Angel on the Inside

by Mike Ripley

  ‘You need a form?’ she started, then stopped herself. ‘You’re good, babe, you know that? You fancy working for us full time?’

  ‘I thought you only employed females.’

  ‘We could cook the books.’

  ‘Just tell me who hired you – who hired the firm.’

  ‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said, going all coy, squirming against the door to make her skirt ride up.

  ‘And I probably shouldn’t turn up in Horsham tomorrow – around 11 o’clock, say?’

  ‘Come on, Angel,’ she said, straightening up, ‘we’re talking client confidentiality here. I’ve already told you more than I needed to.’

  I had to admit that was true, so I lit two cigarettes and passed one to her.

  ‘Then let’s do it this way. I’ll say a name, and you just tell me if I’m wrong. You don’t have to say it’s right, just if it’s wrong. Okay?’

  ‘So I don’t have to say “yes”, I just get to say “no” if I want to?’

  She pretended to mull this over.

  ‘Sounds like my kinda party game. Go ahead.’

  ‘Your client was a psychotic Welsh git called Len Turner,’ I said, drawing smugly on my cigarette.

  Stella blanked me – she was good, she was very good – and timed it just right before making a noise like the klaxon on a U-Boat going into an emergency dive and shouting: ‘Wrong!’

  She wasn’t the only one who could put on an act, though.

  ‘But he said he was. He told me about you, showed me the photographs developed at that place just round the corner from your office in Shepherd’s Bush. Then he hit me, because he thought I knew something ... and then the others hit me as well, and I thought ...’

  ‘Hey, here, babe.’

  Her arms went around me and her corseted breasts seemed to be everywhere.

  ‘I’ve never heard of anybody called Len Turner, honest. The guy who hired us was straight-arrow respectable. He’s a solicitor, for Christ’s sake. Mind you, he was Welsh ...’

  I let her hold me for perhaps a minute longer than was necessary. Or maybe five minutes. Then I groped in my pocket and produced a crumpled business card.

  ‘Name of Haydn Rees, by any chance?’

  Stella’s head shot back from the clinch, but I pushed her up against the door again.

  ‘I’m saying nothing,’ she said, then made a zipper movement across her lips.

  ‘Right,’ I said, remembering the rules of engagement. ‘But there’s something else I’ve got to know.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said huskily, squirming against me.

  ‘What?’ I asked, distracted.

  ‘Is that the champagne bottle or are you really, really pleased to see me again?’

  I lifted the bottle clear of where it had somehow got trapped between our thighs.

  ‘Bit of both, probably,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  She took a drink from the bottle and then held it to my lips. I had somehow forgotten to move away from her.

  ‘What was it you wanted to know?’ she asked.

  She looked at the bottle, realised I had emptied it and held it out at arms length before letting it drop. It didn’t break, it bounced and then rolled across the floor and under the door of the cubicle opposite the urinal.

  ‘Shit!’ somebody exclaimed.

  Stella and I looked at each other, then at the cubicle.

  ‘Just who the hell is that? Are you some sort of perv?’ she shouted. ‘All I have to do is scream and my friends will be in here like a shot.’

  ‘No, Christ, no, don’t do that,’ said the voice. ‘You just made me jump that was all.’

  ‘We did sort of barge in here,’ I whispered in Stella’s ear. ‘I mean, the guy was probably having a quiet dump and ...’

  She wagged a finger in front of my face and shushed me, then winked.

  ‘It’s the male stripper. I wondered where he’d gone,’ she whispered. ‘Another mystery solved. That’s why I’m the detective here.’

  ‘It’s okay, you can come out now,’ she said towards the cubicle. ‘Just go straight up the stairs and out, don’t look back, don’t stop for anything and don’t expect a tip. I’ll keep them off your back until you’re clear.’

  The lock on the cubicle clicked back and the door opened inwards. The young lad who stepped out barefooted was wearing a policeman’s helmet, a torn white shirt covering an impressively worked-out torso and dark blue trousers, which he had to keep up by bunching the material in his hands around his crotch. Obviously they didn’t make velcro like they used to.

  ‘You got taxi fare?’ Stella asked him, and he nodded sheepishly.

  ‘Good. Go quickly – and consider another line of work. I really don’t think this one fits your pistol.’

  She opened the door and stepped out into the little corridor, then opened the door to the club. I could hear the piano giving out a ragtime version of ‘New York, New York’ and thought yet again that dolphin girl was really good.

  Then Stella was flapping her arm, waving the stripper on, and he actually said ‘Excuse me’ as he ran by me. Stella held up her hand to stop him, stuck her head out of the door, then waved him on again.

  The poor sod hadn’t made the first step of the stairs before she yelled ‘Stripper!’ at the top of her voice, and then there was this primeval, deep-throated roar.

  I never saw what happened to him, because Stella let the outer toilet door swing back and returned to the Gents, closing that door behind her as well.

  ‘Now, where were we?’ she asked.

  ‘What I wanted to know was ...’

  ‘No. Where were we?’

  She put her arms around my neck, leaned back on the door and pulled me in to her.

  ‘That’s better. And it wasn’t all champagne bottle after all, was it? Now what were you saying, babe?’

  It took me a minute to remember.

  ‘Oh yes. It wasn’t you following me around; I would have noticed you. And it couldn’t have been Veronica. Spy satellites would have noticed her. So who was on my case?’

  ‘Now let me think.’

  She nuzzled into me until I could feel her breath warm on my neck. So close and so warm it made me shiver, which she must have taken for encouragement, as her pelvis began to grind into me.

  ‘I’d really like to know, because I didn’t spot anybody at all,’ I said, but my voice, oddly, didn’t sound like mine.

  ‘It was Steffi, one of our new girls. Sorry, operatives.’

  She murmured into my ear and then bit the lobe gently. I hoped to God she wasn’t going to do the tongue trick.

  ‘Steffi?’ I croaked.

  ‘Steffi Innocent. No, that really is her name. Been with us about a month. An absolute natural. Lot to learn, but keen as mustard. She’ll go far that one. Very talented.’

  ‘Well, she fooled me. I never thought anyone could tail me around London without me spotting them.’

  ‘I told you she was good. I would have put her on your case – if I’d known you were involved, which I didn’t ...’

  ‘I get the point. You’re innocent by nature and she’s just Innocent by name.’

  ‘Good one,’ she breathed, nipping my ear lobe again.

  It occurred to me that perhaps I should be struggling more. Or at least some.

  ‘I’d like to meet her,’ I said, for the want of something to say.

  ‘I thought you had,’ Stella purred. ‘You’ve been looking at that dolphin on her arse ever since you got here.’

  She did the tongue trick before I could stop her.

  We slipped back into the party with hardly anyone noticing us apart from the five or six women nearest the toilet entrance, who shouted ‘Go, girl’ and applauded Stella as she swept regally by, and Michael behind the bar, who made a big sho
w of pulling back a cuff to look at his watch, tugging his beard and nodding slowly as if deeply impressed.

  Steffi Innocent, dolphin submerged, was doing ‘Georgia On My Mind’ and playing it well, though I reckoned few if any of Stella’s guests recognised it.

  Stella was holding my hand and leading me to another bottle of champagne, which had been left unguarded on a chair. I tugged her in to me and said ‘She’s good.’

  ‘Yes she is. And she can play piano.’

  ‘I want to talk to her,’ I persisted.

  Stella looked at her watch – a sparkling rectangle with slightly fewer diamonds than, say, Amsterdam – and drank from the bottle before answering.

  ‘Half an hour here, then we’re round to the restaurant. We’ll lose a few on the way, so it should calm down a bit. You can talk there. Have a few drinks. Steffi will run you home. She knows where you live and she doesn’t drink.’

  I knew there was another reason I didn’t like her.

  ‘I’d better make a call,’ I said, fishing for the mobile I had miraculously remembered to bring with me.

  ‘They don’t work down here. That’s why you’re a member,’ she said, and she was right on both counts. ‘Come and meet some of my old school friends. Haven’t seen them for years. Tell them you’re a ... pornographer. How about that? Tell them you’ve just finished editing The Illustrated Guide to Lesbian Bondage. Good, huh?’

  ‘Good? It’s selling hand over fist.’

  By the time Stella organised the move to the restaurant, I had convinced various friends of hers that I was (a) indeed a pornographer, (b) a film producer who had had an artistic disagreement with a scriptwriter and (c) the official bouncer for Gerry’s, though not a very good one, hence the battered face. What was scary was that all three of these scenarios seemed to them not only believable, but appealing. When I forced my way to the bar to get another bottle of something, my butt was nipped and tweaked all the way there and back as if by an army of crows pecking at some juicy piece of roadkill. Four different hands – and the same one at least twice – groped the inside of my thighs under the table. One of them actually came on to me with the line ‘Chicks dig scars, you know’ and looked affronted when I laughed; three of them wrote their mobile numbers on the back of my hand; and one seriously wanted to star in my next movie – and that was when I was being the pornographer.

  It must have been something to do with it being a warm evening, a dark club, too much booze and a hen night. If I’d met any of them out on the street, even wearing a suit and tie and tipping my hat and holding doors open for them, they would have reached for the pepper spray.

  Steffi Innocent had stopped playing the piano and disappeared into the throng, drinking from a bottle of mineral water. I tried to spot her but failed as Stella began to herd her noisy flock up the stairs and out onto an unsuspecting Dean Street.

  ‘Are you really taking all this lot for a meal?’ I asked when I got next to her.

  ‘Some of them will drop out because they’re pissed, some ‘cos it’s Friday night and they have to go out with their Man, some will go out looking for drugs and then there’s those who think they’ve got a nut allergy and all that satay sauce may not be a good idea.’

  ‘Good thinking, if you’re worried about the bill.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m not paying. My darling soon-to-be-husband is.’

  ‘So he is rich, is he?’ I asked, realising in an instant what a daft question that was where Stella was concerned.

  ‘For the moment,’ she said, with a grin of pure evil.

  I think 28 of us made it to the Rasa Sayang, but it was difficult to tell. The staff met us with plates of their speciality – cubed orange chicken on wooden skewers with peanut satay dip sauce – and looks of growing apprehension on their faces as the cream of the Home Counties in their best designer party frocks swarmed in like fire ants.

  I had already made up my mind that Armstrong was just going to have to take his chances in Soho overnight and I would get home somehow, making a mental note to add ‘Get home’ to my to-do list. Having decided this, I ordered a Tiger beer at the reception bar, and by the time I turned around to follow the ladies, all the orange chicken had gone and one of the younger waiters was standing with his knees together and was biting his lower lip in agony.

  ‘They must have gone that way,’ I said to him, but he didn’t respond, so I just followed the perfume trail downstairs.

  The restaurant had laid out a long table and curtained it with bamboo screens, which were nowhere near strong enough to contain this lot, or protect the other customers. Stella took control from one end and announced that the seating plan would be ‘Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, me, boy, girl, girl, girl, yada-yada’. Despite the catcalls and booing and shouts of ‘She’ll be nipping to the loo again soon,’ she also announced that her ‘associate’ Randy was settling the bill, the banquet was on its way – she had ordered everything on the menu at least once but anyone with a serious nut allergy was going to die – and she would get round all of them personally before she sneaked off for an early night.

  I took the chair next to Stella’s, although she stayed on her feet, waving forward the waiters with open bottles of wine. Most of them just put the bottles on the table and legged it. Down the table I spotted Steffi Innocent, who was either very good at avoiding eye contact or simply hadn’t registered me, negotiating with a fleeing waiter for a bottle of mineral water.

  I felt a hand on my left arm. Its owner was a small redhead in her early twenties. She was wearing a sleeveless, peach coloured, satin material dress with Chinese or Japanese calligraphy strokes down the front, which showed off the freckles on her arm. Her hair was long and frizzy, parted in the middle to frame sparkling blue eyes (though you can do that with contact lenses), and apart from a pale orange lipstick she was fresh faced and obviously proud of her complexion. She would have been on anyone’s shortlist for a ‘Miss English Rose’ calendar were it not for her prominent, not to say large, not to say hugely out of proportion to the rest of her, breasts, which strained the satin dress to its limits. I couldn’t have missed her in Gerry’s; it would have been physically impossible.

  Now, I’m not one to gawp, but it took a few seconds for me to realise she was speaking to me.

  ‘I just loved that book you did on lesbian fetishism, and now I hear you’re making the film of it,’ she said in an accent that would have got her into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. ‘Are you auditioning actors yourself, or do you have somebody who does that for you? I mean, I’m not really a professional – I don’t have an Equity card yet or anything – but I’m not averse to a little girl-on-girl hot action, as I believe it’s known.’

  There was a time when I would have drawn up a contract on the back of a menu and got her to sign it on the spot. I must be getting old, as before I could even think of something to say that didn’t involve a lot of drooling, Stella came to my rescue and pulled me towards her.

  ‘Butt out Charlotte, I need his full attention,’ she told the redhead.

  ‘Oh, strewth, I was only trying to get a rise out of him,’ said Charlotte, and her accent was suddenly Australian, or perhaps New Zealander, as she turned away and started to talk to the girl next to her.

  ‘She’s very good,’ I whispered to Stella.

  ‘She’s a stand-up comedian, and she could do you and the Hackney Empire with one hand tied behind her back, so don’t mess with her. Now listen up.’

  Stella talked fast in my ear as I liberated a bottle of wine and filled glasses for both of us. Food came and went in front of us and I got busy even if Stella abstained. I had meals to catch up on and a blood count to rectify. She had only to fit into a wedding dress.

  ‘I’m going to do the rounds and thank everybody for coming and then piss off, okay? I’ll get Steffi to come and sit here and you can ask her anything you like, and I wasn’t
kidding, she really will drive you home.

  ‘Now, I’ve told her to come clean and tell you anything you want to know. She’s not keen on the idea, says it breaches client confidentiality, it’s probably unethical and unprofessional. And this is from a chick who takes her work seriously. Her dad is a copper, her brother’s a copper. She would have joined the Met herself, but I think she’s too right wing for them. Whatever, I’ve overruled her. Management decision, the buck stops here, I’m the boss. If it involves old and distinguished friends, then I intervene. That’s one of my principles. I don’t have many, but that’s definitely one of them.’

  Yes, Stella, especially friends who could tell a few tales out of school. Maybe make a speech at your wedding ...

  ‘Mm ... mm,’ I said with my mouth full. Stella took it as a sign of encouragement.

  ‘Now, I really, really didn’t know about this case until this morning.’

  ‘You’ve said that. I believe you.’

  ‘Good. What happened was, I was away and Veronica was distracted so Steffi took the call from this guy Rees who said he was a solicitor, up in town for the day, and needed an enquiry agent to do some leg work in London. Steffi met him, took the brief, and Veronica drew up a standard contract to fax to this Rees guy’s office in Cardiff.’

  ‘Did you check him out?’ I asked, testing a meatball dipped in plum sauce.

  ‘Check him out? He’s a fucking solicitor. We get 50 percent of our work from solicitors.’

  I shrugged and drew a plate of spare ribs closer.

  ‘Our retainer comes in the post next day, so Steffi starts work, having assured Veronica that, although she’s new, she’s up to the task; and frankly I wouldn’t have queried that, because that gal went up the learning curve on a skateboard. Plus, the job was tracking this Keith Flowers jerk. There was no mention of you, or the famous Amy May.’ She paused at that, but I didn’t respond. ‘At least, not then. Now, fair play, she did ask me – just like in passing – about Amy, and I said I didn’t know Amy personally, but I knew Mr Amy and that we’d had a few laughs in the past.’