Vicious Circle (22 page)

‘You are late. You said seven.’

‘Okay. Forget it. I’ll get another ho for tonight. Pussy stacked up knee deep around here.’

‘No! I didn’t mean that. I am sorry. Please forgive me. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.’

‘You had better. I have a hard-on here that will blow the glass out of all the windows in the street when it bursts.’

Victoria giggled. ‘You are so funny. Come here and blow my window out, lover boy.’

Hector intervened softly. ‘At the time that cultured conversation was in progress, Hazel was lying in a coma with a bullet in her brain and just a few hours away from dying.’

Paddy looked down and shuffled his feet. Nastiya took Hector’s hand that lay on the bench between them. She squeezed it hard, but remained silent. There was nothing that any of them could say for his comfort.

Dave coughed and broke the silence. ‘There are four more conversations between the two of them but it’s all the same sort of dismal stuff. It’s just threats and boasts of sexual prowess from him and a few recriminations from the girl. However, there’s not been a call from Aleutian for the past few weeks. I’ve tried the number, but it’s unobtainable.’

‘Either he dumped her, or he left the country a few weeks back,’ Hector suggested.

‘He just dropped her,’ Nastiya said with certainty. ‘Men like Aleutian don’t stick around more than a few weeks. They move on once they have had a good taste of the tart.’ Significantly she raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow at Paddy.

‘No private jokes here, please,’ Dave cautioned her. ‘Let’s keep it serious and on the ball. So that’s the end of the phone calls but they have given us some good stuff.’ He looked at Hector. ‘If you are ready, I can run the videos for you, boss?’

‘Go ahead please, Dave.’

Dave dimmed the lights and turned on the first video that he had copied from the iPhone. There was immediately a cacophony of background noise over the audio speakers, men’s raised voices and women’s high-pitched shrieks of laughter, loud music and the clatter of bottles and glasses. On the screen the images were jumbled and confused, as the camera panned wildly from ceiling to floor, over a table of beer bottles and half-empty glasses, down onto close-ups of human feet and legs. Then it steadied. The scene was obviously the interior of a squalid nightclub. The tables were crowded together around a tiny dance floor. Victoria’s unmistakable voice rose above the hubbub.

‘Be cool, everybody! Remember, this is your audition for
The X Factor.
’ The lens pulled back and focussed onto a group of young people sitting around a table laden with drinks and overflowing ashtrays. Some of them leered at the camera and raised their glasses in salute, others held hand-rolled joints at jaunty angles in the corners of their mouths and blew puffs of smoke, and one thrust his finger down his throat and made vomit noises.

The camera zoomed in on a pretty blonde girl sitting on a boy’s lap at the far side of the table, and Victoria’s voice instructed her, ‘Come on, Angie. Do some magic trick.’

Angie hooked her thumbs in the top of her dress and pulled it down to her waist. Both her large white breasts popped out and she took one in each hand and pointed her nipples at the camera. ‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’ she squealed. The camera shook with laughter, then moved on to the next reveller in the circle.

‘Here we go!’ Dave Imbiss told them and froze the frame. They were looking at the image of a dark-skinned male. Hector guessed he might be thirty or a little older. His hair was gelled into a quiff and he wore a hoodie jacket with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows and the hood thrown back. His forearms were muscular and toned as though from gym work. He was good-looking in a brutal fashion, with a cruel cynical mouth. His expression was studiedly nonchalant.

Dave let them scrutinize the image for a little longer. ‘I think we have here the missing link in the puzzle; the mover and shaker who set up the hit. This, boys and girls, is Aleutian.’

Hector straightened up in his seat and leaned forward like a hound with the scent of the quarry in his nostrils. ‘Do we have any more footage of this beauty?’ he asked in a deadly quiet tone.

‘Plenty, boss. Plenty. Victoria obviously has the big-time hots for him. She just can’t get enough.’

‘Neither can I,’ Hector murmured. ‘I want him very badly. Let’s move on, Dave.’

The video started again and Victoria’s voice picked up the commentary. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. They don’t come any cooler than this. This is Mr Cool in person. Give your fans a wave, Mr Cool.’

Mr Cool lifted two fingers in a V sign and placed his thumb between them. Without a change of expression he prodded it towards the lens in a grossly lewd gesture. Victoria hooted and she sang, ‘Do that to me one more time!’

The man in the frame leaned back in his chair and locked both his hands behind his head. He winked at the camera. Dave froze the frame again.

‘Okay, folks, check his left hand,’ he told them and zoomed in on it. ‘Is that the red tattoo, boss?’

‘That’s the one, Dave. The Maalik tattoo. But are we sure this one is Aleutian? She hasn’t used that name in this shot. Go on running the footage.’

Dave started the video again, but the camera panned off the subject and Dave apologized. ‘Nothing more on this one. But not to worry too much. There is plenty more on three of the others; enough to make a strong man throw up.’

‘Let’s see them, please,’ Hector ordered.

The next video was a wide shot of the same nightclub dance floor. The camera operator must have been standing on a table to achieve such a high-angle view. On the closest edge of the dance floor Victoria Vusamazulu was dancing with the man with the Maalik tattoo. She was oscillating her hips, throwing her head from side to side so that her long false hairpiece whipped across her face. Her partner towered over her. He had shed the hoodie jacket and the sleeves of his sweatshirt were cut away to expose the full length of his heavily muscled arms. Hector was able to judge his size by comparing him to Victoria. He stood head and shoulders taller than her.

He was big, very big, and he moved well. He was balanced and coordinated. He was quick on his feet. Hector judged that he would be a dangerous man in a fight. Suddenly the man snatched the hairpiece off Victoria’s head and he circled her, lashing her with the hairpiece across her back and buttocks as though he was her slave driver. She writhed in feigned agony. He reached out to the zip fastener running down the back of her dress and pulled it down to the cleft of her buttocks. She held the front of the dress to her breasts but her back was naked and shiny black with sweat.

The other dancers crowded around them, clapping time to the music and to their primitive gyrations, urging them on with shrill screams and yips of excitation.

The man closed in behind Victoria, grabbed her hips and pulled her towards him, pounding his loins into her buttocks in a graphic parody of anal intercourse. She pushed back at him just as vigorously, meeting each of his thrusts, riding out his assault.

Suddenly the screen went black and the noise cut off into complete silence. Dave switched on the overhead lights.

‘Sorry for that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘End of video. We will never know how that story ends.’

‘And a good thing too. No nice girl would be safe in bed with a husband who watched that kind of thing.’ Nastiya gave her opinion and prodded Paddy in the ribs.

‘If you thought that was a little over the top, Nastiya, you had better leave the room now before I run the last one,’ Dave warned her. She shook her head and moved closer to Paddy. She took a firm grip of his arm.

‘I can trust this man to protect me,’ she said. ‘It is my duty to stay here. One day it may be my duty to kill that nasty Aleutian animal.’

‘How do we know this is Aleutian?’ Hector cut in. ‘Come on, Dave, give us the name please.’

‘Your wish is my command, boss. His name is coming right up!’ He switched off the lights and started the last video.

Once again there was a rapid series of fuzzy, out-of-focus shots of the floor and ceiling of what was clearly a woman’s bedroom, with pink bedclothes on the queen-size bed and a dressing table crowded with toiletries and perfume bottles. There was also a menagerie of fluffy animal toys arranged on the single chair standing beside the bed. Then the frame steadied as if the camera had been placed on a tripod. Focus pulled in on the bed. Now the man from the nightclub sequence lay on the bed on his back. He was naked. He stared into the lens with that same enigmatic expression. He had one hand behind his head and the tattoo was in clear focus. With his other hand he was stroking himself.

‘Come on,’ he said to the person behind the camera. ‘What are you waiting for? Does Mr Big frighten you, bitch?’

Vicky Vusamazulu sashayed into the shot. She also was naked. She undulated her glossy black buttocks as she went to the man on the bed. She swung one leg over him and straddled him.

No one in the theatre spoke again for a while. Twice more Victoria stood up from the bed and came back behind the camera to change the angle and the focus, from wide angle to tight close-up, and then she ran back to the bed and launched herself into the action once more.

‘Isn’t it strange?’ Hector asked at last.

‘Isn’t what strange?’ Paddy demanded without taking his eyes from the screen.

‘Isn’t it strange how boring it is to watch other people doing this, when it’s such great fun to do it yourself?’

Nastiya laughed delightedly. ‘I love you, Hector Cross! You can be so wise and funny.’

‘Fast forward please, Dave,’ Hector insisted, and Dave shrugged.

‘Okay, but I warn you that you are going to miss a load of good stuff.’

The movements of the couple on the screen became as jerky and frantically rapid as those in a Charlie Chaplin black-and-white movie from the 1920s. The sound was squeaky and unintelligible.

Nastiya started giggling and that set them all off. At last Dave Imbiss controlled his laughter sufficiently to warn them, ‘Okay, quiet please, the lot of you! Here comes the moment we have all been waiting for!’

The action calmed down into real time and Aleutian spoke out clearly.

‘Brace yourself, you little beauty! Here comes the deadly African black snake!’

‘Oh yes, Aleutian! Give it all to me, Aleutian, you dirty bastard, you!’

‘There you are!’ Dave Imbiss said smugly. ‘Ask for the name and Imbiss gives it to you not once but twice. That’s what I call real service.’ He reached across and switched off the video.

Hector broke the silence that followed. ‘That girl hasn’t been very well brought up.’ He gave his opinion gravely. ‘Did you notice that at the end there she didn’t even say please?’ He stood up and went to the podium. He thrust his hands into his pockets and turned to face them.

‘Great work, Dave. You never let me down. Right now you have made Victoria Vusamazulu the hottest property in town. She is our only conduit to Aleutian. We have to keep her on the boil.’ He looked at Nastiya. ‘Your job, I’m afraid, Nazzy.’

‘Me?’ She looked surprised. ‘It doesn’t seem to me that Victoria shows any signs of lesbian tendencies.’

‘You know as well as I do that a woman is much more open to a friendly approach from another woman than from a man. She doesn’t expect a pass. I want you and Vicky to become soul sisters. That way we stay close to Aleutian.’

‘Okay.’ Nastiya shrugged. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Hector turned to Dave. ‘Give me the girl’s iPhone, please.’

Dave passed it to him and Hector switched it on and dialled in a number.

‘I am dialling my own iPhone,’ he explained. As soon as the ring tone sounded he switched on the speaker, and cautioned the others to silence.

‘Hello. Hector Cross’s phone. Victoria Vusamazulu speaking.’

‘This is Hector Cross, Vicky. Do you still need your iPhone this evening rather than tomorrow? I think I can arrange that.’

‘Oh, yes please, Mr Cross,’ she exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘That would be wonderful. I am totally lost without it.’

‘Good. My secretary is going off duty now. I will put her in a taxi and send her to you. She will deliver it to you.’

‘Thank you. Thank you so very much, sir.’

‘I take it that you are at home by now. What is your address?’

‘Yes, I am in my flat in Richmond. The address is Forty-seven Gardens Lane and the postcode is TW9 5LA. Tell the cabby it’s on the corner with Kew Gardens Road. It’s about three hundred yards down the road from the Kew Gardens tube station.’

‘That’s fine. My secretary’s name is Natasha Voronov. She is a blonde Russian lady. She should be with you in thirty or forty minutes.’

He broke the connection and handed the iPhone to Nastiya. ‘Off you go, tsarina. Victoria is waiting for you. Take your time. We’ll keep dinner for you.’ He paused a moment and then went on. ‘I tell you what; stop at an off-licence on your way. Get Vicky a decent bottle of wine. Tell her that it’s a present from me. A big apology for stealing her phone. She might invite you to share the bottle with her. She is probably lonely now that Aleutian has vanished from the scene. Get chummy with her, get her to share her girlie secrets with you. Most likely she will want to complain about Aleutian, and tell you what an utter bastard he is. You can complain about Paddy and tell her what an utter bastard he is. The two of you should have a great time.’

‘I like that suggestion,’ Nazzy agreed.

*

Nastiya returned from her visit to Victoria’s flat an hour late for dinner. The three men were dressed in mess kit and waiting for her in the living room. All three of them were on their second whiskies. They stood up as she appeared in the doorway.

‘So, how did it go, my lovely?’ Paddy beat the others to the question.

‘Let me go up and change first. I won’t be a minute and then I will come down and tell you the full story.’

When she came down the staircase again they all realized it had been worth the wait. She was wearing her diamonds and she was gorgeous. As the host, Hector took her hand and led her into the dining room. The first course was grilled Dover sole served off the bone with wild girolles from Provence smothered in saffron sauce.