Kiss Me Quick (11 page)

‘Didn’t we go through this last night?’

‘Maybe I was proven wrong last night. Maybe you were tired of him, bored with him, scared of him. Either way, you wanted out, and you know Jack’s not the type of man to take rejection lightly.’

Her eyes narrowed and held him in a dissecting gaze. Then, in mock legalese, she gave her summary. ‘And I put it to you, Detective Treadwell, that your motives are personal. You want this to be true so I can be a damsel in distress and you can cast
yourself
in the role of my knight in shining armour. You want me to have betrayed Jack, because you don’t want me to love him. Because, let’s face it, Detective, you want me for yourself.’

Vince felt a sudden and pressing need to do something with his hands. He took a strip of Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum out of his pocket, carefully released it from its paper sheath and foil wrapper and popped it in his mouth. She was right. Sitting there, stripped of her make-up, and naked – as he imagined – under that soft towelling robe, he realized he did want her for himself.

He suppressed the thought, stood up and went over to the mantelpiece to inspect the skeleton clock under its glass dome. All those little cogs, levers and gears working flawlessly away. He then checked the time, because he didn’t have all day. ‘You know, Miss LaVita, I’m making it up as I go along – just like you.’ No reply. Vince looked around to see her flicking ash into the heavy
crystal
ashtray. ‘The other flats in this building, are they empty?’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘And this one is Jack’s place?’

‘The whole building is. It’s not in his name but, then again, nothing is. In fact, Jack is officially of no fixed abode. Even before he flew the coop.’

‘I admire his taste.’

She smiled. ‘How do you know it’s not
my
taste?’

‘The Gallic influence. It’s like a scaled-down version of the Palace of Versailles, or a French tart’s boudoir.’ He then added quickly, ‘And you’re not French.’

Her smile vanished. ‘Neither is Jack. He’s Corsican. He’s very particular about that fact.’

‘Your contribution, my guess, is this,’ he gestured to the red lip couch he’d been sitting on. ‘Mae West’s lips? By Salvador Dali, right?’

She nodded and looked surprised.

‘When I was reading Law at university, I used to sit in on the Art History lectures.’ He knew he’d thrown her with this revelation. He’d unsettled her on her Louis XIV chaise longue and wiped the smugness off her face. She had him pegged as a
flat-footed
prole, and why not? Last night he’d given her precious little reason to think otherwise. He had just listened to her life story without offering any of his own.

Vince looked at the painting of the wolf and gave it a dismissive shrug, then went over to another painting hanging to the side of the mantelpiece. It was a small portrait of a smiling, moustachioed man in a blue uniform, circa 1880s.

‘He’s looking happy and relaxed, but notice how he’s hiding his hands. If the painter could do hands properly, he would have painted them. Hands are a common weakness in artists, because they’re so hard to get right. And hiding them is his “Tell”. You know what a Tell is?’

Bobbie looked at her own hands, and flared her fingers. Long, elegant, slender, soft and smooth fingers. She let them relax, but the rest of her remained tense. She smiled a rather sad little smile, and said, ‘I’ve been around enough gamblers and chancers to become familiar with the term.’

Vince had spotted her Tell on the beach last night, and was sure he’d have found out more had they not been interrupted by the Three Stooges. He sensed there was a lot more to her story than the picture she’d painted of a rural childhood idyll.

He was straight in. ‘That Jack might want you dead doesn’t worry you?’

From art to brutality. She looked startled by the sudden change of subject.

‘It doesn’t,’ she said, ‘because it’s not true. Jack wouldn’t hurt me.’

‘Not even if his own life depended on it? Or he suspected you’d set him up for a fall?’ She didn’t answer, and he continued. ‘You shared a home together, a life together?’

‘Only for six months.’

‘Six months, six weeks, six hours – he let you into his life, so he must have trusted you with things. And told you things he wouldn’t tell anyone else?’

‘He didn’t.’ She frowned. ‘And I think you should leave now.’

‘He’ll do anything to stay out of jail and you’d be deluded to think otherwise. The truth is that Jack Regent is a
cold-blooded
—’

‘How dare you!’ she shouted, and sprang to her feet. ‘You think you know Jack? You know nothing! As smart as you think you are, Detective, you’re just bumbling around in the dark.’

They stood staring at each other for what seemed to Vince like quite a few minutes, as he tried to assemble a defence for himself. He ended up looking away from her because, however much he thought he knew about Jack Regent, he knew that Bobbie had him bang to rights. When he turned back to her, she had sat down again. Lighting another cigarette, her hands trembled.

He muttered ‘Thanks’ by way of a goodbye, and made his way to the door.

Bobbie unfurled her legs from under her and stood up to see him out. ‘What were you hoping to learn here today that you didn’t know already?’

‘To tell you the truth, Miss LaVita,’ he said with a shrug, ‘I really don’t know.’

Bobbie let out an audible sigh, then said, ‘Follow me.’ She stepped briskly back into the living room.

Vince followed her as she headed over to the far side of the room, approaching a wood-panelled wall where yet more
paintings
hung. She slipped her hand behind one of them, and pressed something, whereupon a section of the wall opened up like a door.

A secret door? A hiding place? Was Jack in there?

Vince smiled at the thought, but went over to take a look. A mechanical skylight cranked open to reveal a room beyond. It was a study or library lined with books from floor to ceiling. It
contained
an antique mahogany desk with a well-used green leather writing surface, and a brass Anglepoise light on top, also a red leather chesterfield sofa and a matching armchair. Vince stepped over the threshold and went to inspect the book-lined shelves.

It was quite a collection. No paperback penny dreadfuls, or cheap romances or hardboiled thrillers. Instead there was
philosophy
, western and eastern; liturgy and religious matters; fine art and antiques. And lots of French writers: Baudelaire, Balzac, Diderot, Dumas, Gide, Rimbaud, Rousseau; and the
contemporaries
such as Camus, Sartre and Genet. And then there were the histories. War mainly. Napoleon, the home-town boy, Corsica, not Brighton, was well represented in large volumes; conquering more shelf space than those other glorious tooled-up globe trotters: Alexandra, Attila and Genghis.

Bobbie joined him and picked out a book randomly. It was Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
. ‘Jack spent hours in here. This was his private place. We all need one, don’t we?’

Before Vince answered, he reviewed the angles: Jack Regent, the cultured criminal in his lair, surrounded by beauty while indulging a thirst for knowledge. It fitted a profile but then, again, just because you surround yourself with this stuff doesn’t mean it rubs off on you. Take Lionel Duval for instance: a mock Tudor mansion apparently stuffed with art and uniform sets of
hand-tooled
leather-bound books. It was unlikely that any of them had ever been opened, never mind read. They were bought by the yard to present a facade of intellect and respectability. But Jack’s library was different, carefully hidden away and out of sight. The books well thumbed, and obviously read.

Vince glanced around at Bobbie as she replaced the volume on the shelf. She was right, Jack wouldn’t sully her with his business. She was up on the walls with the art, and on the shelves with the books. The guilty pleasure, the weakness. He needed her. He wouldn’t hurt her.

‘You’re right, we do all need our little private places. Many men make do with garden sheds.’ He went over to the desk and started opening drawers.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘When Machin searched the flat, did he take a look in here?’

‘No.’

‘Did he even know about it?’

‘No.’

All the drawers were completely empty, except the last one contained a lone paper clip that was bent out of shape. It looked as if it was laughing at him.

‘It’s just books in here. Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘I should get some of our men over to take the place apart.’

As if calling his bluff, she said, ‘Be my guest.’

Vince believed her, though. If there were any clues to Jack’s whereabouts here, they’d already been cleared out. He’d seen enough and walked out. Bobbie closed the door and the secret room disappeared.

‘So, Vincent, when are you going back to London?’

‘I’ll be around for another week or so.’

‘Good. That means you can buy me that Knickerbocker Glory we didn’t have last night.’ She opened the door for him and Vince stepped out into the hallway. ‘Where are you off to now?’ she asked.

‘To see my brother, Vaughn.’

‘Can hardly be the same Vaughn I know, who’s small and skinny with an acne-scarred face and—’

‘Yeah, that’s him.’ He cut her short, not wanting to hear any more about his brother’s inadequacies.

Her smile twisted. ‘But you’re nothing like him.’

Vince looked wary. ‘It has been noted.’

‘He’s scum. Junkie scum.’

He was standing amongst the collected debris littering the entrance to Vaughn’s basement flat. But just because it was ankle deep didn’t mean Vaughn wasn’t at home. It just meant Vaughn didn’t care.

Vince knocked on the door. No response. Eye pressed to the keyhole, he saw a window wide open, a net curtain fluttering, and a foot making a hasty exit. Vince put his own foot to the door, kicking it hard, and it flew open. A dingy hallway with a bedroom to the left. An unmade mattress, some scattered clothes, a set of dumbbells on the floor. The living room was a dark dungeon of damp: black-speckled magnolia chip wallpaper, and mismatched sticks of furniture. A roll of linoleum chucked on the floor and peeling Formica made for an unconvincing kitchen. On further inspection, there were signs of a woman’s touch. A framed photo of a married couple standing with a shy little girl, the child wincing as if almost trying to hide herself from the camera’s unrelenting gaze. One hand had dragged a lock of her hair into her mouth to obscure half of her face. Next to it stood a bunch of posies in a jam jar, making an attempt to jolly the place up.

So this was the girl Bobbie had told him about just before he left her apartment. The same girl Bobbie had given a job to, working in the cloakroom of the Blue Orchid Club. Because she felt sorry for her. Because it was dark there. Because in the
darkness
of the cloakroom you couldn’t see the purple birthmark that blighted half of an otherwise pretty face. She wore her wispy mousy hair like Veronica Lake. A long fringe covering one side of her face. For Veronica it was a sexy trade mark that provided her with a look. For the girl with the wine stained skin, it was a mask, a veil.

Vaughn had started hanging around the cloakroom, paying the girl attention, until Bobbie had banned him from the club after he was caught snorting speed in the gents. The girl had left only a week later. Bobbie said that she suspected Vaughn had
introduced
her to drugs. Vince didn’t argue the point.

The back window was still open and Vaughn had made his escape. Vince wasn’t too troubled; he knew he’d catch up with his brother soon.

Vince was now standing at his mother’s grave. He knelt down and cleared away the leaves and bracken, and laid down a modest bunch of flowers he had bought. At just eighteen, Vince’s mother had boarded the ferry from Ireland and crossed the water to England, and had ended up in Brighton. Her first job there was waitressing in the restaurant at Hanningtons, which was Brighton’s most prestigious department store. It was a popular hang-out for ‘the racing fraternity’ of bookmakers and gamblers, and it was there that she first met Lenny Treadwell. He was then working for his uncle, who was a bookmaker, but Lenny had big plans. He wanted to become a ‘face’ in Brighton, not remain a bookie’s runner and driver. That was how he came to hang about in the shadow of men like Henry Pierce and the Jack Regent mob, who had the money, prestige and power he craved.

Besides a nice smile, there was an innate honesty about her, and maybe that’s what attracted Lenny, since it was something he would never possess. They started going out, and he looked good in his suit. He was a handsome charmer, and a degenerate gambler, and with that comes optimism but seldom a sense of reality. Lenny fancied himself at the tables and reckoned he had a good nose for a nag but, as his uncle had always warned him, the only way to make a small fortune as a gambler is to start with a large one.

She really liked him, no matter what her friends said about him, so one thing led to another and soon she was pregnant. Lenny wasn’t ready for this, still had his dream of the big score. He wanted her to visit a woman he knew of who got rid of such problems. She showed a steely determination and resolutely refused. They got married in the registry office and moved into a tiny terraced house on Albion Hill. There, Vaughn was born and, like most families on Albion Hill, they struggled. Whatever Lenny had dreamed of soon went out the window. And so did his luck at the tables, the races and the dogs. He couldn’t seem to back a winner, ended up throwing dud betting slips in the air like confetti. And that’s how he developed a gambler’s Tell – he started weeping uncontrollably and everywhere. Not a good look to
possess
amongst the hard cases he was wont to run with. As well as the belly-up gambling, he took the plug out of the jug and started drinking, crying into his cups. He started skimming money off his uncle who, after giving him a good talking to, eventually gave him a good hiding then the sack. Lenny developed the shakes, needed to swallow a quart of Scotch before he could leave the house. He started placing bets he couldn’t afford and writing cheques he couldn’t cover. When his own money was exhausted, he pawned the modest pieces of jewellery his wife’s mother had bequeathed her. Finally he started borrowing from the only people who would still lend to him. The wrong people. The Jack Regent mob.

When Vince came along a year later, things just got worse. Earning whatever she could from cleaning jobs, his mother had long since given up on her husband, after it became clear he couldn’t provide for his family. The writing was on the wall when Lenny fell behind with repayments to Jack Regent’s shylocks. That was when Lenny skipped town, never to be seen again, leaving Vince barely a year old, and Vaughn only two. Their mother kept her boys above the breadline only by working her fingers to the bone. Cleaning in the mornings, pulling pints in the evenings, both jobs she hated, but she did them because she had to.

The boys living on Albion Hill fought regularly with the boys of Carlton Hill. Occasionally they would join up to fight the James Street boys. Who, in turn, would join up with them to fight the boys from the estates in Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk. Vince marked himself out as a fearless fighter. Tall for his age, strong, game and fast, he was a natural-born scrapper endowed with a precision and powerful punch. And he was smart, too,
passing
his Eleven Plus exam despite himself. Even while attending grammar school, he carried on running with the boys of Albion Hill. As they got older, and further into their teens, the gang fights became more vicious, more organized, the gang became a mob and Vince became a natural leader. And it looked as if he was heading the same way as them, crime, time, more crime and always more time.

When Vince became old enough to learn that his father had skipped town because he was in debt to Jack Regent, the
childhood
awe he’d harboured began to turn into teenage resentment. But it wasn’t that act alone that focused him on Jack Regent and shaped his future.

Billy ‘the Schnozz’ Riley was eighteen, and living with his mother four doors up from Vince. He was a braggart and a bully with a screw loose; and that loose screw made his tongue flap and talk himself up, and eventually dig himself a hole. It had been a Saturday afternoon, and hot. Most of the families were out on the street, the women gossiping and smoking, the men struggling back from the pubs, the kids fighting a losing battle with gravity as they chased footballs that kept rolling down the hill. Their playtime activities summed up the neighbourhood: a constant uphill struggle.

The big black car had no trouble rolling up the hill, however. Vince couldn’t remember the make of it, not a Rolls-Royce but with the same kind of pedigree and prestige to make heads turn as it glided up Albion Hill. It came to a halt outside Billy the Schnozz’s house.

The driver, thickset and bull-necked, sprang out the car and dutifully opened the back door. Out stepped Henry Pierce, while another man stayed inside, his face obscured by a low-slung panama hat and black wraparound sunglasses. What little of his face was visible was shrouded in thick smoke from a bespoke blended cigarette. The kids murmured his name as if he was the bogeyman made flesh.

‘Heard he’s got a crippled foot,’ one boy whispered, his tone so hushed that his mate asked him to repeat it. But the boy didn’t dare speak louder, for fear his voice would penetrate the black car and reach the ears of Jack Regent.

Pierce cracked his knuckles and took a cursory look around him, not to check that no one was watching, but to make sure everyone
was
watching. And everyone was, for a crowd had already gathered. Pierce strolled up to Billy’s door. He didn’t bother knocking, just kicked it off its hinges and entered. Meanwhile, the driver waited on the kerb, eyeing the crowd for any dissent or potential rescuers. He needn’t even have bothered; there were no candidates for either role.

A minute later, and Billy the Schnozz exited via a top-floor window. A closed window. Loud gasps from the crowd. Women looked away, girls started crying; the boys’ faces lit up as if they were watching a firework display, as shards of glass exploded into the air and Billy hit the pavement with a bone-buckling thud.

Vince noticed two beat coppers appear at the top of the hill, from where they had a good view of what was happening. When they saw who was in the black car, they quickly turned and walked away.

It should have been all over for Billy. But Jack needed his
coup de grâce
. He needed to put his signature on this violence. With one hand, Pierce hauled Billy up on to his knees by clasping a handful of his hair. Pierce then reached into an inside pocket, and everyone thought they knew what was coming next. Because everyone knew what Henry Pierce usually kept in there: the knife, the razor or the ice pick. Instead, Pierce pulled out a …
pen
? The sight of this drew unexpected gasps from his audience, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Pierce was given to poetic flourishes in his frequent acts of violence, so in his hands, the slim steel Sheaffer ballpoint pen still managed to look like a weapon, glinting lethally in the sunlight. Pierce gripped Billy’s hair tighter, pulled his head back and inscribed
I AM DEAD
on his forehead.

He then told Billy, ‘You’ll wear this on you for the rest of your days, boy! If the rain washes it off, you run straight home and write it back on. Never be without, boy. Never be without!’

When the inscription on the forehead was completed, the writing was already on the wall as to where the pen would end up next. Pierce thrust the pen up into Billy’s nostril, through the bone, the cartilage, until the blunt end of it emerged, bloodied, just above the bridge of his nose. What saved Billy from getting his brain skewered was also the reason for his nickname, ‘the Schnozz’. That was the considerable size and length of his nose, against the relative dimensions of the pen.

Pierce wiped the pen clean on Billy’s shirt-tail, climbed back into the car, and it was gone. An ambulance was called, which
collected
Billy and carted him off. The boys laughed at his fate, but Vince didn’t join in. In broad daylight, right under everyone’s gaze, Billy the Schnozz had been destroyed. And no one had lifted a finger to help him, not even the law. It had all clearly been orchestrated and sanctioned by one man, but there were no
repercussions
and no questions asked. Vince thought long and hard that night. It wasn’t just the horror of the act that affected him, it was the power behind it. The power that one man could exert over others. And Vince didn’t ever want to be one of those
others
. An innate sense of justice had stirred in him, without him fully understanding it. At first he thought he was weak, so he kept his tears to himself and laughed along with the
others
when it was talked about the following day. But he’d changed.

He put childish things behind him, stopped hanging out with the pack that trawled the streets, knuckled down and got on with his school work, listened to his teachers with fresh ears. Achieving top grades, he went to Durham University to read Law and get as far away from Albion Hill and the memory of that hot
summer’s
day. But as the old adage goes: you can take the boy out of Albion Hill, but you can’t take Albion Hill out of the boy. And now Vince was back to finish the job.