The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

TROUBLE IS A LONESOME TOWN by Cathi Unsworth

Dougie arrived at the concourse opposite the station just half an hour after it had all gone off. He’d had the cab driver drop him down the end of Gray’s Inn Road, outside a pub on the corner there, where he’d made a quick dive into the gents to remove the red hood he’d been wearing over the black one, pulled on a Burberry cap he’d had in his bag so that the visor was down over his eyes. That done, he’d worked his way through the mass of drinkers, ducked out of another door and walked the rest of the way to King’s Cross.

The Adidas bag he gripped in his right hand held at least twenty grand in cash. Dougie kind of wished it was handcuffed to him; so paranoid was he about letting go of it even for a second that he’d had trouble just putting it on the floor of the taxi between his feet. He’d wanted it to be on his knee, in his arms, more precious than a baby. But Dougie knew that above all else, now, he had to look calm, unperturbed. Not like a man who’d just ripped off a clip joint and left a man for dead on a Soho pavement.

That’s why he’d had the idea of making the rendezvous at the Scottish Restaurant across the road from the station. He’d just blend in with the other travellers waiting for their train back up North, toting their heavy bags, staring at the TV with blank, gormless expressions as they pushed stringy fries smothered in luminous ketchup into their constantly moving mouths. The way he was dressed now, like some hood rat, council estate born and bred, he’d have no trouble passing amongst them.

He ordered his quarterpounder and large fries, with a super-size chocolate lard shake to wash it all down, eyes wandering around the harshly lit room as he waited for it all to land on his red plastic tray. All the stereotypes were present and correct. The fat family (minus dad, natch) sitting by the window, mother and two daughters virtually indistinguishable under the layers of flab and identical black-and-white hairstyles by Chavettes of Tyneside to match the colours of their footie team. The solitary male, a lad of maybe ten years and fifteen stone, staring sullenly out of the window through pinhole eyes, sucking on the straw of a soft drink that was only giving him back rattling ice cubes. On the back of his shirt read his dreams: 9 SHEARER. But he was already closer to football than footballer.

Then there was the pimp and his crack whore; a thin black man sat opposite an even thinner white woman with bruises on her legs and worn-down heels on her boots. Her head bowed like she was on the nod, while he, all angles and elbows and knees protruding from his slack jeans and oversize Chicago Bulls shirt, kept up a steady monologue of abuse directed at her curly head. The man’s eyes were as rheumy as a 70-year-old’s, and he sprayed fragments of his masticated fries out as he kept on his litany of insults. Sadly for Iceberg Slim, it looked like the motherfuckingbitchhocuntcocksucker he was railing at had already given up the ghost.

Oblivious to the psychodrama, the Toon Army had half of the room to themselves, singing and punching the air, reliving moment-by-moment the two goals they’d scored over Spurs – well, thank fuck they had, wouldn’t like to see this lot disappointed. They were vile enough in victory, hugging and clasping at each other with tears in their eyes, stupid joker’s hats askew over their gleaming red faces; they might as well have been bumming each other, which was obviously what they all wanted.

Yeah, Dougie liked to get down among the filth every now and again, have a good wallow. In picking over the faults of others he could forget about the million and one he had of his own.

Handing over a fiver to the ashen bloke behind the counter, who had come over here thinking nothing could be worse than Romania, Dougie collected his change and parked himself inconspicuously in the corner. Someone had left a copy of The Scum on his table. It was a bit grubby and he really would have preferred to use surgical gloves to touch it, but it went so perfectly with his disguise and the general ambience of the joint that he forced himself. Not before he had the bag firmly wedged between his feet, however, one of the handles round his ankle so if anyone even dared to try…

Dougie shook his head and busied himself instead by arranging the food on his plastic tray in a manner he found pleasing: the fries tipped out of their cardboard wallet into the half of the Styrofoam container that didn’t have his burger in. He opened the ketchup so that he could dip them in two at a time, between mouthfuls of burger and sips of chocolate shake. He liked to do everything methodically.

Under the headline STITCHED UP, the front page of The Scum was tirelessly defending the good character of the latest batch of rapist footballers who’d all fucked one girl between the entire team and any of their mates who fancied it. Just so as they could all check out each other’s dicks while they did it, Dougie reckoned. That sort of shit turned his stomach almost as much as the paper it was printed on, so he quickly flipped the linen over, turned to the racing pages at the back. That would keep his mind from wandering, reading all those odds, totting them all up in his head, remembering what names went with what weights and whose colours. All he had to do now was sit tight and wait. Wait for Lola.

Lola.

Just thinking about her name got his fingertips moist, got little beads of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. Got a stirring in his baggy sweat pants so that he had to look up sharply and fill his eyes with a fat daughter chewing fries with her mouth open and to get it back down again.

Women didn’t often have this effect on Dougie. Only two, so far, in his life. And he’d gone further down the road with this one than anyone else before.

He could still remember the shock he felt when he first saw her, when she sat herself down next to him at the bar with a tired sigh and asked for a whisky and soda. He caught the slight inflection in her accent, as if English wasn’t her first language, but her face was turned away from him. A mass of golden brown curls bobbed on top of her shoulders, she had on a cropped leopardskin jacket and hipster jeans, a pair of pointy heels protruding from the bottom, wound around the stem of the barstool. The skin on her feet was golden brown too; mixed race she must have been and, for a minute, Dougie thought he knew what she would look like before she turned her head, somewhere between Scary Spice and that bird off Holby City. An open face, pretty and a bit petulant. Maybe some freckles over the bridge of her nose.

But when she did turn to him, cigarette dangling between her lips and long fingers wound around the short, thick glass of amber liquid, she looked nothing so trite as “pretty”.

Emerald green eyes fixed him from under deep lids, fringed with the longest dark lashes he had ever seen. Her skin was flawless, the colour of the whisky in her glass, radiating that same intoxicating glow.

For a second he was taken back to a room in Edinburgh a long time ago. An art student’s room, full of draped scarves and fake Tiffany lamps and a picture on the wall of Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel. This woman looked strangely like Marlene. Marlene with an afro. Black Angel.

She took the cigarette from between her red lips and asked: “Could you give me a light?” Her glittering eyes held his brown ones in a steady gaze, a smile flickered over her perfect lips.

Dougie fumbled in the sleeve of his jacket for his Zippo and fired it up with shaking fingers. Black Angel inhaled deeply, closing her bronze-coloured eyelids as she sucked that good smoke down, blowing it out again in a steady stream.

Her long lashes raised and she lifted her glass to him simultaneously. “Cheers!” she said and he caught that heavy inflection again. Was he going mad, or did she even sound like Marlene too? “Ach,” she tossed back her mane of curls, “it’s so good to be off vork!”

“I’ll drink to that,” Dougie said, feeling like his tongue was too big for his head, his fingers were too big for his hands, that he was entirely too big and clumsy. He slugged down half his pint of Becks to try and get some kind of equilibrium, stop this weird, teenage feeling that threatened to paralyze him under the spell of those green eyes.

She looked amused.

“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.

Dougie gave his standard reply. “Och, you know. This an’ that.”

It pleased her, this answer, so she continued to talk. Told him in that smoky, laconic drawl all about the place she worked. One of the clip joints off Old Compton Street, the ones specifically geared up to rip off the day trippers.

“It izz called Venus in Furs,” she told him. “Is fucking tacky shit, yeah?”

He started to wonder if she was Croatian, or Serbian. Most of the girls pouring into Soho now were supposed to be ones kidnapped from the former Yugoslavia. “Slavic” was a word that suited the contours of her cheeks, the curve of her green eyes. But how could that be? Dougie didn’t think there was much of a black population in Eastern Europe. And he couldn’t imagine anyone having the balls to kidnap this one. Maybe she was here for a different reason.

Images raced through his mind. Spy films, Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War. High on her accent, he didn’t really take the actual words in.

Until at some point close to dawn, she lifted a finger and delicately traced the outline of his jaw. “I like you Dougie,” she smiled. “I vill see you here again, yes?”

Dougie wasn’t really a one for hanging out in drinking clubs. He had only been in this one because earlier that evening he’d had to have a meet in Soho and he couldn’t stand any of the pubs round there. Too full, too noisy, too obvious. This was one of the better places. Discreet, old fashioned, not really the sort of place your younger generation would go for, it was mainly populated by decaying actors skulking in a dimly lit world of memory. It was an old luvvie who’d first shown him the place. An old luvvie friend of a friend who’d been ripped off for all his Queen Anne silver and a collection of Penny Blacks by the mercenary young man he’d been silly enough to invite back for a nightcap. Dougie had at least got the silver back, while the guy was sleeping off what he’d spent the proceeds of the stamps on. He really didn’t come here often, but as he watched the woman slip off her stool and shrug on her furry jacket he felt a sudden pang and asked: “Wait a minute – what’s your name?”

She smiled and said: “It’s Lola. See you again, honey.” And then she was gone.

Dougie found himself drifting back to the club the next evening. It was weird, because he’d kept himself to himself for so long he’d felt like his heart was a hard, cold stone that no one could melt. It was best, he had long ago told himself, not to form attachments in his line of work. Attachments could trip you up. Attachments could bring you down. It was better that no one knew him outside his small circle of professional contacts and the clients they brought. Safer that way. He’d done six months time as a teenager, when he was stupid and reckless and had vowed he’d never be caught that way again.

He was mulling over all these facts as he found himself sat at the bar. He didn’t quite know what he thought he was doing there, just that he felt his heart go each time the buzzer went and a new group of people clattered down the steps. Lola had come into the place alone. He supposed he could ask the Guv’nor what he knew about her, but that didn’t seem very gentlemanly. After all, he wasn’t a regular himself. Who knew how long she’d been making her way down here after the grind of an evening “huzzling the schmucks” under Venus’ neon underskirts?

At half past one she had wound her way down the stairs towards him. A smile already twitching at the corners of her mouth, she was pleased to see him. One look up her long, bare, perfect legs to her leather miniskirt and that same leopard jacket and he felt the same.

“He-looo, Dougie,” she said.

Dougie felt drunk, as he had ever since.

Gradually, over whisky and sodas with the ice crinkling in the glass, she’d told him her story. It was all very intriguing. Her father was Russian, she said, ex-KGB, who since the fall of Communism had managed to create an empire for himself in electronic goods. He was a thug, but a charming one – he had named her after a character in a Raymond Chandler book that he’d read, contraband, as a teenager. They had a lot of money, but he was very strict. Made her study hard and never go out. There was not a lot of emotion between him and her mother.

Her mother was an oddity, a Somalian. Lola didn’t know how they met, but she suspected. Back in the old days, it was quite possible her father had bought her out of semi-slavery in a Moscow brothel. Her mother always claimed she was a princess, but she was also a drunk, so what was Lola to believe? She was beautiful, that was for sure. Beautiful and superstitious, always playing with a deck of strange cards and consulting patterns in tea leaves. She might have mastered dark arts, but never managed to speak Russian – probably she never wanted to. So Lola grew up speaking two languages, in one big, empty apartment in Moscow.

Right now, she was supposed to be in Switzerland. She looked embarrassed when she told Dougie this. “At finishing school. Can you believe? Vot a cliché.” Lola had done a bunk six months ago. She’d crossed Europe, taking cash-in-hand work as she did, determined to get to London. She wanted to escape while she was in the “free West” rather than go back to what she knew would be expected of her in Russia. Marriage to some thick, bastard son of one of her father’s ex-comrades. A life of looking nice and shutting up, just like her mother.

But she feared her father’s arm was long. There were too many Russians in London already. Someone was bound to rat her out before long, the reward money would be considerable. So she had to get together a “travelling fund” and find somewhere else to go. Somewhere safe.

“Vere are you from, Dougie?” she purred. “Not from round here, eh?”

“What do you reckon?” he said archly. “Where d’you think I got a name like Dougie from, heh?”

Lola laughed, put her finger on the end of his nose.

“You are from Scotland, yes?”

“Aye,” nodded Dougie.

“Where in Scotland?”

“Edinburgh.”

“Vol’s it like in Edinburgh?”

A warning voice in Dougie’s head told him not to even give her that much. This story she had spun for him, it sounded too much like a fairytale. She was probably some down-on-her-luck Balkans hooker looking for a sugar daddy. No one could have had the lifestyle she described. It was too far-fetched, too mental.

The touch of her finger stayed on the end of his nose. Her green eyes glittered under the optics. Before Dougie knew what he was doing, words were coming out of his mouth.

She had given him the germ of an idea. The rest he filled in for himself.

The Venus In Furs was not run by an established firm, even by Soho standards. Its ostensible owners were a bunch of chancy Jamaican wide boys whose speciality was taking over moody drinking dens by scaring the incumbents into thinking that they were Yardies. Dougie doubted that that was the case. They could have been minor players, vaguely connected somehow, but Yardie lands were South of the river. Triads and Micks ran Soho. He doubted these fellas would last long in the scheme of things anyway, so he decided to help Lola out and give fate a hand.

Trying to help her, or trying to impress her?

It helped that her shifts were regular. Six nights a week, six till twelve. Plenty of time to observe who came and went on a routine basis. Maybe her old man really was KGB ‘cos she’d already worked out the day that the Suit came in would be the significant one.

There was this office, behind the bar, where they did all their business. Three guys worked the club in a rota, always two of them there at the same time. Lynton, Neville and Little Stevie. They had a fondness for Lola, her being blood, so it was usually her they asked to bring drinks through when they had someone to impress in there. She said the room had been painted out with palm trees and a sunset, like one big Hawaiian scene.

Like everyone, Dougie thought, playing at gangsters – they were playing Scarface.

Once a week, a bald white guy in a dowdy brown suit came in with an attache case. Whichever of the Brothers Grim were in at the time would make themselves scarce while he busied himself in the office for half an hour. One of them would hang at the bar, the other find himself a dark corner with one of the girls. Then the bald man would come out, speak to no one and make his own way out of the club.

Every Thursday, 8 p.m., punctual as clockwork he came.

That proved it to Dougie. The lairy Jamaicans were a front to terrify the public. The bald man collected the money for their unseen, offshore master. With his crappy suit and unassuming exterior, he was deliberately done up like a mark to blend in with the rest of the clientele.

Dougie had a couple of guys that owed him favours. They weren’t known faces, and it would be difficult to trace them back to him, their paths crossed infrequently and they moved in different worlds. On two successive Thursdays, he gave them some folding and sent them in as marks. Both confirmed Lola’s story, and gave him more interesting back-up on the Brothers Grim. Both weeks, it was the same pair, Little Stevie and Neville, little and large. Large Neville, a tall skinny guy with swinging dreads and shades who was always chewing on a toothpick, sat behind the bar when the bald man showed up. He practised dealing cards, played patience, drank beer and feigned indifference to the world around him, nodding all the while as if a different, slow skanking soundtrack was playing in his head to the cheesy Europop that was on the club’s PA.

Little Stevie, by comparison, always grabbed himself a girl and a bottle and made his way over to the corner booth. While Neville looked like a classic stoner, Little Stevie was mean. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with thick gold chains around his bulldog neck. A pork pie hat and thick black shades totally obscured his eyes. Ocassionally, like when the girl slipped underneath the table, he would grin a dazzling display of gold and diamond dental work. Stevie always drank proper Champagne – not the pear fizz served to the punters as such – and both Dougie’s contacts copped the telltale bulge in his pocket.

Stevie’s booth was the one from which the whole room could be surveyed and, even while receiving special favours, he never took his eye off the game. The minute the office door clicked open and the bald man slipped away he would knee his girl off him, adjust his balls and whatever else was down there, and swagger his way back over to the office all puffed up and bristling, Neville following at his heels.

Yeah, Stevie, they all agreed, was the one to watch.

While they were in there playing punters, Dougie was watching the door.

The Venus was based in a handy spot, in a dingy alley between Rupert Street and Wardour Street. There was a market in Rupert Street and all he had to do was pretend to be examining the tourist tat on the corner stall. The bald man went the other way. Straight to a waiting cab on Wardour Street. Each time the same.

On the night it all happened, Dougie felt a rush in his blood that he hadn’t felt since Edinburgh, like every platelet was singing to him the old songs, high and wild as the wind.

God, he used to love that feeling, used to let it guide him in the days when he was Dougie the Cat, the greatest burglar in that magical city of turrets and towers.

But now he was Dougie Mackingtosh Investigates, the Private Eye for the sort of people who couldn’t go to the police. He had changed sides on purpose after that first prison jolt, never wanting to be in close proximity to such fucking filth ever again. If you couldn’t be a gentleman thief these days, he reckoned, then why not be a Bad Guy’s PI? His methods may have differed from those used by the Old Bill, but Dougie had kept his nose clean for eighteen years, built up his reputation by word of mouth and made a good living from sorting out shit without causing any fuss. Filled a proper gap in the market, he had.

His blood had never sung to him in all that time. He supposed it must have awakened in him that first night he met Lola, grown strong that night she’d finally allowed him back to her dingy flat above a bookie’s in Balham, where she had so studiously drawn out the map of the Venus’ interior before unzipping his trousers and taking him to a place that seemed very close to Heaven.

Bless her, he didn’t need her map. He didn’t even need to know what Neville and Stevie got up to, only that they were good little gangsters and stayed where they were, in that little palace of their imagination where they could be Tony Montana every day.

He wasn’t going to take them on.

All he needed was the thirty seconds between the Venus’ door and Wardour Street. And the curve in the alley that meant the taxi driver wouldn’t be able to see. All he needed was the strength of his arm and the fleetness of his feet and the confusion of bodies packed into a Soho night.

At the end of the alley he slipped a balaclava over his head, put the blue hood over the top of that and began to run.

He was at full sprint as the bald man came out of the door, fast enough to send him flying when he bowled into his shoulder. The man’s arms spread out and he dropped his precious cargo to the floor. Dougie was just quick enough to catch the look of astonishment in the pale, watery eyes, before he coshed him hard on the top of his head and they rolled up into whites. He had another second to stoop and retrieve the case before he was off again, out of the alley, across Wardour Street, where the taxi was waiting, its engine running, the driver staring straight ahead.

Dougie was already in the downstairs bogs of the Spice of Life before the cabbie was checking his watch to make sure he hadn’t turned up early. Had pulled out his sports bag from the cistern where he’d stashed it and bust the lock on the attache case by the time the cabbie turned the engine off and stepped out of the car to take a look around. Dougie’s deftness of touch was undiminished by his years on the other side. He counted the bundles of cash roughly as he transferred them into his sports bag, eyebrows raising as he did. It was quite a haul for a weekly skim off a clip joint. He briefly wondered what else they had going on down there, then chased the thought away as excess trouble he didn’t need to know.

By the time the cabbie was standing over the crumpled heap in the alleyway, he had put the attache case in the cistern and taken off the blue hood, rolling it into a ball as he nipped out of the side door of the pub. He junked it in a bin as he came out onto Charing Cross Road and hailed himself a ride up to King’s Cross.

Dougie looked up from his racing pages. As if struck by electrodes, he knew Lola was in the room. She walked towards him, green eyes dancing, clocking amusedly his stupid cap and the bag that lay between his feet. Sat down in front of him and breathed: “Is it enough?”

“Aye,” nodded Dougie. “It’s enough.”

He hadn’t wanted there to be any way in which Lola could be implicated in all this. He’d had her phone in sick for two days running, told her just to spend her time packing only the essentials she needed and gave her the money for two singles up to Edinburgh.

The night train back to the magic city, not even the Toon Army could ruin that pleasure for him.

“You ready?” he asked her.

Her grin stretched languidly across her perfect face.

“Yes,” she purred. “I’m ready.”

Dougie gripped the Adidas bag, left his floppy fries where they lay. As they stepped out onto the road, St Pancras was lit up like a fairytale castle in front of them. “See that,” he nudged her shoulder, “that’s bollocks compared to where we’re going.”

His heart and his soul sung along with his blood. He was leaving the Big Smoke, leaving his life of shadows, stepping into a better world with the woman he loved by his side. He took her hand and strode towards the crossing, towards the mouth of Kings Cross Station.

Then Lola said: “Oooh, hang on a minute. I have to get my bag.”

“You what?” Dougie was confused. “Don’t you have it with you?”

She laughed, a low, tinkling sound. “No honey, I left it just around the corner. My friend, you know, she runs a bar there and I didn’t want to lug it around with me all day. She’s kept it safe for me, behind the bar. Don’t vorry, it von’t take a minute.”

Dougie was puzzled. He hadn’t heard about this friend or this bar before. But, in his limited experience of women, this was typical. Just when you thought you had a plan, they’d make some little amendment. He guessed that was just the way their minds worked. She leaned to kiss his cheek and whispered in his ear: “Ve still have half an hour before the train goes.”

The pub was, literally, round the corner. One of those horrible, bland chain brewery joints heaving with overweight office workers trying to get lucky with their sniggering secretaries in the last, desperate minutes before Closing Time.

He lingered by the door as Lola hailed a bored-looking blonde behind the bar. Watched her take a small blue suitcase from behind the bar, kiss the barmaid on each cheek and come smilingly back towards him.

A few seconds before she reached him, her smile turned to a mask of fear.

“Oh, shit,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him away from the doorway. “It’s fucking Steve.”

“What?”

“This vay,” she had his arm firmly in her grasp now, was propelling him through to the other side of the bar, towards the door marked TOILETS, cursing and talking a million miles an hour under her breath.

“Steve was standing right outside the door. I svear to God it was him. I told you, he is bad luck that one, he’s voodoo, got a sixth sense – my Mama told me about sheiit like him. We can’t let him see us! I’m supposed to be off sick the night he gets ripped off – he’s gonna know! He’s gonna kill me if he sees me.”

“Hen, you’re seeing things,” Dougie tried to protest as she pushed him through the door, down some steps into a dingy basement which smelt of piss and stale vomit.

“I’m not, it vos him, it vos him!” she looked like she was about to turn hysterical, her eyes were flashing wildly and her nails were digging into his flesh. He tried to use his free hand to extricate himself from her iron grip, but that only served to make her cling on harder.

“Hen, calm down, you’re hurting me…” Dougie began.

“There’s someone coming!” she screamed and suddenly began to kiss him passionately, smothering him in her arms, grinding her teeth against his lips so that he tasted blood.

And then he heard a noise right behind him.

And the room went black.

“Fucking Hell,” Lola looked down on Dougie’s prone body. “That took long enough.”

“I told you he was good,” her companion pouted, brushing his hands on his trousers. “But I thought you’d enjoy using all your skills on him.”

“Hmm,” Lola bent down and prised Dougie’s fingers away from the Adidas bag. “I knew this would be the hardest part. Getting money out of a tight fucking Jock.”

That slinky Russian accent had disappeared like a puff of smoke. She sounded more like the petulant queen she was now.

“Come on.” She stepped over her would-be Romeo and the pile of shattered ashtray glass he lay in. “Let’s get out of here.”

The car was parked nearby. As Lola got into the passenger seat, she pulled the honey-gold Afro wig off her head and ran her fingers through the short black fuzz underneath.

“I am soooo tired of that bitch,” she said, tossing it into the backseat.

Her companion started the car with a chuckle.

“He fucking believed everything, didn’t he?” he shook his head as he pulled out.

“Yeah… and you said he was a private detective. Well, let me tell you honey, you wouldn’t believe what I suckered that dick with. My dad was a Russian gangster. My mother was a Somalian princess. I was on the run from Swiss finishing school. Can you believe it?”

Lola hooted with derision. “Almost like the fairytales I used to make up for myself,” she added. “You know, I thought he might fucking twig when I told him I was named after a character in Raymond Chandler. But I couldn’t resist it.”

“Well,” her companion smiled at her fondly. “You certainly made up for the loss of that Queen Anne silver. We’ve got enough to keep us going for months now. So where do you fancy?”

“Not back to Soho,” Lola sniffed, as the car pulled into the slipstream of Marylebone Road. “I’ve fucking had it with those posing thugs. I know. I fancy some sea air. How does Brighton sound to you?”

“The perfect place,” her companion agreed, “for a couple of actors.”

Dougie came around with his face stuck to a cold stone floor with his own blood. Shards of glass covered him. He could smell the acrid stench of piss in his nostrils, and from the pub above, he could hear a tune, sounding like it was coming from out of a long tunnel of memory. He could just make out the lyrics: “I met her in a club down in old Soho/Where you drink Champagne and it tastes like cherry cola…”

In loving memory of Lee Hazlewood 1929-2007, who had all the best stories and all the best songs.