I did and I didn’t. Drugs might be the foundation of our business model these days but they left me cold. I liked to stay in control and most coke heads I’d met had a pretty thin grasp on what constituted reality. I’d heard about people taking Ketamine and floating off to happy land. It was meant to be the recession-busting drug. Why go out when you can just invite your mates round, take some K and sit there giggling at each other? To me it just sounded boring. Booze was more my thing. I liked to go out.
There was a brief burst of applause for the blonde with the boob job as she finished one dance and began another. She wasn’t my type. I preferred the natural look, ‘What have you heard about Geordie Cartwright?’ I asked Billy.
‘The last time I saw him was a few days back, he was in City Vaults,’ he replied a bit quickly.
‘Yeah?’ I wondered why he didn’t ask me why I was asking. Maybe he thought that was my business.
‘Yeah, he was at the bar, talking to some Russian bloke.’
‘A Russian bloke,’ I asked, ‘you sure?’
‘Well, he sounded Russian, yeah I’d say so. I dunno, I s’pose he could have been Polish or something, how should I know, but he looked like a Russian.’
‘And what did this guy look like, apart from Russian?’
‘A big fucker, about six-foot-five. A beefy bloke with a shaved head,’ and he laughed, ‘he looked like something James Bond would have to fight.’ And he grinned and waved his hands around in front of me like he was doing martial arts.
‘Okay,’ I said, trying to disguise my very obvious interest in this development, ‘and what were they talking about?’
He shrugged. ‘Fuck knows, I wasn’t really paying attention. I just ordered my pint near them, said hello to Cartwright and left them to it.’
‘Did it look like they knew each other well then?’
‘Well it looked like they hadn’t just met but I dunno. Maybe the bloke was on his holidays and Cartwright was just chatting to him.’
‘On his holidays? In Newcastle?’
‘I dunno, maybe he was a football fan or something.’
‘I repeat, in Newcastle?’
‘Yeah, well, I dunno, right. All I know is Cartwright was talking to a Russian bloke and they seemed pretty pally. That’s all I know mate. What can I say?’
‘That’s alright Billy. No bother.’
‘Was that useful like?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Who knows mate, who knows?’ I drained my pint. ‘Enjoy the match.’
He snorted, ‘doubt it.’
Normally I would have gone to the match. Usually, only the cast iron guarantee of a threesome with Cameron Diaz and Kylie Minogue would have tempted me to give up my place and, even then, I’d have been checking text messages for the score while they were going down on each other. But this wasn’t usually. I didn’t think Bobby would want to see my unpopular face in his executive box today. He’d want to know I was out there pounding the streets looking for Cartwright and, since I’d already tried that and got nowhere, except for the strange tale of a big Russian, drinking pints with our missing friend, I picked up my car and set off up the A1.
I’d not had the Merc CLS long but I was getting used to it. It had every feature going and looked pretty cool in black with its matching leather interior. In fact I was more chuffed with it than I let on. Anyway, it made short work of the A1, which was quiet now that half the city was at the match. Before I knew it I’d left the city’s houses and high rises behind me. People who’ve never been up here still think the north east is one big slag heap or derelict pit site, but a fair bit of it is countryside, stretching out for miles either side of what used to be called the Great North Road, in a sea of green.
When I reached the farmhouse, I walked up to the door and rang the bell. No answer. The place was looking a bit dilapidated these days. It had been a working farm once but the owner pissed away the family legacy with the usual money-shredding combination of gambling and booze. When he eventually took a shotgun to himself, the land was bought by an adjacent farm. Our old associate Mark Miller bought the house for a song because it was surplus to requirements.
I asked him once, ‘doesn’t it bother you that the bloke blew his brains out in here?’
‘No man, not me,’ he said, shaking his head and its accompanying long mane of greying hippy hair, tied back in a pony tail, ‘don’t believe in ghosts or any of that bullshit.’
I rang the bell again and again. Still no reply, so I called his mobile.
‘Where the fuck are you?’
He laughed, ‘my studio.’
‘You mean the cow shed?’
He laughed again, ‘it’s not a cow shed. It’s a custom built, state-of-the-art, professional, photographic studio,’ then he whispered, ‘come round David. It’ll be worth the walk.’
SEVEN
I went down the side of the house and crossed a small patch of rough ground. The door of the so-called studio, an enormous metal-roofed lock-up that looked like a World War Two era Nissen hut, was unlocked, so I pulled it open and went inside. The entrance way was a dark corridor. All I could hear up ahead was the staccato click- click-whir coming from deep within the darkened room then a high pitched whine as if a flash gun was charging up again. I walked towards the big studio lights, passed metal shelves filled with car parts and tools set aside for DIY and gardening. There was a big, old-fashioned steel girder supporting the roof and the flash from Miller’s camera was rebounding off it. I turned into the large, open area of the studio where Mark ‘Windy’ Miller worked and, seeing me, a stark naked young girl squealed.
I got a quick flash of her pale body as she jumped down from the sofa Miller had her standing on. She grabbed a white towelling robe and clasped it tightly to her in an effort to avoid any more of her intimate bits being placed on show to a complete stranger.
‘Come on Kayleigh,’ he told her, like she was the worst kind of prude, ‘you’ve got to learn to be less body conscious than that.’ I was trying to take in the fact she was actually called Kayleigh. No prizes for guessing what band her dad was into back in the 80s. ‘This here is David Blake. He’s not just an old friend, he’s a professional photographer too. Aren’t you mate?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘So he’s seen it all before, hasn’t he?’ she hesitated, keeping the robe pressed tightly against her young body, but her eyebrows knitted together in a frown that told me she was unsure how she should be behaving. ‘Hasn’t he?’ he repeated. Mark tutted at her like she was being a silly girl then asked patiently, ‘what would Keeley Hazell do?’
She smiled then, blushed, giggled and finally dropped the robe, standing in front of me in all her Page-three- hopeful, naked glory. ‘That’s better,’ he told her and, all of a sudden, she seemed to be enjoying the exposure. She blew air out of the corner of her upturned bottom lip, disturbing a wisp of blonde hair over her forehead, put her hands on her hips and stood straight so there wasn’t an inch of her I couldn’t see, then she did a self-conscious little wiggle from side to side. ‘Good girl,’ he told her then turned to me, ‘I think Kayleigh here has got everything it takes to go all the way.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ I told them. She beamed at us both, the silly cow.
‘And he ought to know,’ said Miller and somehow we both managed to look serious. ‘Nearly done mate, why don’t you just take a seat for a minute.’
I waited till he shot another roll of film while young Kayleigh stood there and posed. She tried to look serious, then pouted like a naughty schoolgirl, then adopted what she presumably thought was a coquettish pose and all on Miller’s instructions. He asked her to raise an arm, cup a breast, roll her nipples between her fingers to make them
