After that opening interview, there was a bit of a fallow period for Charlie. But six days later he was called by nail-varnish-and-mascara at the Form Divine Office, and sent off to stand in for someone whose form divine had been hit by ’flu. It was a television advertisement for a crunchy breakfast food of doubtless minimal nutritional value, but the advertising agency wanted to play up the health angle. Charlie and ten or twelve others cavorted around energetically in front of a number of stunning backdrops, wearing a variety of sporting gears, and Charlie said he enjoyed it very much, except that it was difficult to cavort energetically when carrying a bowl of Cornimunch. Later he did a session for a Hackney District Council poster in which he was supposed to be a sports teacher with a multi-racial class. The fees for these jobs were not large. Todd Masterman, phoning him at the gym, said that everyone was pleased with his work, and he (Todd) felt sure that something else would come up before very long.
In the meantime Charlie did not waste his time. He changed his lunch-time habits, forswore pub steak and kidney pie, and walked through Soho munching a sandwich—not always a comfortable thing to do in November. “I wanted to increase my visibility,” he explained. At other times he would sit in Soho Square or Golden Square, reading Power Bike or other such magazines, or sometimes he would just loaf around the narrow streets of the area, looking with interest at anything unusual on four wheels or two.
One day, towards lunch-time, a man came into the gym whose face he thought he knew.
“I’m just meeting Harry,” he said, and stood around in the office reading the Daily Grub. As soon as he had opened his mouth, Charlie had noticed his appalling teeth.
Charlie went on sitting at his desk, going through the gym’s accounts for the previous month. He was conscious of eyes on him. Now and then, for verisimilitude, Vince Haggarty would turn over a page of the Grub. It was the day on which that journal of opinion printed Bob Cordle’s final pictures, the chronicle of the last few seconds of Susan Platt-Morrison and Wayne Flushing. Charlie noticed that Vince turned over that page very quickly. Not natural, thought Charlie, in one who was part of the body business himself. Before long Harry (a rather sleazy young man, not rated serious enough by other people in the body trade) came out of the showers, and the two went off together.
It was two days later, in the lunch-hour, that the approach was made. Charlie had just handed over Jim’s Gym to young Anatomy Lesson, and was strolling along Wardour Street, Power Bike rolled up in his hand, wondering whether to slip into a sandwich bar or risk a pub lasagne, when he saw a Nittachi 500 leant up against the wall of one of the various film company’s offices. Automatically, by now, he stopped to admire it—stood back to wonder at the shape and the sheen, bent down to look at the gears and the speedo, and was just straightening up when he was conscious of a presence behind him.
“That’s some machine,” said a voice.
“Yes, man!” said Charlie, with joyous enthusiasm. “Boy, if I owned a little number like that—!”
“It’s really got power,” said Vince, and the pair of them went off into a long rigmarole of technicalities and performance statistics. (I asked Charlie later whether Vince Haggarty knew his stuff on motorbikes, and Charlie shrugged and said he seemed to know as much as he, Charlie, knew, so it seems a great deal of bullshit-artistry was being indulged in by both parties.)
“You’re the chap from Jim’s Gym, aren’t you?” Vince asked, as the technicalities tailed away.
“That’s right.”
“I was in there the other day. O’Connor’s used to be my gym, in my competition days, but I knew Jim’s quite well. Don’t get around to much serious training any more, more’s the pity. Have you got time for a drink?”
“I was just going to drop in somewhere myself.”
So they went along to the Horse and Plough, a rural nest in deepest Dean Street, and Vince bought pints for himself and Charlie, and they sat in the corner furthest from the music and talked. Vince’s approach was less than subtle.
“They cost money, bikes like that,” he said.
“Don’t I know it! But I’m saving up,” said Charlie, playing the enthusiastic innocent (which he, by nature, most definitely was not). “And I’m getting the odd job, posing for ads and that, and I’m putting all that money aside. It’s fun—great. I enjoy it.”
“Really? I used to do a bit of posing when I was in competition shape. It was a bit extra, but I always thought the money was pretty poor.”
“Yeah, it’s not riches. But it’s going to be great seeing myself when those ads come out!”
“I’m on the other side of the camera now,” said Vince, casually lighting up a cigarette. “It pays better, and I’ve got to the age when it’s just too much of a sweat to keep in shape.”
“You’re a photographer?” said Charlie, still with that boyish enthusiasm. “What sort of work do you do?”
“Oh, this and that,” said Vince. “I could put work your way, if you were interested.”
“Really?” said Charlie, as if he were auditioning for children’s television.
“Depending on what you’re willing to do.”
“Oh, I’ll do anything,” said Charlie.
Vince took a sip of his drink.
“Watch it someone doesn’t take you up on that,” he said.
“Oh, I just meant I’d do posters, TV ads, posing, modelling—whatever’s going.”
Vince was looking at him hard across the table.
“I could put jobs your way where you could earn more than you’ll ever get from that sort of work. Unusual jobs . . . ”
Charlie frowned, as if bewildered.
“What sort of thing?”
“Specialist work . . . Come on, you must have some idea of what I’m getting at. Now and again I do a bit of work for the sex mags, for example. I could use you on that. Depending on what you’re willing to . . . show.”
Charlie put on a particularly vacuous smile.
“I haven’t got anything to hide,” he said.
“That’s what most people feel these days,” said Vince. “Most modern people. Attitudes are healthier now than they were. And most of the magazines I work for are on sale perfectly openly—the police take a very permissive line these days. They know it’s a kind of safety-valve. Now, just for instance, I could do a sequence of you for one of the gay mags—Hom, or Fly.”
“Isn’t Fly the British Airways in-flight magazine?”
“No, it isn’t. It really isn’t. In Fly the fly is ever-open, if you get my meaning.”
“Oh, I get your meaning.”
“Would you be interested in that kind of work?”
Charlie made a great show of slow thinking.
“It’s not something I’ve ever considered,” he said at last.
“You’ve no moral objections?”
“Oh no. Still, we’ve always been a pretty religious family. I wouldn’t want my old mum to see it.”
“Hom and Fly are not magazines your old mum is likely to pick up casualy.”
“I wouldn’t want my mates to see, either,” said Charlie, going all teenager. “But I don’t suppose they’d be likely to buy it.”
“Of course, we’d go on to the other stuff, if that went well . . . Twosome stuff—know what I mean? Various combinations and possibilities.”
“What about money?”
“Oh, you’d be well paid.”
“How well paid?”
Charlie stuck to the point. If Vince had been brighter he would have seen that Charlie’s financial acumen did not jell quite with the ingenuousness he had flaunted hitherto. I don’t think Charlie had much faith in the special police fund he was supposed to get paid from. Anyway, Vince did not see the discrepancy, and in the end they came to an agreement for £75 for the first session. It wasn’t riches, but Charlie thought that was about the sort of sum that someone inexperienced in that kind of thing might be willing to accept.
“Right,” said Vince, when that
part of the negotiations was concluded. “Well, here’s to success! This could well be the beginning of a very nice little sideline for you.”
“I hope so,” said Charlie, smiling shyly. “When will we have the session?”
Vince got out a grubbly little diary-notebook, a habit he had perhaps acquired from Bob Cordle.
“What about Tuesday evening?”
“Fine. Where?”
“Hmmm. Haven’t used my place for some time. Let’s say there—52 Dedham Road, NW2—around six-thirty.”
That was a big disappointment for Charlie, who had hoped to find out what locale had been hired to make up for the loss of the Bodies studio. But he smiled his enthusiastic amateur smile, and asked:
“Should I bring anything with me? Wear anything special?”
Vince drained his glass.
“What the guys who read those magazines are interested in, you’ll have with you anyway.” He got up, clapped Charlie on the shoulder, and said: “See you Tuesday.”
“It was more of the old slave-market stuff,” said Charlie, when he reported to me, eating a takeaway pizza at our flat.
“I told you you weren’t going to enjoy it as much as you thought,” I said.
“It’s like being weighed by the pound in a meat-market.”
“My wife is under the impression that it’s only women who are regarded in that fat-livestock way,” I said.
“I never said it was only women,” said Jan. “Still, it does seem as if it’s only men who buy flesh wholesale like that, doesn’t it?”
I had to admit that was a clever hit. I sat there wondering whether it was true.
Chapter 15
WHEN CHARLIE, on his lunch-hour a couple of days later, popped down to New Scotland Yard to tell me about the photographic session at Vince Haggarty’s flat, I fetched Garry Joplin in, and Archie Nelson from the Dirty Squad. Most of the men in that squad are thick as two planks, and have to be told that the works of D. H. Lawrence, not to mention those of Oscar Wilde, are now generally available to the impressionable public, and that all sorts of things they were told in Sunday school were wrong are now legally indulged in around the Metropolitan area of London without the whole fabric of society falling apart. Archie Nelson was not thick and not corrupt, and he was the pleasantest and loneliest guy in the Dirty Squad, if somewhat irritating by reason of his world-weary air. When Charlie saw us all there he said he was embarrassed at having to tell his story to an audience, but he was not in the least embarrassed, or, I suspect, embarrassable.
In fact, Charlie had enjoyed himself disgracefully.
Vince had had an assistant with him in the Dedham Road flat—a thin, hollow-cheeked young man, with sharp, rat-like eyes. His name was Mick Spivey. He did a lot of shifting around of lights and equipment, but Charlie suspected from things he said that his place in the set-up was mainly organizational and financial. He had a wheedling manner and a whiney voice, and Charlie did not like him at all. When he got there Mick and Vince were shifting furniture around and putting the heavy lights on to frames, or suspending them from the ceiling. Charlie helped them for a bit, and Vince said that was all right because a muck sweat could be very attractive, and anyway could be wiped off. The props of the session were pretty simple: the sofa, one or two of the African wall-hangings, and soon. Then Charlie began taking off his clothes, and the session got under way.
Vince had got certain minimal items of clothing, for purposes of titillation, and the session began with Charlie in these. There were briefs, over which Charlie popped, a special pair of ragged Y-fronts out of which Charlie popped, and a jock-strap which he was required to play coyly with. Coyness, Vince and Mick decided after consultation in serious voices, didn’t come easily to Charlie, so they gave that up. Then they photographed him without the clothing props, sitting astride the arm of the sofa, smouldering nakedly in front of the ethnic drapes, or lying invitingly on the rug by the fireplace. Then they went into the bathroom, which was in fact a shower room, and quite the smartest room in the flat, newly redecorated in white and blue tiles of a modernistic design.
“Very photogenic, showers,” said Vince, as if Hitchcock had not made that discovery long before. Then they had had great fun with veils of water and splashes on the camera lens for some time, until Vince’s girlfriend had arrived, shown herself at the door of the bathroom, and that had put an end to the session.
“Erections are not allowed,” said Archie Nelson, in the pedantic manner of a local government officer reciting building regulations, “but otherwise there’s nothing there that we would pounce on, so far as I can see. It all sounds very much within the guidelines we lay down.”
“Yeah,” said Charlie, rather miffed. “But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? It was my first time.”
“Any indications of anything more dubious lined up for the future?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a session with leather gear arranged for some time next week.”
The Dirty Squad man shrugged, with an air of Tiresias who has foresuffered all.
“They haven’t given me a location yet,” Charlie went on, “but I think it’ll be in the new studio, for variety’s sake. They said the readership of Fly and Leather overlapped. But then there was something else . . . ”
“Yes?”.
“Before I went they were tossing around various possible future projects. What they were talking about was films—what they called ‘twosome films.’ Me—with girls, other men, boys. They said the others would all be white.”
“Why?” I asked, fascinated, as if Vince felt himself bound in some way by the Equal Opportunities law.
“I think he’d got the idea that I fancied his girlfriend. Well, he knew I fancied his girlfriend . . . But what he actually said was there was no great market for black on black. ‘It doesn’t appeal,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the fact that it’s damned difficult to film.’ I can imagine the contrast does work better.”
“What did you say to his proposals?”
“I expressed some doubt about the boys. I thought that would be in keeping with the character. As for the rest, I said I’d probably be willing.”
Archie Nelson was still showing signs of lack of interest, so I said: “Was that all?”
Charlie screwed up his face.
“Not quite. This all took up the time while I was dressing. I was just about to leave, and Vince was handing over the money—in cash, and very welcome—when he said: ‘There’s more where that comes from, if you’re willing.’ And of course I said I was very willing. Then he said, sort of lightly, but watching me: ‘We can fix you up with some real kinky jobs, if you have a mind to do them.’ And I said, lightly too, that I thought I’d be ready for most things . . . And that was about it.”
“Right,” I said. “So we just wait until he gives out a few more details on what kind of kinky he has in mind.”
Archie Nelson yawned, infuriatingly.
“We can’t do much, even on the kinky stuff these days. About the worst we can do is report them to the RSPCA if there’s animals involved. But keep your ears open so as to learn more about the distribution. There was this other bloke—what did you say his name was?”
“Mick Spivey,” said Charlie. “A right ratty little guy. Sell his mother for a tuppence-off washing powder coupon.”
“Keep close to him. Try and find out where their stuff is stored. There’ll be films and videos, and they will take up a fair bit of space. Remember anything you hear about who the customers are, and how they get the stuff out to them.”
“Right. So I’m to stay with it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Until they really start pressing you to do something you wouldn’t like.”
“I don’t pressure easily,” said Charlie complacently.
“Remember the part you’re playing,” I said severely. “You’re not you, you’re him.”
Charlie, I suspected, like most non-actors, found it difficult to keep up any other persona consistently.
The next time I heard from him it was by phone: he still had done nothing likely to raise the temperature of Archie Nelson even half a degree from its professionally reptilian cool. He had done the posing for the leather mag, but he said it was only “the same as before, only with cowhide.” No shocks or surprises. The interesting thing from my point of view, though, was that the session had taken place in the new studio.
“Where was this?” I asked.
“That’s the problem. I was told to go to Vince’s pad, and we drove on from there. I didn’t like to look around me too interested, like. It’s the Elephant and Castle, that I do know. Perhaps two or three minutes from the Underground. It’s an old warehouse, practically derelict, or at least bloody scruffy. There’s some grubby old houses nearby, but a lot of them are empty, and there’s a bit of ground with some of those houses they put up after the war.”
“Prefabs?”
“That’s right.”
“Not many of those left. That should help us identify the place. It sounds a dump.”
“It is, but they’ve done it up inside, of course. A hell of a lot of whitewash on the walls, and piles of drapes—a few ethnic ones from the girlfriend, some tartans and tweeds for the healthy outdoor feel, and lots of those pastel, satiny ones like poor old Wayne and that girl were posed against in those last pictures. Me and my leather were taken against pastel blue. I should think I looked great.”
“You’re getting a taste for this business.”
“It’s the cash they hand you in a brown envelope at the end of the sessions.”
And Charlie rang off, obviously highly pleased with himself. He had certainly given me something to go on. I got straight on the phone to the Elephant station, and told them to give the relevant parts of Charlie’s description to the boys on the beat and see what they made of it. In fact, two days later I was looking at a list of four possible locations sent me from the Elephant station, when Charlie rang again.
“I want to see you.”
Bodies Page 13