Kiss Me Quick (5 page)

Yeah, Shirley liked him. But she knew her true value in the looks stakes and had him sussed as an arrogant piece of work who also knew his value, and knew she didn’t stand a chance with him. Not sober anyway. She resented pouring his club soda. As she pulled the pump for Machin’s beer, she squeezed her shoulders together and deliberately stooped. It had the desired effect, for both Machin and Vince were instantly drawn to her cleavage; plump, flawless breasts encased in a black lacy bra, under a sheer leopard-spot print blouse.

Machin winked at Vince and said loudly, ‘The beer’s shit but the view’s priceless.’

‘But you can’t see the sea from here,’ she replied, with a wink.

‘I’m looking at the best front in town,’ said Machin, winking back.

‘Cheeky bugger!’ She winked at Vince.

Vince thought about joining in the winking, since it was
obviously
infectious – like conjunctivitis.

‘He is a cheeky sod, this one!’ said Shirley, her voice full of mock indignation. ‘A disgrace to the boys in blue!’ She looked at Vince; it was him she wanted for the conversation. There was more winking. More mock scandal, and sirens of laughter from Shirley.

Vince had heard enough now and steered his club soda over to a table by the window. He had the case file with him and flicked through it whilst he waited for Machin, who was still courting Shirley with the double-entendre shtick.

Machin was stocky, with cropped hair that saved him from a comb-over. No neck, tough and solid. Vince wondered if he could take him in a fight. He was shorter than Vince, but carried the kind of heft that was hard to knock down. It had always struck Vince as odd that Machin had become a copper, for while
growing
up, Machin had always got himself involved in the stuff that Vince had grown out of and avoided. But he’d never taken a pinch for any of it, nor picked up a record. So why not be a copper? Pay’s not bad, the pension’s good, and there’s more than enough sidelines and backhanders to make the grief worth it. And that’s exactly how Vince pegged Tony Machin.

Machin dumped himself next to Vince, his bulk reverberating through the foam and vinyl bench. He tapped his head with a forefinger and asked, ‘How’s the bonce?’

‘Still ticking over,’ Vince said, raising his glass. ‘Cheers.’

‘Cheers. A coma? What’s that like, then, son?’

‘Eminently forgettable.’

‘You slipped or something, so I heard?’

Vince just nodded, not wanting to get further into the subject, whereas Machin held his beer up expectantly, halfway between the table and his mouth, wanting to get into it.

‘That’s right, I slipped. Lights out. Goodnight, Vienna,’ said Vince, hoping to put the matter to bed. ‘Can’t remember a thing. No big deal.’

Machin nodded slowly, more a gesture of weighing him up than agreeing with him. ‘I see, son, I see,’ he said, eventually lifting the pint to his lips and taking a gulp.

Son?
That grated on Vince. They were the same age, more or less, though Machin managed to look a good ten years older. On the plus side, it reduced the times Machin called him by his first name, and Vince enjoyed the distance that gave them. He
recognized
his own taciturn tendencies when he wasn’t a hundred per cent about someone, and Machin was destined to be that
someone
. Vince reopened the file on the table, before Machin could use it as a beer mat.

‘Mr Jack Regent,’ noted Machin, in a proclamatory tone.

‘Any clues?’

‘He’s not here. We’ve already looked. Not a stone unturned,’ said Machin, raising a halting hand. ‘And don’t tell me there’s a lot of stones in Brighton. We know, and that’s how busy we’ve been with it.’

‘I don’t doubt that for a second. I hear the south of France, and even Corsica, are nice at this time of year.’

Machin gave a confirmatory nod to the suggestion. ‘Odds on, son. Money in Swiss accounts. Enough to pay off whoever might need paying off. Spend the rest of his days sitting pretty in the sun. With the money he’s made, why wouldn’t he?’

Vince considered this, and it made sense. A man in the autumn of his years, getting out of the rackets to enjoy the fruits of his ill-gotten gains. But Vince hadn’t come down to Brighton to toast Jack Regent’s good fortune. ‘Maybe Regent’s not ready to retire. It’s his town – got a lot invested here. I thought there might be something about the fingerprints on that knife. Could be a frame-up?’

‘Frame-up?’ demanded Machin, looking as if he might blow the head off his beer with a snort of derision. ‘What’s wrong with him just getting sloppy? Jack Regent messed up. It was bound to
happen
sooner or later. They get away with it for years and then they get complacent, and that’s how we get ’em.’

Vince took a sip of his club soda and mulled over Machin’s assessment. He wasn’t buying it but conceded that, when it came to Jack Regent, he himself did have a vivid imagination. Maybe Vince was looking at it from a kid’s perspective. He’d left Brighton at eighteen and never really returned. Machin had stayed, still lived and worked in the town, and knew Jack personally. To Machin, maybe he was just another villain, more successful than most but still just a villain. Fallible, not invincible. Not a young man any more.

Vince drained his club soda and asked a more sober question: ‘Any clues to who the body was?’

Machin took a large gulp of his pint and shook his head. ‘Not a clue, son. And we can’t keep it on ice forever. He’ll be going in the ground this week.’

Vince picked up the autopsy photos for a closer look. The headless and handless corpse on the white slab. The smooth
hairless
chest, with skin like a woman. But even dead, and his body decomposing, Vince could detect the musculature of a strong, sinewy type. He looked like an athlete, yet the report revealed that his liver showed fatty deposits, early signs of cirrhosis, and there were shadows on his lungs. A heavy drinker and smoker, then. Vince thought about the victim and, as with the girl on the silver screen, tried to give him life. A history, a story. Maybe it was because he couldn’t see his face, his eyes, but he drew blanks this time. The victim remained faceless and lifeless.

‘Even when you’re dead, you’re still not out of breath,’ remarked Vince. ‘And with all the gases that build up in a body buried at sea, there’s more than enough to float you to the top even if you’re weighed down. Pros usually stab the chest, puncture the lungs, to let all the air out, so you drop like a stone. And, let’s face it, we’ve got to have Jack pegged as a pro, right?’

Machin nodded in agreement.

Vince ran the tip of his forefinger around the corpse in the photograph. ‘No chest wounds on our boy. My guess, he was meant to be found. And planted with a knife with prints on it.’

‘Only trace prints. Nothing to get too excited about, son.’

‘Even so, how hard is it to wipe a knife clean? Then it’s sealed and taped to the body? Whoever did this, wanted us to know who did it – or else frame someone for it.’

Machin didn’t look convinced. He drained his pint and wiped his mouth with the back of his meaty hand.

Just then, the pub door swung open and a suited man lurched in. He was in his mid to late twenties, his freckled face topped off with bright ginger hair that had been dulled down with fistfuls of Brylcreem. Flushed, redder than usual for a redhead, he looked as if he’d just beaten Bannister’s record by running up the hill from the station on Edward Street. He was a copper, and it was urgent. He gave Shirley, with her bawdy banter, a swerve and came straight over to Machin.

‘Vince, meet Ginge, our copper-topped copper,’ said Machin, giving Vince his now customary nod and a wink. ‘He’s a good boy, local, give you all the help you need with the new faces in town. What’s up, Ginge?’

Ginge was still catching his breath as he told him, ‘Bodies.’

Three of them. Two white men and a half-caste girl, but all reduced to the same waxy, junkie pallor. What little colour they had in their faces had left them the minute they’d taken the lethal dose of heroin. Hard to age, early twenties maybe, but they looked as if they’d already lived a lifetime – and all of it bad. Undernourished and frayed-looking, with dried foam around their mouths, vomit on their clothing. Two blood-stained syringes on the ash-smeared oatmeal carpet.

Vince bent down for a closer look. The pretty half-caste girl wore her nails long and painted letter-box red, but they were now hanging from her fingertips by bloody threads. Two nails
completely
off, embedded into the carpet. They looked like falsies but weren’t, which meant she’d obviously tried to dig her way out of the misery and pain she suffered just before the heroin finally dragged her under.

He stood up and looked around the Kemp Town bedsit. Not even a bed, just a sit. A green vinyl sofa sagged on the floor, with yellow foam bulging out of the tears. A beaten-up leather
patchwork
pouffe with its kapok guts hanging out. The floor was littered with sweet and chocolate-bar wrappers. Mars bars, Bounties, Opal Fruits and Crunchies had been on the menu – junkie diet.

The main feature of the room was a big shiny hi-fi, a small stack of 45s and 33s beside it. Everything else was fixed to the walls: fireplace, central-heating radiators, empty shelves, a small green-streaked washbasin in the corner. A hundred-watt naked light bulb hung from the ceiling, to throw a brutal light on the death scene. It was like a place to shoot heroin in the comfort of not being in your own home. A horse stable but little more.

Machin was holding up a small cellophane wrap of tarry-black nuggets in some tweezers. He dropped this in a plastic evidence bag.

‘What a bloody mess,’ he said, handing Vince the baggie. ‘Not seen this stuff before. The gear we see is usually just a dirty white powder.’

Vince inspected the nuggets. The sample had an organic purity about it, more like black Moroccan hashish. ‘IDs?’ he asked.

‘A woman downstairs says she’d seen the bloke with the beard coming in and out, but didn’t know who actually lived here. Said they made a racket, playing their music all night.’

Vince gazed down at the bloke with the beard. Not much of a beard, not much of a bloke. Looked like he weighed about eight stone. Stained drainpipe jeans, scuffed winkle-picker boots, a turtleneck jumper with holes. A vague stab at the Beatnik look, perhaps? But, by the tracks on his arms, Vince could tell he was already a seasoned junkie who’d let the fashion plate, along with everything else in his life, slide off the table.

Photos were taken of the bodies and the room. What evidence there was there was gathered. Then the three corpses on the floor were bundled on to stretchers, strapped and carted off for
autopsies
and toxicology reports. Simple: death by misadventure and desperation.

‘The whole building belongs to a Paul DeGelb,’ said Machin. ‘You heard of him?’

Vince nodded. ‘Slum landlord in Notting Hill. Crossed his path when I was working out of Shepherd’s Bush. DeGelb probably owns the freehold, but can’t shift the tenants downstairs who’ve been there for years. You gradually get them out by turning the place into a shit hole. Get some junkies living in the building, up all night, playing loud music, pissing the other tenants off. They soon enough sell up or leave.’

‘Well, he’s started buying property down here. Got some other places in the Avenues.’

Vince kneeled down to flip open the lid of the hi-fi. The
long-playing
33 record on the turntable was Rachmaninoff’s
Third Piano Concerto
. ‘Not exactly soothing rhythms to nod out to, this. They look like they’d be more into Bob Dylan,’ he observed. He then flicked through the stack of records. Some were by bands of the day, loud and electric; some were brass-band marching music; also a recording of animal noises and a recording of Donald Wolfit’s selected Shakespeare monologues. A disparate collection, certainly, but all with one element in common: loud and annoying.

Vince picked up a 45 by a band called The Shakers, five quiffed youths wielding washboards, kazoos and a tea chest. Obviously they were a skiffle band. Vince recognized one of the
chubby-cheeked
smilers on the cover as the dead Beatnik found lying on the carpet. Vince flipped the record and checked his ID. ‘Chas Starlight, he was calling himself back then,’ said Vince, handing the record over to Machin. ‘Not a lot of Starlight left now.’

‘Dominate Records,’ said Machin, reading the label. ‘They must have been one of Dickie Eton’s outfits.’ Vince recognized the name. ‘Eton lives down here,’ said Machin. He clicked his fingers for recall. ‘What’s the name of that singer, the fella with the big lips?’

Vince gave a
how the fuck should I know
shrug and offered, ‘Nat King Cole?’

‘Like the Beatles.’

‘The Rolling Stones?’

‘That’s the ones. I heard they wanted Eton to manage them and produce all their records. Eton turned them down. Shrewd move if you ask me. They won’t last.’

* * *

The main incident room at Edward Street police station was all about the Kemp Town three. It was a frenzy of ringing phones and activity: coppers getting a run on where the syringes were supplied; who was out there dealing, and how much of the lethal stuff was on the street.

The heroin had been sent off to the lab for toxicology reports, but just the very raw tarriness of it told Vince that it was pure. Too pure for street consumption. It should have been cut, cut, then cut again. With quinine, laxative or talc. Whoever had
supplied
it didn’t know what the fuck they had, or what they were doing, and neither did the three who took it. Death by misadventure it may have been, but three of them made it a headline-grabbing incident. Questions were being asked:
Does Brighton have a drug problem?
Whilst pills were frowned on, they were understood and semi-tolerated. From dodos in the morning medicine cabinets to dexies in the all-night dance halls, it seemed that in 1964 everyone needed a livener. But this was heroin … Blood. Fire. Needles. Nodding zombies. Oblivion. Death. No one understood it. Bad for the image of the town, even for a town that thrived on having a bad image.

So it was all being kept very much on the QT. The blessed fourth estates weren’t being told it was heroin, but amphetamines, pills of some description. Because three dead in a seedy bedsit on heroin – that
was
going to put a dent in the day-tripper trade. The body on the beach was on the back burner. It had slipped out of the public’s consciousness like it had slipped off the front page. No one really cared about it now, headless/handless/horrific or not. It was an old case already, left to Vince to keep it alive before it completely slipped off the dial and into a sealed file. Those kids slipping their mortal coils on hard drugs, that’s what had seized the Brighton constabulary’s attention now. The papers would lap it up. A sign of the times. The new scourge. The new plague! And that’s where Machin was, too, downstairs giving a press conference with his Supe and the Chief Inspector.

Vince was sitting in Machin’s office, drinking tea, looking at mugshots and reading the reports on the case. He’d also dug up some info on Dickie Eton, real name Neville Roper. A prodigious and precocious talent, and a millionaire before he was twenty-five. Pushy parents from Peacehaven had put their boy on the stage. A talent scout spotted him at Worthing rep, and he was signed up to the Rank Oganization. This slender hoity-toity boy was
marketed
at first as the new Freddie Bartholomew, and renamed ‘Dickie Eton’. Lots of Little Lord Fauntleroy roles in comedies and musicals. He was also a teenage recording star with four
top-ten
hits.

But Rank’s plans for Dickie to grow into as big a star as Dirk Bogarde never materialized. He stopped short of becoming a grown-up matinee or pop-idol stardom when he stopped
growing
. At five foot three inches he was never going to cut it in the big time. He stayed stunted and got bitter and twisted. But he was determined – determined to wreak revenge on all those who scoffed and saw him as a spent force.

He started working for promoter Larry Parnes as a talent spotter in the music business. Larry taught him artist management, looked on him as a son. Then he started working with the record producer, Joe Meek, and learned the production side of the
business
. Meek, a raging homosexual, looked on him as something a little bit more than a son.

Dickie persevered. He picked their brains. Then he picked them dry. He took their best clients and set up his own record label in Denmark Street, as Dominate Records. His trademark ‘Sea of Swirl’ producing style, with its swirling percussions and strings, led to many a hit with a stable of girl groups: The Heart Stoppers, The Head Spinners, The Hard-Ons, The Wolf Whistles, The Pick-Ups, The One Night Stands and The Morning Afters. And when the boys became more popular than the girls, he
manufactured
four-piece Mod bands: The Blues, The Bombers, The Bennies, The Dexies, The Lines, The Head Cases and The Heart Attacks. He had made his fortune.

Vince didn’t find any criminal record there, or mugshots of Dickie Eton. He was, if not totally straight, then certainly undetected.

But there were plenty of Jack’s associates found among the serried ranks of mugshots. And way down the list was a petty criminal called Vaughn Treadwell. His record had him pegged as a lowlife, but Vince had him pegged as his brother – older by a year. Painful reading. More often in prison than out. Not because of the severity or audacity of his crimes, but because he just kept getting caught. Pulling the same stunts now as when he was still fourteen. Chance burglaries, ill-thought-out warehouse lifts, and misjudged muggings where, chances were, he’d end up as the victim and receive a good hiding. It would be comical if it wasn’t so true – and if he wasn’t Vince’s brother.

Then, way back up the top of the list, to the face he’d been avoiding. The real horror story, looking into the face of Jack’s deeds. The man who, as a kid, had put the fear of Christ into him. He turned the pages and found a mugshot of Henry ‘Redskin’ Pierce. Pierce had picked up the nickname Redskin during his wrestling career, since his costume and character of choice was Red Indian. Some said he even had genuine Sioux blood in him, and others said it was because of the razor and knife cuts he’d picked up over his long and violent criminal career. They had never really healed, remaining flushed and fulsome. Against his
sallow
bloodless complexion, his scars looked like sets of red lipstick kisses.

It was Pierce who did Jack’s bidding. It was Pierce who was the visible one. He collected. He delivered. He maimed. He sent out the message. The wrong look in a packed pub always led to the same thing, some luckless mug lurching around with half his face on the floor, asking himself what the fuck he’d done to deserve that! Nothing, was the answer, because Pierce would have done it anyway. He decided on the looks that you were giving him, even if you weren’t looking at him, even if you were twenty feet away with twenty people between you and facing in the other direction, minding your own fucking business. Because he could. Because it sent out a message: ‘You think I’m your worst
nightmare
, you should meet Jack.’

Tony Machin bowled into the office, and went straight for the filing cabinet to retrieve a quart of whisky. He poured two shots into two chipped white-enamelled tin mugs, and took what looked like a well-deserved swig.

‘Did the press buy it?’ asked Vince.

‘Buy what?’ asked Machin, distracted as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘That they OD’d on bad pills.’

‘They bought it. We told them they were small-time dealers from out of town, and the pills were homemade. Said we found a chemistry set and a small press for making the pills. They’d obviously got their chemistry wrong and “paid a price for their irresponsible foolishness”.’

Vince gave an approving nod. ‘That should hold them.’

Machin shook his head sceptically. ‘You might be able to bury this sort of stuff in London but down here – they’ll be all over it. Headlines tomorrow, read all about it: “Is Brighton the new drugs capital of England? Are we out of control? Are we becoming like America? Lock up your daughters!”’

Vince laughed, but wasn’t really listening. He was still studying the mugshot of Henry Pierce. One good eye staring out; one
sitting
there dead like a big streaky dobber.

Machin kept on with his public outcry shtick. ‘Oh, and that other piece of crap they trot out every time something goes wrong in this town: “Brighton used to be such a
nice
place.” Who are they kidding? It’s never been a
nice
place. That’s the appeal!’ He then came and stood over Vince and followed his gaze. ‘Henry “Redskin” Pierce. Old Crazy Horse. Forget him, son. The mad Indian’s retired.’

‘Is it true about him being a Red Indian?’ asked Vince,
looking 
up at Machin. ‘I thought he just used to wrestle dressed up as one?’

‘He did – until he almost killed a geezer. But legend has it he really has got Indian blood in him.’

Vince looked doubtful. ‘I think Tonto’s been speaking with forked tongue, kemo sabe.’

‘Either way, he’s gone back to the reservation. He’s holed up in a retirement home for the blind. Lost the sight in his one good eye.’

Vince couldn’t resist a smirk. ‘What happened?’

‘Not much. No one took it out, as much as I wish they had. He just went blind, about six months ago.’

‘Maybe that eye lost the will to live after all the shit it had seen.’

‘Yeah, maybe, son. Maybe,’ said Machin, handing Vince a mug of whisky.

‘You forget, I don’t drink.’

‘Oh, yeah. Hard to get my nut around that one, son – a copper who doesn’t drink.’ He poured Vince’s into his own. ‘Waste not, want not.’ Machin leaned against the filing cabinet. ‘Anyway, Henry Pierce is finished, out of commission. Wouldn’t surprise me if someone tops him soon.’ He smiled at the thought. ‘Revenge for all the years of grief he’d doled out. Especially now Jack’s not here to look after him.’