Tennison switched on the tape recorder and sat down. She gestured to a chair, but instead Otley perched himself on the corner of her desk. She noticed he hadn’t shaved this morning, and it crossed her mind that he might be drinking again.
Clicks, mike noises, rustlings, and then Jessica Smithy’s voice came out of the twin speakers.
“I’m going to put this on-is that okay? Only I don’t have shorthand. This always makes my life easier.”
Cups and saucers rattling, Muzak playing, background noise of traffic. Cafe? Restaurant? Wine bar?
“Is there any other place I can contact you? I called the advice centre…”
“I told you not to do that! I said I would contact you!”
Tennison looked at Otley, who nodded. Connie.
“We got to first agree on what you will pay me.”
“I can’t say we will pay you this or that amount of thousands, without first having at least a bit of information.”
“I’ll take it elsewhere…”
Tennison tightened her lips in annoyance as Dalton and Haskons came in. She jabbed the STOP button and glared at Dalton. “You’re late. We’ve got tapes of Colin Jenkins.” On her feet now, she jerked her thumb to Halliday’s wall, and lowered her voice. “This is to stay with us until I say otherwise. This woman said that Connie was selling his story-that he was going to name a high-ranking police officer.”
Deliberately not looking at Dalton when she said this, nevertheless she saw his reaction to it in the droop of his eyelids, the slight stiffening of his jaw.
Tennison went on, “And two, a Member of Parliament.” She gave each of them a searching look. “If a name comes up it stays with us, understood? Because we could be opening up a big can of worms, and we will need hard evidence to back it up.”
The three officers pulled their chairs forward as Tennison restarted the tape.
Dalton was leaning forward, wearing a frown of concentration. “Sorry I’m late, but when did this come up? Who brought this in?”
Tennison shushed him. Dalton dropped his head, staring down at his injured hand, now heavily bandaged and secured with tape.
The Muzak and traffic noises seemed worse than before. They had to strain to distinguish the voices from the irritating background clutter.
“Just telling me that you have important names isn’t good enough. I mean, what if this is all a lie? Just to get money out of my paper?”
“I told you I had names-very important people, high up people. An MP, a police officer, a…”
The three men flicked glances at one another.
“I have to go to my editor, Connie. I have to sell him the story too, you know.”
“I want big money.” Tennison recalled the sweet, shy smile in the video. But this was the hard-faced Connie, the calculating hustler out for everything he could get. “… Because if they found out I was doing this, then they’d kill me. There’s a guy called Jimmy Jackson, he’s real crazy.”
Tennison clenched her fist, looking around triumphantly. Bingo-first name! She craned forward with the others.
“I want at least twenty thousand quid…”
The rest was drowned out in scuffling footsteps, a door opening, the sound of traffic suddenly swelling.
Impatiently, Tennison looked at her watch. From her desk drawer she took out a small Panasonic tape recorder, slipped it into the pocket of her dark-blue jacket, and stood up.
“Get the dialogue transcribed and see if the tech boys can clear off the background noise,” she instructed Haskons. “We want names, and as fast as possible.”
She gave Otley the nod to follow her outside. In the corridor she paced, turned, paced again, on a real high. At last they were getting somewhere. It was the best buzz she ever got, when the pieces started coming together. Beat an orgasm hollow.
She stabbed her finger in Otley’s chest. “Get someone to keep tabs on Jackson. If he knew about those tapes, he wasn’t looking for Connie because of any money.”
Otley went off at the double. Dalton came out. “I had to go back in for the blood tests,” he said with an apologetic shrug, and tapped his bandaged hand.
Tennison faced him. “Yes, I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound off at you in there.” She turned to go.
“I’ll get the results this week. In the meantime I just have to wait,” Dalton continued as she walked off. “… Can I sit in on the Jessica Smithy interview?”
Tennison paused and looked back at him. Her name hadn’t been mentioned in there, and yet Dalton knew. He’d asked who brought the tape in, and all the time he knew that too.
What she knew was that somebody was playing silly buggers, for sure. She nodded. Dalton trailed after her.
“I had two meetings with him. We met once on the tenth in Mr. Dickies at Covent Garden, and on the fourteenth in the Karaoke K bar.”
“How did he first contact you?”
“He called the office.”
“But how did he know to get to you, specifically?”
“Maybe he reads my column.”
“So-if I called your office at the paper and said I had a hot story, you would drop everything and meet me in the middle of Covent Garden?”
“You get to have a feel for a story, intuition.”
“And you had a feel for this one?”
“I just don’t understand your attitude.” Jessica Smithy puffed on her cigarette, eyes rolling at the ceiling. She said tartly, “Unless you don’t want an investigation into Colin Jenkins’s death.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Tennison said, though she had a pretty good idea.
“But then-if what Connie told me is true, it would make sense.”
“What exactly did he tell you?”
“That one of his clients is a high-ranking officer within the Metropolitan Police Force.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. That is why I wanted to talk to you. Being a woman… if there was a cover-up.” Jessica Smithy stared hard at Dalton, his crime being that he was the only male present, and possibly a pederast into the bargain.
“You had two sessions only with Connie, correct? Just two, and both of them taped?”
Jessica Smithy blew a gust of smoke out in a long sigh. “Yes!”
“Did you make any further tapes?”
“No, I did not,” she stated, enunciating each word separately.
Haskons came in and leaned over to whisper in Tennison’s ear. She listened, nodding, and scribbled on a notepad, tore it off and passed it to him. He went out. Watching every detail of this interaction with her restless, darting eyes, Jessica Smithy smoked furiously. Her long pale cheeks were hollowed as she sucked in, held it, suddenly let go.
Tennison wafted the air. “Have you tried the patches?”
“What?”
“To give up smoking.” Jessica Smithy flicked ash, ignoring her. “You had only two meetings with Colin Jenkins…” She carried on ignoring her. “And on both these occasions you recorded the entire conversation between you and Colin Jenkins?”
“Yes.” Token answer, bored to tears.
Tennison plowed steadily, resolutely on. “You said that Colin Jenkins first contacted you directly at your office. How did you get in touch with him the second time?”
“I left a message for him at an advice centre. In fact I even went there, it’s the one in Soho, and I knew it was a big hangout-”
“What date?” Tennison cut in.
“-for rent boys. It would have been the twelfth of this month at three-fifteen P.M., not A.M.”
“When you went to the advice centre did you interview any other boy?”
“This is bloody umbelievable,” Jessica Smithy snorted, stubbing out her cigarette in a cloud of ash. “No, I did not. I didn’t interview anybody.”
“Did you speak to anybody?”
“Edward Parker-Jones. He runs the centre.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.” She dusted her fingertips. “I just asked if he knew where I could contact Colin Jenkins.”