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Soho, London

Saturday, April 3, 1993; 21.40

As we set off up Greek Street, I felt instantly reassured by Soho’s drunken school-playground vibe. Outside the pokey, sticky-carpeted pubs, drinkers clumped obediently between territory-marking velvet ropes; hemmed-in lives cutting loose, drinking, smoking, talking and laughing too hard.

It all happened here. We were just another pair of pissheads who’d run out of pleasure, innocently seeking more.

As we turned left into Old Compton Street, Fintan pointed out a semi-derelict three-storey building on the corner.

‘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.

‘Excuse me, sir?’ came the gruff Soviet-baddie command and I leapt fully four inches off the red carpet. I landed but my heart remained lodged somewhere around my Adam’s apple, beating so hard that I couldn’t speak. I nodded, mouth open, like a halfwit.

‘We will need to see ID, proof of age.’

Fintan turned back, a well-rehearsed picture of surprised innocence, while my mind performed a rapid-fire inventory of everything on my person that proved my 23 years.

‘As you can probably tell, gentlemen,’ Fintan gushed, ‘we’re on a very low-key night out. Neither of us expected this to happen. Though I can tell my 23-year-old friend over there is absolutely thrilled.’

Fintan threw me a look that said: ‘Snap out of it now. TALK!’

‘You are both Irish?’ asked the Russian.

Fintan nodded.

‘Then we require ID for you too,’ he said, his darkening eyes letting Fintan know he wasn’t swallowing any of his old blarney, ‘and we must frisk you.’

‘May I ask why?’ Fintan laughed, a little too desperately.

‘Oh, let me see,’ said Russki, his heavy-lidded, hateful eyes somehow managing to convey both tired boredom and latent violence, ‘last October you blow up Sussex Arms in Covent Garden; last November, Canary Wharf; last December, the city centre of Manchester …’

‘Say no more,’ said Fintan, reaching into an inside jacket pocket and producing his driving licence. Russki barked something at his underlings. One began writing down the licence details while the other introduced Fintan’s inside legs to what looked like a black table tennis bat with lights.

My insides collapsed in horrible realisation. I had only one piece of picture ID on me. And I didn’t want any of these men to know I was a cop.

‘I haven’t brought any ID,’ I announced flatly.

Russki looked at me balefully. ‘Close up, you look older. We just search you.’

‘No need to bother,’ I said, hands-up, taking a step back, ‘I can go home and get it, be back in half an hour.’

I took another baby step back and trod on a foot. I turned to apologise, only to nuzzle a great wall of chest belonging to another bouncer – and he wasn’t moving.

‘I’m sure you have nothing to hide from our friend Yulian,’ said Russki with a smile. ‘We do a quick search, you go in.’

My eyes locked onto Fintan’s, relaying the bad news. Through some inexplicable sibling sympatico, he read it instantly.

‘Hang on one minute there,’ he piped up. ‘If he says he wants to go, then he’s free to go. And after this harassment, I’m leaving too.’

Russki’s enormous left hand reached out to Fintan’s chest, shutting him down. Yulian palmed mine like a zombie on a first date. He reached into my inside pocket and whipped out my warrant card. He blankly absorbed the contents before handing over to Russki.

‘Why didn’t you tell us you are an officer-of-the-law?’

‘You didn’t ask,’ I said brightly, matter-of-fact.

‘If I know this, I let you straight in. Why you not show me?’

‘Look at the card,’ I said, suddenly emboldened by the memory of a small detail that I never thought would come in handy. ‘It has my name, photo and number. What’s missing?’

Russki surveyed it, his narrowing eyes dragging his brow into a full-on frown.

Suddenly I felt in control. ‘It doesn’t have my date of birth, does it? That’s what you asked me for. ID for proof of age. That doesn’t provide it.’

Russki handed it back to me nodding.

‘I see,’ he said finally.

‘Besides,’ I added, still a move ahead, ‘we’re not encouraged to broadcast the fact we’re cops, especially on a night out. It can put us at unnecessary risk.’

‘When he says we …’ blurted Fintan, ‘I’m not actually a cop of any sort.’

Russki ignored him.

‘You will be safe here tonight, detective,’ he said solemnly, standing aside, ‘I can assure you of that.’

These words sounded about as reassuring as the last rites.

As I walked through, Fintan turned to Russki and said, ‘You do know that every single ounce of Semtex in the world comes from your old Eastern Bloc. Ironic, isn’t it, that it’s now shitting you all up here in London.’

I floated down the ornate staircase on a current of relief, into the carnal-red, cabaret-style club. Fintan quickly caught up, riding a very different wave.

‘Fucking hell,’ he gasped, ‘I can’t believe you brought your warrant card on a job like this. What were you thinking?’

‘I hadn’t planned on showing it to anyone, Fintan. Did you think we’d get searched? Of course you didn’t.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t bring my press card. I’d never take it with me on a job like this. Because I’m not a fucking idiot.’

‘We could’ve walked away until you opened your big mouth,’ I pointed out.

‘What?’

‘They could smell your bullshit. That’s when they started getting heavy. Until that point, we could’ve turned around and walked off. Instead they made you produce your driving licence.’

‘Yeah, but if you’d shown them your driving licence, instead of your warrant card, we’d be in the clear now. They’d have our names but no idea what we do for a living. Now they know you’re a copper, they’ll be watching our every move. They’re probably on the phone to Reilly right now, as we speak, telling him about you and some other professional busybody turning up at his club.’

We both stopped dead in our tracks. Until now, neither of us had dared to properly acknowledge what we might be getting ourselves into here. Suddenly Jimmy Reilly felt too real, too close.

‘What if Reilly turns up?’ I rasped, ‘Starts asking questions.’

Fintan’s cheek muscle flickered. He squinted to see things clearer in his mind.

‘We’re safe until the first edition lands,’ he said, ‘but when they see my by-line on that story, then our cover is blown. He’ll realise we came here to check him out.’

‘What time does that happen?’

‘The first batch lands at King’s Cross around midnight. That gives us almost two hours. But we need to be out of here literally on the stroke of 12.’

‘I’ll come and find you Cinders,’ I said.

‘No, you won’t,’ he muttered, ‘we leave separately, and not the way we came in.’

He felt my confused glare.

‘Check out the lenses,’ he said, his eyes shooting up.

About a dozen pillars propped up the ceiling, each one a four-eyed CCTV monster.

‘Forty-eight cameras. I bet there are 48 tables, one trained on each,’ he said.

‘Makes sense,’ I agreed.

‘They can watch us all night. If we both get up to leave suddenly, they could intercept us in the foyer for another chat. No thanks. Don’t look now but there’s a fire exit about 50 feet to the right of the toilets. Before it gets to 12, tell the lady you’re with that you’re going to the loo. On the way, veer right, go through that door and don’t stop.’

‘Until …’

‘We’d better not hang around the West End. All the nightclub and taxi radios are on the same bandwidth. The goons here could have every bouncer and cabbie in Soho looking out for us in seconds. Head to Tottenham Court Road but keep north of Oxford Street. Those roads will be quiet by then. I’ll see you at the Troy on Hanway Street, about 12.30.’

‘Why don’t we just scarper right now?’

‘Will you quit staring at that fire exit? Check out the stage instead. Everyone else is. Then let’s try to look like we came here for a good time.’

The club’s focal point was a glass platform about the size of four snooker tables, shimmering three feet above a sparkling blood-red floor. Little red circular tables, each dimly lit by a single lamp, jostled hungrily around it, like piglets around a sow’s nipple board. Silhouetted men sat alone in scarlet retro armchairs, waiting for the next floor show, studious, smoking and bereft.

‘10.09pm and not a cock in the house stiff,’ announced Fintan. ‘Bit gynaecological sitting that close, wouldn’t you say, Donal? Jesus, they might as well put them in stirrups.’

‘Ringside, quite literally.’

‘I think we’ll do better over here.’

He led me around the island of ground-level tables and chairs, up two steps to an elevated area, also wall-to-wall red velveteen.

‘Good job we didn’t wear red,’ he quipped, taking a seat at a front table, ‘they might never have found us again.’

I took the chair next to him as a waitress swooped in. ‘What can I get you gentlemen?’

‘The house champagne will be fine tonight, thank you,’ said Fintan, trying to sound like he usually quaffs the Dom Perignon.

‘Anything to eat?’

‘Just a portion of fries please, for now,’ he said, uncharacte‌ristically frugal for a man who loved nothing more than splashing out on expenses.

‘Jesus, look,’ said Fintan in wonderment, nodding towards a dark corner behind the stage, ‘the livestock, in their holding pen.’

Inside a roped-off zone, a dozen or so fake-tanned, black-eyed girls sat bored and restless in their scanties, waiting to splay their orifices to the assembled pervs.

‘They all look orange, like Sooty puppets,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘By the looks of it, tan isn’t the only fakery going on.’

‘Hey, looking on the bright side, you still get to ram your hand up their holes later.’

‘Jesus, Fintan! They might just be dancers. Maybe that’s all Liz did here.’

‘Why do you always have to idealise women? It must be because you’ve never actually known any, not properly. Listen, if dancing is all Liz did, then she must’ve been better than Anna fucking Pavlova, to rent a flat like that.’

‘Why didn’t she scale down, rent somewhere cheap, then she could’ve stopped working here?’

‘They get hooked on the lifestyle. A lot of these women have several properties, kids at private school, membership to Chelsea health clubs, all achieved without a husband or a partner. Once you get used to earning a thousand pounds a night, how do you give all that up?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: ‘A thousand a night, for dancing and sleeping with one person?’

‘Some of the Arabs leave with three or four girls, and don’t even fuck them all. They still pay the ones they don’t touch just for sitting in their tent.’

‘In their tent! Jesus, Fintan, you can’t say things like that.’

‘What?’ he protested. ‘In the weeks before and after Ramadan, wealthy Arabs flood into London to shop, eat and shag, get it all out of their systems. Some of the poshest hotels erect tents on their roofs, supposedly so that the Arab men can enjoy their traditional shisha pipes without smoking out the hotel lounges and bars. At least that’s how the hotel explains it away to the other guests. The tents are for smoking alright, smoking hot hookers and drugs and booze, but well out of sight of their devout Muslim mums, wives and families. These men are the wealthiest in the world. It is almost a matter of honour that they party harder than the next richest man in the chain.’

He frowned and turned to me: ‘You have brought some money here with you, Donal? Or a credit card?’

‘I don’t have a credit card. I took out 70 earlier. I’ve got about 50 left.’

‘Fifty quid?’ he whispered, eyeing me in disbelief, ‘Jesus, Donal, I’ve just ordered the cheapest bottle of plonk on the menu and that was £120. You’re expected to buy two of these before a woman will even sit with you.’

‘I’ll just eat then.’

‘The chips are another 50.’

‘Fifty pounds! For a portion of chips? You can’t be serious.’

He pushed a menu towards me. I scanned it without bothering to disguise my disgust.

‘This is … obscene. We still have time to buy perfectly adequate £2 pints in any pub down the road.’

‘For fuck’s sake, you can’t go now,’ he muttered, reaching into his inside jacket pocket and whipping out a black wallet.

He set to work beneath the table, then tapped my knee and hissed: ‘Five hundred quid, fully sanctioned by accounts.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Like I said, it’s been signed off by accounts. Relax and have some fun.’

‘How would this look to anyone on the outside? A cop taking 500 pounds cash off a reporter, who is also his brother, to spend on hookers? I could get the sack just for having this conversation with you.’

‘I’m a little more concerned about us getting our legs broken if you try to leave after ten minutes,’ he growled. ‘I’ve had my hand under this table now for fully two minutes. In the name of all that is holy, will you take the fucking cash?’

I took the fucking cash, pocketing it seconds before the waitress bounced a wine bucket, two glasses and a bowl of fries off the cloth-cushioned table top. The fries remained steadfastly rooted to their receptacle because they were soggy McCain oven chips costing three pounds each. The champagne failed to fizz enough to flow out of the open spout, because it was lukewarm sparkling wine from Kwik Save. I suddenly didn’t feel so bad about taking the newspaper’s money. This felt about as luxurious as Ryanair.

‘Here,’ he said, pushing the wine bucket towards me, ‘take this, go sit over there, and get your enormous Rolex out for the girls.’

By 11pm, foreign businessmen flooded the Florentine; wealthy wallflowers coaxing out the honeybee hostesses in their black leather mini-skirts and orange tans.

Let’s get this straight – every female in the club had been officially rated since birth as ‘way out of my league’. Pretty, slim, lithe and glowing – they were the kind of textbook beauties dangled daily in the media as an example of what all women should strive to look like.

Maybe it was just me who didn’t find them sexy. Over-tanned, over-toned, overbearing – like their rictus smiles, their entire personas seemed dehumanised and robotic, designed for a photo-shoot rather than real life.

But maybe the finer things in life are wasted on me. I’d tried criminally expensive whiskey and chocolate, but found them bland and characterless. I’ve ridden in a Bentley and driven a Jaguar – both felt too smooth and insulated. No fun. As for food, I’d take a carvery over caviar any day.

Beer, bangers and boilers all the way for you then, Donal, I told myself.

My jangling nerves had a thirst on, polishing off bottle one in no time at all. Bottle two came with bottle-blonde Lenka, a Slovenian who proved every bit as bitter sweet as the Margarita she insisted I buy her.

‘So nice to meet you, Dunnell,’ she smarmed, making my name rhyme with Sally Gunnell.

‘You too, Lunka,’ I replied, wondering whether it was the sulphites, sugar or pesticides in champagne that always drove me slightly loopy.