Silvermeadow bak-5

by Barry Maitland

  Hislop glanced at it. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ She smiled and handed it back. ‘We’re on performance contracts here. The last thing I need is a reputation for shopping our best clients to the filth, know what I mean?’

  ‘We’re anxious to contact him, that’s all.’

  She shrugged and swept her red hair back from her forehead, her biceps swelling impressively under the brilliant white T-shirt. Then she got to her feet and took a book from a shelf and turned the pages. It was an album of photographs, Kathy saw, of men and women bodybuilders in studio poses. She found the one she was looking for and passed it over to Kathy and Lowry. In it, Testor was wearing almost nothing, his body oiled and gleaming. She traced the outline of the hairless torso with a fingertip. ‘This is my work,’ she said.

  Kathy’s reply was drowned by a muffled scream from beyond the Primavera door. Ms Hislop ignored it. ‘I wax him,’ she said. ‘I do most of the regulars myself.’

  There was a second scream, a male voice in agony, followed by a string of curses. Ms Hislop shook her head resignedly and rose to her feet in one smooth aerobic movement. ‘’Scuse me one moment.’ She disappeared through the door.

  After several minutes she returned and sat down in the same perching position, as if in the middle of a knees-bend exercise. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘What was that all about?’ Lowry asked.

  ‘God, they’re babies,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘Men.’ She raised an eyebrow knowingly at Kathy. ‘It’s just so bloody embarrassing when they start to cry. Don’t you find that?’

  ‘What are they doing to him?’ Lowry asked cautiously.

  The Primavera door opened again and a girl in a white tracksuit came out and knelt by Ms Hislop’s side, whispered in her ear.

  ‘All right,’ she nodded. ‘But there’s no refund. He knows that.’

  She turned back to Lowry. ‘Body wax. First time.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘The women come in here, pop up on the couch and get it over with without a murmur.

  But the men… God! They want a full consultation first, before they decide. Then they get so worked up thinking about it they’re in a panic before we even begin. You can see why God gave the job of having babies to women-if the men had to do it, there wouldn’t be any.’

  ‘They’re stripping his body hair off with wax?’ Lowry looked at her in horror.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But… why?’

  She looked at him as if he was even more stupid than she’d supposed. ‘It’s the look, isn’t it?’

  ‘The look?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you read your wife’s magazines?’

  ‘I don’t think she has any.’

  ‘Course she does! You take a gander. All the male models have got totally hairless bods. Nobody would touch a hairy model these days. It’s the look. Movie stars are the same. When did you see a hair on Arnie Schwarzenegger’s pecs? And sportsmen, too, your swimmers and runners and that. Body hair is definitely out.’

  ‘Christ…’ Lowry’s imagination was still coping with the vision of the hair being ripped from his back. ‘But still, why bother?’

  ‘Well, it’s ecological, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ecological?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, clean and green. And anyway, a lot of them, their wives and girlfriends make them do it. They ask why they should be the only ones to have to do it. They expect their men to take equal waxing responsibility.’

  This reduced Lowry to stunned silence.

  Kathy said, ‘How much is it? I might treat him.’ She nodded at her fellow DS.

  ‘Men’s chest wax is the same as ladies’ half leg wax. Nineteen ninety-nine, unless he’s very hairy.’ She looked at Lowry appraisingly. ‘I’ll give you a half-price introductory offer.’

  ‘Thanks. Think I’ll give it a miss, all the same.’

  ‘So you do Eddie Testor regularly?’

  ‘Yes. He comes in once a month. Has the works. I give him a special deal, as a regular.’

  ‘What, head, body, legs…’

  ‘Everything, yes.’

  ‘Everything?’ Lowry echoed.

  She nodded.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘He never complains. Seems to like it. Ideal client.’

  ‘I meant, as a person.’

  ‘Quiet. Keeps to himself. He comes to the gym regularly, too. To work out, you know.’

  ‘Does he have a friend here? Someone he meets regularly?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He’s a solitary sort of bloke.’

  ‘What does he talk to you about?’

  ‘Movies. He just talks about the movies he’s been to see. At the multiplex, usually. He goes to everything that’s on: children’s films, horror films, comedies, thrillers, everything. That’s why the others don’t like to do him, because he spoils it for them, tells them what happens, can’t help himself. I don’t care, cos I never go to the pics. He never mentions friends, or family.’

  ‘What address do you have for him?’

  She looked it up on the computer, but it was the same one they had.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be there at the moment,’ Kathy said, and then had another thought. ‘You didn’t see him on the sixth of this month, did you? Week ago Monday?’

  ‘That’s the day that girl disappeared, isn’t it? Blimey! You think Eddie…?’ It hadn’t struck her before that this might be why they were there, and she seemed startled by the idea.

  ‘We think he could have been a witness to something,’ Kathy told her soothingly. ‘That’s why we need to talk to him.’

  ‘Ah, well…’ She checked her computer again. ‘No, not the sixth. He was booked in for his monthly the following day, the seventh, four till five p.m.’

  As Kathy and Lowry thanked her and got up to leave, she suddenly added, ‘Oh, hang on! I just thought of something. Have you been to Carmen’s?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lowry said. ‘A fortune teller?’

  Ms Hislop looked sharply at him. ‘You should take up the offer on the wax, you know. You could do the sunbed, too. It’d make a big difference to you. Your wife would have a nice surprise.’

  ‘She’d have a bloody heart attack,’ Lowry muttered, looking impatiently at the door.

  ‘Carmen’s?’ Kathy prompted.

  ‘Hair salon on this level, other side of the food court, beyond the multiplex, through the Spanish market. Everyone goes to Carmen’s, me included. And I remember her or one of her girls saying that one of their customers was related to Eddie-his aunty or something.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Kathy said. ‘We haven’t come across her.’ She thought of Kerri’s Uncle Dragan. One day, she thought, the computer would have a complete record of the family interconnections of everyone, a map of the hidden blood lines that linked a subject to a second cousin or a step-uncle twice removed who might be waiting in the shadows to provide help, or something else. ‘You wouldn’t have a name, I suppose?’

  ‘No, but Carmen might.’

  The foyer to Carmen’s salon was all blonde timber and gleaming chrome, the only indication of its purpose a few discreet displays of bottles under concealed spotlights, like a museum of rare artefacts. Carmen turned out to be a small, dynamic woman with bright, compelling eyes, and a network that seemed to have got somewhat further than the police computer in mapping the human relationships of this area of Essex. She consulted with some of her staff, her technical director (colour), her creative director and her chief stylist, and finally found the nails consultant, who recalled a conversation with a woman who spoke of her nephew (actually, she thought, the adopted boy of her sister’s husband’s brother and his wife, who’d been tragically killed in a car smash) who was a pool attendant at the leisure centre. The customer, the aunt, was remembered as being in her fifties, blonde, a smoker with problem cuticles, and with an overall style bias described in the private terminology of the salon as ‘fluoro’.

  ‘That means
brassy, hyper, unsubtle, too much,’ Carmen explained.

  Together with an approximate date of her last visit, four to six weeks before, the computer came up with three possible names and addresses. Two of the names had bookings arranged for the month ahead, and the receptionist rang their numbers on the pretence of confirming these. As she closed, the receptionist asked if they had a relative working at Silvermeadow, by any chance, since the salon was offering a special discount to centre staff in December. The second one said yes, her nephew worked there, but she didn’t want to get him to come to the phone right now, because he was asleep and hadn’t been well. In any case, she said with a wheezy chuckle, he’d be the last person to need a booking at a hair salon.

  ‘Carmen, that’s brilliant, thanks,’ Kathy said as the receptionist rang off. ‘I’m really impressed. I wish our information was as efficient.’

  Carmen smiled, eyeing Kathy’s hair. ‘Nice basic structure, love. But you need a better cut. And what have you been washing it with?’

  Kathy agreed to make a booking once the investigation was over, and meanwhile bought three bottles that Carmen recommended.

  When Lowry saw the price on the till display he gave a little gasp. ‘Kathy, if you ever meet my wife, do me a favour and don’t tell her about this place, eh?’

  ‘Lowry…’ Carmen frowned. ‘I know the name… Yes, Connie Lowry, is that your wife?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked worried.

  ‘Oh, I know Connie. She’s nice. She comes here regular. Everyone comes here, Gavin. Even your friend Harry Jackson comes here.’

  Lowry looked shocked, as if she’d accused Jackson of participating in some morally questionable practice. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d have had enough raw material for you to work on,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised what we can do. You should have come to us for your last cut. Really you should.’

  They ran across the carpark through the rain to Lowry’s Escort. Kathy was interested to see that whoever took care of his laundry obviously didn’t handle the interior of his car. It was full of rubbish: fast-food containers, newspapers, cigarette packets and odd bits of clothing jumbled together over all the passenger seats. He grumbled as he threw things into the back to make room for Kathy, who was shivering by the time she got in out of the rain.

  ‘I’ll get the heater going,’ he muttered. ‘There’s a box of tissues somewhere. Look down there.’ He began pressing numbers on his phone.

  ‘You reporting to Brock?’ Kathy said, groping around her feet.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, but from the muttered words she could pick up it sounded more as if he was calling first for armed support and then, more surreptitiously, with his back to her, speaking to someone about cameras and a news crew. Then he drove off, pulling the car over short of the carpark exit and sitting with the engine running, tapping the steering wheel impatiently while he examined a street map.

  A second car appeared on the road behind them and flashed its lights.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Lowry muttered, and threw the car into gear.

  The address was a modern brick terrace, compact and drab in the rain. The front doors faced a tarmac parking court into which Lowry turned his car, the other following close behind. He switched off the engine and waited.

  ‘Did you call Brock?’ Kathy asked. She hadn’t seen him at Silvermeadow that morning, and there were things she wanted to speak to him about. She pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll give him a call.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He pointed through the rain-washed windscreen as an unmarked van swung fast into the court and squealed to a halt. ‘I told Phil,’ Lowry said. He looked at his watch. ‘You’ve worked with the Indian guy before, I take it. Desai?’

  The sudden jump in topic threw Kathy. ‘Eh? Yes, a couple of times. Why?’

  ‘Like him, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  Lowry grinned and pulled a bag of barley sugars out of the door pocket and offered them to her.

  ‘I’m sensitive to these things,’ he said.

  Kathy undid the paper from the sweet and threw it into the ankle-deep trash. ‘Go wax yourself,’ she said, and saw another van come to a halt in the street opposite the entrance to the carparking yard. It had a satellite dish on its roof and the logo of a TV channel’s news programme on its side.

  ‘Come on.’ Lowry jumped out of the car and ran to the back of the first van. As he pulled open the back doors, Kathy saw the outline of men inside with guns.

  The woman who answered their knock on her front door was instantly recognisable from the hairdresser’s description. Her chemical hair colouring, her glossy orange lips, her lime-green costume jewellery, all vibrated in the dull grey light, working very hard to make the dreary world a brighter place. Kathy immediately understood what ‘fluoro’ meant.

  ‘Hello.’ She smiled at them, taking in the support people hanging back in watchful anticipation. ‘To what do we owe this little visitation?’

  ‘Mrs Goldfinch?’ Kathy said, showing her warrant card.

  ‘That’s me, darling. Call me Jan.’ Eddie’s aunt appeared unperturbed.

  ‘We want to speak to your nephew, Eddie Testor. Can you tell us where he is, please?’

  ‘Why yes, certainly!’ She gave them a little flash of brilliant white dentures. ‘He’s here! How on earth did you know? Everyone seems to want to speak to him today. Why don’t you come on in? I don’t think there’ll be room for all of you, mind.’

  After they’d got Eddie dressed and taken him downstairs to the car with a towel over his head, Jan realised she was almost out of cigarettes, and went back up to Eddie’s room to see if he had any. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she said from the doorway, staring with fascination at Lowry pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

  ‘Why don’t we go downstairs and talk about Eddie, Jan?’ Kathy said, steering her back out onto the landing. ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’

  Aunty Jan was happy to do that, because it was a touching story that she loved to tell. The poor boy had had a very difficult time of it after his parents were killed in the accident, she explained when they were settled in the kitchen. It was divine intervention really that had brought the two of them together after so many years. She had been checking out the sunbeds and spa pools and saunas at the fitness salon at Silvermeadow one day when she had stopped to admire the photographs of the waxed body builders hanging in their golden frames (‘Well, Kathy darling, there’s no harm in looking, is there?’), and one in particular had caught her eye. It had reminded her so much of her sister’s brother-in-law Donald, on whom she’d had a terrible crush twenty years ago, before he and his wife were killed in the accident. So like him, in fact, that she began to think of their little orphan kid Eddie, whom she hadn’t heard of for years. And then she’d looked at the signature scrawled across the bottom of the photo and when she managed to decipher the name her heart had gone all of a flutter, for there he was, Eddie Testor, in the glorious flesh.

  ‘It’s not that I fancied him, Kathy darling,’ she said. ‘Not really, cos that would be like incest almost, and anyway I’ve got a boyfriend, who’ll be here any minute actually, to take me to our dancing class, Latin American. But I had to speak to him, and tell him that we were long-lost relatives, and that if he ever needed an aunty I was here. He didn’t really take up my offer until last Sunday night, when he showed up in such a state, poor kid.’

  ‘Did he say what had happened? The black eye, the cut lip?’

  ‘Some thugs beat him up, didn’t they? He looks a great hunk of muscle, but he’s like his dad, a real softie inside.’

  ‘How did he get here?’

  ‘Taxi dropped him off.’

  ‘And he brought a bag with his things?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So he’d been to his home, then?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘After he’d been beaten up, he went home.’

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose he d
id. He was done in when he arrived here. Completely exhausted. He’s hardly stirred from his bed since he got here. He’s really not been well.’

  Lowry joined them in the living room. He was carrying a number of clear plastic bags containing packets and bottles, which he laid on the coffee table.

  ‘What are these, Mrs Goldfinch? Do you know?’

  ‘From Eddie’s room?’ she said vaguely. ‘They’ll be his pills. For his body building, you know. He has to take a lot of pills.’

  ‘Where does he get them from?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know that. From his doctor, I suppose, or his friends at the gym.’

  ‘Do you take pills, Jan?’ Kathy said.

  ‘Me? Only what the doctor gives me. I’m depressed, see, since Alfred passed away. That’s my late husband. But I don’t believe in letting it show. You have a duty to add a little sunshine to the world, I always say, no matter if it’s raining in your heart.’

  Kathy thought that probably explained Aunty Jan’s remarkable unconcern at being the subject of a police raid.

  ‘That’s your pills in the bathroom cabinet is it?’ Lowry said.

  ‘Yes, they’re mine… Oh!’ She looked at him in alarm. ‘You haven’t touched them, have you?’

  Lowry shrugged ambiguously.

  ‘Oh no! You can’t take them away!’ Panicking, she looked to Kathy for support. ‘You mustn’t do that!’

  ‘It’s all right, Jan, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ She looked at Lowry, who seemed at first reluctant to cooperate, but then he reached into one of the plastic bags and took out a packet which he handed to Kathy. She made a note of the name and the chemist’s label before she returned them to Jan, who looked relieved.

  Just then the front door bell sounded and Jan jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, that’ll be him now, my boyfriend. We’re late. You don’t mind me dashing off, do you? It’s the rumba you see, my favourite. I love the hip movements, don’t you? Although my boyfriend has a bit of trouble with them, since his operation.’

  Kathy and Leon Desai stood at the window, watching Brock and Lowry working on Eddie. Kathy was very conscious of Leon’s body at her side and its stillness, observing the exchanges in the other room with hardly a blink of his dark eyes. Despite Lowry’s lip service to interviewing rules, Kathy was in no doubt that his manner was intimidatory, and was intended to be so. He sat hunched forward across the table as if short of hearing, baring his teeth in what he might claim to be a smile. His crouching posture contrasted with Eddie’s, sitting stiffly upright, head back on his thick neck, and Kathy wondered if Lowry might be physically envious of the other man, even while he seemed, with every gesture and word, to despise him utterly. Brock was sitting back, saying nothing, doing something with a pencil on a notepad as if the proceedings held no interest.