Kiss Me Quick (34 page)

Spider had known that Pierce was planning to kill Bobbie, because Pierce had filled him in on the details. Not
all
the details, not what happened twenty-five years ago, because that was
private
between him and Bobbie. Pierce had told him that the order came from up high, and it made Spider feel good that Pierce was part of a bigger picture, and not just acting under his own psychotic volition. It made Spider feel good that he himself was part of a bigger picture. And a murder. That felt really good, really villainous. That Pierce was taking his own sweet time to do the job didn’t worry Spider unduly. He knew that Pierce, a sadist at heart, would savour his work, indulging his depravity. So, once Pierce disappeared into the house, Spider had lit up a joint and turned on the radio. Maybe that’s why he didn’t initially hear his boss, Henry Pierce, as he called out into the night.

‘SPIDER!’

The black 59 Cadillac Deville with red trim pulled up. The back door was duly opened. Pierce, his hand covering his newly ornamented eye, was guided into the back seat. But there seemed to be someone next to him. Confused, he called out to his driver. ‘Spider!’

Spider didn’t answer. Spider was next to him in the back seat. Dead.

With a heavy foot on the accelerator, the car sped off into the night.

The street-entrance door was ajar. It was dark inside. Vince tried the lights – dead. He walked towards the stairs and felt a stickiness underfoot. He looked down to see a tar-like substance on the marble floor. As black as it was, he soon recognized it as congealing blood. Without hesitation, he raced up the stairs.

The door to the apartment was closed, but almost hanging off its hinges. Vince needed to lift the door to open it and enter the flat. He tried the lights; again they were dead. To his left he saw a twisted heap on the floor: it turned out to be the smashed black bureau. He called out Bobbie’s name. No answer.

Vince went down one of the passages and noticed a soft warm light flickering from inside one of the rooms. He put his ear to the door, and heard a young girl’s voice. She was softly singing a lullaby that was carried along on the hushed, jagged breath of sobs. He opened the door into a large white-tiled bathroom, and saw that Bobbie was lying in the bath. A single candle lit the room. Her precious photo album lay on the floor.

She didn’t seem to notice him as she stared straight ahead, her toes playing with the taps. The bathwater was pink with blood. He looked at her body, but saw no wounds.

‘What happened, Bobbie?’

She carried on staring at her toes and humming her lullaby.

Vince braced himself for the worst, but stayed calm. ‘I went to the Blue Orchid, but no one was there …’ Still she kept on with the lullaby. ‘Bobbie?’

‘The bad man,’ she said, pulling an exaggerated,
frightened-child
grimace. ‘The bad man dressed in black came.’

Vince bent down and grabbed her under the arms and lifted her out of the tepid water and on to her feet. She was as light as a rag doll, lifeless as if all that spirit that keeps us from floating off into the ether had evaporated. Bobbie didn’t say a word to all this manhandling. She seemed stoned but he sensed she hadn’t taken anything. Then he saw the bruising, the colour spectrum of pain: black and blue and brown and yellow. It stretched from her shoulder blades down to the base of her spine, like a mottled cape. He held her close, her limp body swaying in his arms. He squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, ‘Sorry sorry sorry sorry …’

Grabbing a white towel off the rail, he wrapped it around her. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her down the passage, into the living room, and laid her gently on the red lips of the sofa.

‘My pictures …?’ she said softly.

He went back into the bathroom and retrieved her photo album. She held it close, hugging it in her arms.

‘The lights, Bobbie? Do you know where the fuse box is?’

‘Vincent, sit down with me, just for a moment,’ she uttered in a childish voice, opening her photo album.

Vince tried to suppress his impatience. ‘Come on, Bobbie, please, where is it? Is it downstairs? Do you know?’

Not looking up from the album, ‘Downstairs under the table, I think,’ she replied perfectly calmly, as if nothing had happened.

Vince went downstairs and located the fuse box. The fuses themselves were all in place, just switched off. He pressed the switch and the hallway lit up.

Back upstairs, he found Bobbie sitting bolt upright, peering at the photo album. She was smiling at the pictures and muttering, not just to herself but to the people in the photos. She was
asking
them questions, giving instructions, chiding and laughing. The images had come to life and she was now absorbed in the world of her photo album, as the memories swarmed back to her. Borrowed, stolen, fake, but memories nonetheless; formed in her imagination, forged out of the darkness and nightmares of her childhood. They were hers, and right now they were better than the ones Pierce had left her with.

Vince surveyed the damage. The bureau lying there like a stack of firewood for a bonfire about to be lit, the broken ornaments, shattered mirrors, upturned furniture, the glass-fronted clock lying smashed on the floor. And the blood, thick and dark like tar or spat tobacco. He went over and stood beside her.

‘Bobbie?’

She didn’t answer, her focus still on the photo album. Vince put his forefinger under her lightly dimpled chin, and gently lifted it until her eyes finally met his – or tried to. Those brown eyes that always seemed so alive and switched on, now wore an emulsive sheen and looked vacant and lost. He wondered if this was an act to put him off asking her the questions he needed to ask. The little actress trying to escape reality?

‘Bobbie, the blood? What happened?’

‘None so blind as those who cannot see,’
she recited and winked at him. ‘Well,
he
would say that now, wouldn’t he?’ It was a joke, and she was smiling, but it was underpinned by a steely dead-eyed coldness. She turned her attention back to the photo album.

Vince looked about the room for clues to Pierce’s demise and spotted the carving knife on the floor. He bent down and picked it up, finding there was no blood on it. Then he noticed Pierce’s swordstick lying under the tall throne-like chair. No blood on that either. Pierce didn’t play by the Queensberry Rules, and most women don’t know them, anyway.
None so blind as those
…

‘Sit down with me, Vincent. We can look at my photos,’ trilled Bobbie in a childish cadence, unnecessarily shifting over to make space for him on the sofa.

Too late. Vince had found his own photos. He bent down and picked up the torn glossy prints scattered on the floor. Realizing what they were, he put them on the coffee table and pieced them together. The evidence laid out in front of him, undeniable. He sank to his knees, not only to get a closer look but because he physically had to. His life had drained away from him and was now spilled all over the coffee table. He inhaled deep and sombre breaths and stared at the evidence before him, caught in black and white. He thought of the possibilities of the photos being
mock-ups
. With the right equipment, it’s easily done. While working Vice Squad he’d seen porno mags, photos of movie stars performing gross acts with smiles on their faces as if they were in a Lassie movie. But he knew
these
weren’t forged. He looked at himself, hoping he wouldn’t see himself there. But it
was
him, just as Eddie Tobin had said. Vince was kneeling directly over the man on the floor, his right hand raised, balled into a fist that was about to smash down into the waiting face of the projectionist. Vince wore a twisted scowl of righteous anger, during a moment frozen in time. A single frame of film. But what had happened next? That was what Vince couldn’t see.

His mind raced ahead, writing a scenario for himself, putting himself in the dock and making his defence. He wasn’t a killer, he assured himself. He didn’t feel like a killer! But what did a killer feel like? Vince had sat in on interviews with real sociopaths, and the experience had always left him cold. Their moral
compass
was so out of sync with the rest of the world. They talked about their murders as if they were everyday and commonplace actions; couching the atrocities in emotionless language possessing the monotony of a read-out shopping list or an errand run. And then you had your schizophrenics, who remember nothing when they kill. They wash the blood off their hands and wake up
forgetting
it ever happened: a tabula rasa.

Vince looked around the wreckage of the room, at the girl sitting on the red lips looking at the photo album. It all presented a surreal aspect of insanity. He thought of the good Dr Boehm, whose diagnosis not only had Vince pegged as schizophrenic sociopath but also a narcissist. He guessed that narcissists would like nothing better than to sit around looking at pictures of
themselves
, yet here Vince was looking at pictures of himself that he wished didn’t exist. And Bobbie was looking at pictures of herself that never did exist. Surreal insanity.

Vince stood up, stamped the blood back into his feet and shook off the feeling of unreality. He paced around the coffee table displaying the photos and wanted to kick it over, but didn’t want to add to the carnage of the room, or the madness. He was
determined
not to get dragged under. Vince knew, somewhere deep down, that none of it was true. It was all a set-up. He knew that it was only telling him half the story. What about the girl on the screen? Where were the pictures of her in this collection? If she was alive, he could find her and thus discover the truth. She could tell them, how he was trying to save her. As for the projectionist, maybe he had been justified in killing him? Maybe he was merely defending himself? And if he did kill that sicko who was putting such vile obscenity up on the screen, then what of it? Maybe he was
justified
…

The phone rang and broke his train of thought.

‘Don’t pick it up,’ said Bobbie firmly, her eyes suddenly alert. She put down the photo album and stood ready to block his way.

He gave her a soothing smile. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, padding over to the phone.

‘Please …’ she said, following him, wrapping her arms around him, burying her face in his chest. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out now, leave now …’

Vince unpeeled her arms from around his neck, then carefully picked the receiver up as if it was a stick of dynamite about to go off. He didn’t say a word, just listened hard. He heard panting – more like a dog than a human. The breathing was erratic, and the caller was trying to control it and put words in its place.

‘Hell … hello … hello?’ came the voice at the other end. There was interference on the line, a crackling static that broke the voice up.

‘Is … is … is anyone there?’

The well-brought-up voice was unmistakable, no matter how hard the interference tried to distort it.

‘Terence?’ Vince asked.

‘Yes … s.’

Vince took the phone from his ear, beat the earpiece against the hard edge of his lower palm, hoping to dislodge the static, then put it back to his ear. ‘Terence? Can you hear me?’

‘I can hear you.’

‘Where are you?

‘The harbour.’

Terence sounded so faint and remote that Vince felt as if he himself should be saying, in a plummy BBC voice, ‘Go ahead, Hong Kong. We’re receiving you.’ Instead, he shouted down the blower: ‘’Fucksake, Terence, speak up! I can’t hear you!’

‘I’m in Shoreham harb—’

Vince, loud and annoyed: ‘I got that part. What are you
doing
there, Terence?’

‘He’s here!’

‘Who’s here?’

‘Jack.’

Vince gripped the stick of dynamite which had now just blown up in his ear. Then he tried to compose himself, not wanting to alert Bobbie to what he’d just heard. But he needed to
double-check
what he’d just heard.

‘Say that again.’

‘Jack Regent. I’ve seen him … Called the hotel, but you’ve not been there, so I called this number you gave me. You don’t mind, do you, Vince?’

‘No, Terence, I don’t mind. Tell me exactly what you saw.’

‘I was standing about thirty yards away, between the loading pallets. I was staking out the warehouse.’

In normal circumstances, Vince would have raised a smile at Terence’s use of the term ‘staking out’, obviously culled from one of
The Black Mask
detective magazines he avidly read. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and this wasn’t the time for fictional heroics.

‘A car pulled up at the warehouse. It was American. No one got out. They waited for about a minute, then the warehouse doors opened, and they drove in.’

‘OK, you’re forty yards away—’

‘Thirty.’

‘Thirty, then. It’s dark. How do you know it was …?’ Vince, conscious of Bobbie listening, didn’t even want to use the
pronoun
him
, because she’d instantly know who
him
was. Because there was only one
him
in this story.

‘I made my way along the quayside and spotted the man in the driving seat. He was wearing a hat, but he lit a cigarette. I then saw his face. It was Jack Regent.’

Vince was concerned. ‘Did he see you?’

There was a pause.

‘No no no, I was very careful.’

‘Terence, are you wearing those shoes with the Blakeys?!’

‘No, I thought of that, Vince. I’m on surveillance, so I wore my plimsolls.’

‘Jesus Christ, Terence … get out of there.’

‘But it was him, Vince. It was—’

‘Get out of there. That’s an order!’

Beep-beep-beep
. The pips went.

‘Vince, I’ll call—’

Vince, urgent. ‘Give me your number.’

The line went dead.

Vince paced around the room, waiting for Terence to call him back. Bobbie was pacing after him.

‘I’m not giving up.’

‘Giving up what, Vincent?!’

‘Giving up who I am.’

As soon as Vince put the phone down, Bobbie had said, ‘Jack’s here, isn’t he?’ She’d been watching him speaking on the phone with his back towards her, talking quietly, not giving anything away. She’d seen his back straighten, the muscles of his shoulders tighten. Even before Vince had shouted, ‘Get out of there!’ it was obvious.

She demanded the truth, and eventually he told her. He saw fear invade her face, and heard anger disfigure her voice. Mixed emotions blending into pure hatred. He tried soothing her by insisting that he was going to get Jack and put him away for life so she’d never have to see him again. But that didn’t allay her fear, or assuage her raw hatred. Vince didn’t understand where this fresh burst of hatred came from, but he accepted it. He was getting used to not asking questions.

‘I came down here to do a job, Bobbie. I’m still a detective until I’m told otherwise.’

‘Even if it means ending up in the pay of the men you’re
supposed
to be going after? They’ve got you trapped now, Vincent. Your life’s not your own.’

Vince stared at her, noticing her eyes – alert, lucid all of a sudden. ‘I’m not going through the rest of my life living in fear of something I don’t even know I’ve actually done.’