Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  “That’s right. There’s a fair bit of that sort of work around. Not as much as if you’re a glamour girl, but that’s life, isn’t it? Unfair. Then there’s various sorts of promotional stunts—for the motor show, the boat show, big affairs like that. I don’t go much on those games, but they bring in the money.”

  “Why don’t you go much on them?”

  “Interfere with training, don’t they? I mean, you can spend hours and hours on them, and that plays havoc with your routines. Anyway, they’re not serious. What you might call jokey. I’m serious about the sport, and I think it sort of brings it into disrepute.”

  “Ahh. Now, coming back to the other things I mentioned—the sort of thing that would really bring the sport into disrepute—”

  Denny turned on his bench and fixed me with his blank, blue eyes.

  “I told you, I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

  “You didn’t: you said you didn’t go in for it. You must know something about it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No idea who goes in for it, who does the filming, who does the recruiting of the actors?”

  “No, honest.”

  “Come off it, Denny. It’s one of the things you boys do. You’ve only got to pick up the gay mags to know that.”

  “Then why don’t you go along and ask them?”

  “I shall, if necessary. Only they don’t like us very much there, understandably, and I’d guess they’ll be as cagey as you’re being.”

  “I’m not being cagey. I don’t know.”

  “I just don’t take that, Denny. Anyway, what I’m looking for is something a bit more serious than a full frontal prick shot for Fly. Something quite a lot more serious than that.”

  Denny squirmed.

  “Well, it’s no use coming to me.”

  “What I’m looking for is something that would make a big strong chap like you pack up his bags and fly off to Aberdeen the moment he heard about the four corpses in the Bodies office.”

  “What are you talking about?” Denzil demanded, with an air that approached the self-righteous. “I was giving an Exhibition here.”

  “No, you weren’t giving an Exhibition. You’re not even on the posters, except as a last-minute sticker. You volunteered the Exhibition as soon as you heard of the murders. I got that out of your old mum—”

  “If you’ve been bullying my mum—”

  “It would take a tougher man than me to bully your mum.”

  A slow, rather silly grin appeared on Denzil’s face.

  “Yeah. She’s got spunk.”

  “More spunk in her little finger than you’ve got in the whole of that big body.”

  “Here—”

  “Come on. I want it straight. You practically fainted when I asked what you’d been doing. What was it?”

  “Nothing. I told you. You’ve got it all wrong. Bob Cordle’s the last person who’d ever get mixed up in anything . . . dirty.”

  “Right—forget about Bob Cordle, then. The moment you heard about the murders at Bodies you threw a blue funk and fled up here. Now, I’d be quite justified in taking you in for questioning, just on that alone—”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “—but let’s assume for the moment that Bob Cordle was the spotless gent you and everyone else make him out to be. What follows? Here are a couple of possibilities. The reason you panicked was because you were involved with one of the other people who died. Or because you were involved with something ‘dirty,’ as you so vividly describe it, and you thought it might be raked over in the wake of the Bodies affair.”

  He sat there, thinking—a process that seemed to come harder to him than for Rodin’s young man. Eventually, doubtfully, his voice hoarse, he asked:

  “You wouldn’t really take me in for questioning?”

  “Of course I shall take you in, if I think you have anything to do with the Bodies business.”

  “It’d ruin me in the sport.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  Hard, Perry, hard! Could you deny poor little Birdie that ecstatic delight that Denzil seemed to arouse among aficionados? Well, yes, I could. Sorry, Birdie: there was no other way. Denzil Crabtree takes some getting through to.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, finally.

  “I thought you’d decide to do that,” I said.

  “But it won’t have to come out, will it? If you find it’s nothing to do with the killings—and it isn’t, honest!—you can keep quiet about my part in it, can’t you?”

  “If it is nothing to do with the Bodies affair, we can probably keep the lid on it,” I said cautiously. He seemed to ignore my qualifications, and to be more relieved than he ought to have been.

  “I’ll tell you, then.” He shifted uneasily on his bench, looked up into my face to see what my expression was, and finding little comfort there looked down again at his thighs. “It’s a silly business, and it’s the only time I stepped off the straight and narrow. Because normally I just take what my agent offers, and he wouldn’t touch a thing like that, I tell you straight . . . Trouble is, the things he does touch don’t bring in all that much money. Being legit and very occasional.”

  “But you needed money?”

  “For equipment. Not having a regular job—just the dole, and Supplementary, and that, and what I can pick up from the odd job here and there—it’s a tight squeeze sometimes. Normally I can manage, but there was this new type of lat machine I wanted for my gym in the attic—it was just what I needed, just the thing to put the finishing touches, get me into the ultimate shape, and it cost the earth.”

  “And you’d been telling people how much you wanted it?”

  “Well,” he said uncertainly, “I suppose so. Mates at the gym, and that.”

  “And quite by chance someone approached you?”

  “Yes. How did you know? It was quite out of the blue.”

  “Out of the blue movies, more like. Sorry, I interrupted. Just tell me what happened.”

  “It was about a month ago. I was coming away from a posing session at an advertising agency’s studio in Wardour Street. For some North Country ale, though I never touch alcohol in point of fact, on principle. Well, so I was walking through Soho, and I met up with a mate, and we went for a drink—”

  “Who was the mate?”

  “Well . . . it was Wayne Flushing, actually. He was coming out of Jim’s Gym. But he’s got nothing to do with this. Nothing at all . . . Anyway, we went to this pub, because pubs in Soho are often useful, and you can make lots of contacts there—”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said feelingly.

  “—and while Wayne was up at the bar, getting fill-up bitter lemons for both of us, this man approached—”

  “Someone you knew?”

  “Oh no.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Small . . . dark . . . a bit of a paunch.” Denny’s words had all the air of a slow-thinking improvisation.

  “Hmm. All right. Go on.”

  “Anyway, he said: Did I want to make a lot of money in a dead easy way? And when I said that at that particular moment in time I did, he said wait behind when Wayne went.”

  “Which you did?”

  “Yes. Said I wanted another. I think Wayne was a bit suspicious, because you can have just so many bitter lemons. Anyway, I stayed behind, and this chap, this little chap, came up again, and he offered me good money if I’d take part in this film . . . ”

  I sighed.

  “I see. How much, and what was the kink?”

  “Four hundred. And there wasn’t any kink. It was straight sex with a gorgeous model, he said. And he said the sex could be . . . what’s the word . . . faked.”

  “Simulated?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That must have been a great relief.”

  “Here, you’re not taking this seriously.”

  “So far it’s not a patch on Sons and Lovers. Be glad I’m not pigeonholing it with G
rimm’s Fairy Tales. So you jumped at the idea, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t. It’s the sort of thing you just don’t do, if you’re in this business.”

  “So what convinced you? He upped the fee, I suppose?”

  “Well, there was that. But I told him I couldn’t have my face used. It would be recognized and known, by someone or other in the business. And he said it could be arranged, though he downed the fee again, because of the technical difficulties that would involve. He said this was going to be one of several . . . bits, like episodes, in a film called Copulations. And this one they would shoot mostly from behind, or cut it off at the neck if they used front shots—see what I mean?”

  “Oh yes. That was the expendable bit of you.”

  “Well, yes,” he said, looking up at me again, doubtfully. I don’t think Denny appreciated me. “Anyway, I made more conditions, like that I wanted to know as little about the thing as possible. I said I wanted to be taken to the studio in a blindfold, and that.”

  “Why on earth did you stipulate that?”

  “I just wanted to know as little as possible about it. Just . . . do it, like, and take the money and go. I mean, just in case someone thought they recognized my body—because it’s very well-known—and officials of the sport started asking questions. They can catch you out, can’t they?”

  “I should think it very likely they could. You didn’t specify that the cameramen should be blindfolded too?”

  “No, I didn’t think of that,” he said regretfully.

  “Anyway, you did it?”

  “Yes, I did. I wish to hell . . . sorry . . . I wish I never had. They picked me up at home, put on a blindfold in the car, and took me to the studio. There was just this chap I’d met in the pub—he was sort of director—and one cameraman, and this girl, or rather woman . . . ”

  “You recognized her? She was the girl who was killed?”

  “No. That wasn’t her. The report said she had light brown hair, and this girl had dark brown hair.”

  “These things can be arranged.”

  “It wasn’t her. There was a picture in the paper, and it wasn’t the girl. This girl was sort of . . . tartish. Common—know what I mean? . . . Anyway, we took our clothes off, and . . . and this bloke directed it all . . . and we sort of did it. It was all stimulated, like you said.”

  “Simulated.”

  “Right. But I didn’t like it at all, even so. I mean, I felt it was sort of beneath me. I just did what he told me and thought of that lat machine.”

  “Mrs. Stanley Baldwin would probably have approved.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She is said to have recommended shutting one’s eyes and thinking of England.”

  “Was she in these films?”

  “I think I can say quite categorically, no. So, when the film, or the episode, was in the can, you put the blindfold on again and they took you home?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s it, is it? Story over?”

  “Well, I thought it was. Hoped it was. I don’t know why you’re so cynical about it. That’s what happened.”

  “Cynical? I’m not cynical. It’s a jolly good story. I just have the idea that something has been left out.”

  “I haven’t left nothing out, honest.” Denny’s face showed consternation, and his grammar slipped. “I’ve told you everything.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. Because nothing that you’ve told me so far explains why, when you saw the story of the Bodies murders in the papers, you upped and fled to Aberdeen.”

  He looked up at me from his seat on the bench, and I put on my most inexorable expression. His eyes once more went down to a contemplation of his nether extremities, and he stayed for some minutes in thought.

  “It was just that . . . when I was there . . . ”

  “Where?”

  “Filming . . . in the studio . . . though I’d taken all these precautions . . . I thought I recognized the place.”

  “Ah.”

  “See, I’d posed for Bob Cordle, like I said, and though there were classy drapes all around the walls, and o’ course a bed, which I’d never seen . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “ . . . still, I had the idea that the studio where we made the film was the studio in the Bodies office.”

  “Yes, I did rather think it might be,” I said.

  • • •

  Well, it was a jolly good story, as I said. Story being the operative word, because I had the idea that parts of it at least were pure fiction. The point was, which parts? I had a night in the Aberdeen hotel, with a miniature whisky from my room bar whose price suggested it had been brought overland by gold-plated Cadillac from Samarkand rather than distilled in the vicinity, and I had a dawn taxi-ride and the early flight to London to stew the thing over in my mind, sift through the various elements in the story, and fix on the bits I believed in, and the bits I didn’t.

  It was a real problem. Take the most idiotic element in the whole story, Denny’s claim to have insisted on being blindfolded to and from the studio where he had filmed his little bit of porn. Did the idiocy spring from his improvisation under my pressure, or from his stupid attempts to keep himself in the clear even as he dabbled in the dirt? Other elements in his story I was also dubious about. Did he really not know the man who approached him in the pub? Or the woman he appeared with in the film? Was it a woman, and was the film really just straight sex? If it was something bent, Denny would be inclined to lie about that. Nothing bent about bodybuilders!

  I was back home—such is the wonder of modern travel, that compensates for its discomfort and monotony—for a late breakfast in the Abbey Road flat with Jan and Daniel, our son. Jan was doing translations for various Arabian Gulf embassies at the time, work which mostly could be done at home. Considering the staggering size of their oil revenues, the pay was meagre, but Jan said she enjoyed the work. Of course, over cereals and toast I gave her an edited version of what I’d been up to up North.

  “And what was he like, this Denzil?”

  “Not too bright. Apart from the one subject of her beautiful son, his mum was a hundred times sharper. I suppose she’s been part of the problem with Denny. Everything seems to have fallen away, except the contemplation of his fantastic body—its development, its presentation, its needs. He’s become the complete Narcissus. Though perhaps cattle gazing at themselves in a pond gives a better idea of what he’s like.”

  “Yes,” said Jan thoughtfully. “You were a bit like that when you were really serious about the weight-lifting thing.”

  “I was not!”

  “You were, Perry. You used to spend hours lifting those ball things in front of the mirror in the bedroom, and watching your biceps swell, and wondering whether your pectorals were expanding. It was pathetic.”

  “What a whopper! There’s no mirror in the bedroom, anyway.”

  “That was back in the Edgware flat, before we moved anyway.”

  “There was no mirror in the bedroom there either.”

  I can understand why wives tell lies about their husbands when there are other people present, but I’ve never understood why they tell them when there’s only the husband there. Most certainly there were no mirrors in the bedroom of the Edgware flat. In fact, the only mirror in the whole flat was in the bathroom. I remember I found it awfully inconvenient.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN I GOT BACK to New Scotland Yard it was still fairly early in the day, but I found there was someone waiting for me—a girl, pretty, dark, probably in her early twenties.

  “I’m Sally Fox,” she said, coming with me into my office. “I won’t take up much of your time. You may know what I’m going to tell you, or it may not be of relevance anyway.”

  I sat her down, and she refused my offer of tea or coffee.

  “No, thanks. I have to be at Bedford College by eleven. I’m a postgraduate student there, and that’s how I met Susan Platt-Morrison, of course. We
shared a seminar, and occasionally met while we were waiting to see Professor Hardy. Sometimes we used to get together over a coffee or a beer to discuss our thesis. Mine is on Mrs. Gaskell, and the topics overlapped.”

  “So you were a friend of hers.”

  I had said it as a statement rather than a question, but it made Sally pause for a moment.

  “No. No, I wouldn’t say that. Susan was a very cool girl, almost distant, and very self-reliant. Mostly when we got together the talk was about academic things.”

  “But not entirely, I suppose, since you’re here.”

  “No. For example, I knew about the posing, how much it brought her in, and so on. She always told you the cost of anything she’d bought, or what anything she’d done had brought her in. Quite coolly, not so much as if she was obsessed with money, rather that it was one of the facts of life it was silly to ignore.”

  “Not money-mad, but money-based?”

  “That’s about it. She asked me at one time if I would fancy doing that kind of posing: she said she could introduce me to the right people if I was.”

  “You didn’t take her up on that?”

  “No. I said I’d think about it, but I never took her up. I don’t know why. I was a bit of a feminist in my teens, and they’re very hot on the exploitation angle. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it just seemed a bit grubby. One wouldn’t feel too good about the sort of people who’d be looking at you. Susan never brought it up again, but she always talked quite naturally about her own posing, and about the offers she got.”

  “Offers?”

  “Of work, I mean. That was what I wanted to tell you about. I had coffee with her after a seminar, several weeks before she was killed. She said she’d had this offer—‘Real money,’ I remember she said—if she’d do something that went a bit further than the sort of posing she’d been doing. What the man who approached her had in mind was a short film—”

  “Ah yes, I thought it might be.”

  “A sex film, of course, for the video market. She said there were various proposals—some of them ‘a real hoot,’ she said. She used that sort of language, though she wasn’t upper class, and certainly not of that generation. Some of the possibilities that had been suggested were for pretty kinky films. She said if she did it, she didn’t care much either way whether it was straight or kinky. She said she’d just regard it as a job of work, and hope that it wasn’t so ludicrous that she collapsed with laughter.”