Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

‘Reilly owns that place now. A few months back, he sent his heavies in, demanded the deeds, got the deeds. A year or so ago, a similar place on Berwick Street resisted his approaches and got burned to the ground.

‘A turf war, over a cattle shed like that?’

‘If you look closer, there’s a clip joint in the basement, an unlicensed sex shop on the ground floor and three or four prostitutes on the first and second floors.’

I turned to see a red door open to a bare wooden staircase. On the flaky wall, a garish square of pink card announced ‘Models’ in black marker pen.

I couldn’t imagine how any man could take that stairway to farmyard sex with a spent, cowed slave. The very existence of these fleshy wank stations had to be about male power and control: a King Kong, chest-beating, ‘me Tarzan’ fleeting reassertion of authority for men emasculated by modern life and equality. Or maybe they were just horny as hell and this had to do.

Either way, Soho had dozens of these so-called ‘walk ups’. It would be the ‘walking back down again’ I couldn’t handle. Maybe it was the Catholic in me, but how could you face the outside world again after your sordid deed, burning with guilt and shame? What if – blinking into the sun, sticky and dishevelled – you bumped into someone you knew? How could you ever explain away your behaviour? And Soho really is that small.

‘Talk about putting yourself in a vulnerable position,’ I said. ‘Presumably as soon as your keks hit the floor, some muscle jumps out of the wardrobe and robs you.’

‘No, those girls are the real deal,’ he said, and who was I to argue with the Vice Admiral.

‘There’s a menu of services on the wall,’ he went on. ‘You get what you pay for, albeit with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm.’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about this, Fintan.’

‘I’ve very good contacts in the Vice Squad. And they maintain good relationships with the pimps and the girls, mostly. The cops know they’re never going to get rid of it so they try to make it as safe as possible for all involved. Most of these places have CCTV in the hallways now and covert cameras in the bedrooms. They set it up to protect the girls but it’s helped them in all sorts of ways that they hadn’t bargained for.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Let’s just say men of influence don’t like being caught with their trousers round their ankles. Especially married ones.’

‘I trust a thorough, conscientious journalist like you has insisted on seeing this footage.’

He laughed: ‘Let’s just say it made me feel very conventional. Boring almost.’

‘I don’t understand why a multi-millionaire, semi-legit gangster like Reilly would get involved in something so … tawdry.’

‘According to my snouts in Vice, two reasons. His place back there pulls in two grand cash a week, and he gets to road test all the fresh meat.’

‘Sounds like a fucking animal,’ I said.

The seedy, decrepit underground sex hovels soon gave way to Old Compton Street’s colourful gay sex shops, pubs and clubs – so clean, overt and unashamed. I wondered what this contrast revealed about male sexuality.

We stomped on through more neon-lit alleyways, past joints promising peeps and teasing strips. Under the archway announcing Raymond’s Revue bar in Walker’s Court, a dreadlocked man mumbled offers of crack, his hamster-like cheeks storing the rocks, ready to swallow if police swooped.

Brewer Street’s porn cinemas, weirdo publishing outlets and sex shops eventually gave way to the innocent white-bulb signs of legitimate theatre, and to the trendy restaurants of Glasshouse Street – bouncers on the door, celebrities inside, paparazzi on the pavement.

Finally, we crossed the grand, sweeping, traffic-heaving Victorian vista of Regent’s Street.

‘Okay, don’t stare, next street on the left, four or five doors down, red canopy. That’s our place.’

‘Aren’t we going in now?’

‘For God’s sake, Donal, we’re high rollers! We don’t go anywhere on foot. We’ll hail a black cab.’

‘Damn, if only you’d brought your Hot Rod Mondeo. They’d be laying their black bomber jackets over the puddles …’

‘Shut up and stick this on.’

I felt something pushing into my hand, opened my fingers to find a silver watch with a comedy-large red face. Fintan was already strapping what looked like an alarm clock to his wrist.

‘That,’ he said, nodding over to my scarlet arm-candy, ‘is a Paul Newman Rolex Daytona 6565, worth 200 grand. I’m letting you have the flashiest watch because you’re most in need of sprucing up.’

‘Gee, thanks … 200 grand? For a watch?’

‘Yeah, bonkers, isn’t it? Then they have the gall to complain when they get mugged. Only Father fucking Time himself knows these are fakes, so make sure you flash yours towards the apes on the door. And, later, at the mutton inside. They’re experts at wheedling out real money from time wasters. So keep your sleeve high and the hoes will come a running. It’ll be no change for you really, will it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Relying on your right wrist for sex!’

He hailed a black cab and we dived in.

‘Here,’ he said to the driver, handing him a tenner, ‘take a loop round the block, then drop us outside the Florentine. Keep the change.’

I could never summon up the chutzpah for an enterprise like this alone. But Fintan thrived upon it. Although this probably confirmed my long-held suspicion that he was a fantasist, it also made him an ideal wingman. He didn’t so much get into character as transmogrify. Like that time he posed as a restaurant critic for the Irish Times, earning us a three-course meal at the trendy new Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly. He’d even insisted on inspecting the kitchens.

‘Hey,’ smiled the scoop monger, mission-high, ‘this’ll be the closest you’ve got to a piece of female ass since, ooh let me think, your actual birth?’

‘Very good, Fint. I must tell that one to Mam. She’s so proud of you already. You know she’s stopped going to the local shop altogether now? Too embarrassed by all your sordid “bonking bishop” exposés.’

That wiped the smirk off his face.

‘Imagine,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘there’s men of the cloth out there who are getting more sex than you.’

The taxi driver pulled up a door down from the Florentine. A sudden twang of dread strummed my nerve endings. I’d confidently pictured myself inside the club, talking the talk. After all, how intimidating could these hostesses-cum-hookers be? And they didn’t even know that their colleague Liz had been murdered. Not yet.

What I hadn’t prepared for was ‘walking the walk’ past the leering row of bouncers outside. This small army of enormous dead-eyed Slavs had probably disposed of Liz’s body earlier today. What if they guessed from my haircut that I’m a cop? What if, while I’m inside asking awkward questions, they found a way to confirm I’m a cop?

‘Get out of the fucking car,’ hissed Fintan from the pavement.

I let him lead. Fintan’s streetwise swagger imbued him with confidence, whereas my metronomic stomp screamed farm labourer or escaped village idiot.

The bouncers’ pitiless eyes had already fastened upon us, seeking out hidden truths. I imagined them with Predator-style infrared vision, peering into our very souls. I wondered suddenly what I’d say if they stopped me. We hadn’t made any plans for that. And I’d always been hopeless at lying.

I took a quick scan of their faces: glum, hateful, exhausted. Small wonder; it can be wearing work halving, disemboweling and draining a hooker. Terrible hours.

I’d heard about these Eastern European muscle men, how easily they could make people disappear before vanishing themselves. I pictured their homelands brimming with gaunt, ravenous, psychotic replacements.

I thought about spinning on my heels and fleeing. They’d never catch me. But Fintan was already level with the first two members of our unwelcoming committee. This was it.

As I winced through their glowering death stares, I couldn’t help bracing myself for unexpected impact – as you might walking through an open gate at an automatic tube ticket barrier.

I checked my ‘millionaire alert’ timepiece more often than a Chechen suicide bomber, but none of the goons clocked it. Surely just one well-aimed shimmer of Rolex would mark me out as a youthful captain of industry ‘slumming it’ incognito for the night. In desperation, I faked an itchy forearm and wafted it in front of their faces, back and forth, like a lighter at an Aerosmith concert.