“About a year,” she repeated. “I called them about the shower, but they never came. They’re arseholes, you know, dahling.”
She inhaled on her cigarette and blew the smoke upwards. Jack walked over to her.
“I know who you are. You’re Lola Vavoom. You used to be big in movies.”
“I will treat that feed line with the contempt it deserves, dahling. I’d never tread on Norma’s toes. Who might you be?”
“Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division. These are Detective Sergeant Mary and Constable Baker.”
She nodded in Mary’s direction but didn’t look at her. She put a languid hand out towards Baker, just out of his reach so he had to step forward to shake it.
“Detective Baker,” she cooed.
“Constable Baker,” he corrected with a small smile.
Despite her faded grandeur and worn poise, Lola had a certain grace and bearing that still made her extremely attractive.
“That’s a beautiful name. I had a lover named Baker once. He was hung like a hamster.”
“Is that good?” asked Baker, unsure of her meaning.
“It is if you’re another hamster.”
Jack managed to turn a laugh into a cough. Baker blushed, but Jack quickly took charge of the situation.
“Miss Vavoom — what are you doing here?”
“Here, dahling?” she replied with a smile. “Why, I live here!”
“We thought you’d be in Hollywood… or Caversham Heights at the very least,” added Mary, who remembered seeing Lola performing Anthrax! live when she was a little girl.
“Hah!” Lola spat contemptuously. “Being waited on by an army of cosmetic surgeons? No thanks. What you see is what I am. I’ve not had my boobs done or my arse lifted, no nips, no tucks. No ribs removed, nothing. Those little strumpets we see on the silver screen today are mostly bathroom sealant. They buy their breasts over the counter. ‘What would you like, honey, small, medium or large?’ They give us stick insects and tell us it’s beauty. If someone of their size went for an audition in my day, she’d have been shown a square meal and told to come back when she was a stone heavier. What’s wrong with curves? Anyone over a ten these days is regarded not as an average-sized woman but a marketing opportunity. Cream for this, pills for that, superfluous hair, collagen injection, quick-weight-loss diets. Where’s it going to end? We’re pressured to expend so much money and effort to be the ‘perfect’ shape, when that shape is physically attainable by only one woman in a million. It’s the cold face of capitalism, boys and girls, preying on misguided expectations. Besides, I always found perfection an overrated commodity.”
Her voice had risen as she spoke, topping her tirade on a high C. She paused and collected herself, then continued in a normal voice.
“Sometime I’ll make a comeback, and when I do…”
Jack and Baker just stared. Lola looked from Baker to Mary and then back to Jack again. She tapped her heel against the doorframe and lit another cigarette.
“So. You’re the police. I heard about Humpty. I was sorry, I thought he was a nice guy. A bit short for my taste, but there you have it.”
“When did you last see him?” asked Jack, trying to gather his senses.
She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “About this time last year. I saw Hump come lumbering out; he never could move very fast with those short little legs of his. He looked a bit agitated, and I asked if he was all right. He was a bit startled when he saw me and said everything was fine, then went downstairs. I went back indoors, but I could still hear the shower running. Humpty never came back, and I called the maintenance engineer the following week. He didn’t turn up, and it’s still running. My guess is that they’re trying to make the building unsafe so we all have to move out.”
She looked around the shabby corridor and pulled at a piece of curling wallpaper disdainfully. It tore off easily in her hand, and she crushed the fragment to little pieces.
She suddenly looked bored. “Can I go? If you want me, you know where to find me. I don’t go out a lot.”
Lola didn’t wait for a reply. She just looked at them all, smiled at Baker, went back inside her room and closed the door noiselessly behind her.
Jack sighed and put an ear to one of the glass panes of Humpty’s front door.
“We’ve just met British cinema history,” he commented.
“She was rather a cracker in her time, sir,” declared Baker.
“I think she still is.”
“Well,” announced Mary, “if I look that good in my fifties, I’ll be a happy girl.”
Jack raised a finger to his lips. “Quiet a second, guys.”
They all stood in silence for a moment.
“She’s right. The shower is still running.”
He stepped back and gestured to Baker to force the lock. They pushed the door open against a mound of junk mail that had collected in the hall and then went on to the second door that separated the hall from the rest of the apartment. Jack paused and looked at Mary and Baker, seeing his own feelings of foreboding reflected on their faces.
As Jack grasped the door handle, it came away in his hand, and the door itself fell away into a rotten, soggy heap. A wave of damp air blew over them all. The moisture in the air had exacted a terrible toll on the apartment. Everything they could see was in an advanced state of rot. The carpets and furnishings were thickly mildewed, and the paper had peeled off the walls and lay in heaps next to the moldy skirting. The books in the bookcase had rotted down to a dark mulch, and everything in the flat was covered with a thin layer of moisture. There was a heavy smell of damp, and Jack noticed that several varieties of fungi had started to grow on the walls and floors. He felt the floorboards collapse gently under his weight, the patterned carpet keeping him from falling through entirely. He trod gently into the bedroom and saw that the sheets had rotted off the bed and the contents of the wardrobe had fallen off their hangers into a soggy mass. As he called to Baker to turn off the shower, his eyes settled on a badly corroded cartridge that lay on the wet carpet. He looked closer and found another, then two more. He bent down and prodded one with a pen, but it had stuck fast to the carpet.
Jack heard the shower stop. There was a short pause, and then Baker spoke, his voice solemn and quavering slightly.
“Sir, I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”
The SOCO team was there in under an hour. They looked around curiously at the decayed room and walked carefully on a floor that now undulated where the floorboards had partially collapsed. One officer busied himself cutting out the squares of carpet that had the cartridges corroded to them, but the fingerprint boys were sent away almost immediately.
Shenstone scratched the back of his head when he saw the mess. “How long has the shower been going?”
“A year.”
It posed severe problems. The photographer was still busy as Mrs. Singh arrived, breathless after hurrying up the stairs. Jack was sorting through the heap of junk mail and private letters, most of which seemed to be either bank correspondence, invitations to functions or pleas for charitable donations. There were hundreds of love letters, too — obviously brief amours hastily cast aside. The oldest postmark dated back almost a year, which seemed to tie in with what Lola had told them.
“Jack, Jack,” said Mrs. Singh, shaking her head sadly, “what’s going on?”
Jack took her to the bathroom, finding her a safe passage over the rotten floorboards. “Body in the shower. Probably been dead about a year.”
“A year? Well, as I said, dead men do — ”
But then she saw the body. A flash went off at that moment to punctuate the discovery.