6:15am.
Morning sun floods through the cracks in badly drawn curtains. Groaning, Ed drags himself out of bed, dresses, kisses a snoring Emma goodbye. Downstairs, coffee, chocolate digestives, then outside, bringing his battered council van spluttering to life, driving 3 miles to the warehouse. Picking out a large, grey panel from the stores, Ed checks its dimensions for a proper fit, while tutting at the raucous, yet anatomically correct sexual graffiti rendered in black marker all over one side. He hauls the panel to his van, eye-to-eye with a huge erection, lovingly depicted, complete with testicles, pubic hair, little veins and knots up the shaft, and even the small piece of skin connecting taught, retracted foreskin, revealing a bulbous, wet head.
Quite the work of art. Must’ve been from the ladies, that one, muses Ed.
Setting off towards the Talk of the Town, Ed takes a short detour to pick up his workmate, Steve.
“Steve!” laughs Ed, nodding to the back of the van, “You’re supposed to wipe this filth off before it goes into storage. Been wanking off to it again, haven’t you, you little perv.”
“Ah, so you didn’t make the Siberian Tigers gig last night then?” diverts Steve, scratching his beard and ignoring the jibe.
“Nah, stayed in with Emma, watched a weeks’ worth of Corrie.”
“Week’s worth of porno more like. Gig was fucking stormin’, mate, you should’ve come”.
—
6:57 am.
DI Jack Porter enters the sparse, badly lit interrogation room, pulls back a plastic chair and thuds down opposite me. Jack’s crisp, white shirt fails to contain a bulging waistline, which hangs like a cliff over a loosely buckled belt, dull grey trousers, and mean, black shiny shoes. Staring across the small table I am assaulted by two penetrating cold blue eyes, icy pools in a craggy, pocked-marked landscape. Porter’s hard, thin mouth is rigid with determination and contempt.
This terrifying vista is a far cry from the bustling, sea of adoring fans of last night’s rowdy and exuberant Tigers gig.
“My daughter likes the Suburban Tigers. I think they’re shit. Just so we know where we stand, OK?” barks Porter.
The suit to my right, with all the backbone of a wet fish, smirks at this. I can’t help wondering whose side he’s on.
“Cheers. I’ll take that as a compliment”.
“George!” Porter calls over to his sidekick, “We have a smart-arse on our hands”
“Cocky bastard aren’t you?” Says Porter turning back to face me head on. “’Spose you’d have to be to get away with the shite you spew out on stage.”
This time I make no reply.
“So. Let’s take it one more time, from the top. Right from where you ended the gig at around 1:47 am, went backstage, plied yourself with alcohol and drugs and then murdered Katrina Savage in the green room, some time between 3:00am and 3:15 am – all because you were out of your head and she wouldn’t have the kind of filthy, disgusting sex you were demanding, right?”
“But I’ve told you twenty times already” my blood pressure rising again. “I never spoke to Katrina, never even saw her, and I don’t own a knife! You’ve got the wrong guy.”
I take Porter through the whole story again, and in excruciating detail I retell every last debauched episode of Suburban Tiger’s post-gig escapades, repeatedly protesting my innocence. Yes, there were drugs. Yes there were groupies. Yes there was a weirdly shaped sofa. And yes there was sex. Raw, orgiastic, ridiculous sex at that. But murder? No fucking way, man!
The only bit I do leave out, however, is the loo-job. A groupie’d followed me and locked herself into an adjacent cubicle. Didn’t see her face, but as she’d entered the cubicle I noted her svelt figure, high heels, and curly blonde hair. Good enough. Inside my cubicle, her disembodied voice asks me in a husky tone if I want to stick my dick through the two-inch hole in the dividing wall, so she can suck me off. Naturally I oblige, but I’m not giving Porter the lewd satisfaction of that particular encounter. Nor do I tell him that, just as I was about to explode through the hole into an unidentified, but very warm, welcoming and expert mouth, I get a text from Eddie the bassist on my iPhone (I was watching porn on it to help me along. C’mon man, it was my fifth time of the night. Or was it sixth?).
Oh, and I am certainly not going to recount the shock when, as I lay recovering, trousers round my ankles, sliding down the toilet lid, “she” popped her head round my cubicle door, wiping “her” lips while scratching a neatly trimmed beard shrouded by a halo of cute blonde curls.
Fucking Eurovison. It’s killing the music business.
—-
7:37am
“All my job is, is swapping bloody filth!” Bemoans Ed, surveying the infantile scrawl of vaginas, tits, cocks, balls, open mouths and inevitable spunk droplets, and of course the unmissable two-inch hole, pussy hair scrawled all around, captioned with “Stick your dick in here”.
Weeks back, someone’d made a complaint to the committee about being watched through the hole in a Talk of the Town loo. Steve and Ed had finally been tasked with the job of replacing the vandalised panel.
“Don’t lie! You love your job man!” says Steve. “In any case, what we are upgrading to is a better class of filth – ladies filth innit!”
—-
7:51am
“You filthy, filthy, filthy little man”, sneers Porter.
“Do my best” I weakly rejoin.
“Shut it! George, he’s got an alibi! Time of the murder, reckons he ‘ad is dick stuck in a fucking 2-inch hole in the wall!”
Guffaws from the other side of the dank, sweaty interrogation room. Finally I’d come clean, if you’ll forgive the pun. George checked my phone and confirmed Eddie’s text came in at exactly 3:08 am. This means I shot my load into that bearded chin pretty much exactly the moment Katrina was murdered. My music teacher always said I had good timing.
“We’re checking your alibi now. SOCOs are heading to the Talk of the Town to see if we can scrape some of your filthy dirty DNA off of that sordid wank-hole.”
I merely nod.
—
8:43 am
Ed powers the last screw home and admires the replacement loo panel, complete with expertly rendered dick.
“Hmmmm, you’re right. A definite improvement!” Steve sniggers, shouldering the old cock-holed panel and loading it into the van outside.
As Ed and Steve pull out of the rear car park, an unmarked Police van arrives, and six SOCOs enter the rear of the Talk of the Town in search of a hole in the lavatory wall.
© Simon Atherley, June 2014