The One a Month Man (6 page)

I
lunched on a burger and a double espresso on the South Bank, beside the London Eye. At an outdoor table, in the welcome shade of a tree that smelled as if all the dogs in the neighbourhood had left their calling cards, I phoned the Bournemouth Central Police Station and asked for Detective Sergeant Charlie Mullet. I knew Mullet from his days with the Met. He’d migrated south a few years ago with his wife and two kids, in search of a better quality of life; by that, he meant schools where the curriculum didn’t major on designer drugs and how to use knives to achieve maximum penetration. Whether he’d found his Eden, I had no idea. We hadn’t spoken since the night of his roistering farewell shindig, when the rest of us had pooled our pocket money to hire a stripper to mortify him. Mullet was very much a slippers-and-fireside guy, which meant he was probably more suited to the provinces than the big, bad metropolis, where sin was the signature, along with the dog piss.

Mullet was at his desk when he took my call, the first five minutes of which were spent on catch-up. With that out of the way, I said, ‘You might be able to help me with a cold case I’m working.’

‘With a Bournemouth connection?’ he said, perking up, clearly itching for some big-time action.

‘Tenuous,’ I said, hosing his enthusiasm.

‘Oh,’ he said, suitably watered down.

‘Does the name Frankie Cullis mean anything to you, by any chance?’

He didn’t need thinking time. ‘You bet.’

My pulse rate increased to a trot. ‘I wasn’t sure he was on your turf.’

‘He’s one of our celebrity sewer-rats. A poison-paw in every mouldy pie. What’s your interest in him?’

‘I’m hoping he’s a stepping-stone, leading me to someone else I need to track down.’

‘He hasn’t made his name down here as a Good Samaritan, especially when it comes to helping the law. He doesn’t do favours, unless it’s worth his while, which requires a bung.’

‘OK, I’m listening,’ I said, offhandedly. ‘What’s he up to?’

‘Everything he shouldn’t be doing. But he’s a skilled tightrope-walker. He somehow manages to keep his footing and, so far, he hasn’t fallen into our net. He and his missus run an online dating agency, among other dodgy things.’

‘A front for prostitution?’ I said.

‘Naturally, but they’re not brothel-keeping.’

‘Living off immoral earnings, though,’ I said.

‘What other way of living is there for that type? But try proving it. They sail close to the wind, but they’re crafty navigators.’

‘Have you had personal dealings with them?’

‘Several run-ins. Nicked them a few times, but they always walked; spiked by the CPS before I even got them in court. He protests that he’s just an Honest Joe matchmaker, trying to broker a little happiness for the lonely.’

‘Obviously sainthood awaits,’ I said, humouring him. ‘What the couples get up to after they’re brought together is none of the middleman’s business. How many times have I heard that?’ My rhetorical question went unanswered.

‘Cullis also owns a bar in a sleazy part of town. The
Shipwreck. Should be The Flotsam. Caters for tarts, their pimps, drug-pushers, petty thieves and fences. We’re always raiding the dump. Make plenty of arrests, but we’ve never netted Frankie or his beloved, Simone.
Simone
! She’s about as French and ugly as the Old Kent Road.’

Mullet’s powers of description had improved since he’d become gentrified.

‘What’s his address, apart from the sewer?’

‘Which one do you want? Where he occasionally lives with his wife, such as on Christmas Day? Where he shacks up with his mistresses – note the plural? Or his pond-life bar where he serves watered-down drinks, smuggled wines and spirits, and sells fags that dropped off the back of lorries?’

‘Gimme all three,’ I said, greedily.

‘Best of luck,’ he said, after looking up the information for me. ‘If you want a guided tour, just give me a bell when you land in town.’

I could tell that he wanted us to get together to reminisce some more, like an old soldiers’ reunion, to recall bygone busts in the Smoke, and to regale one another with anecdotes about ex-colleagues known to us both. Met detectives always gassed about quitting the Smoke for pastures new and environmentally friendly, but those who did cut and run never really ever severed the umbilical cord. The pull of the womb was constant, like gravity, and stayed with them until grabbed by the grave.

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, with no intention of taking up his offer.

‘Look forward to it,’ he said, equally aware that we wouldn’t be speaking again until one of us wanted a professional favour from the other. He had ditched the Met and London, so he was no longer one of the elite. That’s the way it worked. There was as much snobbery among cops as in the aristocracy, exemplified by the fact that we Met operators considered ourselves the nation’s aristocrats.

Before setting out for Bournemouth, I phoned Sarah to see if she had made progress.

‘God, this is mind-numbing!’ she groaned.

‘Still trawling?’

‘Still among the departed, like a warped tombstone tourist. Nothing so far. Just dead ends. Ha! Ha!’

‘Nice to see your sense of humour’s intact.’

‘That wasn’t humour, Mike; that was despair. How’s your day going?’

I updated her, as succinctly as possible.

‘What next?’ she said, anticipating my response.

‘I go to the seaside.’

‘Makes sense,’ she said. ‘No point returning here first, adding unnecessary mileage. Be careful – sounds as if you’ll be
swimming
with the sharks.’

I arrived in Bournemouth just before four o’clock in the
afternoon
. I had some knowledge of this sprawling coastal conurbation, but not detailed, so on the periphery I pulled into a filling station and bought a street-map in the shop. Of the three addresses I’d been given for Cullis, his home was the nearest, so it was logical to try my luck there first.

After a few wrong turns and circling a roundabout three times, I located Frankie Cullis’s shack, which was something rather grander than a beach-hut. Its façade was colonial-styled, with a couple of mock Roman columns supporting a portico at the double-door entrance. A black Bentley and a two-door silver Merc were parked on a horseshoe-shaped, pebbled drive at the front of the house, which had been built on rising ground, some fifty yards from the pine-lined avenue. There was a
rockery-garden
sloping in tiers to a white, pebble-dashed wall of medium height. Although all the houses in this road were of a similar size – in other words gargantuan – the shapes and styles were varied. None of the properties was older than twenty or
thirty years, I estimated, though what did I know about such matters? On the opposite side of the road was a golf course, which was also landscaped on a slope. The road must have been bulldozed into a cutting through rising ground on both sides. No parking was allowed in the road, a by-law I happily ignored. The black wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the driveway of Cullis’s property were remote-controlled. However, a few yards from the iron gates was a smaller, unlocked entrance for
pedestrians
, such as the postman and trades-folk, the route I took.

As I climbed the crooked, stepped path through the rockery, I counted the windows, which were all louvred: four up and the same number down. I reckoned there could be as many as eight bedrooms, two or three bathrooms and probably three large downstairs rooms, excluding the kitchen. Some shack!

The bell chimed. These kinds of houses didn’t have anything as common as a ringing bell. I half-expected the door to be flung open by a flunky or at the very least a pinstriped butler. Like most of my expectations, this one was adrift, too. No one could criticize my consistency.

‘We don’t buy anything on the doorstep, especially
insurance
,’ said the short, balding, portly slob, who showed me nothing below his waist, as he appraised me disdainfully through the sliver of daylight between the doors. Being mistaken for an insurance salesman was almost a compliment. Usually I was instantly taken for a cop.

‘Mr Cullis?’ I said. He could have been the gardener or handyman, but, in that event, he would have been much more polite and presentable. Especially to an insurance salesman.

‘Who wants to know?’ He’d obviously had a misspent middle age, watching too many TV soaps.

My ID was already in my hand, which I pushed to within a couple of inches of his unshaven face.

‘Shit! Now what?’ And before I could answer, he said, ‘You’re not local, are you?’ My ID had been so close to his fugitive eyes
that my details must have been out of focus. ‘I know all the bleedin’ locals. Bane of my life!’

‘Met,’ I said.

‘Then you’re trespassing on another force’s patch.’

How I loved barrack-room lawyers! ‘Do I get invited in or must I mess up your fancy woodwork?’

‘What’s this about?’ he said, holding his ground.

‘I’ll tell you when I’m inside.’

Reluctantly, he opened the door further and motioned with his head for me to cross the threshold, stand-off over.

‘Well?’ he said, as soon as the door was shut, not intending to allow me any further than the lobby.

As I repeated my spiel about searching for a woman, he looked bemused, though probably more relieved than anything else, realizing I wasn’t there to nick him for an old-bones crime, a legacy of his London days.

‘Follow me,’ he said, hitching up paint-stained hipster jeans.

As we were about to pass the foot of the stairs, someone above us called out, ‘Frankie, what you doing? I’m gasping for that drink I thought you were fetching.’

The voice came from a young woman. Cullis’s eyes and mine latched on to the voice trajectory. The woman, semi-naked, was leaning over the upstairs landing-rail, tits dangling.

‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry!’ she spluttered on seeing me. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’

‘Don’t matter. It’s no one special. Wait in the bedroom,’ Cullis ordered. ‘This business won’t take long.’ Then, to me, ‘Come on. Let’s get this over, so I can get back to unfinished business.’

‘Wives can be very demanding,’ I said, enjoying the
mischievous
moment.

‘Funny! My wife’s in hospital. Broke her leg falling out of bed. Pissed as a priest on Communion wine. Got what she deserved. Legless!’ He guffawed at his own pun.

‘But are you getting what
you
deserve?’ I said, meaningfully.

‘I won’t know that until I get myself back upstairs.’

Everything about the house was ostentatious and tawdry, like its owner. The room he led me into was an oversized den, with a pool table at one end and a shiny jukebox in a corner. The walls were adorned with framed
Playboy
centrespreads. A computer sat on a table against the window, a printer on the burgundy carpet. A huge TV screen was pressed against the wall furthest away from the pool table. There was also a cabinet, filled with bottles of liquor, everything from pernod to tequila. The drapes, colour-toned with the carpet, were hung from ceiling to floor, and the leather furniture was all mix but very little match. Someone other than Cullis would have called it eclectic.

As he kicked the door closed irascibly, he said, hands buried in his pockets, ‘How long is this going to take? As you’ve just witnessed, I’ve someone upstairs whose needs require attending to.’

God, he was funny! He smirked. I didn’t.

‘It needn’t be long,’ I said. ‘Much will depend on your memory.’

His flabby face creased with curiosity. ‘Let’s roll, then.’

‘When you ran Venus for the Lonely escort agency, one of the women in your stable was a Tina Marlowe.’

‘Who says so?’ His hooded eyelids fluttered like the shutters of a rapid-fire camera. His eyes, a road-map of burst capillaries, darted in all directions.

‘I say so.’

‘What year was that?’

I told him and, on cue, he laughed hoarsely. ‘You know how many girls passed through my hands?’

I wasn’t sure if his rather repellent defacement of the English language was accidental or an example of his coarse humour. ‘Let’s just stick with Tina Marlowe,’ I said.

‘The name means nothing to me,’ he said, stubbornly, pouting childishly.

‘Her whoring name was “Lolita”; maybe that will jog your memory.’ Now I started to wind him up.

‘I’ve never knowingly employed whores.’ For once our eyes engaged.

‘We’re talking history,’ I said.

‘Ancient, not modern, by the sounds of it,’ he countered smugly, treating me to the sight of teeth as rotten as his life. ‘Never a good subject of mine.’

‘Look, I’m not here as part of an investigation into any of your activities, Mr Cullis,’ I said, wearily, placing a hand on heart. Pledges, such as swearing on the Bible to tell the truth, didn’t carry much weight with inveterate villains like Cullis, so hand on heart was Boy Scout stuff.

‘I’m listening,’ he said, sceptically.

‘I just
have
to find Tina Marlowe.’

‘Why, she owe you a blow job?’ Regretting his unfettered mouth, he went on hurriedly, ‘How do I know you don’t want her to testify against me, for something?’

‘
Something
such as?’

‘Such as something concocted, an invention.’

‘Mr Cullis, if that were the case, why would I be searching for just one particular woman, going back all those years?’ I said, feigning boredom. ‘I’d have hundreds to choose from. Many of them more recent.’

‘Whether or not I believe you is immaterial. I don’t keep records. Anything that was kept stayed with the agency. You were there this morning, right?’

‘I thought this was going to be quick and easy,’ I said,
sidestepping
his smokescreen question. ‘Seems like I’m going to have to get a search warrant and return with a posse. And talk with the young woman upstairs. Talk with your wife in hospital.’

For a moment I thought he was going to spit in my face and throw a punch; perhaps in reverse order. ‘You bastards never change, do you?’ He unclenched his fist and wiped away spittle from his puffy boxer’s lips with the back of a heavily veined hand.