The City Trap

by John Dalton

  * * *

  ‘Des still not in then, eh?’

  ‘Nah, he took the full week off.’

  ‘Can’t see him lasting much longer.’

  ‘Des’s all right. I mean, let’s face it, Dick, it’s a crap job.’

  ‘His other option seems pretty weird.’

  ‘Well, he’s still getting the phone calls.’

  ‘But does he get the dough, eh, Wayne?’

  ‘Fuck knows. But who gives a shit, let him do it.’

  ‘So where’s this bird then who’s doing his shift?’

  ‘In later, and pretty dishy too I tell you.’

  ‘Ten times better than Des.’

  ‘Phew, no comparison.’

  ‘So what you reckon your chances are?’

  ‘Fuck knows.’

  Des managed to enter the Fedora with a certain amount of style. He caught the gaze of Bogart on the wall and thought, Yeh, well, it’s only acting after all. Match in mouth, Wayne straightened up and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Give us a malt, and one for yourself,’ Des said as he plonked his camera on the bar. ‘I reckon I’ve earned some dosh today.’

  ‘Well, Jesus, this is a major happening, Des.’

  ‘See the morgue’s still empty, apart from Dick that is.’

  ‘Ha, ha.’

  ‘So what you done then, solved the perfect crime?’ Wayne flicked his match up into the air with his lips and got it into the ice bucket.

  ‘No, just done my bit for the divorce rate.’

  ‘That ain’t hard to do these days.’

  ‘Got some snaps up at the lab now. I’ll have them in an hour.’

  ‘Dirty sod. Still, you’re looking half normal, Des, and that’s a big improvement. If you got that bleeding Miranda out of your hair, well, Jesus, I wouldn’t know you.’

  ‘Don’t mention her.’

  ‘I mean,’ Dick said, trying to get in on the conversation, ‘what did happen with you and that bird?’

  ‘Don’t – mention – her!’

  Des leaned over towards Dick and fixed him with a hard stare. The work he’d done may have been troublesome but it had helped; an aspirin for the heart, and he didn’t need a meddling prat to ruin its effect.

  ‘Forget it,’ Wayne intervened. ‘A bust-up’s a bust-up, ain’t it, Des? Nothing else to it.’

  ‘Yeh, full stop to that.’ Des turned his attention back to his whisky. ‘So, Wayne, any messages for me?’

  ‘As it happens, yeh. This woman, Bertha, she wants to see you, said it was “very serious business”.’

  * * *

  Someone was having difficulty crossing the road. He was hovering hesitantly on the kerbside and looking extremely worried. But this was no inexperienced child, or an elderly guy fearful his creaky legs wouldn’t make the crossing. This was Jerry Coton and he was stoned. ‘What the hell was in that j-joint?’ he was muttering. ‘The whole w-world looks set to explode!’

  Jerry had been out for the afternoon to see a dole friend. A pleasant activity with shared joints and gallons of coffee. There was the usual half-cocked homespun philosophy and obsessive concentrations on the rhythms of rock. ‘Shiit, that bass line, it really moved!’ But on leaving for home, Jerry felt like he’d walked out into a nightmare. The trees on the streets suddenly seemed alive, with tiny eyes and limbs groping. People’s faces too seemed odd: luminescent and caricatured. As he reached the shops on the main road, a large crate of oranges on the pavement flared up like a brazier of fire. Jerry’s thoughts then were only of home, until he went to cross the road.

  ‘They’re all g-going too b-bloody fast! Well, they look slow in the d-distance but, Jesus, when they c-come up to you –’

  Jerry felt he had to talk out his thoughts just to give them some sense of reality.

  ‘That’s the b-bleedin d-drivers, though, isn’t it? They do that, ease d-down hoping you’ll take the p-plunge and then accelerate j-just to give you a scare.’

  He looked round. There were some traffic lights a short way up the road but the thought of crossing at that point made him just as nervous.

  ‘Walking out in front of revving c-cars, their eyes and feet primed for amber, then someone t-turning into the m-main road and smashing you down. No way.’

  Jerry hugged himself and shuddered. He could ask someone for help but, either way, they or him would come over weird. He looked back into the road.

  ‘Jesus, the t-tarmac, what if I went to cross and s-sank straight through?’

  * * *

  Des McGinlay sat in Daley’s wine bar and felt the tension in his shoulders. Outside, expressway traffic streaked the night with red and amber. He looked at the streams of light – could be transient firebugs flitting through tall tower moulds of ants. It’s a jungle out there after all. Des shuddered and turned his attention to the gleaming pool of whisky that sat before him. He studied its golden glow. He could almost breathe it in and he felt an acute sense of temptation. It would be easy to drift slack, drown in sorrow and blame ‘M’. A sweet fix of poison and a healthy ‘sod you’ . . . a working philosophy well enough. Des smiled but then saw the envelope of photos on the table in front of him. Now there was bitter crap. Joy, deceit and betrayal packaged 10 x 8 and barely a centimetre thick. Were they worth more than a boozy oblivion? Des didn’t get a chance to answer himself. Rebecca suddenly sat down before him.

  Rebecca, forty years old, putting on weight with butcher’s cheeks and pale grey hair, seemed nervous. She flustered about with her purse, couldn’t decide whether to get a drink and looked cagily all around her. Despite her earlier forthrightness, Des could see that this was a big moment for Rebecca. Her only marriage, maybe her only partner, she had subscribed to and believed in the Great White Wedding. Now some seedy, on-the-make jerk was going to prise her life apart. Bitter crap indeed.

  ‘S-So, I suppose you’ve found out?’

  ‘Do you really want to know? I mean, we can forget all this.’

  ‘I – I –’

  ‘Just a bit of folly. Believe me, I know. Even at forty, people do some really stupid things and the only thing you can do is forget them. I mean, I’ve got a bad memory, and my bill – well, you can just write it off as a mistake.’

  Rebecca sat and stared at Des for quite a while after that. It was somewhat disconcerting. Her head held erect and haughty but her lips and chin were quivering, seemingly about to dissolve.

  ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘N-No . . . no, I’m all right. I was just thinking about what you said.’

  ‘As I said, whatever you want to do.’

  ‘This is an important moment for me.’

  ‘I know. It’s easy to set up an investigation in anger, but it’s much harder when the results come in.’

  ‘You’re not that insensitive, are you? You seem almost decent.’

  ‘No more messed up than most.’

  ‘I suppose I could forget it and try to ignore everything that goes on behind my back.’

  ‘Oh yeh, you could. You don’t have to talk to me about easy options.’

  ‘But I have to know really, otherwise . . .’

  ‘Yeh, I guess you wouldn’t want to live with a lie.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The answer, as you’ve probably guessed, is yes. The woman is a research assistant called Naomi Kent. They have it off a few afternoons a week at her place. It’s all there in the photos, but you may not want to look. Thinking of divorce proceedings though, well, you’ve got the shit where you want him.’

  Rebecca put her hand on the envelope and tentatively tapped her fingers. Des thought her chin was really going to drop off.

  ‘God, I feel awful,’ she said.

  ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  ‘I don’t think I do want to see the photos yet.’

  ‘It can help to get pissed, you know. Makes you think about revenge, helps you murder him in your mind. It’s a way of trying to break free. I’ve been working on it myself for months now,
all that frigging pain you’ve got to shift . . .’

  But Rebecca wasn’t listening. Her eyes went off to the flow of the traffic, the tall towers where people were ants and the city was a big, lonely place.

  * * *

  As soon as he opened the door, Des knew he was in for a hard time. Brown eyes, upfront and probing, hit his own and he almost stepped backwards. Previously, he’d been eyeing up a bottle of Scotch and wondering whether he deserved some celebration. But Des couldn’t quite give himself permission. His motives for indulging seemed doubtful. That woman again. It had been stalemate until the doorbell rang.

  ‘You Des McGinlay then?’

  ‘Sure am.’

  ‘Glad I’ve found you. I’m Bertha Turton.’ Bertha looked around in a doubtful manner. ‘Thought you blokes had offices above laundrettes and the like, not pub landlords taking messages.’

  ‘I’m working on it,’ Des replied. ‘But you found me anyway.’

  Des invited Bertha in. He switched on the light in his front room and sat her down on an old easy chair. She still seemed doubtful, looking at the bare table, battered filing cabinet and sofa that filled out the rest of the room.

  ‘Yeh, this is my office,’ Des said, ‘until I get the cash together for a proper place. This, and the Fedora, which is where I kind of entertain clients.’

  ‘S’pose you have to start somewhere.’

  Bertha Turton was a tall woman. Somewhere in her mid-forties, she had a pale, attractive face, but looked pinched and drawn. Her neglected bleached hair was like grass the winter had killed. She stretched out her long legs and Des reminded himself to focus on work.

  ‘I’ve heard about you. You used to go out with Ceceline, right, but then got hooked up with a bitch called Miranda and disappeared off the scene.’

  ‘How the hell you know that?’

  ‘Just a bit of asking around. People don’t take you too seriously as a private investigator. Just someone else spinning a line, but they reckon your heart’s in the right place. They say you know how to handle yourself.’

  ‘Great. So why have you bothered coming?’

  ‘Because you are known. Because maybe I can keep an eye on you and trust you to stay on my side.’

  ‘The client is all with me, but, you know, money. The reason I don’t have much of a track record is because the people who come to me don’t have any. I’ve just wrapped up a job though.’

  Bertha’s eyes probed again and Des shifted in his seat. She smiled quietly to herself.

  ‘Whatever the rates, I have the money.’

  ‘Ah, so what’s the job?’

  ‘The biggest thing you’ve ever snooped into.’

  Prostitutes have mothers. That was the thing that lit her anger and fuelled her pride. Some dirty whore ends up dead in a lay-by. Who cares? The mother does. Bertha didn’t flinch as she told Des about the death of her daughter Claudette. The phone call from the police, the trip to the morgue, and the forensic details of her death.

  ‘It was hard, very hard; and the police were hard too, as though a prostitute’s mother didn’t count for so much.’

  ‘I read about it in the paper. I’m sorry, Bertha, I really, I mean I don’t know –’

  Des was shocked. He didn’t think he’d end up with this kind of offer of work. Missing persons, adultery – fine; but murder? Bertha seemed to sense this.

  ‘Look, you know the police aren’t going to put much energy into this, and won’t get far anyway because who’s going to talk to them?’

  ‘Yeh, but this is deep water.’

  Bertha pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose. No tears. She was resolutely, almost vindictively, calm.

  ‘But Claudette wasn’t supposed to be out on the game that night. If she was, Vin would’ve been round to protect her.’

  ‘You mean it could’ve been local, someone she knew?’

  ‘Someone I know! If it was, Des, I want that arsehole and I want him nailed.’

  ‘Have you got any other reasons to suspect . . . ?’

  ‘Yeh, she left me a parcel to look after. I opened it the other day; it had over five thousand quid in it!’

  Bertha Turton gave Des a defiant look, her brown eyes once again piercing straight into those that were blue.

  The money, was it really the money that made Des suddenly get keen? He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable that he might so easily be bought, so easily tempted into a dangerous situation. Or was it Bertha’s sudden smile? Intimate, suggestive, seen clearly and then suddenly gone.

  ‘So are you going to do the job or what?’ Bertha asked.

  6

  Des had woken with the hunger back again. A sweat and some half-muffled dream where Miranda, armed with a knife, walked naked among high-rise towers. It put him off his breakfast. He stumbled out to his car and thought how awful the street looked with litter strewn everywhere. Des didn’t see the sun was up until he hit the expressway heading into town. There the blue haze of pollution was already building, leaving the sun an ineffectual glow. Des worked hard to throw off the ache he felt.

  ‘Jesus, man, I got a real job now, no need to go down the bleeding Fedora, don’t have to dust off my taxi licence. Get with it, Des, and sod the woman.’

  But a night spent in bed with his unconscious self proved difficult to shrug off. As he got nearer the city centre, the traffic slowed to a crawl and Des began to snarl at the congestion and confusion of passers-by. ‘Sex. In-your-face sex. But where the bleeding hell is it? Bet bloody Miranda’s getting it all!’

  He finally got out of the jam, drove too fast down a side street and then hid himself away on the top deck of a multi-storey car park.

  ‘Just leave me alone!’

  DI Errol Wilson didn’t want to see Des anywhere near work. Though an old friend from way back when Des did self-defence classes, the fact that he’d become a dick made him wary of what his colleagues might say. So they met up on the footbridge that spanned the six-lane highway, the no man’s land between Alpha Tower and the city centre. When Des hauled himself up the corkscrew ramp Errol was supping a Coke and seemingly counting the cars that emerged from the Queensway tunnel.

  ‘So how many is it since you got here?’

  ‘Must be hundreds, man, an that’s barely five minutes.’

  ‘I can think of better places to meet, like one of those trendy new bars. You could fix me up with some trendy new food and a nice ten-year malt.’

  ‘Shit, some of my colleagues frequent those joints, they would wanna know who you were and I’m too close to promotion to admit knowing you.’

  ‘Ah, you’re losing your touch, Errol. The ladder’s going to your head.’

  ‘I’m getting older too, Des. What the fuck, we all change.’

  ‘Well let’s go down Chinatown, eh, check out Wung Li’s and have a snack. Kills you quicker than fags this place.’

  ‘OK, man, I can live with that just the once.’

  Wung Li’s was much like any greasy transport caff, except of course for the Chinese script. Yellow stained walls, circus posters and plastic carnations. But the food was good and the counter always gleamed. Des slumped into a corner after ordering while DI Wilson settled down with great care. They had the place to themselves, bar two Chinese guys stuffing noodles at a table by the door.

  ‘You really are getting fussy, aren’t you, Errol?’

  ‘Look, man, I’m earning good money. I’ve lived most of my life in shit and I don’t need or want it any more. You wanna know how much this suit cost?’ Errol ran a slim brown finger down his navy blue lapel.

  ‘Don’t give me a heart attack.’

  ‘So what gives then, Des? What’s the important business?’

  ‘The Claudette Turton murder.’

  ‘Shit!’

  A young Chinese woman brought over the food and tea, her face courteous despite the language and Errol’s insistence on serviettes.

  ‘Jesus, Des, what are you doing this for, man? This is real gutter fu
ckery. I mean, I get a fat pay cheque every month, an in ten year a good pension. I can fuck off to Jamaica then, be a beach bum widout a care in the world. Shit, you don’t even know if you can pay the gas bill nex month. When you retire, you’ll be half starved on Social Security, queuing up wid the old dears down the market for half-price stale bread!’

  ‘Come off it, Errol, don’t give me this grief. I’ve got enough problems.’

  ‘Yeh, well you certainly look a mess.’

  ‘Just give me credit, I’ve landed myself with a well-paid case; a few more and I might out-snoot you.’

  ‘All you’ve landed is trouble, brother.’

  It took some time for Des to get Errol to talk about Claudette Turton. The deep-fried spring rolls had to be tackled with extreme caution by a cop who was concerned about getting beansprout juice on his tie. Des slurped loudly and let his fingers drip with oil.

  ‘The usual keep-it-under-your-hat disclaimer, Des, but, well, we don’t really know sweet fuck all about Claudette’s murderer. Her neck was broken. She had sex at some point before she died. No signs of struggle so rape doesn’t look likely, though we got a DNA fix on the guy that fucked her. Being what she was, the two events may not have been related.’

  ‘What’s with this serial killer angle?’

  ‘Inconclusive. Whores and tarts, yeh, dumped nude in the country yeh, but then the evidence seems to vary a bit.’

  ‘No leads, huh, Mr Well-Paid DI?’

  ‘You know the score, Des. Nobody’s talking, no one gives a fuck. We put the heat on her pimp, it’s possible, but im don’t really fit, cept the guy’s a real sucker.’

  ‘Vin St James.’

  ‘Yeh, it’ll probably be my job to make sure the git doesn’t get fitted up.’

  ‘So what you reckon then, Errol?’

  ‘There’s quite a few of these cases, Des, unsolved. Most likely some sexually screwed up nut who went too far one night, is scared shitless now and won’t come out of hiding for a long time. That, or some fuckery with the vice kings and, shit, we can’t get much to stick on them.’