Dying to Read

by John Elliott

  Parking fines and licence endorsement for speeding were the pretexts for wife beating in the second episode. Production values now extended to two sets: a suburban sitting room and an enquiry counter in a police station. Here a kindly older desk sergeant suggested to the rookie spouse that old-fashioned discipline — alas nowadays not as keenly observed as previously in his younger years — would put matters right. Later that evening at home — surprise, surprise. Tears and the path of rectitude duly followed.

  The final part of the unsavoury triptych, although once more confined to a single domestic set, took longer to unfold. In it the new bride wore the pants. She bossed and nagged, preventing her husband from watching sport on TV, stopping him staying out with the lads, in other words asking him to be an attentive and loving partner. But no. In this macho universe the shrew had to be tamed. The problem was hubby was too much of a wimp to do it. In desperation he sought counsel with his aunt who with the aid of what looked like a small ping pong bat — Geraldine guessed it was some kind of American-style paddle — smacked the domineering wife on her you-know-what in order to correct her errant behaviour. Mission accomplished, the bat was handed over with a knowing flourish to the future lord and master while the still sobbing wife realised the error of her ways. Love and marriage in this skewed titillation took on a whole new meaning.

  The next offering, Chalet Maids 2, shot by Cox, fulfilled what it had said in its intro. Two lazy, vodka swilling — not Lacenaire’s Krepkaya but simply a bottle captioned vodka — disrespectful young women failed to carry out their contracted duties in a ski resort. They didn’t clean, change bed linen or cook the prescribed meals. Exasperated guests finally took matters into their own hands, literally, and spanked them soundly. In the last scene the tour rep (female) bent both of them over the table and caned their bare buttocks. Geraldine sighed. The marks looked real. Augustin had witnessed this. Not only that, he was its recorder. Alright, she knew it had not happened in real time. It must have been edited. No doubt action had stopped many times till Augustin took up a new position to frame the faces of the beaten, the face of the beater, the bare bums before and after the strokes. What had he felt? Excitement? Arousal? Pity? Or nothing? Just something else to shoot? A techie, as Toby had described him, doing what he was hired to do.

  So far the players in these vignettes had all been different. It would take time to check them out for meaningful links. She decided to watch the remaining one and then call it a day. She therefore clicked and opened Teenage Mandy’s First Spanking. A young woman, presumably Mandy, stood in the corner of a bedroom, her face to the wall. She was dressed in Baby-Doll pyjamas. Moving across the end of a bed, the camera slowly rose from her bare feet, up to her calves, then to her thighs, resting momentarily on her girlish, scantily covered bottom, before rising finally onto her back and her anxious now half-turned head. Geraldine recognised many men would find her beautiful. She was different from the women in the previous videos. They, you felt, knew exactly what they were doing, what they were paid to provide. She, on the other hand, looked as if this really was happening for the first time. The door behind her opened. Mandy gasped quietly. A person as yet unseen said, ‘Now, young lady, I’m going to give you a lesson which has long been overdue.’ The voice was instantly recognisable. Not so long ago it had said, ‘I was at school with Christabel. Call me Joan. I’ll call you Geraldine.’

  On the screen a large hairbrush was laid on the bed cover. Mandy pleaded, ‘Please, mother don’t. I’m truly sorry.’ Geraldine thought again of Brideshead Revisited and a hairbrush used in jest to spank a naughty teddy bear, but she knew from what she had already viewed this would not be in jest. As she recalled the posh hairdresser had said to Charles Ryder, ‘Such an amusing young gentleman. He bought one of these for when his teddy bear misbehaved.’ Joan Oliphant in her now revealed etiquette instruction must have a drawerful.

  Mandy, in spite of her protestations, was now lying across her fictitious mother’s lap, her pyjama bottoms lowered, the back of the hairbrush resting on her white cheeks. The hand holding the brush raised it and brought it down with two sharp blows. Mandy squealed. This was the same hand which in this very room had so delicately eased a glove off with its pinched fingertips. Now it belonged to the Queen of Smarts. The blows continued. Mandy oohed, wriggled and sobbed. Momentarily the beating stopped and that hand again, this time without the hairbrush in its grasp, massaged the now reddened cheeks. Was it her imagination or did the camera here linger longer on the faces of the two protagonists? They’re a family group, Geraldine suddenly thought. A perverted one but still a surrogate family. Mother, severe and cruel in this scenario, daughter, repentant after her as yet unspecified misdemeanour, and circling them both the son recording it all faithfully. Somehow she felt this must be LR. She fast forwarded to the credits. Sure enough. Mandy was Lucy ‘Mandy’ Revell. ‘They ate ice cream together,’ Toby had said. Two kids regarding each other as brother and sister. It was possible. And Joan Oliphant, here designated as Ms Atcheson, was the make believe or perhaps the real mother of one or both. She wanted to protect Augustin even if now he was dead. She didn’t want the police to become too involved. She had hired Geraldine as what? An insurance policy? A beginner she could manipulate? The answer was still far from clear.

  A dim memory surfaced somewhere from her early years when her mother, worn out from her tantrums or her recalcitrance, had finally said in exasperation, ‘You’ll know what for when Dadda comes back. His hand is bigger than mine.’ Of course, nothing had happened. Kind Dadda would never have dreamed of hitting her nor her mother no matter how frazzled. They didn’t send her to the nuns where she knew girls were smacked, sometimes, by ferrules it was said, on their bare legs. Her parents were agnostics and proud of it in an unobtrusive way. Religion to them should be administered in small doses.

  She thought of Hamish. How good it had been just to feel the physicality of his hand round her waist, to touch him spontaneously without thinking. She wanted to see him again soon. She had promised, apart from divulging the name of her client, to share information with him in future, but how much should she tell him? After all, he was a policeman, a detective like her, but still a policeman. Could he overcome that fact and act in a non-policeman way? Perhaps there was a tangle ahead of conflicting interests. And why had he chosen the job? He hadn’t truly explained. Was there some of the supposedly kindly, but decidedly unkindly, desk sergeant lurking in him which said ‘Yes beat your wife she deserves it, she’s broken the law, get her back into line’? Norma. She was the answer. Before she did anything rash she must consult Norma.

  Closing down the computer, she suddenly realised how quiet Lacenaire had been. She had not heard a word or even a squawk from him during the whole screening. ‘Tiger got your larynx then,’ she said moving over to his cage. ‘Movies not to your taste?’

  The bird eyed her birdily. He remained obdurately and uncharacteristically silent.

  Chapter 14

  In Which Nothing Much Happens, or is it Simply In Between?

  ‘Aren’t you even a bit concerned about Jerzy?’ Pat paused for a nanosecond to let the fact that she was talking to him penetrate the brain of a dreamy-eyed Hamish perched like a well-fed and watered Lacenaire behind his desk. Getting no response she continued, ‘I am a lot. There’s something fishy in that seminar he attended. I bumped into — well I say bumped into, but she’s so reet petite she barely comes up to my shoulder — the burnishee of the blue lamp from R Division yesterday and she knew nothing. I mean, looking up at me from her exalted rank she maintained it hadn’t been in her diary, and later a fact-finding call to Hounslow confirmed their Obi Wan Kanobe wasn’t there either.’ Still finding no response she brushed an errant wisp of hair back from her momentarily furrowed brow and upped her volume control. ‘Oy, Princess Leia, I’m talking to you not giving my voice a morning sound test. From young offender breakfast time till now you’ve looked as if you’ve locked yourself in the nick that ti
me forgot.’

  Across the Ops room Hamish, oblivious to her summons, continued staring contentedly into space, his lips set in an increasingly seraphic smile. Nothing was up, chucky, to alter the phraseology of his new-found avian friend of last night. Far from it. Everything had come up ten of spades and roses instead.

  ‘Blimey! I give up.’ Pat tossed a couple of sugar lumps in his direction, one of which hit his shoulder, the other, following a more deviant parabola, dropped harmlessly to the floor. ‘Either you’ve been at the Es in the secure store, or some misguided damsel has had her bones jumped on by you last night. Anyhow, no-one belonging to un-reformed young offenders should look this soppy. Those behind the fence at Crime Academy Inc will be chortling into their Ready Brek at the thought of a love-sick copper. Remember you’re at work. I’m your skipper, and this Cox thing is going nowhere.’ Her voice tailed off in exasperation.

  Gradually aware of someone speaking and a mysterious lump of sugar which had materialised unexpectedly on his desk, Hamish reluctantly relinquished his projected visions of Geraldine, the now perspicacious and curvaceous sleuth. In his delighted mind she had been touring for the first time his Whitton flat, which, of course, was miraculously and fortuitously clean and tidy. There she had dallied significantly and sexily in the bedroom inspecting the freshly laundered duvet and sheets before testing the springiness of the mattress with him beside her. Mega task number one. He must invite her there today.

  ‘Oh go on then, tell your Auntie.’ Like the bad cop suddenly turned good, Pat played the sympathetic older woman gambit. ‘Let’s hear the hideous details that have transformed you into this moon-struck loon. Speak even if it be in Deutschygramophon. Anything’s better than watching your idiot gaze. Come on, spill the beans or I’ll have to go back to South Yorkshire practices.’

  Confiding details of his love life, or lack of it, to colleagues, even as putative aunties, was not something Hamish did readily, yet he knew if he failed to deliver sufficient titillation Pat’s bad cop good cop routine would go into hyperdrive for days to come overshadowing the Cox investigation. ‘I met a librarian,’ he began tentatively.

  ‘When? Where? Gender? Of what persuasion? Auntie needs the facts before she can rush to judgment.’

  ‘A few nights ago at a lecture on Diogenes. I saw her again yesterday.’

  ‘Her. At least that’s according to standard procedures. At which public library does she go shush and replace the books? Just in case I want to take a gander.’

  ‘It’s a private commercial one. They provide information for TV researchers.’ He was going to have to be careful and remember each false detail for future probing which undoubtedly would follow.

  ‘I expect over the steaming froth of a cappuccino you leant across, after discussing, of course, the merit of the last Booker Prize winner, removed her horn-rimmed spectacles and said, “Why Miss, name to be supplied, what beautiful eyes you have. It’s a shame to keep them covered.” Who or what was Diogenes?’

  ‘Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel. Geraldine’s her name. She’s Irish.’ It was always best to include as much of the truth as was wise.

  ‘Raven haired and blue-eyed, no doubt, who speaks a language that the stranger does not know.’

  ‘Strawberry blonde, actually,’ he fibbed. ‘Whether she speaks Gaelic or Erse or whatever it is I don’t know. We got beyond words last night.’

  ‘Attaboy. Auntie Pat is pleased. Regular sexual congress helps us old offenders go about with a cheery smile on our physogs in an otherwise mean and indifferent Feltham. Just keep me posted of developments. In affairs of the heart I have no superiors.’ She beamed encouragingly, her interrogation temporarily suspended.

  ‘Where is Jerzy by the way?’ Hamish recalled she’d said something about him sometime during his reverie.

  ‘Back at the hotel looking for another lead. Don’t you find it a bit odd we’ve been left to ourselves with Coxie?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, no super keeping tabs. Nobody bellyaching ’cos we’re gaining zilch. I’m worried that Jerzy’s being laid out to dry and they’re going to say it proves he’s past his use by date never mind the sell by.’

  ‘He hasn’t asked for more resources. He’ll get there. People open up to him. They want to tell him things.’

  ‘Yeah, but are they relevant. It’s the killer details we need, Princess Leia, not just mood music and background noise.’

  For a second, because she seemed so untypically downcast, Hamish thought of telling her Geraldine was also on the trail, which might lead to God knows what, but then reined back. Time would tell just how unofficial his and Geraldine’s involvement needed to be. Before any further temptation occurred to spill some beans, as Pat would put it, the ring-tone on his mobile sounded. Ready to hear Geraldine’s beguiling tones he picked it up, put it to his ear and relaxed his body into receptive mode only to receive the still distinctive glottal stops of his paternal grandmother, Aileen: ‘Your grandpa and I are coming down to London on a wee jaunt, Hamish, and it would be wonderful to see you. We’re going to a matinee of the Phantom then have a bit of a dauner and a meal before the coach home.’

  As Hamish knew, a bit of a dauner in Scottish parlance meant a short walk, which when employed by Aileen translated as a determined foray into the department stores of Oxford Street accompanied by a less than keen and thirsting for a dram spouse, Peter. Marking down the date, two days hence, time five thirty, venue the Wetherspoons in Charing Cross Rd, found as a result of his grandfather’s internet research, he ended their conversation by confirming he would be there unless some new duty intervened, in which case he would let them know. ’Family,’ he said in response to Pat’s enquiring look. ‘Just when you think you’ve finally given them the slip they turn up to re-infantilise you. God knows what havoc my grandfather will wreak after two hours of Lloyd Webber and a trail through Selfridges.’

  ‘Treasure them while they’re there, young Princess. Life’s fleeting. You only have to ask a morgue attendant. Enjoy what Jerzy calls the in between.’

  Her attempts at humour were bad enough, but the addition of old offenders’ wisdom was a step too far. Hamish mentally abandoned the Ops room, rewound his vision of Geraldine at Whitton and expectantly opened the door in answer to her pressing of the bell.

  Chapter 15

  Playtime

  1. The Second Time Around

  Experience had taught Jerzy that a first investigative visit was like an inquisitive frog suddenly leaping into a previously unencountered pond. The splash was highly noticeable, but the resulting ripples took time to reach the banks. A second, unheralded appearance often picked up dividends. Deep down most people wanted to tell. Letting a little time pass helped to loosen their tongues, and even those who felt they had something to hide initially gradually became emboldened enough to talk.

  He sat to begin with in the lobby, not unobtrusively — that was not his style — picking up and putting down several newspapers provided in the rack. Then he wandered through to the coffee shop where last continental-style breakfasts were being served and ordered an Americano and apple Danish. From there he sheltered in the bar awhile, nursing a double gin and tonic before returning once more to the lobby. He didn’t announce his presence to management, though they were soon aware of his leisurely progress. He didn’t approach anyone or try to start a conversation. A casual observer might well have concluded that it was his day off and that he had decided to spend part or all of it in the hotel because he had found it attractive on his previous visit. Among the staff, however, there were no casual observers, only interested ones. Sammy Devereux and the Human Resources grapevine had spread the word. Now, thanks to the demise of Augustin Cox, here was their own chance of notoriety. The downside was the detective in charge — this lumbering hulk with the self-satisfied smile — was clearly not up to the task. Where were the newspaper headlines? When was the Crimewatch slot scheduled? The man needed a severe jolt otherwise
the opportunity of possible publicity would dribble into nothingness. Someone had to take a lead and show some initiative. Okay, Augustin had been a slimeball, a chancer, who had got his mitts on his own kind of rip-off, but dead he deserved his life journey to be told.

  They came forward slowly and then more steadily to his lobby armchair facing the big front window. They hovered at his table back in the bar, while he consumed a club sandwich washed down with a glass of Chilean merlot. They told him the little they knew, the lot they knew, their indirect or direct experience with Augustin, their snippets of info gathered about him, their suspicions of his motives. None of them had a good word to say because although they’d never said anything at the time they’d known all along something was not kosher, and they weren’t just talking about the usual scams and perks of the trade. Slippery, perverse, cold, without conscience, were the words they used, and Jerzy listened and nodded and smiled, thinking like Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony that any good was oft interred with the bones. Nobody, however, confessed to murder, and for that small mercy Jerzy was glad. False confessions wasted time. Eliminating erroneous suspects took more human hours and overtime than he had at his disposal. The Augustin Cox case did not rate high in budgetary expense.

  When eventually the ripples subsided he sat back and collated what he’d got. There were two different worlds: the one of staff the other of guests. Sure they met on several fronts, but it was normally a superficial and a codified interaction. Concierges, night porters, regular taxi drivers, however, provided ways of accessing more personal services from outside, namely female and male prostitutes. Augustin, on the other hand, had operated from within, supplying more esoteric talents, and now, thanks to his new informants, Jerzy had more than an inkling as to the roles played by Milly Simpson and Linda Parks, then in Human Resources, who had been the key to Augustin’s advancement from kitchen porter to the freedom of wandering corridors and entering rooms. Specialised websites and designated members club meetings fronted by Milly were the databanks. Everyone had their fantasies, and some people played them out either in safety or in danger. The hotel was less safe than the shield of the website persona or the carefully vetted club, but still reasonably safe. Milly had seen to that. One could understand for those particular aficionados the frisson of calling room service and asking if Augustin were on duty, the anticipated and then actual knock on the door, the uniform, the slightly foreign accent, the requested pretext toasted ham and cheese sandwich deposited on the occasional table, all a kind of foreplay in itself. It wasn’t to Jerzy’s taste. He preferred more plebeian, as Sammy, no doubt, would say, shenanigans, but even they sometimes led to murder.