The Peter Ord Yarns E-Book

Paul D. Brazill

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Both books in Paul D. Brazill's 'The Peter Ord Yarns', now available in one volume!
Gumshoe Blues: After a divorce, Peter Ord decides to turn his life around and becomes a private detective. But with his constant drinking and questionable decision-making skills, his new career quickly takes a turn for the worse. Trying to solve challenging cases and keep up with his boozy sidekick Bryn Laden, Peter soon finds himself on the wrong side of a local crime lord's radar.
Seatown Blues: Peter Ord returns to his hometown, hoping to start fresh, but it doesn't take long for him to fall back into his old habits. Hanging out with a group of lowlifes and getting involved in criminal activities, Peter navigates the seedy underbelly of his hometown. Along the way, he encounters a cast of offbeat characters, each with their own quirks and secrets.

Leseprobe

THE PETER ORD YARNS

THE COMPLETE SERIES

PAUL D. BRAZILL

CONTENTS

Gumshoe Blues

Introduction

Gumshoe Blues

Mr Kiss and Tell

Who Killed Skippy?

The Lady & The Gimp

Seatown Blues

Dead is a Four-Letter Word

Gun Street Blues

The Shape of a Pear

Punk Fiction

Lowlife, High-Hopes

Stroll On

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2023 Paul D. Brazill

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

GUMSHOE BLUES

THE PETER ORD YARNS BOOK 1

Dedicated to the real-life Peter Ord.

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

- Charlie Chaplin.

INTRODUCTION

When I eventually got my act together and started writing fiction, one of the things that I was drawn to was the interconnecting worlds of artists as diverse as Damon Runyon, Quentin Tarantino, and Tom Waits. Which is why I created Seatown, an over-ripe version of Hartlepool, my hometown. Indeed, Hartlepool itself simply oozed odd anecdotes and quirky characters. I’ve known the real-life Peter Ord for almost half a century – gulp - and have even been in a couple of bands with him. He is simply the wittiest person that I’ve ever met, and I thought it would be quite entertaining to put him through the wringer in a few shaggy dog stories. And that is what I have done- more than somewhat. I’ve rewritten and reimagined the yarns so many times over the years that I’ve pretty much lost track of where and when they first appeared. But here they are, collected together, the hapless meanderings of Peter Ord. As always, I hope they entertain.

Cheers!

© Paul D. Brazill 2023.

GUMSHOE BLUES

In the beginning was the sound. The light came later. The sound was a horrifying wail that skewered its way deep into my unconscious brain, until I awoke swiftly, sharply - drowning in sweat, my heart smashing through my ribcage; my head about to burst. Some twat, somewhere, was playing a U2 song, over and over again, and all was far from bloody quiet on New Year’s Day.

I forced my eyes open and squinted until I saw the familiar sight of a fraying Seatown United poster peeling from fuzzy, red-flock wallpaper. I was lying on a brown tweed sofa and tangled up in a tartan blanket that had seen better days and nights. I was home.

The air in the room was warm and soupy, and I felt a wave of nausea pass over me. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and counted to ten. The dry heaves kicked in around six. A beat. I peeled my eyes open again. The aquarium bubbled and gurgled, bathing the room in a sickly green light. Sickly and yet soothing. I reminded myself that I really had to put some tropical fish in there one day.

I edged onto my side and awkwardly kicked the blanket to the floor. I was fully clothed. My armpits were soaking. My fake Armani shirt was soggy. A sickly smell permeated my pores and the least said about my trousers the better.

Beside me was a sticky coffee table that was cluttered with the remnants of the previous night’s drinking session. I picked up an open can of Stella Artois and shook it. It was more than half full. A result, then.

I slowly sipped the beer can’s warm, flat contents until I started to get a glow on, like one of the kids in the old Ready-Brek adverts. Booze: central heating for boozers.

Bonzo, The Ledge, and their musically illiterate pals continued to strangle a cat in the flat next door, and I knew that I was going to have to make a move soon, before my head went all Scanners. I finished the lager, edged myself up to a sitting position, and picked up my glasses from the coffee table. One of the lenses was scratched, but at least they weren’t broken. Another result.

The blinking, digital clock-radio that was plonked on top of the television set, said that it was 3.15am. It was always 3.15am, ever since I’d thrown it against the wall during a particularly grating late night phone-in show. In the real dark night of the soul, there was always some twat talking bollocks at three o’clock in the morning.

I grabbed my knock-off Armani jacket from the floor and fumbled in the pockets for my mobile phone. It was just after ten. That gave me enough time to get ready and make myself presentable before my midday meeting with Jack Martin.

My stiff joints ached as I shuffled towards the kitchen, and I noticed that my shoes were stained with something that looked a lot like blood, but was much more likely to be chilli sauce from the doner kebab I vaguely remembered stuffing down my gob the night before.

I put on the kettle and crushed a couple of diazepam and codeine into an Xmas turkey-flavour Pot Noodle: the most important meal of the day, breakfast. My headache was starting to settle into a steady throb, but my throat was like a nun’s knickers. I foolishly opened the buzzing fridge to look for a cold beer, but the smell made my stomach lurch and the waves of nausea quickly built to a tsunami.

I staggered toward the toilet bowl and evacuated my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. After a minute or two of retching, I kneeled on the linoleum, whimpering and panting like a stray dog.

Wiping my mouth on the back of my hand, I went back to the living room and poured myself a large vodka and orange.

Happy New Year.

Out with the old and in with the new.

* * *

Truth be told, my most vivid and powerful memories of childhood were always in black and white. The monochrome Saturday morning Kidz Klub serials that were shown at the local Odeon cinema, and the Hollywood films on afternoon television, when I was throwing a sickie from school. It all seemed so much more vibrant than anything that real life could come up with. And, as you would expect of someone who grew up living more fully in his imagination than in the day-to-day, adulthood proved to be a series of disappointments and non-events.

Nightclubs, for example, were, in my mind, bustling with tough guys in pinstriped suits, wise-cracking cigarettes girls and sultry femme fatales belting out torch songs on a Chiaroscuro-lit stage. So, when I eventually stumbled into the grim reality – claggy carpets, overflowing toilets, beer-bellied men staggering around a dance floor with leathery, bottle blondes: well, my heart sank like the Titanic.

Not that Velvettes was a nightclub, of course. Not as such. It was supposed to be an exclusive ‘Gentleman’s Club’ close to the Marina’s yuppie flats. In other words, it was an up-market strip joint. Since it was New Year’s Day, Velvettes wasn’t open to the public and it looked pretty bloody garish in the cold light of day – all shiny chrome and red and black leather. It was like something out of American Psycho or an eighties porno film-set. The kitsch theme continued with a stained-glass recreation of the famed poster of a female tennis player scratching her arse that many a teenage boy had on their wall in the Seventies. I’d even splashed out on one myself.

“It’s not exactly Sophie’s Choice, is it?” I said, fiddling with a sticky beer mat. “It’s just a hypothetical question.”

“Naw, it’s a wotsit,” said Tuc, Velvettes’ behemoth of a barman, running his fingers through his close-cropped hair. “It’s entrapment.” His East London accent stumbled further forward with every sip of Stella, not that he’d ever really lost it completely. I had no idea what had dragged Tuc from his life down The Smoke to Seatown, this fading one-whore-town on the north east coast of England. And, to be honest, I thought it was for the best not to ask. There were rumours that he was the bastard offspring of the dead billionaire Robert Maxwell and although I didn’t know anything about that, whatever he was, he was certainly one sort of a bastard. A hard bastard.

In fact, Tuc was so hard that one of his regular party pieces was to see how many times he could head-butt a rabbit, using the small crucifix that was tattooed on his forehead as his ‘sight.’ Although, he gave up that little pastime, along with quite a few others that were equally as unsavoury, when he met Wendy.

As part of an ASBO, Tuc had been forced to attend regular ‘addiction awareness sessions’ at the ever-popular Albion Road Substance Abuse Centre – or ARSESUCK, as it was more commonly known – in order to help him ‘deal with his self-medication issues’. The effectiveness of these sessions could be judged by the anthill of happy talc he’d just vacuumed up his nostrils in two seconds flat. But, while he was there he’d first encountered Wendy Hope, the last of the flower children, who quite miraculously transformed him into a tree-hugging vegetarian and introduced him to the dubious delights of all manner of New Age and self-help carryings-on, including acupuncture sessions to help with his various cravings.

Indeed, as we spoke, Tuc was fiddling with the clusters of multi-coloured acupuncture needles that pierced his ears. He had so many now that he was starting to look like the bloke from the Hellraiser films.

I sipped my half-pint of Kronenbourg and looked longingly at the constellation of booze bottles that were glimmering below the bar’s flickering Jack Daniels sign, tempting me like a row of hookers in a high-class bordello.

“And, anyway, I ain’t no shirt-lifter, am I?” Tuc continued, scratching his tattooed neck.

“I’m not saying that you’re gay, Tuc, but, if, for some reason, you did have to, you know, make the two-backed beast with another bloke, what would you do? Is it better to give than to receive?”

I couldn’t resist it, even though messing with Tuc’s mind was like shooting fish in a barrel. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, after all. He’d received his nickname after the time he’d tattooed a dotted line and the word ‘cut’ around his neck, while looking in a mirror.

“I’m saying nothing,” he said, and he struck a match on the NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. Some wag had used a marker pen and changed it to NO SUCKING.

Tuc lit up with a sulky look on his face and turned to the CD player. “Fancy a bit of Barry Shite?” he said.

“Aye, why not,” I said.

Tuc walked over to a massive sound system and picked up a remote control. As the Love Unlimited Orchestra kicked in, I looked at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar and was pleased to see that the effects of the hangover were only internal. All I saw was a common-or-garden, bespectacled, middle-aged man in a well-cut suit. A chief accountant, maybe, or a solicitor, but certainly not a Private Investigator. And that was just how I liked it: really. Easier to be incognito. If I ever got a proper case.

“So, what does the gaffer want?” said Tuc. “I’ve never known him use a private eye before. He’s got plenty of his own geezers, if he needs anything hush-hush.”

I shrugged.

“Haven’t got a clue. I thought you’d know,” I said.

“Mr Martin ain’t said a dicky bird to me,” said Tuc.

There was a grumbling in my stomach, like a tank rolling down Tiananmen Square. It was either the cheese and onion pie I’d bought from a petrol station on the way over to Velvettes, or a sense of trepidation.

A red light bulb that dangled over the bar flashed.

“Well, now’s your time to find out,” said Tuc.

He nodded toward a crimson cushioned door at the end of the bar. “Off you trot.”

I pushed the door open and immediately heard The Archers theme.

Jack Martin, the owner of Velvettes, and a string of other strip joints in the region, sat in a red leather armchair. He was in his late sixties. He had salt-and-pepper hair that erred on the side of Saxa, and his face had that scrubbed-by-a-Brillo-Pad look favoured by football managers like Sir Alex Ferguson. As I walked into the red leather-and-oak office, Jack was scrutinising the Sunday Times crossword through half-moon glasses.

“One across, five letters. Question: To egg on. Answer: Toast,” I said.

“Yes, very sharp,” said Jack, gesturing at me to sit down. “You’ll be cutting yourself, if you’re not too careful.” Despite his Newcastle accent, his nicotine-stained and brandy-brimmed voice still sounded more than a little like the tiger from Disney’s The Jungle Book cartoon.

“What can I do you for, Mr M?” I said.

Jack Martin put down his paper and examined my business card. “Peter Ord, Private Investigator,” he said. “Very… stylish looking card.”

I’d got my niece, Kaylee, an art-student, to work on the card’s design. The loop of the P had been made into a deerstalker hat and O had been drawn to look like the lens of a magnifying glass. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” he said.

“Fire away.”

“Were you a big fan of Mrs Thatcher’s stint as Prime Minister, Peter?” said Jack.

“Not too bothered either way,” I answered. “I’m not exactly what you’d call a particularly political animal.”

“Head in the clouds, head in the sand, eh?” said Jack, with a look of distaste. He plonked a bottle of expensive looking brandy on his desk along with two glasses.

“Cheers,” said Jack, filling both glasses. He pushed one towards me.

“Cheers,” I said.

“You see, Mrs T was, in many ways, a visionary, Peter. She believed in an aspirational society,” said Jack. “Get on your bike; go for it; seize the day; grab the bull by the horns. That sort of thing.”

I sipped my brandy, enjoying the burn.

“But, that’s not for everyone, is it? Ninety-nine per cent of the population are just here to make up the numbers. Cannon fodder. They live on dreams. Hopes. They live their shitty little lives and week after week they wait for their lottery numbers to come up, hoping for a way out of the mire. They spend their winnings in their mind just before the numbers are drawn and then drown their sorrows in watered down lager and strong cider when they don’t win the jackpot. Hope is the real opium of the masses, Peter.”

He knocked back his drink and poured himself another one. “And this is where I and my little dream factories come in. The punters shuffle into my clubs and catch an eyeful of the dancers; Brazilian, Thai, Ukrainian. As exotic as you like. And they look at them and think: Wouldn’t crawl over that to get to the wife. And of course, these girls see this. They see the most desperate. And they flirt with them and the suckers just eat it up. So, when the dancers invite them into one of the booths for a private dance, well, of course your customer says yes. Hoping for a bit of hanky-panky, or at least a hand shandy”

I finished my drink and Jack refilled my glass.

“And we make a packet out of them because, although they never get so much as a sniff, they keep coming back. As I said, people live in hope.”

He sat on the edge of the desk.

“So, it would not be conducive to good business practice if I let one or two of these ladies actually give the customer a little too much satisfaction, would it?”

“I suppose not.”

“And, indeed, it would be in my interest to find out which, if any of them, was actually doing this. Which is why I’m hiring you, of course.”

I nodded.

“Here’s the deal. I want you to frequent Velvettes and some of my other clubs, from time to time, to see if you get offered… a bit of touch and go, or even a full service, from one of the girls. Or see one of them arranging a dangerous liaison with a customer… or even a member of staff. Fraternising is not allowed on my premises. Understand?”

And of course I understood. Everything was crystal clear. Jack Martin was hiring me because I looked like a desperate, sex-starved loser. The sort of bloke, in fact, that any resourceful, gold-digging stripper would recognise as ripe for the fleecing.

Flattery will get you everywhere.

* * *

The first weekend of the New Year was like being stuck in a run-down border town, situated somewhere between disappointment and false hope. Consequently, Velvettes was so crowded it was suffocating. The place was stuffed with sweaty, shifty-looking middle-aged men, and half-naked women wandering around with pint glasses full of money. An overweight DJ wearing a pink court jester’s hat played back-to-back hits of the 80s. On the tiny stage a tall, statuesque blond, naked except for a pair of angel’s wings strapped to her back, canoodled with a glistening silver pole as Dexy’s Midnight Runners invited us to Come On Eileen.

I was standing at the bar finishing a packet of dry-roasted peanuts when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Private dance?” said a petite South American girl with a sticky accent. She was dressed in a red nylon nurse’s uniform that crackled when she moved. Her lipstick was crimson, her fingernails, the same colour. And so was my face.

“Aye,” I said and followed her to the back of the room and into what looked like a darkened priest’s confession box. She clicked the door closed and red light filled the room, which was more than a little cramped. Not enough room to swing a dick.

“Please sit,” she said.

I plonked myself down in a leather armchair and grinned.

“I’m Maria,” she said. “Come here often?”

“Innuendo and out the other, eh?” I replied, with an anxious smirk. “I thought innuendo was a gay bar in Milan, eh?”

I was babbling, nervously.

Maria looked confused.

“Sorry, I don’t understand,” she said.

I coughed.

“I don’t come here as much as I’d like to,” I said.

She smiled.

The instrumental version of ABC’s The Look Of Love played as she started an air dance – no touching, no grinding herself into my lap – just the odd moment when her hand or knee accidentally brushed my skin.

Cue: goose bumps; a lump in the throat and a lump elsewhere. And it was easy to see how it worked. How a punter could think: maybe she meant to touch me. Maybe she fancies me. Maybe, baby, I don’t know. It was the old brain/body dichotomy in action.

Jack Martin was right about people living in hope.

* * *

“How long were you married, Ordy?” asked Tuc, as I leaned on the corner of the bar and flicked through my divorce papers. I’d actually received them a couple of days before, but had only just plucked up the courage to read them.

“Fourteen years,” I said. “I don’t remember breaking two bloody mirrors, though.”

Tuc nodded sagely, as I stuffed the documents into my jacket pocket.

Angie Beale and I had been joined at the waist for just over thirteen years before the cracks started appearing in what, I’d thought, was a fairly solid relationship, despite its sporadically psychotic episodes – episodes which were invariable exacerbated by the copious amounts of alcohol we imbibed. The foundations of the house of love had started to shake, however, with the reappearance of a positively seismic blast from Angie’s past – her erstwhile fiancé Greg Bardsley, an overweight local councillor with an equally corpulent bank account. And so, one wet and windy night in May, after a particularly prolific drinking session, I challenged Greg to what I suppose once upon a time would have been referred to as a duel. We both ended up in a dark and dingy alley outside the Methodist church, stripped to the waist in the pouring rain, illuminated by the light from a stained-glass window. Greg had bopped around like Mohammad Ali, albeit a fat, white and wheezy Mohammed Ali, as I took off my jacket, shirt and horn-rimmed glasses and carefully placed them on a wheelie bin for safekeeping. As I turned around I was sucker-punched by a big pink blancmange that sent me hurtling into a pile of black bin bags.

“And let that be a lesson to you,” I said to Greg who was towering over me like a gloating Godzilla over a demolished Tokyo.

“Wanker,” he replied, before triumphantly waddling off hand in glove with Angie, leaving me to light a cigarette, lie back, close my eyes, and inhale deeply in a manner that I hoped was reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo at the close of Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle.

The following day I decided to quit my job and become a Private Eye. Some people put it down to the bang on the head.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Tuc.

“Can I keep the change?” I said, and carried on drinking.

The late evening segued into the early hours of the morning. The crowd at Velvettes was thinning out. As the dancers hovered around the bar there was a cacophony of foreign accents. It was a nice sound, too. A refreshing change.

Seatown was your archetypal claustrophobic small town. It was tucked away on the north east coast of England and its awkward location meant that you couldn’t really end up here by accident. All the main roads and motorways bypassed the place. People rarely moved from the town, and not too many outsiders decided to settle here either.

I was swimming in self-pity and brandy. Mostly brandy. Tuc poured me another drink, as Maria wandered over. She was dressed in a black sweater and jeans, and carrying a Marks & Spencer’s carrier bag.

“Have you finished your shift?” I said.

“Ah, the great detective,” she said. ‘I have finished for the night, yes.’

“Can I buy you a drink?”

I could feel Tuc’s laser beam gaze, knowing that I really shouldn’t have been ‘fraternising’ with the performers.

“Of course,” said Maria. “Tequila!”

“Tequila for the lady,” I slurred.

I winked at Tuc, finished my brandy and headed toward oblivion like dirty dishwater down a plughole.

The next morning, the sound of the doorbell dragged me by my lapels out of the abyss and into consciousness. The day was migraine bright and I woke up with a sense of dread that was even worse than usual. When I saw Maria sleeping next to me I knew why.

The doorbell wouldn’t stop ringing. It was like a stiletto grinding through my brain. It was even worse than a U2 song. I sat up.

“What is it?” said Maria, sitting upright, exposing her bought and paid-for breasts.

“Dunno,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’d best have a gander.”

I reached over to the bedside table, picked up a box of Tic Tacs and Poured them carefully into my mouth. Crunching the mints, I slowly got up, pulled on a pair of jeans and stumbled toward the door hoping, just this once, that it was a Jehovah’s Witness. Furtively, I peeked through the letterbox and was pretty damned sure it wasn’t. And I doubted that it was the Avon Lady, either, unless she had a tattoo around his neck. I looked over at Maria and crawled back into the bed. I was so far up shit creak an outboard motor wouldn’t help, let alone a paddle, so why not go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

* * *

When I decided to become a Private Investigator, although I certainly didn’t have any romantic illusions that the profession would bear much of a resemblance to the lives of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, I had, at least, a smattering of hope that there might be a little silver screen glamour to the job. Over the years, however, that hope and I, had barely been on nodding terms. So it wasn’t the greatest of shocks to find out that I’d have to take on sideline jobs here and there. Being a store detective, for example, seemed a fairly reasonable ‘sideways career shift’. Even working as a security guard wasn’t that much of a stretch. But not being Santa Claus. In Poundland. Ahem.

And, with Christmas over and done with, I’d lost even that job. I was skint and desperately in need of some work. And desperate times called for desperate measures.

“Poundland’s next to Poundworld, across the road from All 4 A Pound, mate,” I said to Bryn Laden, who was clearly taking great pleasure in my humiliation.

“Near Greggs, then?” he said. He stretched his arms out wide as he yawned.

There were sweat patches under the arms of his raincoat. Quite an accomplishment, that.

“There are more Greggs in this town than there are cockneys at a Man United game, Bryn. Everywhere is near Greggs,” I said.

I looked out of the kebab shops’ window as snowflakes started to fall like confetti. A motorcade of buggies stuffed with chubby kids and pushed by chubbier women rolled past and up the ramp toward the granite-grey delights of Seatown Shopping Centre, the personification of Seventies architecture and rumoured soon to become a listed building. Shit, then.

“YTS shoplifters,” said Bryn, pointing a shaky finger at one of the kids.

I nodded and smiled. Oscar Wilde once said that only a fool didn’t judge by appearances and if you asked anyone to describe their idea of what a sleazy hack looked like then Bryn Laden would surely fit the bill perfectly; lank hair, hanging down like rats’ tails, red nose, waxy raincoat and, of course, permanently pissed.