A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  “Is this a fecking Once Moore with Feelings coffee love fest or what?” Urry grunted. “American shit, rotting your guts. You should be drinking good old English tea. If it’s good enough for the Queen, then it’s good enough for me.”

  “I thought coffee came from Brazil,” Irvine said deadpan.

  “And surely tea’s from India,” King added, keeping up her side of the banter.

  “Right, that’s it, I’m fecked if I’m going to stay here and listen to the Met’s answer to Ant and Dec. I’ve stuff to do…”

  “People to threaten?” Irvine continued seamlessly, catching Urry in a rare eyeball stare that just dared him to try and leave the table.

  “Okay, bring it on; here we go,” Urry said triumphantly. “At long last we’ve reached the topic you’re here to discuss.”

  King took out her notebook.

  “Yes, love, write this down, because I’m only going to say it once. I’ve worked with Tim Dickens for a long time. He’s a mate, been a good mate, and you know what? He looks after his crew really well, and in my book you can’t do better than that. I mean, he’s never done a Pete Townsend and given his crew the entire proceeds from a big US show to split between them as a tour bonus. But nonetheless, Tim Dickens has always looked after the crew well, and he’s always looked after me particularly well. Hell, I’m still on a retainer, and it’s over seven years since my boss even dreamt of treading the boards again.

  “So, to me it’s very simple. Someone threatens my boss’ livelihood, they’re in effect threatening my livelihood. It’s not going to happen. End of. I heard through the grapevine what was going on…”

  “What exactly was going on?” Irvine interrupted, wondering exactly how much Marcus Urry knew.

  “What was going on was Paddy fecking Mylan had my boss by the balls and wasn’t prepared to let them go. And, you know, when someone has my boss by the balls, then…”

  “Then they’d got you by the balls… yeah, we know,” Irvine said, considering the degrees of hygiene of the two gentlemen in question.

  “Exactly!” Urry said proudly.

  “But let’s assume you’re using balls as a metaphor…” Irvine started.

  “No, Sergeant, the actual metaphor is the holding of the balls,” Urry said. He held his strenuously toned arm into the middle of the table and slowly opened his hand palm up, and then slowly and with great menace in his eyes, he closed his hairy fingers tighter and tighter into a fist until Irvine felt his own eyes about to water.

  “We get all of that, Marcus. We know you can probably rip the heads off chickens with your teeth and you can frighten babies, but what I’m trying to find out is how much in the know you were about your bosses’ business dealings.”

  “Tim Dickens got greedy. Paddy Mylan wanted a bit of rock ‘n’ roll glamour. They both tangoed. For a while Paddy led the dance; then Dickens took over. Soon Dickens discovered that even though he was leading the dance, he was still getting shafted. I was called in to disentangle the dancers and clean up the mess. End of.”

  “So you got Tim Dickens out of the deal?” King asked.

  “Well, Paddy’s D for dead, so the deal is D for dead as well.”

  “So you’re admitting you killed him?” Irvine asked, in disbelief.

  “No, dick-head, but maybe I scared him into taking his own life. Do I need to draw pictures for you? Bring back Morse, for heaven’s sake!” Urry said to an imaginary audience.

  “So you’re claiming you scared him into committing suicide?” Irvine continued, still not quite believing what he had just heard.

  “Listen, I’m only going to say this once, so jot it down, sweetie,” Urry said, pausing to wink at King. “You more than most must realise how pathetically stupid most murderers are. If I ever committed a crime, I can absolutely guarantee neither you, nor any of your mob, would ever have a hope in hell’s chance of catching me. Get my drift?”

  “Yeah, Marcus, we get it. You’re a clever barsteward, but can we just go back a teeny wee bit here and tidy up this ‘scaring’ Mr Patrick Mylan issue?”

  Another extended sigh from Urry.

  “Okay, time out here,” Urry announced. “Can I just say, were I to have had a chat with Mr Mylan and, as a result of that chat, he realised the error of his ways and found a convenient, if sordid, way to end his life, then I can’t be held accountable for his actions, now can I?”

  Irvine blew through his closed lips slowly, counted to ten and said, “Okay, Marcus, why don’t you tell us exactly what happened?”

  “Well, I rang up to fix an appointment to see Patrick ‘I’m so grand these days you can’t call me Paddy’ Mylan. He wouldn’t agree. I told his Frenchman I was going to turn up anyway. He told me I wouldn’t be let in. I reminded him of England’s victory at Waterloo, and I advised him in no uncertain terms that he’d be just as foolish to try to resist.”

  “I believe you’ll find that the English were assisted by the Dutch, the Germans, and the Belgians at that particular battle,” King offered.

  “Whatever,” Urry grunted. “We led the charge, and we certainly kicked Napoleon’s ass. So I show up, I had a very large roll of plastic under my arm, and Jean Michel…”

  “Jean Claude?” King offered.

  “No, there was just one of them there,” Urry replied impatiently.

  “Mr Mylan’s assistant is called Jean Claude, not Jean Michel.”

  “And the difference is?” Urry snarled. “So, Jean Michel, Jean Claude, whoever, puts up little or no resistance. Mylan had more bottles, I’ll grant him that. He brings me through to his office. I sit down and I start to tell him a few stories from the good old days of rock ‘n’ roll, the days when you had the likes of Peter Grant standing up to the music business tossers in order to protect his charges, the Zep. I went to great length to advise Paddy exactly what happened to those who’d fallen by the wayside, if you get my drift. Anyway, long story short, I’m telling him all these tales. It’s all very civilised.

  “Eventually he asks me what the large roll of plastic is for. So I get up,” Urry continued, bursting to get the next part of his story out, “I start to unroll the plastic, and I take a pair of scissors from my pocket, and I cut the plastic up into pieces, and as I do so, I put one piece over the sofa, another over the chair, another over a rug. All the time he’s looking at me and he’s getting more and more scared, and then, when I’d enough pieces of the furniture covered to make my point, I say, ‘Ah this? This is just a trick I learned from a New York manager who in turn allegedly learned it from the Mafia. We find when we do it this way, the blood causes less damage to the furniture.”

  “And what happened?” Irvine asked.

  “I believe he was in need of his brown trousers,” Urry spat out, just about containing himself until he managed to get his punch line out.

  “I’d heard somewhere that you beat a hasty retreat after he’d threatened you with a very large volume of Shakespeare’s works.”

  Urry slowed up his chortling to boast, “Listen, Sergeant, when you’re behind enemy lines, you need to be resourceful to escape with your information. Tactics, Sergeant. It pays to be a master tactician. I allowed him to think he was scaring me off with the book. But look at the facts: I managed to infiltrate his mind, show him the error of his ways and plant the seeds of destruction, which clearly sprouted forth a week or so later when he topped himself. End of.”

  Irvine was trying to work out if Urry was a dangerous thug or simply a buffoon.

  “Tell me this, sir,” he said, taking his jacket from the back of his chair and standing up to put it on again, “can you tell me what you were doing between the hours of four o’clock and eight o’clock last Saturday afternoon?”

  “Yes, I’d be happy to, or would you prefer to, miss,” he said looking at King.

  “Sorry?” King asked, slightly stunned.

  “You know, tell the good sergeant here what we were up to last Saturday afternoon.” He then stopped talking, op
ened his mouth, slid and furiously wagged his tongue from side to side. “You should have seen your innocent constable here, sergeant. She was absolutely gagging for it. You get my drift?”

  Then he roared with laughter, cleaning away the resultant spittle with the back of his hand.

  King held her composure, “I do believe, sir, you’re mistaking me for your regular girlfriend.”

  “What?” Urry grunted, looking really pissed off that he hadn’t managed to get the constable to rise to his bait.

  “Yes, she’s a real doll, I hear.” King paused as Hurry Urry sat up again in his seat proudly and puffed his chest out. “A blow-up doll.”

  Before they left, King and Irvine extracted Urry’s feeble alibi: supposedly he’d been around at his mum’s in the Elephant and Castle for lunch and had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  Just as King was about to turn the key in the ignition, Irvine, claiming he’d forgotten something, ran back into the rehearsal rooms. He met Urry in the stairwell. He stood in front of Urry, and Urry stopped in his tracks. He took a step towards Urry, and Urry took a step back. Irvine slowly took another step. This time Urry’s step took his back to the wall, and Irvine leaned in so close that their noses were less than half an inch apart.

  “What you need to realise, Marcus,” Irvine whispered in a hiss, “is that being in the right, particularly your version of right, won’t always save you. For instance, if I ever hear of any more chauvinism, rudeness, or bigotry from you, I’ll quite happily dump you in jail overnight; and with your long, smooth hair and your generous soft girth, I know for a fact that an inmate or two, or maybe even three, will find you extremely attractive. And yes, I will admit that after your night of hitherto unknown passion, you will be released from prison the following morning. You’ll be let out because you are, as you say, a master tactician and are always in the right, but you’ll still be walking funny. Get my drift?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day began, Kennedy woke to find the other side of the bed, the side he usually slept on, empty but still warm to his touch from the body of Sharenna Chada. He thought she must have left while he was asleep, but then he noticed the light coat she wore was still carefully placed on the back of one of the two chairs in his bedroom, chairs that were never used for sitting on but as clotheshorses. His bedroom door, which he usually slept with closed, was open. He could hear no sounds coming from the bathroom half a flight up.

  Maybe she’d left forgetting her coat? Kennedy was now alert. He knew he’d have trouble getting back to sleep. Once his brain clicked into gear, he could never return to dreamland. He mentally thanked Miss Chada that his back no longer troubled him as it had only four days ago. Thinking he could hear some noises down on the ground floor, Kennedy got up, slung on a puffin-emblazoned Rathlin Island T-shirt and headed out of his bedroom. Walking down the stairs without them creaking was an impossible feat, but he crept downstairs as quietly as he could.

  When he reached the first floor landing, he thought he could hear something in his L-shaped lounge, book, and music room. Ever so quietly, he stuck his head through the door, and there, standing at the top of the antique stepladder reading a book, was the mostly undressed Miss Chada. He hadn’t disturbed her, so he continued to stare and marvel at the flowing curves, which surely would have inspired even Michelangelo. Sharenna preferred not to fully show off her body to anyone, well at least not to Kennedy. Now he came to think about it, ann rea was similar. In her case she was always saying it was important they kept the mystery of each other’s bodies alive for each other. Kennedy felt, in Sharenna’s case, it had much more to do with shyness, and she never fully undressed until she was under the bed covers excepting of course that first fateful night, when aided by several glasses of wine, she’d performed an extremely sensual strip for Kennedy.

  Kennedy felt guilty about the way he had crept up on her, so he took several steps backwards on to the landing and called out, “Sharenna, where are you?”

  He heard her fussing around, returning books and descending the stepladder, and then she called out, “I am with your books.”

  Kennedy was intrigued by her charming turn of phrase.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “The ladder?” she asked as she very discreetly slipped into the seat by his desk. She immediately swung around so that her back was to him and her modesty sheltered.

  “No,” he laughed, “up out of bed?”

  “Ah I must learn better how to eat,” she said, obviously annoyed with herself. “Perhaps how not to eat would be more fitting. Indian food late at night always does this to me. I didn’t want to disturb you so I came down. I was going to prepare some tea and toast for you like you did for me last time. That was very nice. But it was too early to wake you. So I was just wandering around your beautiful house. It’s very clean.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It is too big for one person…” She stopped mid track. She mentally retreated but chose not to qualify it by saying, “Of course I wasn’t suggesting that I…” Kennedy figured for Miss Chada even to say she wouldn’t, wasn’t, couldn’t, would also have been too indiscreet. Instead she chose to move away from the subject altogether.

  “So many books,” she said instead, as if no other matter were crossing her mind. “Have you read them all?”

  “No,” Kennedy admitted. “I have an A list of ‘must reads’ and a B list of ‘will read sometime,’ but the A list never drops to a level that permits dipping into the B list.”

  “Perhaps when you retire you will read your books. I can see you in your books. It is so important to read.”

  She was looking around his desk now. She tidied it up; she opened and closed the drawer without actually looking into it. She turned on his desk lamp. The resultant glare was too cruel to the early morning light, and she killed it immediately.

  “What do you read?” he asked.

  “I read Dickens and Shakespeare and lots of books to help me with my work,” she started.

  “Really?”

  “You mean I shouldn’t read Dickens or Shakespeare? Maybe you mean I shouldn’t try to get more knowledge to help me with my work?”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean either,” Kennedy said, as she smiled tolerantly. “It’s more I was expecting Indian writers or maybe some modern ones.”

  “I would prefer not to pollute my mind.”

  “Where did you grow up, Sharenna?” Kennedy asked. He knew little or nothing about her.

  “Oh,” she said, swinging in the captain’s chair, still with her back to Kennedy, “it’s much too early in the day for a late night conversation.”

  Kennedy was considering this when she continued. “But if you would like to return to your bed,” she whispered, “I will join you there.”

  Two minutes later, under the cloak of darkness of his room, she slid under the blankets beside him. Her blemish-free skin, chilled by the cool morning air, sidled up close to him, and they continued to get to know each other better, if only in the carnal sense.

  ***

  As Kennedy walked over Primrose Hill three hours later, he thought of Patrick Mylan and his relationship with Chloe Simmons. Both parties to the agreement seemed relatively happy with their sides of the bargain. Mylan was receiving the sex he desired without, in his book, the downside of a proper relationship. Chloe, in her own words, was happy to set herself up and put herself beyond the misery someone like her sister was subject to in the love stakes. Admittedly, she had been putting her emotional life on hold, but now those restraints had disappeared with the death of Mylan, she seemed quite excited and intrigued by what the next part of her life held in store for her.

  But what about myself? Kennedy thought. What about him and the mysterious Miss Chada? Mysterious was probably too strong a word. He had known her in a professional way for over a year, although he still didn’t really know a lot about her. But what about their situation? Was what they were e
njoying a deal or a relationship? They’d been together several times now, and after the initial “getting to know you” stage, physically speaking, each occasion had been very rewarding. He was still amazed that one so outwardly shy, innocent even, could give of herself so freely. There were no “buts” in Kennedy’s equation. The physical side of Kennedy’s relationship with ann rea, magic though it had been, had on reflection been somewhat blemished by the toil and dilemma of the emotional side. After all of that, it was altogether an extremely pleasant change to enjoy the honesty of his relationship with Miss Chada.

  Walking up the steps of North Bridge House, Kennedy wondered if what he had with Miss Chada was enough to enjoy a continued and deepening relationship, or did one in fact need the emotionally charged side to click in before that could become a reality?

  The Ulster detective updated his noticeboard, and triggered by his memory of Miss Chada’s journey of discovery as she wandered around his house in the early morning, he decided he needed to go and have another look around the house of Mr Patrick Mylan.

  A very subdued Jean Claude Banks greeted him at the front door. The house felt very lonely and very sad. Jean Claude Banks seemed very happy when Kennedy said his preference was to look around the house on his own.

  “All zee chambers are open,” Jean Claude said to Kennedy as he wandered up the stairs.

  Houses. Kennedy thought about houses a lot. He thought about what houses could tell you about their owners. What people thought about their houses could tell you even more about the people in question.

  Some people, Kennedy felt, lived their lives in houses without ever being aware about the fabric of the building, without ever thinking about the history of their houses. Such people, Kennedy reckoned, rarely succeeded in making their houses into homes. As he continued to look around Mylan’s house, he couldn’t help but feel that this man had lived a life and died without leaving a lasting stamp or mark of any kind on his living accommodation.

  Kennedy focused in on Patrick Mylan. He wondered about his parents who had died when Patrick was very young. He wondered about his siblings. The word from Mylan’s friends was that there weren’t any, but they were dealing with the truth as supplied to them by Patrick Mylan. Was that what he’d wanted them to believe? Kennedy tried to imagine the place Mylan must have grown up in. What would the change from his parents’ home to his uncle’s farm have done to Mylan while he was at such an impressionable age? Not for the first time, Kennedy wondered what Mylan’s voice sounded like, how his phrasing reflected his personality or vice versa. He’d started to pick up some hints while interviewing Chloe Simmons with DI Coles. (He felt very embarrassed when he recalled his near major faux pas with Coles.)