Kiss Me, Hadley: A Novel

by Nick Macfie

“Yes.” I didn’t know if I should add “I’m afraid so” but I couldn’t let the silence go on and on, so I said: “I’m afraid it’s all ended rather badly.”

  “What?”

  “What can I say, Scout? It looks like he was murdered. Whoever did it wrapped him up in red gaffer tape. I know this must come as a bit of a shock.”

  “That’s awful. Well, thanks for telling me.” Another pause. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Okay, I’ll speak to you soon.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  I walked back inside. The news of a death can take people in all sorts of surprising ways. She was bound to be in shock. The overworked Santa Claus picked up his sack and walked over to the bar opposite me, his back still ramrod straight as if he were wearing a brace.

  “My Lady Laurie of the Lamp. Wouldst thou doth me the festive favour of delivering another of your finest ales forthwith?”

  I forgot Zeb, snarled deep in my throat and hung my head. Another evening ruined.

  “Forsooth, my fair maiden?

  Forsooth, fuck off. Laurie was giggling as she took the old man’s glass. I didn’t giggle. That’s it. Just got started and it’s time to leave, all because of one of these over-the-top English prats who talk pompous nonsense all over the planet and get away with it. Worse than that, they make barmaids laugh. I was scowling at the white-bearded loon.

  “Old chap, if you don’t mind my asking,” he said.

  Oh lord, please spare me this festive season. Why was his voice rising at the end, as if he were asking a question? There was no question. Was he Australian?

  “My old China. If you don’t mind my asking.” There it was again. “Have you…?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Have you given the downhill runway idea any thought?”

  Oh lordy lordy. “Well, well, well, what a surprise. The man with a plan.”

  “The man with THE plan. Sorry to hear about your colleague.”

  “You’re sorry to hear about my colleague, Santa?”

  “You’re right, my old mate, I’m not really sorry,” Terry said. “He was giving my girl a hard time.”

  “So you had him killed?”

  “Keep your voice down, you fucker.”

  “So you had him killed?” I said in a harsh whisper. “First you draw a Christmas tree on his dick, and then…”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Are you telling me you had nothing to with it? None of your ‘colleagues’?”

  “Zeb Shrubs was a bad man. Had a lot of enemies. He owed lots of money and pulled a lot of stunts in his time. Once I did something bad to someone who gave me a hard time at school. Some English fucker with a name like Prat or Pluckarse. He was a bit of a toff, like you. It was Christmas. You know what I did?”

  “Wozzat Ven?”

  “I tattooed a Christmas tree on his dick.”

  “You tattooed a Christmas tree…”

  “Never mind messing around with magic markers. I went to the fucker’s home, some poncy tree-lined avenue in the Home Counties. I used a machine. But I wasn’t finished. You know what I did then?”

  “Wozzat Ven?”

  “I stapled his unit to the fridge.”

  “You stapled his unit to the…?”

  “To the fridge door.”

  I was having a problem visualising this. For Terry to be able to staple this man’s “unit” to the fridge, surely he must have had a very large unit. Either that, or a very small fridge.

  “I don’t see how you could do that.”

  “It’s easy when you’re angry.”

  “That’s not what I mean…”

  “He was still unconscious. I dragged him along the floor, turned him on his side and then opened the fridge door until his soggy dick was in with the cheese and tubs of taramasalata and hummus.”

  “Hummus?”

  “And then I stapled it to the fridge door. He must have died in agony.”

  “He died?”

  “Lost too much blood. That wasn’t part of the plan.” Santa took off his absurd hat and slowly unpeeled his beard. “You win some, you lose some. We’re having a carol service here tonight. All the old favourites. You’re welcome to stay.”

  All I wanted was some time alone. Some time for reflection. All this deception and subterfuge. And murder for that matter. Life surely didn’t have to be this complicated. Abba were playing ‘Super Trouper’.

  “Perhaps you could run a piece in your newspaper, to give the runway idea some momentum,” Terry said. “I don’t know about you, Hadley, but whenever I hear Abba songs, I get misty-eyed. They’re all about sex and surrender.”

  “The fridge, the runway, Abba songs. Terry, you’re all over the place.”

  “And yet at the same time they are all so innocent. Sometimes I just want to say: thank you for the music.”

  “You’d better keep that quiet. Wouldn’t be good for a gangster’s reputation to get all misty-eyed over an Abba song.”

  He spread his arms. “It’s Christmas, for fuck’s sake.” He got up and moved around to my side of the bar. “Did you know it once snowed on this mountain? On Taai Mo Saan? At the very top? Higher than the tea house where we were the other day.”

  “I didn’t know that. I don’t think it’s true. More bloody subterfuge. You said you had a plan.”

  “But it did, I tell you. Not deep and crisp and even. But there was definitely a few flakes. In the sealed-off weather observatory section. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.”

  “Pictures?”

  “I have a little present for you.”

  “You’re very kind, but there’s no need…”

  “No, but it is Christmas. Let me give you a little present.”

  “I don’t want one.”

  “Go on. It’s in Santa’s sack. What would the world be like if we didn’t get presents at Christmas?”

  Terry reached into the bag and pulled out a small box.

  “Open it.”

  “What for?”

  “Open it, you bastard. Go on. You know you want to. Make an old Santa happy.”

  I finished my drink and unwrapped the box. Inside was a snow globe featuring Hong Kong Island, with a little Star Ferry running back and forth along an inch-long track. When you shook it, snow fell on the Peak, on Wanchai to the east, on Tsim Sha Tsui across the harbour and on the Nine Dragons to the north.

  “You really shouldn’t have.”

  “Something to remember me by.”

  “You said you’d do something for your daughter. Have you got a Christmas present for her? Do you have any other children by the way?”

  “Never mind that for now. We’ll fix everything. The two of us.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Yes. Something bold. Something to be proud of. Nothing grisly, like pushing someone off a gondola wrapped up in red insulating tape. You think of gondolas, and you think of romance. Not this time. Anyway, Scout is my only child and there hasn’t been a day of her life that I haven’t thought of her. You must learn not to be so judgmental.”

  The front door opened and in came a dozen or so Filipinas, all smartly dressed, showing a lot of short legs, carrying silver and gold bags and talking a hundred miles an hour and giggling.

  “You have come on our carol night,” Terry said. “Isn’t this fun? You are going to stay to sing with us, of course?”

  “Perhaps another time.”

  “There won’t be another time. Don’t leave us, you bastard.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  I paid and said goodbye to Laurie and stepped outside where the temperature had dropped enough that I could see my own breath. Only when I was sitting in the back of a cab and heading down the far side of Route TWSK did I realise I had left Terry’s snow globe on the bar.

  I WAS HAPPY TO GET BACK to the tables and the grim bouncers and the ghostly hookers. I returned to the routine with the click-clack of the chips, only occasionally
feeling a slight shudder, only a slight one, mind, when I thought of Zeb, humiliated, lying in all those tangled ropes.

  “The woman in the casino. That’s what she said to me in a note,” I told Scout. “Give a man enough rope and he will hang himself. Did I tell you this? She handed it to me about two weeks ago and then this happens.”

  “Bit of a coincidence.”

  We were sitting in the bar by the pier, watching the commuters come off the evening boats.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence. And there’s the London connection. But Terry Tinsel has got to be the prime suspect. If not him, his mates anyway. After all, he just wants the best for you.” Whoops, almost gave the game away.

  “Forget all about it,” Scout said. “I have.”

  “If Zeb was locked out, why didn’t he call the locksmith? He wouldn’t have been able to open the balcony doors from the outside anyway.”

  “Maybe they were open. We’ve been through this before.”

  “Scout, the doors were locked. The police told us.”

  “So the person who did this to him, who dragged him in, wrapped him up and pushed him out, also locked the balcony doors. What’s the mystery? They had been open before, but the person who did this locked them. Mystery solved.”

  “Why are you so angry? I’m just trying to get my head around this.”

  “For a shit-hot foreign correspondent or whatever you are, you are pretty dumb.”

  “Well explain it to me then.”

  Scout lit a cigarette and faced me. She didn’t say anything.

  “Scout, what happened? You know something. Are you saying you had something to do with it? You pushed the fucker off the balcony?”

  “No.”

  “Are you saying the bastard jumped? Wrapped in gaffer tape?”

  “Is this how journalists ask questions, badgering people all the time? And don’t keep disparaging him like that.”

  “Don’t keep disparaging him? After what he did? Have you even known anyone to disparage people more than him? On a scale of disparagers from one to ten…”

  “Enough, Hadley.”

  What a mystery this girl was, I thought. I didn’t know her at all. I had a vision of her angrily trying to find the end of the gaffer tape, stabbing at it with her fingernails, then ripping it open with a rising, zipping noise (a big whoosh) and running round and round him until he looked like a red mummy. And there were the Pet Shop Boys standing by the door to the balcony with their arms folded. One of them offered Scout a lipstick.

  “Don’t you think you ought to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  She was playing with her cigarette, criss-crossing the end of the filter with her thumb nail, and staring into space. She knew something. She knew what happened, and I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.

  “You’re not going to like it,” she said.

  “Oh, Scout. What happened?”

  Zeb had gone back to the “Xanadu” the night after his confrontation with me, she said. He was drunk and had boasted about it at the table. He had thrown it in Scout’s face. Instead of being scared, he was aroused. He was up for it.

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  Scout pulled on her cigarette and exhaled noisily as she ground the stub under her heel.

  “He fucked me.”

  A horn sounded as the giant ferry approached the pier. Two single-propeller planes flew overhead trailing huge banners, but it was too dark to read what they said. They did a U-turn and headed back towards Hong Kong Island. I was in shock. I was bewitched, bothered and felt betrayed. I was racked to the core with jealousy.

  I said the first thing that came into my head. I pretended not to care. I was being pretentious. “You went back to Zeb’s place?”

  “I had no choice.” Scout ordered another round of drinks. “The pit boss told me to go. It was like an order. He said what I did was my own business but to take the rest of the night off. But I knew what he meant.”

  “What do you mean? Maybe he was giving you the night off?”

  “He was talking in front of Spike, Zeb. Zeb handed over a wad of money. They were both smiling. The chef was smiling. I knew I had no choice.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It didn’t have to be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like… So fucking tawdry. What happened next?”

  “We took a speedboat straight to Central?”

  “A speedboat?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “Not much. That’s where he fucked me.”

  “He fucked you on the speedboat?”

  “It was very fast.”

  “Oh my lord.”

  “And then we took a taxi back to his place, up a windy road. Anyway, we got there about one in the morning. We took a lift up to his flat…”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He wondered if you and I had a thing. I said of course not. He said he didn’t do this sort of thing all the time and that it was just that he really liked me. All that kind of stuff. He said I wouldn’t regret it.”

  “What?”

  “For the first time, there was something attractive about him.”

  “What? Zeb? Attractive?”

  “Anyway, we went up to the entrance to his flat and then he said he had left his keys somewhere. Maybe at the office. He called the locksmith. There was a number on the flap of his letter box back down in the foyer. There was no answer.

  “Then he got all excited. He said he could get down into the flat from the roof, that it would be easy. There were workmen and ropes and the gondola thing. He said he’d done abseiling before and it was a piece of cake. He told me to stay in the foyer and he went back up and took the fire stairs to the roof.

  “So there I was sitting in the foyer, reading the South China Morning Post, when this Chinese geezer came along in a green uniform and sat opposite me. He was carrying a little leather bag. I smiled and he smiled and he kept staring. Then he asked me if I was the one who needed him.”

  “Needed him?”

  “He said he was the locksmith. He said he had received a call from Zeb but was unable to pick up. ‘I have a way with locks,’ he said. So I said great.”

  “I don’t get it. How did he know it was you who wanted the locksmith if he hadn’t talked to Zeb? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Good point. I didn’t think of that at the time. Spike needed a locksmith and here was a locksmith. That’s all I knew.”

  “Was it Terry?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Was he smallish but built like a fighter? Late twenties?” I was thinking of the policeman in Tottenham Court Road.

  “Could be. Good looking. You know him?”

  “I may have met him. Back in London. What happened next?”

  “I followed him to the lift and we went up the forty-fifth floor. He crouched down at the door, opened his bag and took out a set of metal prods and tried a few and then click. Bingo. He actually said that. He said ‘bingo’ and gave me a big smile.”

  “You both went inside?”

  “That’s where it gets strange.”

  “Oh, so now it’s getting strange for you?”

  “Well, yes. This guy was a complete turn-on.”

  “This guy was a turn-on?”

  “I guess I was in the mood.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “He put away his metal key things and pulled out some polythene wrap-around shoes, like they wear at crime scenes in the movies, and he told me to put them on. But I was wearing heels. So he made me take them off and then put on the polythene shoes. He put the heels in his bag and puts on some polythene shoes himself and a pair of rubber gloves. He made me swear not to touch anything inside.”

  “Didn’t you think that was a little ‘strange’?”

  “Of course it was strange. It was surreal. I was in a kind of trance,
I have to admit.”

  “Go on.”

  “We went in. A nice place. Lots of rattan furniture and bamboo plants and a view right across the harbour. Lights everywhere as far as you could see. It was unbelievable. I leant against the glass doors to the balcony and the locksmith pulled me back and wiped the glass with a cloth he pulled out of nowhere. The flat was all very clean and tidy but not very lived in. No sign of life. There were pictures of scribbly writing on the wall. Not sure what that was all about.”

  “His wife was a famous graphologist.”

  “Oh. Anyway, I was feeling very excited. I felt like a trespasser and what with what had happened on the boat… All the drama.”

  Scout looked down and played with the beer mat.

  “Yes, all the drama. Go on.”

  “Well, this guy obviously wasn’t a locksmith.”

  “Brilliant. What did you do next?”

  “He was obviously a bad man…” Scout’s speech was slowing down and slurring in a quite unsettling way. Now she was pushing out her lips in a pout and turning her head towards her shoulder. What was she trying to tell me? “…so I let him give me one.”

  “You let him give you one? You mean a key?”

  “It was a kind of a key, I suppose. I let him… give me one.”

  “You mean…” Oh lord, how could I be so dense? “You mean you let him give you one? In the flat?”

  “He was a very good locksmith. Very thorough. Wiping fingerprints off the furniture afterwards.”

  “Off the furniture? Oh boy, Scout. You’ve made me go all funny in the stomach. What is the matter with you?”

  “Well, you wanted to know.”

  Not only was I all funny in the stomach, but I found this information too deliciously decadent. I wanted to know more, but there was no way I could ask. I couldn’t bring myself to address the subject.

  “Where in the flat did he give you one?” I asked.

  “On the sofa.”

  “Oh no.”

  “And on the balcony.”

  “On the balcony? Oh lord. It’s not possible. It’s just not… the done thing.”

  “It was a bit chilly, but that was the last thing on my mind.”

  “For fuck’s sake.” I paused. “Did you see any red gaffer tape in this man’s bag?”

  “What a strange question, Hadley.”

  “What a strange question? It’s the most normal thing that’s been said tonight. I am trying to focus on what happened, apart from… what you’ve just told me.”