Blackmail. But who, how and why?
Clues come hard and fast as our intrepid reporter investigates the death of the editor. But he didn’t expect this.
Reverse Ferret.
Chapter 12
UNDERCOVER MILES (Part 2)
“I don’t think so.” Platting screwed his eyes to recall the scene. “I didn’t notice anything. He was just lying there.”
“The pen?” “The pen?” “In his hand.”
“Just an idea of mine,” he said. “Just to make it look he had simply passed away where he sat.” He perked up at the thought of his cleverness. “Quite a nice touch I thought.”
“Pretty bloody stupid if you think about it. Left-handed man found with pen in right. Weren’t you thinking at all? No wonder the police are suspicious.”
“I did what I thought was best,” he said mulishly. “Then I took her home and came back here.”
“You started to say: ‘it was only later...’ but you didn’t finish the sentence,” said Preston.
“Only later what?” Miles was playing dumb.
“That something else happened, perhaps,” persisted Preston. “That there was something to hide?”
“Oh God,” he groaned, taking off his glasses and rubbing them agitatedly with the grimy handkerchief. “Okay, but don’t tell Hazel what I am about to tell you. I was pleased with myself for convincing everyone, including the cops, that he had died that morning and for saving Hazel from any, er, awkwardness but what you probably wouldn’t have noticed that when all the shouting and screaming was going on was that I had a camera case in my hand.”
Preston remembered it clearly and how he had thought how incongruous it was that he hung on to it so tightly.
“I’d noticed it just as I was going in to the office to head off Grace, the secretary, and picked it up for safe keeping.”
He then went off on one of his apparently irrelevant perorations: “As you know - maybe you don’t - since the wife blew me out and then when Hazel banned me from her sofa I’ve often had to kip down here in one of the offices, Boggart’s sometimes, even dossed down in The Turk’s fur-lined bivouac, though she has so many freebies stacked up in there there’s hardly any room. I’ve had to settle for the desk too.”
“The desk?”
“Yeah, underneath. Not great. Though you do hear stuff. Blimey.” He was quite revived by the memories of his nocturnal eavesdropping. “That’s why I think Haze has been seeing someone else. I’ve heard the odd late night call when she comes back from the pub, that sort of thing. Arranging trysts.”
He sniggered. “Hard to forget the night you and that Grace went at it on your desk.”
“What? Who? Not me,” Preston said, utterly shocked but determined not to show it. “Give me a break. On the desk when I have a perfectly good home to go to. What do you take me for. And the secretary? No chance. No way.”
“Okay, sorry. Must be mistaken. Helluva racket whoever it was. Anyway, that night, after I had seen Hazel home, I went down to the printers’ quarters for a shower as I often do. There was a camera in the stairwell, it had a bit of a dent in it and the flash had been broken so I thought I’d drop it off in the dark room for them to fix.
“I confess I couldn’t help myself. After my shower I opened the camera up and had a look at the negatives. Did I tell you I had started a photography course when I was sacked? I started to make a pictorial essay of Spanish castles.”
“What did you find?” asked Preston, impatient at the techie tyro’s ramblings.
“I developed the negs and when I saw what they showed I felt sick. I didn’t want to believe it. Hazel and the editor. Together.
“So it was blackmail,” exclaimed Preston.
“It must have been,” said Miles.
How horrible, thought Preston. No wonder poor Hazel had been so tormented.
“My first instinct was to confront Hazel,” said Miles. “I was so angry because I had been betrayed, that’s how it felt. But then I began to understand the anguish she had been going through and, in a funny sort of way, I wanted to share the pain of it with her. After all, she had lost the man she had loved.”
“Poor Hazel,” said Preston. “Lucky she hasn’t seen the pictures.”
“She never will,” said Miles. “I destroyed them.”
“She must never know.”
“The only other person who does know is the man who took the photos,” said Miles.
“Any ideas?”
“Yes,” said Miles. “I remembered the case I’d picked up and asked the head of the darkroom - we’re old mates - if he could identify the owner. It occurred to me that if the case fitted the camera that would prove that he was the one who took the photos. My darkroom mate knew the camera belonged to one of the staff who uses an office issue Canon AE-One but when I showed him the camera case, he just laughed. “That incompetent twat,” he said. “He lost the case for the Canon and had to make do with one for an old Pentax.”
Miles paused for dramatic effect. “There’s no doubt,” he said. “Put camera and case together and you get... Mervyn Moss, blackmailer.”
“Moss. A blackmailer?” Preston was incredulous. “He’s a horrible fat shit but even he wouldn’t stoop so low and anyway, he’s too stupid to pull off that kind of stunt.”
“I know, it’s hard to believe. I suppose, to be charitable, someone else could have borrowed his camera,” suggested Miles. “But I think he did it and when I see him...”
“So you haven’t challenged him?” asked Preston.
“Not yet. I’ve been waiting to but he hasn’t been in the office for a few days. I’m not sure what we can do, apart from thrashing him within an inch of his life, because there’s no proof now that I’ve destroyed the negs.”
“We’ll think of something,” said Preston, with a confidence he didn’t feel. “We have to think of Hazel’s feelings above all.”
“You’re right,” said Miles. “I would do anything to help her, even now when I know the truth.” His voice cracked: “The fact is, I love her, I worship her. She didn’t deserve that.”
“No, she didn’t,” said Preston, aghast at what they had stumbled on.
“Just wait,” said Miles. He smoothed down his rampant hair like a gladiator preparing for battle. “I’ll have him.”
“Before you do that, I think we ought to have a check though his locker and see if we can find anything that incriminates him.”
“Ah, talking about his locker,” said Miles. “There’s something else that will interest you. That very same night I was about to head upstairs for a night of luxury in Chateau Boggart when, bugger me, the very man came out of the lift in front of me and went to the photographers’ room. And can you believe it? Trotting alongside him was none other than Theresa.”
“What, our Treeza? Treeza of the biscuits?”
“The very one,” said Miles, justly pleased to be the bearer of such extraordinary news.
“So that explains the swipe cards,” said Preston. “Swipe cards?”
“Never mind. What were they up to?”
“I tucked in behind the dark room door where I could see that they were going through stuff in one of the lockers.”
“Do you know whose?” asked Preston.
“Yes, I checked later.” Again, he savoured the moment, pausing for dramatic effect and adjusted the tape on his glasses. “Mervyn Moss’s.”
“Him again. What the hell game is he playing? What did Treeza and Boggart actually do?”
“It was hard to tell,” said the self-appointed undercover agent. “They were there for about 40 minutes and seemed to deliver one set of papers and take away another. Very odd, but what made it even odder was that they seemed very friendly.”
“You mean?”
“At one stage they started snogging and she came over all giggly. Shades of that Dick Emery character - Oooh you are awful, but I like you. Know the one I mean?” Preston blanched at the image. “Then what happened?”
“They went off and I and tucked myself up in The Turk’s office. I knew I had to get to the editor’s office before anyone else that morning.”
“Have to say I was surprised to see you there,” said Preston.
“Well, I only had a few yards to go, didn’t I? I held the bridge. I did. Sorry,” he added when he saw how irritated Preston was at another poetic aperçu. He leant on the books with a renewed air of determination. “Shall we go and look now, while Swervyn’s away.”
“I can’t now,” said Preston, looking at his watch. “I have a meeting with a contact about another saga of dirty dealings. We’ll have time tomorrow.”
“Count on me to be discreet; rely on me to help,” said Miles. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it. The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. Macaulay, Thomas B.”
“Christ Miles, don’t you ever stop?” Preston laughed. “Hang on. What are you up to? Stop moving about. No. It’s not you. It’s an earthquake. Bloody hell what’s going on?”
The two men leapt to their feet. It wasn’t an earthquake. Two of the office filing cabinets were falling over, slowly, inexorably, like two drunks slipping insensibly off their bar stools. There was a groaning, a screeching sound of tearing metal and the shattering of glass as the cabinets keeled over on to the office belonging to The Turk and to the one adjacent which belonged to Boggart.
As the cabinets toppled it became clear that there was at least one floorboard missing underneath them and that they were sliding into the gap. As they did, the boards on either side splintered and the office carpet, a cheap material that gave everyone electric shocks every time they touched metal, sagged into the rapidly opening space in the way a bundle of hair would be sucked down a plughole.
“Christ on a bike,” was the best Preston could offer. It must have been caused by the engineers who had been laying the cables for the computers. Obviously when the job was cancelled they had downed tools and forgotten to replace the boards. “Deliberately on purpose,” said Preston later when the dust had settled. “No one could place heavy metal cabinets over a gap without noticing something was missing.”
There was a scream from inside the office and as the cabinets continued their unstoppable downward lurch, the metal walls and the frosted glass that afforded the occupants their privacy were reduced to a tangled ruin.
And, oh God, there was The Turk, half naked, clutching her chest in an impromptu impersonation of Barbara Windsor in Carry on Camping, in puce underwear and teetering on high heels. She had been about to try on her latest booty from a grateful fashion house - Marc Jacobs as Baby Killer explained later - but which to him looked like outsize maroon petticoats in serried layers.
Preston’s first, shameful, impulse was to laugh at her discomfort, but his nobler instincts prevailed; he almost felt sorry for her. He took off his jacket and made toward her to offer it as cover. It wasn’t necessary. The Turk was made of sterner stuff. She quickly recovered herself, stood there defiantly in all her statuesque glory and pulled the dress over her head before emerging, a raging Valkyrie.
“Don’t just stand there, you idiots,” she shrieked. “Get help.”
Miles and Preston tried pushing the cabinets upright so that they get into the office and rescue the damsel in distress but succeeded only in dislodging another floorboard which sprang up, tipping the cabinets forward, sending cascades of books, papers and files across the outer office.
The Turk was incandescent: “Don’t be so bloody useless. Get me out of here for God’s sake.” And she yelled: “Giuseppe where are you? Come and help these two useless cretins.”
The downtrodden art man raced obediently to her aid and balanced precariously on the twisted metal of the devastated office to reach across and try to pull the trapped woman to freedom. Despite much tugging there was too much glass and jagged metal for her to climb over and she gave up, flopping down on her desk, outsize petticoats foaming around her thighs.
“Get the bloody maintenance men up here. And quick.”
Preston phoned but got no answer so Giuseppe scampered off in search of assistance while the other two started to tidy up the papers that were strewn across the floor and stack them against the corridor wall. Preston took care to put Ronette’s album on the top of a pile.
“Maintenance guys on their way,” announced Giuseppe.
Preston whispered to Miles: “I’ve got to go. Can I leave you with Jasmine, I’ve got a really important meeting?”
“No probs,” said Miles.
“Keep an eye on that album,” he said to Miles. “Put it somewhere safe.” To The Turk: “I’m going to see where the maintenance bods are. I’ll chase ‘em up. Won’t be a sec.”
As he made a dash for the lift he could hear The Turk shouting down the phone: “Nigel, you’ve got to come and help me. The whole bloody place has collapsed on me. No. Yes. Hurry.”
He hailed a cab to take him to his rendezvous with the croupier. All he could think about - more than the riddle of the camera, the ghastly possibility that Moss had been trying to blackmail Hazel and the editor, the intriguing business with Treeza and Boggart, even the spectacular sight of The Turk in her undies - was the revelation about Grace and a mystery man. Together. On a desk. His desk! Must be a mistake. A horrible mistake. He could hardly question Miles more without alerting his suspicions so he had to keep to himself the raging pain of jealousy and the angst of doubt about his mercurial lover - that Grace.