Kiss Me Quick (16 page)

‘You lie with dogs, you get fleas. Don’t take it out on me,’ he said, pushing her back into the chair.

Her breath turned loud and juddery as a delta of tears rippled out of her.

Vince stood there, rooted to the floor, feeling like an awkward bully – even though she was the one who had done the slapping, and he was the one with the torched cheek. It was the parting shot he’d had in his sights since the first time he’d set eyes on her, yet it gave little satisfaction. He went back to his case and zipped it up, ready to leave. He looked around at the sobbing girl. The tears seemed real enough. No method acting here. She was, if anything, attempting to suppress the tears, but was failing
miserably
. Her slender frame quivered like a just plucked bow. If left alone, she looked as if she would be sobbing her heart out on the floor.

A small voice: ‘I’m scared.’

With an enervated sigh, he said, ‘Go see Machin.’

‘I don’t trust him.’

Vince couldn’t argue with that. He sat down again on the corner of the bed. Elbows on knees, head bowed, hands running through his hair, exasperated and exhausted with it all. ‘So what do you want me to do about it?’

‘I don’t want to be alone tonight.’

He stopped running his hands through his hair and looked up towards her. ‘You can’t stay here. I’ll drop you back home. You’ll have to—’

‘I’m sorry I slapped you.’

‘It’s OK. Not the first time it’s happened.’

‘And not the last, I imagine.’

Vince smiled. ‘No, you’re probably right there.’

She looked up at him with eyes that meant it, and said, ‘I trust you, Vincent.’

Ten minutes later they were getting into the Triumph Herald. Before they set off, Vince was struck by a new thought. A new player. ‘What do you know about Max Vogel?’

‘The antique dealer?’

Vince nodded.

‘I know Jack did business with him.’

‘Fencing the antiques the knocker boys got hold of?’

‘Vogel’s in the antiques game, so I guess so. But, more than that, I know that Jack respected him.’

‘How do you mean?’

She shrugged uncertainly, but was working on that most formidable of intuitions: female. ‘Vogel wasn’t just another lackey. I think Jack trusted him with certain things that he wouldn’t trust other people with.’

‘Like what?’

She gave another speculative shrug. ‘Money?’

Treble Dutch began to make sense to Vince. Jack was
undoubtedly
rich but, as Bobbie pointed out about the flat, he possessed very little that was actually in his name. He relied on and trusted others to honour business agreements that were not backed up on paper. They were, of course, backed up by fear, more potent a guarantee than any contract could provide. No small print, just big pain if the contract was broken. That made it easy for Jack to disappear into the wind, relying on a network of off-shore accounts holding Jack’s untraceable money. No doubt about it, Jack would need men like Max Vogel.

Vince twirled the key in the ignition, started the engine, then turned to Bobbie. ‘Before we head back to your place, I want to stop off somewhere first.’

‘Swordfish.’

‘Swordfish?’ repeated the fuzzy electric voice over the intercom.

‘That’s right,
Swordfish
,’ replied Vince. He was standing in the vestibule of a four-storey Regency town house in Brunswick Square.

Vince thought he heard some chuckling in the background as he said the fabled password. He looked over at Bobbie seated in the car, fixing her hair in the rear-view mirror. Hair done, she looked over at him and waved. He smiled, waved back, then was buzzed in.

Vince scoped the rooms of the Brunswick Sporting Club. The layout was just as Terence described. Wall-to-wall red carpet. A full-on full-service casino. Tables offering roulette, craps, blackjack, stud and four-card poker, chemmy. A caged
caissier
’s desk. Pretty young waitresses in revealing little numbers ferried drinks from the bar to the tables. In another room, big-hit slot machines lined the walls; the slots only accepted tokens that needed to be cashed with the
caissier
in the event of a jackpot. The Brunswick Sporting Club was clearly doing cracking business.

It was the usual casino crowd: a handful of hopefuls who thought they could beat the house; and, if cuts of suits and the quality of wristwatches were anything to go by, a smattering of punters with serious money. But they all had one thing in common: the gambler’s mindset – optimism and cynicism held in one hand. And, like all people who chase money through games of chance, the air they breathed was malodorous with jaded desperation. No clocks on the walls, no timely reminders that their luck was up.

A big fleshy hand was laid on his shoulder. ‘Ach! Such mischief! I heard about the kerfuffle at the races! Are you pots!?’

Vince turned around. ‘What are you talking about, Long George?’

Long George leaned into him, eyes bulging under the
magnification
of his heavy-rimmed glasses, and said, ‘Henry Pierce. Crazy Horse! Big Chief Mashigina himself! Much I care for the man, but you ruffled his feathers. And when Big Chief Mashigina has his feathers ruffled, we all feel the flap. I thought you was a good boy. What was the cause? What was the cause?’

‘There was cause, Long George. There was definitely cause …’

Vince was about to reassure him that he was ‘a good boy’ and reveal what ‘the cause’ was, when he suddenly spotted Machin at a card table. He was sitting between two Chinamen, playing
blackjack
and looking for all the world as if he was going belly-up. Vince made his excuses to Long George, since he wasn’t there for the local colour. He was in a hurry, and went straight over to Machin.

Machin threw in his cards from another bad hand. As he lifted a large Scotch to his lips, he saw Vince coming over. Machin
nervously
shuffled a small amount of chips in his hand then stood up and made his way over to meet Vince.

‘I’m doing my bollocks tonight, son, so don’t give me any grief or your holier-than-fucking-thou Scotland Yard shit either,’ began Machin, pre-empting and cutting off at the pass. ‘Look around, son. Unless being a mug punter is a crime, this is a victimless crime scene. And, another thing, it would be up and running somewhere anyway. Just smaller rooms and more of them. This way it’s more contained.’

The Brighton copper obviously had his excuses and
justifications
well rehearsed for such an event as getting caught gambling in an illegal casino. Vince gave him a blank-eyed, couldn’t-give-
a-fuck
look and said, ‘Buy you a drink?’

Machin nodded, and Vince sniffed the air. The Brighton copper stank of booze. A good three or four hours’ saturation of single malt had made his face and breath fume. They now made their way to the bar.

‘You should have said you were working undercover,’ said Vince.

‘Would you have believed me?’

‘Don’t be fucking silly. How you do your money is your
business
. Why you want to put it in Jack’s pocket is also your business. But, then again, it probably comes back to you with interest.’

At the bar, Machin ordered. ‘Scotch. Large one. Dash of water. No ice. And tomato juice for the lady.’

Vince smiled. Being teetotal, he was used to the gags. Being teetotal in the world he operated in, he might just as well have worn a tutu. Because all coppers drank, the incident rooms on any given Monday morning, in any given city, were a swamp of hung-over coppers, slowed down and slumped over desks while soaking up the weekend’s bacchanalia with bacon sarnies and golfing stories. But Machin was poisoned, polluted, pickled with the stuff. Vince wondered how he did it. Then he saw how he did it. A scab of white powder was lodged in the corner of Machin’s nose. He’d clearly been balancing out the booze by tuning up in the gents’ with a toot of amphetamine. He was now speeding, edgy, tapping his fingers on the bar as though he was playing an invisible miniature piano.

Vince asked him: ‘How much d’you make out of this place? What’s your graft?’

‘Not as much as you greedy cunts in Soho.’

‘Not me,
son
.’

Machin smiled smugly. ‘No, you’re Mr Vinnie-fucking-
clean-face
.’

Vince kept shtum at that. The London-to-Brighton jungle drums had obviously been beating out his song, as ‘clean face’ was Tobin’s nickname for him.

Machin took a slug of his drink, rubbed his nose, tap-
tap-tapped
his tune on the bar. The speed had made his nose run, and stalactites of white powder, carried in an aspic of snot, edged down across his sweaty top lip, only to be hoovered back up again. It was like watching some repellent sea creature retracting its antennae.

Vince leaned against the bar, keeping his eyes off Machin and his yo-yoing amphetamine snot stream. But he could still feel the man’s hot alcohol-fuelled breath on him.

‘You don’t think I’ve got friends in the Met? I’ve got friends in the Met, son. I hear things. The Peek-A-Boo Club …’

Vince tensed up.

‘…You didn’t have a warrant to search the place. Never mind go around kicking doors in …’

And then it was on him, again, the searing pain in his head. Vince knew he couldn’t neck any more pills – doctor’s orders, two a day, max. He looked around the room for a distraction, hoping to hit upon something to move him out of the narrative of nausea he was trapped in. His eye fell on Long George, the smiling pit boss, checking the tables, making sure the games ran smoothly; making sure all the cash kept running uphill to his boss Sammy Bellman; who in turn kept it flowing at a good, orderly pace towards his boss, Jack Regent.

‘You know your problem, son? You take it too personally. That’s why I didn’t tell you about your brother being – what shall we say? – Henry’s
stick man
. And a junkie. But you found out for yourself, so I hear. Been causing right commotions, police brutality. I mean, Treadwell, in a public bar of all places? We all have to loosen tongues every now and again, soften them up a little. But you, you’re university educated. Your lot are supposed to be our fucking betters!’

Vince’s headache torqued. He leaned more heavily on the bar.

‘You can’t go around upsetting the apple cart,’ continued Machin, straightening up and wiping his typhoid gob with the back of his fat hand. ‘So do yourself a favour, and relax, take it easy, take a couple of weeks off, then piss off back to London.’

Vince turned sharply around to Machin and spat out the words, ‘Shut the fuck up and tell me about Max Vogel.’

Machin did as instructed and shut the fuck up, and looked alarmed. It wasn’t being told to shut the fuck up that brought the alarm to Machin’s face; it was the name Max Vogel. It unnerved him. It meant something. Drunk, unguarded, his face gave it all away. If he were to return to the tables and play cards wearing that kind of face, he’d lose his house, his pension and his fat wife. Machin mopped his brow with a red napkin plucked from the bar, but he couldn’t wipe the big fat gambler’s ‘Tell’ off his face. He knocked back the last of his drink.

‘Fuck off, Vinnie,’ said Machin with a sudden smile of
camaraderie
. ‘It’s my night off.’ He put his drained glass down on the bar and staggered off.

Vince watched him take his seat at the blackjack table. Machin now looked pissed off, a bad loser. Couldn’t take his luck, or his drink. Vince didn’t follow him to the table, since he’d heard all he needed.

Vince left the Brunswick Sporting Club. He needed the fresh mid-May air that still held a chill. The headache mellowed; no longer a searing pain, it now beat at a manageable thrum. As he made his way downstairs, he thought about the pain intervals, which were getting closer and closer together. But he dismissed the problem – it wouldn’t always be like this. This was Brighton, the past. Bad memories. Bad juju. Dr Boehm had told him how the brain protects itself against bad memories, puts up a fight when they try to break through. And then there was Vaughn. Always a source of pain, but it seemed that he’d surpassed himself this visit. Vince knew that he would finally have to cut him out of his life. Back in London it would be different, with fresh cases, fresh faces. There he could again be the cool, detached, objective detective going diligently about his business. Vince smiled at the thought: it had a ring to it.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the car horn. He stepped outside and saw Bobbie sitting in the car. Two men stood over her, tapping on the window and telling her to open up. She looked scared. The men were in their early twenties, and they were both wearing houndstooth-check suits. Vince thought he might have recognised them from the Beach Bottle club the night before.

Vince strode towards the car. Bobbie still looked scared, started shaking her head as if to warn him. It was a trap. Emerging from the basements behind him were about ten of them. They were tooled up, carrying coshes, bottles, switchblades and chains. Vince was going for his badge when he felt a blow to the back of his head. He swung around and saw them lined up against him, and he knew he was fucked, badge or no badge. A cosh swung towards his head, and Vince ducked it. Another quickly followed and crashed into his shoulder blade. He rode with the blow, and rode with the pain that came along with it. He knew that if he went down he was double and treble fucked; he was never
getting
up again.

They moved around him, encircling him, all in their late teens and early twenties. And, like the two by the car, they were dressed in houndstooth-check suits. All cut from the same cloth and sharing the same tailor as Henry Pierce’s driver, Spider. Used to hunting in a pack, they moved in unison, their eyes wide and wild. They wore vicious smiles on their expectant faces. They were getting ready to go in for the kill.

Vince needed a tool, something more threatening than just the bluntness of fists. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a …
pen
. It was a slim, stainless-steel Sheaffer pen. Vince knew from experience that, wielded in the right hands, the pen could prove as mighty as the sword; and right now Vince’s hands were the right hands. He moved it fast, jabbing all around him. In the dark, it did the trick. The houndstooth mob must have thought it was a knife, a stiletto, because they gave it a respect it didn’t deserve: stepping back, widening the circle, allowing gaps for Vince to make his escape.