Blood Never Dies (8 page)

‘Yes, by all means,’ Atherton said. ‘Any help always gratefully received.’

‘Waxed legs?’ Slider said. ‘What does that tell us? Why would a man wax his legs?’

‘Swimmers and cyclists do it to cut down on resistance. Athletes of all sorts do it,’ Atherton said, ‘because they have a lot of massages, and it can hurt if you’re hairy.’

‘He wasn’t muscled enough to be an athlete.’

‘Surgeons sometimes wax their arms because it makes scrubbing up easier.’

‘But it wasn’t his arms.’

‘Well, some men just like the look of smooth skin,’ Atherton tried.

‘But he wasn’t still waxed, so it can’t have been that he liked the look.’

‘So what do
you
think?’

‘It could have been something he just tried out and didn’t like. Or there was some reason we haven’t twigged. I don’t know. It just adds to his peculiarity.’

Atherton was thinking. ‘Is there a pattern here?’ he asked. ‘False name—’

‘Probably.’

‘—county cords to visit Honest John, tight jeans and trainers to move into Conningham Road. He’s acting a part.’

Slider sighed. ‘I thought from the moment I saw him he didn’t fit in at that flat. The tattoos are just a little touch of insanity to add to the mix. If he was your high-flier suddenly gone bust and reduced to a furnished let, why would he get himself tattooed? It’s just too frivolous.’

‘I’m losing enthusiasm for that theory,’ Atherton admitted. ‘And the missing keys suggest black-sack man was something to do with it, and did take stuff away.’

‘It’s not only the keys,’ Slider said. ‘Freddie Cameron says Williams took some kind of narcotic, but if it was suicide, what did he bring it home in? No suitable bottle or packet in the place. He could have had a pocketful of loose capsules, but where are the capsule cases? And if it was just a powder, he couldn’t have brought it back in his cupped hands, could he?’

‘The murderer brought it in and removed the evidence,’ said Atherton. ‘I’m a willing convert to your side. So where do we go from here?’

‘We’ve got the pizza to follow up. Still some neighbours to canvass. McLaren’s on car movements in the area at two a.m. Selective circulation of the mugshot – and I think we’ll circulate the tattoos as well. Nothing from Mispers?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then we just plug on, and hope something comes up before we have to go public.’

‘I must say it’s rather peaceful not having the press hanging round and tripping us up every step.’

‘Yes, not terribly eye-catching news, nameless man found dead in cheap rental flat,’ Slider said. Over the years he had attended all too many human endings like that, but generally the deceased were either old, obviously poor, or drug addicts. This man wasn’t any of those; but the longer he could keep the press out of it the better.

‘It’s going to be a long one,’ he concluded.

The taxi driver looked exactly like a London cabby out of a movie. He was a spare man of about five foot six, probably in his sixties, with the deeply lined face of a smoker and a smoker’s voice with a Shepherd’s Bush accent. He had a thick, shapeless nose, a chin like a nub of pumice stone, brown-framed glasses and wiry silver hair sprouting from under an old-fashioned flat cap, which he whipped off courteously as he was shown into Slider’s room.

He gave his name as Harold Barnes.

‘It’s about this photograph – sir,’ he added at the last minute, having subjected Slider to a quick analysis.

‘Please sit down,’ Slider said, charmed with the novelty. Not many people called him sir these days. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’

‘Very lovely of you, sir, but I won’t trouble you. I fill up too much I gotta keep stopping, if you get my meaning. And time’s money in our line o’ business.’

In that case, Slider thought, he ought to get businesslike. ‘You recognize the man in the photo?’ Taxi drivers were one of the usual places mugshots were sent, along with hospitals, social workers and the other police forces.

‘Yes, sir, I do. I picked him up in Kensington High Street one morning.’

‘Do you live in Kensington?’

‘No, I live in the Bush, but I often cruise down that way. Ken High Street’s a good place to pick up fares. It’s a rubbish tube from there, and there’s lots of the sort of people live there that don’t like going in buses.’

Slider nodded. Behind Ken High Street there were blocks and blocks of Edwardian and between-wars luxury flats, inhabited by wealthy elderly and middle-aged ladies, who had probably never been on a bus in their lives and didn’t mean to start now.

‘So you picked him up—?’

‘He flagged me down, just about the end of Allen Street – down that end of the south side.’

‘And when was this?’

‘Oh, a good while ago. Coupla months, anyway.’

‘Then why do you remember him?’ Slider asked. ‘One fare among so many?’

‘’Cos of where I took him.’ The cabbie gave Slider a cocked and sly look, like a parrot spotting a peanut. ‘He give me the address, and I thought, “Hello,” I thought, “I know your game.” He asked me to take him to Ransom House, Luxemburg Gardens.’

‘Luxemburg Gardens – that’s Brook Green, isn’t it? But what’s Ransom House?’

‘You not come across it? That’s where they make all them blue films.’

‘Porn films?’ Slider said. Something rang a bell in Slider’s mind.

‘Not the real rough stuff, I don’t mean. The semi-respectable stuff you can get in the back rooms o’ video shops.’

‘How do you know this?’ Slider asked. He didn’t look like the sort of man who watched blue movies.

As if he’d heard the thought, Barnes said, ‘I don’t go in for that sort of thing meself. Watched a bit of one once, years ago, and it was just embarrassing. Didn’t know where to look. But Ransom House has bin there, ooh, must be twenty years, and I’ve took plenty o’ fares there in my time, so I know what they do.’

Slider nodded. ‘So you thought he was going there to
act
in a porn film?’

‘Well, he looked about right for it – tall, nice looking. He seemed a bit nervous, too, kind of sitting forward, tense. So I says, to jolly him along, like, “This your first time?” And he looks a bit startled and says, “First time what?” and I says, “Going for an audition, are you?” And he stares a minute like he might be going to say he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he sort of relaxes and laughs, rueful like, and says, “Yeah, I don’t know whether to hope I get the job or not.” So I says, “They pay good money, from what I hear.” And he says yes, but a bit distracted like, as if he’s thinking o’ something else. Well, that’s all the conversation we has till I drop him off. He pays me, and while I’m putting the money away I see him go in out the corner of my eye, and that’s all I know about it, sir,’ he concluded with something like satisfaction, sitting square and upright on his seat with his cap on his lap and his faded blue eyes looking expectantly at Slider through the lenses of his specs.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to ask, except, ‘Can you remember any more exactly when this was?’

‘Like I said, a while ago.’

‘Was it before Easter or after?’

He thought a moment. ‘Got to be after. When did we have that bit o’ nice weather? Beginning of May, wasn’t it? Might have been then, because it was a warm day, I remember that. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, no jacket. And when I see he was nervous, he was sweating on his upper lip, and I wondered meself if it was the heat or the nerves, you get me?’

‘Yes, I follow. Well, you’ve certainly given us something to follow up. Thank you very much for coming in.’

‘Just doing me jooty,’ Barnes said, pleased.

‘Ransom Publications,’ Atherton read from the printout, ‘is the publisher of soft-core porn films, their most famous titles being the
Office Orgy
series, which now number thirteen and have acquired cult status. Not with me, they haven’t,’ he interpolated.

‘I’ve heard of ’em,’ Connolly said. ‘Me sister Sheila’s boyfriend and his mates were into that stuff. There was another series before that called
College Orgy.
That got up to
College Orgy Ten
.’

‘It mentions that here,’ said Atherton. ‘And
Hospital Orgy
and – what’s this? Can it be? Yes,
Shopping Mall Orgy
.’

‘Great titles!’ said Connolly. ‘I’m guessing here, but would you say imagination’s not their mighty strength?’

‘You don’t need imagination,’ Mackay said. ‘It’s all there on the screen.’

‘Yeah,’ McLaren growled, and they exchanged a glance. It hardly surprised Slider to learn that tying one on and then watching a blue movie was the way some of his firm relaxed off duty from time to time.

‘There was this one,
Office Orgy Three
I think it was – classic!’ said Mackay. ‘This bloke comes in to mend the photocopier and there’s this couple having it off on top of it, and he says, “You could damage the paper feed like that”. I mean, brilliant or what!’

‘Hurr,’ McLaren agreed, with as much machismo as could be expected from a man who has had all the bacon sandwiches in his bloodstream exchanged for yogurt.

‘If I may continue?’ Atherton said patiently. ‘Ransom Publications is a branch of the Marylebone Group. And the Marylebone is a property development and management group, with its registered address conveniently in Cyprus.’

‘Conveniently?’ Slider queried. It meant they couldn’t make enquiries about it at Companies House.

‘Convenient for them, not for us,’ said Atherton. ‘So three months ago our victim waxes his legs – and who knows what else besides – gets himself two tattoos, and about two weeks after that—’

‘He’d have to wait for ’em to heal,’ Connolly said. ‘First they bleed, then they weep, then they scab and peel—’

‘Thank you,’ Atherton interrupted hastily. ‘Two weeks or so later he goes for an audition at a porn-film firm. That’s nearly a tongue twister.’

‘I wonder what they have to do in an audition,’ Fathom mused.

‘Don’t,’ said Swilley sharply. ‘Boss, we don’t know he was going for an audition. You don’t put your hand on your heart and swear truth to a cabbie.’

‘No,’ said Slider, ‘but he went there, and he seemed nervous, and why else the wax and ink?’ That was what had stirred in his mind while talking to Barnes. ‘Anyway, we haven’t got a whole lot of other leads to follow. And I don’t have to remind you, detecting is like an electric kettle – you have to cover the elements.’

‘At least they might be able to confirm his name,’ Atherton said. ‘That would be a step forward.’

‘See what else you can find out about Ransom Publications,’ Slider said to Swilley.

‘Yes, boss,’ she said.

‘And the Marylebone Group.’

Brook Green was a subsection of Hammersmith, between it and Kensington, taking its name from the open area of grass and trees also called Brook Green. There once had been a brook, too, but as London had spread westwards in the nineteenth century it had been put into a pipe, where it still ran under the Brook Green Hotel. The area was home to an elite independent girls’ school, St Paul’s, where Monica Dickens had once been a pupil. In an earlier age, Gustav Holst had been its music master, and wrote
The Planets
during his tenure there.

Slider wondered what the school authorities thought about having Ransom House as a neighbour, but when he and Atherton arrived he concluded that it was discreet enough for them not to know about it. It was a small nineteen-thirties office block, half the ground floor of which had been rented off to a printing firm. Beside the main door a brass plaque simply had RANSOM HOUSE engraved on it, with no indication as to the nature of the business. A check with Paxman, the uniform sergeant on duty downstairs, had told him there had never been any trouble there.

The heat was less oppressive than yesterday, and there was a pleasantly verdant smell on the air from the grass and trees. The late sun was filtering through the leaves of the plane trees in a flickering, gold-green, Hollywood sort of way, and there ought to have been swelling string music in the background signifying a romantic encounter was about to unfold. But there was only the muted roar of traffic from Hammersmith Road, and two police detectives with hot feet, and suits they’d had on all day, ringing the bell of an extremely closed-looking office door.

There was an intercom grille in the wall, and a woman’s voice answered simply ‘Yes?’

‘Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush. I would like to speak to somebody in charge, please.’

There was a pause, and then a buzz. They pushed in, to find themselves in a small, anonymous hall, with stairs visible straight ahead through a half-frosted door, and to the left, an open door into an office. The office was also anonymous, containing nothing that might give a clue to the nature of the business conducted here. The Crittall windows were frosted, the carpet was green, the walls cream-painted. There were two desks, filing cabinets, cupboards, computers and telephones, everything you would expect; and it was very tidy. But the one occupant – a middle-aged woman, smartly dressed and still handsome – seemed to have settled herself in comfortably, with a fleet of framed photographs on her desk, a row of plants along the windowsill and a reproduction of Monet’s ‘Poppies at Argenteuil’ on the wall. Slider got the feeling she had been there a long time.

She looked up at them with a motherly smile. ‘May I see your identification, please?’ Having inspected their briefs thoroughly, she said, still smiling, ‘Well, what can I do for you? I hope we’re not in trouble? Not a complaint? We like to get on well with our neighbours and everything upstairs is soundproofed.’

‘No trouble, no complaint,’ Slider said. ‘We’re trying to find out something about a man who came here one day a couple of months ago. We think he might have worked for you.’ He offered her the photograph, and she took it, looked, frowned unhappily as she realized what it was, and handed it back.

‘Yes, I think he did work for us for a time. Look, I think you’d better speak to Paul. Paul Barrow. He’s the boss. Let me buzz up to him for you.’ She had a brief conversation, muted, turned away from them so they couldn’t hear, on the telephone, and then said, ‘You can go up to the studio. Through there, turn left through the door and up the stairs.’