Verismo Bliss - Chapter 12

12.

The postcard was from Barcelona and had Gaudi’s gaudy cathedral on it; the woman posing in front of it had curves that were about as subtle as the cathedral’s spires. Flipping it over Harry clocked that it was postmarked a week ago. It declared that the writer was sorry she couldn’t make the funeral, that she hoped all was well with Ramona and that, if they met up again, that they could put their differences behind them, for her father’s sake. It was signed, with an extravagant flourish, Gloria Isles. Two kisses. No love.
‘So?’
Ramona Noche tapped a long fingernail against a long stemmed wine glass full of a dark red Bordeaux. She was dressed casually in dark jeans and a white top that was transparent enough to show her dark skin and the lacy white bra she was wearing through it.
Harry pushed the card toward her. ‘So?’
Ramona pouted. ‘I thought you would be interested. Aren’t you interested in Gloria’s whereabouts?’
Under the table he felt her foot rubbing against the inside of his leg. They were sitting in a corner booth at Peking Joe’s, orders placed, the aroma of food quickening their senses. Much like the bare foot was doing to his body below the stomach.
Harry leaned forward. ‘I’m very interested in Gloria’s whereabouts. But I’m not the only one.’
‘Oh?’
‘Maybe you should let Clive Strange see this postcard,’ he said, pushing the card closer to her.
Ramona pushed the card back to him, her foot falling away from his leg, and snorted in derision. ‘Don’t play games, Harry.’
‘I thought you liked games. The other night, on the train, was that all part of a game?’
‘Is that what you think?’ She slumped back in her chair, anger flashing in her eyes. ‘What, you think I let everybody who takes me home put their hand up my skirt? Or are you just pissed that’s all you got to put up my skirt?’
Harry took a slow drink from his glass. He didn’t drink much wine but she’d wanted to share a bottle, and he’d been in a sharing mood when they first sat down. He knew what he said next could give her the excuse to walk out on him and he didn’t want that. ‘Strange gave me details of the will - and before you say anything I wasn’t checking up on you; it’s just routine detective work.’
‘Am I routine, detective?’
‘I doubt anybody would ever describe you as routine, Ramona.’
Ramona’s shoulders relaxed a little and the tiniest amount of warmth, like a shaft of light poking through the darkest storm clouds, returned to her eyes. ‘Strange knows that will is bullshit. Did he tell you that?’
‘He told me your father was planning to marry Gloria Isles.’
She lurched forward and her wine glass went tumbling from the table. It didn’t shatter but wine spread across the floor like oil from a stricken tanker. Two waiters were on the scene in seconds – like para-waiters receiving an emergency call they cleaned the spill away with the minimum of fuss and a fresh glass was presented to Ramona and topped up with the claret in just over a minute. Harry considered contacting the Guinness Book of Records, but when he saw the tears in her eyes he decided it wasn’t a time for flippancy.
‘Harry,’ she said, reaching across the table, and tapping her fingers against his hand in a gesture that wasn’t intimate; it seemed more an attempt to keep his attention on what she was saying. ‘Gloria was some crazed fantasist. She told everybody who cared to listen that my father was madly in love with her and was going to propose. I think…I think my father went along with it for a while because he was flattered by the attention. Whatever else I might think about her, she was attractive, and young; I’m afraid my father couldn’t resist a pretty, young thing. And yes, I did know he used the self-employed. I didn’t like it. We rowed about it on occasions. I know that I should be more enlightened about it, like everybody else seems to be, but…when it was my own father, and it had just been us, since my mum died. Nothing had come between us when I was a child. Hell, I’m not naïve enough to not realise now that he was probably fucking those skin sellers even when I was a kid – I remember certain things, which made no sense then, the sound of the door being opened and closed in the middle of the night, the smell of perfume in my father’s room – but when I needed him he was always there. Gloria changed that. Suddenly she was around taking up his time, and not just at night. I felt jealous. And don’t get any stupid oedipal crap in your head, Harry: that stuff relates to boys fucking their mums, not girls their dads. Sure, I love him, but I didn’t like seeing him make a fool of himself. She made him change his will; maybe she had something over him; maybe she forced him. I will contest it.’
She took a long drink from her glass; the movement of her throat as she swallowed attracted him like a mouse beguiled by a boa constrictor.
‘I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell the police. The day dad was killed, we’d had a massive row. I’d come round the shop that afternoon. He’d put the closed sign up. I thought he must be stock taking. I let myself in. Went upstairs.’
She paused and looked away from Harry, staring into the distance, at a memory she wanted to forget but couldn’t scrub from her mind.
‘Are your parents still alive, Harry?’
‘No.’
‘How would you have felt if you’d found your father in bed with a girl who could have been his granddaughter on top of him?’
The food arrived. Neither of them picked up their chopsticks. The aroma which had filled their senses with anticipatory delight, now made them feel a little nauseous.
She shrugged. ‘I probably over reacted. I did over react. Anyway, big row. You know the last thing I said to my father? I told him to fuck off. That’s the last memory of me he took with him to the grave.’
She stabbed a prawn with a chopstick and it split in two, the pink insides looking like hardened candy floss.
‘Do you know who the girl was?’
‘We didn’t exchange numbers. Sorry. Look, let’s skip, I can’t face eating now. Take me out of here.’
Outside, on the streets of Chinatown the air rustled with simmering heat. Their skin began to moisten as soon as they left the air conditioning of Peking Joe’s. It was storm weather. People moved like molten lead, shimmering in the heat haze, their bodies liquid and languid. She took his hand and dragged him down the alley by the side of the restaurant which was used by the waiters to dump left over food and to smoke their cigarettes like new born babes on the nipple. There was just a cat there now though, rummaging for a treat among Peking Joe detritus.
‘Make me come,’ she whispered into his ear, her breath so hot it caused the hair on his neck to feel in danger of igniting like an Outback bushfire. ‘Make me forget.’
He wanted to say no. He wanted to make her feel the way she had made him feel when she left him alone on the Tube. He wanted her. He wanted to fuck her so bad that the feeling took over his whole being and, at that precise moment, was the only meaning to his life.
He kissed her on the mouth but she turned aside. ‘Touch me,’ she whispered. She tugged at the button and fly of her jeans and pushed his hand inside them. He could feel her wetness already.
As his fingers stroked her his lips searched for hers, but again she turned away, offering him her neck, which was soft with hair like down and wet with humid sweat. ‘I can’t do two things at once.’ Her voice was breathy and moist on his ear. Her hands began to move round his waist. Oh he needed her to touch him so bad. He was hard already, his erection getting snagged in his Calvin Klein’s. But then he realised her fingers weren’t reaching for him but something in her slim, low slung handbag. For a moment it flashed in his mind that she was reaching for a gun, or a knife. He tried to position himself so he could see what she was after. A tablet. She was taking a tablet from her bag. It was the colour of the Sahara.
‘No,’ he said, grabbing her hand as she went to pop it in her mouth.
‘What? You know what this is?’
‘Sure, it’s Bliss,’ Harry said, suddenly embarrassed at his actions.
‘Yeah, then you know what it does. Now, let me swallow it, and you…’
She pushed his head down and put one leg over his shoulder. He tugged her jeans down a little and kissed her between her legs.
Chinatown sparkled in the heat like strip lighting reflecting off a glistening prawn. A dozen different tongues mixed in the air. A dozen different ways to curse London and all her whores.

Harry walked up Wardour Street and entered Soho. He needed to walk off his erection, and Soho was as good a place as any since most of the sex shops had now been turned into fetish emporiums. Sex was common place and demystified so Soho had branched out to cater for extreme fetishes. Harry liked his sex pretty straight so the leather, whips, bondage, baby gear etc left him feeling just a little sad and was like ice cubes on his genitals. There was nothing like a sex shop to make sex unattractive.
She had dropped the Bliss and he had made her come, numerously and loudly, with his mouth; so much so that they were beginning to attract attention even in Chinatown where the noise of pleasure or pain was usually ignored. Walk on by. When his tongue was beginning to hurt and she was shuddering with excess spasms she pulled him away and held onto him for a few moments, her body shaking like earthquake aftershocks against him. Then she’d smiled, kissed him on the cheek and asked him to find her a taxi. She didn’t ask him to share it with her. He stood holding up his hand and erection in farewell.
He kicked out at a Pepsi can. Idiot. Maybe he should leave this town and learn to live as an ascetic on some bleak Welsh hillside. He cut through a small alley which flashed with rainbow coloured light bulbs, timed to scare an epileptic. A man was hawking lighters and pens that had male and female models in bikinis or trunks that disappeared when the lighter was struck or the pen turned upside down. Two schoolgirls bought a pen each and ran off giggling. And Harry knew he wouldn’t survive in the wilderness; hell, where would he get a stripper pen from in the middle of nowhere. There were some things only the city could provide.
He still couldn’t figure Ramona. He knew she was still hiding something, even though she had opened up a little and offered him something she claimed not to have told the police. But somehow she had brushed him off too easy and then distracted him with her sex – even though it was her who had taken all the pleasure. Harry wanted to kick something again. Arsehole. That’s what he was. And what if he found out Ramona had killed Gloria, or maybe even her father, would he turn her in? Yeah, he was pretty sure he would. He might even enjoy it.
He was on Berwick Street now, gazing in at the latest fashions on display in the window of Soho Style. For men the suit was back in style, based on a 1920’s look with a modern twist. Or so the sign said. To Harry it was just a classic, stylish suit. For women the fashion was maternity wear. If you were pregnant that was fine. If you weren’t pregnant that was fine too. In the Eighties it was padded shoulders - now it was the padded belly look that was fashionable.
Harry saw a woman pushing a pram down the street. Men didn’t pay her much heed, but most of the women peeped in at the sleeping baby, its hands red and twitching as the child dreamt. A pregnant woman, or a woman with a baby, had become enough of an uncommon thing to provoke attention. Yet all they had done was to be lucky enough – or unlucky enough – to be with a man who was fertile. Harry was the unusual one – the 1 in a 100 – that should provoke interest. Yet nobody who passed him knew. He didn’t look manlier than the infertile man. He didn’t ooze fertility. Would Ramona treat him differently if she knew? Would she actually let him fuck her?
He walked up Berwick Street, he liked it around this area, it was full of interesting little shops and cool cafes where the bohemia still hung out. Of course, it attracted the pretentious, but places like this always did. He decided he needed to do something to assuage his unfulfilled desire. One of his secret pleasures was browsing through vinyl in real record shops. And Berwick Street had two or three classic shops. His favourite was Sister Ray – presumably named after the Velvet Underground song about searching for a mainline and sucking on a ding-dong. Sister Ray wasn’t a large store but it crammed what space it had with CD’s and vinyl. Harry spent a good twenty minutes enjoyably flicking though the LP’s and pulling particular ones out, spinning them over, and reading the track listing. There was a whole art to the way you pulled them out, one hand keeping your place in the racks, spun it, read it, decided on purchase or not. Nothing grabbed his attention until he came across an original copy of the Gun Club’s Fire of Love.
His heart beat a little faster. His older brother had owned the record and Harry remembered hearing it for the first time, the music dripping through the thin bedroom wall like musical honey. It shook him. He had never heard anything like it before. If he had been old enough to understand he would have known that the honey the music dripped was sex: roots rock style sex. Deep South sex. Longing and loneliness. It was the first time music had sent tingles through his body and actually scared him. He didn’t know music could inspire and scare.
When he was a little older he had bought his own copy but that had been sold, along with the majority of his first record collection, when times were hard and Mary declared a music collection was a luxury. He owned it digitally now, of course, but that wasn’t the same as having the actual vinyl artefact. He knew what most people who really loved music knew, that digital music was cold and robotic – true music didn’t come in ones and zeros, it came in grooves and spoke between the hisses and cracks.
The LP cover, with its three voodoo looking black men on it, the sort of men who would cut your heart out to make zombie food, stared at him and made him feel a lurching nostalgia, like he stood on the deck of the Titanic as it hit ice. Flipping it over he read the titles of the songs: from Sex Beat, She’s Like Heroin To Me, Black Train…As debut albums went, Harry put this up there with The Doors eponymous LP.
He slipped out the inner sleeve. He saw the names he knew so well: Jeffrey Lee Pierce; Ward Dotson; Rob Ritter; Terry Graham. The guiding light of the Gun Club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, had died the clichéd rock ‘n’ roll way back in ’96, oddly enough on Harry’s birthday, but he had no idea what had become of the others.
Harry knew he was going to buy it the moment he saw it, but if there had been any doubt it would have evaporated the moment he turned the inner sleeve over. He saw two names scrawled in blue ink on the sleeve. One name would have made him stop with amazement, two made him want to go out and buy Jung’s Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle.
The first name was Harry. He had written it. The writing looked so much more childish and precise than his scrawl now. He remembered writing it. Claiming ownership of this great record. The second name, written under his, was Nav.

He sat by the window of his apartment, watching the sun setting in a firestorm of orange and red, turning the grass in the park a party food of colours. In the dusty areas of the park the teenagers from hell drank their cider and bragged about sexual conquests and violent conflicts. On the record player the swamp blues of The Gun Club poured forth, caressing Harry’s body with melancholy, excitement and nostalgia.
He had considered dropping a couple of Zehighs – they were as ubiquitous in most people’s medicine cabinets as paracetamol – but he had recalled what Wat Tyler had said about them being addictive and had poured out a JD instead. Clearly the addictive properties of alcohol would be ignored for the evening.
Could it really be the same Nav, Navaho, neo-punk charmer, and beautiful free spirit? Had she somehow, somewhere, purchased the same LP that he himself had sold, only to re-buy it years later? It wasn’t like London was a small town. The chances that his own copy had found its way back to him were beyond his calculation, that Nav had owned it too, made it even more so.
But what did it matter? What was Harry supposed to take from it? Was there a lesson to learn? He took a sip of the neat JD. If there was he had no idea what the lesson was. Other than it was a fucking small world.
He looked out over Slade Gardens and across the roof tops, tenements and high risers of Stockwell. It had been his home for six years. But it didn’t feel like home. He didn’t feel at home anywhere, if he was honest, save maybe in the grooves of black vinyl and the golden amnesia of Jack Daniel’s. Looking at the kids in the park (though if they heard him calling them kids he would probably be attacked by them) he thought about Gwendolyn Falsham and Navaho. Two young girls, out there somewhere in the city. People had so much freedom now, to express themselves in whatever way they wanted, and yet two girls with all the freedom in the world, ended up alone. Navaho was a great young woman. Everybody on the street seemed to know her and like her. But she didn’t belong to any of them. She had no ties as far as he could see and certainly he had no idea how to contact her. She was off the grid. What if she needed help? Where did she turn to? Did she have someone she could turn to, or did they turn her away if she had lost her exuberance for life?
And what of Gwendolyn? A family and money. University to look forward to. Friends. One friend who had died whilst making sure she was ok. What use was freedom if it only made you run into loneliness?
A thought crossed Harry’s mind. Why hadn’t he thought about it before? He flicked on his smart and saw he had a message. It was from GB Lottery. He’d won £100 on the compulsory. He was informed that there was a 30% tax on the prize, a 10% charity levee and a £10 transaction charge. Great. He deleted the message and browsed to Vurtlife. He found Barry Penny’s profile. It was still protected. He set Outcrypt to work on it and leaned back to listen to the second side of The Fire of Love.
Harry let the alcohol and the music work on his senses; he wanted to time travel himself back to how he felt when he first heard the music. But you can’t synthesise passion, you can only remember it in an abstract way. You go from seeing everything in black and white to feeling everything in grey, grey, grey. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe. When did he last feel passionate about anything? Solving cases made him feel good, and if he helped people along the way it made him feel his life wasn’t completely useless. But feeling good was a long way from passion. Earlier that evening he had made a woman come and he had felt hardly anything, just the nagging doubt that it was a small golden pill that had done most of the work. Was he passionate about Ramona Noche? He was pretty sure he wasn’t. He was pretty sure all he felt was an immense desire for her. She had that sort of body. A body that would drive men to murder and women to suicide. But that sort of passion was easily spent. Harry knew he hadn’t felt anything really deep for a woman since his wife had found her soul mate in Ali’s All Night Off Licence. It wasn’t so much the cleaning up of the vomit and the hospital appointments, but more the cursing and the hateful things she said during her attempts to dry out. He had to give her ten out of ten for quality of abuse. And here he was drowning his sorrows and his desires.
Mary had always said she wanted to be buried; for some reason she had a morbid fear of fire. But burials had been banned over ten years ago – there just wasn’t the space anymore. You were burned up and scattered. No memorial stone, just a book of remembrance at the crematorium, the pages turned each day by some mysterious warden to display the anniversary of the dead.
Harry had kept Mary’s ashes in a drained bottle of Stolichnaya, her favourite brand of vodka, for a week. The house was quiet without the curses and the retching noises; the bottle served as a reminder of yesterday’s parties. Then he poured her away, into the dark and cold Thames, and threw the empty bottle after her.
And now he could drink without guilt.
Had he stopped himself feeling anything real for another woman since, or was that all dead within him? He wasn’t sure. He’d only ever know if he came across somebody he felt more than lust for. He had a feeling it wasn’t going to happen. He was 42 with a chancy career, only a little capital in the bank, a rented apartment and no car. He wasn’t exactly this year’s eligible bachelor. He looked into the half empty shot glass and saw a lonely retirement ahead, penny pinching what little money he had. There were worse futures. Besides, he might get lucky and get killed on a job before that happened.
Goodbye Johnny, the final track on the second side, faded to the end and the needle clicked in and out of the closed groove.
From his smart came the sound of a creaky door opening: Outcrypt had done its work.
Harry took Fire of Love from the turntable and then picked out Mazzy Star’s She Hangs Brightly on ECD and slipped it into the player. If he was going to be a melancholic then let it be to the beautifully melancholic voice of Hope Sandoval. As Halah started he picked up his smart.
Outcrypt had got him into Barry Penny’s Vurtlife page. Barry Penny may have had his head parted from his body, but you never really die on the internet, just slowly get visited less and less like a sick aunt in a seaside nursing home. His page had become a shrine, with messages all saying in poetry, long rambling memories or just one-liners, that Barry Penny was one of the greatest blokes ever to walk the earth and who could have done such a thing to such a beautiful soul.
Harry wondered if the administrators quietly closed down the sites of those who had died after a few years, or if there had been no activity for so many months, like council workers taking away wilted accident flowers from the side of the road.
Barry Penny was listed as having 483 friends. That was a lot of friends in the physical world, but average for netlife. Harry figured there were about a hundred farewell messages, so where were the other three hundred and eighty three friends when you needed them?
He scrolled through the messages, most making his senses feel dull, but the odd one from a sister or ex-girlfriend managed to make Barry Penny more real, looking for one from Gwendolyn Falsham. But there was nothing. Zip. Either Gwendolyn didn’t care, or she cared too much.
Harry browsed through Barry’s pictures and dragged up the ones that had Gwendolyn tagged. The pair of them looked close, but something differed in the way they looked at each other: Barry’s eyes shone with what used to be called love, before love became untrendy; Gwendolyn’s eyes shone with the sort of affection you turned on a sibling. Harry could imagine the scene that had been played a million times before if Barry had ever declared his love for Gwen (Harry wondered if he had), and the words she would have said: ‘But I love you like a brother.’
Harry clicked on Barry’s personal messages. There was one unread message in his inbox, dated the day after his death. It was from Gwendolyn Falsham: I can’t believe you’ve gone. How can I face this world totally alone? Now there’s no one to confide my secrets to. If I hadn’t come here this would never have happened to you. I’m so sorry. Will always hold you dear in my heart, my one true brother.
Even in death, Harry thought, she couldn’t say she loved him. He’d rest easy knowing he was her ‘one true brother’. But what would Oliver – the mere half-brother – think of that?
Harry flicked down the messages. There was one from Gwendolyn on the 23rd July, the day before she disappeared: Call me. Something’s happened. Harry could almost feel the eagerness with which Barry had read that message and called her. Whatever had happened it had forced her to run away. And it had ultimately got Barry Penny murdered.
His smart ding-donged at him and an icon of a door flashed at the top of the screen. Somebody was buzzing to enter the apartment. He clicked on the icon and a video screen popped up showing Karl Carr’s mug staring up at him. The smart gave him two options: admit or ignore. How he wanted to ignore Carr, but it was unusual for him to drop in unexpectedly, so he pressed admit.
Harry pocketed the smart and turned off Mazzy Star. He didn’t want to share Hope Sandoval with that dirty bastard. If Carr saw a picture of her he’d track her down and fuck her, even if she was probably in her fifties now.
‘Harry, you look like shit, as usual,’ Carr said, bustling his way into the room. He threw some magazines off Harry’s couch and threw himself down, his feet, shrouded in a pair of vintage Timerberland’s, hoisted up on to the coffee table.
‘Karl, always a pleasure,’ Harry said. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Whatever you’re having.’
Harry filled up his glass and showed the square Jack Daniel’s bottle to Carr, who grimaced and asked for a can of whatever beer Harry might have. He was driving; better keep off the hard stuff.
‘Hope you’ve come to tell me I’m back on the Met’s payroll,’ Harry said, handing Carr a can of Hobgoblin.
Carr flipped open the can, smoothed down his goatee as though in anticipation, took a long swig, made that annoying satisfied noise people make when drinking booze or tea, and said, ‘Sorry, me old mate, no go. Especially after all that shit that went down at that fucking march. Shit, I’m no fan of immigrants, don’t get me wrong, with the English criminal I know where I am, but these foreigners have different criminal ways, makes my job harder, but they ain’t the problem, not really. Anyway, the politics has got worse. The Sun are saying the marchers were provoked into violence by the police and that their anger was caused by being second class citizens.’
‘Try telling all that to the poor bastards who got the shit kicked out of them.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Not to mention the guy who got killed.’
‘I didn’t hear about that?’
‘The powers are keeping it hush-hush, they didn’t want full blown race riots kicking off. The guy was English so it would fuel the fires. Besides it looks now as though it might be another one to chalk up to the Ripper.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, couldn’t have elucidated it better. I’ll come to that in a minute. First, here’s a name and number. That guy can get you into the Bump Bangers Club if you’re still interested. What’s that all about?’
‘A case I’m on. Nothing major. Thanks for that. Is this name for real?’ Harry asked looking at the slip of paper. ‘Cornelius Apricot?’
Carr smiled. ‘We call him Corny; yeah, it’s his real name. Lusting after pregnant women ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. You seen the latest fashions? They all want to look pregnant!’
‘You ever been to a meeting of the Bump Bangers?’
Carr shook his head sadly. ‘Unfortunately I am going against fashion to say this, but pregnant women do nothing for me. Give me a woman any colour, and most shapes, though not really fat, curves sure, but not pregnant. There is something very unsexual about it.’
‘Melinda wasn’t getting any then, when she was carrying Fred or Georgina?’
‘I had a permanent fucking headache.’
‘How is Fred, by the way?’
‘Good and bad days. Melinda deserves a medal.’
She sure fucking does.
‘How come you never had kids, Harry?’
‘By the time I was ready, Mary had married the bottle.’
Carr stroked his thin beard. ‘Can you, Harry? Have kids, I mean?’
Harry shrugged.
‘Ok, I never asked. You know I had the snip. Hell, that was a performance convincing the doctor I should have it done. They really don’t like doing it now, not with all this infertility crap. I used the kid as an excuse – said I didn’t want to risk bringing another Fred into the world. In the end I had to get 10% self funded.’
He downed the beer and crushed the can.
‘I might need another favour,’ Harry said.
‘Get me another beer and I’ll see what I can do.’
When Harry brought in the beer Carr had picked up a framed picture of Mary. He was looking at it in the same way he looked at all women, appraising if they were fuckable or not. ‘She was a pretty woman.’
Harry handed Carr the beer. ‘You know Ramona Noche, daughter of Luz Noche, the old guy murdered in Goodwins Court?’
Carr smiled. ‘Sure. She is sweet.’
Harry filled up his glass. ‘You interview her?’
‘Sure. Four times. I had to keep calling her back to clarify a few points for me.’ He looked at Harry, his eyes clear, open. ‘You know what I’m saying?’
‘And did you get everything…clarified?’
‘Sure. Sure. Ramona Noche was most…helpful with my enquiries.’
For a moment Harry thought the shot glass was going to shatter in his hand, he was gripping it so tight. He took a sip. Carr was just being his usual leering self; it didn’t mean anything. He could imagine him calling her back into the interview room, charming her with his smile, looking her up and down, asking to see her again. But she wouldn’t have gone. She wouldn’t.
Carr smiled and stepped back to the sofa, almost tripping over the coffee table, as he slumped down. Mind the gap, thought Harry. East Ham. This train terminates at Upminster. A man on the platform: Carr’s build. Don’t be an idiot, Harry thought.
‘You spoken to her?’
Harry nodded. ‘Did she mention Gloria Isles? She worked for Luz.’
‘No love lost there. Apparently she was a gold digger, that’s how Ramona tells it anyway, but everybody else seems to think Luz was in love. We tried tracking her down but she’s vanished. This, as you know, is unusual for anybody other than the homeless and jobless.’
‘Or the dead?’
‘You think she’s dead?’
Harry handed him the postcard. ‘Not if that is to be believed. If she’s abroad it might explain why she vanished off the UK grid.’
‘Ramona gave it you? When did you see her last?’
‘Today.’
Carr read the card through and flipped it over to look at the picture. ‘Gloria’s a looker. I’d like to interview her. What do you make of it?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t like easy answers. A lot of people are looking for Gloria Isles – you know she was named as the largest beneficiary in the will – and suddenly a postcard turns up from a place we can’t check.’
‘Yeah, I heard about the will. People have killed for less money than Gloria is going to get.’
‘Why run without the money?’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t know.’ He tapped the postcard against his fingers. ‘I could get onto the Mossos d'Esquadra – the Catalonia spics – see if they can turn anything up. Leave this with me, Harry. You sure you don’t want to be a cop again?’
‘I’m sure. You want another or you gotta rush. What were you doing in this neck of the woods anyway?’
‘You remember that police woman, Hayley? The pretty cop who got us a tea at the Long Acre crime scene. She lives round here and she’s going for promotion; I was helping her out with some interviewing techniques. Always like to give a hand up to those who need it. Shit, I nearly forgot the main reason I dropped in, besides Corny’s name that is, the other murder.’
It had slipped Harry’s mind too, full as it was of images of Ramona being ‘interviewed’ by Karl Carr. ‘You say your not sure if it’s the Ripper or not? Shit, I hate using that name.’
‘I know what you mean, but it’s what everybody is calling the killer or killers unknown, so…’ Carr pulled out his smart and started tapping through screens. ‘The guy was found in the old Opera House, the Russell Street side, and to start with it just looked like he had had the crap kicked out of him, so we presumed the neo-skin crew. He had numerous boot marks on him, all the same tread, we’re getting them analysed. We had him taken away quickly and quietly. It was when the med guys were looking at him that we discovered all wasn’t as we thought. For a start he had multiple stab wounds as well as bruises and cuts from kicks and punches. But what swung it was this.’
Carr turned the smart round to show Harry. There was a picture on it. A close up of a face. The face was so battered and bruised that Harry doubted even the guy’s mother would recognise him; not that she’d want to. Harry looked closer and suddenly saw, amidst the cuts, bruises and swellings, what Carr was alluding to. There were no eyes. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, shit. Our Ripper guy goes in for the gruesome so we figure this could be him. And before you ask, no, we haven’t found the eyes.’
‘You ID him?’
‘Yeah. Some guy called Steven Pike. He was a transient. He was well known in the area; he sold The Big Issue. You know him?’
Harry looked at the photograph again. Steven Pike. Spike. He’d never known his full name. And now, Steven Pike would never make it back to Newcastle