Corpsing (16 page)

I went to the local library and looked up a few articles on Alun and Dorothy.

Anne-Marie came round in the afternoon. She wanted to talk. From her handbag, she brought out a large chunk of dope. After lightering, crumbling, tobaccoing and rolling it, she started to smoke it. Immediately, her shoulders relaxed and her eyes went moist.

‘I hate my job.’

‘Then quit.’

‘Oh, Conrad, I can’t. The models need me.’

‘I’m sure they’d survive.’

‘Most of them are far worse than Lily ever was.’

‘Wow,’ I said, finding it difficult to imagine.

‘Oh yeah. They have everything: bulimia, drugs, shitty boyfriends.’

For a moment I thought of asking Anne-Marie if Lily hadn’t had everything, too. (Including the shitty boyfriends.) But she was already off on to another topic.

‘What are you going to do? Go back to… whatever it was. I never really understood it. Television.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I think I’ll probably dig out an old idea I had for a screenplay. See if I might not be able to make a go of it. I don’t have to work for a year or two, if I live off what Lily left me. And I can always sell her flat.’

‘She left you her flat?’

‘It was in the last will she made before she died.’

‘Wow. How do you feel about that?’

‘About as guilty as you’d expect.’

Anne-Marie looked at me as if to say sorry-for-asking.

‘It’s a nice flat,’ she said. ‘I always liked it.’

‘I’ve been back a couple of times. It wasn’t easy.’

‘I’d like to see it again.’

‘One day.’

I asked if I could have some of her dope.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Keep it all.’

I had an idea it might come in handy.

‘Tell me about your film.’

I made something up.

Then I told her I had to go out, and she left.

When my regular taxi-driver arrived, I carried my wheelchair out and put it into the back of his cab – looking up and down the road. Just as I was slamming the door behind me as I got in, I heard a large car-engine start up. I glanced back round just in time to see a Ford Mondeo pull out about twenty yards away.

When I checked a couple of minutes later, it was still there – one car behind us.

When that car turned off, I got a clearer view of the Mondeo. I couldn’t see much of the two men inside it, except that one of them was black and the other seemed to have very white hair. He didn’t look all that old, though. As to the car, there was something suspiciously null about it – no individual personality had been allowed to imprint itself. Although the number-plate revealed it to be a couple of years old, it still looked exactly as it would have done in the catalogue. Everything about the Mondeo – when put together with the fact that it was following me – screamed unmarked police car. But if these were police, following and watching me, then why hadn’t they done anything about my shit-parcel visitors last night?

One explanation was that they’d only just started following me. Another, that they’d decided it would be a laugh (or to their
advantage) for me to have the shit scared out of me. Perhaps they’d done it (the shit) themselves.

Of course, I wanted to see how my followers would cope once we got to the theatre. If they were really prepared, they would have tickets already – and that would make it even likelier they were the police.

The taxi drew up outside the front of the Barbican.

I didn’t get out immediately, pretending to be fumbling for my change whilst actually looking out for the Ford Mondeo.

Disappointingly, it sped past and on round a corner.

I waited a few seconds more, arranging with the driver to be picked up afterwards, but the Mondeo didn’t return.

After the performance I spotted the Mondeo again as we were crossing the river. It followed us all the way to Mortlake, although hanging further back than previously – probably because it wasn’t hard to guess where we were going, and if they lost us they could easily catch up. Just to test this, I asked the taxi-driver to take me to a service station, so I could buy some cigarettes.

When we pulled up into the service-station forecourt, the Mondeo carried on past and parked, facing out, in a side-road.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I got back in, softpack in my hand.

‘It’s no smoking in the back there,’ said the taxi-driver as we drove off.

‘Home, James,’ I said, stowing the cigarettes.

‘James is actually my name,’ said the driver, laughing.

‘God, you must get sick of that joke.’

‘Nah, course not.’

We laughed.

‘I won’t tell it again.’

‘No problem.’

James drove me home.

‘Same time tomorrow?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ James replied.

The Mondeo returned to its parking space just as I was closing the front door behind me.

I felt more exposed than I had since childhood. When I was a boy, I was in a permanent state of battle-readiness. I knew that Germans could be waiting round the next corner or Japanese hiding in the next shadow. I armed myself with pieces of wood nailed together to resemble the guns of Polish partisans. I carried a bowie knife strapped to my snake-belt. I studied survivalist manuals. But I had been preparing for the wrong war. The Germans never wanted to invade Milton Keynes – not in my lifetime, anyway. And this obscurely disappointed me. I wanted to die firing at the enemy’s incoming, arrogant, marching troops as they turned the bend down Amplewick Close. I wanted to splatter their blood on the Ford Cortinas and watch them dive for cover behind the birdbaths.

Scared, I wanted to go to the police and ask for their protection. And not just this following-me-around-in-unmarked-cars business. But it seemed to me that there was no way I could do that – not without giving up on everything: the investigation, my revenge. Either I was out on my own, taking whatever risks were necessary, or I was made safe, unable to do anything but wait. Now that I’d come so far, I didn’t want to just give up. Part of me – quite a lot, actually – was enjoying the various new freedoms that being outside the law allowed me. For once, I could do what I wanted: be offensive, be dangerous. If this meant that I was myself in danger, then I would for the moment have to live with that. In one way I wasn’t afraid of anything specific they could do to me – the three bullets had taken away my fear of physical harm. Anything else would either be less than that, in which case I could handle it, or more than that, in which case I wouldn’t be around to have to handle it.

One practical thought occurred. Maybe I should start making some serious attempts to get hold of a gun.

I didn’t sleep very well.

Yes, it was gun time.

From what I’d heard, it wasn’t that difficult to get hold of a gun. All you needed to do was go to the right pub in South-east London and get talking to the right bloke. But I knew that I’d never been very good at getting talking to the right bloke. (Once, I’d come away from Brixton having completely failed to score some dope.) And I didn’t want to waste too much time sitting in the wrong pub. What I needed was someone who could point me in the right direction – tell me the name of the pub and the name of the bloke.

I wasn’t sure where to start, until I remembered something from the articles on Alun and Dorothy I’d looked up in the local library. Sub Overdale, the director of their production of
Macbeth,
had insisted on a great deal of pre-rehearsal research. Alun and Dorothy had gone on prison visits to meet real murderers. One of the articles also hinted that they’d spent time around some more glamorous, less caged criminals.

All of this had been set up with the assistance of the stand-up comedian Tony Smart.

As you probably know, Tony Smart is most famous for having done three years for armed robbery – and then for turning his life around, starting with a well-received appearance headlining the Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth Xmas Party. After this success, he was allowed to travel to other prisons to do other gigs. By the time of his early release, he’d already been taken on
by an agent. Within two years, he’d headlined at comedy venues all over London and had supported a couple of more famous comedians on their national tours. By the time I became interested in him, his first video,
Criminally Funny,
was featuring heavily on the shelves of WH Smith. And he was all over the telly.

A lot of Tony Smart’s material relied upon an implicit threat to the audience. He’d never had much trouble with hecklers. He dressed like a nouveau spiv – flash bespoke tailoring, alligator shoes, gold chains. This, the less imaginative critics said, was ‘post-Tarantino stand-up’. In a shoulder holster, he carried a replica of the gun he’d used during his armed robberies – resprayed in ironic leopardskin. In a way, when he was onstage, he was actually playing an ironic replica version of himself. He was safe. He was disarmingly disarmed. The money he’d once been unable to get enough of directly (from terrified cashiers), he now picked up in wads (from satisfied punters) through the box office. Which didn’t mean he no longer got in trouble with the law – he’d been done twice in recent years: once for drunk-driving after a friend’s wedding and once for assault at a post-gig party. Both incidents had upped his profile and provided him with some new material (the impending Back Behind Bars tour).

At the moment he was starring in TV adverts for a new brand of toilet cleaner – shaped like a powerful under-rim-shooting gun – with the tag-line: ‘Protect your home from scum like me.’ Various Watchdogs were aroused, which meant more publicity for both him and the product. Toilet-ducks had never been dangerous to anything but all-known-germs before. There were even some questions asked as to whether Mr Smart, as an ex-criminal, should be allowed to profit either directly or indirectly from his crimes. Even
he
wouldn’t deny that much of his success (and all of his material) was reliant upon the idea that he was a hard man who’d once been even harder. The prospect of a challenge in the courts was something that had him spending a lot more time with lawyers than ever before.

He had it all, and he didn’t want to lose it – the house in Islington, the E-type Jag, the ex-air-hostess wife; mates in top-ten bands and the England football squad; journalists on his doorstep.

For a boy from a dodgy area of Luton, he’d come a long way – via Brixton, via Wandsworth. And as a good working-class lad done good, he was giving-some-of-it-back: donating sequencers and samplers to a Luton music college, supporting meetings between the victims of crimes and their perpetrators, sponsoring a boxing club.

A recent documentary had shown him – flash suit, E-type – revisiting the tower block in which he’d grown up. There had been a lot of laughter, but you could see his eyes jumping from side to side – wanting to work out where
it
was going to hit him from next: the panic of someone who has left the street, and therefore isn’t quite sure what it is any more – a new piece of street slang, perhaps, that he doesn’t want to appear not to know. But Tony had made it through – the winks went tic-crazy, the pats on the back rained down like clubs, the jokes about lend-us-a-tenner were received with the implication that Tony found them
so
hilariously funny he might just have to work them into his next act. Uncredited, of course. Ha ha.

The really unique position that Tony Smart held, though, was that of the only ‘real’ (although admittedly minor) criminal that anyone famous in London knew – apart from their pimps and coke dealers. Tony was the one who sparkled with the glamour of violence done and violence understood. The fact that he said he’d given up – and as a now-recognizable personality he’d probably had to – didn’t affect the straights at parties and on chat shows who wanted to know
what it felt like
to point a gun at someone’s head.

It was most likely because of this side of his reputation, the reputation of a man who knew about crime from a street level, that Sub Overdale – Alun and Dorothy’s socially militant director
– had contacted Tony Smart. There was also a snazzy PR angle: RSC luvvies sit at feet of gangland gag-meister.

Going the most direct route, I called Sub Overdale at the Barbican – in the hope I’d catch him in his office.

Sub was well known for attending every single night of his shows, and giving all the cast members notes the following day – down to the most insignificant extra. In the business he was called a ‘challenging’ director to work with, as in ‘a total fucking nightmare’.

Luckily, I got him.

Once through, I explained that I was a great admirer of him and his methodology (I used that word) – and that, as a struggling young director (by now he wanted me off the phone as fast as he could) about to direct a student production (off!) of
Crime and Punishment
(off! off!) in Portsmouth (off! off! off!) I wanted to consult Tony Smart.

‘Oh,’ said Sub. ‘I can’t give you his home number. He’s very touchy about that.’

‘How about his agent then?’ I decided to cut my losses and try to save myself another trip to the library.

‘But I’ve got his mobile.’

He gave me it.

I thanked him again and again, doing my best to appear desperate to want to continue speaking to my guru – until he put the phone down on my gushing gratitude.

Part of me wanted to try the same story on Tony himself. But another part realized that I might do better with something a lot closer to the truth.

‘’Lo,’ he said.

‘Hello. Tony Smart? You-don’t-know-me-but-I-got-your-number-off-Sub-Overdale. My name is Conrad Redman. You may remember – I was shot, along with Brandy, that is Lilian Irish, in the Le Corbusier restaurant on Fr –’

‘Good restaurant that.’

‘I’m now writing a book about the experience, and the police aren’t being very helpful. I need to know about guns and hits and things like that.’

He was on-track by now.

‘Gotcha.’

‘I was hoping you could put me in touch with a few people.’

‘You was goin’ out with her, right? From the ads on the telly –
her.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I’m doing a surprise appearance at the Comedy Store tomorrow evening, nine. Try out some new material, y’know. Speak to me afterwards.’

I would have to miss that evening’s
Macbeth,
but I didn’t care too much about that: it would just keep Alun and Dorothy on their toes. They might relax a little after the interval, but never completely. And, if I were lucky, there might even be a stand-in cougher at Friday evening’s performance – who, of course, they’d take to be me.

It also meant I would be able to fit in something else that I’d been meaning to do – pay a visit to Alun and Dorothy’s home whilst they were both definitely away. If I was lucky, their son Laurence would be in. I needed to talk to him.