Shooting in the Dark

watched him for a moment, saw pain in his hunched shoulders, understood for the space of a breath that he could sing no other song. His profile was a line of genius; she wanted to reach out and trace it with the tip of her finger. The slope of the brow, the slight loop of nose, and its echo there again in the chin. He was young, early or middle twenties, and the blues had found a deep gash in his soul and come to rest there for a while. Undeniably queer and undeniably a god.
    Sam had always been a friend and never a lover and that was the best way round. He was constant as a friend. If they’d ever overstepped the mark and hopped into bed, turned friendship into a sexual affair, they might have gained the moment but the loss would have been incalculable.
    Marie sometimes wondered if the world saw her as a Miss Moneypenny, spending her life waiting for the odd glimpse of James Bond. She couldn’t see herself and Sam Turner as an emotional item, and the things you couldn’t see were not meant to be.
    The Greek god left the piano and paid Maggie at the bar for his coffee. They both watched him turn a corner in Swinegate and disappear into the silent and lonely world of the truly beautiful.
    ‘Who was that?’ Marie asked.
    Maggie raised her eyebrows, looked over at the freshly deserted piano, and slowly wiped down the counter. ‘I’m not sure he really happened.’
     
    Smith’s. The shelves lined with magazines of every description. Music, Women’s, Pets, Lifestyle, Computers. All of them tempting the passing trade in a variety of voices, commanding attention with whispers and fluttering eyelashes or glass jewellery and hysterical screams. Each one held out a promise: objects to furnish the home or objectivity, nudity or the bare facts, a free gift or personal freedom. She half-closed her eyes, walked past the women’s section, picked up magazines at random and checked out the typefaces. Aviary Birds, The Spectator, Bodybuilding, Time Out, Punch, The Internet, each had a tale to tell, but none of them had the feel of the letters that made up the blackmail note.
    ‘Something aimed at a young audience,’ Sly Beaumont had said. She watched the customers for a while. Girls gravitated towards the women’s section, thumbed through copies of New Woman, Cosmopolitan and Tatler. Young men tended to make their way to the computing section, or gazed wistfully at scantily clad models in the lad mags. Both sexes sniffed around the music section in equal parts.
    Marie’s brain began clicking into PI mode. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer picked up a copy of the Radio Times and she didn’t need to look at it to know that it wasn’t the source of the note. Whoever had written the blackmail note was unlikely to have been a woman. You could never be completely sure; as time marched on Western culture seemed to throw up more crimes of violence that had the woman’s touch. There had been reports of gangs of young females recently perfecting the art of mugging. But this one smelled like a man.
    She moved over to the section with the men’s glossies and read the titles: Men’s Health, Esquire, Loaded, Bizarre. Escapist mags, offering tales of sexual prowess, soft-porn photographs of implanted breasts and tanned thighs, the latest casual fashions and reviews of videos and films. All of them aimed at low achievers, the kind of guys who were already convinced they were descended from kings. Young men who were the victims of their own egos, ripe fodder for the siren cry of the pornographer. Marie had been avoiding them all her life.
    She remembered a well-known occult phenomenon, according to her boyfriend, David Styles, who knew about such things. If you put in all the effort you could in the early stages, the angels came along to help you out when the going got rough. Marie preferred to think she just got lucky, but there was an extra bonus in sharing a bed with someone who believed in angels.
    Stuff didn’t ring any bells, Later and GQ both felt wrong, but Loaded had headings and intros in that distinctive Hermes font. As she thumbed through a copy she came across the phrase ‘five grand’ in a sub-heading the same size and density as the phrase in the note. ‘Gotcha,’ she said, and the guy next to her with his head in a copy of Bizarre quickly put it down and left the shop.
     
    Sam laughed when she told him. ‘So we’re looking for a young guy with a hard-on?’ he said over the phone.
    ‘Yeah, I guess,’ she