Dead Time

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Goran Gvozden?’ I said. ‘What’s that? Russian?’

  ‘Serbian.’

  I indicated the photograph. ‘May I?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course.’

  I picked up the photograph and looked at Goran Gvozden’s face and I tried to see murder in his eyes. But I couldn’t. All I saw was someone having a good time doing something he loved.

  ‘Goran came round to see Lenny on Christmas Eve,’ Wendy Lane said. She hesitated. ‘They had some kind of an argument.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I have no idea. I heard raised voices. And Lenny was upset after Goran left. But he didn’t discuss it with me. It might be hard for you to believe, but we did not have that kind of relationship.’

  I put the photograph down.

  ‘Was Lenny still involved in his bar? Faces?’

  ‘Faces is a gentlemen’s club. It’s where we first met. But Lenny was trying to sell it. Please have some satay, detective.’

  I picked up a stick of meat and took a bite. It was like chewing a small brick. I wondered what Ratana was good at.

  Because she certainly hadn’t been hired for her cooking.

  5

  There was a little red rope across the unattended doorway of Faces Gentlemen’s Club.

  Even standing on the street I could taste the thick fug of cigarette smoke, sweat and scent. The Jam was playing on the sound system. A song I knew and loved. Vicious chords and Paul Weller singing about having a row near Slough with the Eton Rifles. I stood there listening to it as I checked my phone for calls. I had phoned what was left of our Murder Investigation Team but I had only reached answer phones. Night had fallen and we were meant to be on leave.

  Realising that nobody else was coming, I stepped over the rope and walked up a stained scrap of red carpet and into Faces.

  Eyes turned towards me in the darkness. And Faces was dark everywhere apart from the over-lit bar that stretched right down the middle of the club. At either end there were poles where women slid up and down. They sported the usual uniform of string bikinis, high heels and bad tattoos. I watched the women for a moment, thinking that their athleticism deserved a more appreciative audience than the stone-faced men who drank at the bar.

  Faces had an unusual crowd. They were all men, and although they ranged in age from their early twenties to their late fifties they all had the same look. A look that has existed among British males for half a century: a hard, neat look that takes a manly pride in itself, a look that began with Mod in the early Sixties, ran through skinheads and suedeheads and then all came back around in the Eighties.

  The Faces crowd wore Fred Perry polo shirts under dark Crombie overcoats, Ben Sherman shirts with tight mohair suits, highly polished Doctor Marten’s boots or heavy English brogues on their feet. Hair was cut and shaved short. It was like the British Museum of long-lost youth cults in there. I was wearing a brown leather jacket and black jeans and they all looked at me as if I was wearing a burkha.

  I took a seat at the bar.

  A thin man in Fred Perry appeared before me, furiously polishing a half-pint glass. He had a haircut like one of the Oasis brothers when they first started out, all layered and feathery at the sides, but it was thinning on top now. I guess he was maybe forty years old, but there were a lot of chemical miles on his clock. He had the look of the ageing groover who never dreamed the long night would end.

  ‘Triple espresso, please,’ I told him. ‘No milk, no sugar.’

  ‘No chance,’ he said. He kept polishing the glass. ‘Members only.’

  I smiled. ‘Then I’ll join.’

  ‘Membership’s full.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Maybe I’ll just have a look around.’

  A fat man in a tight, short-sleeved Ben Sherman called out to him from the far end of the bar. ‘You got a problem up there, Pete the Mod?’ he said, looking at me.

  ‘No problem,’ Pete the Mod said, ‘but that thick bastard Roy is meant to be on the door.’ Then he smiled for the first time. ‘Got paper, have you?’

  He meant, Do you have a search warrant?

  ‘I don’t need a search warrant to take a look around if I’ve got something called a Section 18,’ I said.

  He was smiling more broadly now. He had been skimping on the flossing.

  ‘But you can only have a Section 18 if you’ve got someone in custody for the crime you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘You got anyone in custody for Lenny’s murder?’

  ‘Damn, you’re good,’ I said.

  He snorted with triumph.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m just making some discreet enquiries about Lenny Lane, okay? Let me talk to the manager.’

  ‘I’m the manager,’ he said. ‘Pete the Mod. And you’re wasting your time in here. We were his friends, right? If you want to talk to someone about the murder of Lenny Lane, you should start with that big Russian bastard who taught him kung fu or karate or whatever it was.’

  I thought of the photograph on Wendy Lane’s coffee table. ‘Goran Gvozden?’

  ‘That’s him. I heard they had a big row before Christmas.’

  ‘I think the man’s Serbian.’

  ‘That’s a kind of Russian, right?’

  ‘You might be thinking of Siberia, Pete the Mod. Serbia is different. Part of the former Yugoslavia.’

  The dancers were stepping down from the bar. They were replaced with two new dancers. One of them, at the far end of the bar, had exactly the worn-out, exhausted look of the first two. But the one nearest me was much younger. She tugged self-consciously at her pants as she began slowly to move to Eminem’s masterpiece, ‘Shake That Ass’.

  ‘What about you, Pete the Mod?’ I said. ‘You have any beef with Lenny? I heard he wasn’t dealing since he came out of Belmarsh. I heard he might be thinking about selling this place. Were you still getting paid on time?’

  Pete the Mod’s mouth tightened with fury. He leaned close and I could smell cigarettes and lager and the mints he chewed to hide them.

  ‘You looking for a backhander?’ he said.

  ‘Now you’ve hurt my feelings, Pete the Mod,’ I said. ‘I spoke to Wendy Lane. She told me that this was where she met Lenny.’

  ‘Yeah, Wendy worked here.’

  ‘What did she do here?’

  Pete the Mod gestured at the women sliding up and down the poles.

  ‘What does it look like women do here?’

  ‘Wendy Lane was a stripper?’

  ‘Wendy was an exotic dancer.’

  I thought about that for a while.

  ‘Look, I already talked to DCI Flashman and I don’t have to talk to you,’ he said. ‘I know my rights. You’re either walking out or I’m having you slung out. Your shout.’

  He walked to the other end of the bar. My eyes alighted on the thin white legs of the woman dancing on the bar. She had long black hair and large dark eyes and a small gold crucifix around her neck. Mediterranean, I thought. Italian or Spanish. A good Catholic girl who was wondering what she had got herself into.

  A heavy weight plopped down on the bar stool next to me. It was the old skinhead from the end of the bar. He raised a meaty paw to the inner thigh of the girl before us and guffawed with pleasure when she recoiled from his touch.

  I touched his arm.

  He looked at me with his cruel, watery eyes.

  ‘When do the gentlemen get here?’ I said.

  His face creased with incomprehension. ‘What?’

  ‘Faces Gentlemen’s Club,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see any gentlemen. When do they get here? The gentlemen?’

  ‘What are you talking about, mate?’

  ‘I’m not your mate,’ I told him. ‘And if you ever disrespect a woman in my presence again, then I’ll break your arm.’

  I looked up at the girl. She was watching me. I felt a stab of pity for her but then I couldn’t think about her any more because the bouncer who should have been on the door was coming out of the toilet, buttoning his
fly, and heading towards Pete the Mod who was furiously jabbing a thumb in my direction.

  The bouncer approached me.

  He was a big man but inside his XXL dinner jacket it was the kind of bulk that is measured in width as much as height. He was built like Mike Tyson, or a refrigerator, or possibly Mike Tyson’s refrigerator. There was a livid white scar high on his scalp, as if someone had removed the top of his skull to have a look inside.

  ‘Sling the bastard out,’ Pete the Mod said.

  The bouncer and I looked at each other.

  ‘Hello, Roy,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Max,’ he nodded, and smiled with embarrassment.

  Pete the Mod was staring at us, dumbfounded.

  ‘I know Roy from Fred’s gym,’ I explained. ‘Smithfield ABC. Trained there for a long time, didn’t you?’

  The bouncer nodded shyly.

  ‘And I saw him fight a couple of times at York Hall,’ I said. ‘When he was a pro. Sugar Roy Robertson! Roy was a very good heavyweight. He should have stuck at it a bit longer.’

  Sugar Roy shrugged.

  ‘You got to live the life, Max,’ he said. ‘I had trouble with my weight. Liked my nosh too much…’

  Pete the Mod clipped him round the ear.

  ‘You great useless lump!’ he said. ‘Just chuck him out or I’ll do it myself!’

  Everybody was watching us. The girl on the bar had stopped dancing. I smiled at Sugar Roy Robertson. In his day, which was about five years ago now, he had been one of those fighters that I had always loved. Plenty of heart, always coming forward, a real warrior. Didn’t mind getting hit if he could hit his opponent in return. Always entertaining to watch. And he was a nice man. I didn’t want to fight him. Not least because one of his big hands would knock me unconscious if it was ever allowed to connect cleanly.

  ‘Sorry about this, Max.’

  ‘Me too, Sugar Roy.’

  He took my arm, gripping it high above the elbow, lifting it, pulling me off balance. I bent my knees, dropping my centre of gravity, letting my weight release me from his hold and stepping away from him just as he loaded up to give me a big right. Before his fist had started coming forward I dropped a short left hook on the tip of his chin. He was going to hit me hard. But I hit him first.

  The short left hook buckled his legs and his huge hands fell to the bar to stop himself falling. He blinked at me, wondering what had happened as I placed my card in front of Pete the Mod.

  ‘Sugar Roy always kept his guard a bit low,’ I told him. ‘If you’re going to keep your hands that low, you better be like Muhammad Ali or Floyd Mayweather. You better know how to dance. Call me if you hear anything about what happened to Lenny Lane.’

  I walked to the door, neither taking my time or rushing, uncertain if they were going to let it go. In my experience, men who dress like this lot rarely let it go.

  I was back on the street when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see the Mediterranean girl who had been dancing on the bar, a parka thrown over her string bikini.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For standing up for me.’

  I got her accent immediately.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘What part of Italy are you from?’

  ‘Calabria.’

  ‘You’re a long way from Calabria – what’s your name?’

  ‘Cara,’ she said. ‘Cara Maldini.’

  ‘Cara, you should either go back inside or go home. You’re going to catch hypothermia standing out here.’

  In the doorway of Faces I could see figures huddling. They were draining the bottles they were holding. They were working themselves up for what they wanted to do to me.

  Multiple assailants, I thought. Not good.

  ‘Go,’ I told her.

  She leaned towards me and quickly kissed my cheek.

  ‘They’re not telling you the truth,’ she whispered, and turned away. She went back inside Faces, removing her coat, as the men in the doorway began to walk towards me.

  I turned away as the first bottle smashed into the pavement ahead of me. I still did not run. But by now I was walking very, very fast. Another bottle disintegrated against the roof of a parked car. The third one caught me between my shoulders blades.

  They cheered. I began to run. And so did they.

  A car screamed to a halt by my side and the passenger door flew open. I got inside and DC Edie Wren hit the accelerator before I had the door shut again. She pushed a strand of red hair from her forehead and looked in the rearview mirror. A small diamond glittered on the third finger of her left hand.

  ‘Assaulting a police officer,’ she said. ‘We should go back mob-handed and nick the lot of them, Max. I got your message. Any joy on Lenny Lane?’

  ‘People keep talking about this Serbian. Goran Gvozden. Lenny’s martial arts teacher.’

  ‘Flashman of the Yard’s got this one, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘But it was me that found the body. And it happened outside my front door. And nobody executes a drug dealer in my neighbourhood and gets away with it.’

  Wren laughed. ‘Fair enough.’

  The streets of west London flashed by.

  ‘Nice ring,’ I said. ‘Is that what you got for Christmas?’

  She nodded, smiling with a sort of shy pride.

  ‘He’s semi-separated from his wife. They sleep together but they don’t have sex.’ A beat. ‘Is that just bullshit, Max?’

  I shrugged. There was nothing good and true I could say.

  ‘Thanks for coming out,’ I said.

  ‘It’s okay. He’s at home now. You know…’ she shot me a look. I had never met anyone so tough who was also as vulnerable as Edie Wren. ‘With his two kids,’ she said. ‘And her.’

  She swung the car onto Savile Row, a street famous for bespoke tailors and the rooftop where the Beatles played their last gig. In the distance I could see the big blue lamp outside number 27. West End Central.

  ‘What about you?’ Wren said. ‘Santa bring you any good presents?’

  ‘Scout bought me Nighthawks by Edward Hopper,’ I said.

  Wren laughed.

  ‘What did Scout do?’ she said. ‘Rob a bank?’

  6

  Everyone bowed when they entered the Double G dojo.

  Hard-bodied men and women who had given ten, twenty or thirty years to the martial arts and wide-eyed children wearing brand new white cotton kit with a white belt – elite and novice alike, they all paused at the short flight of steps that led down to the mats, and they all bowed in the direction of the man who ran the Double G.

  Goran Gvozden stood in the middle of the hall, a big grin on his great slab of a face, nodding at his students as they filed from the mats and took a seat at the low benches that circled the hall.

  Edie Wren and I took off our shoes and joined the spectators.

  Gvozden was holding a long bamboo stick with both hands. He was testing its weight, getting the feel of it as his students settled on the benches. Two young men faced him, dressed all in black, their faces covered in what looked like beekeeper’s masks with a metal grille on the front. They also held bamboo sticks as long as swords.

  When the students were seated and silent, Goran Gvozden nodded at the two masked men. They slowly bowed to each other.

  Then Goran Gvozden gripped the bamboo sword above his head like a battle-axe and he flew at them.

  Chopping, slashing, bringing the sword down on his opponents with enormous force. They backed off, expertly defending themselves with swords held high and horizontal above their heads, lightly diverting or blocking his blows, and then suddenly they were coming back at him, slashing at his neck and his ribs, and he was stopping maybe half of the blows with wild defensive parries, but many more were getting through, hitting his sides and shoulders with a bullwhip crack. His bamboo sword was smashed from his hands.

  A murmur ran through the crowd.

  Goran Gvozden was losing this fight.

&nb
sp; And then suddenly he was in the air, attacking again, moving with enormous grace for a man so large, the outside ridge of his two bare feet slamming into the abdomen of his two attackers, knocking the wind right out of them, doubling them up.

  Everybody laughed. Goran Gvozden helped the black-suited men on the ground to their feet. He had a big grin on his face. The men took off their headguards, and they were smiling too.

  Plenty of hard knocks but no hard feelings.

  Somehow everyone’s honour had been satisfied.

  Goran Gvozden and the two men in black bowed deeply to the spectators. Everybody stood up and applauded. They were still clapping when Wren and I went up to him and showed him our warrant cards.

  ‘Mr Gvozden? I’m DC Wolfe and this is DC Wren. We have a few questions, if you have a moment.’

  The big grin was dialled down just a little.

  ‘That will be about my friend Lenny,’ he said, his English good but the accent heavy. ‘Please. Come into my office.’

  There was a small room at the back of the dojo that was somewhere between a modest office and a shrine to the martial arts. Beyond a single desk with a large iMac, the walls were covered with souvenirs of Goran Gvozden’s life in karate – photographs of him taking part in competitions, holding awards, and posing with large groups of people all dressed in identical white pyjamas. Mounted in pride of place above his desk were three long, gently curved samurai swords. One of them was in a black lacquered sheath. The steel blades of the other two were mottled by time. They did not look like replicas. They looked like the real thing.

  ‘That was kendo outside, right?’ I said, as we sat opposite him. ‘The Japanese art of sword fighting?’

  ‘Oh, no – that was just a bit of fun,’ he said. ‘Our guests are serious kendoka – kendo practitioners – but I just wanted my students to experience a noble and ancient art.’

  Through the window of his office we could see his students getting back to their kata drills, the heavily choreographed kicking and punching routines that are the foundation of karate.

  ‘You teach Wado Ryu karate?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘And how long did you teach Lenny Lane?’

  He thought about it. ‘Nearly eight years,’ he said. ‘Not including the time he was away.’