Neither detective responded.
He looked from one to the other of them, brow furrowed with thought as he undid another shirt button. ‘Christ it’s hot in here. Okay, there’s something else too.’ His eyes settled on Tash. ‘These kinds of pics are of no interest to me at all, not that they ever would be, even if I wasn’t ... gay.’
Tash slumped back in her chair.
Stevie slid a pen and paper toward him to write down names of people who could corroborate what he’d just said. What a waste of bloody time, she thought. The Dream Team site was devoted solely to the exploitation of underage girls, so it was highly unlikely that Lolita would be gay, or even bisexual. He might, of course, be running it as a purely business concern, but it was rare that people were into this kind of abuse just for the money.
Holdsworth scratched away with the pen for a while. ‘These guys will back me up.’
‘You’d have saved yourself a lot of bother if you’d told us that straight away,’ Stevie said, Tash’s expression hadn’t lost any of its early contempt. ‘Ashamed of being gay are you, Mr Holdsworth?’
Holdsworth placed a full stop after the last name and put the pen down. ‘No, but I work with children. It could easily be assumed by the ignorant masses that because I’m gay I’m into little boys, which I’m not. I keep my orientation to myself for the sake of my job.’
Stevie pushed the button of the tape recorder. ‘Stopping for a break at 12:45.’
Stevie and Tash pushed their way through the swinging doors into the operations room and made their way to Clarissa’s desk. ‘Is it possible to access someone’s Internet connection through a local area network in say an Internet cafe, and send stuff through it without the knowledge of the person who’s logged in?’ Stevie asked.
Clarissa squeezed her dimpled chin as she thought. ‘LAN sniff you mean? These cafes don’t tend to have the best security. Does it have a wireless connection?’
Stevie had no idea what LAN sniff might mean. She looked to Tash who’d been somewhat thoughtful and subdued since Holdsworth’s revelation. Tash nodded ‘yes’.
‘Then all it needs is someone in the know to be sitting in a car outside with a laptop to pick up signals from the cafe,’ Clarissa said. ‘He—or she—can log in from his own computer then log into a computer in the cafe to control it. If he deletes his system logs as he goes, it’s virtually untraceable.’
‘We think that might be what’s happened to Julian Holdsworth,’ Stevie said. ‘He visits the cafe several nights a week and logs in for a set time, regular as clockwork.’
‘Then it would be someone who knows his routine, knows him well enough to guess his password,’ Clarissa said.
‘But not well enough to know he’s gay,’ Tash said quietly.
Tash and Stevie split up, Tash to find out how the Emma Breightling search was going and follow up on Holdsworth’s friends, Stevie returning to Julian Holdsworth. If they were in an old movie, she thought as she stepped back into the interview room, the interrogatory spotlight would be dimmed, the swinging bulb now stilled.
Once he’d learned he was no longer under arrest, Holdsworth accepted her profuse apologies with as much alacrity as he did the free lunch she sent out for.
‘It was Miranda’s idea, that little scam in the Mall,’ he said through a mouthful of lamb kebab. Stevie’s serving still lay wrapped on the table in front of her. She picked away at the paper. If worry for Emma had diminished her appetite, revulsion at the sight of the gravy dripping from the side of Holdsworth’s butter yellow moustache killed it altogether.
‘To tell you the truth I’m glad you guys put a stop to it before too much harm was done,’ Holdsworth said, eager it seemed to restore some lost points.
Stevie thought back to the photo of the muslin-clad Bianca Webster and bit her lip. From where she stood, Bianca’s modelling session had kick-started the events that had ultimately led to her death.
‘I’ve never known such a greedy bitch as Miranda,’ Holdsworth went on. ‘Want, want, want, more, more, more.’ He drained his coffee and held out the cup, raised eyebrows indicating he’d like another.
Stevie took the cup and handed it to a uniformed constable passing by the open door and returned to her seat. She decided to capitalise on the distance Holdsworth seemed to want to put between himself and Miranda Breightling. Clasping her hands on the table in front of her she affected a tone of gossippy interest. ‘What about Miranda’s husband, Christopher?’
Julian Holdsworth finished chewing his kebab and dabbed at his mouth with the corner of a paper serviette, leaving small traces of gravy on his moustache. He licked his fingers and leaned conspiratorially towards her. With the metaphorical spotlight no longer shining in his eyes, she could see he was enjoying the drama.
‘Quite a bit older than she is, ten, fifteen years maybe. He’s a plastic surgeon, but dabbles in cosmetic surgery on the side—probably experiments on his wife, I mean have you seen her...’ he circled his hands around his chest area. ‘I think he used to be a bit of a philanthropist, one of those surgeons who was always flitting off to war zones to treat the unfortunate, correct deformities, patch up landmine victims—you know, the saintly type. His good deeds died somewhat of a death when he married Miranda—then the cosmetic side of things began to take over.’
‘More money in cosmetic surgery I suppose,’ Stevie commented, remembering Emma saying something similar. It was, after all, a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you were rich. ‘Do you think they might be having financial difficulties?’
‘You’d have to ask the accountant that, I wouldn’t know. She can be a bit slow settling her invoices, but that’s generally the way these days, isn’t it?’
‘Her accountant—would that be Aidan Stoppard?’
‘Yup.’
‘What do you know of him?’
‘Not much. He and Miranda were at school together, some high school or other on the wrong side of town. That’s part of Miranda’s problem, a huge chip on the shoulder. She told me once, after one bottle of bubbly too many, that when she first left school and started making new friends, she’d tell taxi drivers in a big loud voice to take her to an address in Claremont. Once she’d left the friends behind, she’d get the taxi to drop her off at a bus stop so she could bus it home to the outer suburbs with no one the wiser.’
‘A social climber.’
‘You can say that again, it’s obvious she only married Christopher for his money and social position. And he’s still besotted with her, I can’t see why, the silly bugger. He’s no dumb arse; he has to see through her—I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.’
‘And what do you think of Aidan Stoppard?’ she asked.
Holdsworth shrugged. ‘Okay, I suppose.’
‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Do you know him well?’
‘Not really, only in passing. Enough to say hi when he drops in at the agency, sometimes work talk. Why the interest?’
‘With Emma missing, everything about the family and the agency is of interest.’ She explained the minimal details of the circumstances surrounding Bianca’s death, the paedophile ring that had somehow acquired copies of his photos, and why they had suspected him of supplying them.
He rubbed his moustache. ‘You think someone deliberately singled me out for this?’
‘Yes, someone who didn’t know you were a homosexual, I suspect.’
‘I told you I don’t advertise.’
‘But you do have a very predictable routine at the cafe.’ Stevie allowed a slight smile, which Holdsworth returned somewhat sheepishly.
‘I was trying to shake the gambling habit,’ he said. ‘I think maybe I have now, but I wish it hadn’t had to be like this.’