Looking For Walter Newhouse Chapter One

I woke up to darkness. For some reason, John Bonham was using my head as his drum kit, and a small shoal of tiny fish were stirring up the contents of my stomach.

I was all curled up and decided to stretch out. I didn’t get very far before my feet hit an obstruction. My hands too.

Right about then I noticed my bed seemed to be moving, and hot on the heels of that thought came the realisation that I wasn’t in bed at all.

I was in the boot of a car. The stink of oil and rubber confirmed that thought.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been dumped in a car boot. In fact, I was pretty sure I had been in this exact same one only a day or two before.

I groaned and massaged my temples as the memories filtered their way past Bonham’s drumbeat.

There was a reason this shit had started happening to me, and I needed to work out what that reason was.

I suppose it all started when I met Cora, that night at The Cauliflower Ear. I’d been paid to take a dive in a fight with Barny Topper. The lad was new in the ring and his manager owed someone a favour, or maybe it was money, I don’t know. At the end of the day, it all comes down to money, doesn’t it?

This sorry story I’m about to tell you surely does.

Anyway, I took the dive early on, just like I’d been told. I could do that better than anyone because I had what’s known in boxing as a ‘glass jaw’. One punch on the chin and I was out like a light. So I spent the first few rounds dodging Barny’s lefts and rights and when the time came, I hesitated just long enough for the boy to connect.

And that’s it, I was out.

I wasn’t out for long, just a second or two. The ref was still counting, the crowd shouting, and all I had to do was lie there looking stunned until the ref got to ten and Barny was pronounced the winner.

I got paid, and I decided to stick around a while, hang out at the bar round the front of the pub and spend some of my wages.

That’s where I met Cora Newhouse and her husband Walter.

I hadn’t been long in town so I hadn’t got to know many people yet, just the lads I was with in the Slaughterhouse Mob and some of the other boxers on the circuit. I’d heard about Cora Newhouse, but this was the first time I met her. Seemed she had a reputation for playing away from home.

Walter was a mean little man who appeared to be tough enough to get into a scrap, but maybe not get out of it. I say he was small, but that’s just how he appeared. He was actually a similar height and build to me. He had a laser-beam stare that told you in no uncertain terms you shouldn’t mess with him. Like a lot of small-minded, petty little men, he acted like he was trying to be bigger and tougher than he was.

Cora, she was something else. She looked like she’d been poured into her dress and maybe she was about to overflow any second, you know what I’m saying? Had that look about her that made a man think things he shouldn’t be thinking when out in public, and maybe some things he shouldn’t be thinking at all.

I got talking to Walter Newhouse at the bar, and he invited me to come and sit with him and Cora at their table. Cora, she was sitting in the corner, seemed to me she held her head in a funny little way, like she had a stiff neck or something. Later that evening, I spotted the bruise on her right cheek. She’d had a good go at covering it up with makeup and keeping her head at that odd little angle to keep it out of my line of sight. I decided not to ask how she got that bruise. She would just tell me she walked into a door or something, but I already knew the real reason.

Walter tried hard to be the life and soul of our little party, clapping me on the back every time he roared with laughter at one of his own stories, and insisting on paying for every round of drinks. And those drinks came thick and fast.

Eventually, just as I was thinking I couldn’t take another slap to the shoulders or back and maybe I should make my excuses and leave, Walter asked me if I wouldn’t mind looking after Cora while he went out back to put down some money on the boxing. I thought that was pretty strange, to be honest. If I’d been married to Cora, I wouldn’t have let her out of my sight for a second.

And that was how it started. Before you could count to ten and declare a knockout, Cora and me were in the sack together and I’d switched from boxing to wrestling.

Over the next couple of months, we started spending more time together, even going out and catching a few matches. Walter didn’t seem to care much what we got up to. Cora said he was tied up with business and happy to have her out of his hair. Every now and then she would turn up for one of our dates with another of those bruises marring her ever so beautiful face. I tried asking her about it once or twice, but she always fobbed me off with the walking into a door story. I told her she had to be the clumsiest girl I’d ever met and left it at that. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t really any of my business.

It was the night we went to see Bunny Johnson knock out Paul Brown in the sixth round that things started getting a little weird. We were back in The Cauliflower Ear, having a couple too many drinks, when the landlord comes over and tells me there’s a call for me. I strolled over to the bar all casual like, feeling on top of the world for once. I was out with the hottest woman in town, I’d won some cash betting on Bunny, I was feeling good.

I picked the telephone off the counter. ‘Yeah?’

‘Pearce? It’s Derek.’

‘Terry already told me that. What do you want?’

‘It’s Johnny, he’s here, we’re going to have that game of poker.’

‘Ah, shit, Derek. I’m out, you know? Do you really need me there?’

Derek lowered his voice. ‘Fuck yeah. This is Johnny fucking Thunderbolt, you think me and Frank are going to take him on, just the two of us? Get your arse over here sharpish.’

‘All right, all right, keep your hair on. I’m on my way.’

Johnny Thunderbolt had been a wrestler once, a good one too, until the drugs got hold of him. Now he worked for the Slaughterhouse Mob, like me, Derek and Frank. The only problem was, we’d found out Johnny was skimming some of the protection money he was collecting and keeping it for himself to feed his narcotics habit.

Stupid bastard.

‘Do you have to go?’ Cora said and gave me that look that got me thinking those unmentionable things I talked about earlier.

‘I won’t be long, got some business I need to see to,’ I said.

Cora pouted. ‘I never get to see you anymore.’

‘We’re out all the time!’ I said. ‘If we spent any more time together, we’d be a married couple.’

And then she gave me this look. Not the one that gets me thinking unmentionable things, but a different one. One that got me thinking other things, like murder.

When a thought like that pops into your head, it’s hard to shake it. You can push it away, try and think about other stuff, you can use logic on it and argue it into submission. But a thought like that, it never really goes away. It just lurks in the corners of your mind, waiting to jump on you when your defences are down.

By the time I got to Derek’s place, I’d been dancing around that thought enough that I was growing weary, and I was about ready to drop to the canvas and lie there while the ref counted to ten.

A flickering blue glow from the living room window told me that Derek’s mother was watching the television. Derek answered the door before I’d finished knocking on it.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ he hissed. ‘Johnny’s getting antsy, he knows something’s off.’

‘I had to wait an age for the bus,’ I said.

Derek shut the door behind me. ‘Bloody hell, Ray, when are you going to get yourself a car? My brother can pick you up a banger on the sly.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, following Derek through the tiny hallway.

We had to go out the back and then through a door into the garage. Derek’s dad had been a big shot in the Slaughterhouse Mob until his ticker packed up on him one day in the middle of a robbery and he dropped down dead. Mortimer Craggs, he’s the head of the Slaughterhouse Mob, he decided he’d take care of Derek’s mum, he’d been so fond of the old man, and he paid for her to have a garage built on the side of the house. No one knew why, because Derek’s mother couldn’t drive, and she didn’t own a car.

Still, it was a nice thought, I suppose.

Anyway, me and Derek, we stepped inside the garage and it’s lit with one greasy bulb hanging from the ceiling, and there’s a table in the middle with a single pack of cards sitting on it. It was a pathetic attempt at pretending we were going to play poker, but one look at Johnny told me he was out of his head, anyway.

‘Ray!’ he said.

I was surprised he even recognised me.

Frank was standing behind Johnny, looking ready to burst a blood vessel. He was a big bastard, rolls of fat on his rolls of fat. You could hardly see his eyes, they were buried so deep in his puffy face.

I nodded at Johnny. ‘How are you doing, Champ?’

The air was thick with tension. I just wanted to get this over with.

Johnny lifted his hands and bunched them into fists, miming taking a couple of jabs at me as though he was the boxer and I was the wrestler.

I looked at Derek.

Derek nodded.

We piled on to Johnny and managed to get him on the concrete floor more by luck than judgement. Once he was down, we got Frank to sit on him.

I thought he might crack a few of Johnny’s ribs, but that turned out to be the least of Johnny’s problems.

‘Where’s the fucking money, Johnny?’ Derek yelled into Johnny’s face.

That seemed a pretty pointless question to me. All that money he’d been skimming off the top of the Mob’s takings had obviously been shoved up his nose.

Besides, Johnny couldn’t speak due to the fact that Frank was sitting on his chest.

I leaned against a wall and lit up a cigarette. ‘What now, Derek? You just going to yell at him all night?’

Derek rounded on me. I wasn’t too sure I liked the look in his eyes.

Turned out I was right not to.

‘This piece of shit needs to pay back what he stole!’ Derek said. ‘Then we tell Mort and he can deal with him how he wants.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t see how he can pay any of it back, seen as how he’s spent it all on shit and snorted it up his hooter.’

‘That’s his fucking problem,’ Derek said, dragging a tin washing bucket out of a corner.

Water splashed over the sides as he dragged it across the floor, leaving a trail of dark stains on the bare concrete.

‘Bring that chair over,’ he said.

I picked up the wooden kitchen chair Derek had indicated and carried it over to him.

‘What’s this all about?’ I said.

Derek ignored me.

‘Pick him up and sit him in this chair,’ he said to Frank.

The big man did as he was told. Frank never said much, just carried out his orders.

He dropped Johnny, who seemed to be having trouble breathing, on the chair and Derek wrapped coils of rope around him until he was satisfied Johnny couldn’t get free.

‘Take his shoes and socks off,’ Derek said to Frank.

Frank looked at Derek, those deep-set, piggy eyes of his maybe showing some doubt for once.

‘Fucking take his shoes off, will you?’ Derek said.

Frank did as he was told.

Once Johnny’s feet were bare, Derek told Frank to put them in the tub of water.

I had a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach I knew what was happening next.

‘All right, Derek,’ I said. ‘You really think this is a good idea?’

‘Shut the fuck up, Ray,’ Derek said.

He had picked up a long length of electrical cable, all coiled up like a sleeping snake. He shoved the plug into a socket in the wall. Let the coil of thick, dirty white cabling drop onto the concrete floor. He was still holding on to the other end, and that’s when I saw the bare wires.

‘Bloody hell, Derek,’ I said. ‘That’s a live wire.’

Derek smirked. ‘No shit, Sherlock. You’re on form tonight.’

I snapped my mouth shut. I mentioned that look in Derek’s eyes, right? He’d gone full on Looney Tunes now, and I had a feeling if I complained too much, he would turn that live electrical cable on me. Even Frank looked a little pale around the gills.

‘Pull his trousers down,’ Derek said to Frank.

Frank turned a pale shader.