“Nodded off first. Is that what he said happened?”
“That’s what he said… Are you all right, Kelly?”
“Yes! Yes, absolutely fine,” Kelly replied, about twenty times too eagerly, and lapsed into silence.
Dervla headed for the shower room, left Kelly to it. She could hear the camera moving about beyond the glass.
“Morning, Mr Cameraman,” she said as she soaped herself beneath her T-shirt. “I hope you feel better than I do.” She slid a slippery, sudsy hand inside her knickers.
Beyond the glass the camera’s electric motor gave a little hum as it pulled focus. Dervla might have heard it had the shower not been running.
The message was already being written as Dervla approached the basin to brush her teeth. The writer’s tone had changed.
“K is your enemy,” it said. “Fucking slut is still ahead. She cock-teases the boys to avoid nomination.” And then the unseen finger underlined the first four words…
“K is your enemy.”
DAY THIRTY-SIX. 11.50 p.m.
Sergeant Hooper was thinking about ringing for a cab. He had had a long and fruitless day on the murder inquiry followed by a pretty monumental amount of beer and curry and it was time to pull the pin.
It had been a decent night out with the lads, but it was about to go boring on him. It wasn’t that he particularly objected to pornography, although he was not a big consumer of it himself, it was just that he had never seen the point of watching it with your mates. As far as he was concerned, the purpose of porn was to stimulate sex, either sex with yourself or sex with a partner. That was what it was for. To be masturbated over or to be watched with a girlfriend as a way of expanding the horizons of your own nocturnal activities. What he was not into doing was sitting bleary-eyed on a friend’s couch holding a kebab in one hand, a can of Stella in the other and drooling over it with a bunch of pissed-up off-duty coppers.
“You lot are sad,” he said. “I’m going to finish me beer and leave you to it. Don’t stain the sofa now.”
“You don’t understand, Hoops,” said Thorpe, a detective constable from Vice. “This isn’t about sex, it’s about quality. We’re critics. Porn is an art form and we are aficionados. Do you know that at the blue movie Oscars in Cannes they have an award for best come shot?”
“I find that very hard to swallow,” said Hooper, unwittingly earning himself about five minutes of hysterical drunken laughter.
“Pornography is a legitimate film genre,” insisted Blair. “Every bit as important as, for instance, the adventure movie or the romantic comedy.”
“Like I said, Blair, you’re sad,” Hooper replied. “Why can’t you just be honest? You watch this stuff because it gives you a hard-on. Well, fair play to you, mate, I can understand that, I just don’t see why you need company.”
“You’re wrong, Hoop, you just don’t understand at all. This is a social thing. We discuss the movies, the acting, the groaning, the relative success of a golden shower, whether the dick you see being slipped actually belongs to the bloke you see slipping it. What we have here is a critics’ forum. You seem to be under the impression that all porn movies are the same.”
“Aren’t they?”
“No more than horror movies are all the same, or westerns. Is Butch Cassidy the same as A Fistful of Dollars? Of course it isn’t. Is The Exorcist the same as a Hammer Horror? I don’t think so. Well, it’s the same with porn. For instance, this one I’m putting on now. This is from the tacky end of the market, real hard-core humping. A proper down-and-dirty porn nasty.”
“Thanks for the warning, mate,” said Hooper, draining his beer. “I think I’ll give it a miss. I’ll find a cab on the street.”
“You’re mad. You’re missing out on a classic of its type, a cultural icon. The Fuck Orgy series is a milestone of its genre.”
Hooper was already heading for the door when the little bell rang in his head. “What series?” he said, turning back.
“Fuck Orgy. Legendary no-holds-barred, in-your-face porn. No stupid plot, no lengthy preamble, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Fuck Orgy is the name and fuck orgy is most definitely the game. This is number three, an early one, really only for the connoisseurs. The series hadn’t found its feet yet. The recognized triumph of the collection is Fuck Orgy Nine, which won no less than -”
“Is there a Fuck Orgy Eleven?” Hooper enquired urgently.
“There certainly is. They’ve made fifteen so far. I can get you them all if you like… What are you looking so pleased with yourself about?”
Hooper was indeed smiling. He believed that he had found out what Kelly had whispered to David in the hot tub. The thing that had made him look so concerned.
DAY THIRTY-EIGHT. 9.00 a.m.
As he removed his coat and hat in the cloakroom Chief Inspector Coleridge was surprised to hear cheering and shouting coming from the incident room. He walked in to see a group of his officers, both male and female, clustered round a video monitor from which strange moans and groans were emanating.
“She will never get that in her mouth!” a constable was saying.
“It can’t be real!” shrieked one of the girls. “It must be digitally enhanced.”
Now Coleridge realized what sort of video they were watching, and was about to begin the process of disciplining the lot of them when Hooper pressed the freeze-frame button and turned to his boss.
“Ah, sir,” he said. “Sorry about the noise, but we’re all a bit pleased with ourselves this morning. I think we know where Kelly had met David before.”
On the screen a young woman was frozen in the act of performing oral sex on a man who appeared to have been crossed with a donkey. The woman was most definitely not Kelly.
“That’s not Kelly,” said Coleridge testily, “and I don’t see David either. What’s your point?”
“Look behind the main lady, sir. Look at the two girls reaching round to feel her knock- breasts, the one on the right, she’s partially obscured by the man’s dick- penis, but it’s Kelly all right.”
“Good heavens,” said Coleridge. “So it is.”
“She said that she’d been a movie extra, sir. Now we know what sort of movie she was an extra in. No wonder she didn’t rate it very highly. This film is Kelly’s ‘Far Corgi In Heaven’, by the way.”
“Curious title.”
“Not when you know that what she actually said was Fuck Orgy Eleven.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I never… And the owner of that… um, appendage… Is that David?”
“No, sir, that’s just one of the numerous disassociated penises that the movie features. This is David.” And Hooper fast-forwarded a little to reveal the entrance of the star of the film: an outrageous bisexual figure in a long purple wig and high-camp make-up, pink lips, glittery eye shadow and a fur and feather posing pouch, which he was in the process of removing.
“David, sir,” said Hooper, “or Boris Pecker as he is known in the Fuck Orgy series. He also appears at times under the names of Olivia Newton Dong, Ivor Whopper and half of a mock Scottish gay-porn comedy double act known as Ben Doon and Phil McCavity.”
“Good heavens.”
“I talked to his agent this morning. He tried to hold out on me at first, but in the end he didn’t fancy getting nicked for obstructing the police in their inquiries. Our David has a secret double life as a porn star. Apparently he’s much in demand.”