‘This is a hell of a place they’ve got here. George Price has done very well for himself,’ whispered DS Waters.
‘Men like him and Harry Baskin know where the money is: sex and gambling. Talking of which, she’s not bad either,’ muttered Frost, in the same hushed tones as Waters, as he gestured towards the cluster of framed ‘glamour’ pictures of Melody Price. They were perched on the top shelf of the smoked-glass and steel entertainment centre that also housed the top-of-the-range Bang & Olufsen stereo equipment.
The two detectives sat on the cream sofa, waiting for Melody to arrive with a pot of fresh coffee. Both men were grateful for it; it had been a long night for Waters, and Frost was still groggy.
The first thing the DI had done once he’d discharged himself was to call Sue Clarke. Her mother, with the customary cold edge that ran through her voice whenever she spoke to him, said that Sue wasn’t at home as she had stayed the night at the Prince Albert Hotel. She then hung up briskly before he could ask any more. Frost, rather intrigued, called the Prince Albert, and eventually got hold of Clarke, who briefed him on the details of her visit the previous day to Michael Price.
Frost then asked her what on earth she was doing at the posh hotel. The DC sighed, then made some noises that sounded like giggling, but equally they could have just been her clearing her throat. She said it had been a long night and then rang off almost as fast as her mother. She sounded hung-over. Frost recognized a hung-over female voice when he heard one: invariably husky and sexy. But what the blazes was she doing there? And who was she with, more to the point?
With Frost unable to drive due to doctor’s orders, and Clarke seemingly unavailable to ‘chauffeur’ him about, Frost had seconded DS Waters for the duty.
‘Wow, Jack, you certainly do look like you’ve been in the wars, you poor thing,’ said Melody Price, in a voice that billed and cooed like she was addressing a three-year-old. She was carrying a tray with three bone-china cups and saucers, a silver milk jug and sugar bowl, and a big cafetière full of pitch-black coffee.
Waters sprang to his feet and in three energetic bounds was at her side, relieving her of the tray and putting it on the coffee table.
‘Oh, thank you, John – you don’t mind me calling you John?’
‘Not at all, Melody, not at all,’ said Waters with an eager-to-please smile plastered across his face.
Frost sat there, looking just as Melody had described, with his black eye and a big bandage wrapped around his head. No longer the recipient of Melody’s attention, Frost watched on as she worked her magic on Waters. He couldn’t help but smile. Sue Clarke, with her female intuition and competitiveness, had sussed her out right from the start. There was no sisterhood with Melody Price. She knew where her power lay; like with Maggie Thatcher and her all-male Cabinet, wrapped around her perfectly manicured little finger.
Once all the coffees were poured, Melody asked, ‘So, Jack, tell me, how was George this morning? I’m seeing him after the races tonight.’ Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Waters. ‘Being in a coma, John, I know he doesn’t see me, but I sense he senses my presence, my physical presence. My aura, if you will. He breathes easier when I’m there.’ She then turned her gaze back to Frost, and winced at the sight of him. ‘You’re always better just handing over your money, instead of putting up a fight … and losing.’
‘I’m a policeman, it’s sort of my job to put up a fight.’ Frost ran a thumbnail across his throbbing cheekbone that prickled with heat. ‘Although in fairness, I don’t actually remember putting up much of a fight. I think they just cracked me over the back of the head and I was out like a light. But some good did come out of it. It opened up other lines of inquiry into George’s shooting.’
‘Robbery, you mean? Punters as well as bookies getting done over? I thought you were looking for Terry Langdon?’
‘Oh, we are. We need to question him so we can formally eliminate him from our inquiries.’
‘But I thought you said Terry was …’
‘Innocent until proven otherwise, I think is what we say.’
‘Well, nice as it is to see you, I’m not sure how I can help. I’ve told you all I can.’
‘That’s interesting. But we believe your relationship with Terry Langdon went a bit further than just an infatuation on his part.’
‘What are you insinuating?’
‘I’m saying, quite openly, that you and Terry Langdon consummated the relationship, had an affair.’
Frost watched as she palpably consumed this information with a noisy swallow of her coffee. She straightened up in her chair, bristling, eyes full of hot indignation, mouth snarling like it could spit venom. ‘How dare you! I’m a happily married woman, my beloved husband is in hospital, I am the injured party here—’
‘We have it on good authority.’
‘Who from?’
Frost matched her high-octane outrage with a blank-eyed indifference. ‘When we find Langdon, and we will, no doubt he’ll tell us himself all about it. Bound to. So why don’t you give us your side of the story first.’
Melody dropped her act as quickly as she’d taken it up. ‘It was a drunken fumble, nothing more. A mistake on my part. George was away for a few days. Terry had been pestering me. I went out with some friends, to Blazes nightclub in Rimmington, and he turned up. Now I think about it, I think he must have been following me. I’d had too much to drink, he kept saying he worshipped me, and one thing led to another.’
‘Did George know about it?’
‘He suspected it.’
‘What was his reaction?’
‘Not best pleased. But I denied it, and kept on denying it.’
‘Do you think Terry might have told George?’
‘I told Terry that if he did, I’d never forgive him. And anyway, it was his word against mine. I had nothing to worry about, or to hide. I’m an open book, as they say.’
‘We all have our little secrets, Melody.’
Mrs Price gestured towards the top shelf of the glass-and-steel unit. Both Waters and Frost gladly took the opportunity to have yet another look at her in various stages of undress, posed artfully, and not so artfully, against a studio backdrop, or draped across a Harley-Davidson.
She proceeded to explain herself: ‘I’ve been a glamour model. Done some Page Threes back in the day. If Terry said to George, I know your wife has three moles on her bum, he’d just look like he knew about as much as the average Sun reader, because there’s very little of me that hasn’t been on public display at one time or another.’
DS Waters couldn’t help but smirk. And Frost probably would have joined him, but his swollen lip was prohibiting anything remotely expressive; every time he spoke he felt like a ventriloquist without his dummy.
Melody Price placed her cup and saucer on the coffee table, and drew the meeting to a close by rising to her feet and saying, ‘Now, gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a lot of things to do today, including visiting my husband in the hospital again this afternoon.’
On that cue, Waters and Frost also stood up. Frost then suddenly barked out, ‘Socks and Winston!’
Mrs Price, who had been heading towards the lounge door, came to an abrupt standstill, took a moment, and then spun round in a perfectly executed catwalk turn. ‘Sex … and winking?’
‘Socks and Winston,’ Frost repeated slowly.
Her usually lineless forehead crinkled in a frown of confusion at this.
The DI put her out of her misery: ‘Those were the only two full names in a black notebook that we found on George. There were also lists of initials in there with numbers beside them. Bets, we assume. But just two names, Socks and Winston, and they were in capitals and underlined. They had the biggest numbers beside them. Jimmy told us—’
‘Jimmy, Jimmy Drake?’
‘Yes, Jimmy Drake, your clerk, I spoke to him at the races yesterday after I spoke to you.’
‘Oh yes, Jimmy said he’d given you some tips.’ Melody smiled and then pursed her lips and made a little tutting sound. ‘You were right, Jack, betting’s not your game. Even when you do win you manage to lose it in the car park.’
Cut lip permitting, Frost attempted to return the smile. ‘He told us about George’s betting service for special customers.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you, I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know about a black notebook. Even so, why is it important?’
‘Because I don’t think whoever coshed me in the car park was after my money, they were after the book. And I think the same person who shot George was after it, too.’
‘They didn’t get it then. How about now?’
‘They did this time. With George dead the book would become irrelevant – all bets would be off, as they say. And maybe that was their intention all along, to kill him.’
‘But they failed. Thank God.’
‘But with him in a coma, and the possibility of him yet making a recovery, the book still holds a lethal power. Don’t you think?’ Frost asked pointedly.
Melody stalked over to the living-room door, swung it open and announced in glacial tones, ‘I think next time you need to speak to me, it will have to be with my lawyer present.’ She then bellowed out into the hallway, ‘Keith!’
Frost was about to ask who ‘Keith’ was, when he appeared in the doorway. Frost recognized him immediately. He was one of Harry Baskin’s bouncers from the Coconut Grove. He wasn’t one of Harry’s biggest bouncers, but togged up in a black Puma tracksuit and white boxing boots, he looked like a capable and fast middleweight.
‘Keith will see you out.’
‘I hope he’s not going to try and lift us up by the collar and sling us out like he does at the strip club.’
Keith swivelled his heavily muscled neck and rolled his bulked-out shoulders like he was limbering up for round one.
‘Harry is a great friend of George’s, as you know, and whilst Terry Langdon remains at large, and you’re here harassing me when you should be out looking for him, Harry thought I might need a man about the house.’ She must have seen something akin to amusement in the two detectives’ eyes, as she emphasized angrily, ‘Protection – for my protection!’
‘Come on, don’t be a wuss, it’s brilliant,’ said Gavin Ross to his best mate, Dean Bartlett. Dean was unsure, but Gavin was an old hand at it by now, he’d done it three or four times. It was the latest thing; all the lads on the estate were trying it. The first time he did it, he didn’t feel so brilliant. In fact, he puked all over his new Fred Perry shirt. The second time was OK, the last couple of times were just as promised. And it definitely felt better than sniffing glue or smoking hash. Not that he did those things much, but this was different. It opened up a whole new world – Gavin felt enveloped in this warm glow of ease and comfort where everything just felt good.
When Gavin asked Tommy Wilkins if he’d get addicted to it, Tommy and his mates laughed in his face. They said he’d watched too many films. Only idiots got addicted to it. They told him to think about it: if it was so bad why would so many people be doing it, why would the biggest rock and roll stars in the world do it? Tommy said that all the bad stuff you heard and read about it was government propaganda, what the police wanted you to think, because they didn’t want people having a good time. Plus the fact they weren’t making money from it, and anything they couldn’t make money from they didn’t want people to do. Gavin couldn’t argue with that, it all made perfect sense. And his experiences with his teachers and occasional run-ins with the police would pretty much back up what Tommy said. There was fuck all to do on the Southern Housing Estate, so why not?
Gavin took the tin foil and folded it over to form a gully to sprinkle the brown powder in. He’d upped the dose this time. After all, the last two had been brilliant, but even now, whilst hardly a seasoned user, and certainly not hooked on the stuff – he was sure of that – he suspected the roller-coaster ride could be better with more stuff. And it was so cheap, cheaper than the hash they’d been smoking, so why not take advantage?
Dean did as he was instructed and took out the ink tube of the clear plastic biro. Gavin then took the silver foil and lit up the underside with his Bic lighter, and sucked up the heavy smoke through the empty biro like a milkshake through a straw. This little ritual had a name, and the name sounded exciting to Gavin. It sounded dangerous to Dean. And maybe this was the difference between the two sixteen-year-old lads. They’d grown up together on the SHE, had known each other as long as they could remember. But Gavin had always led the way. Gavin had been the first to dive off the high board at the local swimming baths; the first to get vertical on the ramp they’d built when the skateboarding craze hit; the first to do what he did with Sally Webber; the first to drink, smoke, sniff all sorts: and now the first to Chase the Dragon. That was what they called it, and it sounded exciting or dangerous, depending on whether you were Gavin or Dean. But Dean knew that he’d follow his mate. He always had.