Peter Robinson: Cold Is The Grave

Shortly before King’s Cross, his thoughts had returned to Tracy’s boyfriend.

Banks wasn’t at all certain what to think of Damon. The grunt was no more than he would have expected from any of his daughter’s friends, and he didn’t read anything into it, except perhaps that the lad was a bit embarrassed at coming face-to-face with the father of the girl he was sleeping with. Even the thought of that made Banks’s chest tighten, though he told himself not to get upset, not to interfere. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate his daughter, especially as he was hoping to get back together with her mother. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Tracy had her own life to lead now, and she was no fool. He hoped.

He had left the young lovers at King’s Cross and first gone to check in at the small Bloomsbury hotel he had telephoned the previous evening. Called simply Hotel Fifty-Five, after the street number, it was the place he favored whenever he visited London: quiet, discreet, well-located and relatively inexpensive. Riddle might have said he would pay any expenses, but Banks wouldn’t want to see the CC’s face if he got a bill from the Dorchester.

The morning’s rain had dispersed during the journey, and the day had turned out windy and cool under the kind of piercingly clear blue sky you only get in November. Maybe the bonfires would dry out in time for Guy Fawkes Night after all, Banks thought, as he zipped his leather jacket a bit higher. He tapped his briefcase against his thigh to the rhythm of some hip-hop music that drifted out of a sex shop.

Banks had strong feelings and memories associated with Soho ever since he used to walk the beat or drive the panda cars there out of Vine Street Station, after it had been reopened in the early seventies. Certainly the area had been cleaned up since then, but Soho could never be really clean. Cleanliness wasn’t in its nature.

He loved the whiff of villainy he got whenever he walked Old Compton Street or Dean Street, where a fiddle had been simply a hair’s breadth away from a legitimate business deal. He remembered the cold dawns at Berwick Street Market, a cigarette and mug of hot sweet tea in his hands, chatting with Sam, whose old brown collie Fetchit used to sit under the stall all day and watch the world go by with sad eyes. As the other stallholders set up their displays – fruit, crockery, knives and forks, knickers and socks, watches, egg slicers, you name it – Sam used to give Banks a running commentary on what was hot and what wasn’t. Probably dead now, along with Fetchit. They’d been old enough back then, when Banks was new to the job.

Not that Soho was ever without its dark side. Banks had found his first murder victim there in an alley off Frith Street: a seventeen-year-old prostitute who had been stabbed and mutilated, her breasts cut off and several of her inner organs removed. “Homage to Jack the Ripper,” as the newspaper headlines had screamed. Banks had been sick on the spot, and he still had nightmares about the long minutes he spent alone with the disemboweled body just before dawn in a garbage-strewn Soho alley.

As with all the dead in his life, he had put a name to her: Dawn Wadley. Being junior at the time, Banks was given the job of telling her parents. He would never forget the choking smell of urine, rotten meat and unwashed nappies in the cramped flat on the tenth floor of an East End tower block, or Dawn’s washed-out junkie mother, apparently unconcerned about the fate of the daughter she gave up on years ago. To her, Dawn’s murder was just another in the endless succession of life’s cruel blows, as if it had happened solely in order to do her down.

Banks turned into Wardour Street. Soho had changed, like the rest of the city. The old bookshops and video booths were still around, as was the Raymond Revue Bar, but cheap sex was definitely on the wane. In its place came a younger crowd, many of them gay, who chatted on their mobiles while sipping cappuccinos at chic outdoor cafés. Young men with shaved heads and earrings flirted on street corners with clean-cut boys from Palmer’s Green or Sudbury Hill. Gay bars had sprung up all over the place, and the party never stopped.

Banks checked the address for GlamourPuss Ltd. he had got from the first place he tried: the phone book. Sometimes things really are that easy.

From the outside, it looked like any number of other businesses operating in Soho. The building was run-down, paint flaking from the doors, the lino on the creaky corridors cracked and worn, but inside, through the second set of doors, it was all high-tech glam and potted plants, and he could still smell the fresh paint on the walls.

“Can I help you, sir?”

To Banks’s surprise, there was a female receptionist sitting behind a chest-high semicircle of black Plexiglas. Written on it, in florid pink script scattered with some sort of glitter, at about waist height, was the logo “GlamourPuss Ltd.: Erotica and More!” Banks had the idea, somehow, that women – right-thinking women, anyway – didn’t want anything to do with the porn business, that they wanted, in fact, to outlaw it if they could. Maybe this was a wrong-thinking woman? Or was she the respectable face of porn? If so, it was about nineteen, with short henna hair, a ghostly complexion and a stud through its left nostril. A little badge over her flat chest read “Tamara: Client Interface Officer.” Banks’s mind boggled. Can we interface, Tamara ?

“I’d like to see the person in charge,” he said.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“No.”

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

She was starting to sound like an immigration official, Banks thought, getting irritated. In the old days he would probably have just tweaked her nose-stud and walked right on in. Even these days he might do the same under normal circumstances, but he had to remember he was acting privately; he wasn’t here officially as a policeman. “Let’s call it a business proposition,” he said.

“I see. Please take a seat for a moment, sir. I’ll see if Mr. Aitcheson is free.” She gestured to the orange plastic chairs behind him. An array of magazines lay spread out on the coffee table in front of them. Banks lifted a couple up. Computer stuff, mostly. Not a Playboy or a Penthouse in sight. He looked up at Tamara, who had been carrying on a hushed conversation by telephone. She smiled. “He’ll be with you in a moment, sir.” Did she think he was looking for a job, or something? As what?

Banks was beginning to feel more as if he were in a dentist’s waiting room than a porn emporium, and that thought didn’t give him any comfort. Clearly, things had changed a lot since he had walked the Soho beat; enough to make him feel like an old fogy when he was only in his mid-forties. In the old days, at least you knew where you were: people like GlamourPuss Ltd., as befit their name and business, used to operate out of seedy offices in seedy basements; they didn’t run Internet Web sites; they didn’t have client-interface officers; and they certainly didn’t come out from under their stones to meet strangers offering vague business propositions the way this young man was doing right now, smiling, hand outstretched, wearing a suit, no less.

“Aitcheson,” he said. “Terry Aitcheson. And you are?”

“Banks. Alan Banks.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Banks. Follow me. We’ll go to the office. Far more private in there.”

Banks followed him past Tamara, who gave a little wave and a nose twitch that looked painful. They crossed an open-space area filled with state-of-the-art computer equipment and went into a small office which looked out over Wardour Street. There was nothing either on the desk or the walls to indicate that GlamourPuss Ltd. dealt in pornography.