by James Lear
“Spit it out.” Boy immediately blushed; I can’t imagine what he was thinking of.
“Well, I have this distinct impression in my mind that I saw some tracks on the landing carpet,” she said, “as if something had been dragged into the cupboard.”
“I see,” I said. “And where did the tracks come from?” Follow those tracks, I thought, and we’re on the scent.
“But now I suppose what I must have seen was afterwards, when they’d taken the poor young man to Daddy’s dressing room. I was in such a state that I didn’t know what was what.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I suppose I must be.”
“But Billie,” Boy said, “that’s not what you told me.”
“This is terribly embarrassing, but I think I must have fainted and got muddled.”
“Poor Billie,” Boy said, standing up for the first time and putting a protective hand on his fragile fiancée’s shoulder, “you’ve been through hell.”
This was hopeless. My one big clue turned out to be nothing more than the muddled recollection of a woman whose evidence would be demolished in a court of law.
“And when you found the—the deceased,” I asked, “was there anything to suggest the way in which he died? Any blood?”
“I say, Mitch, come on,” Boy said. “Let’s not distress poor Billie any more than is necessary. She’s told you what she wanted to tell you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, mentally promising myself that, when I finally got inside Boy Morgan’s ass, I would be merciless. “I didn’t mean to—”
Belinda rallied. “No, nothing of the gory sort,” she said. “The police said that he had been throttled.”
Boy stood between Belinda and me, as if to shield her. “My poor darling. How awful.”
“I leave you, Miss Belinda, in the capable hands of your fiancé. Boy, I shall see you when we dress for dinner.”
He caught my eye for a moment, then lowered his gaze to the floor. For all he was playing the knight in shining armor, I knew that I had found his chink, and I intended to work on that opening with every weapon in my arsenal.
III
WITH SEVERAL HOURS TO GO BEFORE DINNER, I SLIPPED out of the house and strolled into the village of Drekeham, nearly two miles along the cliffs and inland from the family seat of the Eagles. I was playing a hunch that, in the hurry to get Meeks out of the way, the police had taken the supposed murderer to the nearest secure unit—Drekeham Police Station. When I had seen it during a preliminary walk around the village on the day of my arrival, it seemed like a quiet sort of place where the biggest excitement might come from a dispute over grazing rights. Clearly, however, there was manpower enough within those walls to make a clean sweep of Drekeham Hall and to arrest a suspect—all in the time it took me to fuck Leonard Eagle.
I reported to the front desk and relied, as I had long since learned to do, on the British belief that all Americans were semicretins. The desk sergeant was, to my eyes, well past retirement age, and treated me with a lack of manners that was almost offensive.
“I am staying at Drekeham Hall,” I announced.
“Ye-e-es,” he said, without looking up.
“I was wondering if you could tell me anything about—”
“No.”
“About the person who has been arrested this afternoon.”
Now he looked up at me. His eyes were the color of the sea, alternately blue and gray. They were tiny and sharp, and his face screwed up around them as if he did not like what he saw. This was one Englishman who would be immune to my charms, I feared.
“There’s nothing for you here, sir.”
Oh, that “sir”! No one but an English country policeman could have invested it with so much sarcasm!
I thought I would take a chance. “I’ve been sent by Sir James Eagle to see—”
“Have you indeed.” He shot a look at me with those distrustful little eyes that said, quite clearly, You’re lying.
“—to check up on the young man’s next of kin, see if anyone needs to be informed, that sort of thing.”
“No, sir, there’s no need for...‘that sort of thing.’ ”
Now his rudeness was open. I saw little point in beating my head against a brick wall. Where were the guileless, malleable cops so useful to the heroes of detective literature?
I walked out of the station—and there he was. A copper so guileless, so malleable, that as soon as I saw his V-shaped torso swathed in blue serge and studded with silver buttons—not to mention the absurd helmet, just in the shape of a prick—I knew this was the man for Mitch Mitchell. He was waiting, oh so conveniently, right outside the station door, doing something entirely unnecessary to his bicycle wheel. As soon as I passed, he stood up—almost as if he were about to salute.
“Good afternoon,” I said, taking note of a strong jawline and thick eyebrows that looked incongruous on a face that, in all other respects, bespoke innocence and trust. The moment I spoke, the young policeman broke into a grin.
“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re the American who’s staying at the big house.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said, taking my time to scan up and down his uniform. He was a tidy piece of work; about 19 years old by the look of him.
“I...I like your accent, sir.” I don’t suppose he had heard the real McCoy before, except on the radio. Talking pictures had not yet arrived in Drekeham—but my little rookie was already half in love with America, and, I hoped, ready to go the rest of the way. He was exactly the sort of fresh-faced young man that I recognized as a particular English type: masculine, without being arrogant, and, though ignorant of vice, not averse to it.
“You do?” I said, with all the Bostonian twang I could muster. “Well, that’s just...dandy.” This had the desired effect, and he grinned even more broadly. “What’s your name, officer?”
“PC Shipton, sir.”
“Well, PC Shipton, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to show a visiting American around your station grounds. I’m...kinda interested in what you got back there.”
If he thought this request was eccentric, he didn’t show it. Perhaps an interest in the backs of police stations was exactly the sort of crazy whim that he expected from Yankees.
“Okay, pardner,” he said, in the worst American accent I have ever heard. “This way.”
He led me down an alley between the police station and the adjacent grocery store. It was wide enough for two men to pass at a pinch, and the broken cement of the floor was bursting with dandelions. I caught up with him and fell into step, our shoulders brushing. He was a good six inches taller than me, even without his helmet.
“This is where we wheel our bikes down,” he said, thankfully reverting to his own accent, which was broadest Norfolk, lilting up at the end of every sentence whether it was a question or not. “But I’ve got a puncture today, so I need to mend it.”
“Hope your pump’s working properly,” I said, just to test the waters.
“Usually don’t let me down, sir,” he said, without a trace of double meaning. I glanced sideways at his eager face, the pale skin of his jawline just dusted with stubble.
“And here’s the yard,” he said, as we emerged into an untended garden that seemed to serve as a dumping ground for the station’s unwanted furniture. There were filing cabinets at crazy angles, their drawers spilling open. There were old broken chairs, a couple of desks, and, in the longer grass, what looked unmistakably like the handle of a chamber pot. Nothing to excite suspicion: no obvious instruments of torture, no secret doorways, just the red brick back of the station that looked, to all intents and purposes, like an ordinary, dull family home.
“Gee, officer,” I said, “that’s neat.”
He was tickled pink; listening to me speaking was obviously furnishing him with anecdotes for the pub.
“What else can I show you, sir?”
“What’s that room there?” I pointed toward a window low in the
back wall, covered with heavy-gauge wire mesh.
“That’s the cell, sir.”
“You just have one?”
“No, there’s two. One there, for high-security prisoners, which we never use, this being Drekeham, and one just behind the front desk, where we put old Mr. Desmond if he’s too drunk to get home on a Saturday night.”
I could see a light gleaming through the dirty glass of the low window, and pointed this out to PC Shipton. He started, as if shocked.
“I think they must be cleaning it, that’s all.”
Had I strayed too far? I knew that I must not, at any cost, scare off my prize PC. I had to win his trust—or at least his obedience. I turned my back to the building, as if my interest was satisfied.
“And what’s down there, at the end of the garden?” There was an outbuilding under a tree, and, beyond that, scrubby bushes.
“That’s the bog—sorry, sir, the ‘john,’ where we go for a fag when we’re not busy.”
“I could do with a fag now, couldn’t you?”
“Sure could, pardner!” He was off again, and I guessed that his alarm had passed. Fortunately for me, I had in my jacket pocket a pack of Lucky Strikes, which I kept about my person specifically for the impressing of young Brits. I myself smoked seldom, and only for effect. His eyes widened.
“Wow, look at that! Real American fags!”
“Care for one?”
“Better not. I’m on duty.”
“I’d be mighty obliged...” Again, laying it on with a trowel did the trick.
“But if we went down the bog...”
“Exactly. Nobody can see you. Anyway, I expect everyone’s very busy today. Too busy to care if you go off for a...fag.”
“That’s true enough,” he said, not thinking what he was giving away. “Everyone’s busy today indeed. Lot of blokes up from Norwich. Don’t know what’s—” He checked himself. “Anyway, down here’s where we normally go for a quiet smoke, if we don’t want to be interrupted.”
“Down here” was a building quite unlike anything I had seen at home, nor indeed in Cambridge for that matter. I had been warned when I came to England that sanitation remained firmly in the nineteenth century, but I had yet to see anything quite so Victorian.
It was a building of crumbling red brick, about the size of the new war memorial in the village square, and just as ornate; obviously toilets of any sort were to be celebrated. You entered through a narrow, doorless opening that then doubled back on itself to shield occupants from prying eyes. Inside there were tiled walls that may once have been white, but were now so overgrown with algae and moss that the predominant color was green. There was a large urinal, where three men could have stood shoulder to shoulder, and a single cubicle, the door of which was pierced with a small square window, modestly covered with zinc mesh. The whole interior stank of piss and tobacco and sweaty men.
“So this is where you smoke,” I said, redundantly; the floor was thick with cigarette butts.
“Yep,” said Shipton, leaning against the wall and crooking one leg. He took off his helmet and placed it on the windowsill; I was delighted to see that, though so young, he was already starting to lose his hair. Premature baldness combined with heavy beard growth always seems to me to indicate a prodigious, unfussy sexual appetite. PC Shipton may not have been aware of this appetite yet. He was about to be made so. I tapped the bottom of the cigarette pack, and offered him a Lucky Strike. He took it between finger and thumb and put it to his lips, a gesture I always find delightful. And then he did something that, to me, is as erotically disturbing as many more obscene gestures; he undid the top button of his tunic, pulled it loose, and rubbed his throat. It made a scratching sound as he did so, though he had obviously shaved that morning.
I held a match to his face, and he bent forward, cupping his hands around the flame, then inhaled long and deep. The smoke came out in a long gray jet. Although I do not relish cigarette smoke, I love to see other men enjoying it. PC Shipton’s appreciation of such a simple pleasure as a sneaky smoke promised well.
After I had feasted my eyes on this performance, I felt the need to take things a little further—and, fortunately for me, I had a full bladder to lend some credence to an admittedly hoary ploy.
“I need to take a leak,” I said, stepping up to the urinal. I positioned myself near the middle, and proceeded to unbutton. PC Shipton saw nothing unusual in the act; we were, after all, in a lavatory. He did not offer to absent himself.
“Must be all that tea they make you drink up at Drekeham Hall, I bet,” he said, laughing and puffing on his cigarette.
“Guess so.”
“Reckon I need to go as well, now you mention it.”
This was exactly what I had been hoping for. There is some primal instinct in the human male that drives us to communal pissing, and it’s a phenomenon of which I’m very fond.
Due to my careful positioning, PC Shipton was obliged to stand close by me, whichever side he chose. He stationed himself to my right, fag in mouth, and began to fiddle with the front of his dark-blue uniform trousers. From the corner of my eye I could see his silver buttons shining, and a pale filament of smoke rising from his mouth.
I had pulled my dick out as far as possible—and, I’m glad to say, even in its resting state it’s big enough to turn most men’s heads. Given the location and the company, it had started to expand a little, and was looking more than usually plump. Before it got too hard, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and cleared my mind; in order to make this look unplanned, I had better suit the action to the words. I’m not pee shy, and before long a thick yellow stream was splashing off the dirty white ceramic of the urinal. A few drops bounced back and, I noticed with delight, landed on PC Shipton’s shiny boots.
By now the young copper had hauled his own truncheon into view, and a handsome specimen it was: short, stubby, and, I immediately noticed, uncircumcised. The contrast had not passed him by either, and before he even started to piss, he said, with a chuckle, “Cor, look at that, sir! Roundheads and cavaliers!” I guessed he was not about to launch into a discussion of the English Civil War.
“You got something there that I don’t.”
“What, you mean this?” He tugged on his foreskin, stretching it out a good inch and a half. “We’ve all got this in my family.”
“Looks good,” I said, still pissing like a fire hose. He continued to play with his foreskin, now stretching it from side to side with the finger and thumb of each hand. I enjoyed the show, and my cock was starting to rise even further. Fortunately for me, I finished pissing before pissing became impossible. I did not put my cock away, but allowed it to hang out the front of my pants, where it stiffened and climbed in the cool, dank air.
“Anyway, better not play with it, might drop off,” Shipton said, pulling his foreskin back a little way so that I could see a glimpse of peeping helmet. It looked shiny and slightly sticky compared to mine.
He turned his hips slightly toward me and started to urinate, completely unabashed. He enjoyed pissing, directing the stream up and down the wall of the urinal, describing circles and zigzags until he was done. Then he started shaking himself, a little harder than was strictly necessary. I stood with my hands on my hips, my cock by now unmistakably hard—and he could have no doubt, however innocent he was, that it was his performance that had made it that way. His own prick, which he seemed unwilling to relinquish, was already a good deal bigger than when I first saw it, and the foreskin, which had covered it so liberally before, was straining to contain the head.
We might have stood there modeling for each other had not fate taken a kindly hand. PC Shipton, idly masturbating, exhaled a long jet of smoke—which went right into my eye. It hurt like hell. I winced and put my hands to my face in discomfort.
“Shit!”
“Oh, sir!” he said, quickly flicking his half-smoked cigarette into the gutter of the urinal, where it drowned in our mingled piss. “I’m so sorry! I’m
always doing that!” His hands left his cock, and he placed them on my shoulders. “Try to open your eyes and blink, sir. That’ll make it better.”
I did as he told me, cursing the ease with which my eyes water when irritated. Tears were streaming down my face. He blew on my eyes, trying to soothe them; the tobacco on his breath wasn’t pleasant, but the sensation was.
“Thank you, PC Shipton.”
“It’s Bill, sir.”
“Thank you, Bill.” For a moment the pain had made me forget that we were standing there airing our dicks. Then something reminded me: the tip of his, exposed by his now fully stretched foreskin, touched the tip of mine. His was going up, mine was going down, and they met halfway. He didn’t remove his hands from my shoulders, but simply allowed our two cockheads to rest against each other. My move.
I always pride myself in recognizing the psychological moment, and acting on it. There was no longer any point in pretending that our communal pissing and dual erections were either coincidence or horseplay. This may have been new to PC Shipton (though I was beginning to wonder), but I knew full well that we had just crossed the Rubicon between “fooling around” and “having sex.” I reached down with one hand and wrapped it around both our cocks, mashing them together so that they rolled and squashed against each other. I could feel just how hard he was—and, after a moment of doing this, I was fully as hard as him.
He still had his hands on my shoulders, and, when I looked up from the delightful spectacle of our fighting cocks, he was staring into my eyes.
“Sir... What are you doing?”
“I’m feeling your cock, Bill.”
“Feels nice, doesn’t it, sir?”
“Sure does. And this will feel nicer.”
This was a bad day for my flannel trousers. They’d already gotten dusty in the cupboard, grassy and wet by the swimming hole, and covered in Boy Morgan’s spunk. Now, as I knelt before my stiff young copper, they started soaking up a mixture of piss and cigarette ash. Mercifully, Drekeham Hall had an excellent laundry service.
