Chill Factor (17 page)

“Yes, I think I do.”

“There were four items of junk mail in Latham’s dustbin, two of them from charities. He’d opened them all and the return envelope and payment slip from one of the charities – the World Wildlife Fund – was pinned on his kitchen noticeboard. Silkstone, on the other hand, handled things more efficiently. There were two items in his bin, both of them unopened. One of them, from ActionAid, was
postmarked
the day before the killings, so it had probably only arrived that morning.” I grinned, saying: “Of the two of them, I’d rather pin it on Silkstone. Wouldn’t you?”

She smiled and carefully lifted a spoonful of toffee banana towards her mouth. I watched her lips engulf it and the spoon slide out from between them. “So…” she
mumbled
, chewing and swallowing, “So…if you were a
psychiatrist
, doing a profile of whoever had killed Mrs Silkstone,
you’d go for the person who dumped his junk mail, unopened.”

“Every time.”

“What about the evidence?”

“We’re just talking profiles. You used the word, I try to avoid it.”

“Why?”

“Because most of it is common sense. I don’t need a
psychiatrist
on seventy grand to pinpoint crime scenes on a map for me and say: ‘He lives somewhere there.’”

“It might be common sense to you, Charlie. It’s
mumbo-jumbo
to most of us.”

“It’ll come. There’s no substitute for experience.”

“So how did Latham’s semen get to be all over Mrs Silkstone?” Annette asked.

I shrugged and flapped a hand. I suspect I blushed, too. “In the usual manner?” I suggested.

“So he was there when she died?”

“It looks like it.”

“But you think Silkstone was with him?”

“I don’t know, Annette,” I sighed. “What do some people get up to behind their curtains? It’s all a mystery to me. Profiling isn’t evidence. It should be used to indicate a line of enquiry, and you should always bear in mind that it might be the wrong line. When you do it backwards, like we’ve done, it’s next to worthless.”

She smiled, saying: “That was interesting. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.” A waiter placed the bill in front of me but Annette’s arm reached out like a striking rattlesnake and grabbed it.

“My treat,” she said.

Light rain was falling when we hit the street, and I
guided
Annette under the shelter of the shop canopies, my hand in the small of her back. “Shall we have a drink somewhere?” I asked.

“Mmm. Where?”

“Dunno.” I was out of touch with the town-centre pubs. Most of them were good, once, but
yoof
culture had taken them over and the music made thinking, never mind
conversation
, impossible. Annette might not mind that, I thought, and something gurgled in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t have a calculator in my pocket, but elementary mental
arithmetic
said she was nineteen years younger than me. Nowhere would that gap be more evident than in a
town-centre
pub.

Across the road there blinked the neon sign of the Aspidistra Lounge, Heckley’s major nightspot. Formerly the Copper Banana, formerly Luigi’s Nite Scene, formerly Mad John’s Fashion Emporium, formerly the Regal Kinema. The later two of these enterprises were run by Georgie Casanove, formerly George Hardwick. Georgie was our town’s answer to Pete Stringfellow, but without the finesse.

“We could try there,” I said, nodding towards the lights.

“The Aspidistra Lounge?”

“Mmm. We could call it work, claim on our expenses. Georgie, the proprietor, isn’t exactly a Mr Big, but I think he could finger a few people for us, if he were so inclined. Let’s put some pressure on him.”

“Right!” she said. “I’m game.”

We dashed across the road, avoiding the puddles, and stepped through the open doorway of the disco. A bouncer with a shaven head and Buddy Holly spectacles was leaning on the front desk, chatting to the gum-chewing ticket girl. He straightened up and stepped to one side, taken off-guard by the sudden rush of customers, and tried to look
menacing
. I’ve seen more menace on the back of a cornflakes box.

“Two, please,” I said to the girl, not sure whether to speak under, over or through the armoured glass that surrounded her. We could have flashed our IDs like TV cops would have done, and they would have let us in, but I preferred it this way.

The words: “Ladies are free before ten,” came out of her
mouth in a haze of peppermint that evaporated in the air somewhere between her and the bouncer, who she was
gazing
towards.

“Oh, I’ll take three, then,” I answered.

“That’ll be seven pounds fifty.”

I pushed a tenner towards her and she slid my change and two cloakroom tickets under the window. “Thank you.” The bouncer strode over to a door and yanked it open. I ushered Annette forward and said: “Cheers,” to him. We were in.

I know one tune that’s been written in the last ten years by any of the so-called Brit-Pop stars I see on the front pages of the tabloids, and the DJ was playing it.

I leaned towards Annette and said: “Verve,” into her ear. She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” I added, determined to exploit my sole opportunity to swank. It’s a simple catchy rhythm, repeated
ad nauseum.
I nodded my head in time with it:
Dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum,
dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum.
Once heard, it’s ringing through your brain for days, a bit like
Canon in
D
.

“I’m amazed!” she gasped, and I rewarded her with a wink.

Our brains slowly modified our senses to accommodate the sudden change in environment. Irises widened to dispel the jungle gloom and nerves in our ears adjusted their
sensitivity
to just below the pain barrier. Noses twitched, seeking out pheromones from anyone of the opposite sex who was ripe for mating. Four million years of evolution, and this was what it was all leading to.

“It’s a bit quiet,” I shouted above the battery of chords bouncing through my body.

“It’s early,” Annette yelled back at me, in explanation.

It was the same as every other disco I remembered from my younger days. A bright, small dance floor; bored DJ sorting records behind a console straight from NASA; pulsating lights and lots of red velvet. OK, so we didn’t have lasers and dry ice then, but they’re no big deal. Still permeating everything was
that same old feeling of despair. These places always look a dump when you see them with the house lights up. This looked a dump in semi-darkness. When I was a kid we called it the Bug Hutch, and came every Saturday to catch up with Flash Gordon’s latest adventures.

Georgie himself was behind the bar, attired like a cross between Bette Davis on a bad night and Conan the Barbarian. “It wouldn’t cost much to convert this back to a cinema, George,” I told him, flapping a hand in the direction of the auditorium.

“Hello, Mr Priest,” he growled, managing to sound threatening and limp simultaneously. “Not expecting any trouble, are we?”

“Who could cause trouble in an empty house?”

“It’s early. We’ll fill up, soon as the pubs close.”

“Two beers, please.” The locks on his head were platinum blond, but those cascading through the slashed front of his satin shirt were grey.

“What sort?”

I looked at Annette and she leaned over the bar,
examining
the wares. “Foster’s Ice, please,” she said.

“Two,” I repeated.

He popped the caps and placed the bottles on the
counter
. “That’ll be four pounds fifty,” he told me.

I passed him another tenner, asking: “How much is there back on the bottles?”

“Isn’t he a caution,” he said to Annette as he handed me my change.

We walked uphill, away from the bar and the speakers, feeling our way between the empty tables to where the rear stalls once were. It was much quieter back there, and a few other people were sitting in scattered groups, arranged according to some logic based on personal territory. As the place filled territories would shrink and a pecking order emerge. There were two couples, three men presumably from out of town, and a group of girls. We looked for a table
equidistant from the girls and the couples, but before we could sit down one of the girls waved to me.

It was Sophie, with three of her friends. I nudged Annette and gestured for her to follow. The girls moved their chairs to make room for us, removing sports bags from the vacant ones.

“It’s Charles, he’s my uncle,” Sophie told her friends, a big smile illuminating her face.

“Hello, Uncle Charles,” they chorused.

I introduced Annette to them, and Sophie rattled off three names that I promptly forgot. She and Sophie renewed their acquaintance.

“You don’t do this for amusement, do you?” I asked, looking around at the decor.

“We’ve been playing badminton at the leisure centre,” someone informed me.

“We just come in for a quick drink and a dance,” another added.

“It’s free before ten,” Sophie said.

“Right,” I nodded. Apart from the price of the drinks, it sounded a reasonable arrangement. I gritted my teeth and asked them what they’d have.

“Thanks, Uncle Charles,” they all said when I returned, six bottles dangling from between my fingers. One of the girls, dark-haired, petite and vivacious, said: “Can I call you Charlie, Uncle Charles? I already have an Uncle Charles.”

“I’d prefer it if you all called me Charlie. Uncle Charles makes me feel old.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” I lied, glancing up at the ceiling.

“Gosh, that is old.”

They were in high spirits, the adrenaline still pumping after a couple of hours on court, and I began to wonder if joining them had been such a good idea. Four confident young women at the crossroads: left for marriage and a
family
; right for a career in whatever they chose; straight on for
both. I didn’t feel old – I felt fossilised.

The music paused, the DJ spoke for the first time, and when it started again the four of them jumped to their feet, prompted by some secret signal.

“We dance to this.”

“Come on, Annette. Can you dance, Charlie?”

“Can I dance? Can I dance?
Watch my hips
.”

I had a quick sip of lager, for sustenance, and followed them on to the floor. The difference in rhythm or melody was invisible to me, but this was evidently danceable, what had gone before wasn’t. I joined the circle of ladies,
swivelled
on one leg and wondered about joint replacements.

The style of dancing hadn’t changed, so I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. The girls put on a show, swaying and gyrating, lissom as snakes, but I gave them a step or two. Fifteen minutes later the DJ slowed it down and the floor emptied again, faster than a golf course in a thunderstorm.

We finished our tasteless beer and left. There was a street vendor outside, selling hot dogs. The girls’ ritual was to have one each then make their ways home. I couldn’t have eaten one if Delia Smith herself was standing behind the counter in her wimple. Just the smell of them made me want to dash off and bite a postman’s leg. We stood talking as they wolfed them down. Young appetites, young tastes, young digestive systems. Here we go again, I thought.

Annette shared my views on hot dogs, and declined one. When we’d established that nobody needed a lift we left. “That was fun,” Annette said as we drove off.

“It was, wasn’t it.”

“Sophie’s grown up.”

“I had noticed.”

“The little dark one – Shani – took a shine to you.”

“Understandably.”

“And not a size ten between them,” she sighed.

I freewheeled to a standstill outside her flat, dropping on to sidelights but leaving the engine running. “Thanks for the
meal, Ms Brown,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Mr Priest,” she replied. “I’ve enjoyed myself.”

“Good. That’s the intention.”

“Well it worked.”

After a moment’s uncomfortable silence I asked: “Are you…are you going away, this weekend.”

“Yes,” she mumbled.

“Right.”

She pulled the catch and pushed the door open. “Charlie…” she began, half turning back towards me.

“Mmm?”

“Oh just, you know…thanks for…for being, you know…a pal. A friend.”

“A gentleman. You mean a gentleman.”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Just as long as you understand one thing.”

She looked puzzled, worried. “What’s that?”

“That it’s bloody difficult for me.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

Her smile made me want to plunder a convent. “Goodnight, Charlie,” she said.

“Goodnight, Annette.”

The house was in darkness, blind and forlorn. The outside light is supposed to turn itself on at dusk, but it looked as if the bulb had blown again. The streetlights illuminate the front, but the side door is in shadow. I avoided the milk
bottle
standing on the step and felt for the keyhole with a
finger
, like drunks do, before inserting the key. It was cold inside, because a front had swept in from Labrador and the central heating was way down low. I turned the thermostat to thirty and the timer to constant. That’d soon warm things up. I made some tea and lit the gas fire. I was too alert to sleep, too many thoughts and rhythms tumbling around in
my head. The big CD player was filled with Dylan, but that wasn’t what I needed:

I know that I could find you, in somebody’s room.

It’s a price I have to pay: you’re a big girl all the way
.

Not tonight, Bob, thank you. I flicked through the titles until one flashed a light in my brain. Gorecki’s third; a good choice. Sometimes, the best way to deal with a hurt, real or imaginary, is to overwhelm it with somebody else’s sadness. I slipped the gleaming disc from its cover and placed it on the turntable.

“What do some people get up to, behind the curtains?” I’d asked Annette. “Profiling isn’t evidence,” I’d said. They get up to everything you could imagine, and plenty of things you couldn’t, and that’s the truth. Read the personal column in your newspaper; look at the magazines on the top shelf in any newsagents; explore the internet; look at the small ads in the tabloids. That’s the visible bit.