Gone Tomorrow (34 page)

‘But she never said what it was the bloke did?’

‘No. She said she didn’t know – Susie never told her.’

‘And
no
idea who the bloke was?’

Swilley shook her head. ‘They hauled in quite a few of the customers but cleared them all. Well, they had a DNA sample from the semen so they could be fairly sure about it, and most of them were well known to the girls and just ordinary punters. Susie ran an expensive house. They were respectable (ha-ha) businessmen, most of them.’

‘I bet that enquiry ruined a few lives,’ Slider commented. ‘Did the locals suspect anyone, even if he wasn’t charged?’

‘Nope. Not a clue. I rang Dave Tipper and he asked one of the officers who was on the case. They’ve never come near to looking at anyone. Of course, they ran the DNA but there was no match on the database. They’re now thinking that the killer must have been either a foreign businessman or someone from outside London who visited occasionally and went to Susie for his jollies, went too far and had to dump the body. She was dressed when she was found in the water, so they reckoned he could have got her into a car by “walking” her with her arm over his shoulder and his round her waist, so that if anyone saw they’d think she was just drunk. But apparently no-one did see.’

‘Yes, it’s amazing how people don’t see things,’ Slider said. But of course a lot of the time they did see things, and simply wouldn’t say. And there was, he knew, a stratum of thought that whatever happened to prostitutes was their own fault.

‘So what do you think, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘I mean, all this acupuncture business, and Everet’s boss being called the Needle – do you think there’s something in it?’

‘It’s certainly very suggestive,’ Slider said. ‘Whoever this boss is, his people are afraid of him, afraid enough not to grass him, and apparently Susie Mabbot was too afraid of him to refuse sex or to tell anyone his name.’

‘But she’s dead and it doesn’t really get us any further forward, does it?’ Swilley said gloomily.

‘Oh, it does,’ Slider said. ‘For a start we’ve got a DNA profile now, so if ever we do arrest someone we’ve got something to check against.’

‘It’s a big if,’ Swilley concluded. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Get a picture of Susie Mabbot and take it over to Neville Coulsden, see if he can identify her as the Susan who came to help his daughter move her things. Take one of her in life, if you can. I’d rather not have that poor man faced with a mortuary mugshot.’

‘Sure, boss. And if she is the same?’

‘One step at a time,’ Slider said. ‘There’s every chance she isn’t – or he won’t be able to say one way or the other.’

‘But
if she
is—?’ Swilley insisted.

‘Then we know that she knew Everet, who worked for a man called the Needle and might well have introduced her to him.’

‘Or vice versa.’

‘Whatever. It comes out the same. And as she was killed with those particular marks on her, it is very suggestive that her killer and the Needle are one and the same.’

‘But we still don’t know who the Needle is,’ she pointed out with fatal logic.

‘There is just that small thing,’ Slider agreed. ‘But link by link we’re forging a chain.’ And eventually, he thought, it might be long enough to trip somebody up.

When Swilley had departed – with a ‘publicity’ picture of the ex-madam – on her way to Harlesden, Slider took the papers on Susie Mabbot into his own room and went through them again, settling the facts into his head. When he got to the statements of the other girls in the house he slowed, then paused. Then he rummaged amongst the photographs, pulled one out, studied it, and smiled.

‘Sassy Palmer, as I live and breathe,’ he said. Toms were notorious for using false names, of course, but at the end of every string of aliases, like the crock of gold at the end of a rainbow, was a set of fingerprints and a birth certificate. The employee of Susie Mabbot who described herself as Suzette Las Palma had been pinned down by the patience of the Notting Hill squad as Suzanne “Sassy” Palmer, and Slider knew Sassy. What was more, he knew where to find her. That level of the underworld rarely moved far from its origins, and though Notting Hill came under a different borough, its station and his own were a bare mile apart.

He looked at his watch. This time on Sunday morning she ought to be in bed and asleep after her Saturday night exertions. Just the right time to catch her with her guard down and ask her a few questions.

‘Trevor Bates,’ said Speedy Rice. ‘That was a queer thing, now, the way Crafty Collins took up with him. You wouldn’t have thought they had a thing in common. I mean, Crafty, he had enough upstairs. He wasn’t stupid by many a long mile. But this Bates bloke, he was college educated and everything. Smart
as a whip. Well, he was an engineer – and I don’t mean he was a greaser,’ he added sternly, as if Hollis had expressed doubts.

‘Electronics engineer, wasn’t he?’ Hollis said, to show he was on the ball.

‘That’s right. Motherboards and solder, that’s as dirty as he got
his
hands.’

‘How did they meet?’ Hollis asked.

‘Well, as I understand it, this Bates wandered into Crafty’s tattoo parlour because somebody had told him that was where to go for a spot of the doings, know what I mean? He worked in one of them tower buildings on the island, you see. Anyway, him and Collins struck up a what-d’ye-call—?’

‘A rapport?’ Hollis offered.

‘That’s the thing. Like love at first sight, kinda thing, only this was more of an un’oly alliance. They were thick as thieves. They made quite a team, too. Collins had the brawn – and the violence – and Bates had the brain. He was a skinny runt of a feller, was Bates, until Crafty took him in hand. Like the bloke that gets sand kicked in his face in the advert. Sickly white, too, and with that red hair – not ginger, but more like Rita Hayworth, know what I mean?’

‘Auburn,’ said Mrs Rice, without looking up from the jumbo
EastEnders
crossword. Seven letters with two f’s in the middle? What the blazes was that?

‘If that’s what it is,’ Mr Rice conceded. Anyway, Collins showed him body-building techniques, acted like his personal trainer, not that they’d invented them in those days. Bates wasn’t half badly built by the time Crafty’d finished with him. No Mr Atlas, but he looked the goods.’

‘And what did Collins get out of the relationship?’

‘Well, now,’ Mr Rice said thoughtfully, ‘as to that, I can tell you what I think, but it’s only my opinion. I remember that little bird, you see. I think Crafty was fascinated by Bates. I think he sort of – loved him, in a way.’

‘Now, Stan!’

‘I don’t mean in a queer way, not that,’ Mr Rice amended hastily. ‘But he protected him, looked after him just like he did that little bird. ’Course, he was older than him, Collins was, older than Bates. Maybe it was like an older brother thing, I dunno. Anyway, he kept him from being beaten up or killed,
which he quite likely might have been, moving in the sort of circles they moved in. Anyone even looked cross-eyed at him, Crafty’d sort ’em out so’s their own mothers’d have to look twice at ’em. On the other side, I reckon it was thanks to Bates that Collins stopped getting followed about by the police.’

‘How’s that?’ Hollis asked.

‘Well, Bates tamed him, kind of – taught him to keep his temper, or at least to use his violence a bit more cleverly. Bates was an organiser, and he thought things through the way old Crafty never had. Bash first, think later, that was Crafty. And Bates was clever – inventive, always thinking up new things. Collins was just a doer, know what I mean? Together they could get up to four times as much mischief – and they did, from what I heard. Well, Bates was a bit of a scholar and he got on well with the Chinese – into all the philosophy and Chinese medicine and them eastern therapies and everything. He kind of understood ’em, and they trusted him, so he could do business with ’em without ’em giving him away. That’s how Collins made himself a nice fortune without getting caught by the authorities. If you want a solid reason for him liking Bates, that’s what he owed him, keeping him out of legal trouble like
he
kept
him
out of physical trouble. But that wasn’t what it really was, not to my mind. Bates was that little bird to him. He was his soft spot.’

Mr Rice shook his head slowly, gazing in wonder down the telescope of memory.

‘I’ll tell you an example,’ he went on, ‘of how soft Collins could be with this Bates bloke. Have you ever seen him – Collins, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Hollis.

‘Well, you might have noticed a tattoo round his neck, a dotted line right round the bottom of his neck.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen that.’

‘Well, it was Bates did that to him. I told you he went to Crafty’s shop first of all for some of the other things he sold, but the story I heard was he’d never been in a tattoo parlour before and he was fascinated by the needles and the dyes and the stencils and all that. That’s how it all started. He might have gone away with his spot of hash and that would’ve been that. But he hung around to watch Collins working the needle, and kept coming back to watch some more, and they got friendly.’

‘Did Bates get a tattoo himself?’

‘Oh, no. Squeamish about it, as far as his own white skin went. But couldn’t get enough of seeing it done to other people. Well, that’s what I heard. Anyway, I was telling you – one day, this is what I heard, he asked Collins, could he have a go using the machine. And Collins let him do one on him. That’s how far he’d let this bloke go, because it must’ve been a big risk, especially round his neck like that.’

‘Why that particular tattoo?’

‘I heard it was a kind of joke, that it was meant to be like Boris Karloff – you know, the stitches holding his head on?’

‘Frankenstein’s monster?’

‘That’s the one! Bates was all brain and Collins was all brawn, like I said, and, what with him only having one eye – well, Bates used to call him that, Frankenstein’s monster. Kind of affectionate, I suppose,’ he added, but doubtfully.

Hollis thought that from what he had heard so far, it was evidence of Bates’s desire to live dangerously. ‘So when Collins went back to England, did Bates go too?’ he asked.

‘’Course he did! You couldn’t have one without the other. Gammon without spinach that’d be.’

Perhaps, then, Hollis thought, that was where the stash went. Perhaps the faithful Collins used it to set Mr Bates up in business. A capital sum to buy the first old houses to be done up? It was possible – though why would Collins give it all away? Wasn’t that taking friendship too far? Most criminals displayed all the loyalty of a tart in a barracks. On the other hand, if they had made the money together, as a partnership, perhaps it was only nominally Collins’s, because he had the legitimate business to pass it through: he was the laundry for their joint efforts. And perhaps they shared the profits. There was nothing in Collins’s lifestyle to suggest he had money, but maybe that’s how he liked to live. It was not impossible that there was a big deposit somewhere they hadn’t discovered yet.

Speedy Rice seemed to have come to an end of his recollections. Hollis looked over his notes, thanked him, and asked if he’d be willing to have a statement taken, if anything should come of it.

‘’Course I will,’ he said. ‘Got to do our duty, haven’t we?’

‘I wish everyone thought like that,’ Hollis said. He got up to
go, thanking Mrs Rice for the coffee and biscuits, at which she beamed with pleasure and said he was welcome, it was nice to have company now and then, and come again.

The company removed itself carefully, stepping over furniture and squeezing through the doorway. Hollis was a thin man and no more than average height, but this place made him feel like the jolly green giant.

Mr Rice had leapt nimbly to his feet and said, ‘I’ll show him out, Mother, don’t you move.’ When they got out into the roaring, shuddering street – Hollis could swear the traffic bellow was bouncing off the pavement in lumps – it became clear this courtesy had an ulterior motive.

‘I didn’t like to say anything in front of the wife,’ he told Hollis in a confiding shout, ‘but there’s some other stuff I could tell you about Collins and Bates.’

‘Please do,’ Hollis shouted back.

‘Well,’ said Mr Rice, ‘when I said it was like a kind of love, Mother thought I was suggesting they were queer. But it wasn’t that. They both had women – lots of ’em. They used to go hunting ’em together. Chinese women, mostly, o’ course. There wasn’t many of the other sort, and you could get into trouble chasing them.’

‘Prostitutes?’ Hollis asked.

‘I suppose so. There
were
lots of prostitutes, B-girls and dancers, and then all those massage parlours and places that were sort of on the brink.’
He made a rocking movement with his hand. ‘Could go either way, get me? But there were plenty of women available. I dare say some of them were just poor and needed the money. And maybe some were too scared to say no. They had some funny habits, those two.’

‘Such as?’

Mr Rice looked up at him with a sort of stern reluctance. ‘It’s only hearsay. But there was a lot of talk about Collins and Bates – Collins having been one of ours, you know. The talk was that they liked to hurt women. I’d hesitate to believe that of anybody if I could help it, but I’ve knocked around the world a bit, and I know what men can be. Even some of the decent lads in our unit, well, they thought Chinese women didn’t count the same as white ones.’

‘Yes,’ said Hollis. ‘I’ve known men like that.’

Speedy nodded, man of the world to man of the world. ‘And if you start thinking like that, it’s not a big step to thinking no women count.’

‘Did both of them get their pleasure that way?’ Hollis asked.

‘The way I heard it, it was Bates liked to do the hurting, and Collins liked to watch, but he must have been part of it, mustn’t he? I dare say he held ’em down or something. Nasty, I call it. People like that – well, I don’t know what they deserve.’
He paused and then added reflectively, ‘So Crafty Collins is dead, is he? There’s a lot of ’em gawn, from back then. I go to the reunions, and every time there’s another one gawn. The old man with the scythe, you know. And what about afterwards?
Collins’ll be finding out about that. If there is an afterlife, your sins’ll all be looked at pretty bloody close, I reckon. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’