‘Forty per cent.’
‘The girls keep the rest and any extras?’
‘They keep their tips,’ she said defensively.
‘Right. Who was she with on Tuesday night?’
She turned to her computer and tapped the keyboard. After some moments she said, ‘Anton.’
‘Anton? Anton who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know the names of your punters?’
‘Only if they want to tell me.’
‘And how many of them tell you?’
‘Quite a few. But I don’t know if their names are real or not.’
Grace found himself getting increasingly angry. ‘These girls sign up with you and you send them out on dates with single men – on which you get a fat commission – and you don’t even bother to find out their bloody names?’
There was another silence. ‘We always check on the girls, on a first date. We phone them after ten minutes. We have some code words; if they’re not happy, then we have security we can send over to help them. This was her fourth date with Anton. I wasn’t worried – I mean I didn’t feel I had any reason to be worried.’
‘It didn’t bother you that she was a young, innocent law student?’
‘We’ve lots of students on our books. They find it a good way to supplement their grants. Thanks to Tony Blair, most students leave uni with debts it will take them years to pay off. Doing escort work gives them an alternative. I like to feel we are doing our bit to help them.’
‘Well of course,’ Grace said, his voice corrosive with sarcasm. ‘I mean, all that cash coming in… all your altruism, and her private arrangements with Anton the butcher none of your concern.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking, then he asked, ‘How many girls do you have on your books?’
‘About thirty. And ten guys.’
‘You have pictures?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me see Janie’s.’
She went to a filing cabinet, retrieved a folder, opened it, took out a photograph in cellophane, then handed it to Grace.
It wasn’t like any of the photographs he had seen in her father’s house or in her flat. This was a wholly different Janie Stretton, a Janie of the night.
She was lying seductively on a leopard-skin rug, dressed in the briefest of leather hot pants, a black lace blouse unbuttoned to the navel, with her breasts all but completely exposed.
Grace handed it to Branson. ‘Just escorts,’ he said to the woman sarcastically. ‘Women companions for social functions, that sort of thing?’
‘Yeah, that sort of thing.’
‘Claire, I didn’t just ride into town on the tailgate of a bloody truck, OK? She was on the game, wasn’t she?’
‘If she was, it was without our knowledge.’
‘Where do you advertise?’
‘Magazines, newsagents, on the internet.’
Grace nodded. ‘And where do you get most of your clients from?’
‘It varies. We get a lot from word of mouth.’
‘And which magazines?’
Claire hesitated. ‘Contact magazines, tourist ones, the local paper, one or two speciality mags.’
‘Speciality?’
After some more moments of hesitation she said, ‘Fetishes, mainly. People who are into rubber. Bondage. Stuff.’
‘Stuff?’ Grace questioned.
She shrugged.
‘So do we have any way of finding out how this Anton first got hold of your number?’
She peered in the folder and pulled out an index card. ‘May sixth. Anton. I wrote down, “Strong European accent”. He said he’d seen the advert in’ – she squinted as if trying to read her own writing – ‘the Argus.’
The local newspaper.
The phone rang again. She ignored it and continued squinting as if trying to decipher more notes. ‘He wanted to see some picture of the girls, so I directed him to the website. Then he rang back about half an hour later, saying he’d like a date with Janie. I have his number!’
Grace sat up and saw Branson’s instant reaction also. ‘You do?’
‘I always take a call-back number for our clients. It puts them on guard.’
‘Let me have it, please.’
He wrote it down as she read it out, then immediately dialled it on his mobile phone. Instantly he got the unobtainable signal. ‘Shit.’
‘Is there anything else at all you could tell us about this Anton?’
‘I wish I could. Do you… think – that – that he might have been the one who…?’
‘If he wasn’t her killer, he must have been one of the last people to see her. Do your girls ring in after their date’s finished?’
‘Sometimes, depends how late it is.’
‘She didn’t ring you on Tuesday night after her date with Anton?’
‘No.’
‘And you were ringing her about another date on Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at her notes. ‘Another gentleman. Do you need his name and number?’
Grace nodded. ‘We’ll check it out.’
‘You’ll be discreet?’
‘I’ll put my most discreet man on to it.’ Grace grinned to himself. He’d delegate his new recruit Norman Potting to the task. The DS was about as discreet as a bull on roller blades in a china store.
29
By four o’clock Tom’s office was starting to empty. Typical for a Friday, he thought. It was a fine, sunny afternoon in London, and the weather forecast was good. One by one his staff were clearing their desks, saying their cheery goodbyes and heading for the door.
He envied them their carefree weekends, and tried to remember when he’d last had a weekend in which he had really relaxed and not thought about work, not sat at his computer, poring over a spreadsheet of his outgoings and income, not peeked anxiously over Kellie’s shoulder as she’d sat at her keyboard on the sitting room floor.
His window was open a little despite the roar of the traffic and he felt the air, balmy and warm. Maybe this weekend he would switch off a little, as much as the dark cloud of that damned CD would allow. It was good news that Kellie had a job. The money wasn’t great, but at least it would cover some of her spending extravaganzas – just as long as it did not encourage her to spend even more.
At four fifteen he decided, To hell with it. If he left now he might just make the next fast train, the 16.36, which would get him home comfortably in time for the barbecue he’d planned with Kellie, using the monster new piece of kit she had bought.
He shook his head at the thought of the barbecue. Insane. Yet he was curious to know what it looked like; curious to know how any barbecue could cost north of five hundred pounds.
In a fit of extravagance, minor compared to Kellie’s, he took a cab instead of the bus to Victoria station, arriving with just minutes to spare. He grabbed an Evening Standard from a vendor, and without bothering to wait for his change sprinted for the platform, clambering aboard the train just seconds before the wheels began to turn.
Out of sheer determination, he struggled down the aisle of every single one of the train’s crowded carriages, looking for the dickhead. But there was no sign of him. By the time he had finished, he had broken into a heavy sweat from the heat and from his exertion. He found one of the few empty seats, removed his laptop and his high-speed internet card from his bag, put the bag and his jacket up on the luggage rack, then sat down with his laptop on his knees and glanced at the front page of the newspaper.
Thirty Dead in Iraq Bomb Carnage.
He glanced through the article, about yet another suicide car bombing of police recruits, guiltily aware he had become almost numb to reports like these. There seemed to be so many, all the time. And he’d never really worked out where he stood on Iraq. He didn’t care for Bush or Blair and every successive outrage had made him increasingly doubtful the world was a safer place since the invasion. Sometimes when he popped his head around the bedroom doors of his sleeping children he stared at them with a guilty helplessness, knowing just how responsible he was for their safety, but in terms of the politics of the world into which he had brought them, he felt woefully inadequate.