Gumshoe Blues (The Peter Ord Yarns Book 1) - Paul D. Brazill

Gumshoe Blues (The Peter Ord Yarns Book 1) by Paul D. Brazill

Book excerpt

In the beginning was the sound. The light came later. The sound was a horrifying wail that skewered its way deep into my unconscious brain, until I awoke swiftly, sharply - drowning in sweat, my heart smashing through my ribcage; my head about to burst. Some twat, somewhere, was playing a U2 song, over and over again, and all was far from bloody quiet on New Year’s Day.

I forced my eyes open and squinted until I saw the familiar sight of a fraying Seatown United poster peeling from fuzzy, red-flock wallpaper. I was lying on a brown tweed sofa and tangled up in a tartan blanket that had seen better days and nights. I was home.

The air in the room was warm and soupy, and I felt a wave of nausea pass over me. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and counted to ten. The dry heaves kicked in around six. A beat. I peeled my eyes open again. The aquarium bubbled and gurgled, bathing the room in a sickly green light. Sickly and yet soothing. I reminded myself that I really had to put some tropical fish in there one day.

I edged onto my side and awkwardly kicked the blanket to the floor. I was fully clothed. My armpits were soaking. My fake Armani shirt was soggy. A sickly smell permeated my pores and the least said about my trousers the better.

Beside me was a sticky coffee table that was cluttered with the remnants of the previous night’s drinking session. I picked up an open can of Stella Artois and shook it. It was more than half full. A result, then.

I slowly sipped the beer can’s warm, flat contents until I started to get a glow on, like one of the kids in the old Ready-Brek adverts. Booze: central heating for boozers.

Bonzo, The Ledge, and their musically illiterate pals continued to strangle a cat in the flat next door, and I knew that I was going to have to make a move soon, before my head went all Scanners. I finished the lager, edged myself up to a sitting position, and picked up my glasses from the coffee table. One of the lenses was scratched, but at least they weren’t broken. Another result.

The blinking, digital clock-radio that was plonked on top of the television set, said that it was 3.15am. It was always 3.15am, ever since I’d thrown it against the wall during a particularly grating late night phone-in show. In the real dark night of the soul, there was always some twat talking bollocks at three o’clock in the morning.

I grabbed my knock-off Armani jacket from the floor and fumbled in the pockets for my mobile phone. It was just after ten. That gave me enough time to get ready and make myself presentable before my midday meeting with Jack Martin.

My stiff joints ached as I shuffled towards the kitchen, and I noticed that my shoes were stained with something that looked a lot like blood, but was much more likely to be chilli sauce from the doner kebab I vaguely remembered stuffing down my gob the night before.

I put on the kettle and crushed a couple of diazepam and codeine into an Xmas turkey-flavour Pot Noodle: the most important meal of the day, breakfast. My headache was starting to settle into a steady throb, but my throat was like a nun’s knickers. I foolishly opened the buzzing fridge to look for a cold beer, but the smell made my stomach lurch and the waves of nausea quickly built to a tsunami.

I staggered toward the toilet bowl and evacuated my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. After a minute or two of retching, I kneeled on the linoleum, whimpering and panting like a stray dog.

Wiping my mouth on the back of my hand, I went back to the living room and poured myself a large vodka and orange.

Happy New Year.

Out with the old and in with the new.

***

Truth be told, my most vivid and powerful memories of childhood were always in black and white. The monochrome Saturday morning Kidz Klub serials that were shown at the local Odeon cinema, and the Hollywood films on afternoon television, when I was throwing a sickie from school. It all seemed so much more vibrant than anything that real life could come up with. And, as you would expect of someone who grew up living more fully in his imagination than in the day-to-day, adulthood proved to be a series of disappointments and non-events.

Nightclubs, for example, were, in my mind, bustling with tough guys in pinstriped suits, wise-cracking cigarettes girls and sultry femme fatales belting out torch songs on a Chiaroscuro-lit stage. So, when I eventually stumbled into the grim reality – claggy carpets, overflowing toilets, beer-bellied men staggering around a dance floor with leathery, bottle blondes: well, my heart sank like the Titanic.

Not that Velvettes was a nightclub, of course. Not as such. It was supposed to be an exclusive ‘Gentleman’s Club’ close to the Marina’s yuppie flats. In other words, it was an up-market strip joint. Since it was New Year’s Day, Velvettes wasn’t open to the public and it looked pretty bloody garish in the cold light of day – all shiny chrome and red and black leather. It was like something out of American Psycho or an eighties porno film-set. The kitsch theme continued with a stained-glass recreation of the famed poster of a female tennis player scratching her arse that many a teenage boy had on their wall in the Seventies. I’d even splashed out on one myself.

“It’s not exactly Sophie’s Choice, is it?” I said, fiddling with a sticky beer mat. “It’s just a hypothetical question.”

“Naw, it’s a wotsit,” said Tuc, Velvettes’ behemoth of a barman, running his fingers through his close-cropped hair. “It’s entrapment.” His East London accent stumbled further forward with every sip of Stella, not that he’d ever really lost it completely. I had no idea what had dragged Tuc from his life down The Smoke to Seatown, this fading one-whore-town on the north east coast of England. And, to be honest, I thought it was for the best not to ask. There were rumours that he was the bastard offspring of the dead billionaire Robert Maxwell and although I didn’t know anything about that, whatever he was, he was certainly one sort of a bastard. A hard bastard.

In fact, Tuc was so hard that one of his regular party pieces was to see how many times he could head-butt a rabbit, using the small crucifix that was tattooed on his forehead as his ‘sight.’ Although, he gave up that little pastime, along with quite a few others that were equally as unsavoury, when he met Wendy.