A Sticky End (11 page)

I wanted to see him naked, but this would have to wait. In order to get his pants off I'd have to unlace and remove his boots; as for his shirt, first there was the nightmare of buckles and buttons on his tunic. So I contented myself with lowering his pants halfway down his thighs and pulling his shirt up to his belly button—enough to expose the whole of his midsection, and more than enough to see that Stan Knight was pale-skinned and smooth, except around his cock and ass, where blond hair formed a thick bush. I licked all around his balls, which were already getting tight; it wouldn't be long before he was coming in my mouth, and that was just as well. There was work to be done, mysteries to be solved, friends to save…

And a very nice cock to be sucked. First things first.

I took him back into my mouth and moved my lips down to the base, and soon I had a good rhythm going. With one hand I stroked his stomach, feeling the muscles working underneath the tight skin; with the other, I worked my way beneath his balls and around to his ass. Stan was so caught up in what was happening to his dick that he didn't really notice the added attention I was paying to his ass—all he knew was that he was easing into that final rapid downhill slide toward orgasm. If he hadn't been so far gone, he might have steered me away from that taboo area; as it was, he allowed my fingers to rub his ass lips and push a little way into the hole. And, when I judged the time was right—when his abdominal muscles tensed, and his cock stiffened in my mouth—I slipped one into him, just to the first knuckle.

His climax hit him like a wave breaking over a seawall, and he was helpless, holding on to my head, pumping his cock into my mouth, unloading his balls, unable to think of what he was doing, let alone analyze the fact that he was having sex with a man who had just digitally penetrated him. I took care to slip that finger out in plenty of time, before he came to his senses. Next time—oh yes, there would be a next time—he'd have an empty feeling in his ass and he wouldn't know why. He'd just want me to fill it.

I swallowed his spunk, and let him soften a little in my mouth. My own cock was hard as hell, of course, but I had no urgent need to come; it wasn't long since the last time, and though my powers of recovery have been met with disbelief on occasion, I was content to save myself for later. What mattered was not that I shot a load over the young copper's boots, or into his handsome, flushed face, but that I had got myself a sidekick. And a very useful, decorative one at that. So I pushed my cock back into my pants—Stan gave it a lingering glance, already looking forward to his next taste—and buttoned myself up.

Would he make his excuses and leave? Would he arrest me? Or did he realize what I intended him to realize—that we were now partners in crime as well as in pleasure, and that it would be definitely in his interest to help me out? I would never willingly stoop to threats or blackmail, but when Morgan's life was in danger, morals took second place.

Happily for both of us, PC Stan Knight showed no remorse, nor any urgent inclination to leave. Instead, he wiped himself up with a bit of toilet tissue, splashed water on his face, and rearranged his clothing.

“You—” he started, then stopped. There was a mischievous smile on his face.

“What?”

“You swallowed it.”

“Yup. Rude not to.”

At this he threw back his head and laughed long and loud, his Adam's apple working in his throat. I had a terrible desire to kiss him—but he'd keep.

“Right, Mitch,” he said, when he was once again a respectable, properly dressed young copper on duty, “what next?”

“You'd better get back outside. I don't want Godley or Weston turning up and finding that you've deserted your post. As for me, I've got a lot of questions and I need some answers.”

“What sort of questions?”

How much could I tell him? I decided on the bold course of action. After what had just happened, he could hardly cause me problems. “There was someone else here last night.”

“Mr. Morgan never mentioned him.”

“No. He wouldn't. He wasn't the sort of person that a gentleman—ought to be entertaining at home.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“I'm not stupid, Mitch. I mean, Mr. Morgan is…like you, right?”

Like us, I wanted to say. “Yes. Sometimes.”

“And he and Bartlett…”

“Yes. They were friends.”

“Hmmmm. I see. So would I be right in thinking that this third party who visited the house last night was also…that way?”

“Ten out of ten. Top score.”

“So who was he?”

“They met him in a pub.”

“What sort of pub?”

“You tell me,” I said, holding the front door open; now that I'd thought of Godley and Weston, I wanted to get Stan back to his post as quickly as possible. “Where do men of that sort go around here?”

“There's the White Bear, just across the Common.”

“That's the one. How do I get there?”

He gave me directions.

“Any others?”

“Why? You planning a pub crawl?”

“Maybe. Wanna come with me?”

“I don't get off till seven.” It was now just after four.

“Okay. Pick me up at seven-thirty. You can show me around.”

“There's quite a few of 'em,” said Stan, counting on his fingers. “The White Bear in Wimbledon, the Ship in Tooting, the Ring of Bells in Balham, the Queen's Head in Clapham High Street—”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Yeah. First job they gave me when I started was that beat. Going round the queer pubs, looking out for any funny business.”

“Did you find any?”

“Nah. Copper turns up in uniform, they're all good as
gold, aren't they? Doesn't do any harm to let 'em know we've got an eye out.”

“Right.” Little bastard, I thought—I'll fuck you extra hard for that when I have you at my mercy. “Bet you never thought you'd be visiting them undercover, did you?”

“I wouldn't go in any of 'em on my own, not without the uniform. But I'll be safe with you, won't I?”

“Yes,” I lied, setting myself a challenge of breaching his virgin ass with my dick within the next 24 hours. “Safe as Fort Knox, Stan. See you later.”

I went back inside.

Just over three hours before I had any chance of finding the mysterious Sean Durran—the last person, apart from Morgan, to see Frank Bartlett alive. He, surely, held the key to the mystery. What had he said to Bartlett? What had happened to turn him from a happy, horny husband into a suicidal wreck? Was Durran what he appeared to be—a casual encounter? Or was there some missing piece to the puzzle? Was Durran a killer? You heard such things whispered among friends, or you read between the lines of the crime reports—men killed in hotel rooms, or in parks late at night, a guardsman arrested, or a laborer, or unemployed. Was Bartlett simply unlucky in his choice of playmates? Was Durran a lunatic with a hard cock and a guilty conscience?

It was an attractive idea, in many ways: at least then we'd be talking about a straightforward murder, a crazed killer, an unlucky victim. I pictured Durran to myself—attractive, hot-eyed, mad with lust, madder with remorse, picking up the very instrument with which he had been given such exquisite pleasure just a short while before—Bartlett's razor—and using it to blot out the unthinkable fact of what he'd just enjoyed.

I got carried away with the notion and even started composing the speech I would give to Sean Durran when I trapped him—pompous nonsense about justice and honesty and self-respect.
But suddenly the cold water of reason quenched my ardent fantasy. Was I not falling into the same trap I'd warned Stan Knight about? Pinning the death on some sinister intruder—not, admittedly, the burglar or tramp of popular imagination, but just as convenient. The fact that Durran had been invited into the house, and had joined Morgan and Bartlett in the bathroom, did not alter the fact that he was an outsider. He was not “one of us,” at least in terms of his class, even if other aspects of his nature made him a brother. The police would happily pin the crime on the likes of Sean Durran—a working-class idler, obviously of Irish descent, an habitué of the pubs, shiftless, dishonest, immoral. And I was doing exactly the same thing myself.

Worse, I was admitting to myself that I did not believe Morgan's account of what had happened the night before. Durran had left the house—Morgan himself saw him off the premises. Bartlett was still alive at that time—when Morgan met Durran coming down the stairs, Bartlett was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. They had spoken; Bartlett had been his normal self. Durran left, Morgan went to bed, leaving Bartlett in the bathroom, the door now locked—from the inside. There was no one else in the house, no other means of access to the bathroom—it did not communicate with any other rooms. True, there was an external window, but that was closed from the inside when Bartlett was found, and it would have taken a long ladder to reach it. Morgan went to bed, got up again, mussed up the guest bed, told Bartlett to hurry up, and heard an indistinct mumbling from the bathroom. All this was long after Durran had left. He could not possibly have killed Bartlett. Poison was a possibility—but what of the razor cuts? It did not make sense. It had to be suicide—but why?

I felt helpless, trapped in the silent house. Morgan was at the police station, saying God knows what, Belinda and the children were with poor Vivien Bartlett—what a miserable
time they would be having!—and the servants were out, little knowing the mess to which they would return. The house in uproar, muddy footprints—Durran's, the police's—up and down the stairs and, worst of all, the sealed-off bathroom. Someone was going to have to clean it up sooner or later, and even I, hardened by years in operating theaters, blanched at the thought of that job. The thought of scrubbing up all that blood, the water in the bucket turning red, the smell…

I was standing in the hall, my brain stuck in a cycle of horror and confusion, staring vacantly at the floor—the tiles—a stain on the tiles—a stain in the shape of a leaf.

Blood.

The blood I had noticed before.

Why is there blood on the hall floor?

There was on obvious explanation—it had dripped from the dead body of Frank Bartlett as the police removed him from the house. That's what Morgan had said, and it was entirely possible. But what if that blood was telling a different story? Durran lashing out with a knife, right here in the hallway? Or, worse still, Morgan? Or a game that had gone wrong—the razor, the cut on Morgan's finger, an accident covered up by Morgan to look like suicide. Or no suicide at all, but a way out of a tricky situation.

Damn that spot of blood! I had a good mind to fetch a brush and pail and scrub it away myself.

I needed to get out of the house and clear my head. Every avenue of thought led to the horrible possibility that Morgan had lied to me, and once that thought took hold, others followed like links in a chain. He has lied to me—he lies to Belinda—he lies to the police—he lies to Bartlett. Links in a chain that drags our friendship into the abyss, that binds Morgan on his way to the scaffold.

Sherlock Holmes never has these moments of intense confusion and distress; his mind cuts through every tangle like Alexander's sword through the Gordian knot. Hercule
Poirot simply sits in a chair, his fingertips touching, his eyes closed, and thinks it through until he reaches that eureka moment and denounces the killer in a pleasant drawing room, amid potted palms and cups of tea. Mitch Mitchell, however, was far too close to his mystery, far too emotionally and physically involved than those two cold fish—and, while I don't think I'm a bad doctor, I've never regarded myself as a great detective. Those mysteries that I've managed to “solve” in the past have become clear more through luck than judgment, by blundering across the truth when I was looking for something else—usually cock. Now I felt like running away from the whole horrible mess, racing to Victoria to get the boat train to Paris, forgetting it all in the certainties of Vince's embraces—and I would have, were it not for the thought of Morgan, alone and afraid in a police cell, digging himself into a hole by lies and prevarications, going to his death because I, his best friend, had been too scared and confused to wear out a little shoe leather in pursuit of the truth.

I scribbled a hasty note to the effect that I'd gone to get some air—I didn't want the servants, the police, or Belinda to know what I was up to, if they got back to the house before Morgan did. I closed the front door behind me, realizing as I did so that there might be no one to let me in when I returned. No matter; I had everything I needed. I had over three hours to kill before my rendezvous with Stan Knight. What could I do on a Sunday afternoon in southwest London that could possibly be of use? Under normal circumstances, I'd head for the nearest public baths or fleapit movie house and hope to find a pleasant way to pass the time—but under the present circumstances that would not do.

What I needed more than anything was to find out all that I could about Frank Bartlett—what kind of man he was, what had happened in the days and weeks before his death, what possible motive he could have for suicide. Or,
if not suicide—if this was the cleverest, most dastardly murder of all time—then who were his enemies? I couldn't ask Morgan, and I definitely couldn't go to Bartlett's home and start pestering his widow. Who else knew him? If it were a weekday I'd go to Bartlett and Ross's office, perhaps posing as a wealthy American investor—all Brits believe that Americans are loaded, and I grew up around enough rich folk back home in Boston to do a pretty good impression of the type. But it was a Sunday, and the office would be closed. Unless, for some reason—what was the name of that paragon of efficiency Morgan had mentioned, the industrious, selfless drone who kept B and R's business afloat? Topper? Tiptree? Maybe, just maybe, his life was so empty that he would spend his day of rest at the office. It was a long shot, but what did I have to lose? Only the price of a phone call.