‘A normal person wouldn’t have gone looking for it in the first place.’ A glint of self-deprecating humour appeared in his good eye. ‘And neither would I if I’d known what was in it.’
‘What did you think was in it?’
He shrugged. ‘More of Ben’s possessions. It annoyed me that he denied knowing anything about it.’ He put his head back to stare at the ceiling. ‘Chalky couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. I should have suspected something at that point.’
‘You’d still have taken it,’ said Jackson. ‘You’d have been too curious not to.’
Acland acknowledged the point with a nod. ‘I wouldn’t have paid for it, though.’
‘How much?’
‘Fifty quid.’
She gave an abrupt laugh. ‘You shouldn’t be allowed out alone. Chalky says you got it in exchange for a cheap bottle of vodka. How come the dykes let you back in?’
‘I didn’t try. I waited at the end of the terrace until Chalky came out. It didn’t take long. He said he hadn’t had a drink in twelve hours.’
‘How did you know he was in there?’
‘While we were there I heard a man hawking phlegm up in the room across the corridor. I didn’t know for a fact it was Chalky but it seemed worth a try.’ He held her gaze for a moment. ‘Thanks for telling the police he was there.’
‘You could have done it yourself. You had the perfect opportunity when the superintendent spoke to you outside the Crown.’
‘I gave Chalky my word I wouldn’t.’
Jackson’s smile was cynical. ‘That’s Pontius Pilate stuff, Charles. How long were you planning to sit on the bag before you chose a side?’
‘That’s not what I was doing. I was trying to work out—’ He broke off on a sigh. ‘Chalky said the bag belonged to Ben. Is that what he’s told the police?’
‘In a manner of speaking. His view seems to be that as Ben brought the bag into the alleyway, it must be his . . . on the basis of possession being nine-tenths of the law.’ She saw the doubt in Acland’s face. ‘The police aren’t convinced.’
‘I wouldn’t expect them to be.’
‘Then I suggest you come up with some credible answers about how you knew the bag existed. From what I remember, you told the superintendent you only thought it did.’
*
Apart from a glass crack pipe on a coffee table in the open-plan sitting room with a kitchen at one end, it wasn’t immediately obvious why Jen had been so reluctant to allow the police into her flat. If she’d entered first and palmed the pipe, Beale doubted that he or his detectives would have noticed. The room was in some disorder, with various outfits slung across the back of a sofa and different pairs of shoes littering the floor. ‘Looks as if she couldn’t make up her mind what to wear,’ said Wagstaff. ‘I wonder what the bedroom’s like if she had to bring the choices in here.’ ‘More to the point, what’s in here that had her so twitched? This is the only room we could reasonably have entered if she’d been willing to come with us.’ DC Hicks nodded towards a flat screen on a desk against one of the walls. ‘Her computer’s still on. I can hear the fan working. She may not have had time to close out before she left.’ He walked over and nudged the mouse with the tip of a gloved finger. ‘Bloody hell!’ he said with amusement. ‘She’s seriously up her own arse if she has to admire her own pictures.’ Beale and Wagstaff joined him to gaze at the naked and half-naked images of Jen on the screen. They were standard soft-porn poses – fully naked on hands and knees with her arse raised provocatively, bare-breasted on a chair, cutely provocative in high heels and a bikini bottom.
The text beside the pictures read:
Cass’s STAR profile
Cass is BEAUTIFUL with the look of a movie goddess. You’ll find out that a date with her will be pure class. Her European heritage and soft Italian accent add even more to her allure.
Cass is IRRESISTIBLE but BE WARNED! Her passionate Latin nature will make her unforgettable and your body will crave her for a very long time.
Incall 1 hour: £150 2 hours: £280 Outcall 1 hour: £200 2 hours: £350
‘What’s with the soft Italian accent?’ asked Beale. ‘It sounded more like Estuary English to me when Barnard put the cuffs on her. Doesn’t anyone regulate this crap?’
Hicks grinned. ‘Shall I go back one? It’ll probably bring us to the home page of her escort agency.’ Beale nodded. The detective gripped the mouse between the points of his gloved thumb and forefinger and steered the cursor on to the ‘back’ arrow before using a pencil to depress the ‘click’ button. He took out his notebook and jotted down the name ‘Party Perfect’ and the telephone details. He nodded to the photographs of other girls running down the side of the page. ‘Look at the names. I should think most of them are Eastern European . . . unless they’re using pseudonyms.’
‘Try minimizing it,’ Beale told him. ‘Let’s see if there’s another window underneath.’
Hicks moved the cursor to the other side of the screen and clicked with the pencil again. ‘Microsoft Outlook. Three messages in the inbox. Do you want me to open them?’
Beale ran a thoughtful hand round his growing stubble, wondering how much leeway they had on this search. ‘Not at the moment. Click on “contacts”. We’ve a legitimate interest in looking for Lemarr Wilson or Duane Stewart.’
All three of them stared at the displayed page. Top left was ‘Robert Allan’. Bottom right was ‘Timothy Gains’. A third of the way down the second column was ‘Kevin Atkins’ and an inch below in the third column was ‘Martin Britton & John Prentice’.
Hicks pointed to an icon at the bottom of the screen. ‘She uses a cell-phone synchronizer to feed in information from her mobile. That’s why so few of the names have email addresses. All she’s recording are telephone numbers.’
‘In Britton’s case, there’s no number, just his address in Greenham Road.’
‘Maybe that’s all she knew.’ Hicks clicked on ‘P’. ‘No Harry Peel.’
‘Try “T” for taxi,’ said Beale. ‘If the gods are smiling on us, we’ll find Walter Tutting as well.’
Twenty-eight
BEN RUSSELL’S PROTESTS about being woken at six o’clock in the morning to be taken to Southwark East police station for questioning under caution were noisy and prolonged. He was sick. He wanted his doctor. He wanted his mother. He wanted his solicitor. The police were fascists.
He turned his ire on the ward sister. ‘You should fucking stop them,’ he snapped, pointing his pistol hands at the two uniformed constables.
‘I’ve no reason to,’ she told him. ‘Dr Monaghan feels there are no medical grounds to prevent you going. You’ve been given all the tools to manage your condition and you’ve been doing it successfully for several days now. We’d have discharged you yesterday if you’d agreed to live with your mother.’