‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, with no intention of taking up his offer.
‘Look forward to it,’ he said, equally aware that we wouldn’t be speaking again until one of us wanted a professional favour from the other. He had ditched the Met and London, so he was no longer one of the elite. That’s the way it worked. There was as much snobbery among cops as in the aristocracy, exemplified by the fact that we Met operators considered ourselves the nation’s aristocrats.
Before setting out for Bournemouth, I phoned Sarah to see if she had made progress.
‘God, this is mind-numbing!’ she groaned.
‘Still trawling?’
‘Still among the departed, like a warped tombstone tourist. Nothing so far. Just dead ends. Ha! Ha!’
‘Nice to see your sense of humour’s intact.’
‘That wasn’t humour, Mike; that was despair. How’s your day going?’
I updated her, as succinctly as possible.
‘What next?’ she said, anticipating my response.
‘I go to the seaside.’
‘Makes sense,’ she said. ‘No point returning here first, adding unnecessary mileage. Be careful – sounds as if you’ll be swimming with the sharks.’
I arrived in Bournemouth just before four o’clock in the afternoon. I had some knowledge of this sprawling coastal conurbation, but not detailed, so on the periphery I pulled into a filling station and bought a street-map in the shop. Of the three addresses I’d been given for Cullis, his home was the nearest, so it was logical to try my luck there first.
After a few wrong turns and circling a roundabout three times, I located Frankie Cullis’s shack, which was something rather grander than a beach-hut. Its façade was colonial-styled, with a couple of mock Roman columns supporting a portico at the double-door entrance. A black Bentley and a two-door silver Merc were parked on a horseshoe-shaped, pebbled drive at the front of the house, which had been built on rising ground, some fifty yards from the pine-lined avenue. There was a rockery-garden sloping in tiers to a white, pebble-dashed wall of medium height. Although all the houses in this road were of a similar size – in other words gargantuan – the shapes and styles were varied. None of the properties was older than twenty or thirty years, I estimated, though what did I know about such matters? On the opposite side of the road was a golf course, which was also landscaped on a slope. The road must have been bulldozed into a cutting through rising ground on both sides. No parking was allowed in the road, a by-law I happily ignored. The black wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the driveway of Cullis’s property were remote-controlled. However, a few yards from the iron gates was a smaller, unlocked entrance for pedestrians, such as the postman and trades-folk, the route I took.
As I climbed the crooked, stepped path through the rockery, I counted the windows, which were all louvred: four up and the same number down. I reckoned there could be as many as eight bedrooms, two or three bathrooms and probably three large downstairs rooms, excluding the kitchen. Some shack!
The bell chimed. These kinds of houses didn’t have anything as common as a ringing bell. I half-expected the door to be flung open by a flunky or at the very least a pinstriped butler. Like most of my expectations, this one was adrift, too. No one could criticize my consistency.
‘We don’t buy anything on the doorstep, especially insurance,’ said the short, balding, portly slob, who showed me nothing below his waist, as he appraised me disdainfully through the sliver of daylight between the doors. Being mistaken for an insurance salesman was almost a compliment. Usually I was instantly taken for a cop.
‘Mr Cullis?’ I said. He could have been the gardener or handyman, but, in that event, he would have been much more polite and presentable. Especially to an insurance salesman.
‘Who wants to know?’ He’d obviously had a misspent middle age, watching too many TV soaps.
My ID was already in my hand, which I pushed to within a couple of inches of his unshaven face.
‘Shit! Now what?’ And before I could answer, he said, ‘You’re not local, are you?’ My ID had been so close to his fugitive eyes that my details must have been out of focus. ‘I know all the bleedin’ locals. Bane of my life!’
‘Met,’ I said.
‘Then you’re trespassing on another force’s patch.’
How I loved barrack-room lawyers! ‘Do I get invited in or must I mess up your fancy woodwork?’
‘What’s this about?’ he said, holding his ground.
‘I’ll tell you when I’m inside.’
Reluctantly, he opened the door further and motioned with his head for me to cross the threshold, stand-off over.
‘Well?’ he said, as soon as the door was shut, not intending to allow me any further than the lobby.
As I repeated my spiel about searching for a woman, he looked bemused, though probably more relieved than anything else, realizing I wasn’t there to nick him for an old-bones crime, a legacy of his London days.
‘Follow me,’ he said, hitching up paint-stained hipster jeans.
As we were about to pass the foot of the stairs, someone above us called out, ‘Frankie, what you doing? I’m gasping for that drink I thought you were fetching.’
The voice came from a young woman. Cullis’s eyes and mine latched on to the voice trajectory. The woman, semi-naked, was leaning over the upstairs landing-rail, tits dangling.
‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry!’ she spluttered on seeing me. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’
‘Don’t matter. It’s no one special. Wait in the bedroom,’ Cullis ordered. ‘This business won’t take long.’ Then, to me, ‘Come on. Let’s get this over, so I can get back to unfinished business.’
‘Wives can be very demanding,’ I said, enjoying the mischievous moment.
‘Funny! My wife’s in hospital. Broke her leg falling out of bed. Pissed as a priest on Communion wine. Got what she deserved. Legless!’ He guffawed at his own pun.
‘But are you getting what you deserve?’ I said, meaningfully.
‘I won’t know that until I get myself back upstairs.’
Everything about the house was ostentatious and tawdry, like its owner. The room he led me into was an oversized den, with a pool table at one end and a shiny jukebox in a corner. The walls were adorned with framed Playboy centrespreads. A computer sat on a table against the window, a printer on the burgundy carpet. A huge TV screen was pressed against the wall furthest away from the pool table. There was also a cabinet, filled with bottles of liquor, everything from pernod to tequila. The drapes, colour-toned with the carpet, were hung from ceiling to floor, and the leather furniture was all mix but very little match. Someone other than Cullis would have called it eclectic.
As he kicked the door closed irascibly, he said, hands buried in his pockets, ‘How long is this going to take? As you’ve just witnessed, I’ve someone upstairs whose needs require attending to.’
God, he was funny! He smirked. I didn’t.
‘It needn’t be long,’ I said. ‘Much will depend on your memory.’
His flabby face creased with curiosity. ‘Let’s roll, then.’
‘When you ran Venus for the Lonely escort agency, one of the women in your stable was a Tina Marlowe.’
‘Who says so?’ His hooded eyelids fluttered like the shutters of a rapid-fire camera. His eyes, a road-map of burst capillaries, darted in all directions.
‘I say so.’
‘What year was that?’
I told him and, on cue, he laughed hoarsely. ‘You know how many girls passed through my hands?’
I wasn’t sure if his rather repellent defacement of the English language was accidental or an example of his coarse humour. ‘Let’s just stick with Tina Marlowe,’ I said.
‘The name means nothing to me,’ he said, stubbornly, pouting childishly.
‘Her whoring name was “Lolita”; maybe that will jog your memory.’ Now I started to wind him up.
‘I’ve never knowing
ly employed whores.’ For once our eyes engaged.
‘We’re talking history,’ I said.
‘Ancient, not modern, by the sounds of it,’ he countered smugly, treating me to the sight of teeth as rotten as his life. ‘Never a good subject of mine.’
‘Look, I’m not here as part of an investigation into any of your activities, Mr Cullis,’ I said, wearily, placing a hand on heart. Pledges, such as swearing on the Bible to tell the truth, didn’t carry much weight with inveterate villains like Cullis, so hand on heart was Boy Scout stuff.
‘I’m listening,’ he said, sceptically.
‘I just have to find Tina Marlowe.’
‘Why, she owe you a blow job?’ Regretting his unfettered mouth, he went on hurriedly, ‘How do I know you don’t want her to testify against me, for something?’
‘Something such as?’
‘Such as something concocted, an invention.’
‘Mr Cullis, if that were the case, why would I be searching for just one particular woman, going back all those years?’ I said, feigning boredom. ‘I’d have hundreds to choose from. Many of them more recent.’
‘Whether or not I believe you is immaterial. I don’t keep records. Anything that was kept stayed with the agency. You were there this morning, right?’
‘I thought this was going to be quick and easy,’ I said, sidestepping his smokescreen question. ‘Seems like I’m going to have to get a search warrant and return with a posse. And talk with the young woman upstairs. Talk with your wife in hospital.’
For a moment I thought he was going to spit in my face and throw a punch; perhaps in reverse order. ‘You bastards never change, do you?’ He unclenched his fist and wiped away spittle from his puffy boxer’s lips with the back of a heavily veined hand.
‘The decision’s all yours,’ I said, equably.
‘Just what the fuck do you want, exactly?’
‘Easy,’ I said, placidly. ‘The last contact number you had for her. An address. Anything that puts me on to her scent. Perhaps she was friendly with other girls who worked for you.’
‘She could be dead. She could have gone to the moon. Ever thought of that?’
‘Constantly. Now, are you going to deliver? Get me what I’m after and I’ll be gone, like a passing cloud, without the need to rain on your bedroom party.’
‘Wait there. And keep your hands off my belongings. No bigger thieves in this world than cops. Especially Met cops.’
He exited the room sulkily, slamming the door behind him, as if using a nutcracker on a sensitive area of my anatomy. I heard him shouting at his frustrated lay. ‘Get yourself a fucking drink! I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve got rid of this shite. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the door.’
More than half an hour elapsed before Cullis stomped into the room, sweating as if he’d been to the gym or a workout with the bedroom athlete upstairs, rather than just rummaging through mouldering storage. He was clutching a sheet of paper. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ I responded, combatively. With cockroaches like Cullis, it was imperative to retain the initiative at all costs and never to give him any slack.
Squinting, as if myopic, he read from the sepia paper. ‘She was shacked-up in Paddington. 59 B, Corsham Gardens.’
‘A flat?’ I said, reflexly, as I jotted down the address in my police-issue flip-over notepad.
‘How the fuck should I know? I wasn’t screwing her, if that’s what you’re fishing for.’
‘The grubby thought never crossed my mind,’ I said, which was true. ‘How about a phone number?’
‘Yeah, but what use is that going to be to you thirty years on? Back then it was pigeon-post and jungle drums.’
‘Just give … please.’ The please was rather belated, a minimal concession to civility.
‘Here, read it for yourself,’ he said, holding the sheet of paper to my face, rather than admitting that his eyesight was less than perfect. He probably had glasses, but was too vain to wear them in company.
I knew Corsham Gardens. Only a few weeks earlier I’d made an arrest there, but it was at an even-numbered property. Three decades ago, Corsham Gardens would have been considered a seedy part of town, just a five-minute walk north-west from the railway station. All types of hookers, pimps, drug-dealers and other shady characters had inhabited the ineptly named Corsham Gardens, where there hadn’t been a blade of grass, not even in the backyards of the Victorian houses. Litter in the gutters included used condoms. Since then, the area had been given a long-overdue facelift; major cosmetic surgery. It still wasn’t even a poor relation of Mayfair, but neither was it home to mayhem. Villains continued to live there, but probably not as many as in snooty Mayfair. White-collar villains; hackers and counterfeiters of designer clothes. Villains who were secretly admired by juries.
‘Did she mix with other girls on the agency’s books?’
‘I don’t have that information. The girls didn’t mix. I mean, it wasn’t a mother’s union. Most of ’em didn’t know who else was on our books. Why should they have done? It was none of their business. As long as they got work that’s all they cared about.’
Made sense, but I didn’t concede that. ‘What about a photograph?’
If looks really could kill, it would have been a good idea for me to keep a finger on my pulse.
‘You want blood?’
‘No, just a piccie.’
‘They’ve been kept separate from the CV files.’
‘So everything has been preserved,’ I observed, semi-triumphal.
‘Not everything. It means another trip to the cellar.’
‘I’m obliged,’ I said, leaving him no bolthole.
‘You look it!’ he boiled. The door was slammed so hard this time that the window rattled as if a twister was scything through the area.
Cullis wasn’t absent as long as previously. Held in tobacco-stained fingers was a faded black and white pin-up shot of an extremely attractive young woman. He turned it over before handing it to me, as if double-checking the name that had been pencilled on the back. ‘You’ve got everything now, so you can push off,’ he said, churlishly.
I smiled again, this time indulgently.
Tina Marlowe was posing provocatively, bending forwards, so that her minuscule bra hardly tethered her substantial breasts, even the nipples were semi-exposed. Her underwear was white and lacy, but her stockings and suspenders were dark, presumably black, though, in mono, one could never be definite about colours. Stilettos streamlined her legs, serving as extensions, a prosthesis, to her lower limbs, making her appear much taller than she really was. Her mouth had also been artificially enlarged by the excessive application of garish lipstick, and the indiscriminate use of mascara gave her panda eyes. The banana held to her lips, Deep Throat-fashion, required no explanation. Her long, glossy black hair, probably a wig, cascaded over her face.
In the photo, Tina was billed unimaginatively as ‘Luscious Lolita’, plus her measurements, which most likely had a parallel in creative accountancy.
‘Is this what potential clients would have seen?’ I said.
‘I guess,’ he answered, indifferently, shrugging; haemorrhaging boredom.
I thought of Tina’s father turning over the pages and coming face-to-face with this salacious image of his daughter and trying to reconcile it with the angelic innocence in his deluded mind’s eye. His little girl. His princess. Miss Perfect. The daughter with the world at her feet, about to climb life’s mountain, up and up into rarefied air. But what goes up must come down. What a fall, even before she’d risen beyond base camp. And hard to explain after what she had been through at the hands of a warped male. But we all had different random recipes for survival, many of them inexplicable and irrational; highlighting the difference between machines and humans.
Mr Marlowe had died long before he’d jumped in front of a train. He must have been dead inside from the moment he saw the daughter he did not recogniz
e; the stranger who had become a lodger inside her body. Body-snatching was as prevalent as it ever was. And the Devil was the fugleman among the snatchers. But this was no occasion for brooding sentimentality or psychoanalysis.
‘Who manned the office in those days?’
‘Which days?’ he stalled.
‘I’ll rephrase: who manned the office when this woman, Tina Marlowe, was tarting for your company?’
‘No one manned it. My wife-to-be was what you might loosely call front-of-house.’
‘The one who’s now in hospital with a broken leg?’
‘Yeah, what of it?’
‘Nothing. Just thinking, who said the institution of marriage had passed its sell-by date? Perhaps I should have a word with your wife.’
Now he eyed me owlishly. ‘Is that some kind of threat?’
‘Not at all,’ I said, oozing innocence, but I could tell he wasn’t the least assuaged. ‘I’m assuming she had more day-to-day dealings with the working girls than you did, that’s all.’
Anger flared in his shifty eyes at my reference to working girls, but he resisted more squabbling.
‘She won’t remember any more than I do. This is insane.’
‘No harm in my trying,’ I persisted, mulishly. ‘You know how we work. Plod on ticking boxes.’
‘Yeah, I know only too well how you work,’ he said, sourly, giving me a shot of childish pleasure.
Strange how two people could have a conversation and the intimidation by one and the fear of the other were kept under the surface, like the hidden danger of a Titanic iceberg. There was no necessity for me to say, ‘And while I’m asking your wife questions about Tina Marlowe, I’m sure I’ll be able to slip in a reference to the young woman you’ve got on hold upstairs.’ We read each other’s murky minds as easily as computing the headlines of a red-top.
The One a Month Man Page 7