Jello Salad

by Nicholas Blincoe

  “Where?”

  Mrs Beddoes said, “The Shaftesbury.”

  It was a tense squeeze, the five of them together. Jools was taking sobbing half breaths, taking so many she seemed to suck the air out of the cab. Cheb could feel his cravat tighten around his neck, as though the pin was being twisted around. The needle seemed to sharpen, painful jabs spread across his chest. The next time he looked up, the cab was crossing a packed street, slipping between the partyless crowds in Piccadilly Circus. Above them, the giant advertising signs flashed their messages, leaving the brand-names tattooed in neon across the back window—just for a second—then fading again with the movement of the traffic. But Cheb wasn’t seeing the crowds or the lights, only the dead space in between.

  Like a thumb rubbing away the marks on a piece of plasticine, the movement of the cab caused the crowds to disappear. And like a piece of plasticine that had been over handled, the movement never created smooth new surfaces. The end result was always rank, blackened and greasy, totally deformed out of any kind of shape. Once, in Manilla, Cheb had heard an American sailor describe a prostitutes teeth as a graveyard and the image stayed with him. It wasn’t the idea of the dislocated stumps but, more painfully, the gummy mess that encased them. That was like London, too.

  They reached the hotel and took the elevator to the fourth floor, walking along a thickly carpeted corridor. Once they were inside the room, Cheb heard himself say, “What now?”

  “Tea?”

  His mother was bustling around the long dressing table, saying: “I can’t find the kettle.”

  “Room service?”

  He saw Mannie prodding at the push-dial of the bedside telephone and, after a moment, saying, “They say it’s too late. I’ll go down.”

  Cheb wished he’d thought of that. Mannie just walked to the door, opened it, and he was free.

  His mother was saying, “All this fuss, it’s not worth it.”

  No one else said anything. They sat in silence, Jools and Gloria on a bed, him and his mother on chairs Sitting like that for upwards of twenty minutes until Cheb began to think that Mannie had just upped and run off. He wouldn’t have blamed him.

  Finally, a knock at the door.

  Gloria Manning sniffled. “He hasn’t got a key.”

  Jools stood up. “I’ll get it.”

  *

  Frankie wasn’t actually staying at the Jack Tavern in Holloway but it was a safe bet he’d be there most of the time, from lunch until long past last orders. When Cardiff reached him on his mobile, the background sound of the pub was unmistakeable.

  “Frankie?… Yeah I got a lead… honest… let me give you the address.”

  Cardiff returned to the lobby, ready to sit and wait. He’d seen Viv, Gloria and all their kids arrive. He managed to get the room numbers out of the commissar, just one old pimp to another. Frankie had told him on the phone, fifteen minutes. Until then, Cardiff waited for the sweat to dry on his back and passed the time trying to guess which of the girls around the lobby were brasses and how much they charged per shadey gobble.

  When Frankie arrived, prompt to the minute, he wasn’t alone. The two guys with him were both young, both hard-faced and bull-necked. They’d just be typical hard men, except they looked to be stoned: Cardiff was going off the way they rolled their eyes and sometimes started giggling. They carried a sports bag each, swinging them from hand to hand like they were off for a kick-about.

  Frankie only introduced them as they took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

  “These are the guys who were getting that business together with Callum.”

  One of them said, ‘We ain’t seen him.”

  Frankie said, “No, they ain’t seen the useless cunt.” He gave his new lads a look of approval. “We’ll sort it out, though.”

  They walked along a corridor to rooms 424 and 426. The two young geezers stayed put by a firehose while Frankie and Cardiff put their ear to the first door. Frankie whispered, “These boys, I tell you, I wish Callum was more like them. Keen as fucking mustard.”

  Cardiff looked back over his shoulder. “They’re all right then?”

  “The fucking business.” Frankie looked like he was going on twenty-one again, gee-ed up by having some hard men around him at last.

  Cardiff wasn’t so sure. The two guys looked to have an attitude problem. They certainly didn’t seem overly impressed: either with Frankie or with the situation. They could have been waiting for a bus, the way they just stood around smirking and pulling faces at each other. But Cardiff decided not to say anything, he just walked up the corridor and tried the second door. There was no sound there, either.

  “I‘ll have to knock.”

  Frankie nodded Cardiff rapped and waited. In a second, he heard a mumble he was sure was one of the old girls. It was followed by a louder voice that he blamed on Gloria’s daughter.

  When the door opened, he was staring straight at her: a prosecutor’s glare and a sulky face. Frankie pushed him out of the way and walked through, saying: “Hello ladies, fancy going for a night on the town?”

  *

  Later, when he was sat up in the lorry’s cab, Cardiff said, “I never thought we’d get them out of the room so easily.”

  Frank was sat in front with the driver. He said, “What’d I say. These two boys are the business. They got imagination.”

  The lad who’d got in the backseat alongside Cardiff had lit up a joint. Now he leaned forward, offering it to Frankie between the head-rests. Frankie shook his head but said, “You go on, my son. Enjoy yourself.”

  The lad passed it on to the driver who took a blast then said, ‘How was the Browning? It feel alright, Mr Ball?”

  Frankie lifted up his gun, an automatic pistol with a long chunky silencer. He said, “Yeah, great. It ain’t a Browning though, it’s a spic copy. I got one myself back in España. The reason I asked if you could get me the Hi-power, I had this silencer made and it don’t fit nothing else.”

  The lad nodded, still holding onto his dope smoke so that when he spoke he sounded half-choked. “I was going to ask you about that, Mr Ball. It looks the business.”

  Frankie passed the pistol round so everyone could admire it. For five minutes, everyone was fumbling the joint and the pistol together, tying themselves in knots. When Frankie got his gun back, he said: “Yeah, it does the fucking trick, know what I mean? I tell you, I had a fuck of a job getting one though. In the end, I had to get this Pedro—the-fucking-blacksmith geezer to hand-tool it from the shocks of an old Ford.”

  The two lads gave him an Ooh for his ingenuity. The one driving said, “You know, if you want anything‘ else, we should be able to get it for you, Mr Ball.”

  Frankie said, “How about that, just like fucking Christmas, eh? And don’t call me Mr Ball. Now we’re in business together, you gotta start calling me Frankie.”

  Both lads grinned and nodded, saying Okay, Frankie. After that, the conversation just petered out for the next ten minutes. finally, Frankie turned back round in his seat and said, “So you were using what? A Beretta?”

  The lad nodded. The driver said: “Mine was a Smith & Wesson.”

  They headed East, Frankie’s gun buff chatter joining with the sound of the bodies rolling around the back of the lorry. Finally, somewhere past Bow, they crossed a bridge and stopped outside a warehouse. The driver swung out of the cab. By the time Cardiff joined him at the back, he had the roller—door up and the other lad was shining a torch into the dark where the three women and the bald kid were lying.

  The driver said, “Get cracking.” He already had hold of someone’s ankles and was hauling them out of the back. Cardiff got hold of a pair of feet and started dragging what turned out to be Viv Beddoes. In a few seconds, they had them lined against the lorry. All of them wearing long blue snorkel jackets, zipped and buttoned to the neck and the arms dangling free. Inside the coats, their hands were safely cuffed behind their back.

  Frankie said, “Get them m
oving.”

  Using their guns like cattle prods, Frankie‘s two lads got them all moving in a line, doing the same duckish waddle they’d used as they walked out through the hotel lobby.

  They entered the warehouse, crossing the floor in the semi-dark, following a crack of light that shone through a door in the far wall. The door turned out to be an elevator. One of the lads hauled back the outer door and then the cage door, inside, and they all stepped or waddled in.

  The first floor was almost as bare as downstairs. Besides a few broken breeze blocks and an old steel joist, there was nothing but a tattered sofa and an old armchair, which Frankie took. When the prisoners were lined in front of him, he started with his questions. It was soon clear that only the son, Cheb, had any useful information. He confirmed that Susan Ball and George Carmichael were partners in the restaurant.

  Cardiff said, “Ask him about the cocaine.”

  The boy tried to be cute about that: “What cocaine?”

  Frankie could be cute, too. He lashed out with a foot and swept the kid’s feet away from under him. The boy crashed down, screaming in pain. When he finally twisted around and looked up, he found his mother knelt over him. He had to twist even further before he saw Frankie, standing next to her, pushing a seat cushion to her head with one hand and holding his gun with the other.

  Frankie said, “When I blow your mum’s head off, no one except her’s going to hear more than a pop. ’Course, it’ll sound pretty loud to her. What do you think?”

  Cheb straightened out pretty quick after that. He gave up Susan immediately, saying she had laid on all the party drugs. He didn’t know where she’d got it from but he knew she had more. He’d seen it lying in her case.

  He had even more to say, although it was difficult to hear over the sound of the women crying. Frankie passed his gun over to Cardiff, saying: “I can’t be doing with this racket. Go on, get rid of them, Cardiff. Take them out, through there.” He nodded towards a door, thirty feet away.

  Cardiff took the gun, trying not to show any hesitation. He hauled Viv Beddoes back to her feet and got her hopping in the right direction. He looked back, the other two women hadn’t moved.

  Frankie said, “Go on, follow your Uncle Cardiff.” Behind his head, the two other guys lifted their guns and waved them forward. They started waddling after Viv.

  The room was a kind of large store cupboard, twenty by twenty. Cardiff stood at the door and shepherded them through. As Gloria Manning passed him, he shot her in the back of the head from a distance of three inches. The impact drove her forward, onto her knees and down to the floor. As she rolled over, he caught sight of the gaping hole where her nose had been. There’d been no more sound than someone whacking a sofa with a baseball bat but she was dead.

  He aimed at Jools next. The force of the bullet drove her back against the far wall, leaving her slumped with her stubby little legs all cock-eyed.

  Behind him, he heard Frankie running, shouting, “Jesus Fucking Christ, I meant just take them out of the room. Not fucking take them out and kill them.”

  Frankie looked from Cardiff to Viv Beddoes. Cardiff paralysed, as though he hadn’t got a clue what he’d done. Viv paralysed on the horror, falling backwards and trying to scoot along the floor, still trussed up in the snorkel jacket. Cheb watched her through the door, his eyes locked on her helpless look of shock. He had his mouth wide open: he was just screaming and screaming.

  Frankie had to prise every finger open before he could get the Browning copy out of Cardiff’s hand. He looked down at Viv Beddoes, just a pair of eyes inside the snorkel’s hood, two shimmering discs framed within a white margin. What he could see of her face was pinkish, glistening wet where silent tears covered her cheeks.

  Frank said, “What a fucking mess.”

  Cheb heard another thwacking sound and his mother crumpled down. From thirty five feet, he could see the exit wound that peeled away her throat. Frank Ball had shot her.

  Ahead of him, Frankie was saying, “Look what you made me do, Cardiff, you cunt. I tell you what, you’re gonna clear this up. And when you dump them, better make it look like a pervert done it. You read enough fucking pornography, you should be good at that.”

  *

  Mannie stepped out of the bathroom. It was just as empty as the bedroom, nothing in there but a tube of toothpaste, a hairdryer and a big bargain pot of night cream. He shrugged at Naz, standing in the middle of the room with the tea tray in his hands, and said, “I don’t get it. They were here half an hour ago.”

  PART THREE

  deepinit

  TWENTY

  The headline read: TOPLESS MOTHER OF BOTTOMLESS CORPSE. Underneath there was a photograph of Susan, looking much younger and not much less sexy. A tag across the bottom said: Have You Seen This Woman? The paper was offering a £10,000 Reward.

  When Hogie spoke to her on the telephone, Susan told him it was a publicity shot, used to advertise her act at the Hula Club in ’69. The newspaper had got hold of five different poses; this one showed her knelt on a rug, her hands cupping her naked breasts and a little crown on her head. When he looked it over again, later, Hogie decided it was more of a tiara. After he’d turned to pages five through nine for the full story and the rest of the pictures, he refolded the paper so only her face was visible and stacked it with the others on top of his TV set.

  Susan still refused to see him, or even give him an address. All he could do was walk round the flat hugging his mobile. Throughout, he felt as lost and wasted as a whisper of cardamom in a two-can chilli but Susan was only a part of it. Even as he flipped out of the worst bad acid trip any boy had yet experienced to find himself in Susan’s arms, something had told him this moment of ecstasy was going to end in flames. The satellite of shame was swinging down, from his loins to the stars, oblivion on toast.

  Day One began with the discovery of Viv Beddoes. She was found lying across a Thames Water Authority filter bed in Hornsey. Two hours later, Jools was disinterred from a bottle bank outside Sainsbury’s, Islington. No one knew how her killer had got her inside. Gloria Manning lay undisturbed amongst the railway sidings of Willesden Junction for one more day until a trainspotter finally rang the transport police, saying he was puzzled by her naked body. The police suspected all three women were killed at the same time and in the same place but were waiting for conclusive forensic evidence. Rumours of sexual abuse had not yet been dismissed by the detectives involved.

  The press had failed to interview either of the two orphan boys. After giving his statement to the police, Mannie moved back to Hogie’s flat and the reporters hadn’t yet found him. They hadn’t found Cheb either and preferred to believe that, like his mother, he was also dead. After another two days with no word, Hogie began to think they were right.

  At first, it was Jools who got the most press and airtime. A true star, she’d burned briefly brightly before being extinguished. The soap opera postponed her fictional death out of respect and closed its omnibus edition with a small, printed eulogy to her talent: a line of verse in white on a black screen followed by an EPK of her finest moments. Naz left the room when they ran the clips. He stayed in the bathroom for the rest of that day, sitting on the plastic seat, staring at the flowers on the shower curtain.

  It wasn’t until the fourth day that the police positively identified the body nailed to the floor of the coach as Callum Ball. That was the morning that the photographs of Susan Ball finally pushed Jools off the front page. Susan called Hogie first around nine am and then again at one-thirty, after she’d bought the lunch-time edition of the Evening Standard.

  The first thing she said, “He died of a heart attack.”

  Hogie mumbled uh-huh, he’d bought the paper too. The morning papers agreed that her son was tortured before death and mutilated afterwards but the latest news we that he actually died of heart seizure. It didn’t matter to Susan, so she said. She knew who got him killed.

  Hogie listened to the soft chokes of her sobs
with the receiver crooked between his cheek and shoulder. She wanted him to turn to pages four-through-five and he fumbled the paper open on his lap until he found the picture: a man in his mid-thirties with a sports reporter hair—do and an open—necked shirt. Reading the small print, he learnt it was Frankie Ball, last seen on the steps of the Old Bailey in 1979. A box-out to the side of the main feature claimed that two of the tabloids had men running around the Costa del Sol, both competing to get a more recent picture.

  Susan said, “He’s not in Spain. He’s here.”

  “Your husband?”

  Softly, her voice almost back to normal, now, and only the dried tears causing static on the line: “He’s in London. He’s been trying to find me.”

  Hogie said, “Oh.”

  The Standard was trying to link her son’s death to a shoot-out at a South London nightclub. Most of the report was speculation, suggesting that he’d got involved in a drugs deal that had gone wrong. No one knew how long Ballistic Frankie had been running drugs into Britain but everyone the paper questioned seemed pretty sure he probably was.

  There was just one thing Hogie didn’t understand. “So who’s Ballistic Frankie?”

  “It’s a nickname. It’s what people used to call my husband.”

  “Oh. Have you spoken to him yet?”

  He heard something rustle at the other end of the line; maybe a head shake or a snort before she told him, No. She had decided to avoid him.

  It was the only good news Hogie had heard that week. “So you’re, like, separated then?”

  “What do you think? He set our son up as a drugs dealer and got him killed. I’d say the marriage is over.” Then a pause before her voice came back on-line with a harder tone. “But it’s going to be a messy divorce.”

  “So, can I come round. I don’t like it here, I want to be with you.”

  Susan wondered what to say this time. She was stood in a hallway, breathing damp wallpaper and shivering because the only telephone was chained to the second floor landing wall. Down a few rickety steps, she could see her own bedroom door standing open. It didn’t surprise her when she discovered she had the worst room in the place. Maltese Rosa was happy to help but wasn’t going to throw one of her professional tenants out of a more comfortable room. Anyway, the whole building was nothing but a stack of shoebox bedsits. Only the faulty wiring and thumping plumbing was keeping it from collapsing. Susan doubted if Hogie would understood why she was suffering all this on her own. If all she had to do was hide from the paparazzi and psychotic husbands, why did she have to do it by herself?