“Did you all know Connie?”
“Nah, we don’t know him-pervert!” Alan Thorpe jeered.
Otley cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. “You know what pervert is-I’ve seen you in a film with Connie…”
Alan Thorpe went a mottled pink as the table erupted with raucous laughter. Hooting loudly, the lads started throwing chips at him.
“He’s a pervert, he’s a pervert!” Frankie chanted.
Incensed, Alan Thorpe reached over and belted Frankie on the side of the head. It was getting out of hand. Otley waved his arms.
“Come-on-now! Cut it out, or we’ll be thrown out.”
Alan Thorpe wasn’t through. He swung another punch at Frankie, then grabbed a fork and tried to stab him with it.
Otley pushed him down, fingers splayed against the bony chest, and slumped back into his own seat. “What am I?” he asked wearily. “The pied piper?”
Lillie turned the key in the front door and let himself into the gloomy passageway leading up to Mark Lewis’s flat. He passed the key back to Haskons, who slid it into its hiding place under the outdoor rubber mat.
Across the street, Jackson drew up, and killed the lights. He saw the shadowy figure in the dress and red wig stooping to replace the key. So Red was sick, was he? Too ill to do his act. That bitch Vera had lied again. It was all fucking lies.
In the dim streetlight he watched the figure straighten up and totter inside, lifting the hem of his dress. The door closed. Jackson patted the pocket of his leather coat, just to reassure himself. A light went on in the flat above. Jackson lifted the handle and the door clicked open.
The manageress had the phone in her hand. She peered around from the kitchen doorway, keeping a beady disapproving eye on the gang in the corner. Ten of them now, not including the bloke, flocking in like wasps around a honey pot. She set her jaw and started to dial.
Fag in his mouth, Alan Thorpe was on a boasting streak. Not yet fifteen, he was a forty-a-day lad, when he had the money.
“I done arson, robbery, indecent assault and…” He frowned into space. “Can’t remember the other, I got four though,” he bragged.
Otley needled him. “Not as many as Connie.”
“Connie? Huh! All he ever done was dirty old men.”
“That wasn’t what I heard.”
“When he lived at Jackson’s he went out more’n any of us,” Alan Thorpe confided, looking up through his fair lashes. “He liked it.”
“That’s true, that’s true,” Disco Driscoll said. Probably high on lighter fuel or something, Otley suspected, which accounted for his slurred, rapid speech. “That’s true-he went for whole weekends, didn’t he?”
“Yeah! That film I did was nuffink!” Alan Thorpe stubbed out his cigarette on a paper plate and stuck it upright in the sugar bowl. “I just got me arse tanned-me dad gimme worse. Connie was doin’ the nobs.”
The heads around the table nodded. Connie had been chosen for better things, moved in higher circles. Several of them-Thorpe, Disco Driscoll, Kenny Lloyd, Gary Rutter, Frankie Smith-at one time or another had served time at Jackson’s place, observed Connie’s comings and goings. None of them liked him, stuck-up little poofter.
Disco Driscoll fixed blurred eyes on Otley. “He wasn’t like us, different you know, always sniffin’ around, lookin’ for fresh meat, I reckon he got a back hander…” He tilted his matted head, seeking Otley’s ear. “You know Billy OK Matthews? Well, when he first came up, he was, what…?” He looked to Alan Thorpe. “Ten? Yeah, he’d be about ten. His mother’s bloke raped him, so he’s a bit-you know.” Driscoll screwed his finger into his head. “Connie nabbed Billy fast, didn’t he?” he said, gazing blearily at the others.
“You think Connie was paid for finding young kids then?” Otley said casually. Inside, he felt the opposite of casual. His nose twitched. He could almost smell it, he was that close. He’d got their confidence, and they were spilling the lot, only they didn’t know it. To them it was just shop talk.
Alan Thorpe nodded, lighting another cigarette. He sucked in the smoke like a seasoned professional, which was what he was. “Yeah, for the films like…”
“Who was the bloke in the mortarboard?”
“The what?” Kenny Lloyd said, sniffing up a greenish candle drip from the end of his nose.
“The gown,” Otley said, plucking at the lapels of his raincoat. “He had a cane.”
Kenny despised them, and his pale young face showed it, mouth twisted. “He’s a pervert, they’re all perverts. Big posh ’ouses, lotta dough-dirty bastards!”
Otley’s heart was trip-hammering. He kept his eyes hooded as he looked around at them, shaking his head disbelievingly, grinning his snide skeptical grin.
“You scruffy buggers were never taken to posh houses-who you kiddin’?”
Haskons knelt on the mat, leaning into the bath, soaping his face and hair. The shower curtain hung down, obscuring his upper body. The red wig was balanced on the edge of the washbasin, a bedraggled ferret of a thing after Haskons had sweated into it all night. He still wore his dress, open down the back, the half undone corset straining at its straps.
He groped for the shower head on its flexible stem. The water was too hot. Blindly, he spun the taps, adjusting the mixture. The water hissed out and gurgled down the drain, covering the creak of the door as Jackson came in sideways, bringing his hand out of his pocket, the click as the knife sprang open also lost in the hissing and gurgling, and in Haskons’s grunt as he bowed his head into the bath.
Slowly, Jackson reached out to the plastic curtain. Drag it down over the bitch. Wrap it around her and in with the knife, clean and neat and quick. His fingers gripped the edge of the curtain. The plastic rings clinked and jostled on the rod.
Haskons raised his head, soapy water running down his face. “Can you untie the ruddy corset strings! I can’t get it off…”
He heard the plastic rings clash and ping as Jackson tore the curtain off the rod. Blinking wildly, trying to clear the soap from his eyes, Haskons saw the gleaming blade. He twisted his body, half leaning into the bath, his feet churning at the mat as he tried desperately to get out of this exposed and vulnerable position. From the corner of his eye he saw the blade swoop. Tensing his body against the impact, he swung out his right arm in a helpless reflex action, and in the next instant had the breath knocked from his body as Lillie hurled himself at Jackson. Tangled together, the three of them crashed to the tiled floor between the bath and the washbasin.
Lillie had hold of Jackson’s knife arm, but he wouldn’t let go. Haskons struggled to get up, feet slithering. He grabbed out for support, hitting the shower head, which spun around, spraying water everywhere.
Lillie got a handful of Jackson’s hair and held him still while he punched him in the face, really laying into him. Jackson bucked and squirmed, boots flying. Lillie hit him again. “Drop it!” A boot whacked into Lillie’s ribs, making him gasp. “Get the bastard’s legs!” he yelled at Haskons.
Together they pinned Jackson to the floor, Haskons hanging on to his legs. Jackson tore his head free from Lillie’s grasp and butted him in the face, making blood spurt. This made Lillie mad. He cracked Jackson across the mouth. He dug his thumbs into Jackson’s wrist, jerked it viciously, and the knife went skittering away. This time he got two handfuls of hair and banged Jackson’s head against the tiled floor. Then for good measure smacked it sideways into the washbasin pedestal. This seemed to work, so he did it again, twice more.
“That’s enough,” Haskons panted in his ear. Lillie did it again.
“HEY-THAT’S ENOUGH! Get off him!”
“It’s my blood,” Lillie said. He was trembling all over. He still had Jackson’s spiked greasy hair entwined in his white-knuckled fists. “And I’m not gettin’ off him,” he snarled. “Tie his legs.”