seat?”
“Ugh. I can’t imagine anything more off-putting,” said Jan.
• • •
Talking to the relatives of murder victims is never easy. This time it was the more unpleasant in that there were so many of them, and because I had already latched on to the conviction that three out of the four had died quite unnecessarily. I had to judge whether conveying this conviction would make things better or worse for the survivors.
Dale Herbert’s father was still bowled over by it when I talked to him. He was a large cockney—could have been a Covent Garden porter or some such thing in his time, but he was now retired. His large frame had put on flesh, but evenly, and he was far from out of condition. He was a sad sight, hunched up in his chair, his face in his hands.
“He was the youngest, see,” he said at last. “There’s others, four others, and grandchildren, but somehow . . . I’d the bringing up of him, after his mother died . . . That was when he was thirteen . . . Makes you feel you’ve failed, dunnit?”
“As far as I can see, there’s no possible blame can attach to you, or to your son. I rather think that what happened was that your son was just there . . . ”
He thought for a bit.
“Sort of, with no more meaning than if he’d been run down by an articulated lorry? . . . I dunno, it’s difficult to think of it like that . . . I never thought for a moment of warning him against this photography lark. I knew he was going to Soho, but it’s not as though Soho’s Chicago these days, is it? It’s nothing but poncy pop stars and Chinese cooks, so I never thought . . . ”
“How did he come to take up with Bob Cordle?”
“Well, he’d always been a keen little photographer, ever since he was a kid, and I always had to tell him there was a world of difference between taking a nice snap and doing it for a living. Which there is. So when he was sixteen, he’d like to have left school, and he did for a time, but there was no work to speak of, only labouring jobs and temporary things that wouldn’t lead nowhere, and he thought he could do better than that, and I thought he could and all, so he went back to school and got a few A-levels, and by then he’d heard about this photography course at the City of London Poly, and with me being retired we knew he’d get a full grant, so I pushed him along a bit, and he applied and got in. He was ever so happy about it.�
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“Was he still living at home?”
“Yes, he was. But you know how it is with kids—sometimes he’d kip down at one of his mates’, and he had the odd girlfriend . . . I hate myself for it now, but I didn’t think twice when he didn’t come home last night.”
His expression was so guilt-stricken and appealing that I said hastily, to put him out of his misery:
“Of course. I wasn’t criticizing. Do you happen to know how he met up with Bob Cordle?”
“Oh yes. I was coming to that. I never actually met the bloke but Dale told me all about him . . . We talked a lot, being on our own . . . Well, he was in this pub in Soho, three or four months ago it was, with a gang of pals from the Poly—hangers-on of some pop group or other: Whoosh, or Pink Knickers or some daft name. Anyway, it was round the corner from Windlesham Street, and this Cordle was in there having a pint after one of his sessions. He’d got a lot of his equipment with him, in cases, like, and Dale struck up a conversation because of that, and he took it out and showed him. He was the first professional photographer Dale had met, and he was a very enthusiastic kid . . . a lovely lad . . . ” He dabbed at his eyes. “Anyway, they got on like a house on fire. Very nice man, Dale said—he always said that. Give you the top brick off the chimney, he would, according to Dale, and always helping people one way or another. Anyway, the upshot was he said Dale could tag along to some of his sessions if he wanted, and Dale was over the moon. Not for money, you understand, just for the experience. That’s how it happened. Dale used to go along two or three times a week. Felt he was really learning the practical side.”
“These sessions you mention—did Dale tell you precisely what they were?”
“Yes. There wasn’t any harm in them, so far as I could see. You can’t shield a boy from seeing a bit of titty, not these days, can you? It was mostly girls wagging their boobs and blokes flexing their muscles.”
“There was nothing . . . more?”
“Well, he did other things, this Cordle chap. There was countryside stuff, and buildings, and that. Dale went with him once down to Essex—you know, thatched cottages and all that malarky. Then a lot of stuff for some architectural paper or other. Dale liked that. He loved buildings, specially old buildings. I used to say to him: ‘You like the buildings better than the bodybuilding,’ and he’d say: ‘They last longer.’ I think that’s what he would have gone in for, photographing buildings . . . if he’d lived.”
“And there was never—well, never any hard porn photography in these sessions?”
“Oh no. Never nothing like that.”
“And you think he would have told you if there were?”
He thought long.
“Yes, I do. I really think he would’ve.”
I had to respect that. But it didn’t stop me keeping an open mind.
• • •
“But he was a good man!”
Mrs. Cordle’s outburst was at once an expression of complete mystification and a personal protest to the President of the Immortals. When I interviewed her, she had just returned from her mother’s, where she had been told the news. Ellen Cordle—Nellie, I guessed, to her husband—was a slim, fresh-looking woman in her late forties, with a faded prettiness that in other circumstances would have been very endearing. Now, though not weeping, she was clearly in pain from shock and sorrow.
“I’m sure he was,” I said awkwardly.
“I suppose you’ve heard lots of bereaved people say that, haven’t you?” she said, shrewdly. “Well, I meant it literally: he was good. You think that because he worked for a rather tatty magazine, bought mostly by pretty pathetic people, that he must have been a bit like that himself: grubby round the edges—I bet that’s how you’ve got him marked down in your own mind, isn’t it?”
I was in fact finding it rather difficult to mark Bob Cordle down in my own mind.
“Not really,” I said. “I heard from Dale Herbert’s father how enormously kind your husband had been to his son.”
“Oh God, that poor lad . . . My husband treated him like a son. We’ve got a daughter, you know, but she married and went off to Australia . . . Bob thought the world of Dale. But it wasn’t just him. He was good to anybody—everybody, even if he didn’t particularly like them. I used to tell him he was daft, but I wouldn’t have had him any other way. And he used to say that nobody disappointed him twice. If he got paid back in bad coin, that was the end.”
“Was he particularly close to the people who modelled for him?”
“That would depend—on whether they were regular models, and on whether he liked them or not. They were a pretty mixed lot, as I suppose you realize—street-walkers, bouncers, some downright crooks. But he never condemned them, not until he really knew them and had tried to understand. And he’d do anything for them if they asked him. If one of the girls was down on her luck and needed publicity stills taken to get agents interested, he’d tell her to forget the payments till she was in work again. They have such a short career span, these body people. One of the men wanted to go into photography when he got too old for the posing, and Bob went to endless lengths to coach him, lend him equipment, and so on.”
“As with Dale.”
“Right. Just the fact that Dale was so enthusiastic endeared him to Bob. He loved enthusiasm. He hated the youngsters who don’t give a damn, have a shrug-the-shoulders, take-it-or-leave-it attitude. That’s why he hated all this youth unemployment there is today. He said it encouraged this horrible don’t-give-a-damn philosophy.”
“So he and Dale had become really good friends, had they?”
“Oh yes. He was here a couple of times—when they went down to Essex together, and then again when Bob was doing illustrations for a feature on the suburban semi-detached house, and he said we’d got just as awful semis around here as anywhere else had, and he did most of the illustrations from home. Then they’d do work together at the studio two or three times a week. Bob couldn’t afford to pay him, and he came along or didn’t, just as he liked. Mostly he did, because he knew he was getting the experience.”
“Mrs. Cordle, I don’t want to ask this, but I feel I have to. Did your husband ever do work . . . well, did he ever stray into the hard-porn side of the trade?”
“No, he never did. I can see that was how your mind was bound to be working, and I can say quite definitely that he never did. Naturally he could have, if he’d’ve wanted to, and very profitably. There were people sounded him out. First time it happened he told me about it, and why he’d refused, and he never budged from that. He wasn’t one to change, my Bob, once he’d made up his mind.”
“I see. Mrs. Cordle, you’ve been staying at your mother’s, haven’t you?”
“That’s right. She’s been poorly, and she’s nearly eighty, and Bob said to go over and be with her till she was really better. He said he’d be all right. He was very good at coping on his own, so I didn’t worry.”
“When you last saw him, was there anything bothering him? Anything he wasn’t happy about?”
“No. Not that I recollect. The car needing new fuse plugs, that was about the extent of it.”
“And he didn’t phone you with any worries?”
“He phoned me, to see how I was, see how mother was going on. But not with any worries.”
“Would he have done if he’d had any?”
“Well . . . he didn’t bring every little thing that vexed him home with him, if that’s what you mean. But we both liked to talk things over, if there was anything big. I think he’d have mentioned it if there was anything important. Unless it was something he thought would worry me. Then he might not have mentioned it. He was very considerate, Superintendent.”
Probably he was. And if it was something big enough to get killed for, then he might very well not want to worry his wife with it, I thought.
• • •
Susan Platt-Morrison had shared a flat in Kensington with a girl called Joyce. The arrangement had only been going a m
onth or so, and Joyce could tell me very little about Susan. Yes, she knew she’d done a bit of nude modelling. It was just a way of making a bit of money on the side, because after all a student grant didn’t go very far, did it? Susan hadn’t thought twice about it, nor been in the least bit embarrassed about it, and why should she be? Susan had liked the good things of life, especially good clothes and exclusive make-up, and that was her way of getting them. Well, it was better than working your fingers to the bone, wasn’t it?
Joyce, in fact, was mainly concerned with getting a replacement to share the expenses of the flat, and practically asked me if I knew of anybody. I could see I was going to get little out of her, so I took off for Mummy in the Thames Valley.
Mrs. Platt-Morrison lived in Hordene, which had once been a pleasant country village, and had several postcardable bits in the centre to prove it. Now it was predominantly a far-flung outpost of Lloyds and the Stock Exchange. The Platt-Morrison residence was stockbroker’s Tudor, set in what the advertisements would call extensive lawned gardens. The lawns were finely mown, the beds weeded, the fruit trees pruned and sprayed. Everything in the garden was lovely.
There was a chain on the front door, and when Susan’s mother answered it she peered suspiciously out of the darkness inside. I said “Scotland Yard, Mrs. Platt-Morrison,” and handed her in my card. She took it away and switched on a light to examine it by. Then she came and took down the chain and led the way into the sitting-room. All the curtains were drawn, and only two lamps on little side tables were switched on. I had to strain my eyes to establish that Mrs. Platt-Morrison was a well-preserved fifty-five, skillfully made up and tastefully dressed for death.
She motioned me automatically to a chair.
“How could she do this to me?” she exclaimed, almost involuntarily.
“I’m sure Susan had no intention of doing anything to you at all,” I said. I then went on, as I had with Dale Herbert’s father, though with less conviction in my voice. “I’m sure your daughter was the innocent victim in someone else’s quarrel. The innocent bystander who unfortunately found herself involved.”
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