Shooting the Sleaze

By Alan Robinson

Shooting the Sleaze is a comic thriller that tingles the spine while tickling the funny-bone. It sets official state agencies at loggerheads with private sector counter-intelligence, each employing its own little band of killers. These frequently fall over each others feet. Meanwhile, someone is killing off reporters of the nations leading tabloid. Odd movements like The Poor Peoples Army and the Last of the Republicans are planning to blow away half of Londons famous landmarks. In addition, the countrys most savage uncaught serial killer, Jack the Stripper, is coming out of retirement with a bayonet and a license to kill. These join a glamorous columnist, a corrupt detective, a porn-loving Prime Minister, a former CIA hitman and many of the great and the good in a mad dance of comic violence that ends in a great bang and quite a bit of whimpering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456899240

Book preview

Prologue

The girl I truly love to bits

Is Pamela Anderson, sweet cat

Like viking helmets are her tits

Her muff like Putin’s hat.

The Prime Minister liked to talk dirty to himself in the bath.

Hello there, Honorable Member, he crooned.

He lay, shoulder blades on warm porcelain, inhaling bath salts, and looking at the one part of himself whose tip coyly pierced the suds like the periscope of a pink submarine. If the sub’s captain had been peering back through the thing, he would have seen the great man’s pink face smiling opulently upon him. It really was a fine erection and he wished he had a plastic duck to bump against it. Or a blow-up Pamela Anderson. As fond as he was of dear old Hetty, with her woolly cardigans and collection of cellulite, she did not quite do it for him anymore. So, occasionally he did it for himself, the better to concentrate on the real business of life: his place in history and on the television news, not to mention the newspapers.

Neither the submarine captain nor the Prime Minister could guess that the sky beyond the steamy Downing Street bathroom was due to open and rain down divine excrement, bloody murder, scandal and Byzantine cover-ups upon them. The submarine captain (whose periscope had retracted) didn’t really exist, the Prime Minister, who had lost the soap, would soon be wishing he had had never been born.

*     *     *

The man known to millions—yet known to no one—as Jack the Stripper, one of the most savage serial killers ever to adorn the front page, who only drew the line at eating his victims because he saw himself as a missionary rather than a cannibal, adjusted his regimental tie and combed his hair. Land of Hope and Glory was making his CD player rattle with patriotic passion. He put on a blue blazer to go with the smart grey knife-edged pants, nodded to the coloured picture of the Queen on his wall, switched off the music and went out to see his girl.

When, he wondered, would the high command call him back to action? When would the word come? He longed to do his duty, rip out the tripes of the enemy, cut the bastards to ribbons, obliterate them, get his rocks off doing his own unique thing. He strode through the summer night, loving his country and looking forward to a good screw.

He longed for the call, but did not entirely trust the voice that would call. Men who do what I do are not deemed normal, he cautioned himself. We are seen as mad, evil and not indispensable when push comes to shove. No one really understands us. Be alert, Neville!

*     *     *

The presses at the Globe newspaper, were humming, or would have been if they had been at the Globe, which they were not, so they must have been humming elsewhere. The newsroom at this hour was not an exiting place to be. Things were winding down, the paper had been put to bed, hacks were retiring to the local river-front boozer, where they would booze and winge the night away, try to bed hackettes, or brag about scoops they had or would get and hackettes they had bedded or would bed. Some times they would look out of the pub windows and up at the Globe tower and feel they were part of something powerful and glamorous.

Like the prime minister, some were worried about their place in the spotlight, but most had given up on the star system and were content to be bit players, drawing a decent salary, owning their own homes, driving their own cars, and still able to piss some of it away against a wall when the pubs closed. It was a good life, Journalism, in the late 1990s. There were occasional freebees, you could be rude and arrogant to ordinary people, sometimes help ruin someone you’d had to cringe to the week before, fake your expenses, get free drinks from wannabes, make up stories about being a war correspondent, and screw at least some of the women who said: a journalist! You must have an interesting life!

Unless you were a real foreign correspondent you did not stand much chance of getting shot dead.

The two journalists weaved or rather spun through the same summer night, one third of the braincells in each of their heads dead or sleeping. Their arms about each other’s shoulders they sang noisily about a girl named Jilly who was very silly but liked a bit of willie, and other such manly folklore, finally lurching up to the front door at which they had been aiming, and missing, for three or four minutes. There followed some broad comedy with the key and the keyhole, before they got the door open and fell inside.

Less ‘av another drink, I’ll gerrit, said the host as they picked themselves up in the corridor. Take a seat and don’t pinch the bloody silver.

His companion edged unsteadily into the dark living room. Where’s the light, he mumbled, his fingers scrabbling along the wall. When the light went on, he said oops and looked dimly at the man who has just stepped from behind the window drapes wearing what looked like a bag with eyeholes over his head. Who’s yer friend? he called. The man whipped out a pistol fitted with a longish silencer. Shut the fuck up, he said. It was slowly dawning on the hack that all was not well.

What friend? called the other, waltzing woozily into the room holding a bottle of whisky and two glasses.

Me, said the bag with eyeholes. Come in both of you, or I’ll blow your bowels all over the carpet.

Shit! a burglar, the hack with the bottle said and threw it. It missed the target by a good distance, smashing against the wall.

Too bad, said the mask, you missed your last drink. The first shot hit the bottle thrower in the chest, the second bullet slammed into the head of his fellow hack. They sounded like the noise of a distant moped, phut-phut. The masked man looked down at them.

When you said ‘shit a burglar,’ was that a request or an exclamation? he asked. Sorry I didn’t ask.

He crouched, and carefully began firing into their faces.

*     *     *

It was a torrid night at the Daft Leprechaun in Kilburn, where drinkers gulped back gallons of Brackish Brown and dared each other to step over imaginary lines and fight like a man. In the relatively quiet back garden of the pub, the local cell of the Last of the Republicans was also celebrating its latest coup, a phony bomb warning to British Rail. But it wasn’t all Guinness and goodwill.

There is a story goin’ the rounds that the British Intelligence Service is killin’ off our fellas and not ownin’ up to it, Finian O’Hool told his companions. Now I meself don’t believe this tale, because the buggers is not too bright and besides it’s not their style. If they get one of us they Bragg like Melvin, right? However, I’m keepin’ an open mind and me pistol clean and oiled.

The others looked at him with the respect due to the local honcho. Where did this tale come from then? one asked him.

That’s the funny bit. I got a message from someone close to the man himself.

The man himself?

The man himself.

Er, which man himself?

Finian O’Hool’s face hardened, which was quite something because it already looked like textured brick. His friends stirred nervously.

You’ll be wanting me to name names then, he snarled.

Oh no Finian, no names, no sir, anythin’ but names.

*     *     *

Some way off in Bayswater, the comrades of the Poor Peoples Army, the country’s only revolutionary guerrilla group, were having a party. Two of the comrades were dancing glued to each other, while the other half dozen were playing a game called ‘what would you like to blow up.’

How about Buckingham Palace?

No, what about Big Ben?

Hey, why not Parliament? Like, you-know, Guy fucking Fawks.

I say we do the American Embassy.

The mole placed in their midst by MI5 laughed along and did not miss a word. What if they got serious? I mean, you never know.

Well, we’re going to hit Parliament with a bazooka rocket anyway, so we ought to bomb something else really.

The sudden hush made it clear that not everyone knew about the bazooka thing.

When?

When what?

When are we going to rocket Parliament?

You don’t need to know that, comrade.

"Er, no, I suppose I don’t, if I’m not trusted, that is . . .

Its not a matter of trust, its a matter of need to know. What you don’t know can’t be extracted from you if the pigs put electrodes on your testicles.

*     *     *

A summer night in London can be a wonderful thing, if like Jack the Stripper you are strolling with your lover, lost in tender thoughts of the joys to come and the blood to be spilt. Even the ordinary Londoner with his ordinary girl or boyfriend as the case may be knows the magic of a walk by the river on a warm night, with the lights on the water, or through the West End, with its little pools of urine and vomit reflecting the bright lights.

This was a typical London evening. Kings Cross Station was shut down by a bomb warning, malfunctioning signals had closed the Central Line, the Bakerloo Line was closed for urgent repairs, thousands of people were trudging home to the suburbs, with the pickpockets flitting among them like mosquitoes. Birds sang insanely in bare trees starved of water by a dry winter, an arid spring and the neglect of the water utilities. Traffic clogged every road in hooting-tooting desperation. People walked quickly, looking neither left nor right, chivied by beggars and drunks, and the homeless lay in shop doorways, calling out exuberantly for alms. The air was thick with car exhaust.

Around distant tower blocks, furtive crack markets were starting to trade and the tenants, too scared to go out, were watching the Home Secretary smarm all over the TV screen with his message that crime figures were falling. So were citizens—some raped, some mugged, some assaulted just for the hell of it, some killed, some expiring on trolleys in hospital corridors, some just starving slowly to death.

The police walked their beats in silly hats and semi comas, or dozed in patrol cars, awaking sometimes to direct a tourist, harass a black, get a hamburger and chips, always contriving to be somewhere else when anyone actually broke a law.

Suddenly, like magic, a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. Then it fell off its perch and died of lead poisoning.

Chapter 1

Two Globe journalists died, a third disappeared and another got a threatening letter before someone upstairs concluded that one of the newspaper’s five million readers might be unhappy about something. At first the management found it hard to understand how anyone could dislike a publication with such fine upstanding boobs on every other page. Five million Britons couldn’t be wrong even if some of them drool over the pictures.

The police, however, thought from the outset that the killings had less to do with the Globe’s globes than with its readiness to do injury to great and small alike in pursuit of the reader’s right to know—in suitably short sentences—the truths, half truths and downright lies it fitted neatly between mammary and gluteal. One murder within its ranks might be seen as unfortunate, two as a tragic coincidence, but the possibility of three or four indicated that someone somewhere was taking the concept of involuntary redundancy to Sicilian lengths.

There must be a lot of people out there who wish you had never been born, so to speak, mused Detective Inspector John Manchester. More probably. And they range from a handful of MPs whom you have caught with their trousers down, if I can put it that way, to a mixed range of financiers and charity organisers with their hand in the till, randy vicars, entertainers of varied sexual preferences, alleged satanic abusers, and one or two members of the royal family. We might have to investigate a cast of thousands. Remember, reputations have been ruined, some as a result of rather imaginative journalism, if you’ll permit the observation.

The Globe’s editor, Garth Dockett, who had been Henry Smitten until he gussied himself up 15 years previously and rose to fame and wealth via shame and stealth, plus the firm conviction that the man in the street is a dirty-minded little bugger, stabbed his cigar into a Globe ashtray and disagreed in cancerous cockney.

Bollocks, Detective Inspector, this is the most popular paper in Britain, devoured daily by millions, and the unhappy few wouldn’t have the nerve, especially those still in the public eye. We are feared because we print the truth, I don’t deny it, and some people hate us, I admit it, but if anyone thinks we are intimidated because someone is knocking off the staff, they can think again. This paper . . . He stopped talking when he saw his proprietor’s hand raised to stem the commercial.

Save it for an editorial, Bruce Booney snapped. Let’s look at the facts. Both victims worked for this newspaper. They were shot by what could have been a burglar, who was so scared by what he had done that he scarpered without taking anything. A third man gets hysterical, walks out and drops out of sight. It does not amount to a grudge campaign against the Globe."

Manchester surveyed Booney with interest. Here was power, money and influence with freezing grey eyes, a shiny bald head and an expensive suntan. His brown silk suit must have cost the equivalent of Manchester’s last vacation in Florida. The cream shirt and brown silk tie were custom made to match the tan. Booney, a New Zealander whose family got there via Australia, was nudging 45, but he looked as if he would out-Murdoch Murdoch, building a media empire with interests in New Zealand, Australia, Britain the United States and the Far East.

The Globe was the jewel in his bald crown and it had now left both the Sun and the Mirror behind as a popular read. Its success was based on old formula: the juicier bits of the female form, the contents of other people’s dustbins, and a ready chequebook. Booney and Dockett had together taken journalism to depths unplumbed by anyone before them.

In turn, Booney was looking at Manchester. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered man in the sort of dark blue overcoat favoured by London’s winter commuters. His light brown hair, fresh complexion and military bearing . . . Christ, thought Booney, he looks just like Paddy Ashdown! You’re a dead ringer for Paddy Ashdown, he snorted. Did ya know that?

Manchester, a Tory voter, was not pleased and took his revenge by pointing out that there might indeed be other good reasons to suppose that someone was putting the boot, or rather the gun, to the Globe. The threatening letter to your columnist, Miss Reynolds, reads as follows: You dirty slag, I’m going to blow your tits off with the same gun that did for your mates.

He paused for effect. "The envelope is postmarked June 2, posted in London the day after the double murder and could well have been written on the night it occurred. Of course, the writer could have heard the news on breakfast TV, dashed off his note, dashed to the post office and slapped on a first-class stamp. It could be sick joke. It could also be a statement of intention by someone who hates the newspaper enough to want to slaughter everyone from copy boys to proprietor. There are enough people out there with motives to hate the Globe. I don’t think it would be wise to dismiss the possibility.

We are pretty sure the killer was waiting in the house and he certainly had not been searching for valuables. In fact nothing was touched. Burglars usually work very quickly, they don’t wait around for people to come home. And why were both men shot in the mouth. Symbolic, don’t you think? Finally, your missing reporter might have gone missing out of fear, we have no way of knowing, but why should he think that he was in any more danger than anyone else at the Globe? His flight is strange, but his complete disappearance is rather alarming, isn’t it?

Dockett ran his fingers through his dyed blond hair, stroked both chins and rasped: I don’t buy it, I just don’t bloody buy it. But of course we are paying attention. We want police protection for Suzy Boobs. He saw Manchester’s confusion. Sue Reynolds is known as Suzy Boobs in the trade because she has such great tits. If she had no talent she would probably have got into the paper on the strength of her chest measurements. Come to think of it maybe she did. But she knows how to write the slop women want to read and she is worth her considerable salary for that alone.

Booney pushed his features into a concerned look. Of course, Garth is right. We want Sue Reynolds protected. Although I still can’t see a disgruntled reader cutting a deadly swathe through the ranks of tabloid journalism, we can’t take any chances. She’s waiting to see you now in her office on the 15th floor. You’ll find she’s is not very disturbed about this. Journalists sometimes get threats you know and most of them are sick jokes. Which they appreciate, thought Manchester, because they share much the same sickness.

Manchester shook their hands are went out, remembering the Globe’s headline over a story alleging that police officers in Wigan were running a call girl service. Blue Lamp Goes Red On Road To Wigan Pier turned out to be untrue and blew the cover of an officer trying to infiltrate a drug and vice ring.

Booney sank back in his chair. Garth, I don’t buy the idea that some reader we offended in a story is thinning the ranks, but I’m closer to buying the basic revenge theory. Maybe Inspector Hound is not telling us all he knows. My feeling is we should look at people we have fired, made redundant, or in some way screwed on the job. Perhaps someone we released in a way that made him unemployable elsewhere. It happens. Ten years ago in Sidney an ex-hack tried to bring a gun into the building. Security knew he’d been fired and stopped him at the door. He waved his pistol and announced he was going to do me in. He wound up in a mental hospital. We just might have a British version doing the rounds with more success

But the letter to Suzy, it wasn’t exactly literate, even in terms of our pared down house style, Dockett protested. And why didn’t you mention that idea to the copper?

I have read worse in my own newspapers, once or twice under your by-line, Booney grinned. "As for the police, I have little faith in British coppers. They don’t make a habit of