That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was “Power to the people.”
Smith was staring at us as if we were both mad.
“So,” I said. “You were involved in a lot of crime back then, Smithy?”
“I wasn’t an angel,” he said. “And I’ll put my hand up to having to deal with some less-than-salubrious elements in my day. That’s one of the reasons I moved abroad — to get away from all that.”
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“I got a yen for dear old Blighty,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “You told me that England was a shit hole.”
“Well, at least it’s an English-speaking shit hole,” said Smith.
“He ran out of money,” said Stephanopoulis. “Didn’t you, Smithy?”
“Do me a favor,” he said. “I could buy you and all the senior officers in this station and still have enough left over for a flat in Mayfair.”
“Make me an offer,” said Stephanopoulis. “I could get a new chicken run. And her indoors is always asking for an extension to the conservatory.”
Smith, who wasn’t about to say anything that could be misconstrued or digitally edited into an admission of guilt, gave us a suitably ironic smile.
“If it wasn’t the money,” I said, “why’d you come back?”
“I went to Marbella because I’d made my wedge,” he said. “I’d retired. Got myself a nice villa for me and the wife and I ain’t going to kid you life was sweet, away from the rain and all the shit. Everything was good until the fucking ’80s when the Russians started turning up. Once their snouts were in the trough there was shootings and kneecappings and a man wasn’t safe in his own home. I thought, if I’m going to put up with this bollocks I might as well do it back in London.”
“Marbella’s loss is London’s gain,” said Stephanopoulis. “Isn’t that so, Constable?”
“Definitely,” I said. “You bring much-needed folkloric color to the historic byways of London.”
We knew from reports that Stephanopoulis had wrangled out of the Serious and Organized Crime Agency that what had really brought Smith back to London was a series of drug deals that had gone bad. His product had been regularly confiscated in Spain and Amsterdam and when he finally got on the plane to Gatwick all he left behind was debts and his wife, who’d subsequently moved in with a Brazilian dentist. That must have hurt.
“Where you from?” he asked me.
“Where do you think?” I said, because the cardinal unbreakable law of the police interview is never give information away — especially about yourself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t seem to know shit anymore.”
“Do you know Jerry Johnson?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Who the fuck’s that?” he asked but he’d flinched and he knew we’d seen it.
“Detective Chief Inspector Johnson,” I said and pushed the photograph from Johnson’s house in front of Smith. He looked surprised to see it.
“This is about Greasy Johnson?” asked Smith. “That prick?”
“So you did know him?” I asked.
“He used to wander around Soho with his hand out,” said Smith. “Just like the rest of the filth. Just like they do now, in fact. How is old Greasy? I heard he got the boot.”
I had a nice crime scene photograph of Jerry Johnson lying naked on his bed minus his wedding tackle all ready to slide under Smith’s nose but Stephanopoulis tapped her finger once on the table, which meant for me to hold back. I looked closely at Smith and saw his leg had picked up the same tremor I’d seen in his office. We wanted him scared but we didn’t want him so scared that he clammed up or tried to do a runner.
“He was murdered yesterday,” said Stephanopoulis. “At his home in Norfolk.”
Smith’s shoulders relaxed. Relief, defeat, despair? I couldn’t tell.
“You knew about it in advance,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yesterday,” I said. “When I came calling — that’s why you had No-Neck on the door, that’s why you were sweating.”
“I’d heard some whispers,” said Smith.
“What kind of whispers?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“That somebody I thought was dead might not be,” he said.
“This dead bloke got a name?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Johnson was in with this strange bloke — like a magician, he was,” said Smith.
“Did card tricks, did he?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Not that kind of magician,” said Smith. “This was like real voodoo magic only it was a white geezer.”
“You said it was like voodoo?” I asked. “Did the man call on loas to possess him, did he carry out rituals and sacrifices?”
“I don’t know,” said Smith. “I steered well clear.”
“But you thought he could do real magic?” I asked.
“I don’t think,” he said. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“At least I think I saw it,” said Smith and he seemed to shrink down into the collar of his shirt. “You’re not going to believe me.”
“I’m not going to believe you,” said Stephanopoulis. “But Constable Grant here is actually paid to believe in the unbelievable. He also has to believe in faeries and wizards and hobgoblins.”
“And hobbitses,” I said.
Smith bristled. “You think this is funny. Larry Piercingham, who they used to call Larry the Lark because he liked to do his rounds early. Remember him?”
“I’m not as old as I look,” said Stephanopoulis as I noted the name.
“I don’t know the details but he got on the wrong side of the magician …”
“Did he have a name?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Who?”
“This magician, what was his name?”
“Don’t know,” said Smith. “When we talked about him he was just the magician and mostly, all things being equal, we didn’t talk about him at all.”
“So what happened to Larry the Lark?” I asked.
“Larry was in with a hard mob from Somers Town, blaggers and handle men and the like. The sort of people that used to do proper scores back in the old days. These were not people that you disrespected — you understand?” asked Smith.
We did. Somers Town used to be a concentrated block of villainy sandwiched between Euston and St. Pancras stations. In the days before rottweilers it was the sort of place where people kept a sawed-off shotgun by the front door — in case of unwelcome guests or social workers.
Larry — who, when he wasn’t robbing security vans, worked as casual muscle for various porn brokers, pimps, and whatever — just went missing one day. His missus wandered around for a bit asking everyone whether they’d seen him but nobody had.
“Not that anyone was actually looking for him,” said Smith.
“A month later there’s a big sit-down celebration at the Acropolis on Frith Street. All the Somers Town gang are there plus selected guests from the cream of the Soho underworld.”
“What was it in aid of?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“I don’t fucking remember,” said Smith. “I don’t think anyone there remembers what it was in aid of originally.”
It was a Greek Cypriot place, lots of grilled meat and fish and olives.
“Proper Greek nosh,” said Smith. “None of that Kurdish stuff.”
“If this was proper villains,” said Stephanopoulis, “why were you there?”
“I had an interest in some of their enterprises,” said Smith. “But mainly I was there because they invited me and when people like that invited you somewhere you went.”
Smith didn’t notice anything unusual until about two hours in, when most of the food was gone. A pair of waiters came in with a large covered salver, cleared a space, and plonked it down in the middle of the table.
“What’s this then?” asked Michael “the Mick” McCu
llough who, if not the undisputed governor of the mob, was currently the least dead or banged-up. “It’s not my birthday.”
Somebody suggested that it might be the stripper.
“Bit of a midget stripper,” said McCullough, and he reached out and pulled the lid off. Underneath was the head of Larry the Lark as fresh-looking as the day it was cut off. Garnished with holly and mistletoe no less. I made a note of that in case it was important.
The Somers Town mob were, by definition, hard men and not averse to spilling a bit of claret themselves. They knew how to put the frighteners on people and they weren’t about to let themselves get discombobulated by something as routine as a head on a plate.
“That,” said McCullough, “has got to be the ugliest stripper I’ve ever seen.”
That got a laugh from the mob right up to the point where the head spoke.
“Help me,” it said.
The voice, according to Alexander Smith, sounded a bit like Larry the Lark’s but had a whistling quality as if his breath was being forced through a pipe. Well, this did put the frighteners on the Somers Town mob, who knocked over their chairs getting away from the table except for Michael McCullough, who wasn’t a superstitious man.
“It’s a trick, you stupid pillocks,” he’d shouted and, reaching out, flipped the salver over.
“I think he expected to find a hole in the table,” said Smith. “To be honest so did I, with Larry the Lark crouched down there having us on — having a laugh. Only there was no hole, no Larry, at least no Larry’s body.”
The head went bouncing across the table and onto the floor with all the hard men, all the blaggers and enforcers squealing like little girls and scrambling to get out of the way. Not McCullough, though, because one thing you could say about McCullough was that he was without fear. He stalks round the table and picks up the head by its hair and waves it at the rest of the guests.
“It’s a fucking trick,” he shouted. “I don’t believe it — what a bunch of pansies.”
“Mickey,” said the head of Larry the Lark. “For Christ’s sake help me.”
“What did McCullough say?” asked Stephanopoulis.
Smith’s heel rat-a-tatted on the tiled floor of the interview room.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because like everyone else I got the fuck out of there. After that nobody talked about that night, nobody talked about Larry the Lark, and the restaurant closed. I kept my head down, made my money, and left the country.”
“What did the magician want from Detective Chief Inspector Johnson?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“The usual,” said Smith. “He wanted to be protected from any undue interference by the forces of law and order.”
I asked what it was needed protecting.
“A club,” he said. “On Brewer Street.”
“There’s no club on Brewer Street,” I said.
“It was very exclusive,” said Smith.
“What did Johnson get from the magician?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Greasy Johnson had needs,” said Smith. “He was a very needy boy, he had special needs.”
“Like what?” asked Stephanopoulis. “Drugs, gambling, booze, girls — what?”
“Sex,” said Smith.
“What kind of sex?” I asked. “Boys, girls, short socks, sheep?”
“The last one,” said Smith.
“Sheep,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re bloody kidding me.”
“I don’t know if it was sheep exactly,” said Smith. “But definitely animal-related. Do you know what a cat-girl is?”
“From manga,” I said. “Girls with cat ears and tails. They’re called Neko-chan, I think.”
“Thank God for the Japanese, eh?” said Smith. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have names for all this stuff. That’s what Greasy Johnson liked. Cat-girls.”
“You mean girls dressed up as cats,” said Stephanopoulis.
“Look,” said Smith. “I didn’t know about these things and I made a point of not ever finding out about them, but dressed up as cats? That’s not what I heard. Freaks of nature, that’s what I heard.”
“Was he still around?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Who?” asked Smith.
“The magician,” said Stephanopoulis. “Was he still here when you got homesick and came home?”
“No he wasn’t,” said Smith. “I made a special point of asking around — if he’d been here I’d have gone to Manchester instead.”
“Manchester,” I said. “Really?”
“Blackpool, if Manchester wasn’t far enough.”
“But he was gone?” I asked.
“Not a sniff,” he said.
Stephanopoulis took her cue. “So who killed Jerry Johnson then?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The leg tremor was back with a vengeance.
“Was it the magician?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it the fucking magician?”
Smith’s head twitched from side to side. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.
“We can protect you,” she said.
“What do you think you know about it, eh?” asked Smith. “You don’t know nothing.”
“Show him, Constable,” said Stephanopoulis.
I opened my hand a conjured up a werelight. I put a lot of red into it and some blur and flicker to make it look impressive.
Smith stared at it with a gratifying expression of stupefied surprise.
“We know what we’re talking about,” I said. I’d been practicing this variation as a low-energy demonstration piece in the hope that it would less likely blow out any local electronics. Even so I gave the tape recorder a worried glance and shut it down quickly just to be on the safe side.
Smith stared at me. “What’s this?” he asked. “We’ve got magic coppers now? Since when?”
“Since Bow Street,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Smith. “Where was you lot when Larry the Lark got himself topped?”
That was a good question and one I planned to ask Nightingale when I had a moment.
“That was the ’70s,” I said. “This is now.”
“Or you could always go back to Marbella,” added Stephanopoulis helpfully.
“Or Manchester,” I said.
“Or Blackpool,” said Stephanopoulis.
“Burlesque among the illuminations,” I said.
“There’s another bloke,” said Smith suddenly. “Another fucking magician, I don’t know where he came from. One minute he wasn’t there and the next minute he was.”
“When did he appear?” I asked.
“In the summer,” said Smith. “A couple of weeks after that fire at Covent Garden.”
“Did you see him?” I asked.
Smith shook his head. “I never saw nothing,” he said. “And nobody said nothing neither.”
“Then how did you know he was there?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“You modern coppers think you’ve got it all sussed,” said Smith. “This is Soho, this is my manor, this is my patch. I’m like a tiger. I know when something’s changed in my patch. Fuck, I can tell when someone’s opened a new Chinese takeout, so yeah, when something that evil creeps back in — I felt it.” He gave us a pitying look. “An old-style copper would have felt it too, even a tosser like Johnson would have known something was up.”
“And gone around looking for a bung,” said Stephanopoulis.
Smith shrugged. “What else are they for?” he asked.
“So why didn’t you scarper?” I asked.
“I don’t dabble in anything I’m not supposed to these days and I cater to a whole different set of punters now — I’m kosher,” he said. “So why worry? Besides, everything I’ve got is invested in my business.”
“So what changed?” I asked.
“I reckon it was you,” he said. “That first time, you were barely out the door when he comes waltzing in and sits down in the same chair.”
; “Who did?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“That’s just it,” said Smith. “I don’t know. I can remember his voice, what he said, but I can’t remember his face.”
“How can you not remember his face?”
“You ever forget where you put your bleeding keys?” asked Smith. “It’s just like that, I know he was there, I know he sat in front me but, fuck me, I cannot remember what he looked like.”
“How do you know he was this new magician then?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“Are you deaf?” asked Smith. “Do you think I’m demented, that I’ve got mad cow disease? I don’t remember the man’s face — does that sound like a natural phenomenon to you?”
Stephanopoulis glanced at me but I could only shrug — magically speaking, this was getting way above my pay grade. I was also getting a cold feeling in my stomach about the way my two cases were beginning to merge.
“What did Mr. Forgettable want?” I asked.
“He was asking after the same bird you were,” he said.
“Peggy?” I said.
He nodded. “What did I know about her, what did I know about you, and hadn’t I been one of the people at Larry the Lark’s debut? That’s what he called it — his debut.”
Stephanopoulis tensed, she wanted to know who Peggy was, but the second cardinal rule of an interview is that the police must maintain a united front at all times. You certainly don’t ask each other questions in front of a suspect. Technically that’s actually a breach of rule one, never give away information, but we’re the police so we like to keep things simple.
“You’re sure this was not the same man as the old magician?” asked Stephanopoulis.
“What can I say,” said Smith. “He was young and he was posh — that’s all I know.”
“Where was the old magician’s club?” I asked.
“You really don’t want to know,” said Smith.
“Yeah, Smithy,” I said. “As it happens I absolutely do want to know.”
UNLESS THE wheels have come off big-time you don’t just stroll around to a location and kick in the door. Apart from anything else, it’s not that easy to kick in a door and the last time I tried to do it I broke a toe. Commercial premises are usually harder to get into than private homes, so we first made sure that the specialist entry team was available and then booked them for later that afternoon. That left us enough time to apply for a search warrant under section 8 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) using carefully selected highlights from Alexander Smith’s interview. I say “us,” but one of the advantages of working with a full Murder Team is that Stephanopoulis had lots of minions to do the paperwork for her. Meanwhile the two of us retired to the Burlington Arms for a stiff drink — we reckoned we’d earned it.
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