Verismo Bliss Chapter 2

2.

The man who entered was tall and broad; his muscular body straining against the constraints of his immaculately pressed powder blue suit. He was dark skinned - Harry figured mixed race – Nordic with African and all-in-wrestler thrown in for good measure. Before speaking his eyes glanced around the room like he was pricing up the joint, and when he did speak his voice was pure public school – or non-government schools as they were supposed to be called now (funny how all government ministers sent their kids to non-government schools). He asked if Harry was Harry and Harry said that’s what it said on the door, so come in, take a seat and state your business. But the man remained standing and walked over to the filing cabinet, looking at a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, which hung above it. ‘My name is Adam Cannon. I represent Martin Falsham. Have you heard of him?’
Harry shook his head.
‘I presume you’ve heard of Raf-Med?’
‘Sure, I rely on it to cure my hangovers and make my days a little sunnier.’
‘Mr Falsham will be so pleased to hear that: he’s the senior director.’
Harry pushed a pen across his desk, trying not to look impressed. ‘So what does the senior director of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world want with a shabby detective with a broom cupboard for an office in the rough part of town?’
Cannon walked across the office, which took all of three strides. ‘You were recommended to Mr Falsham by a friend who used to be in the police. He says you can be relied on for confidentiality.’
‘I wouldn’t have lasted this long if I opened my mouth. Can I know the name of this friend?’
‘I don’t know it myself,’ Adam replied, sitting opposite Harry and crossing his legs. ‘Mr Falsham’s daughter has gone missing; he’d like you to find her.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Gwendolyn Falsham is eighteen.’
‘I guess she’s old enough to go missing. Has he filed a missing person with the police?’
‘He doesn’t want the police involved. There is no - how do you say, in your line of work – evidence of foul play?’
‘A family fall out, then?’
‘So I am led to believe, though Mr Falsham has not furnished the details. She has been gone a fortnight and Mr Falsham wants to talk to her. That is all you need to know at this juncture.’
‘Does he think she’s in London?’
‘He has reason to believe so. She has no independent financial means and his main concern is that she will do what any attractive young girl would do to raise cash.’
‘I don’t know if you keep up with current affairs but prostitution was made legal a couple of years back.’
‘I am aware of that, and I believe they use the euphemism self-employment now. But a euphemism is just a word to make something unwholesome more palatable to the mouth. Not wishing to be indiscreet in these infertile times, but do you have children, Mr Reed?’
Harry shook his head.
‘Then perhaps you don’t fully appreciate how a father might feel about his daughter entering self-employment.’
Harry glanced out the window, the heavy rain against the glass made the outside world look like a painting by Monet. ‘I’ve been told there are many things I don’t appreciate. My rates are £300 per day, not including expenses, and I’ll take the job on one condition – that you don’t expect me to force the girl to meet her father. I’ll find her, tell her that her dad wants to see her and report to Falsham where she is, but don’t expect me to strong arm her home.’
‘That will be acceptable.’
‘You speak for Falsham?’
‘Mr Falsham trusts me.’
‘A man who becomes a director of a huge conglomerate doesn’t trust many people.’
‘Trust has to be earned and proven. I hope you won’t let us down, Mr Reed.’
‘Email me all the details of Gwendolyn Falsham, including a current photograph and names and addresses of all her known friends and relatives.’
Adam produced a memory stick, stamped with the Raf-Med logo. ‘It’s all on here,’ he said, handing it over. Adam held out his hand and Harry gave as firm a handshake as he could, though he felt like he’d just been mauled by a gorilla. When Adam left there was a trace of sweet Cologne in the air that lingered in the office longer than a squeegee washer at traffic lights.
Harry booted up his laptop and browsed to Raf-Med’s official site. There was the logo that was known all around the world, the angel holding out his hands, palm down, in a healing gesture. The angel Rafael, patron saint of medical workers. Raf-Med, in the last financial year, had made a clear profit of $950 million. Harry flicked through the pages. The company had been formed at the start of the century and had made its first big impact with what was billed as the only anti-depressive drug with absolutely no side effects. Zehigh: for people who just want to be happy. The company went into mega-profit when some clever young thing at the advertising agency Smith & Young decided it should be marketed at people who weren’t depressed: Zehigh: making each day a little sunnier for us all. And now the company manufactured cures for everything from athlete’s foot to zits. Oh, and they were investing heavily into researching the male fertility problem. Whoever solved that problem was going to make a bomb. If ever work got slack, Harry thought, he could offer up his body for medical research.
As the rain kept pouring down and the afternoon wore on, Harry looked through the documents on the memory stick. She was a pretty girl, Gwendolyn Falsham, though it was easy to be pretty when your daddy was rich – the best food, the best clothes, the best hairdressers, the best cosmetics, the best doctors, all had a way of improving your chances in life. But, gazing at the photograph on the screen, into her pale blue eyes, he had to admit she would probably have been attractive if she’d been born to an unemployed machinist from Wolverhampton. Her nose was small, and slightly upturned, her lips full and pout-full, and her hair cut short in the latest fashion. It was a head and shoulder shot so he couldn’t comment on her figure and maybe a 42 year old man shouldn’t be thinking about an 18 year olds body.
Gwendolyn’s mother was Falsham’s second wife. His first wife had died giving birth to Oliver, Falsham’s only other child. Oliver was 5 years older than his half-sister. He had a junior position in Raf-Med; probably earning only slightly more than Harry Reed. But that would change. Gwendolyn’s grades at school were good, not spectacular, but fine enough to get her into the red brick of Bristol University. She was due to start her Ancient History course in a couple of months time. She didn’t look the sort to be interested in history. There was a list of her friends and that was pretty much it. A dry, scandal free account of a young life.
Harry put her name into the social networking sites. She appeared to use only one regularly: Vurtlife. And she had no privacy settings on her page - in the computer age it was akin to a teenager from the past leaving her diary open on her bed. He noted her relationship status was listed as messy. Her last update was dated 20th July: Accommodation sorted at last!! Can’t wait to get away! Nervous but happy!!!!  xx. This was followed from 27th July up to 3rd August with remarks from friends like the following: WTF what happened??; FFS please return my calls xxx; Where are you??  xx; OMG Gwen txt me! xx.
Punctuation marks, Harry thought, had become confetti in the hands of the young to sprinkle among their messages as if each one was a wonderful marriage of words. And they were as liberal with their kisses as people had become with their bodies after the Sexual Involution turned into the Second Sexual Revolution. After August 3 the messages had stopped. Either her friends had got bored or they knew where she was. Probably the former. Harry scanned down the archived messages. It was all so bloody inane. Who cared that Gwendolyn Falsham had woken up on 5th June and planned to do nothing all day? One person left more messages than anybody else, and his messages were sprinkled with more x’s than a porn shop: Barry Penny. Checking out her photographs, and noting in passing that he was correct about her having a good body, (the usual parties, holidays, drunken nights, legend evenings, strong nights out and token family ones) he noticed Barry Penny was tagged quite regularly and in nearly every shot he was gazing at Miss Falsham with moon eyes. The kid was smitten, but were the feelings mutual? Harry decided to check him out; many a tragedy had been caused by the flood of teenage hormones. Barry’s Vurtlife, however, was protected, friends only – smart boy.
Harry checked out the family photos. There was Daddy in various poses from leather office chair to grinning under a huge Christmas tree with eggnog in hand. He looked exactly how Harry had imagined him: calm, strong, healthy, rich, happy. There he was with Gwen’s mother. She looked about ten years younger than him. This year’s model. He thought, harshly, that if you took away all the pills, potions and surgery that the blonde beauty Mrs Falsham had taken, she would burst into dust like a vampire staked through the heart. And was the smile that beamed out of every photo permanently scarred into her face?
Harry searched for a couple of contact numbers and then made calls. The accommodation office at Bristol University wouldn’t give him any information over the phone; he would have to email/fax/hard copy his official police sub-contractor license for verification. She hoped Harry understood. Harry understood. He emailed off the license details. The second call was just as unfruitful.
‘Yeah?’
‘Barry Penny?’
‘Sure, but I ain’t interested in changing my provider or any shit like that.’
‘It’s not any shit like that. You know Gwendolyn Falsham?’
A slight pause, then, ‘Sure. I mean, I know her, we’re not best friends or anything.’
‘You looked pretty close on her Vurtlife.’
‘Vurtlife ain’t real life, dude.’
‘You any idea where she is?’
‘Listen, who are you?’
‘The name’s Harry Reed. I’ve been hired to find her.’
‘Who by?’
‘Her dad.’
Another moment of silence. Harry was sure he could hear the kid chewing his lip. ‘I haven’t heard from her in about two weeks. No idea where she is. Sorry.’
And the connection died. Harry put down the phone and turned off his laptop, took his coat and hat and walked down the stairs, passed the Ukrainian sweatshop and into the rain lashed Mercer Street.
It was early evening on an August day, but the sky was so black it could have been midnight, or the start of the apocalypse. Glancing down at the man who huddled in the doorway next to his, whose beard and straggly hair seemed to grow into his dirt encrusted overcoat, Harry wondered if the apocalypse had been and gone without anybody actually noticing.
He walked south down Mercer Street, ignoring the cries of the beggars and the body sellers; his long dark coat and oil cloth bucket hat fighting a losing battle to keep him dry. He dug his hands into his pockets and turned into Long Acre. Slicing through the darkness and flashing across the desolate buildings like a 70’s disco were the red, blue and white police lights. There were no sirens, which meant they had arrived at the scene of the crime after the event. Three police cars, an ambulance and a white police van, all gathered around a red bricked building on the corner of Langley Court. A poster stuck across the corrugated iron in the windows advertised a gig by The Iron Lungs at the New Roxy. A couple of people stopped to stare, then moved on; police attending Covent Garden crime was not unusual.
Harry paused. He didn’t want to hang around in the rain to find out that it was just a dead junkie when just round the corner was the warmth of a Tube journey home. But then, out from the doorway of the building stepped Karl Carr, and the first thing Carr saw was Harry, water dripping from his hat.
‘Hey, Harry, been a while,’ Carr said, removing a surgical glove from his hand and holding it out to grasp Harry’s. ‘Still crazy like me and following the Villa?’
Carr’s hand was dry and powdered with talc from the inside of the glove. ‘Yeah, but haven’t been to a game in a while.’
‘You ain’t missing much.’
‘What am I missing here?’ Harry said, nodding towards the doorway, through which two men in white gowns were trying to get a stretcher.
‘Could be a bit of a problem. You still sub-contracting for us? Got anything on?’
‘Just a missing girl. Routine.’
‘Hayley,’ Carr called to a uniformed cop. She trotted over obediently, her face aglow with a smile big enough to have dried up all in the rain in London. ‘Me and Harry here are gonna grab a coffee in Costa over there, if anybody wants me put them off for a while, ok?’
‘Sure, Karl,’ she said, like a dog being patted for bringing back a stick to its master.
Everybody loved Karl. Harry gazed at the detective over the table in Costa and tried to figure why he was the only one who thought Karl was a creepy little piece of slime. The guy was balding with a pathetic goatee beard that always looked as though he had only just started growing it. He was 30 but could easily have been mistaken for 40. Maybe it was jealousy. Karl had a way with women. For all their fucking liberation they still fell for the honey tongued charms of a philanderer like Carr. But even that couldn’t have been all of it, surely - after all everybody could fuck everybody now without guilt or regret. Even, as in Karl’s case, you were committed to a partnership – as long as the partner didn’t find out. And not to mention the kids, which Harry did.
‘How’s Fred doing now, Karl?’
‘Nice of you to ask. He has good days and bad days. Remember we took him to Switzerland a couple of years back for that revolutionary treatment?’
‘Sure, I remember all the money raising events the cops got involved with.’
‘Ah, everybody was so generous. Me and Mel were so grateful. Well that trip did Fred good and now this guy has opened a clinic in Paris with some new ideas. We’re hoping to get fundraising again and get him out there.’
You should get sponsored for how many colleagues you can fuck, you’d have the money in no time, Harry thought. ‘How old is he now?’
‘He’ll be six next month.’
They caught up on each other’s news, which in Harry’s case wasn’t much.
‘So, what’s the story here? I take it not just another junkie overdose?’
‘It’s not so much this one, as the one before it.’
‘Similar?’
‘I-fucking-dentical.’
Harry gazed out at the police going about their business, questioning the detritus who lingered in doorways and alleys like limpets. Shit, they’d do well if they got the day of the week out of those poor bastards.
‘We thought the first one was a crime of passion,’ Karl continued. ‘It was messy. Clearly whoever did it had issues; we figured issues with the deceased, but now…’
‘How messy?’
‘Wanna see before they cart the body away?’ Karl said, with a little smile that made Harry think of some ringmaster at a freak show.
The building was half derelict, half condemned, with rooms still used by the lower caste of society to chase their pleasures. It was just one of many buildings like this in Covent Garden now. When Harry was a Young Turk you only saw places like this outside of the centre. At the top of the building was an apartment with a bedroom and a bathroom. In the bedroom were a photographer and three forensic cops with their evidence bags. Their bodies were encased in protection, to stop them contaminating the room, but there was nothing to stop the room contaminating their minds. On the bed was a body that had been split open from the thorax down to the abdomen. The skin had been peeled back to reveal the ribs and internal organs. The look on the woman’s face was one of surprise. Again, Harry remembered the body that he had been with that afternoon and couldn’t reconcile the differences – surely this was a new species?
‘Looks like she might have been a looker in life,’ Karl grunted.
They stood in the doorway, gazing into the room as though it was an art installation. It didn’t smell good, and Harry’s appetite for the Chinese he was going to buy on the way home was diminishing fast.
‘Notice anything odd?’ Karl asked.
Harry looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Nope, everything seems perfectly normal.’
‘Smart arse. She has no heart.’
‘Covent Garden’s no place to have a heart. This just like the first one, then?’
‘Close enough for me to worry, though he did leave the heart in the first one. I’ll know more when forensics report back.’
‘Guy with something against women?’
‘Guy with something against everyone. The first victim was male.’
Harry looked around the room again. ‘The first murder? It was carried out in a place like this?’
‘Yep, place in Goodwins Court. You know it? It’s off St Martin’s Lane. Two messy murders in Covent Garden in a week; nice place you work, Harry.’
‘Seems to me that Soho and Covent Garden are merging into one big cesspool.’
‘Shit, Soho is upmarket compared to this place. At least there they just rip you off for your cash, not rip your fucking heart out.’
Karl gave him the pass code for the case files and Harry took off for the Tube, where the hot waft flying up through the tunnels managed to dry him a little, but when he sat down, he still felt the wetness seeping into his buttocks.
Home was in Stockwell, which lay almost at the end of the Victoria Line. It took about 20 minutes. Another 10 minutes to get a Chinese from the Happy Dragon, and then a five minute walk to his apartment in an old Edwardian building that had been converted into apartments probably before Harry was born. Four of them were occupied, one was up for let, and then there was Harry’s, which overlooked Slade Gardens; in the day time it was nice, but at night the place had a habit of filling up with local youths looking for a place to drink and smoke weed. They were mostly peaceful, but could be noisy.
Harry powered up his hi-fi hard drive and typed in Nick Cave; scrolling though, he selected Let Love In. If anybody could make sense of horror, or at least examine it, it was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Harry shovelled special fried rice and curry sauce into his mouth and shrugged. Two cases in one day - could have been worse. One a high paying rich gig that shouldn’t be too hard to crack – young rich girls didn’t do well on their own, she’ll have told somebody where she is. And the other a government paying gig. The cops had started sub-contracting work to private detectives about three years ago. The PI’s got access to all (or most) of the cops files and were left alone to investigate in parallel with the official investigation. The PI’s were paid a set fee which was just a little under what a full ranked detective got and were expected to keep the real cops informed with their progress. If their work was instrumental in solving the case then a bonus was paid. But they couldn’t claim expenses.
Harry liked the deal. What he liked best was that he could do the work when and as he pleased. There was no client on his back chasing him up for results.
Harry managed half the Chinese, the rest went down the chute. He logged onto the Met’s system and then entered the password for case file #AG12563. It was a murder case with the Senior Investigating Office named as Karl Carr. It was linked to case file #AG12628 which was marked ‘pending’ – presumably some poor desk copper would be typing the details of the Long Acre murder up all night.
Carr had once asked Harry why he didn’t apply to the Met. It was a steady wage and the further you moved up the chain the less work you did. But the biggest perk, Carr said, was the pussy in uniform. There was a big turnover in the Met which meant new female blood all the time. It had changed a lot since Carr had first joined; you had to be careful how you approached the women, but as long as you were discreet and treated the girls as equals everything was sober.
Harry had felt like telling him that he didn’t join up because of twats like Carr, but had kept his mouth shut. Besides, it wasn’t completely true.
He flicked through the screens detailing the death of Mr Luz Noche, aged 57, widower, residential address: 4 Goodwins Court, Covent Garden WC2. Business address: Court Antiques, 4 Goodwins Court, Covent Garden WC2.
Lived, worked and died in the same place, Harry thought. The guy must have been dependable. But who the hell wanted to buy antiques in Covent Garden? Second hand stuff, sure, but not anything collectible. Covent Garden was the buy it and use-it-up-today sort of place.
Born in La Paz, Baja California. Parents emigrated to the U.K. when little Luz was just 10 years old. Came from peace to murder. He had four siblings - three sisters and one brother - whereabouts unknown. Parents now dead, buried together in Walthamstow Cemetery. Luz and his dearly departed wife (an English born woman called Louisa Breem) had just one child, Ramona Noche, who would be (Harry counted on his fingers) about 25 now.
He had been murdered on 4 August; the pathologist estimated the time of death as 1am, give or take an hour or two. The only witness was some speed-freak kid, John Khan, who often used the seclusion of Goodwins Court to take his pleasure in peace. He claimed to have been aware of a ‘ruckus around midnight, but, dude, all I really know is it was dark and I’d done a lot of dopamine. Everything was racing so much that it was like seeing into the future, you understand? Like time was shooting off in front of me. I hear this shouting like somebody is screaming into a deep, dark hole. Then a door slams. Man, that sound is such a universal symbol of a pissed off member of humanity. What did we do before doors? Must ruminate my mind on that one. What? Yeah, so I looked up at the door slam which was either in my past or the future and I see the back of this woman or girl. How can you be sure of a person’s age from behind? It was dark, but I know it was a woman. Then there was more shouting and then a scream like all hell had been let loose. It was not a sober experience. I decided to decamp elsewhere.’
Harry pressed stop on the audio file. The kids ID card showed him to be 17 years old and a PWA (person without address). He had the face of a fucking choirboy and the voice of an American ghetto gang banger.
Then there were the photographs. Harry could see why Carr had thought this was a crime of passion. There were close ups of Noche’s face from the front, right and left – or what was left of his face. It was covered in bruises and welts. The right eye was just one big purple ball of pain. His mouth looked like it should be on a Botox doctor’s waiting room wall. It would have been impossible to tell the guy’s age, or what he looked like, without the hard data – maybe even his sex would have been indiscernible.
Harry compared the dead face with the living one off the guys ID card that was on file. He had friendly eyes, and a little smile twitched in the mouth, like he had just heard something funny but felt it improper to smile for an official document.
Harry scrolled down to the murder scene shots again. Just like the woman he had seen earlier, Noche was naked on a bed, his body cut raggedly from thorax down to abdomen. In this case though the killer had sliced off Noche’s penis. The report said it had been found in a corner of the room, as though flung there.
Harry logged out and went to make himself a cup of Earl Grey.