‘The Western Union was running raves, or doing the security for other outfits. When they came to visit me, they were saying: what a fucking unbelievable buzz out there. They were telling me that the energy was incredible. I was banged up, so I had time to be cynical. They believed Manchester was on the edge of some great new experience. I thought they’d got religious. They were telling me that even at City, all the casuals were doing acid. At evening matches, they were so busy tripping off on the lights and dancing around, they didn’t even notice there was a game on. I watched some of it on telly. The whole of City’s end were waving giant inflatable bananas – and with the hoods pulled up on their tops, they looked like a crowd of psychedelic monks: the Brotherhood of The Day-Glo Banana.’
Michael took another long draw.
‘I read about some fans travelling over to Europe on the ferries. They had some kind of rave on board, but when they arrived in Ostend, there were three missing. They’d disappeared halfway across the Channel. You never know where you’re going to end up on a trip. Acid’s a white man’s drug, anyway. You don’t get brothers trying acid more than once, unless they’re already crazy.
‘You know what it means to be black. You’re scared of insanity. Maybe white men get it too – I wouldn’t know, maybe some of them. Half of them are already mad. The reason they’re not scared of it – they are mad already. Let them fry on acid, they can relax and enjoy it. But a brother knows what it’s like to be terrified of going insane. The one thing you can’t let happen is lose your head and let the demons get hold of you. It doesn’t matter where a brother’s from, he knows.
‘A brother can’t do acid, he can’t touch psychedelics. A brother can’t mess with his head because he’s already got the fear of insanity etched on the inside of his black skull. If he took a trip, he might believe he’s gone insane and end up mad, anyway. And he can’t get that knowledge out of his head.’
Now he looked over to Estela: ‘Is that what you’re trying to do, now that you’ve switched sex? Are you trying to erase that fear? You thought that if you were a woman you’d be able to wipe out the nightmares. You thought: yeah, a bubble-head, a brainless bimbo. There’ll never be any reason to think, you believed you’d be safe.’
‘You’re getting too personal, Michael.’ Estela held her voice steady, while she held firm on Michael’s eyes. ‘I don’ want bad blood between us.’
‘You were always an airhead, you hadn’t got the fucking brains to recognise the terrors. Now you come back here, and the only thing you want is for me to find you a gun. Is that because you’re missing your cock already?’
‘I never had any reason to miss my cock,’ said Estela. ‘And I never thought of any woman as an airhead. Whatever I was, whether I was scared of ending up mad or not, I never believed women were the brainless ones - not like you and your boys.’
‘I’ve learnt differently, now.’
‘You learnt differently, because you had to learn. I never had to learn, I knew which direction I was heading in. And one more thing, before we close this business and I forget everything you said,’ Estela took a long count, knowing that Michael would not be able to speak no matter the length of her pause, ‘the reason I was never scared, I had faith in my destiny.’
‘Destiny shit.’
‘I’m warning you, Michael. You insult me, but you don’ insult my religion.’
‘Who are you, Santos Mother Theresa of the Silicone Tits?’
‘Yes.’ Pause. ‘Now pass the Rizlas over and I’ll give them my blessing.’
Chapter Fifteen
Junk stepped out of the squad car on to the hard ridged floor of the underground carpark. Squatting above him were the million stone tons of the Greater Manchester Police Headquarters, Old Trafford. Walking beneath the low ceiling of the causeway, he could feel every gramme of dust in every stone poised over his head. DC Havers shadowed him on his blind side. DS Mayhew tagged him on his right, past neat rows of Peugeot 30-somethings parked nose to the wall, all identical to the car that brought him to Old Trafford.
At the sunlit mouth to the carpark, a crowd of policemen were gathered around a boxy slate grey van, cables spilling out of its open doors and an antenna fixed to its roof.
DS Mayhew said, ‘See that. That’ll be the BBC.’
DC Havers wanted to know if it was TV or radio. Neither of them knew.
The two detectives had introduced themselves on the drive to Old Trafford. Then they had asked about Estela. Junk had told them he didn’t know her. She was some Brazilian tourist, wasn’t she? Mayhew said they had been unable to find her at the address she had given.
‘So you went to find me instead?’
That was when Havers remembered to radio base: they had located Mr John Quay at the Howdam Street bar. Surveillance would no longer be necessary, either at his flat or his place of work.
Junk said, ‘You had an all-points out on me?’
Mayhew said, ‘We don’t use that terminology. We prioritised you.’
Havers and Mayhew’s new priority seemed to have something to do with the BBC van. They joined the crowd of uniforms and gathered around it, sharing coffee out of polystyrene cups. An older policeman, a Detective Inspector with a greying face and yellow hair, surprised Junk by asking if he’d noticed the other van in the corner. He pointed the way with the edge of a clipboard. Junk followed the line and saw a decrepit van, smaller than the BBC’s.
‘It’s a breakfast television crew that arrived earlier. Actually, I’d say they were a bit incompetent. What happened, they knocked the satellite aerial off as they drove into the carpark. I heard they were still looking for a repair man.’
Junk said something, perhaps oh yes? He couldn’t say for certain. He did know Detective Inspector Green.
‘You know a bit about TV, don’t you Mr Quay? Maybe you should help them. Once you’ve finished helping us with our inquiries.’
Junk nodded. Yeah. Perhaps.
DI Green’s eyes were back on the television people. ‘I tell you, it’s been non-stop since about midnight. First the kid gets topped at your place. Then this Paki restaurant gets shot up. I tell you, it’s a fucking nightmare. In the last ten hours, I’ve had to write five different press releases. Two of them were scrapped because they were already out-of-date. Another got binned because the people in DTP forgot to send copies to the Chief Constable and it was decided that if he hadn’t seen it then no one else could either. We’ve got a press conference coming up in ten minutes and I’ve got no fucking idea who’s going to present that.’
Junk hadn’t heard of the DTP. He was told it stood for desktop publishing.
‘You sound as though you’re run off your feet, Mr Green. Have you made progress with the case?’
‘We’ve found that the boy in the Gravity was transsexual. Traces of drugs in his stomach were discovered to be a commercial female hormone compound used by people in the process of a sex-change operation.’ DI Green read the relevant information off a sheet he had clipped to a board.
Junk said, That sounds like news.’
‘It was to his parents. His mother was quite upset. Actually, we were lucky there. We wouldn’t normally get results on the tests so quickly. But when the doctor cut him open, be found a quantity of undigested pills in the victim’s stomach. He must have taken them just before his death. That was useful because it gives us a tight window on the shooting. Of course, no one heard the bang but the music is so bloody loud in those places. As you’d know.’
Junk looked DI Green in the face. The man had been waiting for him, lurking in the carpark. His clipboard ready.
‘You’ve been working the clubs for some time now, haven’t you, Mr Quay? Looking at your record, I’d say you’ve been involved in the Manchester scene since you were fifteen years old. You were a fucking early developer. Although you seem to have slowed down over the past ten years. We’ve got nothing recent on you and what we do have is mostly possession of amphetamine sulphate.’
‘I was a pretty heavy user.’
‘You’re not fucking kidding. You were a regular Billy Whizz. Looking at your files brought it all back. I’d just started working in Manchester, then. I remember there was a huge raid over in Rochdale, acting on information received. We thought we were going to find a European amphetamine mountain. But all we got were traces. Didn’t we try and fit you up for something anyway, manufacturing or supplying or something?’
‘I think there was an idea I knew more about it than I was saying. If I talked, they’d see what they could do. If I didn’t, I’d be in shit.’
‘Yeah, yeah, it’s coming back now. Some of the cops back in the seventies, unbelievable. In a way, you had to admire them, they were total scum. I loved it when I was a young copper; it was like being in the middle of an American film.’
Junk wasn’t so keen at the time.
DI Green turned his sheet over. ‘Well you got away with it. No time in prison, psychiatric reports, that’s it. They decided you were too unstable to give evidence. The shrinks said – what was it? I know I’ve just read it – serious psychotic episodes.’
Junk remembered some of them, not all.
‘And you still work for John Burgess, who was the man we reckoned was behind the whole thing.’
Junk said, ‘He’s straight now.’
‘Oh, forget it. Water under the bridge. I bet he’s embarrassed by this shooting, though. That must spoil the spotless image.’
Junk wondered how long this would go on for.
‘I don’t suppose you know how we could contact Ms Estela Santos? We’ve had a couple of boys sat outside her place since early morning but without luck. We’ve staked out the airport, station, whatever. You wouldn’t believe the amount of manpower we’ve put on it. Womanpower, too. Still, we’ve got the resources. That’s one thing that’s different to when I started. Now, just about every other person you meet is a copper. There are millions of us, I swear. You can almost imagine why the old coppers were such bastards, they were working themselves into the ground. Most of them ended up being thrown out or retired off, they were uncontrollable. You’ve got to laugh, I mean, we should have sent them for psychiatric evaluation instead of you.’
DI Green had a reputation as something of a throwback. Junk thought that he wouldn’t have looked out of place with the police who used to work him over in the past, after 3 a.m. busts. He could almost taste the rubber-metallic sheen that came off the hoses as they laid into him. The rubber of the hose, the metallic smell of his own blood, streaming from his mouth or choking below the surface of the skin – without the skin ever breaking.
‘This Brazilian bird is a mystery. It seems her passport is genuine but it has her down as a man. We almost didn’t notice. In a sense the bureaucracy here is a blessing; Miss Santos’s papers were checked so many times, eventually someone noticed the gender anomaly. Do you suppose John Caxton wasn’t in fact transsexual? That he’d taken Miss Santos’s pills by mistake? I suppose someone should get on the phone to his mum and explain that he might not have been a bender after all.’
*
Junk was taken to another room. Dl Green had decided that whatever Mr John Quay chose to tell a police officer in the course of his investigations, it should go straight on to tape.
‘It’s more of a legal requirement, all this taping of everything, having it typed in triplicate. I tell you, the amount of initialling every scrap of paper received – unbelievable. But if it guards your civil liberties, Mr Quay, I think we’re agreed it’s a bloody good thing.’
Junk looked at the wall behind DI Green’s head, wondering if the matrix of cracks that ran beneath the white paint could map out a new strategy. Overlooked by Junk, DI Green’s junior partner placed a clean cassette in the machine on the table and pressed Record. The tape had been running five minutes but no one had yet asked a question. DI Green spent the time shuffling through a stack of computer print-out. When he looked up, all he said was, ‘They take some reading.’ He flicked to the front sheet and tapped the title page. ‘Burgess’s record as an entrepreneur and nightclub promoter. All of it fucking hearsay. What they call inadmissible. But I can summarise.
‘It was said, at the time, half the reason for Mr Burgess’s success was that he used his clubs to launder money. There were rumours, as I recall. For instance, that he enjoyed the protection of a group of, shall we say, businessmen. What I would call old lags, slags and blaggers. But, so the rumour goes, by the mid-seventies the money came from drugs. Mostly from Burgess’s own drugs. He was alleged to be the biggest supplier of amphetamine sulphate in the North West – and in those days, the whole of the North West ran on speed. Probably would still, if it wasn’t for newer or more fashionable pills and powders, hey, Mr Quay?’
Junk tried not to look anything. Not even expressionless, in case that was taken as insolence.
DI Green barely paused. ‘After pissing off the older guys because he refused to front for them any longer, and as a consequence of setting up on his own, John Burgess ran into some trouble – which he managed to contain thanks to the bunch of thugs he’d put on his pay roll. Chiefly, a white lad named Bernard Chadwick and a black called Michael Cross. Michael Cross was recruited off the Kippax at Manchester City, where he had a reputation as a football hooligan.’
The next pause opened out. Junk wondered if he should speak. His mouth opened but DI Green brushed it aside.
‘That’s okay, Mr Quay. I’m really only reminiscing, talking as much for myself and the young lad here,’ DI Green flapped the sheaf of computer paper he was reading from at his junior partner. ‘Where was I? Yes. By the time John Burgess got around to actually owning nightclubs on his own behalf, he had a secure business – based on locally manufactured amphetamine sulphate, known as ‘speed’, and locally produced muscle, namely black football hooligans and a crop-headed soulboy, the aforementioned Bernard Chadwick. Despite several police operations, we never found enough evidence to convict John Burgess of anything but minor infringements of the licensing laws. Although …’
DI Green began to run a short finger down a column of typeface.
‘… you spent time on remand, I believe, before finally receiving a suspended sentence.’
Junk said, ‘Suspended, yes.’
‘And another of Burgess’s associates, a Mr Paul Sorel, managed to disappear between being put on remand and going to trial. No need to keep opening and closing your mouth, Mr Quay. I’ll tell you what you’ve got to say, when the time comes to say it. For now, I’m just nattering away. I tell you, sometimes I’ve got a mouth on me I just would not believe.
‘Let’s see now. Paul Sorel. He should have faced charges of dealing, just like you. But with him, there was more evidence. You were caught with about fifteen grammes of speed. Paul Sorel was caught with about sixty grand in soiled notes and he couldn’t account for a penny of it. As I remember, our strategy rested on getting Paul Sorel to admit he was carrying the money for Burgess, that it was to be put through one of his nightclubs as legitimate revenue. But this Sorel proved to be quite a tough nut, despite being an outrageous homosexual of the effeminate tendency.’
DI Green paused: ‘How do you think that last phrase sounded, Sergeant? You’ve got to be careful how you phrase some of this stuff. But as none of this is likely to go as far as court, I suppose I don’t have to worry too much about the public hearing how the guardians of law and order talk in unguarded moments.
‘Let’s see. Paul Sorel – total wooftah, camp as Christmas and a coon to boot. That about sums him up. The shirt-lifting fairy did a flit. Now here’s my question, Mr Quay. Was Burgess pleased or dismayed when Paul Sorel disappeared?’
Junk didn’t mean to say it. It slipped out: ‘No comment.’
‘Oh, come on. Did John Burgess know Paul Sorel? You can answer that.’
‘Yes, he knew him. Paul worked at every club Burgess ran, like I did.’
‘In what capacity?’
‘Bartender,
cloakrooms, door … anything, you know.’
‘Accounts?’
‘No comment. I mean, how would I know enough to comment. I did donkey-work, some DJ-ing. I wasn’t management.’
‘Was Paul Sorel?’
‘No comment – well, I suppose you could say he was junior management.’
‘So, he was a useful associate of John Burgess. Now the question again. Was John Burgess pleased or displeased that Paul Sorel did one, at a time when he was supposed to be in Risley remand centre?’
‘How should I know. Pleased, I suppose.’
‘Why? Because Paul couldn’t testify against him?’
‘No, pleased because Paul was a friend and wouldn’t have to spend more time in Grisly Risley.’
‘So they were friends? Doesn’t that mean that John Burgess would be unhappy, because he’d lost a friend? Say, for instance, John Burgess had lost the closest friend he’d ever had and now Paul Sorel was gone, Burgess was weeping away into his lavender-scented pocket handkerchiefs. What would you say to that?’
‘No comment.’
‘Was Burgess broken-hearted?’
‘How the fuck should I know? I’m not Burgess’s confessor. What does this have to do with last night anyway? A boy was killed, that’s all. Everything you’re asking about happened twelve years ago.’
Junk was beginning to grow uneasy in his seat; the rub of the plastic seat through his trousers agitated his fleshless bones, the sharp points of his buttocks. Other sources of anxiety, besides the matt-plastic seat, were the web of lines on the painted surface of the walls and the painfully slow whirr of the tape machine as it ground through its recording. Junk hardly slept, but everyday textures assaulted him with the micro-intensity of a dream. If this were the old days, if this were the seventies, DI Green would have beaten him unconscious by now. Was that better or worse? Worse. Of course worse. When Junk thought silently to himself, and imagined two oppositional choices, he was amazed to find how often he would pick the lunatic’s alternative. He would have to watch that, that kind of tendency could end up harming him in real life. Now Mr Junk, for the ten-thousand-dollar question: will you take the holiday or push your arm into a waste disposal unit?
Acid Casuals Page 10
