I had one last moment of clarity and handed Tanya a fiver and told her to make a break for it.
‘Go on, go. The Tube Station’s that way. Run. I’ll take care of Cindy.’
Tanya was stuck in indecision so I shouted at her again and finally she sprinted off. Well, there was no point in all of us getting nicked, was there?
I bent down and put my arm around Cindy as the police car roared to a halt in front of us.
‘Thank you Godfrey,’ Cindy said, her eyes full of gratitude. She leant towards me and tried to give me a kiss, but I pulled away at the last moment and kissed her on the forehead instead.
‘Let’s save it for another time, hey, shall we?’ I said sounding all heroic, although what I meant was, another time when you haven’t just had my gunk in your gob.
*
‘So, why don’t you talk us through it again? What were you doing on Tooting Common this morning?’ PC Butler asked me across the interview table. He and WPC Kensington remained completely expressionless, giving me a chronic case of the grins.
Talk your way out of this one genius, someone was laughing way off in my brain.
Me and my Ron Jeremy t-shirt had been reunited, as unfortunately had Tanya and Cindy. All three of us knew not to implicate Bling or the company so it was agreed beforehand if it came to it that we’d have to take it on the chin (a bit like Cindy had earlier).
‘Well, you’re not going to believe this,’ I started and PC Butler agreed, he wasn’t. ‘Tanya and Cindy are friends of mine. They’re models. Anyway, we decided to meet up and have a game of tennis and we all just got a bit carried away. We were having a game of dare-double-dare and, well as you can see, there’s just no calling their bluff.’
The two uniforms stared at me across the table wearing uniform expressions.
‘Who’s idea was it for the girls to take their clothes off?’ WPC Kensington asked.
‘Er, I’m not sure. I think it was a joint decision all around, they suggested it and I said I thought it was a good idea, or I suggested and... er, vice versa,’ I explained, tailing off at the end beneath their judgmental gazes.
‘Why don’t you tell us what you were really doing this morning?’ PC Butler suggested.
‘I have.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What happens now?’
‘Now you tell us the truth.’
‘But I have,’ I insisted.
‘No you haven’t, and you’re just making things worse for yourself by lying to us,’ PC Butler said.
‘I can’t help that,’ I told them. ‘I’m sorry that I’m making things worse for myself but this is the truth and I don’t know what else you want me to say. Do you want me to make something up and tell you that? Wouldn’t that get me into even more trouble?’
‘You’re in a whole lot of trouble already, you really don’t want to get in any more,’ WPC Kensington informed me.
‘I know,’ I replied.
‘Okay then, now how about the truth? What were you doing on those tennis courts this morning?’
‘Well, we were having a game of dare-double-dare right, and I said...’
‘Okay, let’s stop right there shall we?’
‘What?’
‘Mr Bishop, tell me something; what do you do for a living?’
‘Er... oh... I’m a... I’m a journalist.’
‘A journalist. And what newspaper do you work for?’
‘Well, it’s not really a newspaper, it’s more of a magazine.’
‘And what’s the name of this magazine?’
‘Um... Bling.’
‘I see, and how would you describe the contents of Bling, the magazine that you work for?’
‘Well, er, in a word – colourful.’
‘Colourful? Can you be more specific?’
‘Erm, not really, it’s kind of a complicated question. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at. I don’t really do a lot on the design side.’
‘Okay, let me put it like this, would it be fair to say that Bling, the magazine you work for, was full of pictures of women in the nude?’
‘Hmm...’ I mused, buying for time. ‘It would be difficult to argue with that one,’ I told him.
‘Yes or no?’ he insisted.
‘Er... yes.’
‘Let me ask you another question. I understand that the magazine you work for usually works two to three months ahead of publication. The edition that you’re working on at the moment, when does it appear in the shops?’
‘Ooh, well, now you’ve got me. I’m not really up with schedules.’
‘June time?’
‘Er... it could be, I don’t really know.’
‘What major sporting event takes place in June?’
‘The Olympics?’
‘Try Wimbledon.’
‘Does it really? “Come on Tim”,’ I said raising a fist.
‘So, you were shooting your Wimbledon edition of Bling on the tennis courts of Tooting Common, weren’t you?’
‘What? Absolutely not,’ I gasped, outraged at the very suggestion.
‘Look, the sooner you admit it the sooner you can go home, so come on, tell us what you were really doing.’
‘I already have.’
‘Why was there a guy taking pictures then and why did he run off as soon as we turned up?’
‘I didn’t see any guy. He was probably just some old pervert with one of those long range lenses.’
PC Butler leaned back and snorted with frustration. I guess he thought they had me banged to rights and I’d cough just as soon as I was pinched. But what would be the point? I was caught, I knew that, and nobody could help me. Boo-hoo, where was the gain in grassing Stuart and Howard up? Okay, you could argue that I might get myself off the hook by claiming that I was just the monkey and that Stuart was the organ grinder, but if in order to unhook myself I had to stoop to the level of a snitch, well, let’s just say I had a bit more self-respect than that. I mean, come on, I was a man, I knew what I was doing. I was a bit too old to go bawling my eyes out in front of the headmaster that it was actually a load of big boys who’d forced me to hold some first year’s head down the bog and flush the chain as I heard the cane swishing behind me. And it didn’t matter that Stuart and Howard had left us behind to get pinched because that was their level. This was mine.
‘You know, they’re really going to throw the book at you. You realise that, don’t you?’ PC Butler gloated. ‘We have witnesses who claim that the girls were not only naked, but that you were instructing them to perform sex acts on each other in front of two fourteen year old boys. That will not be looked upon kindly by the magistrate. I’d be surprised if you weren’t looking at prison time for that sort of thing and five years on the sex offenders’ register. How would you like to have to disclose that every time you went for a new job or moved house?’ he asked.
I merely stared at him, my cockiness suddenly evaporated.
‘Is there anything you’d like to tell us now?’ WPC Kensington asked, when I failed to say anything.
I stayed silent for a moment longer and thought about my options. That couldn’t be true, could it? That I would be classed as a sex offender? Surely this was a bluff. But if it was, it was a very good bluff.
No, I couldn’t believe that. People streaked at cricket matches all the time and only ever got a slap on the wrist. Mind you, streaking was one thing, banging yourself off when you got to the stumps, that was another.