Dangerous (21 page)

She watched the interplay between Toby and David with interest and wondered if David might be bisexual. If Toby liked the man, even if he bedded him, it was no skin off her nose. Perhaps, if things went that way, it would turn out for the best, spare Bernie from marrying some nobody without a pot to piss in. She didn’t like the adoring way Bernie looked at him. She didn’t like it at all.

David Bennett, one way or another, was going to have to go.

47

Fuck all that for a game
, thought Henry as he came up from the subway station at Leicester Square. He felt elated. He’d walked out of the Claremont School for Boys and hadn’t looked back. He was free as a bird. He’d just turned sixteen, he had a change of underwear and a few pounds in his bag, and here he was in the big city.

His plan was to get to Soho, there were hundreds of clubs there, get a job as a bouncer on a door. He’d sleep rough for a few nights if he had to, until he got his first pay packet. That was OK. Anything was better than being back at Claremont with the Hoorays.

He couldn’t forget that it was big sis Clara who had condemned him to that. Sent him away.
Disposed
of him like he was rubbish, like she couldn’t bear to have him anywhere near her.

And why not?

He was, after all, a monster. The thing with the damned dog. And the thieving, let’s not forget that, and turning on that poor tutor, acidic old bastard. All his fault, all down to
him
, of course. So Clara had kicked him out the door, sent him off to posh land where he’d had to toughen up quick, or die. Well, maybe she’d done him a favour. Because now he could fend for himself, big time. Now he was tough, and strong, and no one crossed him if they knew what was good for them.

Henry went knocking on doors that evening, approaching doormen and saying, ‘Your guvnor in? He got any jobs going?’ Girls wandered up to him, but he ignored their ‘Fiver for a shag’ offers and walked on. That night, he slept on a bench in Soho Square, keeping his penknife in his hand in case anyone should disturb him during the night.

No one did.

He was one more vagrant, one more loser dossing down rough on the streets.

The following day, he got some food in a café and then that evening tried again. Door to door to door. He felt dizzy in the end, he’d tried so hard, but no luck.

He began to feel that maybe he’d be better off back at the rotten Claremont, where at least he’d be fed and sheltered. Next day followed the same pattern, and every doorman turned him down, said, ‘Shove off, mate, we ain’t got no vacancies,’ and more girls wandered up, propositioned him.

He’d end up dossing on the bench again, he could see it coming. The clubs were starting to close up for the night. It was dark, drizzling rain and he was shivering. Then another girl came up to him, a tall blonde, and said five quid for a shag, how about it, lovey?

‘All right,’ he said. Anything was better than being stuck out here.

So she took him back to her flat.

Fifteen minutes after coming for the first time, Henry was ready for a reload and Sal – that was the girl’s name, and she had the body of an angel, with fabulous tits and an arse you could balance a pint on – climbed aboard again, pumping at him until Henry exploded once more with the force of his desire.

‘Blimey!’ Sal fell back laughing onto the bed. She was panting and sweaty. ‘That your first time then?’

Henry went red in the face. ‘No,’ he said.

‘It was. Go on. Admit it to your Aunty Sal. I won’t tell.’

‘It’s not my fucking first time, OK?’ said Henry angrily. It was. But no way was he going to tell anyone that. He was good at keeping secrets. He’d had to be.

‘Don’t worry, this bed’s like the confessional,’ said Sal cheerfully, reaching over for two cigarettes from the pack, lighting them, then drawing a deep drag on hers while inserting the other between Henry’s lips. He’d been smoking on and off since he was eleven, so this was nothing too shocking. ‘Anything said in here,
stays
here. All right?’

Henry looked at her and decided that she was all right. Her flat was a tip, and it was in Houndsditch, which held bad,
bad
memories for him, but Sal herself was OK. Good enough, anyway. Now all he had to do was persuade her – somehow – to let him linger here until tomorrow, just spend the night.

Not that he could
afford
a night.

If one shag took half an hour at a fiver, then he’d have to stump up forty quid by breakfast, and he barely had a tenner left. So it was time to turn on the famous Henry Dolan charm. He could do that – charm the birds out of the trees, when he wanted to. And he wanted to,
needed
to, right now.

‘You’re something special, you know that?’ he said to her, smoothing back a wisp of blonde hair from her face. ‘You’re beautiful.’

Sal wasn’t, and she knew it. She had big poppy eyes and he knew now that she was
not
a natural blonde. She looked down his body. A very
fit
body, it was, strong and muscular and with fine smooth skin. The hair on his head was copperbrown, but around his penis the hair was a brilliant fire-engine red. She liked that. She smoothed her hands over his chest.

‘It’s nice to be appreciated,’ she said.

‘I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t appreciate you.’

Sal’s mouth twisted. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘What’s this?’ Henry took her jaw in his hand, brought her face down to his and kissed her mouth. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

‘Take a tip from your old Aunt Sal,’ she said, pulling away, lying on her back, blowing out a plume of smoke from each nostril. ‘Never fuck your landlord.’

‘What, is he giving you grief then?’

Sal rubbed her forehead and frowned. ‘Well, he
has
been. You don’t ever want to get too involved with a bloke like Yasta Frate. Wish I’d thought of that before I let him . . . well, anyway, old stuff. History.’

Sal sat up suddenly. Her back was long and strong. Henry ran a hand down over it, trailing a shiver of sensation from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. She peeped at him over her shoulder.

‘You want to stay tonight?’ she asked. ‘No charge, OK?’

Henry nodded, sat up, put his mouth where his hand had just been.

Gotcha!
he thought.

48

‘Christ,’ said Marcus.

Gordon and a couple of Marcus’s other boys were with him in the office over the Calypso; he was sitting behind the desk and they were standing. All of them were looking at what was on the desk.

The sodden eighteen-by-eighteen-inch cardboard box was on the floor now. Its gruesome contents had been removed and set out on Marcus’s desk, with a newspaper to soak up the blood.

Not that Pistol Pete’s head was bleeding much any more; someone had cut it from his shoulders quite cleanly and now there it sat, his face staring almost serenely ahead, blind to everything, his eyes filming over, his skin tinted a waxen grey. On either side of Pete’s head were his hands, neatly sliced off at the wrists.

Gordon looked sheet-white and sick. He pulled a chair toward him, and slumped into it. ‘Where did you say they found it?’ he asked, gagging.

‘On Sonya’s doorstep. She phoned me straight away. Fucking hysterical, she was,’ said Marcus.

Christ
, he thought.
Pete
.

He’d known Pistol Pete like, always. And now . . . where the hell was the rest of him? Nothing but his head and hands here, cut from his body with something, looked like a machete maybe, or maybe not. So
neat
. There’d been no note, no phone call, no warning of anything more to come. Someone had just taken Pete, his right-hand man, off the street and chopped his head and hands off, and presented it at his girlfriend’s door like a sick perverted
gift
.

Only a few days back, he’d been talking to Pete, laughing and joking with him.

Now, he was dead.

‘I want to find out who did this,’ said Marcus.

They all nodded.

‘I want
their
heads, too,’ he said. ‘And their
dicks
,’ he added, as an afterthought.

49

‘All right. Here’s what we’re going to do,’ said Clara. It was late afternoon and she’d gathered together all the girls who worked in the Heart of Oak, which was mostly a drinking and gaming club. ‘Or rather, here’s what
you
are going to do.’ She gazed around at the girls and felt something close to despair. Dirty clothes. Scuffed shoes. Matted, unbrushed hair. The stench of days-old sweat overlaid by cheap perfume and a whiff of stale cigarettes. Toby hadn’t been interested in the way the girls appeared to the punters because the girls didn’t appeal to him. ‘You look a state, the lot of you.’

‘Cheeky mare,’ said one of them, a tall woman with a face hard as a hatchet, her dark bulbous eyes mocking and her too-blonde hair bleached to fuck.

‘I heard that,’ said Clara.

‘You were meant to,’ said the blonde.

‘Whatever you think of it, it’s the truth. Now Mr Cotton tells me that you have no clothing allowance.’

This seemed to amuse the girls greatly.

‘
Clothing
allowance! We ain’t in the clothes long enough to bother,’ said the blonde, laughing and looking around at her pals for support. They smiled. A couple of them tittered.

‘Really? Well, we’re not actually running a whorehouse here, so that could be where you’re going wrong,’ said Clara.

‘Ain’t had no complaints,’ said a dumpy little brunette, round as a barrel, folding her arms.

‘Yeah, but then you haven’t seen the books, have you?’ retorted Clara. ‘Fact is, takings are poor. You, as hostesses, are supposed to encourage the punters to spend like there’s no tomorrow. And you’re not.’

‘So what about this clothing allowance then?’

‘From now on, you get one. Not a big one – don’t get excited. This is not a fucking benevolent fund. It’ll be just enough to see you nicely turned out. I want to see evening gowns, girls, not tatty old blouses and skirts with the hems coming unravelled.’ Clara looked at the blonde. This was precisely what she was wearing. The blonde’s face was thunderous.

‘So you’ll get your allowance,’ Clara went on. ‘And there’s more. Let’s get on to the subject of personal care, shall we?’

The dumpy brunette heaved a sigh.

‘You all stink like polecats,’ said Clara.

‘Hey!’ said the blonde.

Clara held up a hand. ‘You bloody do. That’s rule number two. Number one, you dress nice. Number two, you make sure you wash every day. Number three, you wear make-up, but not so much slap that you look like an eighteenth-century tart. And you clean your teeth, make sure your breath smells nice, suck on Parma violets . . . ’

‘I know what I’d rather suck on,’ said hatchet-face, to a chorus of giggles.

‘That’s number four,’ Clara went on. ‘Number five, you sort your hair out.’ Clara looked pointedly at the blonde. ‘Six? You smile. No matter what a customer says or does, you smile.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ said the brunette.

‘What, do they give you lip?’

The blonde laughed out loud. ‘You ain’t got a clue, have you?’

‘If they get like that, you report to the manager and he’ll get one of the door staff to see them off. You don’t start fighting it out hand to hand with the clients like an alley cat. You behave like a lady, you got that?’

‘Holy shit,’ sighed the blonde.

‘What’s your name?’

The blonde looked around at her mates.

‘You – the blonde with the mouth,’ said Clara. ‘You got a name?’

‘Sal,’ said the blonde.

‘Well, Sal,’ said Clara, ‘let me put it like this. Them’s the rules. You don’t like them, you can piss off. Simple as that.’

Sal’s eyes narrowed. ‘How big’s this allowance then?’

‘Enough to get you a couple of dresses and a few bits and pieces besides.’

‘That queer Cotton OK’d this, did he?’

Clara stiffened. She walked over to the blonde and stood nose to nose with her. Her voice when she spoke was cold as ice. ‘You know what? You’re
this close
to going out that bloody door with a thick ear.’

‘Christ, I’m scared to death.’ Once again Sal glanced around at her cohorts. ‘Look at me, I’m tremblin’.’

‘You don’t ever call my husband –
your employer
– that, you got it? I hear one more thing like that coming out of your mouth and I won’t be answerable for my actions.’

Sal blew out her cheeks. ‘Right. I’m
really
afraid.’

Clara hit her. Her open palm connected forcibly with Sal’s cheek. There was a resounding
thwack
, followed by a collective gasp of surprise from all her mates as Sal’s head whipped to one side with the force of the blow. Sal’s jaw dropped, then set in a furious line. She stepped toward Clara.

Her little fat friend grabbed her arm.

‘
Don’t
, Sal. You bloody asked for that, you got to admit it. You want to lose this job? Don’t be stupid.’

‘Yeah, Sal. Listen to her. You don’t want to lose this job, do you? And that’s what will happen if you don’t shut your mouth,’ snapped Clara.

Sal stood there, panting with rage. Everyone else held their breath. The dumpy little brunette kept hold of Sal’s arm. Then the tension went out of Sal and she shrugged.

‘All right,’ she said to Clara. ‘Keep your bloody hair on. I didn’t
mean
anything by it. Just joshin’, that’s all.’

‘I mean it. I don’t want to hear anything like that, ever again,’ said Clara, hard-faced.

‘All right, all right.’

Clara drew back. Standing in among the girls, she was even more strongly aware of their odour. She wrinkled her nose. The dumpy little brunette released her hold on Sal. The moment of danger had passed.

‘Let’s get some class back into this place, shall we?’ Clara said, looking around at their faces. ‘God’s sake, what’s the matter with the lot of you? We’ll all profit from this. We’ll trial the new working rules for a month. I’ll bring in the cash tomorrow, and you’ll all get yourself kitted out. In long black evening gowns.’

‘
Black?
’ said Sal.