The One a Month Man (7 page)

‘The decision’s all yours,’ I said, equably.

‘Just what the fuck do you want, exactly?’

‘Easy,’ I said, placidly. ‘The last contact number you had for her. An address. Anything that puts me on to her scent. Perhaps she was friendly with other girls who worked for you.’

‘She could be dead. She could have gone to the moon. Ever thought of that?’

‘Constantly. Now, are you going to deliver? Get me what I’m after and I’ll be gone, like a passing cloud, without the need to rain on your bedroom party.’

‘Wait there. And keep your hands off my belongings. No bigger thieves in this world than cops. Especially Met cops.’

He exited the room sulkily, slamming the door behind him, as if using a nutcracker on a sensitive area of my anatomy. I heard him shouting at his frustrated lay. ‘Get yourself a fucking drink! I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve got rid of this shite. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the door.’

More than half an hour elapsed before Cullis stomped into the room, sweating as if he’d been to the gym or a workout with the bedroom athlete upstairs, rather than just rummaging through mouldering storage. He was clutching a sheet of paper. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ I responded, combatively. With
cockroaches
like Cullis, it was imperative to retain the initiative at all costs and never to give him any slack.

Squinting, as if myopic, he read from the sepia paper. ‘She was shacked-up in Paddington. 59 B, Corsham Gardens.’

‘A flat?’ I said, reflexly, as I jotted down the address in my police-issue flip-over notepad.

‘How the fuck should I know? I wasn’t screwing her, if that’s what you’re fishing for.’

‘The grubby thought never crossed my mind,’ I said, which was true. ‘How about a phone number?’

‘Yeah, but what use is that going to be to you thirty years on? Back then it was pigeon-post and jungle drums.’

‘Just give … please.’ The
please
was rather belated, a minimal concession to civility.

‘Here, read it for yourself,’ he said, holding the sheet of paper to my face, rather than admitting that his eyesight was less than perfect. He probably had glasses, but was too vain to wear them in company.

I knew Corsham Gardens. Only a few weeks earlier I’d made an arrest there, but it was at an even-numbered property. Three decades ago, Corsham Gardens would have been considered a seedy part of town, just a five-minute walk north-west from the railway station. All types of hookers, pimps, drug-dealers and other shady characters had inhabited the ineptly named Corsham Gardens, where there hadn’t been a blade of grass, not even in the backyards of the Victorian houses. Litter in the gutters included used condoms. Since then, the area had been given a long-overdue facelift; major cosmetic surgery. It still wasn’t even a poor relation of Mayfair, but neither was it home to mayhem. Villains continued to live there, but probably not as many as in snooty Mayfair. White-collar villains; hackers and counterfeiters of designer clothes. Villains who were secretly admired by juries.

‘Did she mix with other girls on the agency’s books?’

‘I don’t have that information. The girls didn’t mix. I mean, it wasn’t a mother’s union. Most of ’em didn’t know who else was on our books. Why should they have done? It was none of their business. As long as they got work that’s all they cared about.’

Made sense, but I didn’t concede that. ‘What about a
photograph
?’

If looks really could kill, it would have been a good idea for me to keep a finger on my pulse.

‘You want blood?’

‘No, just a piccie.’

‘They’ve been kept separate from the CV files.’

‘So everything
has
been preserved,’ I observed,
semi-triumphal.

‘Not everything. It means another trip to the cellar.’

‘I’m obliged,’ I said, leaving him no bolthole.

‘You look it!’ he boiled. The door was slammed so hard this time that the window rattled as if a twister was scything through the area.

Cullis wasn’t absent as long as previously. Held in
tobacco-stained
fingers was a faded black and white pin-up shot of an extremely attractive young woman. He turned it over before handing it to me, as if double-checking the name that had been pencilled on the back. ‘You’ve got everything now, so you can push off,’ he said, churlishly.

I smiled again, this time indulgently.

Tina Marlowe was posing provocatively, bending forwards, so that her minuscule bra hardly tethered her substantial breasts, even the nipples were semi-exposed. Her underwear was white and lacy, but her stockings and suspenders were dark,
presumably
black, though, in mono, one could never be definite about colours. Stilettos streamlined her legs, serving as extensions, a prosthesis, to her lower limbs, making her appear much taller than she really was. Her mouth had also been artificially enlarged by the excessive application of garish lipstick, and the
indiscriminate
use of mascara gave her panda eyes. The banana held to her lips, Deep Throat-fashion, required no explanation. Her long, glossy black hair, probably a wig, cascaded over her face.

In the photo, Tina was billed unimaginatively as ‘Luscious Lolita’, plus her measurements, which most likely had a parallel in creative accountancy.

‘Is this what potential clients would have seen?’ I said.

‘I guess,’ he answered, indifferently, shrugging;
haemorrhaging
boredom.

I thought of Tina’s father turning over the pages and coming face-to-face with this salacious image of his daughter and trying to reconcile it with the angelic innocence in his deluded mind’s eye. His little girl. His princess. Miss Perfect. The daughter with the world at her feet, about to climb life’s mountain, up and up into rarefied air. But what goes up must come down. What a fall, even before she’d risen beyond base camp. And hard to explain after what she had been through at the hands of a warped male. But we all had different random recipes for survival, many of them inexplicable and irrational; highlighting the difference between machines and humans.

Mr Marlowe had died long before he’d jumped in front of a train. He must have been dead inside from the moment he saw the daughter he did not recognize; the stranger who had become a lodger inside her body. Body-snatching was as prevalent as it ever was. And the Devil was the fugleman among the snatchers. But this was no occasion for brooding sentimentality or
psychoanalysis
.

‘Who manned the office in those days?’

‘Which days?’ he stalled.

‘I’ll rephrase: who manned the office when this woman, Tina Marlowe, was tarting for your company?’

‘No one
manned
it. My wife-to-be was what you might loosely call front-of-house.’

‘The one who’s now in hospital with a broken leg?’

‘Yeah, what of it?’

‘Nothing. Just thinking, who said the institution of marriage had passed its sell-by date? Perhaps I should have a word with your wife.’

Now he eyed me owlishly. ‘Is that some kind of threat?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, oozing innocence, but I could tell he wasn’t
the least assuaged. ‘I’m assuming she had more day-to-day
dealings
with the working girls than you did, that’s all.’

Anger flared in his shifty eyes at my reference to
working girls,
but he resisted more squabbling.

‘She won’t remember any more than I do. This is insane.’

‘No harm in my trying,’ I persisted, mulishly. ‘You know how we work. Plod on ticking boxes.’

‘Yeah, I know only too well how you
work
,’ he said, sourly, giving me a shot of childish pleasure.

Strange how two people could have a conversation and the intimidation by one and the fear of the other were kept under the surface, like the hidden danger of a Titanic iceberg. There was no necessity for me to say, ‘And while I’m asking your wife questions about Tina Marlowe, I’m sure I’ll be able to slip in a reference to the young woman you’ve got on hold upstairs.’ We read each other’s murky minds as easily as computing the
headlines
of a red-top.

‘Which hospital is she in? The Royal Bournemouth or Poole General? I‘ll take a bunch of flowers with me, say they’re from her loving husband.’

‘I’d be obliged if you left her out of this,’ he said, pleadingly, and suddenly finding some civility.

‘Well, that depends….’

We eyeballed one another for half a minute or so, in the manner of mongoose versus cobra, before he said, yielding, ‘I might be able to give you a lead, after all.’

I refrained from the smugness of a poker player who has bluffed his way to the pot.

‘I always made it policy to treat the girls’ private lives in the strictest confidence,’ he said, as a face-saving preamble before the climbdown. ‘I got to hear lots of things, but they stayed
here
.’ He tapped his head, alluding to a brain, yet another ludicrous boast. ‘Most of the girls, I forget; and that’s the truth.’

‘But not Tina Marlowe,’ I said, finally abandoning sarcasm.

‘She called about a year after walking out.’

‘Called
you?’

‘Not me personally; the agency. Spoke with Simone.’

‘Your wife?’

‘She wasn’t then; is now. Tina had run out of money. Old story. Didn’t fancy office work or serving the pig-ignorant public in a shop.’

‘So she wanted you to bail her out?’

‘She didn’t come begging; that wasn’t her style. She wanted to know if she might be considered for special assignments.’

‘What’s a
special assignment
in your trade? Something like the special of the day at a greasy spoon joint or spicy takeaway?’

‘Only the best got special assignments.’

‘And how did you define
best
?’

‘A combination of brain and beauty. Tina was classy, all right. Very switched on. Really savvy. And as for looks, well, you can see for yourself. She had it all. Special clients would hire a girl for a weekend, or to take on holiday, perhaps on a yacht in the Mediterranean, or just for a one-off important event. Like a couple of times we had girls booked by wannabe Conservative MPs who needed female decoration at their side at candidate selection meetings.’

‘Posing as their wives?’ I said, incredulously.

‘No, just girlfriends, but giving the impression they were an item, with wedding bells possibly soon to be ringing.’

‘What did you say to Tina?’

‘That I’d bear her in mind. Couldn’t promise anything. She gave me a number to call her on.’

‘But not the one you’ve just given me?’ I challenged him.

‘No, she’d moved,’ he said, sheepishly.

‘I’m guessing something did turn up for her?’

‘About a week later, yeah. A new client. A Russian. An attaché at the Soviet Embassy. The Berlin Wall hadn’t yet been
bulldozed.
East was East and West was West. The big thaw was still some way off.’

‘Attaché was the cover name for spy, when it came to the Soviets,’ I said, conversationally now, even agreeably.

‘I keep out of politics; always have.’

‘So what did this attaché want,
specifically
?’

‘Good company for a weekend in the country. Intelligent conversationalist. Someone attentive. A good listener.’

‘And you thought of Tina?’

‘Not immediately.’

‘Why think of doing her a favour? She’d quit.’

‘She had class. None of our other girls had ever been to university, not even to them redbrick gaffs, let alone Oxford. Blimey! I mean, the others hadn’t even changed trains there.’

‘So Tina got the
special assignment
?’

‘I resurrected her photo and CV, inserting them in my A-list album, and left it to the Russki to make his choice. I didn’t lean on him. There was nothing in it for me to push Tina. We’d get our money whichever girl he got the hots for.’

‘And he went for Tina?’

‘No contest. “That’s the one for me,” he said. It must have been a Thursday because he wanted the booking to run from Friday evening through to Monday morning.’

‘A long haul,’ I observed, deadpan. Non-judgmental.

‘Longer than you think….’

Surprisingly, he had me hooked now. ‘Go on,’ I said, without a clue where this was heading.

‘I called Tina, said I might have something for her. She wanted details; usual drill. I told her the punter was a Russki.’

‘How did that play with her?’

‘No problem. She’d already been with the League of Nations; Arabs to Amazonians. She did ask what his English was like. I told her it was better than most Brits; certainly better than mine, which didn’t carry too much weight.’ Self-deprecation didn’t
suit him and he was awkward with it, because it was so forced.

‘Of course she wanted briefing on the arrangements,’ he went on, smirking unpleasantly.

‘Which were?’

‘She should come to the office for 6 p.m., when Simone would introduce them. “Pack enough things for the weekend,” I told her. I honestly didn’t know at that stage too much about what the Russki had in mind. My policy was not to ask too many questions. The less you know, the less you could be
incriminated
. ’Course, the girls were always fussing about what they should wear, which was a good attitude, really something I encouraged. It showed they cared about the impression they made, flying the flag of the agency.’

Dropping their knickers instead of hoisting the banner,
I thought mischievously.
A new take on patriotism.
He really did believe he’d been at the helm of Britain’s call-girl flagship.

‘Did she press you further?’

‘Naturally … about the most important issue of all: the dosh. She whistled when I told her the Russki had agreed to pay her a grand, and that was before any extras she might negotiate with him, which was nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course not,’ I said, my sneer camouflaged.

‘A grand was a helluva bundle of moolah all those years ago. In a weekend, she’d be pocketing a third of the average national annual income. But after her initial reaction, she became
suspicious
. She began wondering what the punter would expect for such a hefty outlay. She said something like, “Is he a kinky perv?”’