Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  “You mean she’d decided to take up the offer?”

  “No . . . She said specifically that she hadn’t decided. I had the impression, though, that she probably would.”

  “Is that just because of the sort of person she was?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t dislike her—really I didn’t—and yet there was very little to like, or to respond to. So hard and cold. I met her once with her mother, at a matinée of Cards on the Table, and I think I could guess where the hardness came from . . . And yet she was such a beautiful girl.”

  “Lovely,” I agreed.

  “Beautiful,” she insisted. “The whole hog. You’d have agreed if you’d ever seen her in life. It sometimes made me wonder. Yeats has some lines about women who, ‘being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty, a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness—’ something, something, something—‘and never find a friend.’ I felt that had happened with Susan. No natural kindness, no warmth, no ability to make friends, because she had nothing to give. Perhaps it was her family, perhaps it was her beauty, but that’s how she was. I think everything was judged quite coolly by her: profit and loss, advantage and disadvantage to Susan Platt-Morrison. If she thought the money made it worth her while going into these films, she’d have done them. It’s difficult not to sound self-righteous, but from what she said they sounded a good deal worse than grubby.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “They’d have been a lot nastier than grubby.”

  When she’d gone, I went along and found Garry Joplin in the Yard canteen, and had a chat with him about his work of the previous day. The main thing of interest was his talk with Wayne Flushing’s father and sister. The father was obviously feeling very guilty that he’d chucked Wayne out of the house, though there was no evidence that this in any way affected Wayne’s end. Joplin was convinced that the father certainly had once been fond of Wayne.

  “There was regret,” he said. “No question.”

  On the other hand, Wayne had clearly been an exasperating person to have around the house. In addition to the weights and the bars, and the pieces of apparatus that spread from his bedroom to the landing, and gradually took over the first floor, there were the sun bed, the oiling sessions, the depilation sessions, all of them gone into with the utmost seriousness. On top of it all, Wayne was a hypochondriac of the most extreme and old-maidish kind, terrified of draughts, obsessed with pimples, convinced that he was about to catch this or that illness, including many quite uncatchable ones. In the end, and coupled with the fact that after he gave up his job he was a considerable financial drain, it had all got to be too much for Mr. Flushing Senior. He had told his son to go, and he had gone.

  Wayne’s sister Debbie had painted a much more admiring picture. Wayne had the most fantastic body, she’d been with him to the most fantastic contests, there’d been fantastic pictures of him in Bodies and Bodybuilding Monthly, and altogether he was the most fantastic brother a girl could have. She’d often gone round to the gym to have a fruit juice with him in a health bar after his workout. What she found particularly horrible about his death was that Wayne hated that sort of posing anyway, and was not much good at it. Competition posing was one thing, and that was a vital part of the sport, but posing for such magazines as Bodies, or doing advertisements, was something else again—mere glamour stuff, fashion modelling without the fashion. Wayne hated it, and he wasn’t one of Bob Cordle’s favourite models because it took so much time and so much film before he got it right.

  Wayne’s flat, Joplin said, had been monumentally unrevealing. Apart from the inevitable equipment, there was a minimum of personal papers, not a single newspaper or book, apart from muscle-building glossies, and no indication of personality or tastes at all. The man was the body. However, in a medicine chest he had found a formidable array of drugs, both doctor-prescribed and proprietary, and on the mantelpiece a model of the Bodmin Nixie, guaranteed to ward off the palsy. All the doors and windows of the flat were fitted with draught-excluders.

  By the time Joplin had told me all this, it was approaching the time of my appointment with Vince Haggarty. I didn’t quite know what I was expecting from Haggarty, because I knew that so far I had nothing to go on beyond my own ear for a definite edginess in his response when I phoned him. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go about the questioning, and I decided that one way to catch him slightly off guard might be to go a bit early. When I rang on the door of his flat, which was the ground floor of a pre-war detached house in Cricklewood, it was eleven-forty, and there was a long wait on the doorstep before the door opened.

  “Sorry. Did I interrupt you? I’m early,” I said breezily.

  “No, no. Not at all. Come on in,” said Vince, and he led the way down the hall into the living-room. I wondered if this was the family home, which Vince had inherited, and divided into flats. The room had bits of conventional furniture, most of it rather elderly, though against the bare walls there were boxes and cases of some kind, covered over with drapes. But I had no eye for the room, or for Vince himself for that matter, because the room was filled by a startling creature in a green robe down to her ankles—a robe of the same ethnic provenance as the covers and drapes elsewhere in the room. She was black—her skin of a dull, matt, total blackness such as I had never seen before. She was also incredibly beautiful, of that classical, arrogant African beauty that makes one feel mongrel and tacky. I had rarely seen anyone so exciting in repose.

  Vince, I realized, was holding the door open for her.

  She said something—it sounded like a European language, soft, full of liquids and sh sounds, like water lapping against a sea wall. Vince nodded, but I rather doubted whether he understood. The woman floated out, her elegance springing from her large, confident body, not achieved in spite of it. Moments later I saw her sailing proudly along the road outside.

  “Sorry about that,” said Vince, coming back.

  “My privilege. I don’t often get to meet such marvellously beautiful women as that. What was the language?”

  “Portuguese. Refuses to learn any other language, silly bitch.”

  “Perhaps with a body like that she doesn’t need to.”

  Vince gave a furtive smile, his eyes sharply on me, as if sizing me up.

  “She gets by.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Part-time. Communication presents problems. She’s from one of these ex-Portuguese colonies. She’s beginning to do a bit of fashion modelling—could well get to be in demand. That dull black skin sets off certain colours fantastically. She’s going to be in Vogue next month.”

  By now I had managed to tear my mind from the woman, and to get a good look at Vince Haggarty. He was a big man—not particularly tall, but broad, and obviously a bodybuilder in his time. The body, though, had begun the process of thickening: though the shoulders were still powerful, the arms were that bit fleshy, and beneath his casual jersey shirt one could see the heaviness of the waist and loins, the beginnings of a paunch. His face was good-looking, knowing, with thick lips concealing a hideous set of teeth—brown and uneven. I thought I smelt tobacco. Once he had been a fitness man, but he had let things slide.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what sort of connection did you have with Bob Cordle?”

  He motioned me to one of the chintzy armchairs, and sat in the other himself, with an affectation of ease which I found less than convincing.

  “Not a great deal,” he said, “on the social side. But I’ve modelled for him a fair bit.”

  “For Bodies?”

  “Yes, in the past. If you look at the back numbers, you’ll find I was on the cover three—no, four years ago. I was in better shape then—though I could still get it back any time, of course.”

  “Do you mean that you haven’t modelled for him recently?”

  Vince replied, rather quickly:

  “Oh no, I don’t mean that. Bob didn’t only do the pics for Bodies, you know. He hired that room and did a lot of his own stuff ther
e, different times in the week. He did work for this and that firm. Quite a lot of it modelling of one sort or another. There’s work of all sorts these days.” He gestured with his hand at a glossy brochure on a side table. “Those underwear catalogues, for example.”

  I glanced in its direction.

  “Would that be one of those catalogues they advertise in the Sunday papers?” I asked. “Men’s briefs and swimwear, all beautifully photographed on living models?”

  “That’s it.” He gave another of his knowing grins, all lopsided and man-of-the-world. “All perfectly legit, so far as I know, and they pay well, which is the main thing. Then there’s more up-market stuff. My agent’s managing to get me into the fashion photography lark.”

  “But that wasn’t Bob Cordle’s line?”

  “Not in the higher reaches. But he did work for mail order catalogues now and again.”

  “Tell me, what were your impressions of Bob Cordle?”

  He rounded his third finger against his thumb, apparently in a gesture of enthusiasm.

  “Oh, one of nature’s gentlemen. Everyone will have told you that, I imagine.”

  “They have. So everything he did would have been straight and on the level, then?”

  “I’d have thought so. Though it was all just a job to Bob. He strolled through it all. He could—what’s the expression?—touch pitch and not be defiled.”

  “You had a religious upbringing?”

  He smiled wryly, showing those discoloured teeth.

  “Irish Protestant. But it didn’t take.”

  “Would you call working for Bodies magazine touching pitch?”

  He backtracked, but delicately.

  “Well . . . not really, I suppose . . . But when you think of the sort of people who take it . . . grubby little hands flicking through the paper to find bodies that they fancy-tongues licking round lips when they come on something they lech after . . . It’s not just good, clean fun, is it?”

  “What you’re saying is, it doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. You think straight-out porn is in a way more honest?”

  He sat back in his chair, again with that appearance of ease.

  “I don’t know that I’m saying anything. But basically it’s all appealing to the same instinct, isn’t it? That, and the underwear mags, and down to the real hard-core stuff. And that was the game Bob Cordle was working in, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. He must have cultivated some sort of detachment.”

  “That’s it. That’s what I mean. We all do it—the people who pose as well.”

  “Did you know any of the people who were shot? The two models, and the boy who was helping Bob?”

  “I knew Wayne, of course. We were in the same game. Not much of a model, and perhaps not too bright, but good at the competitions. That girl—Susan Platt-something-or-other: she looked a bit of all right, but I can’t remember having met her. Of course, in this game it’s sometimes ships that pass in the night. You say hello to a nice bit of tittie, appear on a front cover grinning like maniacs at each other, and never see the girl again.”

  “And the boy?”

  Vince frowned.

  “Don’t think so. Saw the photo in the paper, of course, but I can’t call him to mind. But I had heard Bob had this protégé that he was taking around and training up. That would be this boy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, that would be him.”

  Well, we nagged around the subject for ten more minutes, without seeming to get any further, and after a bit—apparently gaining confidence—Vince Haggarty said he did have an engagement, and if there wasn’t anything else . . . I wasn’t too unhappy about Vince gaining confidence, because I clearly wasn’t going to get anywhere this time. But I was definitely keeping him in mind for some future investigation. I stood up, and let him usher me out to the front door. In the hall Vince put on a maroon blazer, and when we got to the road he eased himself into a nifty little sports car, and, raising his hand in a wave, drove off at speed.

  Before I drove off myself, back to the Yard, I sat for a few moments in the car, sorting out my impressions. With Denny Crabtree I had had the sense of a thoroughly untrustworthy story, almost any part of which might have been untrue. I certainly couldn’t say the same about Vince Haggarty. But then the cases were dissimilar: I had caught Denny by surprise, whereas Vince had had good notice that I was coming. He had had time to get a story together—had made sure he could give the impression that there was no story, as such, to tell.

  Why then, I wondered, was I so dissatisfied with Vince’s side of the interview? I went through the unsatisfactory elements one by one in my mind.

  Vince implied he was still living from posing. Everyone else gave you the impression that one made a pittance from that kind of posing. Vince, apparently, was doing all right from it.

  He’d said—no, implied—that he did posing for the underwear catalogues aimed at the plain-cover homosexual market. Was his thickening body, beginning to run to paunch, really the sort of body they used in these brochures? I could no doubt get some from the Dirty Squad people, but I very much doubted whether Vince would be pictured in any of the recent ones.

  Again, he said he was breaking into the fashion modelling branch of the business. His face was handsome enough, if he didn’t open his mouth. His body was impressive still, especially when clothed. But was it the sort of body designers liked to use to show off their clothes? Much too cumbersome and inelegant, surely.

  Again, his attitude to Bob Cordle was odd. He followed the “nature’s gentleman” party line, but he was apparently quite willing to entertain the notion that he helped in the making of indecent films. Everyone else had scotched that notion—whether from interested or disinterested motives.

  He implied that Bob was still photographing him for this or that publication, but claimed that he had never met Dale Herbert, who had been trailing around with Bob for three months and more. He had remembered most of Susan Platt-Morrison’s name, perhaps only feigned forgetting the last part. Would he, if he had only read about her in the newspapers? Did he know her, in fact, much better than he pretended?

  No, taking it all together, it did not seem to me that Vince had quite got his story straight. I decided I could easily get very interested in Vince Haggarty.

  Back at New Scotland Yard I was told that a Mr. Peace had rung.

  “Who?”

  “He said you might know him better as Charlie.”

  “Oh, Charlie. What did he want?”

  “He says he has a little scrap of information. About worth a plate of moussaka, he thought.”

  I rang Charlie, and arranged to meet him in the Knossos for a late lunch at two-fifteen.

  Chapter 11

  CHARLIE AND I met at the door of the Knossos, both of us five minutes late. Inside the lunch-time rush was over, with one, two or three diners at scattered tables finishing off their coffees. The Leonideses seemed to be in the middle of a family conference, with Mama, Papa and daughter round a large table with another Greek and a boy who was obviously his son. Probably arranging a marriage, I thought. We felt guilty about breaking up the discussions, but the proprietor came bustling up to us in a lather of welcoming sweat, and soon Mama was in the kitchen. Our order was hardly lavish, but before long we were hunched over basins of moussaka, and sipping a couple of glasses of the house wine.

  “I don’t know that what I’ve got is worth even this,” said Charlie apologetically.

  “Let me be the judge of that. I can downgrade us to a sandwich bar next time if it makes you feel easier.”

  “Well, see if this fits in with anything else you’ve been hearing about this business. I’ve been trying to pick up anything I could, see, but like I said those guys don’t talk too much to me. Too busy, too preoccupied with their routines, and not getting interrupted, and getting the maximum out of their time in the gym, which is not cheap. They say ‘Hi’ when they come in, they do their work-outs, shower, then they say ‘Hi
’ on the way out. A lot of them are natural solitaries, and if they talk it’s to each other. About their training routines mostly, I guess. But I got the idea that these days the Bodies murders might get an airing in any chat they might have with each other. I tried hanging round health food shops and places like that, where they might meet accidentally, but I didn’t have any luck. Then it struck me that one of the places they do talk to each other is in the showers.”

  “Difficult to hear.”

  “Difficult but not impossible. And then, they might continue the conversation after the water’s turned off. So I did a bit of tactful reorganization of the gym, with the abdominal board and ladder down beside the showers at the far end. Everybody knows that’s one of my things. Now, yesterday evening two guys finished their workouts at the same time, and were showering together—”

  “Names?”

  “Pete Sinclair and Geoff Tate, but I don’t think they’re anything to do with this. By the time I got to the machine they were already on the Bodies thing. They were agreeing that somebody must have been doing something out of order. ‘Something a bit off,’ Geoff called it. They agreed whoever it was must have been doing it for the money. ‘I hear good money’s being offered,’ Pete said. Now they’d both finished showering, so I could hear quite distinctly. Pete said: ‘Guys who do that sort of thing have only themselves to blame. It spells ruin in this game, and they know it.’ Geoff said: ‘Wayne Flushing was none too sharp.’ And Pete said: ‘Maybe not, but his agent would have warned him, so he had no excuse.’ Then there was a bit of silence, then Geoff said: ‘Personally I don’t see Wayne as the type at all. But if he had Todd Masterman as his agent, then I’ve wondered before now if Todd is quite the clean, upstanding, nothing-that-isn’t-above-board man that he keeps telling us he is.’ ”