‘You don’t know who Hedy Lamarr is,’ Slider said with some certainty. ‘I’m wondering, now,’ he added, ‘whether he didn’t just make someone suspicious, given the fact that everyone seems to think he was out of his place. It would be tragic if he was killed for making a crim nervous when all he wanted was money to pay off his bank loans.’
‘What, more tragic than being killed for any other reason?’ Atherton asked.
‘Point,’ Slider conceded.
FIVE
Barrow, In Fairness
The address Michael Horden had given – 26 Abbots Close, Abbots Road, W12, which sounded beautifully plausible – was in fact a false one. There was no Abbots Road closer than East Ham, or Abbotts Road closer than Southall, and there wasn’t an Abbots Close in either of them.
‘So it’s bullion to bollocks the name’s false as well, guv,’ said Hollis.
‘Maybe,’ said Slider with a sigh. ‘You’re putting the name through records?’
‘Yes, guv. Fathom’s on it.’
‘What about the mobile number?’ Slider asked.
‘Pay as you go. I’m getting the call list.’
‘Let’s hope that will lead somewhere,’ Slider said, from the depths of a man for whom all rivulets run into the sand. So far there was nothing on the pizza. None of the delivery places had been to the address, and no one had recognized the mugshot.
‘But there are still more places to ask,’ said Mackay. ‘I started with the chains, but a lot of small Italian restaurants do pizzas, either eat in or take away – or both. Depends how big an area you want me to take, guv.’
‘If he ate in a restaurant, it could be as far away as Notting Hill, and I wouldn’t like to guess how many Italian restaurants there are in W11,’ Slider said. ‘I can’t have you endlessly trawling the eateries of old London. Do the Bush as far as Hammersmith Broadway and leave it at that. Anyone else we’ll have to hope to catch with a public appeal – because I can see it coming to that.’
Mackay departed, and Atherton, perched on the radiator, said, ‘Neil Desperado, as Mr Porson says. The pizza was always a long shot. Did you know the Dalai Lama is very fond of pizza?’
Slider looked up suspiciously. ‘Oh, really?’
‘He always has the same topping. He rings up Domino’s and says, “Make me one with everything.”’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have asked,’ said Slider.
‘At least Tommy Flynn’s wasn’t a false address,’ Atherton comforted him. ‘And then there’s Ransom Publications, Unit Three, Commercial Way, Brunel Industrial Estate, Staines Road, Hillingdon. That’s almost aggressively real. Close to Heathrow cargo terminal and the M4 – handily placed, indeed, for almost anything.’
‘Why should you think Horden-Williams had anything to do with them? There was no suggestion he’d ever worked there.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Atherton. ‘It’s just that Paul Barrow was so very tasty, he’s left me with an unscratched itch.’
‘Well, scratch away. Go and see what you can find out about him. But get someone to bring me a cup of tea, will you?’
Connolly was on the trail of Tommy Flynn, and first tried his address in Palliser Road. It was a turning off the Talgarth Road, the dual carriageway that became the A4 – one of the two main routes out of London to the west, engorged with traffic and roaring like a waterfall day and night – and the air was piquant with exhaust fumes. Perhaps because of that the houses had not been gentrified as they otherwise might: tiny little Victorian terraced cottages, two storeys of yellow brick and slate roof, most of them divided into flats, their miniature front gardens paved to hold the wheelie bins, and the peeling paint and grubby curtains giving evidence they were rented, not owned.
There were two bells by the front door, neither with a label, so she pressed both good and long. Finally a very cross-looking, panda-eyed woman opened the door, revealing a flight of uncarpeted stairs straight ahead and an open door to the left into her flat, from which emerged a smell of old, cold frying fat, dirty carpets and cigarette smoke.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded, scowling. ‘I hear you ringing upstairs as well. What are you, selling something?’
‘I’m looking for Tommy Flynn,’ Connolly said.
The woman scratched slowly at her unwashed hair, hauled into the inevitable pony tail. She had a tight stretchy mauve top straining over such considerable bosoms she looked as though she was minding someone’s bottom for them, and baggy sweat pants below. She could have been any age from twenty to forty. In the background, the television blithered its daytime brain-rot. Life, Connolly thought. Hate it or ignore it, you can’t love it.
‘He’s upstairs,’ the woman pronounced resentfully. ‘What you ring my bell for?’
‘There’s no labels on ’em, I didn’t know which was him,’ Connolly said. ‘D’you know if he’s in?’
‘How should I know? I’m not his bloody mother. Who are you, anyway? If you was a friend of his, you’d know where he lived.’
Connolly found this a remarkable piece of deduction from a woman whose brains cells were almost visibly leaking out of her ears. ‘Give us a break, wouldya?’ she said with a friendly smile. ‘All I had was the address. It didn’t say upstairs or downstairs.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s upstairs, and I could do without him, with his stupid bloody music and his friends coming round all hours and his drugs. I got two kids down here, you know? I don’t want them getting into that stuff.’
‘I don’t blame you. You’ve a mother’s feelings, so you have. Anyway, it seems he’s not in. D’y’know where I can find him?’
‘He’s prob’ly down the Three Kings, playing pool,’ she said grumpily, unwilling to be charmed. ‘You shoulda tried there first – he prac’ly lives there. Is that it? Only I’m missing Doctors.’
‘Thanks. You’ve been a real help,’ Connolly said, and turned away.
The woman contemplated that for a moment before she decided it had been ironic. ‘Yeah, an’ up yours, an’ all,’ she shouted at her back, before slamming the door.
The Three Kings had once been a glamorous Edwardian hotel, and now was a basic boozer, five minutes walk away down the Talgarth Road. It was empty and barnlike, dim and comfortless, and kept itself going with sports shown on several large TV screens. Connolly was from the old school and thought a television in a pub was an abomination, the denial of everything a pub ought to be – which was a place that felt as nearly as possible like your own front room, where you went to meet people and talk to them.
The screens were variously showing athletics, golf and motor-racing, and there was a surprising number of men there (no women) considering it was a work day. They stood or perched on stools, with glasses in their hands, staring at the screens with the same sort of blankness as she imagined was on the face of the woman watching Doctors. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, they looked like they’d had their brains sucked out through a straw, she thought. Civilization had taken two millennia to deliver the flat-screen TV. It was the height of hilarity.
She went up to the bar and the barman drifted down to her all the time watching the screen opposite him, which was showing motor racing – marginally less fun than watching stalagmites grow. Unable to get him to look at her, she leaned across the bar and shouted against the roar, ‘Is Tommy Flynn here?’
‘Is who?’ the barman asked. Well, yes, she was forgetting – this wasn’t Dublin. Bar staff didn’t know the names of their customers.
‘Have yez got a pool room?’ she tried.
‘Upstairs,’ he said, jerking his head towards the far corner without taking his eyes from the action. One identical car inched minutely ahead of another and fell back again. Breathtaking!
She headed for the corner, passing the door to a separate bar where an even bigger television was showing tennis – a handwritten notice was fixed to the door frame, RUGBY WORLD CUP SATURDAY ENGLAND V SAMOA – and found the stairs. Half way up she could hear the click of balls, and followe
d the soft sound into a high-ceilinged room with long windows on to the roaring road, which must have once been an elegant reception room, and now had a bare wooden floor, three pool tables and not much else.
One young man was sitting on a high stool between two of the windows, cigarette in one hand and cue in the other, watching as another man shaped up to strike the cue ball. On a table up against the wall were two pint glasses of thin yellowish liquid – they looked like particularly large urine samples, but Connolly guessed they were lager – and a tin lid on which rested another smouldering cigarette in blatant contravention of the smoking laws.
Connolly paused until he had taken his shot, and then said, ‘Tommy?’
They both looked at her, and the player, who had straightened up, said, ‘Yeah? What?’
He was young, slim, and almost as good looking as he probably thought he was, with tanned skin, designer stubble, and tousled curly brown hair. He was wearing painfully tight jeans and a slightly grubby white sleeveless T-shirt, which showed off his muscled arms and some rather complicated tattoos over his biceps. Connolly could imagine him at the gym, watching himself in the mirror as he worked the weights and admiring the way they wriggled as he flexed.
On the downside, his eyes were bloodshot, and that he was wired was obvious from his rapidly shifting focus and the way various bits of him jiggled at rest. Another helpful clue was the dusting of white powder round the rims of his nostrils.
He subjected Connolly to a rapid once-over, and then grinned like a monkey and said, ‘’ello, darlin’. Nice tits.’
‘Yeah, nice bum yourself,’ Connolly replied, injecting a bit of grimth into it. ‘Settle down, I want to talk to you.’
Undeterred, Tommy put his cue on the table and stepped round the end of it, to lean against the long side and look her up and down again. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a place like this?’
‘Oh, that’s original,’ said Connolly.
‘Come looking for The Flynn, eh? An’ I don’t blame you, darlin’. Lots o’ girls have travelled the old Silk Route before. As in Silk Root, geddit?’ He gave an explanatory thrust of his pelvis. ‘J’wanna come back to my shag-pit for a little bit of that old Tommy magic? Let me light your fire, baby, y’know what I’m sayin’? I got some sweet blow, some tabs of E, and I ain’t got to work till tonight. We can rock the Kasbah a-a-all afternoon.’
Jeez, what an eejit, Connolly thought. ‘Would y’ever listen to yourself?’ she said. ‘Janey Mack, you’re in Barons Court, not Orange County.’
Out of the corner of her eye she had been watching the friend, who had got down off his stool and had been quietly working his way towards the exit, evidently a bit more on the ball than The Flynn. When Tommy mentioned the blow, he abandoned subtlety and did a legger out of the door and down the stairs.
Tommy turned his head towards the movement, registered what had happened, frowned and said, ‘What’s up with him?’
‘He’s twigged that I am not just a babe, Tommy darlin’, I’m a policeman babe. A copper. The plod. A Gard. Are you with me?’
‘Where’s your uniform, then?’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I’m a detective constable, ya gom,’ Connolly spelled it out. Unlike his friend, Tommy was evidently too amped to worry about it. Besides, people who took a lot of drugs socially often forgot, or refused to believe, that they were illegal. He only grinned the wider. ‘Woah! I’ve never got it on with the filth before. New experience or what! It’s getting me going. C’mon, darlin’, you are hot. Let’s go and r–i–ide to the stars on Tommy’s love rocket.’ He made a taking off gesture with one hand so extravagant he had to grab the table with the other for balance. ‘I’m gonna bang you till your ears rattle, babe.’
‘Will you cool the head, for feck’s sake,’ Connolly said with sobering weariness. ‘I want to talk to you about Michael Horden.’
‘Mike? What you want with Mike?’ He was still grinning and jiggling, but she could see now he was listening. ‘Jeez, that’s a downer. I mean, Mike’s OK, but he is not Tommy. No way.’
‘Never mind. I want to know about him. You worked with him, didn’t you, Tommy?’
‘I ain’t seen Mike in weeks,’ he said, the grin fading into sullenness. ‘You are really puttin’ me off now, you know that? I was ready to give you the full benefit of the Flynn Big Bang, and we could have had us a nice time, you bein’ what I would normally call one shaggable babe. But now you’re goin’ to have to do some fast talkin’ to get me back in the mood, know what I’m sayin’?’
‘Mike Horden,’ Connolly said implacably. ‘Tell me everything you know about him and I won’t pat you down and nick you for your stash. All right? I’m not interested in your drugs or your scrawny little bod, Tommy me darlin’, just information about Michael Horden. You got him the job at Ransom’s, didn’t you?’
Tommy shrugged. ‘He asked me if they were taking people on. I told him they were always interested in new people, if they looked right.’
‘And did he look right?’
‘Yeah. He was a top-looking bloke. I told him he ought to sign on wiv a nude butler agency. I do that, some nights. You can make top dollar, ’specially if you talk posh.’
‘Did he talk posh?’
‘He was tryna talk street wiv me, but he was posh underneath. You could hear it. But he said he wanted to get into movies.’
‘Wait a minute, he came to you specifically to ask you about getting into skin movies, is that right? He approached you, not the other way round.’
‘Yeah, like I’m tellin’ you.’
‘How did he know you were in the biz?’
He shrugged. ‘Everybody knows The Flynn.’
‘So how did you know him?’
‘I didn’t. He come up to me at this club I go to, the Forty-Niners?’
‘Yeah, I know it.’ It was in Kensington Park Road – Notting Hill. ‘Had you seen him before?’
‘Yeah, I reckon. Not to talk to, but I’d seen him in there. He was tall, fit – sort of bloke that stands out. I mean, I ain’t gay,’ he said sternly, to scotch any misunderstanding, ‘but in the business, you get to notice the way people look.’
‘So he comes up to you, never having spoken to you before—’
‘No, wait, he had,’ Tommy said, frowning in thought. ‘Coupla nights before that, he comes up and asks me if I could sell him any charlie. Well, I didn’t know who he was. Anyway, I don’t deal, only to me friends. I told him I only had enough for meself. So he asks me if I know where he can get some.’ He grinned suddenly at the memory. ‘Man, in that place? There’s more snow than Siberia. I told him to go and hang around the bogs and ask the first bloke that comes in and doesn’t have a slash!’ He laughed uproariously at his own joke.
‘But apart from that, you didn’t know him? So how did he know you were in the porn-flick business?’
Tommy shrugged. ‘Someone musta told him. Like I said, everybody knows me. He asked can you make good money at it, and I says yeah, look at me.’ He made a gesture with his hands out to his sides. ‘I was wearing me good threads,’ he explained. ‘Then he says can I get him on. I tells him to go along and ask, and say I sent him. Well, he musta been serious because the next time I go in, there he is. He did good, too. He looked great, and he could act, an’ all.’
‘Act?’ Connolly queried.
Tommy looked hurt. ‘Yeah, you outsiders think there’s nothing in it, just get some wood on and bang away and that’s that. But I can tell you, real porn fans can tell the difference in a minute between a good skin flick and a bad one. I mean, we wouldn’t have got to Office Orgy Thirteen if it had just been a load of boring shagging. They’re real movies, with a plot, lines and everything. People love ’em. They’re classics. They’re witty.’
‘Yeah, I heard that,’ Connolly said. ‘You been doing this a long time, then?’
‘I’m a star, didn’t you know that?’ He grinned, full of himself again. ‘Want my autograph? I got an interes
ting way of writing it – you won’t believe how I do it. Can’t show you here, though.’
‘Love a God, would y’ calm down. Am’n’t I telling you, it’s Mike Horden I’m interested in. So you say he was good at the job?’
‘Yeah, he was top at it. He was a top geezer, too. We hung out together. We had a laugh, know what I mean? He useter come up my place and we’d have a few drinks and roll a doobie and mellow out. Listen to some sounds. He knew a hell of a lot about music – introduced me to some bands I’d never even heard of, but they were brilliant. This one—’
Connolly was not interested in his musical taste. ‘He took drugs with you?’
He looked hurt. ‘Weed ain’t drugs, man. Like vodka ain’t alcohol.’
‘Did he use charlie? E? Speed? Anything apart from marijuana?’
‘Not wiv me. But he asked me where he could buy charlie, didn’t he, so he must have.’
Connolly nodded. ‘So this great guy, your pal Mike – you haven’t seen him lately?’
‘Not for weeks,’ Tommy said, sniffing and wiping his nose on his forearm. ‘Man, you are really pulling me down with your questions. Seventy quid’s worth of best Bolivian marching powder up my schnoz and you’re bringing me right back down to earth.’
‘Never mind, Tommy darlin’. Nearly finished now, then you can go and snort till your ears meet. You know it’ll make your face cave in at the end? By the time you’re forty you’ll be breathin’ through a straw stickin’ out your neck.’
‘Christ, I hope I’m dead before I’m forty!’ Tommy said. ‘What else d’you want to know about Mike? Quick, get it over with.’
‘Did he tell you anything about his background? Family? What he did before?’
‘Nah, we never talked about that stuff. Just the job, sounds, movies, birds, that sort of thing.’
‘Did he have a girlfriend?’
‘He never told me about one. Never saw him with anyone.’
‘Didn’t you think that was odd? Good-looking geezer like him?’
Blood Never Dies Page 8
