BS15 Blood Never Dies by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Author:Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Crime
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
Published: 2012-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Hansel and Regrettal

Mackay hadn’t been there first thing, and as Slider returned to his office from Mr Porson’s, he met the delinquent DC on the stairs, looking ragged.

‘Sorry, guv,’ he got in first. ‘Very late night, doing the clubs, didn’t hear the alarm.’

‘I hope it was a productive late night. You look like a piece of cheese. I’m not signing an expenses sheet for a debauch, you know.’

‘It wasn’t the drinks, guv, it was the noise,’ Mackay said. ‘Trying to ask questions and hear the answers. But I did get something.’ He managed a smile, the sort a dog gives you when your sandwich has gone missing. ‘Something good.’

‘All right, let’s all hear it,’ Slider said, leading the way. He cast a sideways glance at Mackay as he tramped beside him. The strip lighting was not doing him any favours. ‘You’re not going to throw up, are you?’

‘I hardly had anything,’ Mackay protested. ‘I just need a cuppa and an aspirin the size of Middlesex.’

Mackay had gone first to the Forty-Niners. He had a new photo to show round, not the corpse mugshot but a good one taken from the Wynnstay Gardens flat and photo-shopped to remove the beard and change the hair. He had not seen Tommy Flynn, and when he asked after him casually, no one seemed to have seen him for a couple of days.

‘It was a smart crowd,’ he said. ‘Notting Hill types. Loads a dosh, and a lot of people kept nipping off to the bogs, if you know what I mean.’

‘We know what you mean,’ Atherton said.

‘Yeah,’ said McLaren. ‘The day someone goes in the gents and actually takes a dump it’ll be like a breath of fresh air.’

‘There was a lot of monged kids around, I can tell you. I didn’t have any trouble getting ’em to talk, but when they weren’t talking rubbish they didn’t seem to know anything about Corley. One bloke looked like he might be gonna recognize him, but then he just said he looked familiar.’ He looked at Slider. ‘Maybe it was Ben Jackson he was recognizing.’

‘That’s always a danger,’ said Slider.

Mackay gave up in the end and went on to Vanya’s, where the crowd was so thick it wasn’t far off achieving critical mass and collapsing into a black hole. The noise was so loud he was afraid he’d spontaneously combust. ‘I couldn’t get anything out of anyone, they were all just jiggling about looking stupid, right out of their trees. I asked all the staff I could find, but they just shrugged. Most of ’em seemed to be East Europeans, so I’m not even sure they understood the question. In the end I gave it up and went to the Hot Box.’

It was quieter in the Hot Box, not because the music wasn’t loud but because there were fewer people. Fewer and richer seemed to be the Hot Box’s philosophy. ‘I’ve never seen so many bottles o’ champagne outside of a wedding,’ Mackay said. Seduction seemed to be the dominant theme.

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