Birdman

'Shellene Craw was on your books?'

'Ah, so it's Shellene you want. This is no big surprise, Detective Inspector. She owes me two months' commission. Two hundred quid. And now she brings you to my door, asking about what? Drugs, I suppose?'

'I don't think you'll be getting your money.' He sat down and placed his hands on the desk. 'She's dead.'

Julie didn't miss a beat. 'I could have told you that was coming — she was an overdose waiting to happen. The clients complained. Said she had needle marks on the inside of her thighs. Put the punters off. Ho hum, two hundred quid. I'm going to guess she didn't leave it to me in her will.'

'When did you last hear from her?'

'Week before last. Then she didn't turn up to a gig last Wednesday, didn't call.' She paused, lightly drumming her nails on the desk. 'I lost that venue right off.'

'Where?'

'Nag's Head. Archway.'

'And what was the last place she did turn up?'

'Um…' Julie leaned forward in her seat and, licking a finger, flicked through a large loose-leaf file. He could see a seam of grey hair along her parting, the scalp very pink underneath. 'There.' She tapped a page. 'She must've turned up to the Dog and Bell because I didn't hear from them. That was a lunchtime gig, last Monday.'

'The Dog and Bell?'

'Trafalgar Road. That's in—'

'Yes, I know.' Caffery's skin tingled minutely. 'It's east Greenwich.' The aggregate yard was less than a mile away. He started a new page on his notebook. 'Did Shellene work on her own that day?'

'No.' She tilted her head and looked at him carefully. 'Are you going to tell me? Was it an overdose?'

'There was another girl on the show?'

Julie looked at him for a moment, her mouth twitching slightly. 'Pussy Willow. She only does Greenwich shows.'

'Has she got a real name?'

'We all have real names, Mr Caffery. It's only the very saddest of punters that believe our mummies and daddies really call us Frooty Tootie or Beverly Hills. Joni Marsh. She's been with me years.'

'Have you got her address?'

'She won't like it if I give it out. Specially to the pi—' Julie stopped herself and smiled slowly. 'Specially to a detective.'

'She won't know.'

She gave him a narrow look and scribbled an address down on the back of a business card. 'She shares with Pinky. Used to be on my books too. Becky, she's called, now that she's stopped.'

'Thank you.' He took the card. The air force husband was coughing up phlegm in the bedroom.

'Do you have a girl on your books called Lacey?'

'Nope.'

'Betty?'

Julie shook her head.

'And does the name…' He looked at his notes. 'The name Tracy ring a bell?'

'No.'

'Petra?'

'Petra? Yes.'

Caffery looked up. 'Yes?'

'Yes, I — Petra. Funny little thing.'

He raised his eyebrows. 'Little?'

'Small, I mean.' She gave him a dirty look. 'We're not child pornographers, Mr Caffery. I mean one of the strippers. She pulled a fast one on me too, and me thinking I was a good judge of character.'

'She disappeared?'

'Off the face of the planet. I wrote to her hostel. Never got a reply, of course.' She shrugged. 'She didn't owe much so I let it drift. You put these things down to experience, don't you?'

'When was this?'

'Christmas. No, early February, because we'd just come back from Majorca.'

'Drugs?'

'Her? No. Wouldn't touch them. The others, yes. But not Petra.'

'When you say she was small—'

'Tiny bones. Like a little bird. And skinny with it.'

He shifted uncomfortably in the narrow chair. 'Do you remember the last gig she did?'

Julie gave him a long thoughtful look, then slowly, woodenly, turned to the book. 'Here.' She ran her finger across the page. 'January twenty-fifth. The King's Head. Wembley.'

'Did she ever do the Dog and Bell?'

'All the time. Her hostel was in Elephant and Castle. Joni knows her.' She licked her finger and flicked the page over. 'Odd,' she said faintly. 'She did the Dog and Bell the day before the King's Head. The day before she disappeared.'

'OK. I need her address.'

'Look.' Julie sat back and placed her hands on the desk. 'Tell me now what's going on.'

'And a photo of Petra.'

'I said, what's going on?'

He nodded at the ceiling. 'And that one of Shellene.'

She sniffed loudly and retrieved a file from under the desk. She flipped through it, pulling out two head-and-shoulders of Shellene and one badly lit full-length colour shot of a brunette in a fishnet leotard and held the photos out to Caffery without looking at him.

Petra wasn't pretty. She had very small features, dark eyes and the determined triangular chin of a street urchin. The only make-up she wore was a dark pencil outline on her mouth. Caffery held the picture so it caught the sunlight and looked at it for a long time.

'What is it?'

He looked up. 'Did she dye her hair?'

'They all do.'

'It looks—'

'Purple. Yeah, awful, isn't it? I told her not to.'

He dropped the picture into his Samsonite, thinking of the childlike corpse lying in the Greenwich morgue; the only one who had resisted death, the only one who had been restrained. He closed the briefcase, embarrassed by a sudden rush of feeling for a poor anorexic, bound, gagged and fighting for her life.

'Thank you for your help, Mrs Darling.'

'Are you going to tell me what Petra's got to do with Shellene?'

'We don't know yet.'

Julie said suddenly, 'She's dead too, isn't she? Little Petra.'

The two of them regarded each other across the table for a long time. Caffery cleared his throat and stood.

'Mrs Darling, please don't speak about this to anyone. It's very early days of the investigation. We appreciate your help.' He held his hand out, but she declined it.

'Will you tell me more when you can?' She looked very pale under her blue-black bob. 'I'd like to hear what happened to poor little Petra.'

'As soon as we know ourselves,' Caffery said. 'As soon as we know.'

6

AMIP relies heavily on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, the cross-checking database known by its acronym: HOLMES. The pivot in any team is the HOLMES 'receiver' — the officer who collates, extracts and interprets the data. At Shrivemoor that person was Marilyn Kryotos.

Caffery had liked Marilyn instantly: plump and languorous, she drifted through the day, talking in her low, quirky voice about her kids, their pets, their illnesses, their small triumphs and their knee scrapes. The universal mother, Kryotos seemed to deal with a murder in the same resigned way she'd deal with a dirty nappy: as if it were a faintly unpleasant, but correctable, fact of life. It pleased him that her first choice of companion in the team was Paul Essex: as if their friendship endorsed Caffery's own judgement of the pair.

Jack encountered Marilyn that evening when he returned to Shrivemoor with his notes. She was carrying action dockets from the SIO's room to the incident room and he knew immediately something had her ruffled.

'Marilyn.' He leaned towards her. 'What's up? The kids?'

'No,' she hissed. 'It's bloody F team. They're moving in and driving me loony toons. They want this, they don't want that. The latest is that they want a separate bloody office, like they're better than us or something.' She pushed dark hair out of her eyes. 'The CS's got a hair up his bum about this case and he's making us suffer for it. I mean look, will you, Jack, just look at this place, it's not big enough for one investigation team, let alone us and them.'

Caffery saw what she meant — taking his notes into the indexers he had to push past unfamiliar faces in the incident room. The F team officers all wore crisp shirts and ties, many of them with fresh-from-the-cellophane creases. That pride in their clothing would wear thin after a week of fifteen-hour shifts, he knew.