My eyes were screwed shut and it would have taken a crowbar to part my lips. Nothing I could do about my nostrils, though. A warm metallic smell invaded my sinuses and did its best to trip my gag reflex. The only way out was through a guy twenty years younger, four stone heavier and high enough to shank me for fun. If his hand had stayed on my face a second longer, I’d have taken the risk.
He removed it, inscribed a damp cross on my forehead as though signing a painting, and then whispered in my ear. ‘Say “Thank you for giving me this warning.”’
‘Fuck you, arsehole,’ I replied, and immediately felt the screwdriver’s tip again. This time it was pressed against my belly.
‘Now, now,’ its owner said. ‘I really don’t want to have to punish you, Kenny, but I’ve been waiting five hours and if you’re rude . . .’
The pressure on the tool increased to the point where it was threatening to break the skin.
‘Thank you for giving me this warning,’ I muttered.
He grinned and replied, ‘It’s been my pleasure.’
Whatever the guy was on hadn’t affected his speech or motor reflexes. The screwdriver went into one jacket pocket and a handkerchief came out of the other. He wrapped it around his palm to stem the bleeding.
‘The other thing you don’t do is call the police,’ he said. ‘That would be stupid. They don’t know who I am but I know who you are.’ He tucked the ends of the handkerchief into the main wrap, flexed his hand and winced slightly. ‘Well, that’s about it then, Ken,’ he said, as though concluding a routine business meeting. ‘Maybe we meet in the next life. If there is a next life, that is . . .’
And with that he stepped out of the doorway and walked away.
In the bathroom I washed Mr Screwdriver’s blood from my face. Then I spent ten minutes brushing my teeth and gargled half a bottle of Listerine. It took the taste away but didn’t erase its memory. Nothing short of a lobotomy would do that. A tumbler of Monarch followed by another tumbler of Monarch helped reduce the tremble in my hands. I thought about calling the police and decided against it.
Mr Screwdriver almost certainly hadn’t been lying about being unknown to them. He couldn’t have left more DNA behind if he’d tried. The thing with the blood had been for kicks and not for profit. Perform that trick on a regular basis and his palm would have resembled the crust on an apple pie.
And of course there was no need for me to carry on looking for Harry Parr. I’d already found her. The fact that she would have been discovered eventually meant that my new BFF – or whoever had hired him – thought she was still alive, which meant they almost certainly weren’t responsible for her death.
But why didn’t they want me to look for her?
It was two in the morning, and I wouldn’t be getting much sleep. I channel-hopped the TV, hoping to land on something that would divert my mind from the day’s events. All New DIY Disasters did the trick for a while, but after twenty minutes of flooded kitchens and collapsed ceilings my attention wandered.
Specifically to the first time I met Frank Parr.
TEN
Soho, 1977
My brother took me to lunch at Wheeler’s to celebrate my place at Durham University. By then Malcolm had joined an ad agency and was doing well. Following a grilled turbot and a bottle of Chianti to toast our glittering careers, he returned to work and left me to my own devices. Actually, he left me to get the Tube back to Willesden Green, but I’d read far too many intriguingly lurid stories about Soho in the News of the World for that to happen. The reality was more prosaic.
Small cafes and shops heavily outnumbered dirty bookstores with names like Lovecraft and Ram. No one tried to sell me pep pills in Bridle Lane, and I wasn’t invited to an orgy in Rupert Court. Most of the pubs I’d passed were forbidding-looking affairs. The exception was a place on Dean Street called the York Minster. Judging by the animated chatter and laughter coming from its open windows, it was the sort of relaxed establishment where someone a fortnight shy of his eighteenth birthday might be served a drink.
Gaston Berlemont stared at me sceptically over his Gallic moustache before sliding a glass of house red across the bar. He was notoriously prejudiced against draft beer. Had I asked for a pint, I’d probably have been chucked out. After ten minutes a man who introduced himself as the poet Raoul Santiago gave me a cigarette. I’d had a couple of smokes before, but inhaling an untipped Gauloise with a man called Raoul was as different from a furtive Senior Service as night is from day.
When I offered to buy Raoul a drink, he suggested a bottle would be more economical. Twelve hours later I woke up in a studio flat in Carlisle Street beside a woman older than my mother and uglier than my father. My head felt as though someone had hammered a spike of plutonium into it and my wallet was as empty as a politician’s promise. I wondered if we’d done the deed – it would have been my first time if we had – but lacked the guts to wake my companion up. Instead I crept down a flight of rickety stairs and began the long hike back to North-West London.
My parents gave me the bollocking of a lifetime in the hope it would put me off the fleshpots forever. It didn’t. On the day I had been scheduled to settle into my student digs, I moved into the spare room of Raoul’s flat in Berwick Street. By then Raoul had confessed to being a waiter called Brian Hartley. It wasn’t the first time things in Soho would turn out to be other than they’d initially seemed.
My appalled father left me in no doubt that I was on my own financially. Over the next couple of weeks I worked as a builder’s labourer, a sceneshifter at the Palace Theatre and a potboy in a snooker hall. When the latter closed down, the woman in the employment agency sent me for a job as a barman at the Galaxy Club on Frith Street.
I expected the kind of low-rent shebeen where I’d been spending the small hours with Brian et al. Big surprise. Silk paper covered the walls and a large chandelier hung from the ceiling. Maroon leather chairs had been buffed to high lustre. I sat on a bar stool for a while and checked out dozens of bottles and rows of immaculate glasses. Not the place to order an after-hours Double Diamond or a bag of ready salted.
Ten minutes after my interview was scheduled to start, the front door opened and closed. A bass voice exchanged pleasantries with the cleaner and Frank Parr entered my life for the first time. I estimated that he was six foot two inches tall and twenty years my senior. I was bang on with the height but a decade long on the age.
Partly this was due to the dark three-piece suit and the neatly clipped hair. But if Frank had walked in sporting a kaftan and a bubble perm he would still have had the gravitas of a man twice his age. ‘You must be Kenneth Gabriel,’ he said, holding out a manicured hand with a chunky signet ring on it.
‘It’s Kenny,’ I said.
Frank introduced himself and we took a seat at one of the tables. He produced a pigskin cigarette case and a tortoiseshell lighter.
‘Smoke?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Shirley sent me your details,’ he said after lighting us both. ‘To be honest I ain’t had time to read ’em.’
‘Sounds like you’re busy.’
He nodded and said, ‘What d’you reckon to the place?’