The Game Read online

  ‘Both of them? At the same time? Tell me the truth or I’ll go straight home.’

  ‘All right, blast you! Yes, both of them and sometimes together. But I didn’t pay them. It was instead of a fee.’ Clearly, Wallace felt that this put the relationship into a non-commercial category.

  Keith began to revise his opinion of his quiet partner. And yet, for the shy and inhibited Wallace with his terror of women, such a relationship would make a crazy sort of sense. He wondered, momentarily, whether Wallace’s stammer dated from that period . . .

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Keith,’ said Wallace. ‘Those girls were a revelation to me. I’d always thought that a tart would be an inert lump of meat. But those two could drive a man mad. They could give you a head of steam such as you’d never had before, and only let it blow just before the boiler burst. And then do it all over again. And if they weren’t enjoying themselves then they should have been on the stage, except that actresses can’t make a tenth of that much money.’

  ‘It’s been here all this time and I never knew about it?’ Keith said wonderingly.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Wallace said. ‘You may be – used to be – the Casanova of southern Scotland, but tarts aren’t your scene, you being you.’

  ‘Meaning that I never needed?’

  ‘Meaning that you’re too mingy to buy anything you could get for free. But,’ Wallace said firmly, ‘none of this is what I brought you out here to talk about. The p-point is that the whole thing grew. They could take their pick of the best-looking and most talented girls on the game, who were all beginning to clamour to join in, get away from being dominated by pimps and have an organisation to look after the money for them. And as the word spread that they could offer the very best, and in luxurious surroundings, money began to beat a path to the door.’

  ‘And the health-and-beauty bit?’ Keith asked. ‘Did that survive?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It had to. First as a legitimate front for the money. But then there were other pressures. Nobody wants flabby girls, so it was natural to put in a couple of tennis courts, then squash and a solarium. And the customers loved the facilities, they could come for some violent exercise, shower, dinner and a girl and g-go home smiling to the wife. So in went more courts, indoor badminton, saunas, exercise room and nine holes of golf. We needed legitimate businesses and profitable uses for capital, so we put in a bar, improved catering, a stock of good wines and a small airstrip. Now there’s a swimming-pool on the way. We soon had stockbrokers, or whatever, flying up for the weekend. Exercise and lose a few pounds during the day, dine and enjoy a girl at night. The place is becoming a sort of sensualist’s health farm and, Keith, you wouldn’t believe what some of them will pay. Not just rich men. There’s one oil-rig worker sends his mother a hundred quid as soon as he steps ashore and then comes straight here until he’s blown the rest. Then he goes home to mum.’

  Keith’s curiosity was running along a divergent track. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you told me that they could take the pick of the other girls. How does one girl assess another? A woman’s no judge of another woman’s sexuality. Do they have a test-pilot? Are you –’

  ‘No I’m bloody well not,’ Wallace snapped. ‘And just in case you were thinking of applying for the job –’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘– it’s taken. And you wouldn’t suit. Insufficiently discriminating. Right. I’ve told you enough about the place. I just wanted you to understand the set-up and not go blundering around saying and doing all the wrong things.’

  ‘I understand all right,’ Keith said.

  Wallace sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you do,’ he said. ‘Just try to remember that this is no back-street bordello. It’s a very up-market operation. Very important business conferences happen here, when they want the ultimate in hospitality plus total secrecy. One of the biggest take-overs of the decade was signed in the boardroom. All right, you can drive on now.’

  Keith started the car and let it roll forward. ‘Does Janet know that her husband – my partner – is accountant to a high-class knocking-shop?’

  ‘Stop the car,’ Wallace said. ‘Obviously I haven’t g-got through to you. One, I am not their accountant; they have one in residence, and two book-keepers. Two, it isn’t a knocking-shop; it’s a highly respectable group of companies, some of whose property happens to be used for immoral purposes, and they’ll sue anybody who suggests otherwise. The Church of Scotland has much the same problem, I believe. Three, Janet knows all about it and thinks it’s as funny as hell. She’s always wanting the latest gossip.’

  Keith let the car roll again. ‘Doesn’t the resident accountant get a bit distracted at times?’ he asked. ‘Or is it a woman?’

  ‘It’s a man, and he’d better not get distracted. Debbie – the original redhead – retired from the game and married him. She acts as chairman and managing director of the group, and she’s damned good at it. But she’s a tartar. The other girls know better than to make eyes at her man.’

  Keith drove in silence for a while, trying to absorb the overdose of bizarre facts which had been forced on him. ‘The operation must have a name,’ he said suddenly. ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘We kept the original name for the house – Millmont House. The group of companies, and most of the individual companies, go under the name of Personal Service. Don’t laugh,’ Wallace added. ‘The name wasn’t an exercise in cynical indecency, as you might think. When the girls were in Edinburgh, before the days of the clinic, somebody came to the door doing a household survey. He wanted to know whether the girls worked in industry, commerce, catering or what-have-you, and the only one of his categories which seemed to fit was Personal Service. The name stuck.’

  Keith frowned. ‘I’ve seen the names on vans,’ he said. ‘Laundry, was it?’

  ‘That and a few other things,’ Wallace said. ‘Turn in here.’

  Keith stopped the car. The wrought iron, spike topped gates were set in a high hedge, but he could see that the hedge was backed by barbed wire. A discreet sign said Millmont House. Clinic.

  Wallace wound down his window. ‘Mr James and Mr Calder,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Chalet Sixteen.’

  A gruff, Cockney voice spoke, apparently out of the gate-post. ‘Morning, Guv,’ it said. There was a click at the lock, an electric motor whirred faintly and the gates swung open.

  ‘Neat but not gaudy,’ Keith said.

  ‘See what looks like a letter box? There’s a closed-circuit television camera in there.’

  Keith drove forward onto a well-surfaced drive that ran under a canopy of trees. Flowering shrubs, mostly rhododendrons, had been planted so thickly that nowhere was there an uninterrupted view. Keith shook his head. The place was real, but the story, of bullets and supertarts, just had to be a dream or a fantasy on Wallace’s part. ‘There’s been some money spent,’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Sprat to catch a mackerel,’ Wallace said. ‘The girls are coining it.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Usually between eight and a dozen. I think there are ten or eleven just now, including anybody away on holiday or visiting. They come and go. Retire, or take a few months off to go to the Riviera and look for a rich husband. If they never send for their share of the money, they found one.’

  ‘That happens?’

  ‘It does. We’re holding more than twenty thousand for Moira, the other founder-member. Rumour has it she married a Greek shipowner. She doesn’t want him to know about her past. But – go left here – if she ever wants the money, we’ve doubled it for her.’

  Keith turned down what might have been a broad path or a very narrow drive, beside a small arrow labelled sixteen. Bushes almost scraped the sides of the car. They arrived on an apron of tarmac in front of a cedarboard chalet.

  ‘You have sixteen chalets?’ Keith asked as they got out of the car.

  ‘Eighteen. They need spares. Sometimes a guest wants to sleep in, and the girl has another appointment.
Sometimes a chalet gets messed up during a party.’ Wallace stopped at the front of the door. ‘Let us into Sixteen, please, Charlie. Thank you,’ he added as the lock clicked.

  Although the chalet was the size of a large cottage, it comprised mainly one room, but through two open doors he could see a bathroom and a small but comprehensive kitchenette. The large main room was opulent and, to the surprise of Keith who had been expecting an erotic decor, dignified He tried not to look at the big water-bed ‘This isn’t what I expected,’ he said.

  Wallace shook his head at the naivety. ‘If you were buying sex, would you want to be reminded of the transaction? Or would you rather be able to imagine that you were seducing a duchess? Leave the door open so that we don’t have to call Charlie up to get out again. And don’t raise your voice or you’ll activate the cameras and microphones.’

  Keith had been expecting the sleazy side to surface. ‘Huh!’ he said. ‘Space-age equivalent of the cabinet de voyeur?’

  ‘It’s the space-age equivalent of having someone outside the door, just in case the customer decides that it might be fun to rough the girl up a little. There’s a rota of very tough nuts on porter duty. And the knowledge that you can’t get out unless the girl clears it with the porter makes quite a deterrent.’

  Chapter Two

  The back wall of the room was lined with a single panel, veneered in some pale timber – sycamore, Keith thought. On it was arranged a collection of what Keith at first supposed to be reproduction antique guns. He was drawn towards them, pointing like a gundog. Each one was an original.

  ‘Where in God’s name did you get this lot?’ Keith asked. He gave a low whistle. ‘I’ve been looking for a Ferguson Rifle for years. Even the one in Edinburgh Castle’s only a sporting copy.’

  ‘One of our customers was raising money in a hurry. You’re always telling me they’re a good investment, and good investments are always needed here. We paid him just over eight thousand for them.’

  ‘Would you take a hundred per cent profit?’

  ‘We’ll hang onto them for the moment, thanks. Could any of these have fired that ball?’

  The light of enthusiasm faded in Keith’s eye. The expert in him took over. The guns were fixed flat to the wall, partly by a hook in each barrel, and he could not get his gauge into use; but years of practice had taught him to estimate the diameter of a bore to within a very small margin. He worked his way through the collection, muttering aloud. ‘Too small . . . smoothbore . . . unserviceable (let me have it for a day or two) . . . too small . . . too large . . . I repaired this one for you, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘You told me it belonged to your old mother. I didn’t know she was on the game.’

  ‘I could hardly tell you the truth.’

  ‘I gave you a special price,’ Keith said sadly. ‘Why aren’t there any ramrods?’

  ‘Too easily pinched as souvenirs. I’ve got them all locked up safely.’

  ‘Uhuh.’ Keith finished his inspection. ‘This duelling pistol, now. Saw-handled. Possibly Boutet of Versailles. One of a pair. Pity you don’t have the other. Started as flintlock and some bloody vandal converted it to percussion by barrel-nipple in about 1840. I could convert it back to flintlock for you.’

  ‘That would make it more valuable?’ Wallace asked.

  ‘Much more. Anyway, this could be the culprit. It’s been cleaned, but it smells of fresh gun-oil and black powder smoke.’

  ‘G-goddam!’ Wallace said. ‘I was hoping you’d clear them all. How would he get it off the wall? Those hooks aren’t screwed on, they’re bolted right through.’

  Keith laughed in a way that Wallace thought maddeningly superior. ‘You should have consulted me about security. A hook in the barrel and another through the trigger-guard’s all very well, but we could have done better. Look, I’ll show you something.’ Keith pointed to a beautifully engraved and inlaid Queen Anne pistol. ‘Whoever it was, he tried to get this one down. See how he’s used a screwdriver on what he thought were screw-heads and burred them? He could have loaded that one from the breech end, and with a flintlock he wouldn’t have had problems getting a matching percussion-cap. He couldn’t get it down, so he switched his attention to the other one. The trigger-guard on the Queen Anne fixes from inside and he’d have had to dismantle the whole pistol to get it off the wall. So he took two screws out of the Boutet, turned the trigger-guard and lifted the pistol down. Then afterwards, I suppose to try and cover some of his tracks, he cleaned it and reversed the process. It’s in an awkward position, and the screws aren’t quite home.’

  Wallace looked for himself, and grunted. The signs were to be seen, if you knew where to look.

  Keith produced his own tools, unscrewed the trigger-guard and took down the pistol again. ‘Like that,’ he said. He took his gauge out of its long case and measured the bore. ‘Hard to tell exactly,’ he said, ‘because it’s both swamped and belled, but I make it about point six one five at its tightest. That’d just about take the ball with a cloth patch. Let’s have a look at the chair.’

  ‘They took it up to the house.’

  ‘They shouldn’t muck about at the scene of a crime.’

  ‘Well, you just did,’ Wallace pointed out. ‘Except that we don’t know for sure that there’s been a crime.’

  ‘Pull your head out of the sand, ostrich,’ Keith said, ‘and show me where the chair stood when it was noticed.’

  A single leather armchair with a cushion of tartan tweed stood facing the stone fireplace. Wallace moved it round so that it stood to one side of the fireplace with its back to the door. ‘This was here,’ he said. ‘The one with the blood was opposite.’

  Keith sat down in the real chair and stared at a mental image of the other. His posture became fixed, his eyes staring unseeingly at the far wall, always his attitude when deep in thought. Eventually, he stirred. Wallace waited expectantly.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Keith said.

  Wallace looked at his watch. ‘We’ve missed lunch.’ He raised his voice. ‘Hoy! Charlie!’

  There was a faint hum as the audio system came to life. The same gruff voice came over a hidden speaker. ‘Yes, Mr James?’

  Wallace looked at the mirror over the fireplace. ‘Could you send us down some sandwiches – smoked salmon – and a bottle of the Liebfraumilch, please?’

  ‘Make mine a pint of Guinness,’ Keith said.

  ‘Right you are, Guv.’ The hum snapped off.

  Keith nodded at the mirror. ‘That’s where the camera is?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Humph. Take a look at the furniture, fitments and walls.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  Keith produced the lead ball from his ticket-pocket and showed Wallace the mark. ‘A slot like that,’ he said, ‘made by a screwdriver. He won’t have used the floor. Wrong way up.’

  ‘Of course,’ Wallace said sardonically, but he got to work. Keith, if questioned when trying to concentrate, was inclined unwittingly to become more rather than less obscure.

  Keith himself went down on his knees. He studied the seat and arms of the chair, and then began a minute examination of the deep-pile carpet. ‘Seems very clean,’ he said. ‘Has it been vacuumed since then?’

  ‘Since when?’ said Wallace.

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  The food had still not arrived by the time that Wallace had exhausted the possibilities of the walls and furniture. Keith had finished with the carpet and was studying the contents of the vacuum-cleaner. At last a car drew up outside, a door closed and a squat shadow filled the doorway. A burly man with no neck, no hair and almost no nose brought in a laden tray.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Charlie,’ Wallace said. ‘Should you be away from the desk?’

  ‘Doris is covering for me, Guv. Sorry I was so long, but I ’ad to go down to the village for the Guinness.’

  Keith looked up from his small pile of dust and fluff ‘You’re not as big as I
expected,’ he said.

  ‘They don’t need to be giants,’ Wallace said defensively.

  ‘You used to wrestle as Charlie Fairweather,’ Keith said. ‘I saw you a few times at Leith Baths, and at the Caird Hall.’

  ‘Did you now?’ Charlie put the tray down. He shuffled his feet. ‘Fairweather’s me own name. But I was the Masked Marauder, too.’

  ‘Were you, though? You looked taller in the ring.’

  ‘That’s the way it is,’ Charlie said. ‘Well, cheers. Ta for now!’ He bustled out and they heard the car drive off.

  ‘Salt of the earth,’ Wallace said, ‘and a pillar of this establishment, but I wish he’d stick to his own damned job. It’s just his eternal curiosity that brought him down here. Well, what do you make of it?’

  Keith took the only chair and helped himself to a sandwich. Wallace settled himself on the end of the water-bed, bobbing gently up and down. ‘It doesn’t add up yet,’ Keith said. ‘Can I take it that you don’t keep black powder on the premises?’

  ‘You certainly can.’

  ‘Who cleans the chalets?’

  ‘The girls do their own cleaning, change the linen and so on. It’s their only other duty.’

  ‘Yes. It wouldn’t do to have an army of daily cleaners wandering around. I want to see the chair, and I’d like to meet the girl who – er – usually occupies this chalet.’

  ‘Can do,’ Wallace said. He clapped his hands. ‘Hoy!’

  The speakers came alive. A woman’s voice said, ‘Yes, Mr James?’

  ‘Ask Mrs Heller to speak, if she’s free, please, Doris.’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  Keith took another sandwich. ‘These are good,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing but the best around here.’

  Another voice came over the speakers, musical and, for a woman’s voice, deep. The Kensington accent was so good that Keith nearly missed the faint underlying trace of Glasgow. ‘Hullo, Wal,’ it said. ‘Has the mystery been solved?’

  ‘Not yet. We’d like to see the chair, and have a word with Hilary if she isn’t – er – doing anything.’