Bodies (20 page)

“I've got shorts
on
,” said Charlie. “I thought this might turn out to be a schoolboy caper.”

Charlie really went too far. He was meant to be amiably dim. He was more in character when he refused to strip off and get all goosepimply waiting for the boys to arrive.

“OK, OK. Well, look, you just stand over there in the shadows, down by the door, and you come out stripped when I've got them in the light there. That's when I'll hope for some expression shots. The birch is over there in the props box . . . Was that a car?”

It had indeed been a car. I had gestured to have the men lie very low, and it drew up in the same position it had occupied before. Three shadowy shapes got out, and one of them ushered the other two towards the warehouse. I didn't get more than a glimpse of them until they came upstairs and into the light. I guessed they were both about fifteen or sixteen, though they looked younger. Both were scruffy, and probably dirty, and neither looked as if he was getting regular food. The sturdier of the two had a certain aggressive cockiness about him, suggesting he could make out on his own. The other was a pathetic figure—pale, withdrawn, and almost certainly on drugs. He walked into the bright lights of the warehouse studio, dazed, as if he scarcely knew where he was or what he was doing there.

“Come over here,” called Vince, and they came over to the bright lake of light down my end of the room. Vince gestured Mick towards the cameras.

“Right—take off your clothes,” he said, when they had come into the shooting space.

“Here, wait a minute, Mister” said the more wide-awake of the two. “Before we do anything we want the money.”

“After. You get paid afterwards.”

“No, we don't. That's not on. We agreed between us, Colin and me:
money first or no deal. Money for being in it in the first place, and then for six strokes. Then we get extra afterwards if we agree to more. That's fair. We don't do a thing until we get the cash in our pockets.”

Cursing, Vince took his wallet out of his inside pocket and counted out a number of notes for each of the boys. The aggressive one counted his and tucked them into a back pocket, then he counted out his friend's, and put his away likewise. The friend was withdrawn into some kind of inward contemplation.

“Right. Now take your clothes off,” said Vince, nodding again to Mick, who set the cameras rolling and concentrated them on the more with-it one of the pair, since the other was stripping off his clothes as if in a dream. It was when they were nearly naked that Charlie came forward, looking genuinely threatening, carrying the birch. I could just see the boys' faces: the cockier boy was startled, but put on immediately an expression of bravado; the other boy's eyes suddenly focused themselves on Charlie, registered a sudden understanding of what was to happen to him, and then changed to terror and panic. Mick Spivey's camera, of course, was on the wrong boy—a typical example of Vince's incompetence.

As Charlie seized the terrified boy and began strapping him on to the frame, I made the second of my signs to Garry Joplin: the men were to come forward and collect around the door to the warehouse.

The boy's hands were now buckled to the frame, but he was lashing out with his feet. Charlie took them in both hands, and then knelt on one, and buckled the other into the straps. Then he seized the other leg, and the boy was helpless. His body was feebly thrashing around in the limits of its mobility. Vince, behind the cameras, was rubbing his hands with satisfaction.

“This'll look marvellous,” he said.

The other boy's air of bravado was wearing thin.

“This'd better be worth it,” he said obscurely, as Charlie took him and stretched him across the frame. I had a glimpse round the side of the warehouse of shadowy figures-gathering round the door. As Charlie stood up, took up his birch and began flourishing it with experimental strokes in the air, I gave him a few seconds, to make sure they were ready, and then I gave Joplin the third sign.

Then we went in and took them.

A
POLICEMAN
develops antennae that twitch in the company of a born sneak. I don't think I needed those, though, to guess where the weak link was going to be found in those four people we took back to the Yard. I set Garry Joplin on to talk to the two boys, to get evidence of the offer they'd been made, of any work they'd done for Vince before; Vince Haggarty himself I left to cool his heels in a waiting-room; I talked to Mick Spivey. Charlie had said he would shop his own mother for a soap coupon, and he was dead right. Ratty in appearance, and rat by nature—that about sums up Mick Spivey. I had no sooner offered the usual inducements to cooperation than he was spilling the beans in an eager and ingratiating manner that quite turned the stomach.

Vince Haggarty, I learned, had slid into the porn video branch of his new profession almost as soon as he had mastered the elementary techniques of filming. Whether this was because he knew he had not enough talent ever to rise very high in the more legitimate side of the business, or from an inborn tendency to gravitate towards the grubby Mick didn't speculate. He, Mick, had come into the business as soon as it had begun to get off the ground—he had no particular title in the organization, but he acted as business manager, organizer of distribution,
and general odd-job man. Oh, and—though he did not mention this himself—principal recruiter for all the more dicey films. The setup had a list of customers that was growing all the time, and the quickie films to satisfy this market had to be turned out with equal speed. Be they ever so shoddily made, apparently, the new titles were snapped up by the mail-order customers as soon as they were put in the catalogue.

“And where were these videos kept?” I asked.

“Oh, in Todd Masterman's second garage. You'll find a catalogue and a list of subscribers there too. Sometimes we sell copies outright, we have a number of cinemas that take our stuff, but mostly we circulate them to private customers for a whacking fee. Todd didn't want them stored at his place, naturally—”

“Naturally,” I said. “Mr. Clean, and all.”

“—right. But there was no room at Vince or my places, and the rent he charges for the garage makes it worth his risk. Or so he thought. He always imagined that his reputation in the business would keep him clear of all this.”

“He's going to find that he was wrong. That's not the sum total of his interest in this, is it?”

“Oh no. He put up money for cameras and equipment in the beginning, and that brought him a quarter share. Then, any time he put us on to anybody—people on his books, for example—we paid him a quarter of anything we paid them. It was a nice little sideline for him because the agency isn't all that flourishing. It was a good idea, but it was just a bit too specialized ever to take off in a big way.”

So that was it. I talked to Vince, of course, and we fetched in the films and catalogues and the subscribers list from Todd Masterman's Wimbledon home. Pretty soon we took in Todd himself as well, and before long we had the porn film business sewn up. Garry got a lot more detail out of the only one of the boys he could really talk to. The sleeping-rough kids form a little—or not so little, these days—confraternity. Mick had quite a following, both of boys and girls, because he was often among them offering them jobs which, however grubby or nasty, were acceptable because of the pressures of hunger or the need for drugs. And some, I suppose, enjoyed it, for I must not sentimentalize them. Anyway, Mick was almost popular with them, though only as a source of food, drugs or excitement.

They were a sad pair, those boys. Garry did a good job with them, being much nearer their age than I was, and a much warmer person, but the only one he could help was the one who needed it least. He
contacted his parents, patched things up, sent them off together. Probably the lad would have gone home eventually anyway. Equally probably he'd take off again at some time.

The other boy had been placed in care by his mother when he was two. He'd had a succession of foster homes, had run away at fourteen from an institution. We had to return him to one, but it was obvious it wouldn't last. Even before he had run away the first time he was on the road to being an addict. Now he was hopelessly far along that road. He needed the sort of constant and intensive care and support that nobody seems willing to pay for. Garry said he would be dead before he was twenty, and I knew he was right.

We both of us conveniently forgot the money that had been handed to the pair by Vince in the warehouse studio. I couldn't see Vince asking for it back.

I got varying stories and varying emphases about their own personal roles in the business from Mick and Vince and Todd Masterman, but in one thing they were unanimous: they knew nothing about the
Bodies
murders. Why connect them with that? They had not intended filming that night, had not been in the Windlesham Street area at the time, knew nothing whatsoever about the business. One thing they were quite sure about was that it was nothing to do with them.

And I was equally sure it was.

I'd seen the contents of Masterman's garage when they had been brought in. Now I took Joplin and we inspected them in detail. Much of the stuff was duplicate video tapes to be sent round to subscribers. Apart from those, there was the master copy of each film, a master catalogue with printed versions for the subscribers, and a list of those subscribers themselves—or “members,” as they were called, of the Speciality Video Club.

That members list was fascinating. I found that several of the names rang a bell. There was that clergyman in the West Country who had written to Phil Fennilow offering to finance a film of
Lesbia Brandon.
There were names of people who I was pretty sure were MPs, though none of them gave the House of Commons as their address, and most of them apparently lived on farms—engaged in tax-deduction agriculture, no doubt. And unless I was much mistaken there were at least two members of the Metropolitan CID.

The things that interested Garry and me were the films and the catalogue of the films. Well, naturally, you will say: policemen are known to have sewer minds and childish tastes. Actually I'd seen
more than enough of such products in my time to last me out, and even Garry, after the first incredulous chortles were over said they really were a terrible drag. You have to have a certain stamina to enjoy a concentrated diet of that stuff.

And a concentrated diet was what we had to take. You don't want to hear about it, do you? If you go in for that kind of viewing, you'll know the sort of thing we had to watch; and if you don't you can let your mind range in smutty speculation. There were men and women doing perfectly ordinary everyday things, but also things more outré or acrobatic. There were men and men, women and women, men and boys, women and boys, men and girls, girls and Alsatians; there were rubber films, leather films, whip films, bondage films—well, you name it, they catered for it. They had—you had to hand it to them—been awfully quick in getting their catalogue together. The originals were all nicely divided up into the various kinks, and the titles gave away the essential facts about their contents:
Buddy Pals; She plus She; Youth in Bloom; Little Girl
, and so on. The card index gave us the dates on which they were filmed, showing that, until recently, Vince had made use of every evening when the
Bodies
studio was hired out to Bob Cordle—this meant most of them were filmed on a Monday or a Wednesday. More recently things had become more flexible with the hiring of the new studio.

We took the straight sex ones first, running through them until we had got a clear impression of the various “actors” involved, then speeding them up to get a rough idea of whether there was anything of interest in the rest of the film, other than the basic biological interest. They were a lot more entertaining speeded up. I recognized Susan Platt-Morrison in one film—a most professional performance: she looked like a very high-class whore laid on for some visiting Sheik. I also recognized Vince's black girlfriend, and some of the faces I had seen when flicking through
Bodies
magazine, but otherwise found nothing of interest.

When we started in on the more out-of-the-way material, we both recognized someone at once.

“That's—oh my God, that's the lad I've been interviewing,” said Garry Joplin.

It was the more confident of the two boys, being introduced to sex by a buxom and all-too-confident lady.

“Ugh,” I said.

“That's really sick,” said Garry.

“Still,” I said thoughtfully, “put it into
Der Rosen-kavalier
and everybody says ‘Ooh, isn't it gorgeous?' ”

“Der Whatsit?”

“An opera by Richard Strauss. You can cover a multitude of sins with heavy orchestration.”

And so it went on. We saw Susan Platt-Morrison again in the Lesbian ones, and the Portuguese girlfriend seemed to have made a speciality of S-M material, which perhaps, if you had Vince Haggarty as a boyfriend, you might feel inclined to. Various sad-looking waifs of both sexes kept popping up in the films, submitting to being spanked or seduced by various confident adults of both sexes. After a while the same faces, usually giving the same half-hearted performances, became monotonous.

“I say, I've just had a thought,” I said eventually. “I haven't seen Denny Crabtree.”

“You will. Plenty of time.”

“No, but he said he was in a straight sex job. We've seen all those.”

“He also said you didn't see his face, didn't he?”

“Yes. But there weren't any like that . . . Anyway, keep it rolling.”

It was three or four films later (the films ran, on average, about ten or fifteen minutes, by the way, but we mostly saw them in a much shorter time by speeding up) that I called out to Garry: