Kiss Me Quick Read Free Page B

quid to keep her mouth shut. Because that’s what you do in Soho: look the other way and keep shtum. Killing a man in a Soho club was as safe a proposition for the perpetrator as using an empty back alley in a ghost town. Vince also figured, for what it was worth, and considering the ‘keep shtum’ policy that pervaded Soho, that Colin the doorman would have been standing by the neon-lit entrance, and therefore must have had a good look at the men.
    He asked Duval, ‘Where’s Colin?’
    ‘Out front, probably.’
    Tobin to Vince: ‘Why don’t you go and fetch him. And call the incident in, whilst you’re at it.’
    Vince knew that Tobin wanted him out the room so he could finally pocket his envelope. He gave a slow, knowing nod to the two men, making his disapproval of the exchange clear.
    Vince had been working Vice Squad, West End Central, for three months, now, and knew that envelopes were all part of the game. Like tips for the bin men at Christmas, that’s how it was explained to him. But it was Christmas all year round for the Vice coppers in Soho, as the clubs, clip-joints, pimps, prostitutes and porno peddlers paid up every week. Just to ensure that they weren’t hassled every week. It was a sweet deal, and Soho had been pretty much wide open since the Messina brothers (three Sicilian white-slavers who had exerted a stranglehold over vice and prostitution in the West End for a good fifteen years) got pinched and deported in 1955.
    Since then, the nefarious activities of the West End vice rackets had separated into lots of little parcels. Which is just the way Detective Eddie Tobin and his cohorts liked it, because those little parcels soon turned into lots of little envelopes. The envelopes provided insurance for men like Duval, the largest player in Soho. So when a curtain was pulled around a private booth at the Peek-A -Boo Club, and a hostess administered a blow job to a visiting Unilever business man, a Chancery Lane barrister or a Westminster politician, a Scotland Yard policeman wouldn’t suddenly pop his head around the curtain and say, ‘Peek-a-boo!’
    Vince dutifully went off to get Colin the doorman, then that call to Murder Squad. Thus he let Eddie Tobin collect his regular envelope off Duval who, as dirty as he was, was not a true villain – he was too busy legitimizing himself through buying up his own little parcels of land in the lucrative square mile of Soho.
    The club’s reception area was small. Black-and-white glossies of the hostesses, in bikinis and various stages of undress, were tacked to the varnished, pine-panelled walls. Behind a small counter with a cash register on it, a flight of steep, narrow stairs wound their way up through the tall building. But no sign of Colin.
    There was a distant cracking sound, with enough force and surprise that Vince’s eyes darted up towards the ceiling. It seemed to emanate from somewhere at the top of the building. Vince suspected a door slamming shut. He stepped over to the stairwell to investigate, noticing an axe and a cosh secreted under the counter. He pressed a light switch on the wall, but the stairs remained dark.
    Climbing to the first floor he encountered two doors, both of them locked. On the next landing up he could see a light. On the second floor, a shadeless light bulb on its last legs intermittently illuminated the windowless landing. A card inscribed ‘Artist’s Model’ was tacked on to a door and he could hear both the artist and the model at work. Breathless grunts from the artist, and fake groans of pleasure from the model.
    Hand gripping the rickety wooden banister, he carried on climbing to the third floor, where the stairs then twisted up to a narrow landing. The knackered light bulb in the hallway below didn’t have the strength to make its way up alongside him. Vince gave an involuntary shudder and he was glad Tobin wasn’t there to see it. You never lose your fear of the dark, something deadly hiding in its