“Very nice,” said Mick Spivey, looking like a dwarf in her vicinity. “Very nice indeed.”
Vince had gone to the chest over by the far wall, and taken out a long, shiny hide whip. Standard equipment, apparently. He handed it to her, and the corners of her mouth came up, slightly, into an expression of satisfaction. Perhaps she had fantasies of turning it on him. She stood there, magnificent, cracking the whip in the air experimentally a few times.
“Don’t let her touch me with that,” said Harold from his frame. “My skin is very sensitive.”
“It won’t come near you, Harold,” muttered Vince impatiently.
And certainly he was as good as his word. It is difficult to convey the risible yet tacky nature of the filming that followed. First the girlfriend, looking splendid and fearsome, if only Vince’s directorial skills could have captured it, was taken inflicting terrible punishment on the vacant air. Then shots were taken of her standing before the frame, brandishing the whip threateningly at Harold’s back. Then came shots of the whip draped across the shoulders of Harold, with Vince painting in wealts with lipstick across his body between each shot. Harold was shivering, quite genuinely. Cold had its uses in a film of this kind, I decided, though I couldn’t see its helping much in the straighter sex productions. Vince seemed less satisfied however, with the front shots he took of Harold looking agonized, screaming with pain, and begging for mercy. Actors’ Equity are always giving fearful statistics of the numbers of their members who are out of work, but one always suspects that a great many of them richly deserve to be. Watching Harold trying to render simple emotions only confirmed that belief. Finally Vince shook his head and gave up, getting his own back by forgetting to untie Harold and ignoring his pleas to be allowed down from his frame. Finally he took a bit more film of the girlfriend brandishing her whip, sound-recorded the whip being cracked against the warehouse wall, and then decided that his latest fladge masterpiece was in the can, and could be satisfactorily put together in the cutting-room.
Charlie, I could see, found all this intensely amusing. If anyone chanced to look his way he was observing things with an absorbed interest, but at other moments his whole body was shaking with laughter. I too, on my perch outside in the dank November weather, would quite often like to have let out a roar of mirth. But it wasn’t only funny: the shoddy, improvised nature of it was highly chuckle-inducing, it was true—the lights frame Harold was tied to, the lipstick weals. But then there was that splendid naked body, all that beauty and force, which was lending itself to this tacky little piece of fantasy-fodder. It presented an inescapable contrast between the beauty of some bodies, and the ugly things that were done to them. Ah well—as I said to Garry earlier, I should restrain my tendency to moralizing monologues.
Now that this piece was done, to be spliced together at some future date to provide a highly unconvincing little thrill for the video viewers, they could start thinking about the next one. One could see why they did better with the real thing: Vince obviously had no talent at all for faking. Charlie now took pity and went and untied Harold, who quickly donned his clothes, muttering bitterly to himself. Why he kept his complaints to himself was obvious when he was kitted out again: he went to Vince to demand his payment, and Vince with obvious reluctance that was meant to imply dissatisfaction with his performance counted out a number of tens. The girlfriend had put on her clothes again with silent, consummate grace, her face expressing no emotion whatsoever. She was sailing towards the door as Vince paid off Harold, and he called her:
“Hey! Black cow!” She turned. He pointed to Mick. “You want lift? Drive?”
He mimed driving. She stood, impassively waiting, as Vince gave the car keys to Mick. I made to Garry Joplin one of our prearranged signs, the one meaning “Keep very low. Someone coming out.” Mick tossed the keys up in his hand, asked Harold if he wanted a lift back over the river, and then the three of them came out, picked their way through the darkness to the car, and drove off.
Charlie and Vince were now getting down to work. After some thought Vince decided to shoot this lot of film down my end of the room, away from the drapes.
“The drapes are wrong,” he said, showing his first faint glimmer of an artistic sense. “Down here is better—sort of bare, and hard. Like a peni—peni . . . Sort of prison. You know.”
Charlie nodded, though I knew he was itching to supply the word himself. In a matter of minutes they had moved the lights and the cameras down, and positioned them to Vince’s satisfaction. Then Vince went to the large box again, the one containing the props of his trade, and came up with two largish wooden frames, designed to be laid on the floor, with leather, buckled bracelets at either end. Charlie helped him hump them over, but it was Vince who positioned them in the pool of light, and then stood there contemplating them deeply, as if weighty questions of aesthetics were involved. Then he checked each camera meticulously.
“You’ve got to be dead careful you haven’t done anything daft,” he explained to Charlie. “With this sort of caper, there aren’t any retakes.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Charlie. “What exactly is it you want me to do?”
“Simple. Piece of cake. When they get here, I want it all to go very fast, see? At least until they’re strapped down. I’ll size ‘em up, and if they look as if they might do it all right, I’ll tell them to take their clothes off in the light, with the cameras rolling. As soon as they’ve done that, you take them and put them down on the frames—heads there, feet there, and you strap up their hands and their feet so the little buggers can’t change their minds and walk out halfway. I won’t get the birch out till they’ve got their clothes off—don’t want to scare the little darlings too soon. Not that it looks so bad. You might walk forward carrying it-might get a good expression shot out of them. When you’ve tied ‘em up, get hold of the birch again, then stand about . . . here, and when I tell you to, whop the one on this frame with all your might. Make it impressive, slow—sort of ritual, know what I mean? We’ll have plenty of time between strokes, so we’ve got masses of film to play around with afterwards, and we’ll film the other boy, waiting for his, and watching. Now—how shall we have you?” He looked at Charlie with the eye of a Hockney. “I think football shorts, don’t you? Sort of gives the idea of school, don’t you think? I’ve got several pairs here . . . ”
“I’ve got shorts on,” said Charlie. “I thought this might turn out to be a schoolboy caper.”
Charlie really went too far. He was meant to be amiably dim. He was more in character when he refused to strip off and get all goosepimply waiting for the boys to arrive.
“OK, OK. Well, look, you just stand over there in the shadows, down by the door, and you come out stripped when I’ve got them in the light there. That’s when I’ll hope for some expression shots. The birch is over there in the props box . . . Was that a car?”
It had indeed been a car. I had gestured to have the men lie very low, and it drew up in the same position it had occupied before. Three shadowy shapes got out, and one of them ushered the other two towards the warehouse. I didn’t get more than a glimpse of them until they came upstairs and into the light. I guessed they were both about fifteen or sixteen, though they looked younger. Both were scruffy, and probably dirty, and neither looked as if he was getting regular food. The sturdier of the two had a certain aggressive cockiness about him, suggesting he could make out on his own. The other was a pathetic figure—pale, withdrawn, and almost certainly on drugs. He walked into the bright lights of the warehouse studio, dazed, as if he scarcely knew where he was or what he was doing there.
“Come over here,” called Vince, and they came over to the bright lake of light down my end of the room. Vince gestured Mick towards the cameras.
“Right—take off your clothes,” he said, when they had come into the shooting space.
“Here, wait a minute, Mister” said the more wide-awake of the two. “Before we do anything we want the money.”
“After. You get paid afterwards.”
“No, we don’t. That’s not on. We agreed between us, Colin and me: money first or no deal. Money for being in it in the first place, and then for six strokes. Then we get extra afterwards if we agree to more. That’s fair. We don’t do a thing until we get the cash in our pockets.”
Cursing, Vince took his wallet out of his inside pocket and counted out a number of notes for each of the boys. The aggressive one counted his and tucked them into a back pocket, then he counted out his friend’s, and put his away likewise. The friend was withdrawn into some kind of inward contemplation.
“Right. Now take your clothes off,” said Vince, nodding again to Mick, who set the cameras rolling and concentrated them on the more with-it one of the pair, since the other was stripping off his clothes as if in a dream. It was when they were nearly naked that Charlie came forward, looking genuinely threatening, carrying the birch. I could just see the boys’ faces: the cockier boy was startled, but put on immediately an expression of bravado; the other boy’s eyes suddenly focused themselves on Charlie, registered a sudden understanding of what was to happen to him, and then changed to terror and panic. Mick Spivey’s camera, of course, was on the wrong boy—a typical example of Vince’s incompetence.
As Charlie seized the terrified boy and began strapping him on to the frame, I made the second of my signs to Garry Joplin: the men were to come forward and collect around the door to the warehouse.
The boy’s hands were now buckled to the frame, but he was lashing out with his feet. Charlie took them in both hands, and then knelt on one, and buckled the other into the straps. Then he seized the other leg, and the boy was helpless. His body was feebly thrashing around in the limits of its mobility. Vince, behind the cameras, was rubbing his hands with satisfaction.
“This’ll look marvellous,” he said.
The other boy’s air of bravado was wearing thin.
“This’d better be worth it,” he said obscurely, as Charlie took him and stretched him across the frame. I had a glimpse round the side of the warehouse of shadowy figures-gathering round the door. As Charlie stood up, took up his birch and began flourishing it with experimental strokes in the air, I gave him a few seconds, to make sure they were ready, and then I gave Joplin the third sign.
Then we went in and took them.
Chapter 17
A POLICEMAN develops antennae that twitch in the company of a born sneak. I don’t think I needed those, though, to guess where the weak link was going to be found in those four people we took back to the Yard. I set Garry Joplin on to talk to the two boys, to get evidence of the offer they’d been made, of any work they’d done for Vince before; Vince Haggarty himself I left to cool his heels in a waiting-room; I talked to Mick Spivey. Charlie had said he would shop his own mother for a soap coupon, and he was dead right. Ratty in appearance, and rat by nature—that about sums up Mick Spivey. I had no sooner offered the usual inducements to cooperation than he was spilling the beans in an eager and ingratiating manner that quite turned the stomach.
Vince Haggarty, I learned, had slid into the porn video branch of his new profession almost as soon as he had mastered the elementary techniques of filming. Whether this was because he knew he had not enough talent ever to rise very high in the more legitimate side of the business, or from an inborn tendency to gravitate towards the grubby Mick didn’t speculate. He, Mick, had come into the business as soon as it had begun to get off the ground—he had no particular title in the organization, but he acted as business manager, organizer of distribution, and general odd-job man. Oh, and—though he did not mention this himself—principal recruiter for all the more dicey films. The setup had a list of customers that was growing all the time, and the quickie films to satisfy this market had to be turned out with equal speed. Be they ever so shoddily made, apparently, the new titles were snapped up by the mail-order customers as soon as they were put in the catalogue.
“And where were these videos kept?” I asked.
“Oh, in Todd Masterman’s second garage. You’ll find a catalogue and a list of subscribers there too. Sometimes we sell copies outright, we have a number of cinemas that take our stuff, but mostly we circulate them to private customers for a whacking fee. Todd didn’t want them stored at his place, naturally—”
“Naturally,” I said. “Mr. Clean, and all.”
“—right. But there was no room at Vince or my places, and the rent he charges for the garage makes it worth his risk. Or so he thought. He always imagined that his reputation in the business would keep him clear of all this.”
“He’s going to find that he was wrong. That’s not the sum total of his interest in this, is it?”
“Oh no. He put up money for cameras and equipment in the beginning, and that brought him a quarter share. Then, any time he put us on to anybody—people on his books, for example—we paid him a quarter of anything we paid them. It was a nice little sideline for him because the agency isn’t all that flourishing. It was a good idea, but it was just a bit too specialized ever to take off in a big way.”
So that was it. I talked to Vince, of course, and we fetched in the films and catalogues and the subscribers list from Todd Masterman’s Wimbledon home. Pretty soon we took in Todd himself as well, and before long we had the porn film business sewn up. Garry got a lot more detail out of the only one of the boys he could really talk to. The sleeping-rough kids form a little—or not so little, these days—confraternity. Mick had quite a following, both of boys and girls, because he was often among them offering them jobs which, however grubby or nasty, were acceptable because of the pressures of hunger or the need for drugs. And some, I suppose, enjoyed it, for I must not sentimentalize them. Anyway, Mick was almost popular with them, though only as a source of food, drugs or excitement.
They were a sad pair, those boys. Garry did a good job with them, being much nearer their age than I was, and a much warmer person, but the only one he could help was the one who needed it least. He contacted his parents, patched things up, sent them off together. Probably the lad would have gone home eventually anyway. Equally probably he’d take off again at some time.
The other boy had been placed in care by his mother when he was two. He’d had a succession of foster homes, had run away at fourteen from an institution. We had to return him to one, but it was obvious it wouldn’t last. Even before he had run away the first time he was on the road to being an addict. Now he was hopelessly far along that road. He needed the sort of constant and intensive care and support that nobody seems willing to pay for. Garry said he would be dead before he was twenty, and I knew he was right.
We both of us conveniently forgot the money that had been handed to the pair by Vince in the warehouse studio. I couldn’t see Vince asking for it back.
I got varying stories and varying emphases about their own personal roles in the business from Mick and Vince and Todd Masterman, but in one thing they were unanimous: they knew nothing about the Bodies murders. Why connect them with that? They had not intended filming that night, had not been in the Windlesham Street area at the time, knew nothing whatsoever about the business. One thing they were quite sure about was that it was nothing to do with them.
And I was equally sure it was.
I’d seen the contents of Masterman’s garage when they had been brought in. Now I took Joplin and we inspected them in detail. Much of the stuff was duplicate video tapes to be sent round to subscribers. Apart from those, there was the master copy of each film, a master catalogue with printed versions for the subscribers, and a list of those subscribers themselves—or “members,” as they were called, of the Speciality Video Club.
That members list was fascinating. I found that several of the names rang a bell. There was that clergyman in the West Country who had written to Phil Fennilow offering to finance a film of Lesbia Brandon. There were names of people who I was pretty sure were MPs, though none of them gave the House of Commons as their ad
dress, and most of them apparently lived on farms—engaged in tax-deduction agriculture, no doubt. And unless I was much mistaken there were at least two members of the Metropolitan CID.
The things that interested Garry and me were the films and the catalogue of the films. Well, naturally, you will say: policemen are known to have sewer minds and childish tastes. Actually I’d seen more than enough of such products in my time to last me out, and even Garry, after the first incredulous chortles were over said they really were a terrible drag. You have to have a certain stamina to enjoy a concentrated diet of that stuff.
And a concentrated diet was what we had to take. You don’t want to hear about it, do you? If you go in for that kind of viewing, you’ll know the sort of thing we had to watch; and if you don’t you can let your mind range in smutty speculation. There were men and women doing perfectly ordinary everyday things, but also things more outré or acrobatic. There were men and men, women and women, men and boys, women and boys, men and girls, girls and Alsatians; there were rubber films, leather films, whip films, bondage films—well, you name it, they catered for it. They had—you had to hand it to them—been awfully quick in getting their catalogue together. The originals were all nicely divided up into the various kinks, and the titles gave away the essential facts about their contents: Buddy Pals; She plus She; Youth in Bloom; Little Girl, and so on. The card index gave us the dates on which they were filmed, showing that, until recently, Vince had made use of every evening when the Bodies studio was hired out to Bob Cordle—this meant most of them were filmed on a Monday or a Wednesday. More recently things had become more flexible with the hiring of the new studio.
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