Bodies Read online

  But I had misunderstood her.

  “How could she let herself down by posing for one of these grubby little magazines? After the education we gave her!”

  “I think, you know, it was just a way of making a little extra money.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt about that. But if she wanted money, why on earth go on being a student half her life? It was no use expecting me to supplement her grant. I’m a widow, you know. I was paying enough for her as it was. This government has been absolutely foul to middle-class parents, and I can’t think why, when we’re its firmest supporters. When I’d paid out what they demanded of me, I’d done all anyone could reasonably expect of me.”

  I think she thought my eyes must be straying around the plush and dark oak of her sitting-room, though in fact I had taken it all in before sitting down. Anyway, she said aggressively:

  “I’m not pretending to be poor. But unfortunately I think there are certain standards one should keep up. My husband would have expected it. Richard’s one aim in life was to see me comfortably off, if he should go first.”

  I have known in my time many good family men, but I have never known one whose one aim in life was to make sure his widow was comfortably off. I thought Mrs. Platt-Morrison must have made it her business to keep this desirable end pretty constantly before him.

  “Did you and Susan get on well?”

  “Oh yes . . . yes, of course. She always came home for the summer. Gave up whatever London flat she happened to be in, and took a new one when autumn term started. Of course I loved having her.”

  “And you visited her in London?”

  “We often got together when I went up shopping. We’d meet for lunch, or perhaps take in a play. Though there are so few plays around that one cares to see these days.”

  “And did you meet her London friends?”

  “Oh no. I didn’t know anything about that side of her life . . . Perhaps fortunately.”

  “She was studying in London?”

  “Yes, she was doing a Ph.D. under Barbara Hardy. What was it on? . . . Oh God, yes: ‘The Fallen Woman in Victorian Fiction.’ She was very nearly finished, I believe.”

  “And you had no idea about this posing work she did?”

  She hesitated. Then she realized I’d observed the hesitation and decided to come clean.

  “Well, there was this most unfortunate thing a few weeks ago, when Mrs. Pashley made this very loaded remark to me. She had caught her son—who’s at the grubby-minded stage—with this magazine, and she’d taken it from him. And she told me about it, though Heaven knows I’ve no interest in her son, and then she added—purposely, of course—“Darling, it was so funny, because one of the models looked exactly like your Susan.”

  “I see. Did you take this up with her?”

  “Well, yes, I did, actually. I was in town a fortnight ago, and Susan got us tickets for the new William Douglas-Home play, and in the interval I said to her: ‘Darling, it’s so funny, but Marjorie Pashley confiscated a nasty little nudie rag from her Paul the other day, and do you know she said one of the models looked exactly like you. Isn’t it a scream?’ ”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She just stood there, cool as you like, and said: ‘It probably was me. I do it now and again to get a bit of extra cash.’ As if it was the most normal thing in the world! Without an ounce of shame! I could have strangled her!”

  Quite unconscious of what she had said, she leaned forward urgently, displaying more emotion now than at any time since I had arrived.

  “Isn’t there some way this could be hushed up? I mean how she died, where she died, what she was doing? The shame of this will kill me.”

  “Mrs. Platt-Morrison,” I explained, trying to be patient, “this is a very serious killing. Four people. The press are on to it already, and of course we can’t withhold information.”

  “But can’t you just decline to name one of the victims? I shall never be able to face people again. You give children a good upbringing and this is how they pay you back.”

  I left her in disgust. Of course I thanked her for her help and said goodbye. They expect that of policemen in the Thames Valley.

  Chapter 5

  WHICH LEFT US with the body whose happy birthday it had been. Joplin, while I was at the Wild West entertainment, had taken Phil Fennilow—who was most unwilling, as if expecting the corpses to rise up en masse and shriek “Thou art the man”—into the studio, and had held his hand while he looked into the model’s face. Phil, before he could say anything, went green and ran out to the loo. Afterwards he said he wasn’t sure, but the poor chap did have a slight look of Wayne. He himself didn’t know Wayne at all well, but he showed Joplin an issue of Bodies for three or four months back, and Joplin agreed there definitely was a resemblance. In Bob Cordle’s little book there was a Wayne—indexed under W, as almost all the models were indexed by their Christian names—but the telephone number beside it was crossed through, and above it Cordle had written in pencil the one word “Jim’s.”

  “Only there’s no Jim in the address book, so we’re back to square one,” said Joplin next morning to me, as we conferred in my office in New Scotland Yard, both rather bleary from lack of sleep.

  “Hasn’t Fennilow got any records of him—for payment of fees and so on?”

  “Cordle did all the paying, cash. An income tax dodge, I would imagine. All these models were a bit on the fringe—morally, legally, you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. Actually, I met a lady at the Wild West whose fringe was her only badge of respectability . . . Have you got a telephone directory there, Garry? Or, better still, a trades directory?”

  “What are you after?” asked Joplin, burrowing in a pile of reference material and coming up with a large yellow book.

  “Just an idea . . . What would it be under? Gymnasia? Ha! They call them gymnasiums. See under Health Studios . . . Health Studios, see also Solariums. Whatever happened to a classical education? . . . Here we are: Jim’s Gym . . . 14A Little Moulson Street. Where’s that, Garry?”

  “Other side of Shaftesbury Avenue. Not more than a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards away from Bodies.”

  “Let’s give it a try. Two-two-seven-five-four.”

  “Jim’s Gym,” said a London voice promptly at the other end of the line. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes. I wondered if Wayne was there.”

  “No. Hasn’t been in today, or yesterday. Probably got one of his colds. Is it the modeling? Can I take a message?”

  “No,” I said. “I rather think I shall have to come round.”

  We were there in three minutes in the car. Jim’s Gym was on the first floor of one of those poky Soho establishments, over a theatrical costumer’s that specialized in the sort of costume that is made to be taken off. Jim’s Gym, however, seen through its windows from the other side of the street, looked far from dingy—plenty of light, and pinewood on the walls. We went up, and the door was opened by a large young black man, whose muscle was certainly not mere showcase stuff. Not someone I’d care to cross unnecessarily. He seemed friendly enough, though I felt a trifle nervous as I flashed my warrant at him.

  “Here, was it you on the blower ten minutes ago?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Well—” he led the way into the tiny outer office and pointed a large hand at that morning’s edition of the Daily Grub. The headline was STRIP MAG HORROR SLAYING. That was the Grub. They could say it all in four words.

  “Why should you think it had anything to do with that?”

  “Because of Wayne. He did posing for that mob. I’ve often taken messages for him. Was it him?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to establish. You said on the phone that you hadn’t seen him for two days.”

  “That’s right. I assumed it was one of his colds, or one of his slight aches. They’re right hypochondriacs, some of this mob, and Wayne was—is—one of the worst.” />
  “How well did you know him, Jim—is it Jim?”

  “Ha! I should be so lucky! Jim’s a myth, or if he exists he sits in an office in the City. We’re part of a chain, floated on the Stock Exchange and all that. I’m Charlie. How well did I know Wayne? Well, fairly well on the surface. He was in here most days, though it was only now and again that we’d actually swap more than the time of day. Once they’re into their routines they’re not really communicable with.”

  “You could identify him, presumably?”

  Charlie grimaced. “You mean the body? I suppose so. It’s not something I’m dying to do. Are you sure it’s him, then?”

  “No, we’re not. Do you know if he was going with a girl called Debbie?”

  “Don’t know anything about his private life, mate. Here, there’s people here who knew him a lot better than I ever did. Come along through.”

  He led the way from the office through into the gym proper. He looked around to refresh his memory as to who was there, then nipped back to get his copy of the Grub. While he took it over to a man who was exercising with weights in the far corner, Garry and I had a chance to look around. It was indeed a very light, airy room—light with Scandinavian pine, though heavy with the odour of human sweat. There was all the apparatus I was used to from the Scotland Yard gym, where I had for many years lifted weights, done leg curls and cross-bench pullovers and other such activities—more, I sometimes thought, as a protest against the excessively cerebral nature of my horrible family than because I got any pleasure or profit from it. I still went in for it now and then, but in bursts, and mostly because I had caught a glimpse of my body profile in the mirror.

  Mirrors there were a-plenty around the walls here—and even, at one point, on the ceiling too. In them each exerciser could register the sweat, the grimaces of agony, that told him how much good he was doing himself. Some of them, at the end of their training sessions, would no doubt parade in front of them, to admire the improvement in the pecs, lats, traps and delts. Jim’s had the whole range of exercise machines—thigh extension, abdominal board, hypertension bench, all that kind of thing, not to mention exercise cycles, all sorts of pulleys, and a dazzling array of weights and dumb-bells. Some of the machines were of such complexity that I could imagine that any member of the uninitiated, suddenly confronted by them, might believe that he had strayed into the sinister inner room of Secret Police Headquarters in some squalid South American dictatorship. Actually some of the effects were pretty similar too.

  Because an awful lot of the people procuring new bodies for themselves at Jim’s Gym were doing so with gasps, pantings and expressions of sheer agony that in other circumstances might have aroused one’s compassion. Jane Fonda, I believe, foolishly advocates workouts until they hurt. Many of these people seemed to be going well beyond that, into some ecstatic state beyond pain. I saw Charlie stop off by some middle-aged type, flabby of body and with a fire-red cherub’s face—his mouth open, his eyes gaping, his expression instinct with the torment of it all. What’s it all for, I wondered? They still have to fear the heat of the sun. Charlie presumably told him to take it easy, because he gave up the Seated Chest Press and started doing running on the spot, his eyes straying now and again to the mirror, with its unattractive image of his fat little legs going up and down. Would he, I wondered, go straight on from here to an expense-account lunch?

  They were all ages and both sexes in Jim’s Gym, but the majority divided themselves into the middle-aged trying to regain form and the young trying to reach peak form. Charlie stopped by one of the latter at the far end of the room who was putting himself through some pretty advanced weight training. He seemed impatient of the interruption at first, but when he stopped to check the improvements in the body part he was exercising by flexing his biceps at the mirror, Charlie shoved the Grub under his nose and said something which brought the man out of his routine. He stood there reading for quite a while, and when he looked up Charlie gestured towards us at the other end of the room. They both started towards us.

  Wayne’s friend, it goes without saying, was a copy-book body, with especially enormous shoulders and biceps like unpleasantly veined grapefruit. His legs were rather short, though, so he looked like an upturned triangle, a sort of human road-sign, topped by a face that was open, well-meaning, but dim.

  “Jeremy Greave,” he said, in a middle-class voice. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said, finding myself in an impromptu bone-crushing contest. “That looked like some work-out.”

  A slow smile of great complacency spread over his face.

  “It’s a killer.”

  “You look great on it anyway.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He pointed a finger at the copy of the Grub. “You’re not going to tell me that was Wayne?”

  “I’m not telling anybody anything. I’m trying to find out who he was. I gather Wayne did model for Bodies?”

  “Oh yes. He wasn’t one of their star regulars but he did model for them. When he left his job he put his name down with an agency, and he’d been getting a fair number of jobs recently, among them work for Bodies.”

  “An agency?”

  “For theatrical work, advertising, posing. Anybody who needs a bit of good-looking body—chaps or girls—goes along there. It’s run by this guy who was Mr. Southport 1974. The money these jobs bring in isn’t enormous, but it keeps body and soul together.”

  “I see. So Wayne was becoming something of a professional?”

  “Just to make ends meet. I do the odd bit myself. And if by professional you mean the mucky stuff, forget it. Wayne was a lovely clean-minded boy. He never went in for that. That I know for definite.”

  “I see. Do you know where Wayne was—is—living?”

  “Oh Lord—let me see. I’ve been there once . . . he moved there after he left home . . . Cramby Gardens. That’s it. Just off the Finchley Road. Bed-sitter, but very large. He’s turned it into a sort of mini-gym, of course. He’s got a lot of first-rate gear, has Wayne.”

  “You say he left his job and left home. Why was that?”

  “Well, they were connected, really. Wayne was a garage mechanic—had quite a good job in Hendon. But he found that his work got in the way of his training programme. He tried to combine the two, but there was no way he could do it. He was never going to be world class unless he gave it total concentration and commitment. That was what led to the bust-up at home.”

  “Really?”

  “His dad didn’t understand that kind of dedication,” went on Jeremy, his expression of almost childlike naïveté contrasting with the glistening sweat on his enormous shoulders. “For Wayne his training programme was his way of life. He was working his way forward to a holistic bodybuilding philosophy. His dad just went on about “lazy layabouts”—which was ridiculous, of course—and so in the end Wayne had to leave home. He didn’t want to, because he was very fond of his kid sister, but he had no option.”

  I had an idea.

  “His kid sister wasn’t called Debbie, by any chance, was she?”

  “Yes. I think she was.”

  “Did Wayne have a girlfriend?”

  “A girlfriend? Oh, I don’t think so. There were girls, now and then, of course, but I don’t think there was ever a regular girlfriend, in that sense.”

  “I suppose it would have interfered with his total commitment to his programme.” “Well, it would really.”

  “No place for girlfriends in his holistic bodybuilding philosophy?”

  “I expect he would have worked out a place for one in time, if he could have found someone with equal dedication. Quite frankly, it’s a problem for a lot of us.”

  “I can see that it must be.”

  Jeremy was looking round at his weights, drawing a large forearm over his brow. He was itching to get back.

  “Well, it’s nice to talk with someone who really understands the problems,” he said. “Do you build?”

  “I dabbled at one time. I
think I outran my mortgage limit.”

  “Do you really think this body is Wayne? Gee—he’ll be a great loss to the sport.”

  “I think it very probably is. Now, there’s the question of identifying the body.”

  Jeremy’s massive, top-heavy body backed away, but not, as I thought, in horror.

  “You’ll have to count me out. I’m in the middle of my programme. If you don’t carry the programme through without a break it’s practically a day wasted—isn’t that right, Charlie? You take Charlie along. He knew Wayne perfectly well.”

  I’d already decided to do that if I could. As well as the identification, I wanted to chat about the general set-up Wayne was in, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any sense out of the sort of person who talks about holistic bodybuilding philosophies. As Jeremy retreated towards his weights and bars I turned back to Charlie, who had raised his eyebrows eloquently at this last exchange.

  “Any chance?”

  “Oh, I’d do anything for the police. You put my old man away. Still, I need my lunch.”

  “An apple, a nut and a wholewheat rusk?”

  “I was thinking more of a wholewheat steak and kidney pie with two veg, at the Clarendon down the corner.” He lowered his voice and said darkly: “Don’t confuse me with these dumbclucks, right?”

  “What say you go with Inspector Joplin here to identify the body, and we meet at one of the restaurants near to the Bodies office in Windlesham Street? We’ll stand you lunch in return for a chat, and it’ll look better on the expense sheet if it’s near the scene of the crime. Say the Greek one a couple of doors down on the other side of the road?”

  “You’re on,” said Charlie. He went over to a youth exercising on the Chest Pulley, and brought him back to man the office. He was a thin adolescent who seemed to bulge in unexpected places—no doubt at some middle staging-position between six-stone weakling and Charles Atlas. Charlie pulled on the top of his track suit, and I saw him and Joplin off in the police car in the street. Charlie by now was quite philosophical about it.