The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  The Guardian

  Christopher Kenworthy

  Copyright © 2015 Christopher Kenworthy

  Christopher Kenworthy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Remembrance of times past.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I have always liked girls with fine, fat thighs,” Sergeant Lovegod told his colleague and confidant Detective Constable Arnold as they took their ease that night in the throbbing aromatic gloom of the dive bar of the Boot and Flogger.

  “Not for me, the bony elegance of the model. Not for Lovegod, the stringy sinews of the athlete. Give me instead the round, clean line of the Rubens. The chubby, dimpled buttock which spells comfort and happiness.With a girl like that you could spend your declining years cushioned in cellulite, rocked in the yielding flesh of fantasy. Enfolded by the fruitful loins of...”

  “A girl like what?” interrupted Arnold, swilling the dregs of his beer suggestively around the thick base of the jug and peering around the bar.

  “Like that one sitting on the stool in the snug. She’s got thighs like sides of bacon,” said Lovegod, raising a languid finger towards the barman. “Theo! Do you sell alcoholic drinks in this establishment?”

  He smiled into the eyes of the harassed barman as the beer was poured and placed in front of him.

  “Any more gems of wisdom for us this evening, Theo? A little hint on how the Lord went about his work in the days when the world was young? A stricture on the habits of motorists? How about maps, then?”

  Theo took the money from the small pile of change in a puddle of beer on the bar and rang up the sale without replying. Lovegod wiped up the beer with a spillmat and passed one of the glasses to Arnold, holding the other up to the light and smacking his lips appreciatively.

  “Fine pint. A bright, lovely pint, Arnie. A pint cool from the cellar’s subterranean calm, foaming with its own quiet exuberance, nutty with hops and the brewer’s expertise, and redolent of the best that is rural England this early, effervescent summer night!”

  Arnold looked at him with surprise, and then held his own glass up to the light.

  “You’re drinking from a different barrel than me, then,” he said. “This one’s...”

  “Flat and warm and has a faint flavour of goldfish droppings. I know. I was talking about a pint I had last summer in The Black Horse in Giggleswiok,” said Lovegod, drawing deeply on his beer. “Ah, memory. How easily it can gild and beautify even the most fleeting of moments of peace and tranquility. Now, Giggleswiok...”

  His voice faltered and his eyes became unfocused. Arnold waited for a heartbeat, and then looked at him inquiringly.

  “When were you in Yorkshire?” he said, surprised. Lovegod was such a creature of the City that it was hard to visualise that bulky, suited figure against a background of hills, heather and fresh clean air.

  Lovegod’s eyes, bloodshot and smoke filled, peered at him under shaggy eyebrows. Arnold thought of a mastiff suddenly awakened by intruders, resentful of its lost sleep.

  “Miners’ strike. Only break I’ve had from the bloody nick in over fifteen years,” said Lovegod.

  “Best break a man could have, too. A ruck with the pickets, a good night’s sleep, and a few pints of Pickwiek’s Yorkshire pudden-puller. Nothing like it to put hairs on your chest.” His face brightened suddenly. “By God, they breed girls with thighs up there, all right! Bum like a Percheron, your average Yorkshire lass! Where’s that wench gone in the snug?”

  He hoisted himself up on the foot rails of his bar stool and peered round the partition into the next bar.

  Arnold stared into the mirror behind the optics, trying to pick out of the jumble of heads and waving hands in the half-obscured reflection the face which might belong to a girl who roused Lovegod’s barely buried lust.

  It was an impossible task. The bar was packed with people, pressed close together. Their own position in the dive was one jealously guarded, and deeply envied: the corner of bar and glass-and-mahogany partition forming a natural alcove where the two policemen could sit and drink and chat without being jostled or easily overheard.

  Friday nights were especially busy. Perched where fashionable Islington faded into tattered Highbury, the Boot and Flogger’s Victorian elegance protected by its house-proud publican offended the sensibilities of neither community.

  Arnold caught sight of his own face in the mirror, tweaked his tie more perfectly back into its place, and settled his checked jacket more comfortably onto his shoulders. Elegant was the word he liked to apply to himself, though he was aware that others preferred “dapper”. Arnold did not greatly mind so long as they never said it to his face.

  Lovegod was settling back onto his stool and reaching for his glass again.

  “Gone, the wily mare. She knew in what danger she stood,” he opined. “Theo! I’m changing to brandy. Pass me a screw top American with it.”

  Arnold waited for the drinks to be served. It was getting late, and he had almost arrived at the moment of decision which faced him every weekend. Or at any rate, every weekend since he had started working with Graeme Lovegod.

  “I’d better think about something to eat,” he said quietly, accepting his own brandy and American – Lovegod never drank alone, and his colleagues were expected to match his pace – and waited for the protests.

  “Eat? The night is young and the girls are pretty! Let us stay here a while and enjoy ourselves and them. Later we can worry about matters of the flesh,” Lovegod said. His lower lip had begun to jut a little. Give him another hour and he would have drunk the better part of a half bottle of brandy, his lip would be sticking out like a bathroom shelf, and his eyes as red as traffic lights.

  That was the time when a prudent young detective constable would be far from here, and safe. Stay with Lovegod when he was drinking brandy, and a young man risked at the very best a verbal battering which would leave him sick and shaken. Particularly when, like tonight, Lovegod was smarting himself from an undeserved rebuke.

  He stole another surreptitious glance at his superior. The sergeant was lighting another cigarette with a pink disposable lighter. Beside him in a brimming ashtray, the remains of the previous three smoldered malodorously, squashed in half but not quite extinguished. Not for the first time, Arnold wondered how a man could smoke so endlessly and still be so inexpert at extinguishing his own cigarette ends.

  Automatically, he reached out and stubbed the two smoldering butts out on one another. Lovegod watched him with an expression of amused tolerance.

  “Jimmy, you’ll make a wonderful wife for some lucky feller one day,” he said with a wheezing laugh which turned into a cough, spattering Arnold with a mixture of ash and brandy.

  Lovegod was a enigma to Arnold and to a succession of detectives before him. A genuinely witty and intelligent man happily marr
ied and comfortably off, who spent most of his time in pubs in the fantasy pursuit of girls young enough to be his daughter.

  Overweight, self-indulgent, self-centred and often spectacularly rude, he was nevertheless a good and successful policeman, which excused much in the eyes of Arnold and his colleagues, but sometimes not quite enough in those of his superiors.

  Lovegod might at one time have been a good looking and stalwart young man. But time, his appetites and alcohol – mainly bitter beer – had turned his once solid body to fat. Where once he had been a barrel, now he was a pear. Where once his wit had waxed as his sobriety waned, it now degenerated into abuse instead of repartee.

  Where once, Lovegod had sported a mane of tawny hair, he now had only a spreading tonsure, with marmalade coloured hanks hanging over his ears.

  And yet, Arnold reminded himself as Lovegod’s monologue on the virtues of fat women went on, the man was undeniably successful with women – even women young enough and pretty enough to take their choice from the extensive supply of young and, Arnold would have thought, more attractive men who nightly paraded in the Boot.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said automatically. Lovegod stopped.

  “What do you know?” he asked suspiciously.

  Unwilling to admit he had not been listening, Arnold gestured at the smoky room. “Plenty of others around here. Take your pick,” he said lamely. Lovegod stared at him.

  “What’s that got to do with the kids?” he asked. Arnold kicked himself mentally and tried to look as though he had been listening.

  It was too late.

  “What have I just been talking about?” Lovegod demanded.

  “About fat women,” Arnold said forcefully. The great balding head shook slowly from side to side.

  “You know your trouble, son?” Lovegod said “You don’t listen. What I have just been talking about was pretty little girls walking off and just vanishing. Ffffft! Gone! Disparut!”

  “You know where they are and so do I,” argued Arnold. “They are in some ditch somewhere, poor little cows, with their knickers round their necks until some hiker finds them and then the bloody Sun can run another story about the perverts who batten on our children.”

  “As if they weren’t all a part of it, with their page three girls and their double page spreads about what kind of a man turns you on?”

  Lovegod was shaking his shaggy head again. He looked this time, Arnold thought, like an old man orangutan disillusioned with life in the woods.

  “Some of them, Jimmy. But only some of them. There are too many who just never turn up at all. What about them?”

  Arnold shrugged. “Deeper ditch. Fewer hikers. Same difference, except that they aren’t found,” he said. He was sick of the subject. Despite all they could do to prevent it, the list of young girls – and boys – going missing was growing by the day.

  “It is too easy, especially in London. A thirteen year old who looks older can make her living selling her backside on the street. She don’t want to be found at first, and then she’s ashamed to be found.

  “Or some bastard takes her up and ‘protects’ her and takes all her earnings, and then she’s really in it, for she can’t get away. Same thing with the boys except that every now and again they come to the surface when some MP’s caught knocking them off. Then we’re back to the bloody Sun and ‘RENT BOYS SHAME’ for a week or two and the same pattern repeats.

  “We don’t find the little blighters because they don’t want to be found, and then they’re fair game for any prowling pervert – and they can’t even go to their friendly neighbourhood copper.”

  Lovegod was wearing his mulish look, and Arnold recognised with a mental groan that he had left it too late to back out. He was in for a night’s session now.

  “What do you think then, Grey?” he asked.

  “Someone’s bagging them,” said Lovegod. “Bagging them and taking them away for his own nefarious reasons. ‘Have a sweetie little girl,’ he says, and then he pops a bag over their heads and takes them away. Takes them away and nobody the wiser. Not clever police force gentlefolk like me and thee, sunshine, nor nobody else.”

  He stirred his fourth brandy with his finger and sucked the end of it.

  “Remember that eighty year old who was robbed and raped and had seven kinds of shit beaten out of her for four pence and her pension book last year?”

  Arnold nodded. The case had been before he joined Lovegod, but he knew what had happened.

  “Well, I got the pair of little bastards that did that. Got ‘em, bang to rights, Jim-boy. A seventeen year old and a fourteen year old. One of ‘em was black as the inside of your hat, the other one was a white blonde who looked like Aled Jones’s little brother. Know what happened to ‘em? A year for the seventeen year old, and a six month community service sentence for the fourteen year old. The old girl’s in a mental home now, has to have the light on because she’s too frightened to sleep in the dark any more. Screams her head off every time she sees a kid. When’s her sentence going to end, Jimmy? When does she get time off for good behaviour? Those two little bastards are back on the street tonight, looking for a bit more of the same. I saw them last week, waving at me across the road. They were laughing. How come nobody ever leaves little sods like that in a ditch?”

  He peered into his brandy glass.

  “That bottle run dry has it? Theo! Put me a double in here!”

  Arnold cleared his throat warily.

  “I know, Jimmy. We all get ‘em, and we all have to put up with ‘em. I’m nothing special. But it does make you wonder, when someone lays a pile of purple ones that high in front of you, what we are all going through the motions for, doesn’t it? It makes you look at your wife and your scruffy home and the figures for the number of kids being bagged and buggered – well, it makes you wonder what you are doing it all for.”

  “Purple ones? Has someone been offering you bribes?” Arnold was amazed. Lovegod’s reputation did not include corruption.

  “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? What does any clever copper do when he’s asked to turn his head away and stop asking awkward questions?”

  Lovegod poured American ginger into his glass and helped himself to ice from the bucket on the bar, ignoring the ice tongs and the bartender’s murderous look.

  “I told ‘em to stuff their money up their arses, one note at a time, while singing ‘Here’s to the next Time!’ in bright, falsetto voices.”

  Arnold was not very surprised. If Lovegod had accepted the bribe he would not be the first policeman by any means, and certainly not the last. But he would have been the least likely.

  “How much was it?” he asked.

  “Enough to buy me a new car,” Lovegod said indistinctly. “And more to come if I behaved myself.”

  “What did they say when you turned them down?”

  “They were not pleased,” Lovegod told him. “Their little blue eyes failed to light up with joy. But they weren’t that miffed, either. Almost as if they were just going through the motions. Funny, that, because the money was big enough to be very serious indeed.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Lovegod shook his head. “Nobody local. The local talent would have known better than to offer. No, these two were out of town players on an away engagement. Well dressed. Camel coats and Tonic suiting and pigskin briefcases. Smelled nice, too. Fifteen quid a bottle stuff.”

  “Car?”

  “BMW. Hired. Careful, that. Very careful, considering they thought I was for sale. Now who would be that careful, Jimmy, round this place?”

  Arnold shrugged. “We’ve some locals who dress like that to go to the launderette. If they ever went to the launderette.”

  “Up Soho way, yes. Down the Elephant, certainly. But this was a different kind of class. Those two could have walked into Threadneedle Street and nobody would have looked twice. On your local talent, those would have been Sunday best
clothes. On these gents, they were every day. There’s a difference and you can tell.”

  He looked up as the barman reached for a length of grimy once-white rope hanging from a brass bell over the bar.

  “Before you ring that, Theo, fill these,” he said.

  “I told Father about it, but he just told me to put it in my report. I think it is more important than that. Much more.”

  He raised his glass to drink and as he did so, his eyes strayed to the mirror. For a while he remained in the same position, hand still raised.

  “Oh, damn!” he said. “Just what we need. Carver’s back.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arnold was coping with his own fifth large brandy, and the fumes of the spirit were howling around his head, but even so he did not miss the spasm of pain which passed across Lovegod’s face.

  “Who?” he said, peering pointlessly into the mirror.

  Lovegod pushed another Senior Service into his mouth and fumbled with the lighter.

  “Carver,” he said indistinctly through a cloud of smoke and ash. “Harry Carver. Used to live up in Cross Street with a girl and her daughter up to a couple of years ago. Then he disappeared. Word was that they broke up and he went abroad. Didn’t cause me any pain.”

  He poked his finger in Arnold’s chest.

  “You think you’ve seen some tasty characters round here, young Arnie, and you know what bad news is, but that bastard really IS bad news. I’ve had more trouble with Harry Carver than any three villains put together.”

  Arnold was impressed. When Lovegod talked about trouble he knew whereof he spoke, and James Arnold was the man to take good advice when he heard it.

  “What kind of a villain is he?” he asked, craning his neck to try and pick out an unfamiliar face.

  “Well...” Lovegod for once seemed lost for words. “I wouldn’t say he was ever actually a villain. If he was one we never caught him at it. But he has a nose for violence. Round here if you’re not into one of the mobs, you walk carefully, right?”