Bodies (11 page)

“Anyway, you did it?”

“Yes, I did. I wish to hell . . . sorry . . . I wish I never had. They picked me up at home, put on a blindfold in the car, and took me to the studio. There was just this chap I'd met in the pub—he was sort of director—and one cameraman, and this girl, or rather woman . . . ”

“You recognized her? She was the girl who was killed?”

“No. That wasn't her. The report said she had light brown hair, and this girl had dark brown hair.”

“These things can be arranged.”

“It wasn't her. There was a picture in the paper, and it wasn't the girl. This girl was sort of . . . tartish. Common—know what I mean? . . . Anyway, we took our clothes off, and . . . and this bloke directed it all . . . and we sort of did it. It was all stimulated, like you said.”

“Simulated.”

“Right. But I didn't like it at all, even so. I mean, I felt it was sort of
beneath me. I just did what he told me and thought of that lat machine.”

“Mrs. Stanley Baldwin would probably have approved.”

“Who's she?”

“She is said to have recommended shutting one's eyes and thinking of England.”

“Was she in these films?”

“I think I can say quite categorically, no. So, when the film, or the episode, was in the can, you put the blindfold on again and they took you home?”

“That's right.”

“And that's it, is it? Story over?”

“Well, I thought it was. Hoped it was. I don't know why you're so cynical about it. That's what happened.”

“Cynical? I'm not cynical. It's a jolly good story. I just have the idea that something has been left out.”

“I haven't left nothing out, honest.” Denny's face showed consternation, and his grammar slipped. “I've told you everything.”

“Oh no, I don't think so. Because nothing that you've told me so far explains why, when you saw the story of the
Bodies
murders in the papers, you upped and fled to Aberdeen.”

He looked up at me from his seat on the bench, and I put on my most inexorable expression. His eyes once more went down to a contemplation of his nether extremities, and he stayed for some minutes in thought.

“It was just that . . . when I was there . . . ”

“Where?”

“Filming . . . in the studio . . . though I'd taken all these precautions . . . I thought I recognized the place.”

“Ah.”

“See, I'd posed for Bob Cordle, like I said, and though there were classy drapes all around the walls, and o' course a bed, which I'd never seen . . . ”

“Yes?”

“ . . . still, I had the idea that the studio where we made the film was the studio in the
Bodies
office.”

“Yes, I did rather think it might be,” I said.

• • •

Well, it was a jolly good story, as I said. Story being the operative word, because I had the idea that parts of it at least were pure fiction. The point was, which parts? I had a night in the Aberdeen hotel, with
a miniature whisky from my room bar whose price suggested it had been brought overland by gold-plated Cadillac from Samarkand rather than distilled in the vicinity, and I had a dawn taxi-ride and the early flight to London to stew the thing over in my mind, sift through the various elements in the story, and fix on the bits I believed in, and the bits I didn't.

It was a real problem. Take the most idiotic element in the whole story, Denny's claim to have insisted on being blindfolded to and from the studio where he had filmed his little bit of porn. Did the idiocy spring from his improvisation under my pressure, or from his stupid attempts to keep himself in the clear even as he dabbled in the dirt? Other elements in his story I was also dubious about. Did he really not know the man who approached him in the pub? Or the woman he appeared with in the film?
Was
it a woman, and was the film really just straight sex? If it was something bent, Denny would be inclined to lie about that. Nothing bent about bodybuilders!

I was back home—such is the wonder of modern travel, that compensates for its discomfort and monotony—for a late breakfast in the Abbey Road flat with Jan and Daniel, our son. Jan was doing translations for various Arabian Gulf embassies at the time, work which mostly could be done at home. Considering the staggering size of their oil revenues, the pay was meagre, but Jan said she enjoyed the work. Of course, over cereals and toast I gave her an edited version of what I'd been up to up North.

“And what was he like, this Denzil?”

“Not too bright. Apart from the one subject of her beautiful son, his mum was a hundred times sharper. I suppose she's been part of the problem with Denny. Everything seems to have fallen away, except the contemplation of his fantastic body—its development, its presentation, its needs. He's become the complete Narcissus. Though perhaps cattle gazing at themselves in a pond gives a better idea of what he's like.”

“Yes,” said Jan thoughtfully. “You were a bit like that when you were really serious about the weight-lifting thing.”

“I was
not!”

“You were, Perry. You used to spend hours lifting those ball things in front of the mirror in the bedroom, and watching your biceps swell, and wondering whether your pectorals were expanding. It was pathetic.”

“What a whopper! There's no mirror in the bedroom, anyway.”

“That was back in the Edgware flat, before we moved anyway.”

“There was no mirror in the bedroom there either.”

I can understand why wives tell lies about their husbands when there are other people present, but I've never understood why they tell them when there's only the husband there. Most certainly there were no mirrors in the bedroom of the Edgware flat. In fact, the only mirror in the whole flat was in the bathroom. I remember I found it awfully inconvenient.

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK
to New Scotland Yard it was still fairly early in the day, but I found there was someone waiting for me—a girl, pretty, dark, probably in her early twenties.

“I'm Sally Fox,” she said, coming with me into my office. “I won't take up much of your time. You may know what I'm going to tell you, or it may not be of relevance anyway.”

I sat her down, and she refused my offer of tea or coffee.

“No, thanks. I have to be at Bedford College by eleven. I'm a postgraduate student there, and that's how I met Susan Platt-Morrison, of course. We shared a seminar, and occasionally met while we were waiting to see Professor Hardy. Sometimes we used to get together over a coffee or a beer to discuss our thesis. Mine is on Mrs. Gaskell, and the topics overlapped.”

“So you were a friend of hers.”

I had said it as a statement rather than a question, but it made Sally pause for a moment.

“No. No, I wouldn't say that. Susan was a very cool girl, almost distant, and very self-reliant. Mostly when we got together the talk was about academic things.”

“But not entirely, I suppose, since you're here.”

“No. For example, I knew about the posing, how much it brought her in, and so on. She always told you the cost of anything she'd bought, or what anything she'd done had brought her in. Quite coolly, not so much as if she was obsessed with money, rather that it was one of the facts of life it was silly to ignore.”

“Not money-mad, but money-based?”

“That's about it. She asked me at one time if I would fancy doing that kind of posing: she said she could introduce me to the right people if I was.”

“You didn't take her up on that?”

“No. I said I'd think about it, but I never took her up. I don't know why. I was a bit of a feminist in my teens, and they're very hot on the exploitation angle. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it just seemed a bit grubby. One wouldn't feel too good about the sort of people who'd be looking at you. Susan never brought it up again, but she always talked quite naturally about her own posing, and about the offers she got.”

“Offers?”

“Of work, I mean. That was what I wanted to tell you about. I had coffee with her after a seminar, several weeks before she was killed. She said she'd had this offer—‘Real money,' I remember she said—if she'd do something that went a bit further than the sort of posing she'd been doing. What the man who approached her had in mind was a short film—”

“Ah yes, I thought it might be.”

“A sex film, of course, for the video market. She said there were various proposals—some of them ‘a real hoot,' she said. She used that sort of language, though she wasn't upper class, and certainly not of that generation. Some of the possibilities that had been suggested were for pretty kinky films. She said if she did it, she didn't care much either way whether it was straight or kinky. She said she'd just regard it as a job of work, and hope that it wasn't
so
ludicrous that she collapsed with laughter.”

“You mean she'd decided to take up the offer?”

“No . . . She said specifically that she hadn't decided. I had the impression, though, that she probably would.”

“Is that just because of the sort of person she was?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I didn't dislike her—
really
I didn't—and yet there was very little to like, or to respond to. So hard and cold. I met her once with her mother, at a matinée of
Cards on the Table,
and I think I could guess where the hardness came from . . . And yet she was such a beautiful girl.”

“Lovely,” I agreed.

“Beautiful,”
she insisted. “The whole hog. You'd have agreed if you'd ever seen her in life. It sometimes made me wonder. Yeats has some lines about women who, ‘being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty, a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness—' something, something, something—‘and never find a friend.' I felt that had happened with Susan. No natural kindness, no warmth, no ability to make friends, because she had nothing to give. Perhaps it was her family, perhaps it was her beauty, but that's how she was. I think everything was judged quite coolly by her: profit and loss, advantage and disadvantage to Susan Platt-Morrison. If she thought the money made it worth her while going into these films, she'd have done them. It's difficult not to sound self-righteous, but from what she said they sounded a good deal worse than grubby.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “They'd have been a lot nastier than grubby.”

When she'd gone, I went along and found Garry Joplin in the Yard canteen, and had a chat with him about his work of the previous day. The main thing of interest was his talk with Wayne Flushing's father and sister. The father was obviously feeling very guilty that he'd chucked Wayne out of the house, though there was no evidence that this in any way affected Wayne's end. Joplin was convinced that the father certainly had once been fond of Wayne.

“There was regret,” he said. “No question.”

On the other hand, Wayne had clearly been an exasperating person to have around the house. In addition to the weights and the bars, and the pieces of apparatus that spread from his bedroom to the landing, and gradually took over the first floor, there were the sun bed, the oiling sessions, the depilation sessions, all of them gone into with the utmost seriousness. On top of it all, Wayne was a hypochondriac of the most extreme and old-maidish kind, terrified of draughts, obsessed with pimples, convinced that he was about to catch this or that illness, including many quite uncatchable ones. In the end, and coupled with the fact that after he gave up his job he was a considerable financial drain, it had all got to be too much for Mr. Flushing Senior. He had told his son to go, and he had gone.

Wayne's sister Debbie had painted a much more admiring picture. Wayne had the most fantastic body, she'd been with him to the most fantastic contests, there'd been fantastic pictures of him in
Bodies
and
Bodybuilding Monthly,
and altogether he was the most fantastic brother a girl could have. She'd often gone round to the gym to have a fruit juice with him in a health bar after his workout. What she
found particularly horrible about his death was that Wayne hated that sort of posing anyway, and was not much good at it. Competition posing was one thing, and that was a vital part of the sport, but posing for such magazines as
Bodies
, or doing advertisements, was something else again—mere glamour stuff, fashion modelling without the fashion. Wayne hated it, and he wasn't one of Bob Cordle's favourite models because it took so much time and so much film before he got it right.

Wayne's flat, Joplin said, had been monumentally unrevealing. Apart from the inevitable equipment, there was a minimum of personal papers, not a single newspaper or book, apart from muscle-building glossies, and no indication of personality or tastes at all. The man was the body. However, in a medicine chest he had found a formidable array of drugs, both doctor-prescribed and proprietary, and on the mantelpiece a model of the Bodmin Nixie, guaranteed to ward off the palsy. All the doors and windows of the flat were fitted with draught-excluders.

By the time Joplin had told me all this, it was approaching the time of my appointment with Vince Haggarty. I didn't quite know what I was expecting from Haggarty, because I knew that so far I had nothing to go on beyond my own ear for a definite edginess in his response when I phoned him. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about the questioning, and I decided that one way to catch him slightly off guard might be to go a bit early. When I rang on the door of his flat, which was the ground floor of a pre-war detached house in Cricklewood, it was eleven-forty, and there was a long wait on the doorstep before the door opened.

“Sorry. Did I interrupt you? I'm early,” I said breezily.