Killer Instinct

Eight

By the time I started my stint at the New Adelphi Club that Saturday night, the police had made little progress in tracking down Susie Hollins' killer. According to Clare's contact on the crime desk, at any rate.

I asked her to keep me informed, and she promised to give me an update when I went over to eat lunch with them on the Sunday. I think it was Clare's not-so-subtle way of reminding me to turn up.

I was still smiling to myself at her heavy hints when I pulled into the car park of the New Adelphi Club. I left the bike in a corner. Out of the way, but still covered by the cameras, of course, and ambled round to the back door.

Deciding what I was going to wear had been a difficult one. Marc eventually relented on the black jeans front. Considering my limited wardrobe, he didn't have much choice.

Some discussion had taken place about the rest of me, apparently. The best compromise they could come up with was one of the badged polo shirts worn by the bar staff. It was the only thing they'd got that was something like the right size.

Marc said if it worked out on a longer-term basis, he'd see about getting me something more suitable. He didn't specify what. I had visions of the mini-skirt and stiletto outfits worn by the girls waiting on the tables at the club. My acid comment that putting me in high heels would reduce my agility to that of a kipper had been received in noncommittal silence. Ah well.

I hammered on the back door until it swung open. I was expecting Gary, but it was Len who admitted me, dressed in his usual dinner suit uniform. I could imagine him going to ASDA, or down the launderette in it.

He looked me up and down insultingly, making it clear he didn't think he was looking at much. I kept my expression bland while he played his little game. I've dealt with the Lens of this world before, and this time I didn't want to join in. So I didn't challenge, didn't show fear or irritation. I just stood and waited until he decided I'd had enough.

“Let's just get this straight from the start,” he said at last, bolshy, jabbing a sausage-like finger a millimetre from my nose. I resisted the urge to bite at it. “The boss may have hired you, but I'm in charge of security in this place, see? You got a problem, you come to me. You don't go running to Mr Quinn. Clear?”

“Crystal,” I said, making my voice drawl just because I knew it would wind him up.

He grunted, but said nothing, turning and stamping off down the corridor and leaving me to follow on in his wake.

I sighed. It was going to be a fun evening.

Len eventually led me to one of the bars where the rest of his team were gathering. He didn't bother to introduce me while we waited until the last of them turned up. There were six of us altogether, including me, which proved me right in my own mind about Marc's problems. For a place the size of the New Adelphi, a dozen working security wouldn't have been overdoing it.

They were uniformly big men, who walked with their arms pushed out from their sides because of the amount of time they spent working on their back and chest muscles. It must be a qualification for the job that you have to have your neck shortened. I made an educated guess that their combined police records would make long and interesting reading.

They obviously all knew each other, judging from the friendly jokes and comments that were being tossed back and forth. I was carefully excluded from this display of macho camaraderie.

As opening up time approached, the walkie-talkies came out. Some of the team looked mildly taken aback when Len handed one to me.

“This is never the new lass is it, Len?” one of them asked. “Sorry, love, I thought you were bar staff,” he said to me. “The way Dave described you, I thought you'd be bigger.”

“Has nobody ever told you that size is not important?” I asked dryly. “You do surprise me.”

There were a few jeers at that. Even Len grinned, but he didn't ease up enough to show me how the walkie-talkie worked. He left me to work out the tangle of wires by myself.

Eventually I got it sorted. The main device, about the size of a mobile phone, hooked onto my belt, with a separate earpiece and a clip-on mic. The mic had its own remote transmit button. By leaning over someone's shoulder I gathered the channel we were operating on.

Len's only advice was short and sweet. “Unless it's a real emergency, stay off the air,” he told me, then turned to the others. “We're still spread thin, so you all know your areas. If you get a problem, give us your location first, then what's happening, otherwise we don't know where to come and get you out of the shit, do we?”

“So what's my brief?” I asked as the rest of the team each headed off to their own pitch.

“You can stick with me for tonight, I suppose,” he said grudgingly. “You can make regular checks on all the ladies' loos, and if Angelo needs you to search anyone on the door he'll send for you. He's not allowed to search the birds.”

At risk of appearing stupid, I chanced a question. “What am I looking for?”

He shrugged. “Nobody gets in if they're carrying a weapon,” he said. “If they've got drugs on them, it depends how much. If it's for their own use, we take it off them and let them in. If it's enough to deal, they're banned.”

“Sounds reasonable,” I said, nodding.

He swung round and glared at me unsuccessfully for signs of insubordination. That meaty finger prodded at me again. “They might offer you something to turn a blind eye. Don't take it – and if you do, don't think I won't find out about it,” he advised grimly. “Nothing – but nothing – goes on in this club that I don't know about. Clear?”

***

The evening started slowly enough. I shadowed Len for the first couple of hours or so as he made his rounds. It was interesting to take note of the reaction he received from the punters in the club. Most people dived out of his way as he strutted past, anxious not to attract his beady eye.

“So, how long have you been in this game, Len?” I asked when we reached a bit of a lull. He'd stopped pacing and we were leaning on a balcony overlooking one of the dance floors. His eyes never stopped moving over the growing crowd below us.

“Ten years, on and off,” he said shortly.

I waited, but he wasn't going to elaborate without further encouragement. “You must have seen quite a bit of trouble,” I ventured.

He glanced at me sharply, then nodded. “Goes with the territory.” I'd seen people give up teeth with less reluctance, but I thought I detected the faintest loosening.

“How does the New Adelphi compare?”

He shrugged. “No better, no worse,” he said. Just when I thought that was going to be the end of it, he decided to expand on the theme, turning towards me. “You'll always get the Friday night heroes when you open a new place. Want to prove how big a man they are by having a go at the doormen, right? Happens everywhere. That's why Mr Quinn brings his own people in, like me.”

He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Me and Angelo, we've been working for him in Manchester for years. He knows we'll stamp out the trouble before it starts. We've had to crack a few heads up here to begin with, but it doesn't take long before your reputation is enough to keep ’em out. You take on local guys and you don't know who they've pissed off and who they've given in to. You just run the risk of long-running feuds being brought into the club.”

It was the longest speech I'd heard him make. I opened my mouth to ask more, but my earpiece crackled. “Len, it's Angelo. Go to seven, mate.”

Len straightened up. “Keep checking for trouble in the loos, then stay round this area,” he ordered, striding away fiddling with the settings on his walkie-talkie and muttering into the mic.

I did much as I was told for the next hour. Nothing untoward appeared to be going on under my nose on the dance floor. I was quite surprised who I saw at the club, though.

I recognised one face, but took a few moments to put the right name to it. Joy, the brave one from my last class at the Lodge. She looked different away from her baggy track suit and serious expression.

Tonight she was thrashing around on the dance floor with a group of other girls, laughing and joking, with her arms draped round their shoulders. She didn't see me and I was suddenly wary about calling too much attention to myself.

At regular intervals I patrolled the ladies' on each floor. I nodded to Gary who was busy serving drinks in one of the upper bars. He flashed me a quick grin, harassed and sweating.

The loos didn't yield anything much to report. I wandered in, but nobody was actually shooting up over the washbasins. The most I found to complain about was the ladylike way some of the girls stubbed out their dog ends on lipstick-coated bits of sodden tissue in the sinks.

I discovered one couple in a passionate clinch in one of the cubicles and was about to throw one of them out for being in the wrong toilets when I realised they were both female. I made a mental note to ask the club policy on lesbian behaviour and left them to it.

I hardly saw Len again for quite some time. When I did he seemed to spend most of his time checking out the gents'. It was an interesting way to make a living, I supposed.

When I got back to the lower dance floor, Dave was well into his second set of the evening, lording it over his decks. He was biting his bottom lip in concentration, body jerking to the pulse beat of the music.

He had headphones, worn half on so they only covered one ear. More form than function. He looked up and caught sight of me, pulling his mic down to his lips with a wolfish grin. “Hey, it's the Foxy lady!”

I rolled my eyes, ignoring the smirking glances thrown in my direction. “Up yours,” I mouthed, heading for the stairs. I went back up to the next level, and resorted to watching the goings on from the balcony again.

“Don't worry about Dave, he tries to wind everyone up,” said a voice next to me. I turned to see one of the girls from the bar, carrying two fistfuls of empty glasses. She was tiny, not much over five foot, with dramatically spiked white blonde hair. The plastic badge pinned to her boyish chest told me her name was Victoria.

“I can handle him,” I said.

“Oh I don't think you'll have any problems,” she said. She broke into a big grin, the action dimpling her cheeks. She had a silver ring circling into one side of her nose, and two diamond-studded pegs through her eyebrow. “He's like a dog chasing cars, if you know what I mean – wouldn't know what to do with one if he got hold of it. And I should know.”

“He's tried it on with you, has he?” I asked.

She laughed. “Tried being the operative word. Trust me, the only place Dave can keep anything up is on a dance floor! Now Angelo on the other hand . . .” She winked at me, and darted away, somehow managing to pick up another glass as she weaved a careful path through the crush.

I turned back to the floor. Dave was just coming to the end of his shift. He handed over to another DJ and jumped down off the stage. It took him a while to get across the dance floor. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to stop him and give him a thumbs up, or pat him on the back. Anyone would think he'd just picked up a medal.

He jogged up the stairs and spotted me, grinning as he came over. He leaned on the balcony next to me. Sweat was dripping off him, his tight-fitting T-shirt streaked with dark stains.

“Well, Charlie, what did you think of the set?” he asked, although clearly he was already well aware of his own brilliance. He wiped a hand across his face, but he was sweating too much to make a difference.

“It seemed to go down very well,” I said cautiously.

“Very well?” he repeated, his voice almost scathing. “They love me out there. That's real power, that is. And there's nothing like it.” He looked down at himself. “I gotta go change before I go on again,” he said, straightening up.

He saw my sceptical look and fixed me with an intense gaze. “Believe me, Charlie, out there, knowing I've got this whole place in the palm of my hand – well, it's the best feeling I've ever had!”

He swung away. Victoria's scornful words came back to me. “Yeah, Dave,” I muttered under my breath, “for you, I bet it is.”

I was just about to go and make another dutiful tour of the toilets when my earpiece crackled again.

“Charlie? Front door,” came Angelo's distorted voice. “I need you for a search.”

I obligingly made my way to the entrance. Angelo and one of the other doormen were involved in a stand-off with a group of three blokes and their dates. They all looked pretty useful, and the body language when I arrived made it clear a confrontation was almost inevitable, if not already in progress.

“Listen, dickhead,” Angelo was growling at one of them, nose to nose. “The last time you tried to come in here, you had some stuff on you. Either you all get searched, or you all piss off. Now, which is it to be?”

“You lay one finger on my girlfriend and I'll fucking take you apart,” snarled the other bloke.

“I'm not going to lay a finger on her,” Angelo said, managing to imply that the girl was somehow unclean. He smiled his crocodile smile and gestured to me. “She is.”

The bloke looked like he was going to make a fuss, then realised he'd been backed into a corner. His girlfriend came forwards with a dare-you look on her face, her arms spread. I could have told Angelo I was wasting my time before I began by the gleeful look on her face, but I kept my mouth shut.

The last time anyone did a search on me it was a bored-looking policewoman on the way into one of the big indoor bike shows. I think they'd had a bomb scare. She seemed very keen to feel carefully along my arms. I remember wondering at the time if people really carried plastic explosive stuffed up their sleeves.

I racked my brains to recall the procedure and gave the girl what I hoped was a pro-looking pat-down search. I checked her pockets, then ran my hands along her arms and legs, waistband and back. I stepped back and shook my head at Angelo. He just smiled and held his hand out to her.

“Handbag,” he demanded, beckoning.

I saw the alarm flash across her face then. “You've no right to go through my things!” she blustered. Angelo beckoned again, making it clear his patience was wearing pretty thin.

I don't know what the girl had in her bag, but as she handed it over her boyfriend took advantage of Angelo's distracted hands to throw a fairly hefty punch at him.

He was obviously an amateur fighter, hoping to end it quickly with a heavy right. He wasn't prepared for Angelo's snake-like reactions. Wasn't ready for a swift and merciless counter-attack.

The fight that ensued should have been a one-sided affair. Three blokes and three women against two and one. It should have been, but it wasn't. The other doorman waded in to one of the men with a cheerful brutality. Word games were not his forte, but when it came to violence he was a poet.

Angelo was something one step removed. When I'd first seen him with Len, I'd thought he was the milder of the two, but I was wrong.

Now I had a chance to watch him in action as he head-butted the first bloke, then punched low into another's stomach, using more than enough force to put him down. When one of the girls jumped onto his back and tried to claw at his face, he dealt her a savage back-hand blow that knocked her sideways, without hesitation.

He spun round in a half-crouch, hands clenched, just waiting for the next chance to strike. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a soundless snarl. The blood vessels under the shaven skin of his head were pronounced and pulsing.

I recognised the blood lust in him, saw it in the wide, exultant eyes. Where Dave got his high from mixing music and controlling the crowd, Angelo's kick came from sinking his fists into another's face. No drink or drug could equal the buzz.

The girl's friends joined the battle with a shriek at that point. Angelo shrugged them off like he was batting away flies.

The man he'd head-butted was back fighting by then, blinking away the blood from a cut across his eyebrow. He took advantage of the girls' attack to launch a counter-offensive on Angelo's blind side. I reluctantly supposed it was time to put my two-penny-worth in.

I stepped round his flying fists without much difficulty, getting a good grip on his shirt front. I twisted my body into him and he flew straight over my hip, landing heavily. Before he had time to catch his breath I punted him over onto his face, yanking his arm up behind him and angling a pretty effective lock onto it. It was enough to keep him where he was and out of the action until it was all done.

Angelo and the other doorman looked disappointed that the clash was over so quickly. The opposition retreated, apart from the one I'd still got on the floor. I was about to ask what to do with him when Angelo ambled up.

Before I could react, he'd kicked the man viciously in the kidneys.

I couldn't keep the shock out of my face. My feet took me forwards on a knee-jerk reaction, not to assist Angelo this time, but to obstruct him. I seriously contemplated taking him down.

Angelo looked all set to go after the guy again, but he caught my intention and stiffened, neck banded with gorged muscle, hands clenched. We stood each other off, my eyes meeting his steadily. I don't know what Angelo thought he saw there, but for some reason he changed his mind about the pursuit.

He exchanged a nasty grin with his colleague. “You gotta deal with trouble hard and fast, Charlie,” he said when his victim had crawled to his feet and staggered away, helped by his mates. “You show any sign of weakness, and they'll rip you to pieces.”

He gave me the once-over, as if making up his mind about something. “You'll probably do,” he decided, his patronising tone putting my back up. “Your reflexes aren't bad. You just don't have the killer instinct.”

He turned away then, clapping the other doorman on the shoulder. They straightened their jackets, looking pleased with themselves. Angelo inspected his knuckles, which were slightly skinned. I could see the fresh wounds alongside the scabs from some previous engagement with the enemy.

He was trying to act calm, but he was still wired, jittery, couldn't keep his hands still.

Len arrived at this point. “You!” he said, glaring at me. “Get back to the lower floor.”

“Suit yourself,” I said as I moved past him. “Angelo called me up here.”

“Trouble?” Len asked him.

Angelo gave him a big smile. He flickered a glance over to me before replying.

“Nothing I couldn't handle,” he said.

When I got back to the lower dance floor things looked pretty quiet down there, if quiet's the word to use for music belted out of a massive sound system at full whack. Still, at least Marc seemed to have fitted decent equipment, and had it set up to perfection. Distortion is very wearing to listen to. At the New Adelphi, there wasn't any.

I made another round of the loos, still without finding anything startling to report. I noticed Len coming out of the gents' again on one of the upper floors. Either the guy was paranoid about the punters getting up to mischief in there, or he needed a good dose of Imodium.

I worked my way back down through the different levels again. If nothing else, climbing all these stairs was going to get me fit.

The club was starting to really fill up now. Getting from floor to floor was more of a push and struggle. My eyes were beginning to ache from constantly scanning the crowd in the smoky gloom. From trying to spot the furtive movement, the sly gesture. The first hint that something was wrong.

In the end I didn't see the trouble going down.

I heard it.