Kiss Me Quick (28 page)

Tobin was wrong, thought Vince, because Vince
was
smack bang at the centre of things, and they did exist, and it did revolve around him. He wanted to get it back on a cop footing.
Cop
footing
?
That didn’t sound right either. As things stood, it was two ex-cops talking. One retired and one about to be permanently retired.

‘Let’s get this over and done with, Eddie, or else go brush your teeth.’

‘Don’t rush me, Treadwell. What’s your hurry? You’ve got nowhere to go,’ said Tobin, cracking his knuckles and stretching. ‘The clear-up was easy. We gutted the place, turned the
projection
room back into a storage room, moved the cinema to another location. You probably guessed that already, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Here’s the part that you’re interested in. The part you’ll never guess, and the part I like. Lionel called it
irony
. Me, I just think it’s fucking funny! Lionel contacted Dickie Eton. Dickie contacted Henry Pierce. Pierce was good at getting rid of things, as he’d been doing it for Jack Regent for years.’

Vince felt his body gradually coming back to him, and it felt as if he had been on a weekend-long bender. Sweat prickled along his spine, his head throbbed and his chest tightened.

‘Pierce picked up the stiff two days later, in an ice-cream van of all things. Good call, because the stiff was getting a bit gamy by then, stinking the whole place up, needed to be put on ice. Then he was driven down to Brighton.’

Vince was getting the joke; it was on him. And, whilst not enjoying it as much as Tobin, he was certainly appreciating the set-up and execution. It packed a hell of a punchline, a real killer.

‘Pierce did his usual routine, chopped off the stiff’s head and hands so he wouldn’t be identified if anything happened. Only something did happen. Pierce messed up and the body got washed ashore. And the rest you know, Detective Treadwell. You’re investigating a murder that you committed. A murder that’s even been captured on film.’

Vince’s mind raced – backwards – as he tried to remember what happened in the projection room that night. But nothing came to him. It was just the same as it had always been: the tall man entering the room, and then the big blackout. Then he recalled what Dr Hans Boehm had told him, about the mind being the ultimate trickster. It does whatever it takes to protect itself: it shuts down, edits out, compartmentalizes, and blocks the bad memories. But, try as he might, Vince couldn’t block out Eddie Tobin.

‘We got a bit concerned once we heard that Markham had sent you down here, what with you being such a bright boy, and such a smart copper. But, as Duval pointed out, there was the irony, the poetic justice. We laughed. We got the joke. What were you going to find, Treadwell … the killer?’

Vince began to laugh, and it might have turned hysterical, except the door opened and in walked Nick Soroya, with one hand behind his back. A gun? A knife? Vince stopped laughing and tried to stand up. He felt more life in his body now, and
managed
to haul himself out of the high-back chair. Tobin was already on his feet and moving fast from around the desk.

Nick Soroya revealed his weapon – a spike. He held a hotshot syringe in his hand. It was brimful with bad brown liquid, just like the killer gear that had been doing the rounds.

Eddie Tobin was at Vince’s side now and he pushed the
straining
and grunting detective back into his seat. He clasped his arm and yanked up his sleeve. Nick Soroya made like a doctor and held the syringe up for a closer inspection. He then gave the glass cylinder three quick taps with his fingernail. Satisfied with the deadly concoction, the spike was driven deep into Vince’s vein.

There was no time for Vince to say anything. Time had already slowed for him, as it inevitably does when it’s about to stop
altogether
. And the detective’s final thought, as the needle sank in, was just about the act itself. It was fast and professional. The malice and enmity had gone. It was like an execution.

Nick Soroya, the lad with the pleasant face, revealed the true nature beneath his pleasant smile, and Vince recognized the darker purpose behind his eyes as he pushed death home.

Vaughn sat in a grotty pub in the parish of Portslade, which remained a stubbornly unfashionable part of town. That was the extent of his escape route. A backstreet pub he’d never visited before, therefore a pub where no one would know him. For hours he sat in the corner snug with pints and whisky chasers, draining both his glass and wallet. Not getting drunk, just more skint, and thus narrowing his options. But this pub in Portslade still wasn’t far enough away. He listened to the men idly chatting at the bar. The news filtered through that ‘the plague’ was still in the air, and threading its way through the town in needles of despair. A young girl this time.

As Vaughn lifted the glass to take a final swig of his latest pint, the dregs at the bottom looking like organisms viewed through a microscope, his life came into sudden focus. As if surfacing through a glass drunkenly, a sudden sober clarity: he now had nothing. No girl, no money, no hope. The girl didn’t bear
thinking
about. She’d already slipped into the past. A past he no longer possessed. A past he hadn’t seen coming …
if that made any sense?

So he sat there thinking about how he could extricate himself from the shit he was in. Nothing came to mind, apart from what he’d done all his life, to act as a foil for others. But that wasn’t his plan. Because real patsies, suckers, mugs, gulls and foils, they never see it coming. His plan was to kill himself. Go the way of Wendy. Join her in the Big Nod. It seemed like the best plan of action, the best way ahead. It even seemed like the decent thing to do.

In the brief moments he had thought of the girl, it was only to think how little he had thought about her, and how much he had always been thinking about himself. He’d felt sporadic spasms of guilt, only to be usurped by long underlying feelings of
self-centred
fear. Now he thought about topping himself, he could give his impending demise a dignity: he was doing it to be with the girl. And for the girl.

He went to the toilet and locked himself in a cubicle, to hang himself with his belt. But then he realized he was wearing elasticised braces. It was his best suit, worn with red socks to
complement
his new loafers – just like his heroes, Frank, Dino, Sammy and Peter Lawford. But in a pub pisser in Portslade, even Vaughn, with his hyperactive fantasy life and lazy reality, could appreciate the sheer redundancy of that detail. He sank down on to the grimy seat of the bog, his head buried in his hands, and he cried. He cried for the girl and for the others that had died. But most of all he cried for himself. And then he pissed himself, terrified. He was sure death was going to hurt.

There were about forty of them. They tore up deckchairs and used their wooden struts as coshes, or just sent them flying through the air. ‘
We are the Mods! We are the Mods!
’ they chanted. The handful of Rockers didn’t stand a chance. They jumped over the
promenade
railings to escape a kicking or the flying deckchairs. The drop on the other side was about thirty foot but, fortunately for them, the wall came in at an angle, and they managed to scuttle down safely to the next level and make their escape. The BBC and British Movietone News cameras caught it all. It was chaos,
mayhem
, anarchy and excellent copy! Moral indignation kicked in as the ‘Sawdust Caesars’ were seen to be taking over the entire town. Some cynics claimed that the filmed riots were stage-managed. Most social commentators said this drunken hooliganism wasn’t anything that hadn’t been seen before; just take a look at a Hogarth print.

‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’

They’d gathered by the entrance to the Palace Pier. It seemed like the place to be: an epicentre, a potential flashpoint and, more importantly, yet another potential photo opportunity. Police on horses tried to disperse them but, as the cameras rolled, the publicity-astute Mods were eager for their close-ups and refused to budge. They protested. They staged a sit-down. Arguments about infringement of civil liberties were quickly gathered by the more politically minded and hurled at the mounted coppers. The not so erudite or politically minded, and generally more pissed, made do with stones. What a performance!

‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’

Further along the seafront, by the kiddies’ paddling pool, heads were being pummelled, wrists were being cuffed, paddy wagons were being loaded. The boys in blue had contained about two hundred of them on the beach. They threw stones, beer bottles, deckchairs and finally charged the police.

‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’

Away from the seafront and the cameras, shop windows had been kicked in, pubs turned over and motorbikes set on fire. As most of the Rockers had gone home, the Mods now fought amongst themselves, divided by areas, football teams. All
accompanied
by a perennial chorus of ‘What are you screwing at?’

‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’

They’d given the movement a name, Mods, and anyone who was up for a bit of a debacle on the bank holiday weekend had gathered under its banner. It was a truncated and punchy little moniker that seemed a million miles away from the élan of the original Modernist movement that had cut a dash through the subterranean culture of Soho’s coffee bars and jazz clubs, carrying a well-thumbed copy of Jean-Paul Sartre in the back pocket, watching Jean Paul Belmondo up on the big screen, favouring the Italianate-style clothing found in the glossy magazines, and turning away from American bubblegum culture towards a new European aesthetic.

‘We are the Mods! We are the Mods!’

Vaughn wasn’t a Mod. Even though he was wearing an
Italian-style
mixed-fibre Montague Burton suit with three buttons and a single vent, a skinny-brimmed trilby, a pair of suede tasselled loafers, and regularly ingested pills as if they were going out of fashion, he just didn’t class himself as a Mod. That was the trouble with Mods, thought Vaughn; anyone with half a savvy about dress sense was considered a Mod. But he knew that he wasn’t one, and he stood vehemently staunch on that little fact. Because, right now, he wanted to kill them. On his trudge away from the pub in Portslade, he’d planned on robbing a chemist (a Mod trick if ever there was one – even though he
wasn’t
one). It was the
perfect
time for robbery, on a bank holiday. But the mobile alarms of the police force – on motorbikes, sitting in twos in panda cars, or mobbed up inside Black Marias – were thick in the air due to the Mods. And even though the overstretched cops, and the chaos in the town centre offered the perfect cover for such a caper, Vaughn just didn’t quite trust his luck. Getting caught would kill him, and anyway he wanted to do the job properly. No, Vaughn
hated
Mods.

He had recently been avoiding Third Avenue, mainly because he’d been avoiding Henry Pierce. Now he didn’t care, and he reckoned that by now Henry Pierce would be avoiding him, too, what with the bogies sniffing after Vaughn.

He pushed the button, pronounced his name and was buzzed up immediately. At the top of the stairs he was greeted by a tall West Indian he knew as Marcus Three. There were seven West Indians in Brighton called Marcus, and this one was number three. To Vaughn’s knowledge none of them were related, yet they were all called Marcus. In fact, most of the West Indian men Vaughn knew were call Marcus, and he just couldn’t figure out why. Marcus Three sucked his teeth, sniffed the air around him curiously, then sucked his teeth again and said, in his deep patois, ‘You stink of piss, rassclatt!’

‘You holding?’

‘I don’t deal what you’re looking for, bwouy.’

‘Barbs? You got barbs? I’ll take barbs? Please … anything.’ And he meant
anything
– and enough of it to kill himself with.

Marcus Three gave him a nod, and Vaughn stepped inside the flat. All the lights were out, so he couldn’t see a thing. He walked into a fug as clouds of reefer lazed about the airless room. He didn’t know what hit him, but something did.

When Vaughn came round, he found himself seated on a
plastic
chair. He was bound with a thin cord wrapped around his waist. His feet were also secured. It was a thorough job. Even he thought it was too thorough a job for someone as ineffectual as him. It was dark because the windows were painted over in matt black. The familiar mural on the wall depicting some loose-limbed Caribbeans dancing with not a care in the world.

He was still in Third Avenue, downstairs from the same flat, in the basement of the BBC or, to give it its full title, the Beach Bottle Club. There was the warm light of a flame flickering away behind him. As he recovered his bearings, he knew that behind him were tables with dead Jack Daniel’s bottles masquerading as candlesticks, and layered with cascading stalactites of wax. He’d often sat mindlessly at one of those tables, stoned out of his box, thoughtlessly peeling strips of warm malleable wax off the bottles, feeling it crumble under his fingernails. Vaughn heard a noise behind him, chair legs scraping on the floor. He turned his head round towards the light and saw the bulk of a large object: Henry Pierce.

‘Henry?’

Pierce slowly moved away from the light towards the other side of the room.

‘Henry, what you doing?’

There was a theatrical pause, then Pierce’s deliberate tones. ‘Lurking in the shadows, what else?’

Pierce headed over to the makeshift bar, his white stick tapping away before him. His antennae located a bar stool and he sat on it, bolt upright, his feet still firmly on the floor. He laid his white stick on the bar, cracked his knuckles, then folded his arms. Ready now. He gave a knowing sigh of disappointment and said, ‘So, it’s come to this.’

Vaughn took in his situation, and asked the wrong question, ‘How did I end up down here?’

Silence.

Vaughn nodded on realizing that the information was useless to him anyway. ‘That gear you gave me, Henry, it’s poison.’

‘So it seems. And you’re the one who’s been knocking it out, putting it on the street.’

‘You gave it to me! Said it was good!’

‘It
was
good. Just
too
good.’

‘I’m not taking the collar for this, Henry. You gave me the gear.’

‘And why did I give you the gear?’ Vaughn remained silent. ‘That’s right, what are you going to do, boy? Go to the bogies, tell them it’s not your fault? They’ll ask you where you got it. You’ll tell them the truth, that you got it from me. They’ll come to me, ask me why I gave it to you. I’ll tell them the truth, how I gave you heroin as payment. Payment for services rendered, a job well done.’

‘You
made
me!’

In a flash, Pierce was on his feet, the white stick was off the bar and raised in his hand. He bolted over to Vaughn and smashed it down across his lap.

Vaughn let out a primordial scream and closed his eyes until the initial agony subsided. Then opened them to find Henry Pierce was perched again on the stool and the white stick resting on the makeshift bar. Like nothing had happened.

Pierce continued: ‘But the job wasn’t well done, was it, boy?’

Vaughn, through the pain, whimpered, ‘No.’

‘Because the body was washed up on the beach. The
body of 
evidence
was washed up on the fucking beach for some cunt to find it.’

Vaughn pleaded, through tears, ‘I did what you said, Henry, I swear to God. You were there! I cut the head off.’

The misery was seared on to Vaughn’s face, not from his burning lap, where the white stick had left a welt, but from the memory. The memory of that night. The lock-up turned charnel house, where Vaughn, under Pierce’s guidance, had gone about his gruesome task. It was to be Vaughn’s big break into the big time; and to be no longer just a lowly driver. But that night Vaughn had discovered something important about himself: he wasn’t cut out for the big time. He didn’t have the heart for it, or the balls for it, and he certainly didn’t have the stomach for it. He had thrown up remorselessly throughout the whole ordeal.

Pierce, all matter-of-fact: ‘I told you, boy, to stab his chest, puncture his lungs, let the fucking air out the tyres.’

Vaughn, hysterical now, and he would have stamped his feet if they weren’t tied together, bawled out, ‘You didn’t, you didn’t tell me that! You didn’t tell me that you didn’t tell me that you didn’t tell me that you didn’t tell …!’

Pierce, up again, the stick in his hand raised, and Vaughn, with Pavlovian obedience, stopped his whining and squeezed his eyes shut. But, unable to do anything about his ears, he heard the dead air around him slice open as the cane smashed down on to his lap. No cry of pain this time. Legs too numb, throat too sore. Just the burn of piss on his red-hot skinny legs. He’d thought he was all pissed out, but he was wrong. He now pissed like a racehorse. The excess – and there was excess – puddled up on the plastic chair. His eyes opened to the same routine: Pierce on the stool, cane on the bar. Like nothing had happened.

Vaughn realized that Pierce could keep up this routine all night. And realized that he himself couldn’t. For a moment he thought that his plan had worked: Marcus Three had supplied him with the barbs, and he had killed himself, and he was dead. But, instead of being guided by seraph emissaries to the Elysian Fields to join his Wendy, he had gone to Hell. And this was to be his eternity. His personal divine comedy.

‘Soiled yourself, boy?’ Pierce said with a grimace and a tut-tut. But it was cartoon disgust, since he didn’t expect anything else from Vaughn. He would have been disappointed with anything else. Vaughn’s nervous disposition and his terrified bladder were the source of much amusement to those in the know when
gathered
in the pubs, clubs and around the card tables of Brighton. He very much took after his father in that respect.

Pierce continued, ‘The truth, for you, isn’t the best way forward in this case. And that’s not even putting Jack into the equation.’