Кейт Уотерхаус - Soho or Alex in Wonderland

Without looking round Detective Sergeant Bone glanced up into one of the heavily engraved mirrors that festooned the Victorian pub.

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

“All right, don’t look round. Make conversation.”

Quite taken with the role he had been assigned in this little drama, Alex said jauntily, if far too loudly: “Man U were shite on Saturday, didn’t you reckon?”

“Dunno about that, I’m an Arsenal man myself,” said Detective Sergeant Bone with appalling stiltedness, his eyes fixed on the mirror. Alex racked his brains for something conversational to add to the conversation.

Meanwhile Kim Grizzard had positioned himself towards the end of the bar, opposite the caryatid-littered curving staircase down which the landlord could be expected to make his appearance, which he now did. With a napkin tucked into a yellow plaid waistcoat, and bristling handlebar moustaches, he obviously regarded himself as a bit of a character.

“Ah, Master Grizzard himself!” boomed mine host, as he no doubt described himself. “I was expecting you at breakfast time, not lunch time.”

“Sean! You’ve found it!” In his relief Kim Grizzard mimed an elaborate heart-attack.

“Found what, Kim?” The landlord winked owlishly down the bar at Detective Sergeant Bone, who was ploddingly discussing with Alex the merits and demerits of Leeds United.

“Come on, Sean, stop pissing me about. Where was it?”

“Right here under the cider barrel, where your young friend left it.” Yeh yeh yeh yeh, it was all coming back now. They had come in through the Shaftesbury Avenue entrance, had the one, had a slash, and gone out through the Rupert Place door. Completely forgetting about the script. And that little bloke was sitting over there fiddling with his Swiss Army knife. So why didn’t Detective Sergeant Bone go over and nick him, then? What was he waiting for? To finish his drink, most likely.

“He’s no friend of mine, Sean. So what have you done with it?”

“Well, now.” The landlord paused weightily. Alex, listening, felt almost sorry for Kim Grizzard, saddled as he was with the publican’s determination to wring the last drop of juice out of the situation.

“Yes, well, get on with it, Sean. Is the script safe, that’s all I want to know?”

“It’s in the safest place you could ever dream of, Kim. I took one look at your title, Freeze When You Say That , and I thought, There’s only one home for this till he comes in for it.” The landlord paused drolly for effect, his tongue plunged into his cheek.

“Oh, fucking come on, for Christ’s sake!”

“Well, where would you put a book with a title like that, if you wanted to keep it safe and sound?” asked the landlord, in the slightly sulky tones of one whose joke is being spoiled.

“All right, Sean, I’ve got it. Come in, Kim. The deep freeze, right?”

The landlord allowed himself a beam of self-congratulation. “Mind you, I’m not saying it won’t be smelling strongly of lasagne or fish pie by the time you’ve got it thawed out.”

He went over to the deep freeze in a cubby-hole behind the bar. A cloud of dry ice rose as he slid back the lid and extracted what looked like, and in fact was, a solid block of A4 ice about two and a half inches thick. “Jesus, haven’t I been saying this thing’s turned up too high?” exclaimed the landlord as he plonked the ice parcel down on the bar counter like a frozen chicken. Through it, as in a distorting mirror, could be seen Kim’s wilting title page. Freeze When You Say That , a novel by Kim Grizzard, in a typescript that waved and curled as if it were under water, as of course it would be once it had thawed.

Kim didn’t speak, probably couldn’t speak, but simply sank on to a bar stool and began to caress the A4 ice pack until his palms grew moist.

Having extracted all the entertainment value he could out of the frozen manuscript, the landlord, twirling his moustaches, moved along the bar to ingratiate himself with Detective Sergeant Bone.

“Morning, Sergeant Bone, and how’s Sergeant Bone? Haven’t seen the good Inspector Wills of late. Do give him my —”

Even Alex could see that he might just as well have held up an illuminated sign flashing “Police”.

“Shut it!” snarled the detective sergeant.

Too late. Alex heard the scrape of a bar stool and, turning — he guessed he was now allowed to do so — was in time to see the stool hurtled across the floor and Bone’s quarry diving through swing doors, with Detective Sergeant Bone sprawling over the obstacle as he headed in pursuit.

No one had ever accused Alex of thinking on his feet so it was probably instinct rather than quick intelligence that made him figure out that instead of dashing up Shaftesbury Avenue, where his flight would be impeded by the drifting crowds and thick traffic, the fugitive might just turn immediately right into Rupert Place along the side of the pub and try to lose himself in the maze of quiet little streets.

Without much idea of what he meant to do with it, except a feeling that he ought to be armed, Alex grabbed the ice-bound copy of Freeze When You Say That from the bar counter and, with Grizzard’s protesting oaths ringing in his ears, crashed through the Rupert Place door of the pub in time to see the wanted man haring across the street.

With a skill he did not know he possessed, he skimmed the frozen manuscript across the Tarmac like an ice-hockey puck. Following the camber of the street, it curled around the man’s feet. Startled, he stumbled, slithered and went flat on his face.

Charging up behind him, Detective Sergeant Bone jumped heavily on his back. “Well done, Alex,” he panted. “Though mark you, if it turns out we’ve got the wrong bloke, he can probably do you for compensation. In fact,” he added as he struggled with his handcuffs, “the way things are going these days, he’ll most likely sue you in any case.”

James Flood had got the whole story from Detective Inspector Wills, although to his great disgust all he could use of it was that a man was being held.

The man was Christine’s divorced father, who ran a small jewellery repair business in Hatton Garden, where he also lived in a tiny flat. He had always entertained hopes that his only son Christopher would join him in the family business, and could never figure out why he had opted to take an accountancy course instead. Now he understood: it was so that Christopher, Christine, could lead two lives, as separate from one another as could be.

This was something that Colin Yardley, as his name was, himself well understood. He was, Detective Inspector Wills had established, no stranger to Soho. It was his habit to visit a certain establishment in Brewer Place once a week with the object of having himself tied to a bed and tickled with feathers. It was his inability to interest Mrs Yardley, Christine’s mother, in this bizarre pursuit that had led to the breakdown of his marriage; and it was on one of his regular visits to Soho to indulge in his unusual hobby that he had first seen his son dressed up as a young woman.

Detective Inspector Wills could not entirely understand why a man with a depraved taste for bondage games should react with such disgust at a son who turned out to be a transvestite. It was, to his mind, a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. But with that smattering of psychological insight that rubs off on most long-term Soho dwellers, the inspector divined that Colin Yardley had transferred disgust at his own sexual antics to disgust at Christine’s. Some such Freudian bollox anyway, he told Detective Sergeant Bone.

Or maybe it was simple shock. In his son’s youth he had surprised him one afternoon in the parental bedroom dressing up in his mother’s underclothes, and had given him such a good hiding that he considered him cured. It was therefore with dismay that he had recognised Christopher as Christine, poncing along Old Compton Street in high heels like a Soho brass.