Free The One a Month Man by Michael Litchfield Page B

just an Honest Joe matchmaker, trying to broker a little happiness for the lonely.’
    ‘Obviously sainthood awaits,’ I said, humouring him. ‘What the couples get up to after they’re brought together is none of the middleman’s business. How many times have I heard that?’ My rhetorical question went unanswered.
    ‘Cullis also owns a bar in a sleazy part of town. TheShipwreck. Should be The Flotsam. Caters for tarts, their pimps, drug-pushers, petty thieves and fences. We’re always raiding the dump. Make plenty of arrests, but we’ve never netted Frankie or his beloved, Simone.
Simone
! She’s about as French and ugly as the Old Kent Road.’
    Mullet’s powers of description had improved since he’d become gentrified.
    ‘What’s his address, apart from the sewer?’
    ‘Which one do you want? Where he occasionally lives with his wife, such as on Christmas Day? Where he shacks up with his mistresses – note the plural? Or his pond-life bar where he serves watered-down drinks, smuggled wines and spirits, and sells fags that dropped off the back of lorries?’
    ‘Gimme all three,’ I said, greedily.
    ‘Best of luck,’ he said, after looking up the information for me. ‘If you want a guided tour, just give me a bell when you land in town.’
    I could tell that he wanted us to get together to reminisce some more, like an old soldiers’ reunion, to recall bygone busts in the Smoke, and to regale one another with anecdotes about ex-colleagues known to us both. Met detectives always gassed about quitting the Smoke for pastures new and environmentally friendly, but those who did cut and run never really ever severed the umbilical cord. The pull of the womb was constant, like gravity, and stayed with them until grabbed by the grave.
    ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, with no intention of taking up his offer.
    ‘Look forward to it,’ he said, equally aware that we wouldn’t be speaking again until one of us wanted a professional favour from the other. He had ditched the Met and London, so he was no longer one of the elite. That’s the way it worked. There was as much snobbery among cops as in the aristocracy, exemplified by the fact that we Met operators considered ourselves the nation’s aristocrats.
    Before setting out for Bournemouth, I phoned Sarah to see if she had made progress.
    ‘God, this is mind-numbing!’ she groaned.
    ‘Still trawling?’
    ‘Still among the departed, like a warped tombstone tourist. Nothing so far. Just dead ends. Ha! Ha!’
    ‘Nice to see your sense of humour’s intact.’
    ‘That wasn’t humour, Mike; that was despair. How’s your day going?’
    I updated her, as succinctly as possible.
    ‘What next?’ she said, anticipating my response.
    ‘I go to the seaside.’
    ‘Makes sense,’ she said. ‘No point returning here first, adding unnecessary mileage. Be careful – sounds as if you’ll be swimming with the sharks.’
     
    I arrived in Bournemouth just before four o’clock in the afternoon . I had some knowledge of this sprawling coastal conurbation, but not detailed, so on the periphery I pulled into a filling station and bought a street-map in the shop. Of the three addresses I’d been given for Cullis, his home was the nearest, so it was logical to try my luck there first.
    After a few wrong turns and circling a roundabout three times, I located Frankie Cullis’s shack, which was something rather grander than a beach-hut. Its façade was colonial-styled, with a couple of mock Roman columns supporting a portico at the double-door entrance. A black Bentley and a two-door silver Merc were parked on a horseshoe-shaped, pebbled drive at the front of the house, which had been built on rising ground, some fifty yards from the pine-lined avenue. There was a rockery-garden sloping in tiers to a white, pebble-dashed wall of medium height. Although all the houses in this road were of a similar size – in other words gargantuan – the shapes and styles were