Free Blood Never Dies by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Mispers?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘Then we just plug on, and hope something comes up before we have to go public.’
    ‘I must say it’s rather peaceful not having the press hanging round and tripping us up every step.’
    ‘Yes, not terribly eye-catching news, nameless man found dead in cheap rental flat,’ Slider said. Over the years he had attended all too many human endings like that, but generally the deceased were either old, obviously poor, or drug addicts. This man wasn’t any of those; but the longer he could keep the press out of it the better.
    ‘It’s going to be a long one,’ he concluded.
    The taxi driver looked exactly like a London cabby out of a movie. He was a spare man of about five foot six, probably in his sixties, with the deeply lined face of a smoker and a smoker’s voice with a Shepherd’s Bush accent. He had a thick, shapeless nose, a chin like a nub of pumice stone, brown-framed glasses and wiry silver hair sprouting from under an old-fashioned flat cap, which he whipped off courteously as he was shown into Slider’s room.
    He gave his name as Harold Barnes.
    ‘It’s about this photograph – sir,’ he added at the last minute, having subjected Slider to a quick analysis.
    ‘Please sit down,’ Slider said, charmed with the novelty. Not many people called him sir these days. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’
    ‘Very lovely of you, sir, but I won’t trouble you. I fill up too much I gotta keep stopping, if you get my meaning. And time’s money in our line o’ business.’
    In that case, Slider thought, he ought to get businesslike. ‘You recognize the man in the photo?’ Taxi drivers were one of the usual places mugshots were sent, along with hospitals, social workers and the other police forces.
    ‘Yes, sir, I do. I picked him up in Kensington High Street one morning.’
    ‘Do you live in Kensington?’
    ‘No, I live in the Bush, but I often cruise down that way. Ken High Street’s a good place to pick up fares. It’s a rubbish tube from there, and there’s lots of the sort of people live there that don’t like going in buses.’
    Slider nodded. Behind Ken High Street there were blocks and blocks of Edwardian and between-wars luxury flats, inhabited by wealthy elderly and middle-aged ladies, who had probably never been on a bus in their lives and didn’t mean to start now.
    ‘So you picked him up—?’
    ‘He flagged me down, just about the end of Allen Street – down that end of the south side.’
    ‘And when was this?’
    ‘Oh, a good while ago. Coupla months, anyway.’
    ‘Then why do you remember him?’ Slider asked. ‘One fare among so many?’
    ‘’Cos of where I took him.’ The cabbie gave Slider a cocked and sly look, like a parrot spotting a peanut. ‘He give me the address, and I thought, “Hello,” I thought, “I know your game.” He asked me to take him to Ransom House, Luxemburg Gardens.’
    ‘Luxemburg Gardens – that’s Brook Green, isn’t it? But what’s Ransom House?’
    ‘You not come across it? That’s where they make all them blue films.’
    ‘Porn films?’ Slider said. Something rang a bell in Slider’s mind.
    ‘Not the real rough stuff, I don’t mean. The semi-respectable stuff you can get in the back rooms o’ video shops.’
    ‘How do you know this?’ Slider asked. He didn’t look like the sort of man who watched blue movies.
    As if he’d heard the thought, Barnes said, ‘I don’t go in for that sort of thing meself. Watched a bit of one once, years ago, and it was just embarrassing. Didn’t know where to look. But Ransom House has bin there, ooh, must be twenty years, and I’ve took plenty o’ fares there in my time, so I know what they do.’
    Slider nodded. ‘So you thought he was going there to
act
in a porn film?’
    ‘Well, he looked about right for it – tall, nice looking. He seemed a bit nervous, too, kind of sitting forward, tense. So I says, to jolly him along, like, “This your first time?” And