Cocaine Nights

Resting from their embraces, the women looked up with mock surprise as a man's torso and hips entered the frame. He stood by the bed, penis erect, thighs and chest muscles like oiled meat, the passive bull-shouldered stud of countless porno-films. For a moment the camera touched the lower half of his face, and I almost recognized the heavy neck and chubby chin.

The women sat forwards, displaying their breasts to him. Her face still veiled, the bride held his penis in her hands and began to suck its head in the distracted way of an eight-year- old with an over-large candy bar. When she lay back and parted her thighs I pressed the fast-forward, waiting as the manic, jerky spasms rushed to their climax, and returned to play-speed when the man withdrew and ejaculated, as custom demanded, across her breasts.

Sweat bathed the bride's shoulder and abdomen. She pulled back the veil and used a tissue to wipe away the semen. Again I saw an echo of the Rank Charm School in her refined features and perky gaze. She sat up and smiled at the bridesmaids, using the veil to dry her cheeks. Needle punctures marked her arms, but she seemed in ruddy health, laughing when the bridesmaids slipped her arms into the wedding dress.

The screen moved to the left, the camera jarred by the operator's confused hands. The lens steadied itself, and caught the bodies of two naked men who had broken into the bedroom from the balcony and hurled themselves across the floor. The bridesmaids seized their waists and pulled them on to the bed. The bride alone seemed startled, trying to hide her naked body behind the wedding dress. She wrestled helplessly with a thickset man with a hairy Arab back who seized her shoulders and threw her on to her face.

I watched the rape run its course, trying to avoid the desperate eyes crushed into the satin bedspread. The bride was no longer acting or colluding with the camera. The lesbian porno-film had been a set-up, designed to lure her to this anonymous apartment, the mise-en-scene for a real rape for which the bridesmaids, but not the heroine, had been prepared.

In turn the men assaulted the dishevelled bride, moving through a pre-arranged repertoire of sexual acts. Their faces never appeared on screen, but the dark-ski

The film ended in a mélée of copulating bodies. In a bizarre attempt at an artistic finale, the camera moved around the bed, briefly pausing beside the mirrored door. The photographer, I realized, was a woman. She wore a black bikini, and a battery pack hung on a leather strap from her shoulder. A faint surgical scar ran from the small of her back and around her waist to her right hip.

The film came to its final moments. The men withdrew from the room, a blur of greasy thighs and sweating buttocks. The bridesmaids waved at the camera, and the large-breasted blonde lay back and sat the teddy bear astride her midriff, laughing as she jiggled the stuffed toy.

But I was looking at the bride. Set in her bruised features was a face still full of spirit. She wiped her eyes with a pillow, and rubbed the torn skin of her arms and knees. Mascara ran in black tears on to her cheeks, and the smudged lipstick slewed her mouth to one side. Yet she managed to smile at the camera, the plucky starlet facing the massed lenses of Fleet Street, or a brave child swallowing an unpleasant medicine for her own good. Sitting with the crushed wedding dress in her hands, she turned from the camera and gri

11 The Lady by the Pool

Her face shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, Elizabeth Shand dozed at the lunch table beside the swimming pool, her unblemished white skin set off by an ivory swimsuit. Like a jewelled cobra half-asleep on an altar, she watched me walk across the lawn, and began to rub sun-oil into the backs of the two young men stretched out behind her. As she kneaded the oil into their heavily-muscled shoulders, ignoring the pained murmurs, she might have been grooming a pair of sleek racing hounds.

'Mrs Shand will see you now.' So

'I'm surprised they aren't wearing dog-collars.' I sca

'Mrs Shand decided I should work here.' When a bird began to flutter in the rose pergola he raised his mobile phone to his lips. 'More security after the Hollinger fire 'Good idea.' I looked back at the handsome villa with its magnificent skyline views over Estrella de Mar and the Shand empire. 'We wouldn't want this place to burn down.'

'Mr Prentice, do join us…' Elizabeth Shand called to me across the pool. She wiped her hands on a towel and tapped the young Germans on the buttocks, dismissing them from her presence. They passed me as I circled the pool, but avoided my eyes, immersed in their own bodies and the play of muscle and oil. They sprinted across the lawn and stepped through a garden door into the courtyard of a two-storey a

'Mr Prentice – Charles, come and sit next to me. We met at that dreadful funeral. In a way I feel I've known you as long as I've known Frank. I'm delighted to see you, though sadly I've nothing very useful to add to what you've already learned.' She crooked a finger at Gardner. 'So

She gazed at me guilelessly when I sat beside her, ru

'Mrs Shand, it's kind of you to see me. I'm worried that Frank's friends in Estrella de Mar have more or less closed the door on him. For three weeks now I've been looking for something that might help him. To be honest, I've got absolutely nowhere.'

'Perhaps there isn't anywhere to go?' Mrs Shand bared her over-large teeth in what passed for a concerned smile. 'Estrella de Mar may be a heavenly little place, but it's a very small heaven. There aren't that many hidden corners, more's the pity.'

'Of course. I assume you don't believe Frank set fire to the Hollinger house?'

'I don't know what to believe. It's all so horrific. No, he can't have done. Frank was much too gentle, too sceptical about everything. Whoever set fire to the house was a fanatic I waited as Gardner set out the drinks and then resumed his patrol of the garden. On a balcony of the a

'Mrs Shand, if Frank didn't kill the Hollingers, who did? Can you think of someone with a strong enough grudge against them?'

'No one. I can't honestly think of anyone who'd want to harm them.'

'They weren't popular, though. People I've talked to complain that they were a little stand-offish.'

'That's absurd.' Mrs Shand grimaced at the silliness of this. 'He was a film producer, for heaven's sake. She was an actress. They loved Ca