The Dirty Rouge (The Dirty Rouge Series Book 1)

by Geoff Small

  Franklin’s eyes suddenly seemed to bulge out of his head in horror, while his right leg began to shake pneumatically.

  “That’s what he said wasn’t it? ‘Remember me?’.” Smiling, Curzon raised his eyebrows for a moment, trying to prompt a response from Franklin. “Not content with having ruined the young lad’s career, within a moment you would take his life.” Curzon’s smile suddenly disappeared and, staring hard and aggressively into Franklins pupils, searching for the man’s soul, he looked like he could quite easily have been a killer himself. “Not only were you petrified of this drunk and drugged up young man exposing you to everyone at the party, but your ego was piquing you wasn’t it? You were angry because he’d spurned your advances that day at the football ground…you were furious with him at his cockiness, just swaggering round in front of you like that? Who was he to reject and, worse, have the drop on the great Tommy Franklin? Such was your rage, that, before you knew it, you’d picked up a breadknife, charged out of the barbeque area and plunged it into the young man’s chest. Was he dead or still alive? We’ll never know, because you wrapped him up in the blue tarpaulin onto which he’d fallen and left him there until the party ended, when you carried him out over your big, weight lifters shoulders – still mummified in plastic – and put him into the back of your Range Rover along with your barbeque equipment and four heavy bricks. Then, so as not to arouse attention, you drove at neutral speed down to Largs, put the body on your boat at the Yacht Haven there, attached a backpack, placed the four bricks inside it, before sailing out to sea and tossing the poor fellow overboard. But it turned out that you’re not the best after all, because mother-nature kicked your effort into touch by spewing Bobby back onto the beach.” At this point Curzon’s mouth formed into a furious rictus and he spoke through clenched teeth, causing him to sound like a really poor ventriloquist. “Feel. Free. To. Take. The. Floor. Whenever. You. See. Fit.”

  “I’ve nothing to say.”

  Encouraged by this response from his prisoner, Curzon deployed a white lie.

  “I suppose you want to know where we’ve just been, while you were sat back here in the dark on your own?” Franklin, who was no doubt disorientated, nodded, probably involuntarily. “We’ve just been on your boat, talking to forensics…and guess what?”

  “What?” Franklin replied in an eager manner.

  “They’ve already found lots of particles from the bricks all over the deck.”

  “That dust must have got on my shoes while I was doing the barbeque…it means nothing.”

  “It means that you’ve been on the boat between last Saturday night and today,” Curzon said, smugly, so smugly in fact that Franklin, immediately realising his mistake, lunged across the metre of distance between them, and even though handcuffed, managed to head-butt the detective, right on the nose. With the full weight of this iron pumping athlete now lying on top of him, Curzon just about managed to bang out his distress code on the side of the cage, causing the vehicle to screech to a halt before both Deegan and McKay burst in through the back doors. The problem now though, was that Curzon had the key to the cage in his back pocket, and so they were actually powerless to prevent him from being suffocated and merely had to resort to talking Franklin off, which thankfully worked.

  Blood gushing from his nose, Curzon stumbled out of the cage, then with trembling hands he locked the door behind him.

  “You’ve blown your one and only chance Franklin! Now you’re a murderer and a man without honour too – you’re a worm!”

  The vehicle was now parked on a busy street, so to say that Curzon was making a spectacle would be an understatement as old ladies doing their shopping stopped to gawp inside. Deegan and McKay shepherded him out, but before they’d managed to close the doors he was still shouting in the street, Franklin staring out of his cage like some Victorian freak show.

  “This is just the beginning Franklin! When the adrenaline of survival wears off, you’ve got an eternity of self-loathing and guilt to confront, coz you’re a fraud Franklin! You’re not one of the best at all, you’re a phoney and in time you’ll be found out by yourself…and that’s the scariest revelation of all!”

  If nothing else, at least Curzon had a legitimate excuse for taking Franklin in now. However, when he got back to the police station, Fergus Baxter was already there, along with an apoplectic chief superintendent, wanting to know how the prisoner had arrived over an hour after his lawyer, even though they’d left for the station at the same time. Backed up by his sergeant and constable, Curzon claimed to have been held hostage by his suspect in the back of the detainment vehicle, while his colleagues had had to pull over to negotiate his release. Of course, the superintendent immediately asked why they’d not brought the vehicle straight to the station where, not only would they have had more people to deal with the situation, but also a spare key for the cage. Curzon admitted that, in hindsight, the latter approach now seemed the obvious course of action but, alas, such lack of foresight and lateral thinking probably explained why he wasn’t chief superintendent and his interlocutor was. Now, you might be wondering how it is possible that a superintendent would tolerate such blatant impudence and insubordination. Well, when you just happen to have a son who’s been filmed snorting and dealing cocaine, while openly bragging about the fact that his father – then a chief inspector – supplies him with drugs confiscated on raids, and copies of the footage are stored in several lawyers’ safety deposit boxes, to be opened in the event of Curzon suffering an unnatural death or dismissal from the force, it’s not that hard to fathom.

  As a PC, Curzon had spent all his spare time investigating and keeping everyone around him and above him under surveillance, hiding bugs in police vehicles, police frequented pubs and golf clubs, while filming officers and their families performing embarrassing or criminal activities. You see, that’s why he had the edge, because he wasn’t in the job for the money, he just wanted to be a copper twenty-four hours a day, every day, and he accumulated pointless tittle-tattle on people in the same way he collected the worthless, personal bric-a-brac that was hoarded in his apartment. He’d never gone on the offensive with his stockpile of ammunition though, and used it only as a deterrent. For example, he was only blackmailing Chief Superintendent Leon Rotter now after Rotter – then an inspector – had tried to scapegoat Curzon over a batch of ecstasy that had gone missing during a dawn raid, when the latter was just starting out as a sergeant. Far from ruining Curzon’s career though, the corrupt policeman had merely provided our ‘hero’ with the justification he’d needed to capitalise on the info he had stored, which resulted in him filling the chief inspectors’ post the moment Rotter moved up to superintendent. However, in this instance, even though Curzon was adamant that Franklin was their man, orders from above compelled Rotter to command his inspector to release the football star and charge Craig Hunter, who had a plethora of evidence stacked against him and had always been their obvious prime suspect.

  “As a force, our priority is to get somebody into the dock following a murder, so as to reassure the public that we are protecting them. That’s not going to happen if you pursue Franklin, coz there’s no concrete evidence and his representatives will make our lives hell. Your job isn’t to judge, only to offer whatever evidence you find to the prosecution service. Now, there’s plenty of that against Hunter, so let them take responsibility for the rest. If you don’t do it then I’ll have to find someone who will.”

  As Curzon was opening the door to leave Rotter’s office, the superintendent mitigated his tone and tried to protect himself from any repercussions with an:

  “Of course, I owe you one for this.”

  Chapter 17

  Even though Curzon had made his own testimony completely neutral in court, at times doing the defence’s job for them, the brick dust from the Castlemilk construction site and the CCTV footage from The Goose pub proved enough to see Craig Hunter sent down and hated in his community, his poor family receiving death t
hreats and regularly having bricks hurled through their windows. And all because of Fergus Baxter and his cronies in high places who had conspired, once again, to allow a rich murderer – first a banker and now a footballer – to walk free, while an innocent schemie went to prison as a smokescreen. ‘What about the photograph albums!’ I hear you scream. Well, Curzon had withheld these items, firstly because he’d gained them by dubious means, and secondly, they in themselves proved very little as regards this particular case, apart from illustrating his hunch. Mindful from the beginning that Franklin would probably get off, he’d reserved them as his own contingency form of justice. And so, on a freezing December night, just hours after Craig Hunter had been given a twenty year jail sentence, Jackie the Junkie ran from bus stop to bus stop, in and out of pub toilets and down onto underground platforms, pasting copies of the former football star’s holiday snaps on walls. Over the coming days, arguments would rage at bars and in work canteens between fans of one Glasgow team who couldn’t accept the truth, and those of the other who would go on to compose abusive songs and chants that will no doubt remain in folklore for at least a generation. Indeed, such was the ignominy created by these images that Tommy Franklin had to leave his post as manager of St. Clyde F.C, sell his house and move to Thailand, leaving Curzon to worry that he’d probably done more harm than good with his little smear campaign. Either way, this was just the start. Seething with vengefulness, the detective would never rest until the footballer received a punishment worthy of his crime.

  While Jackie had been running from one side of the city to the other in the early hours, fly-posting in her jogging bottoms, face covered by her hooded jacket, the policeman had been doing what he did every time a case closed, whether victorious or not: he’d lost hundreds of pounds on a roulette wheel and drank a seemingly never ending procession of whiskies. Once all his money had been squandered, he repaired to Nancy’s plush townhouse at Park Circus, where he went to forget whatever hideous events he’d been absorbed in.

  Curzon stood at Nancy’s little bar with a bourbon on the rocks, donning his beige Burberry trench coat and a trilby hat, which she kept for him in the house. Meanwhile, the martini cocktail sipping, seventy-year-old prostitute did nothing more than sit at a tall stool, side on to the counter, smelling of expensive perfume and looking aloof. With one leg crossed over the other, she was wearing a long, black, figure hugging silk dress, a slit up one side revealing stockings and suspenders. As Miles Davis’s lonely trumpet played on a CD in the background, she held a smoking cigarette away from her face in a holder, her slender hands gloved in black silk all the way up to her elbows and just beyond. Occasionally she’d fix a seductive stare on him, her hawk-like visage heavily lined and sagging, her strict, vein marbled eyes, frighteningly pronounced in their coronas of black mascara. This whole grotesque effect was capped by an elbow length, wavy brown wig and vivid red lipstick, a sight which would inspire terror in anyone except a drunk in a dimly lit room. But she was the only woman Curzon had ever met who truly understood noir. Together, they would while away the small hours, acting out scenes from movies like The Big Sleep, or Pick Up On South Street, which, as a young girl, she’d actually sneaked into the movies to watch on the day of its release in 1953. Not only that, but he’d seen old sepia photographs of her as a twenty year old, when she’d first started out as an escort in Glasgow. Without a word of exaggeration they could quite easily have been stills from an Ava Gardner movie. If only he’d been born thirty years earlier, the DCI often thought, then even he, cold, repressed, insular Curzon, might have fallen head over heels in love with her. But fate deigned that he had arrived on this earth three decades too late for his soul mate, who had also escaped a miserable childhood through the imaginary world that we now call ‘noir’, a world that she had strived to make real, for fear of having nowhere else to hide.

  At four o’clock, after three hours of purely platonic role play, without one so much as touching the other, the prostitute and the detective, or should I say, the pro skirt and the peeper, enacted their usual farewell. Curzon clinked his whisky tumbler against her martini glass and said, with a slight hiccup:

  “Here’s lookin at you kid!”

  Then he drained the remainder of his drink, removed his trilby hat, placed it on the bar and left the building unsteadily. He stumbled down the frosty steps from the townhouse, before staggering across the sparkling street to a moonlit park, where he slumped on a bench and smoked a cigarette, while tilting his head back to enjoy the stars.

  # # #

  Language: UK English spellings/word usage/punctuation

  Also by the Author

  A Long Walk In The Snow

  Book Two of The Dirty Rouge Series.

  (Kindle Edition)

  It’s Christmas, heavy snow is falling on Glasgow and an author’s body has been found in a city centre alleyway.

  DCI Patrick Curzon – AKA the Dirty Rouge – takes up the case and goes off on another tour of Scotland’s toughest town, lifting stones on both high and low life in his hunt for the killer.

  Set among the tenements and fine Victorian architecture of the city, Curzon’s Investigation takes many tantalizing twists and turns before he eventually discovers the shocking truth, not only about the killer, but also about himself. However, even though he seems to be staring over the edge of an abyss, he can still muster enough strength to fight another psychological dual with his sworn enemy, corrupt defence lawyer Fergus Baxter.

  Guilt Tripper

  (Kindle Edition)

  Set in Scotland, Guilt Tripper is the fast-moving story of Glasgow man, Danny White, an unemployed artist whose beautiful girlfriend has left him for his successful and wealthy best friend, Bob Fitzgerald. Convinced his socialist beliefs have made him soft, Danny decides things should change. So when he discovers Fitzgerald has a perverted violent side, he extorts money from him which he then uses to set up an art school in the Scottish Highlands for underprivileged teenagers.

  Everything is perfect until a bedraggled Fitzgerald turns up at the school one night and tells Danny the sinister truth about the money funding his project. Horrified and conscience-stricken, Danny attempts to put things right - but is it all too late?

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17