Neon Madman

by John Harvey

  Watching her walk away …

  I got up and poured myself another cup of coffee.

  Half an hour later I called Patrick. His secretary told me he’d ring me back in ten minutes. He did. Exactly. He was always an efficient man.

  He also sounded a little confused. That was surprising. He was not a confused man.

  ‘What gives, Patrick?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I made the usual kind of enquiries, phoned the usual people. Up to a point it was all right, but there was one place I kept getting stuck at.’

  ‘Which was?’

  He paused, then said, ‘Mancor Holdings.’

  I sensed that it was meant to bring some kind of reaction or recognition from me, but it didn’t. When that became obvious, Patrick went on.

  ‘The name doesn’t mean anything to you?’

  ‘No. Should it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It came up in connection with Murdoch’s other interests. He was one of the directors until six months ago, then he resigned. I got on to the number given as their head office and suddenly everyone started being so cagey it just wasn’t true. First of all they said they’d never heard of a James P. Murdoch, then, when I told them he was clearly listed as being on their board until recently, they agreed they knew him but all links had been severed. I tried to ask a few more questions, but they stonewalled then hung up. Since then I’ve been asking around but it’s like trying to find out about Watergate.’

  ‘Any ideas what they’re covering up for?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And did you get anything?’

  ‘Not much, but here it is. You’ve got something to write with?’

  I said that I had.

  ‘Right. Mancor Holdings appears to be a parent company for a host of other businesses that drift in and out of existence with some regularity. But it includes Mancor Amusements, Mancor Pleasurama, Mancor Marinas, Corman Films …’

  ‘You don’t mean … ?’ I started to interrupt him.

  ‘No. Not those Cormans. This is some kind of distribution set-up for super-8 stuff.’

  ‘Blue movies?’

  ‘Could be. Anyway, there’s also Mancor Security and something called Corman Enterprises. But, as I said, trying to get information about any of these operations or Murdoch’s involvement with them was hard work. The more I wanted to know the more jumpy they became.’

  ‘Did you try any of the other companies?’

  ‘I rang a couple of numbers but no one was answering. I can let you have the numbers I’ve got.’

  He did so and I wrote them down.

  ‘What do you feel about it all, Patrick?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it could be one of two things—or both. Whatever Mancor is they don’t want people poking their noses in too far. And that means past the front door. And however much they might have wanted Murdoch on their board at one time, they don’t want him now.’

  A pause, then, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be more use, Scott.’

  I assured him he’d done fine, promised I’d drop round for a meal with Frances and himself as soon as I could, then put the receiver back on the rest.

  I seemed to be getting somewhere only I didn’t know where the hell it was. I rang the numbers Patrick had given me. Two were engaged and three weren’t answering.

  I needed to talk to someone and fast. Before somebody else came to talk to me.

  I ran a hand through my hair and brushed it down at the sides. I didn’t want to talk to Murdoch’s wife looking a mess. My hand was a couple of inches above the telephone when it rang. I picked it up immediately. It was her.

  ‘Mr Mitchell?’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Murdoch.’

  ‘It was almost as if you were waiting for me to call.’

  ‘Perhaps I was. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You could talk to me.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘A number of things.’

  ‘Like your husband?’

  ‘He’s one of them.’

  ‘And Mancor Holdings? Is that another?’

  She drew in her breath and I could almost hear her thinking.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked after a few moments.

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘Mr Mitchell. You aren’t about to try and … lean on me, are you?’

  It made a pretty picture. I told her so. She warned me not to get saucy down the phone.

  ‘You mean I have to wait until I’m there in the flesh?’

  ‘Don’t be obscene, Mr Mitchell.’

  ‘Listen,’ I told her, ‘there’s nothing obscene about my flesh. Why only last night I had a work out with two real tough guys and left them looking like something that had been in a car wreck.’

  ‘Mr Mitchell, are you being altogether serious?’

  ‘Sure I am. Altogether. You want me to flex my muscles down the line or can you hang on until I get there in person?’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I should see you at all.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But I’ve got to talk about Mancor to someone and if your old man’s still not around it had better be you. He hasn’t showed up, has he?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘How should I know where he is? What do you think I am? His old lady?’

  Mrs Murdoch hung up with all the precision of a wounded aristocrat.

  A minute later she rang back and made sure that I had the address. I told her I’d be over in an hour and to get the coffee brewing. When I put the phone down again I was feeling pretty good. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad day after all. Maybe I wasn’t as stupid as I’d started off thinking.

  I went over to the window and looked out across what was left of the grass. If I could afford to get it baled up there was a good chance I could sell it as straw. I didn’t need to check the barometer to tell that it was going to be another hot day.

  I stepped into the bathroom and gave myself a few quick squirts with a deodorant. I wasn’t too sure what my chances of getting in a little close-up work might be, but it didn’t hurt any to be prepared.

  I was half-way to the car when I heard the phone ring. It could have been important or it could have been the local dancing school offering me a course of free lessons. Either way I wasn’t interested. By the time I reached the car the phone had stopped ringing.

  The handle of the door was almost too hot to touch and I wafted air through the open windows for a few minutes before I climbed inside and set off to drive across London.

  It was going to be one hell of a journey and I just hoped that it was worth it.

  Apart from an argument with a taxi driver going round Hyde Park Corner and a near collision with an ice cream van at the entry to Putney Bridge, it was a pretty uneventful trip. I only lost around five pounds in weight and it didn’t take more than two minutes for me to scrape myself off the driving seat and pour what was left out into the scent of red roses that hung over the front of the Murdoch house.

  I left the car in the drive and went up to the front door. The bell push was one of those discreet affairs that resembled the Kalahari diamond on a bright day. I wiped my fingers on my handkerchief and pressed it. I could hear bells echoing from the other side of the panelled wood door and then foot steps.

  It was a little oriental guy wearing a short white jacket and a slant-eyed smile that he pasted on each morning right after cleaning his teeth. I told him who I was and offered him my card, but he just kept on smiling and opened the door wide enough for me to get in. It was real nice inside and cool enough for there to have been some kind of air conditioning at work.

  The Chinaman disappeared and I was left in the
hallway with nothing to do but admire the quality of the rug and count the Hockney prints on the walls.

  He came back and opened another door and gestured for me to go through. There wasn’t anyone else in that room either and it didn’t look the kind of room that took too kindly to people.

  When I looked round for laughing boy he’d gone again, but not for long. He came back with a silver tray and a couple of bone china cups and saucers. He set this down on a table and walked back out again. There were two cups, so I guessed that someone might be joining me. I looked at the tea and wondered if I should wait.

  Hell! I was thirsty enough to let my usual good manners slide a little.

  The saucer was lime green with gold leaf edging and a yellow daffodil painted on a black background at its centre. The outside of the cup was white, except for the obligatory gold leaf. The entire inside of the cup was another hand-painted daffodil, along with green leaves and blotches of white and black. The china tea was translucent and there was a jasmine petal floating on the top. I looked at the second cup; there was a petal there as well.

  I was tasting the tea and wondering if you got a petal every time when the door opened and she came in.

  ‘Don’t get up, Mr Mitchell,’ she said coolly as I sat transfixed.

  She reached down and took her tea and walked away so that I could get a better look at her. Either that or my deodorant hadn’t worked at all.

  Whatever her reason she was worth looking at and it didn’t matter a damn that she knew it.

  There’s a late forties movie called ‘Out of the Past’ that’s supposed to star Mitchum and Douglas. It doesn’t. There’s this smooth, beautiful woman in it played by Jane Greer and every time she’s on the screen there’s no looking at anyone else.

  Maybe she doesn’t have Lauren Bacall’s wit and she misses the ice coolness of Veronica Lake, but there’s something that’s all her own. The waved hair that clung to one side of the face; the face made up to look like satin sheets; eyes that were brown pools you wanted to dive right into. That was what she had.

  It was what Murdoch’s wife had, too. It was to her advantage that forties dresses were back in style for they suited her figure as well as the rest of her. I looked her up and down and then down and up but each time I came back to those eyes.

  I didn’t understand a whole lot of things but right now most of all I didn’t understand what her old man was doing hitting the sack with other women when she was around. But perhaps that was the trouble. Perhaps she wasn’t around as far as he was concerned.

  In which case …

  I tried a wry smile and turned my head to one side as though asking her a question. I didn’t think I needed to spell it out and I was right.

  ‘I thought you came to talk business,’ she said without so much as a flutter of her eyelashes.

  ‘That depends what you mean by business.’

  ‘I mean my husband’s business.’

  I gave her a long look. ‘That might be exactly the kind that I’m interested in.’

  ‘Do you think you can handle it?’ The right eyebrow rose a questioning quarter inch.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’d like to give it a try.’

  ‘We’ll have to see what we can do later.’

  ‘Why leave it tighter?’

  ‘Because right now your tea’s getting cold, your mouth’s hanging open like a dog on heat and there are things that are more important.’

  There was nothing I could say. Jane Greer had someone else write her words for her, but this one, she just took them off the top as she went along. I kept my mouth open and tried pouring some tea down it. She was right. It had started to get cold.

  Mrs Murdoch came over and put down her cup and saucer; she was close enough for me to reach up and touch her through the silky material of her dress; close enough for me to know that her perfume was as expensive as I had thought it would be; close enough for me to forget what I had gone there for.

  What had I gone there for?

  ‘You phoned me yesterday and asked some questions about my husband. You wanted to see him. Why?’

  I looked back at her and then moved my gaze away. With eyes like that I was going to tell her too much too soon.

  ‘Don’t get coy, Mr Mitchell. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘maybe we should level with each other. You let me in on what you know and I’ll do the same.’ I wasn’t looking directly at her when I made the promise. ‘Only call me Scott, all this formality is making me feel important.’

  She made a few gestures in the direction of a smile. ‘My name is Caroline.’ She turned her back and walked towards a shelf where she started toying with a small black statuette.

  I wondered why she was suddenly so jumpy. I didn’t figure it was just because we were getting down to first name terms at last. It had to be what she was going to say next. It was.

  She said: ‘I think my husband may have been murdered.’ The words came out very quickly. Quickly for her anyway. All the time she never stopped running her fingers over the smooth surface of the statuette.

  ‘You’ve got to have a reason for that.’

  She faced me and fixed me with those brown eyes. ‘Why? I’m a woman. I have feelings about these things. When some thing dreadful happens to someone you’re close, to, well … you know. Somewhere inside you.’

  Suddenly she wasn’t saying her own lines any more and the eyes ceased to matter. I stood up and went towards her.

  ‘Don’t give me that crap! Last night you didn’t know or care what your husband was up to. You gave me the impression that you lived separate lives and I believed you. Now you’re making like some kind of romantic mystic who can tell if he farts fifty miles away. There might be a few things about you that are soft but your heart isn’t one of them. If you really think he’s dead then it’s because you’ve got good solid reasons for suspecting it and not because of some story book intuition. If you want me to stay and listen to what’s on your mind you’d better start levelling with me and do it fast or I’ll be out of the door before your Chinese house boy can start quoting the thoughts of Chairman Mao.’

  I thought I’d said enough. She seemed to have wilted a good few inches and she was clinging to that damned statuette as though it was saving her life.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s sit down and talk.’

  I went over and took hold of her arm. The dress felt the way I had known it would and underneath it her flesh was both firm and yielding against my fingers. We made it to the settee without too much difficulty—considering.

  She began talking straight away. ‘You’re right, of course, there is something definite, though not in the way that perhaps you mean. What you implied about James and I leading separate lives is also true. But we did hold on to at least the vestiges of a normal relationship.’

  ‘You mean in front of mutual friends?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Yes, but to ourselves as well. I’m not sure why. Possibly it made us feel more civilised. One thing was that if James was not coming home he would phone and let me know. He wouldn’t tell me where he was really going to be, but he would make some kind of excuse. Then, in the morning, he would telephone again, usually when he got into work.’

  ‘Sounds cosy,’ I said, ‘did you work the same thing?’

  She froze more than a few degrees even in all that heat. If she’d been any closer the beads of sweat along my hair line would have turned to tiny balls of ice.

  ‘Don’t get too presumptuous! I assure you I am not in the habit of behaving like an alley cat!’

  ‘But your old man was—or whatever the male equivalent is?’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘It might, but for now we’ll let it pass. I guess you were going to tell me that you didn’t get your phone calls.’

  ‘Exactly. N
either of them.’

  ‘Maybe he’s out on a blitz. Perhaps he got drunk, fell asleep, was having so much fun getting laid that he forgot all about it. I guess he’s only human like the rest of us.’

  She was shaking her head and I wasn’t too clear what to.

  ‘He’d always phoned you before?’

  ‘Yes, always.’

  ‘So you figured something had happened to him and you called me. Why me and not the police?’

  ‘That’s obvious. The police would say that twenty-four hours wasn’t long enough to start worrying without any more facts and …’

  ‘And you thought that a few shots of those brown eyes of yours would divert me from asking the same question?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. You also didn’t have to say that if the cops did get involved then they might start probing around in the wrong places. And you wouldn’t like that, would you, Mrs Murdoch?’ I paused and looked at her. ‘Caroline.’

  Her hand reached out for mine and hovered over it like a butterfly about to land; then it thought better of it and returned to rest on the white silk of her thigh.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Find James.’ She blinked her eyes shut. ‘Or find out what has happened to him.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  She looked at me uncomprehendingly. Or she did her best to. She wasn’t the kind of woman to whom looking dumb came easily.

  ‘You left out the bit about saving the family’s good name and fortune.’

  I thought she was going to go into her ice maiden routine again, but she decided against it. She said, ‘I’ll be honest with you, Scott, I’m not awfully worried about the former, but the money is important to me. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that …’