Kerry Slater was a fat man and maybe that was why his penis looked so small. Its end was livid purple, quite a different colour and texture from the rest of his skin. It looked like an afterthought, something hastily added to the thick trunk of his body. The rest of him was smooth, loose and baby pink, though there was nothing babyish about his prematurely bald head, his spectacles, nor the indecent way he was currently lolling naked on the squashed floral sofa under the bedroom window. He had recently emerged from the bathroom thickly wrapped in towels and a robe, and having slowly, painstakingly dried himself off he had turned to the business of masturbation, a simple enough process that he was making into quite a big production.
He had begun by rubbing some oil into his penis and that had brought it up and into life. Then he’d opened a drawer in the dressing table and pulled out a magazine. Mick couldn’t see exactly what the contents of the magazine were but Slater found them compelling and stimulating and they drove him onwards. He peered over the pages long and hard, and his tongue peeked out of the corner of his mouth and his lips got wet. But the magazine wasn’t enough, or maybe Slater just didn’t want it to be enough. He reached into the drawer again and produced what looked like a giant test tube, with a fitting at the open neck and a length of attached rubber hose that ended in an egg-shaped bulb. It was some sort of erotic suction device and Slater inserted his penis into the business end of it. The curved plastic acted like a lens, magnifying the organ it contained, and as Slater repeatedly squeezed the rubber bulb it did look as though the erection was becoming stronger, filling more of the tube. Slater’s face became a cartoon of sexual pleasure, and Mick had to work hard not to burst out laughing at the comic effect.
One of the cats wandered into the room. Slater shooed it away, then with the penis developer still in place he shimmied across the worn bedroom rug, past the walk-in wardrobe, and turned on the TV set and video. There was already a tape in the machine and at once the image of a naked woman appeared on the screen. She was good-looking, oriental, but definitely not Japanese. Mick could tell the difference these days. She looked as though she came from the Philippines or Thailand, from the sexual proving grounds. She had a smooth, youthful face and she was pleasuring herself in a way that was different from but compatible with Slater’s own method. She was putting her fingers into her vagina, swirling them about, then removing them, putting them up to her mouth and licking them clean.
Slater looked ready, more than ready, to come. Time was getting on. Mick feared he might be late for his reservation at the Morel, but even so he didn’t rush. With the porn still playing on the screen, his penis still in the suction device, he tottered across the room to the dressing table drawer again and this time got out a pair of women’s panties. They were white, creased, not especially small, not especially sexy. Mick wondered for a ridiculous moment whether Slater was going to put them on, and he was relieved when he only pressed them to his nose. He sat down again on the sofa, breathed heavily through the panties, pumped the suction bulb energetically, accelerating all the while, until there was a sudden stop, then a few obscenities said through gritted teeth, and he fell back on the sofa, released and relieved. He stayed there for some time, motionless, breathing very steadily, and Mick thought he might be about to doze off. But then Slater stirred himself, pulled himself together, turned off the TV, put away the pump, the magazine and the panties and proceeded to get ready to go out. His dressing was as swift as his masturbation had been prolonged and he was out of the house in five minutes.
At last Mick was able to emerge from his hiding place in the walk-in wardrobe. He stretched himself a little deliberately and theatrically as he stepped into the bedroom. His sense of intrusion was all the greater now. He was standing in the very space where Slater had so recently stood, naked and sexually aroused. Mick still felt uneasy yet he knew this was the place he had to be. He began to search Slater’s house. He had already briefly passed through it on his way to his hiding place, and he had previously spent a fair amount of time staring in through the windows, but now he had time to check it out more thoroughly.
As he searched, Mick discovered all sorts of new information about Slater, though how much of it he would be able to make use of was uncertain. He looked at cheque stubs, credit card statements, share certificates, insurance policies, in an attempt to see how much money Slater had and what he did with it. It appeared he didn’t do much. His outgoings were tiny compared to his worth.
Mick looked at Slater’s passport to see how far he had travelled. There were no great surprises. He’d been around: to Hong Kong, to Chile, to the States half a dozen times, to India, Singapore. These places didn’t come cheap. Mick wondered if Slater travelled alone, and if not who his companion was.
He found several photograph albums containing pictures of Slater and his friends, and sure enough there were faces there that Mick recognized, Philip Masterson and Justin Carr, though Jonathan Sands was absent. Most of the photographs showed mixed groups of people at parties, weddings, picnics, race meetings, country house weekends, beach holidays. The occasions always looked lavish. There were raffia picnic baskets and bottles of champagne. There were boats and classic cars. People wore blazers, boaters, tweeds.
Slater was not photogenic. He looked old and blob-like in the pictures, moon-faced and surprised by the flash. In almost all of them he had a drink in one hand and plate full of food in the other. In one bizarre, unlikely picture he was on a football pitch, dressed as a goalkeeper, standing between the posts, but he still managed to be holding a champagne bottle.
Mick observed Slater’s tastes in books, records and videos: the latest thrillers and biographies, serious classical CDs, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Renoir and the American musical.
There were a few recent postcards and letters that Slater had received, but they were not very revealing, thank-you notes from people he’d taken out to dinner, a card from his mother on holiday in Italy. There were some bills, a couple of uncashed cheques from magazines, but Mick couldn’t make much out of them.
In the study there was a good collection of cookery books, books about food, and restaurant guides, the tools of his trade. And in the filing cabinets Mick found sheafs of newspaper cuttings, Slater’s own work, generally, with his owlish face peering out above the by-line, looking well-fed and self-satisfied.
And so Mick returned to the bedroom, the arena of Slater’s solitary, baroque sex act. Hiding in the wardrobe had given him some familiarity with Slater’s clothes. They were smart and expensive. He ran to suits and sports jackets, grey flannels, handmade shoes, but they were all neglected. Trousers and coats were casually thrown into the wardrobe and left to fester and crease; there were several wrapped around Mick’s feet. A lot of items seemed to have trails of food down them.