She suddenly remembered something Paul used to say. An expression he’d picked up somewhere.
Up and down like a whore’s drawers.
He’d said it a lot – always in that comedy ‘cockney wanker’ voice he was so fond of – those first few months she’d been carrying Alfie. When the hormone fairy arrived and the mood swings really kicked in.
She felt tears building and held her breath again, refused to let them rise.
She needed to concentrate…
It had been coming. Akhtar’s hand on the gun, cradling it, the talk about being ‘fobbed off’. Being ‘ignored’. She had asked him for tea and he had snapped at her; her well-being or comfort no longer of any concern, no longer something worth worrying about. Not by him, at any rate.
And now he had done something stupid. Worse than stupid.
When he had finally come back in, apologising for the stink and squirting that air-freshener around, there had been this look on his face. Like he’d accomplished something. Triumphant, almost.
‘There,’ he had said. ‘ There ’, like ‘that’ll show them’ or ‘now we’ll see who gets fobbed off’ and more than anything Helen had wanted to strike out hard and smash and claw at his face. To tear the smirk off and demand to know what the fuck he thought he was doing.
At that moment, she knew that she could hurt him.
She looked across at him. Sitting in his chair, his hand was on the revolver in his lap still, but his eyes were fixed happily on the television screen, as though he had done no more than simply cause a little mischief. Put the cat among the pigeons.
Helen knew that if Akhtar had sent a picture of Stephen Mitchell to anyone on the outside, there might not even be time to finish the programme he was watching.
She inhaled through her nose, so she would not have to taste it. The smell was still fierce, the cheap air-freshener no more than a top note, almost as sickening as the stench it was failing to mask. She breathed it in, because she had to.
Rotten meat and lemons.
SIXTY-THREE
McCarthy had punched in the code needed to access the private lift. It had been sent by text message the previous day. He and Thorne said nothing as the lift rose up towards the penthouse level, then just before they reached the top floor, McCarthy said, ‘They’re not always about the sex, you know?’ He looked at Thorne. ‘These parties. Sometimes it’s just a question of meeting people and talking, without having to worry about what they’re thinking. It’s about having fun and not having to lie. You said it yourself this afternoon in my office. It’s about being yourself.’
The doors opened.
‘All very touching,’ Thorne said. ‘Except when “yourself” is nuts deep in an underage boy.’
The man who answered the door had the build of a nightclub bouncer, but his suit was somewhat better cut and Thorne doubted he ever had cause to turn people away for wearing trainers. He nodded his recognition at McCarthy then looked Thorne up and down.
‘A guest,’ McCarthy said.
The man at the door sniffed. ‘Nobody said anything.’
‘Sorry.’ Thorne smiled. ‘Should I have brought a bottle or something?’
‘Oh come on, Graham, stop pissing around,’ McCarthy said. ‘He’s with me, all right? And I’m gagging for a drink.’
In the hour and a half since McCarthy had told him about the party, Thorne had been thinking very carefully about the best way to get inside. To make his entrance. At this point of course, it would have been easy enough simply to produce a warrant card, to put a shoulder against the door and march inside shouting the odds. Thorne doubted very much that he would encounter a lot of resistance if he did, certainly none of an aggressive nature, but all the same he had decided on a rather more low-key approach. He wanted to walk in there with the not-so-good doctor and for it to be seen. He needed the man whose evening he was intent on spoiling to see clearly that the chain was broken and that McCarthy was his. To understand, as quickly as Thorne could engineer it, that no amount of wriggling was going to get anyone off the hook.
‘Actually, Graham, we’re both gagging for a drink,’ Thorne said.
Graham rolled his eyes and stood aside. ‘Enjoy… ’
They laid their jackets down on a cowhide-covered chaise longue just inside the door. McCarthy took a glass of wine and Thorne helped himself to water from the tray proffered by a teenage boy with spiky black hair and pupils like piss-holes in the snow. Then they took three steps down into a large, open-plan living area.
Thorne smelled marijuana, amyl nitrate and aftershave.
Money…
The decor and furnishings reminded Thorne of Rahim Jaffer’s flat and he wondered if it was all those evenings the young man had spent in places such as this that had given him a taste for the ultra-modern and expensive. Ironic, as they had certainly helped pay for it. Looking around – as though he were doing no more than admiring the art on the walls or the stylish light fittings – Thorne counted fourteen men in the room. Forty-ish and upwards and all dressed as though they had just come from one office or another, and while most had a drink in their hands, some had not yet been there long enough to loosen their ties.
There were at least the same number of boys.
While their prospective clients were just starting to relax and remained content to talk among themselves for a while, most of those who had been invited to provide a paid service did the same thing. They were gathered in twos and threes at the edges of the room. Whispering and giggling, moving in time to the low-level soft rock, or hovering near the long glass table where a cold buffet had been laid out.
Two distinct groups, for the time being.
There was plenty of eye contact though. Sizing-up being done on both sides. Sly looks and not so shy smiles.
The boys were white, black, Asian. A selection made deliberately, Thorne guessed, so as to appeal to all tastes. He wondered if the same consideration had gone into picking out the invitees according to their age. Thorne guessed that the majority were fifteen and up, but several were younger – or were at least trying to look younger – while two boys who stood close together near the food could not have been more than twelve.
Someone had probably agreed to pay a little more for them.
With McCarthy staying close to him as per instructions, Thorne wandered across the bleached-wood floor to stand near the vast windows that ran around half the room. A man with swept-back silver hair tapped a finger against the rain-streaked glass and nodded out.
‘Shame about the bloody weather,’ he said. ‘Out on that balcony you get the most astonishing view.’
Thorne turned and leaned back against the glass, scanning the room.
The man nodded towards a skinny boy in a tight black vest who looked to Thorne as though he was not that long out of Spiderman pyjamas. ‘Mind you, the view’s pretty spectacular in here… ’
At that moment, Thorne got his first look at the man he was there for. He walked into the room from one of the two softly lit corridors running off on either side. Coming from the toilet, Thorne guessed, or perhaps a bedroom, though it did seem a little early for that. Thorne watched the man help himself to a drink from another of the boys with the trays, then lean across, smiling at whatever the boy had said, to take something from the buffet. He popped the food into his mouth as he turned, and saw McCarthy.
He raised his glass and started walking towards them.
It took a few steps before the man got his first good look at Thorne, before the easy stride faltered, just a little. Thorne was impressed that he had been recognised so quickly. It had been eight months after all, and even then they had only been face to face for half an hour or so.