Nightside 09 - Just Another Judgement Day

but I took his word for it. “How long has this been going on?” I said.
    “Months! Almost a year now. Though I’ve had my suspicions . . . Look, I know these people. Have known them all my life. I know their faces like I know my own, down to the smallest detail. I can always tell when someone’s had a little work done, around the eyes or under the chin . . . but this is different. They look younger , untouched by time or the stresses of our particular life-style.
    “It started last autumn, when some of them began patronising this new health club, the Guaranteed New You Parlour. Very expensive, very elite. Now all my friends go there, and every time they appear in public, they’re the absolute peak, the very flower of beauty. Not a detail that isn’t perfect, no matter how dissolute their private lives may be. I mean, people like us, Mr. Taylor, we live . . . extreme lives. We experience . . . everything. It’s expected of us, so the rest of you can live the wild life vicariously, through us. Drink, drugs, debauchery, every night and twice on Saturday. It all gets just a bit tiring, actually. But anyway, as a result, we’ve all been in and out of those very discreet clinics that provide treatments for the kind of diseases you only get by being very social, or help in getting over the kind of good cheer that comes in bottles and powders and needles. We all need a little help to be beautiful all the time. A little something to help us soldier on to the next party. We all need damage repair, on a regular basis.
    “But that’s all stopped! They don’t need the clinics any more, just this Parlour. And they all look like teenagers! It’s not fair!”
    “Well,” I said reasonably, “If this Parlour is doing such a good job, why don’t you go there, too?”
    “Because they won’t have me!” Percy slumped in his chair, and suddenly looked ten years older, as though he could only maintain his air of glamour through sheer effort of will these days. “I have offered to pay anything they want. Double, even triple the going rate. I begged and pleaded, Mr. Taylor! And they turned me away, as though I were nobody. Me! Percy D’Arcy! And now my friends don’t want me around any more. They say I don’t . . . fit in.
    “Please, Mr. Taylor, I need you to find out what’s going on. Find out why the Parlour won’t let me in. Find out what they’re really doing behind those closed doors . . . and if they are cheating, shut them down! So I won’t be left out any more.”
    “It’s not really my usual kind of case,” I said.
    “I’ll pay you half a million pounds.”
    “But clearly this is something that needs to be investigated. Leave it with me, Percy.”
    He stood up abruptly, pulling his dignity back about him. “Here’s my card. Please inform me when you know something.” He tossed a very expensive piece of engraved paste-board on to the table before me, then stalked off back through the crowd with his head held high. A smattering of applause followed him. I picked up the card, tapped it thoughtfully against my chin a few times, and looked at Suzie.
    “It’s something to do,” I said. “You interested?”
    “I’ll come along,” said Suzie. “Just to keep you company. Will I get to kill anybody?”
    “Probably not.”
    Suzie shrugged. “The things I do for love.”

* * * *
    In the sane and normal world outside the Nightside, if you’re getting older and starting to look your age, there’s always cosmetic surgery and associated treatments. In the Nightside, the rich and the famous and the powerful have access to other options, some of them quite spectacularly nasty and extreme.
    The Guaranteed New You Parlour was situated in Uptown, the very best part of the Nightside, offering only the very best services for the very best people. Suzie and I went there anyway. The rent-a-cops in their colourful private uniforms took one look at us and decided they were needed urgently somewhere else. The neon there was just as hot, but perhaps a little more restrained, and the clubs and restaurants and discreet establishments glowed in the night like burning jewels. And the lost souls filling the streets and squares were all pounding the pavements in search of a better class of damnation.
    In Uptown, even the Devil wears a tie.
    The Guaranteed New You Parlour occupied the site of what used to be a rather tacky place called The Cutting Edge, an S&M joint for people with a surgery fetish. It got closed