The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (37 page)

“We don’t want to make waves,” said Lewis. “You can find another leading lady—they’re a dime a dozen, you know that.”

Eva wasn’t some leading lady, she was a star, but I didn’t have to tell Lewis. They knew it. That’s why they were cutting me to keep her.

I didn’t tell him that she was the key to the whole movie. Best case: he’d think I was out of my mind. Worst case: he’d believe me, and pull my funding.

“I’ll look around,” I said. “Where should I go?”

I ended up at the Sidewalk Café, watching Eva dancing with a string of men, and hating her.

When she saw me she looked a little upset (I wasn’t proud of how happy it made me, but I’d take anything I could get). She sat for three songs, and then she got a light from Maitland and vanished through the crowd.

I went outside after her.

When she saw me she shook her head, ground out her cigarette underfoot, and turned to leave.

“Just hear me out,” I said. I hated her for making me beg. I was above begging.

“When I move to Atlas,” she said, “you can tell your friends at Capital why.”

“You have to understand,” I told her. “I promised the studio a special effect like they’ve never seen. Without your hummingbird trick, the whole movie’s a bust.”

She raised her eyebrows nearly to her hairline. “My trick?”

“If you don’t do it, the studio will make me a laughingstock!” I saw her face and added, “And you! If this doesn’t happen, it’s going to come back to you, you wait and see.”

“I’ll live,” she said.

And then (just to spite me, I know it) she broke apart, flashes of green and red and the whir of birds disappearing into the dark, and nothing left of her but glimpses of white at the edges of my vision like a scattering of teeth.

A good director films a story that’s set in front of him.

A great director can make a story out of nothing.

I stood in the dark outside the club, watching as a straggler fluttered up into the dark, and the rest of her story came to life in front of me.

The next morning I called Lewis and told him that I would find another leading lady.

“I saw Eva last night,” I said. “She’s not doing very well for herself, it looks like. Looking old. I was thinking we’d do Marie Antoinette instead of that Aztec crap. Everyone loves the French costumes, and then we don’t have to worry about making the Code happy.”

I was scrabbling, and I knew it, but the only way to get ahead in this town is to lie like you mean it, so I went on, “We can use that blonde instead—you know, the one who can sing?”

(Turned out there were several; that phone call took a while.)

Then I called the publicity office and told them I wanted to offer Eva a part in my new movie; did they know if she was meeting Maitland tonight?

When she left her house that night I was waiting for her, leaning against my car.

Eva was in white silk that looked nearly green in the moonlight, and now I couldn’t look at her without looking for a flash of red near her throat.

I knew her so well; it stung that she wouldn’t give me credit for it.

“You ruined my movie,” I said, casually. “Without you I had to change the whole thing. If that doesn’t work, Capital is out a lot of money, and I’m sunk.”

“That’s because you promised something that wasn’t yours to give,” she said.

“How do you think movies get made, Eva?”

Now she looked wary. God, her face was exquisite. I realized, too late, I should have brought a camera.

“Do you think this is still just for the movie?” she asked.

She was looking right at me, and I felt guiltier than I had in a long time.

“Someday you’ll understand,” I said.

Then I yanked the gun out of my jacket and pulled the trigger.

As a director, there were two problems with what happened next.

1) I was a pretty cheap shot—I’d just bought the gun, it’s not as if I had practiced—so the recoil surprised me and the bullet went wild, which takes away the power of the moment.

2) When you tell someone “Someday you’ll understand” right before you shoot, you’re not absolving yourself so much as you are giving them a moment to prepare, and then what happens is that by the time your shot goes wide you’re already staring at the last of the hummingbirds disappearing into the trees.

Still, when I stopped worrying if I’d broken my thumb, I saw that there was a hummingbird hopping around on the dirt in front of me in a panic, one of its outstretched wings suddenly much shorter than the other.

The singed edges were still warm to the touch where the bullet had struck, I noticed, after I scooped it up and kissed it.

The birdcage is an antique, a gift from the studio. It’s big enough that the hummingbird could fly around pretty comfortably, if it could still fly.

(I named it Polly for the present, because that was just the best name for a bird. Whenever people come over, they laugh themselves sick when I tell them, and then they try to call her over like it’s actually a parrot and can answer to the name. I’m working on getting some more sophisticated people.)

I keep the cage just near enough to the window that when the others come looking they’ll see Polly sitting there, and just far enough in that there’s no stealing her out without coming all the way inside.

And they will come back; Eva can’t become human without all of them, and there are only so many places you can hide two hundred hummingbirds.

(“Rising Star Falls,” cried the
Reporter
. “Exotic Eva Disappears—Have We Seen Her Last Film?”)

I hope that’s not the case. I’m not out to harm anyone. When she comes back to bargain, I’ll be happy to bargain.

She knows who makes a star.

EARLY ON A February morning in the city centre, two refuse collectors found a human body wrapped in double-strength bin liners. It had been dumped in one of the tall bins at the back of a Chinese restaurant, with no serious attempt at concealment. As if whoever put it there had wanted it to be found. The refuse collectors had chased a few crows away from the bin, and immediately seen what they had attacked. Before the rush hour, the body was in the city morgue next to the law courts.

Fortunately, the crows hadn’t reached her face. Though what identification we managed was of limited value. She was aged eighteen or so, white, possibly Slavic. Her hair was cut short, spiked and bleached. She had complex injuries, external and internal, that pointed to sustained beating and sexual abuse. What made headlines was that she’d died after being left in the bin, though probably without regaining consciousness.

The photo that appeared in the papers showed her face after the mortician had toned down the bruising. It was a strong face with dark-blue eyes and good teeth, a few loose. She was somewhat overweight. When dumped, the body had been wearing a T-shirt and shorts that were too small for her, probably not hers. We failed to match her face, teeth, and DNA with anyone on record.

In the week following local press coverage of the death, we received three anonymous phone calls from men who claimed to know the dead girl. All of them said her name was Tania, and she’d worked in a massage parlour in the city. Two of them named a place in Small Heath, one a place in Yardley. Both parlours were owned by the Forrester brothers, two local businessmen whose affairs we weren’t likely to be investigating soon. They had important friends in the force and the local council—by “friends” I mean people they owned. There are other kinds of friends, though it seemed that Tania hadn’t had any kind.

The hostesses at both parlours told us the same thing: Tania had been sacked because she was unreliable. A colleague some distance up the food chain from myself had a word with the Forrester brothers, who claimed no knowledge of what had happened to her. We’d already established by default that Tania—which almost certainly was not her real name—had been trafficked from Eastern Europe, but since the Forresters were above reproach we had little to go on.

My involvement in the case started with something the hostess at the Kittens parlour in Yardley had said. There was a “regular” at Kittens who always phoned to ask if Tania was there. If she was busy when he arrived, he waited for her. Since most of the punters chose other girls, this fanboy had made quite a difference to Tania’s confidence. Since her departure—the hostess claimed to be unsure whether the dead girl was really Tania—he hadn’t been back.

Yardley being part of my regular patch, I was asked to monitor Kittens and try to track down this possible stalker of the dead girl. It was one of several parlours near the Swan Centre, a convenient stopping-point for sales reps and long-distance drivers. The hostess—“receptionist” was her official job title—was a tired-looking woman in her forties called Martina. She promised to call me on my mobile if Tania’s former admirer turned up.

Before I left, Martina showed me the waiting area, where two girls were watching TV and drinking coffee. They were both wearing blue cat masks. I didn’t stay, but the image bothered me for days afterwards. At least the sins you commit in your heart don’t expose you to blackmail.

The call came a few weeks later, but not from Martina. The man on the phone said he sometimes visited Kittens, and had been friendly with Tania. He hadn’t been there in a while. Today, when he’d turned up, Martina had warned him the police were after him. “I thought I’d better contact you myself.”

We interviewed the punter, whose name was Derek, for two three-hour sessions. He was aged nearly forty and lived alone. It soon emerged that he was an alcoholic. The interviews were very dull. He wanted to talk to us about Tania and his distress at her death. But he seemed to know nothing that could help us. The weekend of her death he’d been in Stafford, helping his parents move house. We checked the alibi and it held. He was harmless, ignorant, and about as interesting to listen to as woodlice in the loft.

“We were close,” he said more than once. “Tania liked me, I could tell. The way she reacted when I touched her. Sometimes I’d make her cum. Sometimes we’d make love fast, then just sit together and talk until the time ran out. We didn’t meet up outside the parlour, but we would have eventually. I could tell she didn’t have a lover. Sometimes I know things without being told them.”

His sensitivity didn’t extend to knowing who had killed her. “I could tell something was wrong, that was all. She was frightened. I think she got sacked, then some pimp made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. I wish she’d called me. I gave her my number, you know. Asked her to phone me if she was in trouble. Maybe she didn’t get the chance.”

The one unexpected thing he told us was near the end of the second session, when we pressed him for any hint she might have dropped regarding who she knew, how she’d got here. “She just wouldn’t talk about that,” he said. “I saw what happened. In a dream. Kept seeing it. Hearing her scream. The blows. It was driving me insane. All the men were wearing masks.” For a moment his face looked much older. “I don’t suppose that’s evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” my colleague Di Hargreave said wearily. She’d had about enough of Derek’s inner life.

The last question I asked him was “Why have you started going back to Kittens?”

He looked at me, and there was no hint of self-dramatisation in his face. Only blank despair. “What else have I got?”

The investigation stalled. It was partly the block on anything that might inconvenience the Forresters, and partly our failure to trace anyone connected with the murdered girl. The name “Tania” was a mask. For us, the case was symptomatic of a wider pattern. Birmingham needed something to replace its rapidly collapsing industrial base, and the city’s financiers had decided the answer was business conferences. That meant convention centres, mammoth hotels, expensive restaurants, and a blue-chip sex industry. Not girls on the streets, but girls in private clubs and parlours. Even without blackmail, the silence of the Council would have been guaranteed. It was business.

One question we spent some time looking at was why Tania had been dumped in the city centre. It was clearly a message to someone. Most probably to the girls working in the lap-dancing clubs, porn cinemas, and massage parlours scattered between Holloway Head and Snow Hill, the hinterland of Eastern European flesh kept behind closed doors and guarded by discreet pimps on the payroll of local businessmen. A simple message:
Don’t get lazy.
The Chinese restaurant was two blocks away from an “executive gentlemen’s club” owned by the Forresters. But Tania wouldn’t have worked there: she wasn’t the right physical type.

Within a year, we were given a solution to the case. But it wasn’t one that would cut much ice with the CPS. A local filmmaker called Matt Black, backed by Skin City Productions, had made a film “reconstructing” Tania’s life and death. A heavily cut version of
The Last Ride
was screened at the Electric Cinema in Birmingham, and a few other art cinemas across the country. A “director’s cut” was sold to adults via the Internet, and screened privately a few times.

The police team investigating the murder, including me, watched the full version on DVD at the Steelhouse Lane station. It showed a girl called Katja working on the streets in Romania, then being trafficked to Birmingham and given a new name. Her pimps were an Arab gang, nothing like the Forresters. Another prostitute told her better money could be earned doing private parties for businessmen. She was given a number, but didn’t call it until she lost her job at the parlour. The rest was violence.

It was a sleazy, brutal film. There were images that combined hardcore sex with prosthetic simulations of injury. Matt Black clearly thought himself a talented
auteur
with urban lowlife as his canvas. But the wooden acting and flat dialogue suggested that he saw the character of Tania only as a temporary barrier between the camera and her wounds.
The Last Ride
was as weak on external circumstances as it was strong on forensic detail.

Matt Black was interviewed for an arts review programme that went out on Central TV, late on Friday night. I watched it at home. He was about thirty, with a retro-style tailored suit and a nervous smile. The interviewer asked him what the main purpose of
The Last Ride
was. He said, “To deal with Tania as an icon. A media construct. We don’t know who she really was, where she came from. The film explores how her identity was constructed through the same transformations that destroyed her as a person. It’s also an examination of the Madonna-whore image in Western culture.”

The interviewer nodded in a slightly bemused way, then asked why two versions were being released at the same time. “It’s a statement against censorship,” Black said at once. “There’s a false distinction in our culture between art and pornography.
The Last Ride
deliberately blends the style codes of art cinema and gonzo porn. We’re breaking down boundaries.”

“That leads to another question people are asking. Why did you use hardcore porn techniques in a film about sexual violence and abuse? You’re pushing not only what can be released, but what can legally be filmed at all.”

Black smiled. “This film challenges the censors to admit the audience out there are really adults. They’re saying you should not be allowed to
see these images.
Skin City is all about breaking boundaries. Including flesh boundaries.” His smile momentarily became a grin. “The anal space has traditionally been taboo in all cinema except porn. We’re saying, liberate the image. Open all the doors.”

“Does the image have a life of its own, apart from the human reality?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” Black said. “You should be asking, does the human reality have a life of its own apart from the image?”

The programme cut away from the interview there, just as I saw my hands reach out towards the TV with the intention of strangling it. I switched it off and went upstairs to bed. Elaine was already asleep.

Months went past. Our vague hope that
The Last Ride
might stimulate someone who knew the murdered girl to get in touch came to nothing. Other crimes and more accessible villains took our attention. It was November when I got a call from the Steelhouse Lane station to tell me that Matt Black had disappeared. My immediate reaction was “Have you tried looking up his arse?”

We assumed the filmmaker had gone on an unplanned trip somewhere, for research or recreation. But when Christmas came and went and no one had heard from him, Black was added to the list of missing persons. A film he’d been working on, about the dark side of Internet dating, was shelved indefinitely. His absence provoked a renewal of interest in
The Last Ride
, and there was speculation in the press that he’d been swallowed up by the world his films explored.

In late January, I phoned the Kittens parlour and had a chat with Martina. She’d already been made to realise that cooperating with us was sensible. The Forrester brothers might be safe from police action, but she wasn’t. I asked her whether Derek had been in lately. “We saw him just before Christmas,” she said. “He comes in every few weeks, sees a different girl every time. But you know what they told me? He won’t put his hands on them. And while he does it, he keeps his eyes shut. They call him the sleepwalker.”

Several days later, Martina called me in the evening. “He’s here,” she said. I was off duty, but I apologised to Elaine and left my dinner unfinished. I parked across the Coventry Road from the parlour and watched carefully from my car. When Derek emerged, I crossed over and followed him at a distance. He was walking slowly, his head tilted, as if drunk.

I caught up with him as he was passing the children’s playground near the canal walkway. “Hi Derek. How’s it going?” He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Could we have a chat?” I asked. He nodded.

We crossed the canal bridge into the Ackers, a patch of semi-wasteland used regularly for cruising and shooting up in warmer weather. Just now it was deserted. The damp grass brushed the ankles of my jeans. Derek lit a cigarette, didn’t offer me one. It was dark, but the moon was out and the lights of the Coventry Road weren’t far away. “Do you get out much?” I asked. “Go to the cinema?”

“I bought it on DVD,” he said. “Didn’t think much of it. Is that what you wanted to know?” I didn’t say anything. “It was empty,” he said. “No truth. I don’t mean facts. I mean it wasn’t
her
. I don’t blame the actress. But the bloke who made it. Smart little fucker. Mouthing off on TV like he knew it all. He knew
nothing
. What I could have told him . . .” He stopped and drew hard on his cigarette.