“Why, is it fuller dog-shit?”
No, a better reason than that: there were no floorboards. And a ten-foot drop to the rubble-filled basement. Alex wondered how Barry got on when he arrived home pissed in the dark.
But there was a staircase, much of it intact. The pair picked their way across the skeleton of joists where the floor had been and, with no banister rail to hang on to, gingerly made it to the upper storey.
This had a floor, but what it lacked was a ceiling. The rain was now bucketing down. Alex flattened himself against the wall, shivering, but there was no shelter. Like the floor downstairs, what was left of the roof consisted only of beams or joists.
“Well, this isn’t going to be a barrel of laughs, Barry,” he felt bound to say.
“No probs, kid,” responded Barry cheerfully. “Just so long as yow down’t mind roughing it.”
Alex now saw that there was what had been an iron fire-exit door leading to whatever was on the other side of it. The past tense was appropriate, for it was now padlocked. Christ — that must be directly above Stephan Dance’s porn emporium next door. What a place to choose for a pad. Still, with an address like that there should be little fear of burglars.
The padlock snapped open easily, without the aid of a key or even a bent hairpin. “Rust,” explained Barry. “Anyway, who’s gowing to risk his neck coming up to this dump?”
He swung the door open and in the chilly light of post-dawn Alex saw not the simple bed-sitter he had been expecting but what was evidently a storeroom or stockroom, lined with rough wooden shelves on which were stacked cardboard boxes and brown paper parcels. Peering into a box at random Alex saw that it was filled with grotesque black dildoes. The next one with vibrators. The next with novelty rhubarb-flavoured ribbed condoms. He wondered if Dave’s boss back in South Higginshaw was on to this market. The next with X-rated video cassettes: Millie and Tillie Learn the Hard Way; Nymphette Nuns; Wet Nurses. Yeh yeh yeh yeh, you could get all this in Leeds if you had more money than sense.
Considering the prices this stuff fetched, he wondered that Stephan Dance bothered to sub-let his top room. Still, they were miserly buggers, these porn kings. Noted for it.
“So where do you kip down?” he asked, looking round in expectation of at least a sleeping-bag, which he trusted Barry would not be expecting him to share.
“On the floor,” said Barry. “I used to get my head down on that bottom shelf there, but he’s just filled it up with a new consignment of porn mags. Useful if yow want to wank yourself to sleep.”
“And what does he charge you for using this place? As you rightly say, the Ritz it ain’t.”
Barry Chilton guffawed. “Charge me? Charge me? Yow down’t think he knows I come up here, dow yow? Be your age, kid.”
Christ on crutches. “You know what he’ll do to you, don’t you, Barry, if he catches you up here?”
“I down’t like to think about it, it makes my eyes water. But he won’t. He hardly ever gets here till after ten and I’m long gone by then.”
“What do you mean by hardly ever?” asked Alex nervously.
“Once in a blue moon he comes in early to cook the books, but touch wood I’ve always heard the Roller out in the yard and done a quick runner across the wall into Romilly Street. Now yow’d better get some shut-eye, because this could just be one of those mornings,” added Barry mischievously. “G’night, kid.”
Alex did not sleep at all, or even try to. By eight thirty he was off the premises, leaving Barry Chilton dozing fitfully, his head on a parcel of porn. Barry had told him that he could get a shit-shave-and-shower in the Piccadilly Circus tube-station gents’, so that was where he headed first, on the assumption that Piccadilly Circus was not off limits so far as Detective Inspector Wills was concerned.
The streets were already busy, the shops opening, shutters coming down, the cafés filling up. You couldn’t even get a cupper tea in Leeds at this timer day. Punctuating the comings and goings, there seemed to be casually dressed men loitering on every corner. They couldn’t all be plain-clothes officers, for Chrissake. Was he being followed? A CCTV camera mounted over a sandwich shop swivelled as he ambled along Old Compton Street. Was Detective Inspector Wills, or one of his minions, tracking him?
This was getting ridiculous. He had a good mind to jump on a bus and just bugger off out of it, call Wills’s bluff. Trouble was, there seemed to be no bus service in So-oh, and he was buggered if he was going to take a taxi, even if he knew where he wanted to go.
He wandered on, turning up Wardour Street and then into Berwick Street. In Walkers Court a couple of shysters were already setting up an orange box for a Find the Lady game. Nah nah nah, been there, done that, you didn’t catch Alex out again with that one, and anyway they were probably plain-clothes men.
The rain clouds had cleared away leaving the streets bright and fresh-smelling in the early sunlight. The fresh smell, it proved, was a medley of ground coffee, newly baked bread, and the fruit and veg on the Berwick Street market stalls. The pungent odours gave the morning air a whiff of anticipation, but Alex couldn’t say he went a bundle on Berwick Street Market, it wasn’t a patch on the great glass-covered market up in Leeds. Seemed to him they didn’t know what a blurry market was down here, although he could have done with wunner them thick bacon sarnies that so many of the stallholders were getting their teeth into.
Hunger drove Alex on. Dodging the electric dustcart methodically mopping up the cabbage leaves, he meandered on until the cries of the market traders were distant sounds eventually drowned by traffic. Now he was in Broadwick Street, Lexington Street, Brewer Street with its vintage magazine store — big plastic statuette of Ringo he would’ve bought for Selby if he had any money and knew where she was — and thus, having come full circle without realising it, back to Old Compton Street. Seemed to be the centre of the blurry world round these parts, Old Compton Street did.
The aroma of Jamaican Blue Mountain wafting out of the Algerian Coffee Stores reminded him of the need for breakfast, so presently he established himself in Patisserie Valerie. This was the life, eh? He could really take to this caffy lark. They could do with wunner these places in Leeds — all they had was blurry Starbucks.
Finishing his croissant and mopping up the crumble of buttery flakes, he reached for the freebie newspaper that was lying across the table. Metro — yeh yeh yeh, they had something of the sort in Leeds, SOHO MURDER, MAN DRESSED AS WOMAN SLASHED IN ALLEY. By James Flood.
Jesus. That editress of his on the Examiner would have his guts for garters. Alex could almost smell the stench of fat sizzling in the fire.
He was wondering whether the dwindling budget would run to another cappuccino — pleasant though the prospect was, you practically had to take out a mortgage to get a cupper coffee down here — when into the café walked Ellis Hugo Bell of Bell Famous Productions. He was wearing dark glasses: nothing unusual about that, but normally he sported them on the top of his head while today he had them clamped firmly over his eyes. As he came nearer Alex saw why: he was trying to disguise a swollen, purple eye that looked as if he had done twelve rounds at the old Great Windmill Street gymnasium. The split lip and the grazed cheekbone he could unfortunately do nothing about.
Alex grinned. With what he imagined to be the Soho insider’s crafty knowingness he said: “Your mate Kim Grizzard finally catch up with you, did he?”