'So what was it then, peeper?'
'Stiffs.'
Cop nodded, trying to look businesslike, as if this what he had suspected all along.
'Of course, he's not the only person around town who likes them a bit cold. It's quite a popular pastime in some quarters, so I'm told. But not many people are in such an excellent position to do something about it. Old men, young girls, you name it, he was into it. And that might have been an end of it. He could have carried on like that and no one would have been any the wiser. But he gets greedy. Maybe he's planning on a retirement and needs a better quality nest egg, or maybe he's just tired of scrimping and saving all his life. Either way he could do with a little extra money. Couldn't we all? He finds himself approached by a couple of guys who want in on the game. They happen to have some clients who also fancy a night of passion in the morgue and they're willing to pay. So these two new guys ask him how about it? Like to share the spoils for a bit of extra cash? And he thinks why not? As long as everyone is discreet about it no one need know and everyone is discreet of course because they are all respectable men in respectable positions. And so it goes on for a while but then the two new guys think of a new angle. A special-request service. You see someone walking around you fancy, have a word with us and we can arrange the death and a subsequent night of passion.'
The cop whistled. This was worse than anything he'd yet encountered. And if he knew the first thing about the underworld he'd know it was pure invention and not very good at that. But he didn't.
'Of course this is way out of the Dean's league. Bonking a few corpses, yes, he didn't have a problem with that, and for a man like him for whom death was a way of life, it wasn't a big deal. But this was something else entirely. Murder to order? No way. The trouble was, the two guys had made a mistake. They'd miscalculated and let him in on the plan; that gave them a problem. So they invite him to town to discuss the matter. And they get persuasive. Very persuasive. The Dean's no fool, he realises they are planning to silence him, silence him for good. He tries to run away and hide out in town. But what does he know about the cloak-and-dagger stuff? He's just a crusty old academic fallen in with a bad lot. It was only a matter of time before they got to him.'
The cop nodded thoughtfully as he took it in. He was deeply disturbed. 'So who are the two guys?'
'I don't know the names, but one of them is the garage mechanic at Kousin Kevin's Kamp, he's the muscle. The other is the security guy there. He's the brains.'
The cop made a determined frown. 'That little jerk — I know him!'
'Of course he'll deny it all,' I said.
Harri Harries picked up the bag of tools. 'We'll see about that.'
It was still early evening and sleet was falling as they padlocked the gates and dropped me off at the bus stop. The sort of bus stop that looked like bus arrivals were charted with a calendar rather than a clock. I hobbled over to the red telephone box. The door squeaked like a seagull and the inside stank of urine. Llunos's voice had the tone of one who really didn't want to get up and answer the phone at 8 pm in the evening, knowing full well it wouldn't be anything good. I looked at the distant row of yellow lights from behind sitting-room curtains and I knew what he meant. But this had to be done. I told him briefly about what had happened and told him to get up from his tea, the newspaper and the TV, put on his coat and go and find the two guys from Kousin Kevin's. He didn't say no, he just sighed and said, 'Why me, Louie?'
'Who else is there?' He knew that was true.
'You're asking me to arrest a couple of guys who've done nothing wrong.'
'Well it wouldn't be the first time, would it?'
'This isn't funny, Louie.'
'Who's laughing? Look at it this way, you'll probably be saving their lives. Or at the least preventing a serious assault taking place. Just keep them banged-up until we can sort this out. If you keep them under your nose they should be safe.'
Sometime after midnight I parked outside the Moulin and walked in. It was quieter tonight than the last time, smoky and slightly sleepy, as if all the moods of all the people there had become synchronised and the flavour of the night was dreamy-mellow. I ordered a drink, listened to the singers and let my gaze wonder sleepily around the room. It came to rest on a girl dancing and my eyes stayed there for a while with my thoughts wandered elsewhere. Then slowly those thoughts returned and my attention focused on her. Suddenly I understood how a rabbit feels when it stares transfixed at the headlight of an oncoming car.
She was tall but not too tall and slim but not skinny. Her figure was voluptuous and statuesque like one of those space-travelling goddesses in newspaper strip-cartoons, the ones whose job it is to save the universe. She wore a tight bodice of soft white lace, partially unbuttoned so that the cups of her brassiere, like the hands of a malevolent dwarf, thrust her breasts forward to taunt the men who watched in awe. The waist-button of her jeans was undone and the button below that too so that the edge of her white panties flashed in the ultraviolet light. Her midriff was bare and taut, and her faded Levi's 501s had been cut off at about the level that her bicycle saddle reached when she was seventeen. A saddle that had, no doubt, been stolen long ago and was now worth ten times more than the bike.
She danced wonderfully and provocatively with a flowing Polynesian languor, her hair glistening like moonlit water. Occasionally the cascading blonde hair would swamp her soft brown shoulder and the strap of her bodice would be washed away in the flood; and when that happened, her breast remained impossibly in position, mocking and taunting, like a puppet that continues to dance after its strings have been cut. Every time I tried to look away my gaze returned of its own accord, like a compass needle pointing north.
The boy she was with was one of the camp, symbolist painters who sold their work to the tourists on the Prom. He was wearing a ruffed shirt and stage make-up and no doubt had left a portfolio with the hat-check girl containing five dreary views of the bandstand with the moon hanging behind it like a rotten fruit. Scarcely eighteen or nineteen, hardly old enough to have made an enemy in this world, and yet in the Moulin tonight this boy was despised by every man there. Because we all knew from the expression on the goddess's face - the truculent, savage aristocratic disdain - that she had chosen him purely to demonstrate her contempt for the rest of us. Chosen this effete, cross-dressing, half-grown milksop to show us how she despised us for being such hopeless fools; for surrendering ourselves so abjectly at the sight of her flesh. She had chosen him not as a dance-partner, but as a scalpel with which to expose like an Aztec priest our hearts to the common view and make us see, even though we already knew, what pathetic and feeble objects they were. Our palpitating flesh as craven as that of a guard dog who allows himself to be bought off with a bone and licks the hand of the man come to kill his master. And though our humiliation was already more than complete, she intensified it further by ordering round after round of exotic drinks — flaming black sambucas and B52s — which they knocked back in one, and which she paid for from a wallet stuck in her back pocket. And after that, eyes smouldering with contempt, she pressed her chest hard against the boy's bony ribcage and slid with lugubrious, side-to-side slithers up into his undeserving, pimply face. I stopped a waitress and asked the name of this girl in the tones of a shepherd asking about that new star in the east. And she told me without even bothering to look, told me with the air of one sick of explaining the obvious to the ignorant. 'It's Judy Juice, the movie star.'