Kiss Me Quick (3 page)

The club’s reception area was small. Black-and-white glossies of the hostesses, in bikinis and various stages of undress, were tacked to the varnished, pine-panelled walls. Behind a small counter with a cash register on it, a flight of steep, narrow stairs wound their way up through the tall building. But no sign of Colin.

There was a distant cracking sound, with enough force and
surprise
that Vince’s eyes darted up towards the ceiling. It seemed to emanate from somewhere at the top of the building. Vince
suspected
a door slamming shut. He stepped over to the stairwell to investigate, noticing an axe and a cosh secreted under the counter. He pressed a light switch on the wall, but the stairs remained dark.

Climbing to the first floor he encountered two doors, both of them locked. On the next landing up he could see a light. On the second floor, a shadeless light bulb on its last legs
intermittently
illuminated the windowless landing. A card inscribed ‘Artist’s Model’ was tacked on to a door and he could hear both the artist and the model at work. Breathless grunts from the artist, and fake groans of pleasure from the model.

Hand gripping the rickety wooden banister, he carried on climbing to the third floor, where the stairs then twisted up to a narrow landing. The knackered light bulb in the hallway below didn’t have the strength to make its way up alongside him. Vince gave an involuntary shudder and he was glad Tobin wasn’t there to see it. You never lose your fear of the dark, something deadly hiding in its layers. He stood stock-still for a moment, waited for his eyes to adjust and the blackness before him to dissipate, but finally saw there was nothing on this landing, not even a door.

He cautiously climbed the narrow stairs to the next level, where he could hear the whirring of a machine. It produced a soft but steady hum, as he reached the landing. There was a sliver of smoky-white light filtering through the gap under the door. The whirr of the machine seemed to emphasize a deep silence – then, from inside the room, came the sound of a girl screaming.

Vince tried the door handle, found it was locked. Working on the logic that, if the rickety banisters were anything to go by, the door should be a doddle. He focused on a spot just below the lock, and stepped back against the wall for maximum impact. He then lifted his right leg, pulling it back so his knee was just inches under his chin, then shot the heel of his shoe backwards into the door. The door splintered and cracked along the jamb, then burst open.

He stepped over the threshold and into a small room. On the metal shelves lining it were stacked canisters, containing reels of film. A projector sat on a tall metal table fitted with castors, as the machine projected a beam of white light that cut through the darkness and through a hole in the wall – down to where the girl’s screams were growing louder and more desperate.

Vince made his way towards the cavity and peered through it to see a private cinema, containing just three rows holding about twenty seats. Wall-to-ceiling carpeting served to insulate and deaden the sound as about ten men sat transfixedly staring up at the silver screen.

On the screen cavorted two men, either black or blacked up, their faces obscured by crazy-looking wigs and masks. Kitted out like B-movie savages, they were having brutal sex with a young white girl. She was bleach-blonde and junkie-thin, with needle tracks clearly dotted along her opaline arms. Her sun-starved skin displayed a mottled spectrum of pain in shades of black, blue, brown and yellow. Her red-rimmed eyes were vacantly doped up to the full.

The two men clearly weren’t satisfied with the reaction they were getting off their zombie blonde, as they now began to punch her. Their punches weren’t pulled, for there was real venom in their blows, real pain in her cries of distress. And Vince saw
genuine
fear trying to break through those glazed eyes, so he knew that this raping and beating wasn’t just the usual pornographic play-acting. If it wasn’t for the mocked-up jungle scenery – painted foliage, hanging ropes for vines, African shields and spears resting against a wall – it could have been happening live on a stage right now, and not through the filtered past of the movie screen …

All the stuffed envelopes in the world didn’t cover this level of degeneracy, thought Vince. This wasn’t one of the conventional blue movies and stag films that did the rounds of the private cinema clubs of Soho … He suddenly turned numb as he watched one of the men raise a knife …

Vince couldn’t take his eyes off the screen, but he felt helpless to save the skinny girl. All he could do now was to stop the
projector
– but even that was too late, for her horrifying narrative had already run its course. This was just a record of it, and he was powerless to intervene as the inevitable played out before him. Nausea invaded his guts and started twisting and churning. Sweat prickled along his spine, and his whole body felt overwhelmed.

He was about to break the trance and heave the projector on to the floor, when he noticed a tall figure framed in the doorway.

The girl on the silver screen gave a final scream that trailed off into nothing.

The door slammed shut.

Then blackout.

10 May 1964. Scotland Yard.

‘That’s not what happened, sir.’

‘Are you in dispute with me, Treadwell?’

‘No, sir.’

The man sitting across the desk from him was Chief
Superintendent
Ian Markham. Stiff and starched in his beribboned, inky-blue uniform, hands clasped before him, he represented authority exuding authority. Markham had an open file laid before him, and the Queen behind him. How’s that for backup? thought Vince.

‘You clearly
are
in dispute with me. And saying you’re not just puts you further in dispute with me.’

‘Sir.’ Vince didn’t put a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ in front of his response, because he didn’t want to risk further dispute by either agreeing that he was in dispute or denying it.

‘Good. Then the case is closed,’ said Markham, also closing the file to emphasize the point.

Vince imperceptibly shook his head in resignation to the fact that what was written in black and white on that report would soon be filed away as the truth. But it wasn’t the truth, and he could never resign himself to the lies. He felt it burning and
bubbling 
up inside him and just couldn’t help himself blurting out, ‘Eddie Tobin takes an envelope from Lionel Duval every week because he’s bought and paid for and would do anything Duval wants him to, because that’s where his loyalties lie.’

Markham’s face was set rigid as he took stock. Then leaned forward, hands clasped again, tightening, white knuckles. ‘Edward Tobin has served the Met with distinction for twenty-five years,’ said Markham. ‘I’ve no need to inform you of our disbelief
concerning
your judgement in this case.’

Markham unclasped his hands and leaned back, elongating his already long body against the back of the tall chair, as if stretching his authority before the young detective. He didn’t stop there, but Vince had stopped listening, and focused instead on the portrait of the Queen behind him. Demure in her long black robe, she seemed to be smiling at him. She looked a little
coquettish
, comely and come-hither. He thought he might … she looked good. He wasn’t giving serious thought to it, but all things considered, he would rather have been doing anything right now than be sitting opposite Markham, who was currently building up a head of steam and sounding as if he was about to erupt at any moment.

Vince stopped thinking about the Queen and focused his
attention
back on to the Chief Superintendent. What with Markham’s thick, effulgently brilliantined and suspiciously black hair, the black-robed Queen behind him looked like an extension of his head. As if she was growing out of him? No doubt Markham was waiting for the moment when Her Majesty really did stand over him, as he knelt before her to finally have the working-class chips knocked off his shoulders with her ceremonial sword. Arise, Sir Ian, thirty years of loyal service to Queen and Country. And what of the young detective? Off with his head for servicing the Queen! The thought brought a slight smile to Vince’s lips.

Not slight enough to escape Markham. ‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’

‘I don’t, sir,’ he replied, underestimating his folly with the Queen. But, after what he’d been through, he deserved a laugh.

He’d recently spent twenty-three days in a coma. The doctors were surprised at this, as the head injury had not been that severe. No lasting physical damage to the cranium, the surrounding tissue or the brain itself. A little blood draining to relieve some pressure from a ‘dent on the bonnet’, as the surgeon called it. And that was pretty much it from the sawbones. Four weeks of observation and further testing in the hospital, then three weeks of rest and getting his strength up at a sanatorium on the Kent coast. He’d lost weight, suffered muscle loss, felt as weak as a baby, so he had exercised in the gymnasium every day to get it back. Push-ups, press-ups, sit-ups, dumbbells, medicine ball and callisthenics.

A private Harley Street psychologist who specialized in head trauma had taken an interest in his case and volunteered to
oversee
his recovery. His name was Dr Hans Boehm and, as quacks go, he was straight from the Rank Organization’s central casting. He reminded Vince of the professor in the Donald Duck cartoons, quack, quack! He had wild grey hair, a long beard, and spoke in a thick Viennese accent. You couldn’t have made him up.

It was while talking to Boehm that Vince remembered what he had seen in the projection room, and then the figure at the door. Boehm didn’t seem to judge Vince negatively, but Vince could tell that he didn’t seem to believe him either. He explained to Vince how his version of events had played out in the dark, always a fertile playground for the imagination. Stripped of sight, the most powerful sensory guide, the imagination tended to run riot.
The eye is merely a lens, for it’s with the brain that we see
. And just because the lens was temporarily switched off, the brain would keep on seeing – but it sees what it wants to see, no longer refracted through the lens but through the power of the
imagination
. With a beaming grin and in a thick Viennese accent, he reminded Vince that ‘It is only in the night that things go dump, no?’ Vince assured him he wasn’t scared of the dark. 

Boehm then adopted a more prosaic approach by asking Vince if there was any history of epilepsy in his family. Vince said there wasn’t. When asked if he himself had ever been prone to blackouts, seizures or time loss, he said he hadn’t. When the good doctor then inquired about any history of schizophrenia in the family, Vince felt like chinning the quack. But, realizing this would just add fuel to the fire, he solemnly and unanimously informed him that there was no such history. Dr Boehm gave Vince some pills for the sporadic headaches he was suffering and reassured him it was just his brain ‘rewiring’ itself after the coma. He was then given a clean bill of health.

But Vince was far from happy. Bang on the head or no bang on the head, he clearly remembered what he’d seen at the
Peek-A
-Boo Club on Wardour Street. In the projection room. The girl being raped and beaten on the screen. The knife held above her. The figure at the door. The man slamming the door shut. Then the big blackout.

Then, as Vince viewed it, the lies that followed. Eddie Tobin had filed his report, and everything was as it was. Tommy Ribbons corpsed out on the deck with a fuck-off carving knife through his pump (the killer nicked two days later was his brother-in-law, as it seemed Tommy had been cheating on his wife with his
sister-in
-law). A club hostess with the mostest from Luton not seeing a thing. Duval the proprietor not seeing a thing. Colin the
unconvincing
bantamweight bouncer not seeing a thing, because he was out buying pastries in Frith Street when it all happened. Oh, one thing missing: the handing over of an envelope from Duval to Tobin. But, as no one saw a thing, why waste typewriter ribbon on such details?

Then Tobin’s report really did slip on to the bestseller list. After Detective Treadwell failed to return with Colin the doorman, Tobin and Duval had climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where they found the young detective sparked out in the …
storage
room
. Not a projection room, of course, because, according to all involved, there was no projection room. Because there was no
private
cinema club.

As soon as Vince read Tobin’s report, which was withheld from him until he was fully recuperated, he went back to the Peek-A-Boo Club. He climbed the stairs, entered the room and found a …
storage room
. Just mops, buckets, brooms, empty boxes. Vince wanted to get a warrant to tear the place apart, scrape off the wallpaper to reveal the fresh plaster used to cover the hole in the wall – to cover up the lies. They said no, so he went
next-door
to a building, also owned by Duval, and which he believed had housed the private cinema club – only to find it was a newly converted, empty office space.

And the figure framed in the doorway, the man Vince thought to have been the projectionist? No one saw him. No one knew him. He didn’t exist.

And Vince’s head wound? He must have got it when he fell. Tripped over something in the dark. A bump in the night.

For Dr Boehm, Eddie Tobin, Chief Superintendent Markham, and everyone else involved, what Vince experienced that night in the Peek-A-Boo just did not happen. His brain was rewiring itself and playing tricks on him. To Vince, however, it was just a big fat cover-up.

But even with the weight of evidence against him, and the facts written up and signed off in the file lying before him, Vince couldn’t concede what he felt to be the truth. Just like he couldn’t save the girl on the silver screen. To give in would be to say that she didn’t exist. As he convalesced in the sanatorium, he painted a picture in his mind of the sad junkie life that had led to her starring role. Vince reckoned she must have suffered more than enough of not existing, or barely registering in life, and ultimately being seen as disposable. So it was left to him to keep her image alive, to conjure her up. To let her simply go would be to lose himself, lose his reason for becoming a policeman. The girl became his measure; his sense of value and belief system. And Vince knew that one day he would return to that case and prove it. Justice for the girl would prevail, and he would destroy the men who did it to her.

‘Where do you stand on the current anti-establishment fad, Treadwell?’

Vince’s ears pricked up. Anti-establishment? Hardly just a fad, he thought. ‘Sir?’

‘Have a taste for subversive humour?’

‘Not that I’m aware of, sir.’

‘I do wonder. I believe a television programme with Mr David Frost is popular amongst some of the younger officers in the canteen.’

‘
That Was The Week That Was
.’

‘Quite so.’

‘I have watched it, sir.’

‘Mocking Harold Macmillan and other public servants. Who’s next, the Queen?!’

‘Let’s hope not, sir,’ said Vince, smiling satirically. ‘I’m much more a fan of Mr Tony Hancock and
Steptoe and Son
– and, of course,
Dixon of Dock Green
. As for the Queen, I always stand up just before the telly finishes for the night.’

Markham leaned forward on his desk, threading his hands together to make a steeple, his thumbs acting as a chin rest, the tips of his forefingers just touching the end of his nose. With his narrowed eyes locked on to Vince’s, he gave him a penetrating and knowing look. Being caught in Markham’s crosshairs spooked Vince enough for him to shift from cheek to cheek in his seat, and to indulge in a nervous clearing of his throat.

Markham took his own sweet authoritative time, letting a weighty silence fill the room, as if to expunge the atmosphere of the trivialities that had just passed between them, and get back on to the sure-footing of police business rather than show business.

A slight smile quivered then parted Markham’s lips, and he said, almost lasciviously, ‘I know what you want, Treadwell. You want Murder.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Vince with a cut-glass authority to match the Chief Superintendent’s tone, and the Queen’s, for that matter.

Markham’s furtive smile broadened once the apple had been taken, then snapped again into cold composure as he sat back in his chair. ‘’Course you do. Murder Squad. Who doesn’t? That’s not a question, it’s a statement of fact. You’re from Brighton, aren’t you, Treadwell?’

‘Sir.’

‘Got something for you, then. Kill two birds with one stone. You’re owed some holiday, and I think this is the time for it.’

‘Sort of itching to get back to work, actually, sir. And I don’t really consider Brighton a holiday destination.’

‘Treadwell, been watching Mr Alan Wicker, have you?’

Vince didn’t answer. Better safe than sorry. And Markham wasn’t listening, anyway. He had his plans for Vince sorted out before the young detective had stepped through the door.

‘It would be a dereliction of my duty, Treadwell, if I did not inform you of the hostilities felt from certain quarters towards you as a result of your accusations regarding Detective Tobin,’ said Markham methodically. ‘Edward Tobin leaves us in three weeks. Retirement, bungalow in Bournemouth, I believe. Good luck to him. Best keep out of his way, and let this thing blow over. Don’t want any unpleasantness meanwhile. For those three weeks, you will take a well-deserved break. Some rest and relaxation, visit your family. And this,’ Markham opened his desk drawer and pulled out a case file, ‘should keep the grey matter ticking over.’ He shunted the file across the desk.

Vince opened it.

‘I know you took an interest in the case when it first came up,’ Markham continued, getting up from behind his desk in readiness to usher the young detective out. ‘I contacted the Superintendent in Brighton. He said they’d be happy to have you, though it’s not officially being handed over to Scotland Yard. And you’d only be down there in an advisory capacity. But it’s a murder case, so a step in the right direction. A foot in the door.’

Vince looked at the grisly morgue photos featuring a
decapitated
body. But the image that really caught his eye was a small browning mugshot taken some thirty years ago. He found
himself
looking at the face of Jack Regent.

With his eyes still fixed on the photo, Vince said softly, and meditatively, ‘A foot in the door. Thank you, sir.’

Vince closed the file, stood up and shook Markham’s hand. As he did so, he looked up at the Queen. Wham bam, thank you, Ma’am!