Jessica Smithy smiled, holding up her hands. “Hey, I’ll be there! I’ve been trying hard enough to get to you…”
Tennison slid behind the wheel.
“Thank you very much, Chief Inspector!”
Tennison said frostily, “It’s Detective Chief Inspector, Miss Smithy,” and slammed the door on her.
DI Ray Hebdon pushed through the black curtain, blinking in the light. “Nothing in the darkroom.” His expression sagged dejectedly at the sight of the thick albums, several piles of them, on the coffee table. “We got to go through every one of them?” he asked Brian Dalton.
“ ’Fraid so.” Dalton’s mouth twisted in his tanned face. “Sickens me. I don’t understand it-I mean, there’s thousands of them…”
“Of what?” Hebdon hoisted one, riffled through the pages.
“Poofters,” said Dalton, with repugnance.
Hebdon kept turning the pages, saying nothing.
The caretaker shuffled in from the passage leading to the studio. Tufts of white hair sprouted from under a greasy flat cap and his baggy cardigan almost reached his knees. The unlit stub of a cigarette was welded permanently into the corner of his mouth.
“You goin’ to be much longer? Only I wanna go out. I do the place next door. You want the keys?”
“Need you to stay, sorry,” Dalton said, though he didn’t sound it.
“Only the uvver blokes ’ad ’em.” The caretaker sniffed. “Larst night.”
Hebdon frowned at him. “Somebody was here last night?”
“Yers…” The caretaker nodded, waving his hands around in circles. “Took a whole load of stuff out. Police.”
Hebdon pushed past him to the phone.
Vera’s friend with the tight firm buttocks, Red, stood in the sitting room of Mark Lewis’s flat, smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder. He wore a silk kimono with purple dragons and fluffy high-heeled silver slippers. His eyebrows had been shaved off and redrawn with an artist’s flourish, and his lips were glossed a pale pink.
Head back, he blew a graceful plume of smoke into the perfumed air, watching Haskons rooting through the drawers of the gilt escritoire. From the bedroom came the sound of closet doors being opened and banged shut as Lillie conducted a thorough search.
“If I’d known I was having so many visitors I’d have waxed my legs,” Red mused, addressing no one in particular.
He swanned across to the long low Habitat sofa and dinked the cigarette in the frosted lead crystal ashtray. He sat down, crossed his smooth bare legs, and with a little sigh began filing his nails.
“You could help us,” Haskons said accusingly. Not yet eight-fifteen in the morning, and already he was frazzled, frustrated, and thoroughly pissed off. “Where’s his diary? His address book?” Red shrugged, shaping his thumbnail to a point. “What about his tax forms? VAT forms?”
“I don’t know, unless they took it all,” Red said placidly.
Haskons straightened up, flushed. “Who?”
“They said they were police, and that Mark was being held in custody. I mean”-his painted eyebrows rose in two perfect arcs-“there’s not a lot you can say to that. Nobody even asked me about him, you know.” He gave a little plaintive sigh. “… Connie, he was a sweet kid. Not all the time-he was quite an operator-but then, he had the equipment.”
Haskons raised his hand to Lillie, who had appeared from the bedroom, telling him to keep quiet.
“Connie…” Red said pensively, propping his chin on two fingers. “He wanted to be a film star. There’s a lot of famous stars that pay out to keep their past secret. That’s life. Whatever you do catches up on you.” He gazed down sadly at his feet. “Tasteless slippers, aren’t they?”
The day hadn’t started well, and by nine o’clock Tennison was in Halliday’s office, spitting mad. Commander Chiswick was there, his portly bulk framed in the window, neat as a bank manager in his blue and white striped shirt and pinstripe suit. Halliday, across the desk from Tennison, was in one of his twitchy moods. But he was determined not to be bulldozed by this harridan.
“Both Mark Lewis’s flat and studio cleaned out!” Tennison stormed. “And supposedly by police officers.”
“I’ll look into it,” Halliday said.
“I hope you will, because it stinks.”
“I said I will look into it. But we have to abide by the rules,” Halliday insisted, “we have to get the warrants issued.”
Tennison rapped her knuckles on his desk. “There isn’t a single piece of paper with his name left on it, let alone any of his clients’ names. What’s going on?”
Beneath the level of the desk, Halliday’s fingers dug deep into the leather armrests. His pale blue eyes bored into hers. “Chief Inspector, check your transcripts of Mark Lewis’s interview. He was allowed to make a phone call. Maybe he arranged for someone to clear his place out, and it had nothing to do with delays in issuing bloody search warrants!”
“Don’t go casting aspersions around-or they’ll come down on your head,” Chiswick boomed, his fleshy jowls quivering with indignation. “We are just as keen to get a result as you are!”
Tennison half-raised her hand in a gesture of apology. She was so fired up, she’d overstepped the mark. What with missing tapes, not-so-subtle warnings, and officers she didn’t altogether trust, it was easy to get paranoid around here. Or was she simply paranoid about being paranoid?
Chiswick loomed over her. “May I remind you that you inferred that an arrest would be imminent!” He had her on the defensive and was taking full advantage of it. “How much longer do you require four extra officers to assist your inquiries?”
That was rich, Tennison fumed inwardly, when she’d made no such request for extra manpower in the first place. It had been foisted upon her. However, she let it ride.
“I can’t put a time on it. You’ve seen those videos, there’re kids in them…” Tennison looked from one to the other. “I got a breakthrough today, from a journalist. I’ve not interviewed her yet, but she met the victim, taped Colin Jenkins for an exclusive. He was selling his story, and prepared to name his clients.” She checked the time. “In fact she should be here now.”
Silence. Both men seemed taken slightly off guard by this. Chiswick cleared his throat loudly.
“What’s the journalist’s name?”
“Jessica Smithy.”
He rubbed the side of his face, then gave a curt nod, indicating that she was free to go. Tennison went.
Halliday waited. He jumped up. “Don’t cast aspersions! Coming down on whose head?”
Chiswick rounded on him. “Who’s idea was it to bring her here! We’ve got a bloody loose cannon now, and we’re both going to be in a compromising position if it gets out.”
“I warned her off, all right?” Halliday said, low and angry. He pushed his chair aside and stalked over to the window, massaging the back of his neck. “But now there’s this journalist… we can’t tell her to back off.”
“I know what she said,” Chiswick snapped. He took a breath, trying to calm down and think straight. “So give her twenty-four hours. If she’s not charged Jackson, she’s off the case. Get Dalton on this journalist woman.”
Halliday stared at him for a moment. He returned to his desk, twitching, and picked up the phone and asked for the Squad Room.
There were three butts in the ashtray, ringed with lipstick. Jessica Smithy added a fourth, grinding it down with a vengeance. She looked at her watch, yet again, and let her arms flop down on the table.
“Am I going to be kept waiting much longer? She asked me to be here by nine o’clock. It’s already-”
“Chief Inspector Tennison is caught up right now,” DI Hall said, “but as soon as she’s free…”
He went back to gazing out of the window, at the tiny patch of blue sky he could just see between the buildings opposite, daydreaming about Lanzarote. Three weeks to go. Roll on.