Kiss Me Quick (29 page)

Vaughn’s lips twitched, then shaped themselves into something that could loosely be described as a smile, as he was hit by a new thought. ‘Like you said, Henry, you got me to do the work, get rid of the body. I was following your orders. You fucked up as much as me. And Jack will come after you as much as me. So, maybe you should untie me, Henry, and we’ll call it quits, eh?’

As soon as the last word ‘eh’ was out of his mouth, he knew it was a mistake, and closed his eyes and waited for the cane. It didn’t come. He opened his eyes and saw Henry Pierce still sitting on the stool, motionless and seemingly expressionless.

‘No doubt I’ll incur some wrath,’ Pierce said, ‘but I’m a man of good and long standing with Jack. Someone will have to take the fall, so who’s it going to be? Me or you? Who’s your money on?’ Vaughn, tied firmly to the plastic chair, still managed to sink lower into it. Pierce, head tilted up as if he was addressing an audience in the gallery, continued in a vein that seemed well rehearsed, as if he’d gone over it a thousand times – his story, his alibi. ‘I’ve got years of good service behind me. Diligently going about my work, never a complaint from the man. But you? You’re not worth the piss in your pants.’

Pierce picked up the white stick from the bar, stood up and slowly circled his prey, twirling the cane in his heavy brutal hands. It resembled the laborious rotation of a propeller just started up, and Vaughn, leaning away as far as he could, viewed it as just as lethal.

‘Still, today, you find me in a giving mood. I want to help you, boy.’

Vaughn looked through the propeller blades. ‘You do?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

Vaughn really didn’t know.

‘Now you’ve killed the girl,’ Pierce continued.

Through fresh panic. ‘I swear to God, Henry, it wasn’t me. She didn’t get the gear off me. When I heard people were dying, I flushed away what I had left.’

‘Then how did she get it?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Maybe she took it. Stole some before you flushed it?’

‘She wouldn’t.’

‘She must have. While you were asleep, she must have stolen some for her own personal use.’

‘No.’

‘Never underestimate a slip. They’ll rob the gold out of Granny’s teeth to get what they want. And you know that, boy.’

Vaughn knew this wasn’t true of Wendy, but he nodded in agreement anyway. He didn’t want to feel the sting of that stick again. And it felt good agreeing with Pierce. It relieved what little guilt he had.
It was the girl’s fault, not his
. Blame absolved him, and right now he’d take all the absolution he could lay his hands on.

‘Let’s not kid ourselves, boy, the girl’s gone, God rest her soul. It’s out of our hands. She’s in a better place. She’s done and dusted.’

There was a tremulous twitch of the bottom lip for the freshly grieving Vaughn as he said, ‘I … I loved her.’

‘Touched. But we must move on.’

‘
Move on?
It’s only just happened.’

‘Time, in this case, is of the essence. When Marcus Three called me and said you was here, my first reaction was: call the bogies, let him hang! Then I thought again: “justice must be served”.’ Pierce stopped circling and stood in front of him. The cane in his left hand, his right hand gripped the gnarled handle and slowly began to twist off the top of the cane.

Vaughn knew what was coming, because he’d seen that cane unscrewed, unsheathed and wielded before.
Justice must be served
. He closed his eyes and mumbled some prayers for the last-ditch get-out stakes: the ones that would get him back in good with God, and hopefully through the Pearly Gates.

Swoosh
. The sixteen-inch razor-sharp blade sliced through the air and cut the cord that bound Vaughn to the plastic chair. Vaughn, and those who knew Pierce, always suspected his blind routine was exactly that, a routine. An act, shtick, like the Red Indian in the ring, and the black-clad villain on the streets. And if there was any doubt about Pierce’s 20/20 vision in his one good eye, it was nixed at the point where Pierce spotted an opening of about half an inch between Vaughn’s arm and the chair. Just enough to get the blade in, and cut the cord that bound him.

Vaughn opened his eyes to see Pierce cutting the other cord binding his legs. And, in a moment, he was free. He rubbed his wrists and looked up at Pierce, confused. But it was clear, even to Vaughn, that Henry Pierce had plans for him.

Pierce, pragmatic: ‘Let’s start then with Bobbie – Bobbie LaVita. What have you heard?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Not even from your brother?’

‘We ain’t that close. He’s a copper.’

Pierce pulled a grin. ‘Then you’ll love this. He’s been going, shall we say, beyond his brief. Not adhering to Scotland Yard’s strict code of conduct.’ Vaughn looked genuinely puzzled. Pierce gave an incredulous shake of the head and spelled it out. ‘He’s been giving her one, knocking her off, schtupping her. Showing the dog the bone. Sticking his—’

‘I get the picture, Henry. Are you sure?’

‘He’s been seen, spotted. Observed. Clocked.’

For a man who was always a good few steps behind the game, and constantly caught in life’s blinding headlights, there was no wide-eyed amazement from Vaughn at this information. He wasn’t shocked. Bobbie and his brother did look good together. Even Vaughn could see that, in the drama that was unfolding, they were the two principals, the star turn. And he was happy to let them hog the stage as long as he could shuffle off it unscathed. ‘So what’s this got to do with me?’

‘She’s got to go.’

‘Bobbie LaVita?’

Pierce gave a solemn nod.

‘She’s done wrong, Henry, they both have, but … but does she deserve to die?’ Vaughn felt a genuine and overwhelming sadness that echoed his own loss. ‘Maybe … maybe they love each other …?’

‘Like you and your girl … whass-her-name?’

‘Her name is Wendy …
Wendy
,’ he said, sinking down further and squelching about in the warm puddle on the bucket chair.

‘Yours was a pure, decent love,’ said Pierce, stepping around behind him and resting those violent hands on his bony, hunched shoulders. ‘But theirs, their love is wrong.
All
wrong.’

Vaughn began to weep. Uncontrollable, chest-quaking,
salt-wrenching
sobs. ‘I … I … I …. I don’t … I don’t … I don’t wer … wer … want to hurt anyone.’

‘No one ever does,’ said a soothing and avuncular Old Henry Pierce.

‘Yer … yer … yer …
You
do.’

‘That’s true. Now, let’s get you out of those wet clothes.’

Crack!

Nothing.

Crack!

Nothing.

CRACK!

That one did it, and Vince’s eyes opened. Bobbie was standing over him, the flat of her right hand primed and ready to smack him across the cheek again. His face stung, his vision going in and out of focus, but he could make out just enough to see he was back in his room at the Seaview Hotel.

Bobbie grabbed him by the lapels with both hands and sat him upright. His head lolled back again. She wrapped her arms around his waist and heaved him off the bed and on to his feet – only for his dead weight to fall back on to the bed. Not giving up, she repeated the manoeuvre. Again he fell back. And this is how it went on for about twenty minutes, but she persevered. She slapped him some more, she pulled his hair, threw cold water in his face, and thus she kept him awake. She brewed up cups of hot black coffee and forced it down his throat. Sometimes he puked it up, which was good; sometimes he kept it down, which was better. Eventually she got him to his feet. With his arms draped around her shoulders, she walked him around the room. She was exhausted and bruised, through him falling over and landing on top of her, or being pushed against the hard edges of the furniture under his collapsing weight. But she persevered and persevered until he had beaten whatever was running through him, and his body was again running, albeit shakily, under its own steam.

‘Thank you,’ were the first coherent words out of his mouth. He was sitting in a hot bath and Bobbie perched on the edge of it. With his vision no longer blurred, he saw she was wearing drainpipe blue jeans that were rolled up to just below the knee; ballet-pump style black shoes and a tight-fitting white and blue hooped Breton jumper. Although she was tired, devoid of her usual monochrome make-up with its pale powders and harsh black eyeliners, she looked younger than he’d ever seen her before, her skin taut and surprisingly olive-toned.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

Vince considered this, then after a few moments said, ‘I went to a party.’

‘Whose party?’

‘Dickie Eton’s.’

Bobbie’s eyes widened. She looked alarmed. ‘What are you
talking
about, Vincent?’

‘You know about Dickie Eton’s parties?’

‘I’ve been to one,’ said Bobbie. ‘I left when everyone started taking their clothes off. What the hell were you doing there? And what the hell did you take?’

Vaughn shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut in
concentration
, until a memory spiked. ‘They put something in my drink,’ he said.

Bobbie, confused. ‘You got drunk?’

‘I don’t drink.’ He plucked the cigarette she was smoking out of her hand and took a long drag. He held down the fumes inside his chest, feeling the smoke scrape and scorch his lungs, then expelled it with a cough and a splutter.

‘And you obviously don’t smoke either,’ she said, taking the cigarette out of his hand.

Vince looked at Bobbie and gave her a lazy smile. With his voice still smeary with the dope, he mumbled, ‘You look
beautiful
… you know that? You really are a very beautiful girl. The most beautiful, beautiful girl I’ve seen … the most beauti—’

‘Vincent!’ she yelled, cutting him short. She wasn’t smiling at the compliments, because the delivery was wrong – all wrong, slowed-down and vacant. This just didn’t sound at all like the quick-witted and insightful young detective she’d found herself falling in love with.

He sensed her displeasure and ducked his head under the water.

‘You look awful,’ she said, as he resurfaced. ‘Try and remember what happened.’

‘They spiked my drink. Then … then I ended up back here …’

‘Then how do you explain all this?’ Her hand dipped into the bath and scooped away the soap bubbles covering his body. Vince saw bruising to his chest and arms, a gash across his ribs, his knees were torn to shreds, and he had welts to his body that looked like lash marks. The wound that caught his attention the most, and which his eye was oddly drawn to, was the smallest and the most imperceptible mark of all. In the fold of his right arm was a
pinprick
…

And then the memory of the previous night rewound and spooled into place.

The swimming pool, face down, naked,
dead
… The bodies crawling all over him … moving in on him … the boys and the girls … the doped-up sirens enticing him into the water … Vince rises to his bloodied knees … as bad a place to die as any, he’d thought … Dickie Eton, like Nero or Caligula, sitting on his poolside throne … shouts out to Tobin to stop … Eddie Tobin, can’t help himself, follows through with more kicks to the gut … stamps his heel in his face … Vince chokes at the smell of dried dog shit … The cold white marble was surprisingly warm to the touch … the blow to the gut. Vince is chopped to the floor, doubled over … Like a movie set … Cecil B. DeMille …
Sodom and Gomorrah
… white marbled columns, fountains, a waterfall in the corner … The boys and the girls naked, fucking, an orgy … Pills ingested, powders snorted, dope smoked, dope shot and that crazy music whirling around his head … Vince thrown to the floor … The laughter getting louder, raucous, repellent, the music even more disorientating … Dragged through another long
hallway
, the paintings on the walls getting dirtier and dirtier, uglier and uglier. Sex and death, sex and death … Vince hauled to his feet, out of the chair, taken out of the wood-panelled study before the Big Nod kicks in … Tobin to one side, that pugnacious face, the spittle-webbed mouth laughing and snarling … On the other side, the lad with the soft smiling face and the darker purpose …

… His body contaminated, his blood polluted, forever
corrupted
. Shutting him down … That lethal dose of dirty brown in his bloodstream … The spike goes in, the bad heroin is injected into him, execution style. Just business … The door opens, Nick Soroya enters, hands behind his back. A gun? A knife? No … Vince in the chair, just his head floating, disembodied, limbs numb. Mickey Finn in the ice cool glass of Coke … Eddie Tobin sitting at the desk, his thin lips laughing. Oh the irony! … Tobin delivering the deadly joke with its killer punchline … ‘You killed him, Treadwell. You
slaughtered
him …’

… Vince sat bolt upright, throwing off the sheet of bubbles that covered him; Bobbie jumped up as a wave of water splashed over the side of the bath.

‘Vincent!’ Bobbie’s cry shook Vincent out of his recalled vision. ‘What’s wrong?’

Vince looked up at Bobbie and asked, ‘How did I get here?’

‘When you didn’t come back to my place, I called the hotel. They told me that two men had delivered you to your room, said you’d been out drinking and you’d had too much. That’s when I knew something was wrong, because you don’t drink, do you?’

Vince gave a slow deliberate shake of his head, as he pieced it together.

‘Tell me what happened, Vincent.’

He lay back again in the bath and rearranged the bubbles to cover himself. ‘If I tell you what happened, you won’t love me,’ he said, not knowing if he was being serious or frivolous. He
suspected
it was the former, but his delivery suggested the latter. He took a big gulp of breath and ducked under the water again.

‘If you don’t, I
can’t
love you,’ said Bobbie as he resurfaced.

‘I guess I have to take my chances, then.’

And he did. About everything. He laid out the whole thing from top to bottom (skipping over the bits she already knew). From Soho down to Brighton. From walking into the Peek-
a-Boo
Club with Tobin, to walking out of the Grand Hotel with Tobin. To being driven to Dickie Eton’s party by Nick Soroya. To Dickie Eton and Lionel Duval’s involvement with the porno films. To Eddie Tobin telling him about the death of the
projectionist
, and him being filmed committing the murder. Then finally, he, Detective Vincent Treadwell of Scotland Yard, being sent down to Brighton to solve the crime – the crime that he himself had committed.

It was at this point that Bobbie stopped the story. She had
listened
carefully, patiently. She was a good listener, and her own storytelling prowess, in reinventing her past, had made sure of that. She knew the devil was in the detail, but she didn’t believe Vince had killed anyone. To her it was obvious that he had been framed. With or without the film, she reassured him that it was all a big set-up. And that, together, they would prove it. She was so strong and resolute in her beliefs that Vince believed her. The water was cold by the time Vince got out the bath, his skin the texture of coral. Bobbie wrapped a towel around him and dried him off.

‘Are you hungry?’ Bobbie asked him.

He gave a sluggish shrug.

‘Good. Let’s eat.’

The low-slung seagulls hovered over the town like marionettes in the hands of a lazy puppeteer, alerting all to a new day of fresh hunger, scavenging and survival, through their distressed, choric alarm call. Bobbie was exhausted, her body aching from the physical strain, and the desperation of seeing him slip in and out of consciousness and thinking she might lose him. But, as they walked from the Seaview Hotel and along the promenade, the sunrise’s hallucinatory presence gave everything a fresh,
invigorating
glow.

Vince had his arm around Bobbie’s waist, holding her close, feeling it was his turn to do the supporting. For all the new information he’d gleaned about himself and the murder case, he felt surprisingly at ease. Like he’d reached the end of something, and it was now out of his hands – the freedom of powerlessness. Whatever Nick Soroya had shot Vince through with, he was still feeling the hangover of. It was probably the same stuff he’d fixed his drink with. Either way, considering what he’d been told, Vince felt strangely at ease, almost serene. He certainly didn’t
feel
like a killer, and he still had enough of the copper in him to feel
innocent
until proven guilty. And, even though he knew he had enough motive to commit the crime, and certainly enough
righteous
anger within him to carry it out, he needed to see the evidence, have it laid in front of him before he could condemn himself.

The town was scarred by the weekend’s violence with the Mods and Rockers. Broken deckchairs littered the beach, smashed windows lined the high street, and there were bulging police cells. The papers were full of the weekend’s mayhem, and moral indignation and shock. Questions to be asked in Parliament, and visiting politicians sent down to inspect the ‘war zone’ damage.

None of the cafés on the front were open yet, so Bobbie and Vince walked down to the beach and sat down, and there moulded themselves into the shingle. The beach was dotted with inhabited sleeping bags, which looked like recumbent walruses. Vince and Bobbie looked out to sea. Then the inevitable moved in on them.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Bobbie.

‘I told you I’ve got some money stashed, and I’m owed some holiday pay, assuming I’m still a copper by the end of the week. Maybe go away, take that drive around Europe. You still want to come?’

‘I didn’t mean that. About the … the situation?’

Vince closed his eyes and lay back on the stones. ‘Last night, Tobin said they were going to kill me, and they were going to get away with it. And if what Tobin told me is true, they
could
get away with it. Maybe leave me on a beach with a hotshot of bad heroin. Make it look like I dosed myself, like poor Wendy.’

‘But you’re a detective, Vincent, so they know you. Your
colleagues
know you, your friend Ray what’s-his-name from Interpol knows you—’

Vince held up a halting hand and sat up again. ‘That counts for nothing – they didn’t believe what I saw the first time around. Even Ray thinks I’m obsessed with this case. There’s also a
medical
report on me from an eminent Harley Street psychologist who treated me, claiming I’m a psycho. And apparently some film of me killing a man with my bare hands. They’ll just think I’ve gone bad.’

She shook her head vehemently and said firmly, ‘It’s all lies. That’s what
they
say, that’s what they want you to believe. But it’s not true, any of it. Where is this film of you killing the man? Where’s the actual proof?’

Vince smiled, because her trust in him was heartbreaking. He lay back down on the stones. ‘Like I said, Bobbie, if it’s true, then last night was about showing me they’ve got me exactly where they want me. They could have killed me, could have shot me with that real bad heroin. But it seems I’m worth more to them alive than dead.’ Vince rubbed his thumb over the soft skin where the needle had perforated. ‘A corrupted copper is worth his weight in gold.’ He emitted a slow heavy sigh, closed his eyes and let the morning sun warm his face and bruised body.

Bobbie studied Vince. He seemed almost
contented
, resigned to whatever was going to play out. But she herself wasn’t contented. It was as if all Vince’s rage had transferred itself over to her, so that she felt a burning resentment towards Lionel Duval, Dickie Eton, Eddie Tobin and all those who wanted Vincent beaten and laid out on the beach with his eyes closed. She stood up, wiped the damp clinging pebbles off her backside and purposefully insisted, ‘Stand up, Vincent, I’m hungry.’

Vince and Bobbie were now sitting in a café. Eight tables covered in blue-check plastic tablecloths, with doors that opened out on to the esplanade, swivel racks selling cheap sunglasses, rubber rings, lilos, buckets and spades, flip-flops, postcards of the town and cheeky McGill cartoons, straw sunhats, and black-felt bowler hats with paper bands around them enticing passers-by to
Kiss Me Quick, Squeeze Me Slow
.

They had a full English breakfast arrayed in front of them. It was the biggest one they offered on the menu: ‘The Big Brighton Gut-Buster’. Three sausages, three rashers of bacon, three runny fried eggs, three blood-dark discs of black pudding, three tinned tomatoes, a stack of chips and a pile of toast. Vince wasn’t feeling hungry; it was Bobbie who had ordered up the breakfast. She knew Vince was running on empty, so his body needed fuelling and his mind needed firing. She watched as Vince dipped the corner of a piece of fried bread gingerly into the runny yolk of an egg, absentmindedly playing with his food.