Femme Fatale

by Dominic Piper

  Tansil walks around to face me. He’s trying his best to be sinister, but his cockiness is fading. For all he knows, I might have sent that membership list to the newspapers. If I get out of here alive, I’ll do it anyway.

  I give him a quick smile. The fact that my little speech might get me buried in an unmarked grave somewhere seems a fair price to pay. If it was good enough for Mozart, it’s good enough for me.

  ‘Then there’s Mark Gable,’ I continue. ‘Another former shining example of our blessed constabulary. He’s also a member. I’m guessing that he and Tansil owe you and your masonic brethren quite a lot, Hugo. I think their cushy jobs at Temple Security are just the tip of the iceberg. They’d probably do anything you asked them to for a number of reasons, all of them bent. Dr Footitt owes you quite a lot, too, I wouldn’t wonder.

  ‘But of all the great and good who belong to your lodge, there’s another name that caught my eye. Thomas Wade. In case you’d forgotten, he’s the Reception Supervisor at Frampton House. Does Frampton House ring any bells with any of you? Flat twenty-one? Fifth floor? Heating broken? Bad smell? You are in the shit, aren’t you? I think you’ve overreached yourselves this time.’

  ‘You’re full of crap,’ spits Tansil contemptuously, but I can tell he’s feeling a little nauseous. I’ll hit them with a little bluff. It might work.

  ‘The police are harvesting DNA from that girl as we speak. I sincerely hope none of you touched her. Who procured her? Was it you, Barnaby? You’re such a naughty doctor.’

  Footitt exchanges a quick, nervous glance with Chudwell. Chudwell smiles back. That smile tells me all I need to know.

  ‘And you killed her too, Barnaby, didn’t you. Of course you did. Your chums needed a body in that flat and they knew just the person to get hold of a suitable victim and do the business. It had always been heading that way for you, hadn’t it. It was your big thing, your big fantasy and now you had a chance to do it and get away with it, get some friendly help with it.’ I smile at him. ‘Well, I’m truly stuffed, aren’t I. Are you going to slit my throat as well, Barnaby? Or am I the wrong sex? Or am I too conscious?’

  They all stare at me. No one says anything. Footitt allows himself a timid little snigger.

  ‘What was it like when you did it, Barnaby? Did it give you the hard-on you’d expected? Did she look into your eyes or was she drugged out of her head? Who was she? Just another one of your casual pickups? Someone who wouldn’t be missed? Someone whose life wasn’t worth a shit? How old was she, Barnaby? Seventeen? Twenty-two? Did you even know?’

  ‘There’s a point when some things just have to be done. She wouldn’t have been around for long, anyway. Her type never is,’ says Footitt, a disdainful sneer spreading across his features. He’s not on the defensive at all. He’s proud of what he did. He did the right thing. He has it all worked out in his head. I can feel it.

  ‘You better hope I don’t get out of here alive, Barnaby,’ I say. ‘Because if I do, I’m coming for you, my friend. It’s going to be unpleasant, and it’s going to take a long, long time.’

  Footitt sneers at me, but I can see him swallow.

  ‘You’re trying oh-so-hard to provoke us, Mr Beckett,’ says Chudwell, sighing. ‘Keep it up if you must. Nothing you say will make any difference to anything now. We’re not ashamed of anything we’ve done. We’re certainly not going to be morally censured by the likes of you.’

  Tansil looks at his watch. He’s waiting for Gable to show. I’ll keep pushing. I’ve already caused a bit of discord, useless as it may be, and I’m so close to finding out what happened to Rikki I can almost taste it. They all know I’m doomed now. I know much too much, but I need it to loosen their tongues a little more.

  ‘So now we come to the sticky subject of Rikki Tuan,’ I say. ‘Barnaby murders the girl in Rikki’s flat, the police think Rikki did it, and it explains his disappearance. Is that how it was meant to work? That girl’s body was in a terrible state, Hugo. It ruined the whole ambience of the place. So what happened to him? I know you want to tell me. You’re proud of it.’

  Chudwell looks at me. He seems surprised more than anything else. He exchanges a quick glance with Tansil, who shrugs.

  ‘So it wasn’t Baldwin who hired you,’ says Chudwell. ‘It was someone to do with the little Chinaman. Is that right? Who was it? Was it the manager of the restaurant where he worked? Were they annoyed they couldn’t squeeze more hours out of him?’

  This gets a laugh from Tansil and Footitt. ‘Very good, my lord,’ says Tansil.

  ‘Did he not turn up for one of his shifts, so they decided to hire a deadbeat private eye? Is that it?’ says Chudwell, going for more chuckles from his pals. ‘Are you being paid in Egg Foo Yung?’

  ‘He was a cocky little bastard,’ says Tansil, grinning. ‘We gave him plenty of chances. Once, I caught him coming out of The Soho Theatre in Dean Street. Gave him a talking to. Pulled a fucking knife on me. Well, he’d cooked his goose doing that, hadn’t he. The little slitty-eyed cunt.’

  And then I get the whole story, which causes the three of them great merriment. They’re telling it like they’re three old pals describing some crazy party they’d all been to. Rikki was a non-person to them all as much as the girl in his flat was. He was Chinese so he simply didn’t matter.

  Chudwell and Tansil must have known that any investigation into his disappearance would be nothing compared to what might happen if they’d rubbed out Jamie Baldwin, an Olympic silver medallist and national hero, but they still had the sense to use the girl as a backup plan; to steer any possible half-arsed police investigation in the wrong direction. It was fool-proof. Dodgy Chinaman kills prostitute and does a runner.

  Their confidence is chilling. It’s the smug malevolence and fearlessness of people who’ve got away with it before and know they’ll get away with it again. They fall over each other trying to get the details out, correcting each other, sniggering, getting high on the minutiae, tanked on the trivia.

  All three are simply dying to tell someone how smart they’ve been and here I am, a captive audience. Tansil calls Rikki a few more derogatory names. Footitt giggles, Chudwell chortles. These guys are having fun.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you, Beckett,’ says Chudwell, an imperious grin spreading across his fat features. ‘I can see from your expression that you’re magnificently perplexed. Why we do all these things. Why we keep doing them. Why we choose to do them the way we do. It’s because we can, Mr Beckett. It’s because we want to. It is our right. Is this so difficult for someone like you to understand? We are the people who matter. You, the actress, the stripper, the boxer, the Chinaman, the whore in his flat and all the others, are some of the people who do not.’

  ‘Well said, my lord,’ says Tansil, starting to clap.

  The resultant obsequious applause and laughter from Tansil and Footitt is only stopped by the ringing of the front doorbell and the screaming from upstairs. I must book myself a holiday if I ever get out of this.

  39

  NOT YOUR LUCKY DAY

  From what I gathered from my garrulous new pals, this is what happened.

  It was banal, stupid and ugly. If Rikki hadn’t rented that flat in Ebury Street, they’d never have found him. The place that had been given to him in Great Titchfield Street would have been off the books, untraceable. That was probably one of the reasons that Mr Sheng disapproved of Rikki and his colleagues living in places that weren’t sanctioned by him: it made them vulnerable in ways that they maybe couldn’t imagine.

  If Rikki hadn’t rented that flat and held his dinner parties there, he may never have met Philip Hopwood, the costume designer. Hopwood would never have introduced him to Paige, and Rikki would still be alive now, chaining people to radiators by day and being witty by night.

  He could never have suspected it, of course, but the moment Hopwood made that introduction, he was signing Rikki’s death warrant.

  After Rikki pulled a knife on Tansil, he and/or Gable m
ade another couple of patient attempts to approach him in the street, but to no avail. He was a fractious and difficult customer.

  On the third occasion, things got physical. Rikki actually clipped Gable in the mouth and made him bleed before storming off and swearing at the terrible two as he left. Street meetings like these would have been the ‘hassle’ that he complained to Lee Ch’iu about. Why their MO with Rikki was different from that of Jamie Baldwin is anyone’s guess. I get the impression that they did what they did as the mood took them. Perhaps they got a kick out of hassling Rikki. Perhaps it was fun.

  Even after the knife incident and the Wing Chun, they still didn’t suspect anything was amiss. They still didn’t realise what they were dealing with, still didn’t comprehend why he kept walking away. They assumed he was frightened and/or cowardly and the lightning-fast strike to Gable’s mouth did nothing to change that opinion. Just a lucky punch. They all do a bit of the old kung fu, don’t they?

  Then they decided they were sick of being messed around by the little guy and made plans to teach him a lesson he’d never forget. After all, there was some urgency about this after his appearances on Paige’s Facebook site, and they were getting more pressure from Chudwell, whom they had to please and who, in many ways, owned them both.

  By this time, Lady O felt that Paige was beginning to lose her mind. She felt that she had forced Paige into consorting with a damned Chinaman, such was her almost pathological denial about their illicit relationship.

  Her symptoms started to get more extreme. She could hear Paige’s voice in her head, tormenting her with explicit descriptions of her sexual exploits. Footitt was being called to the house so much that he was starting to neglect his duties in the Chelsea. The damned Chinaman had to be dealt with and fast.

  It was Tansil’s idea to run Rikki down. Not to kill him, of course. Not at first, anyway. Just to get him totally incapacitated, maybe even crippled, and work him over until he finally got the message. Tansil and Gable would take him somewhere private and violate him until he agreed to get out of Paige’s life forever. Chudwell picked those two well. They enjoyed their work. It probably reminded them of their days on the force.

  It was easy for them to find his address. Tansil bragged that it took one quick telephone call. They extracted the details about his usual comings and goings from Thomas Wade, their tame Reception Supervisor at Frampton House. Chudwell crowed that they had people everywhere; that freemasonry is the best private intelligence service in the world.

  Then one night they went out in Tansil’s Range Rover and waited until they saw Rikki returning from one of his regular nights out. His habit, according to Wade, was to get a cab and get it to drop him off at Sloane Square. He’d walk along the north side of Ebury Street and then cross over a few yards before he got to Frampton House. I could have told him; never be a creature of habit.

  As it was well past midnight, the roads were pretty deserted. Gable had scoped this out a few times and was confident that it could be done quickly and efficiently without attracting any undue attention. Besides, crazy stuff is always happening in London and the locals usually turn a blind eye. Rikki appeared as expected and Tansil put his foot down.

  Rikki’s reflexes were slow; he’d been drinking. His movements and reactions didn’t quite match up to Tansil’s expectations and after they’d clipped him, he fell back right under the wheels and was crushed. But he was still alive. Tansil made a snap decision to reverse over him and that was that. The two of them must have moved fast. They ascertained that Rikki was dead, got him in the back of the Range Rover and took him away somewhere.

  This had to be covered up and fast. As if it was the most normal thing in the world, they reasoned that Footitt’s unconcealed and longstanding ambition to actually kill one of his female pickups could be put to good use. Tansil thought this deranged plan up and Gable finessed it. They outlined their plan to Chudwell, who quickly persuaded Footitt that it was a good idea and one he could be assisted with. Footitt was over the moon and, of course, eager to assist his fellow freemasons. It’s obvious now that he was crazier than any of his patients, with the possible exception of Lady O.

  With the help of Yeoman’s Row boy Thomas Wade, Gable and Footitt smuggled Footitt’s choice of spaced-out pickup into Rikki’s flat, doped her up a little more, and when Footitt had finished with her, he slit her throat.

  I got the impression that this particular girl was a regular of Footitt’s; that he’d had her before and had long harboured fantasies of killing her during or after the act. I suspect he’d confided this to Tansil who kept the information on the back burner until it became useful.

  When the job was finished, all that was needed was for all involved to leave Frampton House as inconspicuously as they arrived. Presumably Wade let his usual staff go home early and/or killed the relevant security cameras for a while, at least while the girl was smuggled in.

  After turning the heating up, it would only be a matter of time before the alarm was raised. The girl would be found and Rikki’s disappearance would be explained. Game over. It never occurred to any of them that Rikki’s disappearance wouldn’t be reported to the police, but the end result would be the same: dead girl, no Rikki.

  I can hear Tansil opening the front door. I’m expecting it to be Gable, and the freakishly deep voice confirms it; even from here I can feel it vibrating in my chest. They don’t come in to see me, which I’m a bit hurt about, but talk in muted voices out in the entrance hall.

  Footitt is upstairs, placating/drugging the ever-screaming Lady O. Chudwell stays with me, drinking sherry and smacking his rubbery lips. Despite everything else that’s going on, I find the noise she was making quite chilling. It actually makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite all the matted blood they’re covered in. Ridiculously, I worry about what the neighbours might think, then remember that the houses on both sides of this one are businesses, so everyone’s probably gone home.

  While I’m waiting for whatever’s going to happen next, I realise that I’ve completed the job. I’ve found out what happened to Rikki Tuan, even though I don’t know what they’ve done with his mangled body. All I have to do now is report back to Mr Sheng and it’ll be all over. Well, I can dream.

  Gable appears briefly in the doorway. He’s come to take a look at me. He’s got a recent split in his lower lip. Well done, Rikki. He nods at Chudwell, who give him a weedy little salute in return. He’s carrying Paige in his arms. She looks tiny. She’s unconscious. She’s wearing the cleavage-revealing black satin lounging pyjamas that she was wearing the other day. She isn’t wearing shoes or perfume. There’s a big bruise underneath her chin, as if she’s been belted with a powerful uppercut.

  Gable takes a long, disinterested glance at me, then turns away and disappears. I can hear him going up the stairs. Tansil follows him, licking his lips and wiping the back of his hand across his wet mouth. He’s carrying a small black shoulder bag, which I hadn’t noticed before. I can hear Tansil and Gable talking, but can’t make out what they’re saying.

  Jamie Baldwin’s assessment of Gable’s weight was spot on. Easily three hundred pounds and it’s all muscle and it’s all grotesque. It was hard to tell his height from a sitting position, but it’s around six foot five. He was wearing black casual trousers held up by a black braided leather belt and a tight-fitting black t-shirt which looked as though it was a size too small to show off his massive pecs and biceps. I can see now how easy it would have been for him to restrain a light heavyweight boxer. There’s a faint smell of cologne in the air. It’s Black Gold by Ormonde Jayne.

  I’m trying to contain my concern for Paige in case it gets her into more trouble than she’s in already, but my curiosity gets the better of me.

  ‘What are they going to do with her?’

  Chudwell wrinkles his brow as if this was so obvious that there was no reason to ask and certainly no reason to reply.

  ‘Shut up.’

  I try to
get a tone into my voice which is both mocking, sardonic, threatening and intimidating. It isn’t easy.

  ‘You do realise how laughable all of this is, don’t you?’ I say. ‘Two dead, one crippled, a girl’s life fucked around with all because of the selfish little ivory asylum you all live in. Murder, blackmail, GBH, kidnapping, amateur porn. God knows what else you and your crooked cronies have done in the past or what you’ll do in the future. You don’t see it. Perhaps you never will. But you’re a total piece of shit. My lord.’

  ‘You will not speak to me like that.’

  ‘I’ll speak to you how I like. You’re a punk. Your masonic lodge needs a bomb dropped on it.’

  ‘I’m warning you…’

  Before I can experience the full terror of his warning, Tansil and Gable appear once more. Gable takes a look at me and flashes me a great big grin, just like in his corporate photograph. A definite trace of a Manchester accent, just like Jamie Baldwin guessed.

  ‘Some private investigator you are, pal.’

  ‘If I was that bad I wouldn’t be here. Pal.’

  He laughs. ‘True.’

  ‘I think you’ve put too much cologne on. We’ve had complaints from people in Norway.’

  He ignores this and turns to Tansil. ‘Did you search him?’

  ‘No weapons or anything interesting. Wallet, keys, mobile phone and a pen.’ He has a quick laugh. ‘The mobile got accidentally crushed!’

  Gable has a laugh, too. That deep voice is really ugly. I don’t want to hear it. It makes me feel sick. I still have my own mobile in an inside pocket of my jacket, which had been overlooked by Tansil thanks to Anouk’s Samsung Galaxy. He’s getting slapdash in his old age. What good it’ll do me I don’t know, but I may need it. Let’s hope nobody calls me in the next few minutes.