Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  We took the straight sex ones first, running through them until we had got a clear impression of the various “actors” involved, then speeding them up to get a rough idea of whether there was anything of interest in the rest of the film, other than the basic biological interest. They were a lot more entertaining speeded up. I recognized Susan Platt-Morrison in one film—a most professional performance: she looked like a very high-class whore laid on for some visiting Sheik. I also recognized Vince’s black girlfriend, and some of the faces I had seen when flicking through Bodies magazine, but otherwise found nothing of interest.

  When we started in on the more out-of-the-way material, we both recognized someone at once.

  “That’s—oh my God, that’s the lad I’ve been interviewing,” said Garry Joplin.

  It was the more confident of the two boys, being introduced to sex by a buxom and all-too-confident lady.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “That’s really sick,” said Garry.

  “Still,” I said thoughtfully, “put it into Der Rosen-kavalier and everybody says ‘Ooh, isn’t it gorgeous?’ ”

  “Der Whatsit?”

  “An opera by Richard Strauss. You can cover a multitude of sins with heavy orchestration.”

  And so it went on. We saw Susan Platt-Morrison again in the Lesbian ones, and the Portuguese girlfriend seemed to have made a speciality of S-M material, which perhaps, if you had Vince Haggarty as a boyfriend, you might feel inclined to. Various sad-looking waifs of both sexes kept popping up in the films, submitting to being spanked or seduced by various confident adults of both sexes. After a while the same faces, usually giving the same half-hearted performances, became monotonous.

  “I say, I’ve just had a thought,” I said eventually. “I haven’t seen Denny Crabtree.”

  “You will. Plenty of time.”

  “No, but he said he was in a straight sex job. We’ve seen all those.”

  “He also said you didn’t see his face, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But there weren’t any like that . . . Anyway, keep it rolling.”

  It was three or four films later (the films ran, on average, about ten or fifteen minutes, by the way, but we mostly saw them in a much shorter time by speeding up) that I called out to Garry:

  “Stop . . . Can you show that one again from the beginning?”

  “It’s only just started anyway,” said Garry, rewinding.

  “I know . . . It’s just that . . . ” The film started again, with a long, lingering shot of a heavily muscled back. “That’s Crabtree, I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be sure? These musclemen all look alike.”

  And I really didn’t know how I knew. As Garry said, one of the things that had struck me, browsing through the magazines, and again at the contest in Aberdeen, was the essential sameness of the bodies: take a photomontage of the line-up for Mr. Universe or whatever, and block out the faces, and there you were with essentially the same body, over and over. Or with all the white ones alike and all the black ones alike. But Crabtree’s was the body that I had seen most in close-up, and for quite a long period of time. I knew intimately his double biceps pose, and his back lat spread pose. But perhaps what actually made me sure that this was Crabtree was a certain awkwardness in the filming, with the camera concentrating obstinately on the back and shoulders, and cutting off consistently at the neck.

  “That’s him. I’d swear it,” I said. “Though I’m not sure how we’d ever prove it. What did you say this one was called?”

  “Naughty Girlie.”

  “Oh dear . . . Oh Denny . . . You’d better carry on, Garry.”

  The film proceeded on its inept way. The camera backed away from the magnificent shoulder that made up its foreground shot, and there came into focus, facing Denny, a child in a cotton shift. A girl of—what?—ten, eleven in looks, yet perhaps older in fact. Slowly, inexpertly, yet with a childish parody of adult seductiveness that she must have seen in films, she slowly took off the shift, then took off her socks and shoes, then began to remove her underwear.

  “That’s enough.” I said to Garry, and he stopped the projector. “Switch on the light.” When I had blinked in the sudden access of light I turned to Garry, and saw that he was thinking the same thing as I.

  “Have you got the card index catalogue there, Garry?”

  “Yes.”

  “What date was this one filmed?”

  “Let’s see . . . November the seventh.”

  “The seventh. Exactly one week before the murders. . . . You saw who it was didn’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I just had the vague feeling at first, and couldn’t really place her. I thought it might have been in connection with some other case.”

  “It wasn’t in connection with any case,” said Garry. I put my head in my hands. “No. It was poor old Leonides’s daughter.”

  • • •

  It was twenty to three when we arrived yet once more at the Knossos. Mr. Leonides, portly and sweating from a busy lunch-hour, bustled forward waving a menu.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Will it be three?”

  “Not exactly. We won’t be eating.” The last little knot of lunchers began to gather their things together at a table by the door. “You’ll be locking up now, will you?”

  “Yes. I should have done it at half past.”

  “Then come and sit with us, will you?”

  Mr. Leonides bustled the last of the eaters out, cheerily farewelling them, and perhaps it was my imagination that thought it detected signs of strain behind the cheeriness.

  “There is just time for a little drink,” he said hopefully when he returned, “if you gentlemen—”

  “No. No drink,” I said. “Would you sit down, Mr. Leonides? I’m afraid I don’t know any way of making this conversation pleasant, and I’m sad because I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve got to talk with you in connection with the Bodies murders. It’s about your daughter. . . . ”

  There was a long silence. Mr. Leonides had sat down, and he gazed for a long time at the red and white check of the tablecloth, without speaking.

  “You mustn’t blame her too much,” he said finally, looking up at us. “She is not a bad girl. Silly. Young for her age. Not realizing. But not bad.”

  “Your daughter isn’t the one to blame,” I said. “I want to know exactly how it happened. Is she at home?”

  “No, at school. I tell you about it. I tell you exactly how it happened. Though I didn’t hear till much later, you understand. Like I say, she’s a good girl. Very hardworking, willing. Maybe I keep her a little close—you understand? I not want her to be like some of these English girls—talking about contraceptives when they only ten, eleven. Is not nice. Is not the Greek way.”

  “It’s not very often the English way,” protested Garry.

  “Too often. I not like. So I send her to very nice school. Private. The Dorothea Beale School, in Highgate. Very good standard—you know. Well—that’s fine: she very happy. Only—only all the other girls, they come from families much richer than her—you understand? You know how children feel about that? Their fathers are men in the City, Harley Street, the House of Commons. And the restaurant trade? Well, when there’s a depression it hits us first. Hard. Business lunches—yes, still plenty of those. Private people, couples, families—trade way down. We scrape to make a living, scrape to send her to that school. We do not have anything over for luxuries.”

  “And she found she couldn’t keep up with the other girls?”

  “Just in little things, first. She worry. They have, she not.”

  “How old is she, by the way?”

  “Thirteen. She go to this school a year and a bit. So you see, she come up to her second Christmas there. And the big event of the year at the school—it is the Christmas party. Very posh and elegant, and all the young ladies allowed to invite a young man. And all the girls have very fine dresses—new one each year. Point of honour,
you understand? Can’t wear the same one as last year. My Elena she say she alter, no one know, but my Maria say everyone know, and she’d be shamed, and Nikos would be there, and see it, and so it went on.”

  “Nikos?”

  Mr. Leonides looked up at me, a sharp expression in his eye.

  “Yes—you see, she have a boyfriend to take. Was not serious, you understand—or was not decided. But was serious, and we hope. They are too young to know, but his father hope, I hope. His father my oldest friend in England. He have been here much longer. He come here thirty years ago, and more, after the Civil War in Greece. Nikos, Nick he call himself, is youngest child. I come fifteen, seventeen years ago. Maria is our only, two years younger than Nikos, but we hope.”

  “And they?”

  “They?” Mr. Leonides expanded his hands in a generous gesture. “They loved. You think that is not possible at that age?”

  “No. I didn’t say that.”

  “Is possible. Is true. They love like Romeo and Juliet, and we say: ‘Soon—in five years’ time—then maybe . . . ’ ” He sighed. “So don’t say we was pushing them into it, because we wasn’t. Just talking, and saying maybe. In other ways Maria think I’m terrible hard father, but not for that.”

  “And are you strict?”

  “Yes. Sure, I’m strict. It’s right to be strict in a world like we have it now. I want her where I can see her, or where I know what she’s doing. Is that wrong? I don’t want her out everywhere, meeting all sorts of people I don’t approve of. What happened proved me right.”

  “Who did she meet?” asked Garry.

  Leonides paused, and resumed his staring at the tablecloth. At last he said:

  “There’s a café—two doors down, opposite the Bodies place. She used to go there, drink coffee, play the machine there. I thought—two doors away, can’t come to no harm. Like the fool I was! She meet there with some kids—rough kids, kids with no home, sleeping under the bridges, in railway stations, doorways, anywhere. They’re in there, drinking coffee too, and playing the machines. Because they’re doing work for this photographer—what’s his name?”

  “Vince Haggarty.”

  “Is him. And he pays them good money, and they do dirty things in front of a camera. Is pretty, pleasant, yes? But you know all about this. When they get their money, they come out and buy food at the café, hang around, and that’s how Maria meet them and talk to them. And she hears about the money, and she thinks about the dress she wants, and she starts saying at home here that perhaps she can pick up something in the Oxfam shop, or on the stall in the East End, and her mother says, ‘Fine, if you can find something that you want and it don’t cost much.’ But in fact she waits for this Haggarty to come into the café, and one night he does, to talk to one of these kids, and he sees Maria, and I don’t know how it happen, but he make her an offer. And she say yes.”

  He put his face in his hands.

  “She didn’t understand,” I suggested.

  “Of course she didn’t understand!” he exploded. “Not one little bit. He say she go there, take off her clothes, maybe play around a bit. Of course she not understand. But one night she go, and she is gone two, three hours, and when she come back I say ‘You stop hanging around in that damned café all evening.’ God help me—if I’d known what she’d been doing!”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Not for a time. She is very quiet after that. Sometimes breaks out into tears, and when we ask what the matter is, she say, ‘Nothing.’ We think it is her age. But it get worse, not better. She start getting hysterical, wouldn’t tell us nothing, never went to the café, never went out nowhere. Then one day, suddenly, out it all comes.”

  “A week later?” I suggested.

  “A week after the filming?”

  He thought a lot, before replying:

  “Yes. Suddenly her mother ask her for the hundredth time, ‘What’s the matter?’ and this time she answers: she bursts out sobbing and starts to tell . . . I am off-duty in the restaurant. I listen to her . . . I don’t want to tell you what she told us.”

  “It’s not necessary,” I said gently. “I think we know about as much as we need.”

  “But she told us in the kitchen through there, and we sat and listened, and we not realize that Nikos come in.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  “Yes. He is like family. He come in back door, always he is like my own son. His father, my friend Stavros, he have Greek restaurant in Dean Street, so Nikos is always backward and forward for something or other. And he stand there, and he listen, and we don’t know he’s there till he rush out and slam the door.”

  “What did he do?”

  Leonides looked at me, and did not answer for some time.

  “I think you know.”

  “How did he get the gun?”

  “He? Gun? His father, he is old Civil War man. Escape to Albania, not like it there, gets away to Jugoslavia, then to England. He is a man of many guns, many enemies. He teach his son—is necessary to shoot, he says.”

  “And then he came back and—?”

  “Yes. One after the other. Not thinking, not caring . . . ”

  Leonides’s eyes were dark with the pain of it. I thought. There had been something about the killings—the wholesale nature of it, perhaps—that had seemed to mark it out as the work of a madman. But perhaps what it really was was the work of an adolescent. I remembered the small footprint in the dust of the staircase.

  Most of the rest of it I’d worked out before. Wayne Flushing had been such a poor poser that Bob Cordle’s session had gone on much longer than usual. Wednesday night was Vince Haggarty’s night, and perhaps he was sitting around somewhere in Windlesham Street, waiting for Bob to turn the lights out and go home. But someone—someone whom Haggarty had used, or, more likely, someone close to someone Haggarty had used, someone who had never seen him—had not known that his session that night was delayed. He had run up the stairs, listened to the session in progress, then dashed up to the doorway and let fly. There were photographers, there were nearly naked models. They must be the people he wanted to get. It was mad, wholesale revenge. Perhaps it was the all-or-nothing mentality of a fifteen-year-old?

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “The son of your oldest friend . . . ”

  “Of course I would not tell you it if he was living,” said Mr. Leonides. I started. The confusion of his tenses, with present often serving for past, had not prepared me for that.

  “He could not live with what he had done,” he went on. “Not when he found out who he had killed, someone who had nothing to do with . . . with my Maria. Four people who had nothing to do with it at all. He shot himself. His father tell the Coroner it is the O-levels which he do next year. Is much pressure on young people with exams these days, with so much unemployment. The Coroner accept that is the reason. We bury him one day—it was a day you come here yourself . . . It was a funeral party you saw. His father, he never be the same, I think.”

  What started as a massacre seemed to be ending as a pathetic little story. Perhaps it was going to be one of those cases that we silently call closed.

  “I must talk to your daughter,” I said.

  “Do you must? Is better now. She go back to school. She begin to forget. Why you need talk to her? You see that damned film. You hear from me all she told us. Is enough, more than enough. Why you have to go and get her to stir up in her mind all those horrible memories?”

  “I’m afraid I have to hear about it in her own words,” I said, collecting my papers together and not looking at him, because talking to his daughter was not something I wanted to do at all.

  “Then I come,” announced Mr. Leonides, standing up. “I come see you don’t upset her. You not bully her. I know you police. You not nice with young girls.”

  He was becoming too obstructive. He was beginning to annoy me.

  “Don’t be a fool. You know me. Of course we will be gentle with her.”
/>   “No. I not trust you. I come to protect my little girl.”

  “That’s not possible, Mr. Leonides.”

  “Of course I come. A father with his little daughter? Why is not possible?”

  I looked down at the floor, at the pinstripe trousers holding up the substantial body, and at the little feet in patent leather shoes—shoes not more, I felt sure, than six and a half, or seven. “Because you’re still part of the case, Mr. Leonides,” I said.

  Chapter 18

  LIKE SO MANY STORIES I had been told in the course of the Bodies investigation, Mr. Leonides’s proved to be true up to a point. What it was that made me dissatisfied with it I’m not quite sure, but I think it was the way everything tied up so neatly.

  Talking to the man’s daughter, though, was going to be a bit of a problem—and not just because it was likely to prove both difficult and distasteful. Certainly I couldn’t have either of the parents sitting in, so according to Judges’ Rules I had to have someone in loco parentis. On an inspiration I rang from the Knossos to the headmistress of the Dorothea Beale School, and learned that Maria would not yet have left. I asked her if she would set aside a room for us and sit in on the interview, and when she agreed I drove to New Scotland Yard and collected a WPC. I left Garry Joplin with the two Leonideses at the Knossos. He told me later that when the restaurant opened for business at six-thirty, Leonides’s geniality was for once discernibly forced.

  The headmistress had sounded a sensible woman, and proved to be so. Whether or not, like the original Miss Beale, she was impervious to Cupid’s darts I could not know, but she seemed unlikely to be surprised by the nastier sides to the present-day love industry. She sat beside Maria, now and again at moments of stress taking her hand, but otherwise giving me a fairly free hand. I had told her that I had to get at the truth now, otherwise the pressure of lies and evasions would start building up in the girl again, and perhaps lead to a total breakdown. She saw my point.