Confessions of a Private Dick. Timothy Lea
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three kings and a queen and none of them found cause to point the finger at me. They weren’t half-inched, those rings. They’d just fallen off the back of a lorry, that’s all.’
‘Must have been why most of the stones had jumped out of their settings,’ I say. ‘You were done there, there’s no doubt about it.’
‘The boy’s right, Walter,’ says Mum. ‘That eternity ring you gave me dissolved the first time I did the washing up.’
Dad is still shouting about ingratitude as I go out of the door. Sid has made me responsible for finding us an office and I have an appointment with a Miss Bradford who is going to show me some offices at ‘my end of the market’. I remember the phrase because the geezer I spoke to on the phone underlined it when I told him how much we were willing to pay. Sid has a theory that it is an advantage for a private eye to have an office on the shady side of town and there seems little likelihood of him failing to achieve his aim.
Miss Bradford is richly knockered and has a dark complexion – very dark. In fact she is black all over, or, at least, all the parts I can see. Hold my bike for a minute and I’ll check. I gaze with interest at the way the waft and weft of her sweater is being stretched asunder by the thrust of her bust and then move up to her wide brown eyes. Two of them, placed on either side of her hooter to achieve maximum effect. She seems surprised to see me.
‘You’re much younger than the fellers I usually show round,’ she says. ‘What are you, a designer, commercial artist?’
‘I’m a dick,’ I say. The moment I hear how it sounds I wish I hadn’t. ‘A private investigator,’ I correct myself.
Miss Bradford nods. ‘Good, I thought you might need a lot of daylight for your work. In most of the places I’ll be showing you, you wouldn’t be able to see if you were holding your pencil the right way round unless the light was on.’
‘Where are you from?’ I say, always dynamite when it comes to casual banter.
‘Peckham,’ she says.
‘I meant before that.’
‘Southwark.’ Her eyes send tracer bullets towards mine. ‘You thought I was going to say Bongo Bongo, didn’t you?’
‘South Bongo Bongo,’ I say. ‘I’m from Clapham, myself. Europe’s Disneyland. It’s looking lovely this time of year. The goal mouths are cutting up a bit but you can’t have everything, can you?’
Miss Bradford does not reply to my question and I sense that the state of the football pitches in my homeland is not of prime concern to her. There is more than a touch of the Matilda Ngoblas about her and it is a real trip down mammary lane to case those bounteous boobs. Matilda, faithful readers will recall, used to be one of our next door neighbours at 17 Scraggs Lane, ancestral home of the Leas since times immoral and it was with her that I proved that two young people can reach across the barriers of race and colour, and have it off on the sitting-room carpet just like you and me – well, just like me and your sister. Unfortunately, Dad’s unexpected arrival put the kibosh on that spot of instant romance but I see no reason why lightning Lea should not strike twice.
‘What do you think of it?’
I wrench my mince pies off Miss Bradford’s bristols and look round the room. ‘This is where the bluebottles come to die, is it?’ I say with a light laugh.
‘It needs cleaning up,’ agrees the comely blackamoor. ‘Still, what do you expect for the money you’re prepared to pay? It’s a wonder you’re not working out of a telephone box.’
We would have been if Sid had thought of it, I muse to myself idly tracing ‘fuck’ in the dust on top of the desk – well, it makes a change from ‘clean me’, doesn’t it? One thing I do like about the office is the frosted glass in the door that gives out on to the corridor. Just right for grabbing a trailer of Lauren Bacall’s profile or the outline of the two hoods who have come to bounce you off the walls. I can just see myself behind the desk reaching out for the two fingers of Tizer that live in the top right hand drawer and – hang on a minute! The profile outside the door is not at all the kind of thing I was thinking of. It is of some geezer armed with an enormous hard going into orbit at an angle of forty-five degrees to his body. I glance at Miss Bradford and see that she has clocked this new threat to our already over-congested airways. An expression more of interest than of outrage hovers around her dusky chops. This is too much! I always suspected that flashers had big ones and this proves it. Filthy brute, going around making everyone discontented with their lot – or in my case, not such a lot.
‘Excuse me,’ I say briskly. ‘I must put an end to this.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ murmurs Miss Bradford wistfully.
I try not to think what she means by that remark and wrench open the door. Maybe if I gave the bloke 10p he would go and stand outside somebody else’s office.
‘Now look—!’ I begin. I stop when I see an old man holding a broom at his side. ‘All right?’ I say weakly.
The old man looks me up and down as if he finds it a very unrewarding occupation. ‘Your flies are undone,’ he says. I mumble something and close the door.
Miss Bradford is laughing. ‘I thought that was too good to be true,’ she says.
‘Yeah. Looked, er – a bit funny, didn’t it?’ I say.
‘Looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer,’ says Miss Bradford. ‘That’s what sent you bustling to the door, wasn’t it? You didn’t like the competition.’
‘I don’t think of flashers as competition,’ I say. ‘They do that instead of the real thing.’ I turn my back and do up my fly.
‘Are you going to give me a demonstration?’ mocks Miss B.
‘What of?’ I say.
‘That’s up to you. You’re handling the equipment.’
‘I’m not handling it,’ I say. ‘I’m readjusting my clothing.’
‘Are you shy?’ she says.
If I was going to be honest, I would say yes. Self-confident birds always knock me back on my heels and this one is a spade to boot. We all know what they’re like, don’t we? Carrying a black anaconda between their legs and blessed with a natural sense of rhythm. It is not the dancing I am worrying about as much as the ballroom if you take my meaning. Percy is no pouch slouch but size-wise he may fall a few feet short of what Miss Bradford is used to when the tom toms beat out their jungle love call to the turn turns.
‘Shy?’ I say with the suspicion of an amazed laugh. ‘Me? Ouch!’ I have just stumbled back against the filing cabinet and those handles do stick in your back, don’t they? The whole structure gives a hollow rumble and I clear my throat uneasily. ‘This comes with it, does it?’
Miss Bradford gazes into my minces as if she expects the answer to my question to come up on them like a telex machine. ‘It’s funny about white skin,’ she says as if talking to herself. ‘It looks so soft.’ She reaches up and draws her hand down the side of my cheek. ‘Terry likes it.’
‘Does he?’ I say. ‘What a pity he’s not here. I could have—’
‘She is here,’ says Miss Bradford propping her bristols against my all the best. ‘I’m Terry. Short for Teresa.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ I say. ‘I’ve always been partial to – er, br-bl-col—’
‘Black pussy,’ says Terry helpfully. ‘I could tell by the way you were looking at me that you wanted to get my panties off.’
‘Ye-es,’ I say. Terry Bradford is what you might call direct when it comes to filling in the plot.
‘But you’re not going to get the chance.’ My spirits fall and percy suspends his clumsy clamber into the vertical. Could it be that I am in the