Authors: Graham Hurley
They waited in silence, Winter trying to picture the word ‘autumn’ in his mind’s eye. Lately, along with the headaches and the problem with his eyes, had come a series of alarming holes in what used to be his memory, and spelling the simplest words was one of them.
‘Papa India, Kilo Foxtrot, over.’
‘Kilo Foxtrot.’ Winter was still holding the radio. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Affirmative suss cocaine. Subject is under arrest. Out.’
There was a click and a buzz of static before Winter turned the radio off. He opened the door and sat back for a moment or two, listening to the rasp of surf from the nearby beach. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling.
‘Try U-M-N,’ he said at last.
The apartment block, Camber Court, was a brand new addition to this increasingly select corner of Old Portsmouth. There were ten flats in all. Half of them overlooked the thick stone curtain of the Hot Walls towards Spithead and the Isle of Wight. The rest, to the rear, offered a perfect view of the ancient Camber
Dock, home to a picturesque jumble of tugboats, pilot launches, fishing smacks and the odd motor cruiser. Part with a large cheque, and you could get up early and watch the scallop boats slipping out on the morning tide. Alternatively, as Winter had patiently explained to DI Cathy Lamb, you could arrive at half six on a dark winter’s night, neck a glass or two of decent red, pull the curtains and fuck yourself stupid.
Five flights of newly carpeted stairs led to the penthouse in the rear flats. The door opened at Winter’s second knock. In the surveillance photos Richardson had been huddled in a full-length cashmere coat. Now he was wearing designer jeans, a collarless white shirt, and sported a tiny pony tail secured with a twist of blue and red beads. For a puffy-faced overweight gay in his early fifties, this outfit suggested a wistful yearning to turn back the clock.
‘Gentlemen?’ The eyes were glassy behind the wire-rimmed specs.
‘DC Winter. Portsmouth Crime Squad. This is DC Suttle. We’d like a word if we may.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘My goodness. Well …’ Winter realised the man was pissed ‘… why not?’
He held the door open as Winter stepped past. Safely inside the apartment, he confirmed the owner’s ID. Stephen Wallace Richardson.
‘But I’m not the owner,’ Richardson added. ‘Would that I was. You need to talk to Mr Hakim.’
‘And where would we find him?’
‘This week? Maybe Beirut. Maybe Dubai. Maybe Monte Carlo. I can give you a mobile number if it makes things easier.’
‘So what do you do … Mr Richardson?’
‘I’m a guest, really. No, more a lodger. It’s a grace and favour thing. Mr Hakim and I go back a long way. You might say I keep an eye on the place.’ He did his best to look helpful. ‘Is there a problem?’
The question brought a grin to Suttle’s face. The entrance hall was big, almost a room in itself. A fluted vase on an antique occasional table held what looked like a hand-painted dildo – a whorl of yellows ribbed with scarlet – and a collection of photos on the wall, beautifully lit, artfully composed, offered an arresting level of anatomical detail. On closer inspection, the photos were all of the same woman and Suttle couldn’t remember seeing a body so exposed since a stag-night weekend in the fleshpots of Antwerp.
‘That music …?’ Winter had cocked an ear. It sounded classical, maybe opera, and it was coming from a room at the end.
‘Friend of mine,’ Richardson mumbled. ‘Adores Verdi.’
‘Yeah?’
Winter was already trying another of the five doors. Richardson watched him, seemingly helpless.
‘Our salon.’ He answered Winter’s enquiring look. ‘Please. Be my guest.’
Suttle followed Winter through the door. The room was huge, extending the full width of the apartment. Three of the four picture windows were masked with venetian blinds but through the tall window at the kitchen end of the room Suttle could see the black gleam of water in the Camber Dock and the lights of the houses and apartments beyond.
Winter was standing beside a dining table in the central part of the room. The table was set for four places. Plates and cutlery for the early courses had been cleared away but the remains of a rack of lamb
lay in the centre of the tablecloth, flanked by a gravy boat and a little hillock of mint sauce in a Chinese bowl. A trail of gravy drops led to one of the place mats and spoons and forks still awaited the dessert course. Two of the wine bottles on a trolley beside the table were upended in coolers.
Winter turned in time to see Richardson stepping back into the hall.
‘If you don’t mind, sir.’ He motioned him into the sitting room again. ‘So who does the cooking?’
‘I do.’
‘All part of the service, is it? Bed and board?’
Without waiting for an answer, Winter shepherded Richardson towards the vast crescent of leather sofa that dominated the left-hand end of the room. The corners of the sofa were padded with heavy tapestry pillows, and a newly opened box of Montecristo cigars had been abandoned beside a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. There was a bottle of Krug and more glasses on the low occasional table, plus a selection of magazines. Winter gazed down at them. Nesting amongst the copies of
Tatler, Country Living
and
Yachts and Yachting
were a number of porn magazines, mainly Italian and Spanish. He reached for the nearest and began to flick through it. With a waiting room like this, Winter thought, visits to the doctor might become a real pleasure.
From the kitchen came a yelp of delight. Suttle had been checking the line of cupboards over the neat stack of dishes on the granite-veined work surface. A shelf full of spices beside the six-ring ceramic hob had yielded a roughly crafted wooden box divided into three compartments. Winter inspected it, then invited Richardson to lift it down. One of the three compartments was brimming with a snowy-white powder.
Suttle’s grin spread even wider. Couple of grand’s worth. At least.
‘What’s that, then?’ Winter nodded at the box. ‘Bicarb of soda?’
Richardson was looking pained. A couple of minutes ago he’d been on the point of loading the dishwasher. Now this.
Winter told Suttle to call in for a Scenes of Crime team, then escorted Richardson back to the other end of the room. Before he even thought of contemplating an arrest, he wanted the full tour.
The last time Winter had been on this page in the Pompey book of villainy, he’d had to climb endless flights of greasy steps in almost total darkness to bust a couple of middle-aged toms doing the business in some top-floor doss off the seafront. The punters were being serviced side by side on rubber blow-up mattresses, there was a pit bull chained up in the corner, and you couldn’t move for empty cider bottles from the Happy Shopper down the road. At the time it had felt like a kind of victory – at least the dog went to a good home – but even hours later, taking statements from the women back at the Bridewell, he hadn’t been able to rid himself of the smell: White Lightning, body fluids, plus gristly bits of discarded kebab from the van round the corner. Three good arguments, thought Winter at the time, for staying in with a bottle of Scotch and a lifetime’s repeats of
The Sopranos
.
Camber Court, thank God, belonged on a different planet.
‘What’s this, then?’
‘A television.’
‘I know that, but what’s on it?’
Winter invited Richardson to press the
PLAY
button on the DVD. Two men appeared on the huge wall-mounted
plasma screen. A third man – tanned, young, supple, inventive – was obliging them both. Winter watched for a moment, his head cocked left and right as he tried to follow the action, warmed by the sheer class of what he’d stepped into.
‘These perverts for your benefit?’
Richardson nodded, drawn in by a sequence he’d probably enjoyed a thousand times before.
‘Cook’s nips,’ he agreed. ‘Keeps an old man very happy.’
‘What else have you got?’
‘Pretty much everything.’ He indicated a line of DVDs on a shelf beneath the player. ‘Depends what you’re after. Sado. Foot fetish. Wee-wee. Animals.’ He looked pained again. ‘Black men with ten-foot willies.’
‘Your punters have a favourite?’
‘Of course. But it wasn’t me who told you.’
He shot Winter a quick, conspiratorial look then bent to the DVDs and extracted a disc. Slipping it into the player, he stepped back, evidently resigned to whatever followed. Winter summoned Suttle with a nod at the screen. A man in his forties was flat on his back, straddled by a tall white girl with a string of pearls round her neck. The man’s head hung over the end of the bed, his upside-down face a foot or so away from the camera lens. His eyes were closed and blood was pulsing into his big, jowly face as he paced the rhythm of her body above him. ‘Slower,’ he kept telling her. ‘Slower.’
The girl was moving almost imperceptibly now, an inch up and down, exquisite control. Her long white fingers tipped with black nail varnish were cupping her breasts, and when the command finally came she reached sideways for a bulging plastic bag, then half twisted backwards as she pressed the bag down
between the man’s legs. The mouth in the camera lens opened wide, then wider still, a strangled cry, pain and pleasure; then the girl’s other hand sank down across her belly and she began to masturbate, very slowly, still straddling a flagging erection.
Winter reached for the DVD control, pressed
PAUSE
.
‘What’s in the bag?’
‘Ice. Never fails.’
‘This is one of your punters?’ Winter was still looking at the screen.
‘I like to think of them as friends.’
‘And he gets off on looking at himself?’
Suttle stirred beside Winter. He couldn’t take his eyes off the image frozen on the plasma screen, the girl on the edge of her climax, the fingers half buried, the emerald-green eyes half closed.
‘That’s the girl in the photos,’ he murmured. ‘Outside in the hall.’
There were two bedrooms in the apartment. The first one, empty, was a mess. In the flickering light from a semicircle of candles on a cabinet beside the bed Winter tried to make sense of the tumble of sheets and bolsters. At the foot of the bed the heel of a black stiletto was wedged in an empty bottle of Krug. Beside it, an abandoned scarlet basque and a packet of Rizlas. Most of the ceiling was occupied by a huge oval mirror with a gilt surround, and shadows danced across the walls as the draught from the hall stirred the bedside candles. An hour or so earlier, thought Winter, Singer would have been spreadeagled on this enormous rumpled playground, stirred to his umpteenth orgasm by one of Richardson’s girlies.
Through the open door to the en suite bathroom Winter could hear the splash of falling water. He
stepped into the steam, glimpsing a small naked body squatting on the loo, legs spread, inspecting a mark on her inside thigh. Winter hooked a towel from the nearby rail, threw it across.
‘Company, love,’ he said briefly. ‘Get yourself decent.’
Back in the hall he headed for the bedroom with the music. This time there were no candles. A middle-aged man was lying on his back on a nest of pillows, his eyes closed, his body tented by the top sheet. The headboard behind him was a mosaic of tiny mirrors, and Winter watched as another body under the sheet obeyed his muttered instructions. He recognised the face from the plasma screen in the lounge at once, the grey indoor complexion, the heavy jowls, the mouth that so easily shaped itself into a snarl. The man on the bed had his right arm flung out, the fingers riding the volume control on the CD machine, and the music swelled and died in time with the nodding head beneath the sheet.
Winter let the scene develop for a second or two, then switched on the overhead chandelier. The blaze of light emptied the room of intimacy but it was a while before the eyes on the pillow opened. The man grunted, got up on one elbow, exposing the sagging pale flesh of his chest.
‘Who the hell are you?’ It was the voice of someone used to command and respect, a boardroom voice, the kind of voice that spelled trouble. Late forties at least, thought Winter. Maybe older.
‘DC Winter. Portsmouth Crime Squad. I must ask you to get dressed, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have reason to suspect you may be using Class A narcotics.’
‘Nonsense. This is private property. You have absolutely no right —’
He broke off as the figure beneath the sheet emerged. She had an aerosol can in one hand and a small glass phial in the other. As she made herself comfortable in a pose both detectives recognised from the DVD, Winter became aware of her body splintered in the jigsaw of mirrors at the head of the bed. She had big breasts for such an angular frame, and her legs seemed even longer in real life. When Winter repeated his invitation to get dressed, she laughed softly, then ringed her nipples with cream from the aerosol before slipping her hands behind the head beneath her and offering him a taste. He lapped at her, first one breast then the other, before wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and settling back on the pillow.
‘Low-fat Chantilly.’ He looked up at Winter, then yawned. ‘You can get it from Waitrose.’
‘Did you hear what I said, sir?’
‘Of course I did. Now fuck off. Both of you. Maddox?’ He smiled up at her with his pale, dead, hooded eyes. ‘I think our new friends are going. Manners are everything. We should say goodbye.’
The girl tipped her head back, the fall of black hair halfway down her spine. Then she muttered something Winter didn’t catch before slipping off the bed. Dropping the aerosol and the glass phial on the carpet, she disappeared into the en suite bathroom without a backward glance.
Suttle, for one, was impressed. Back in the hall, with the bedroom door closed, he drifted across to one of the photos while they waited for the search team. Winter was on the mobile to Cathy Lamb, as gleeful as ever. The intelligence had proved spot on. These guys were doing serious gear. Plus he’d busted the classiest
fuck-palace Pompey was ever likely to see.
Plover
, in short, was on a roll and the best news of all was Mr Scumbag Singer’s name in the frame. The conversation over, he sauntered back across the hall. Suttle saw him coming, the familiar portly image reflected in the glass.