‘The assailant,’ said Ross, who sounded as tense as Quill felt, almost to the point of anger, ‘also waited until the night before we were due to interview Tunstall again. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.’
‘Who, apart from Lofthouse and the four of us, knew we were going to talk to him again?’
‘Tunstall himself might have talked,’ said Costain. Quill thought he was looking well frazzled, as if sleep was eluding him more than the others, even.
‘Or,’ said Sefton, ‘the Ripper might have supernatural means of learning about this stuff.’
‘Has anyone got anything new about anything?’ Quill asked.
‘This morning,’ said Ross, ‘I heard back from Photographic Intelligence. As I expected, the images from the bar weren’t good enough for their software to do facial recognition.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Quill. He went to the Ops Board and pointed at it. ‘There is, as I have said before, only what’s up there on that board. It is where the only salvation lies for such as us. Let us think. What could we add to it?’ Already, the brothel business card had been attached to the corkboard with the number written beside it and an association line attaching it to Spatley. The card itself had revealed no clear fingerprints except Spatley’s, but now they were at least sure that he’d handled it.
‘But then he lost it,’ said Ross, ‘and that didn’t worry him too much. Which means it’s probably not a clue to him being involved in some sort of scandal.’
Quill frowned. ‘Why do you say it didn’t worry him?’
‘As owner of that office, he could have locked the door, moved furniture about, found it again. It seems as if it meant more to the person doing the searching than it did to Spatley.’
‘It’s time we found out what the connection is, why someone might have wanted to search Spatley’s offices for that card. You two — ’ Quill indicated Costain and Ross — ‘take a trip to Soho and put eyeballs on the target.’
* * *
Costain had always found Soho’s insistence that it was still naughty, almost because it had to be for the tourists, charming. It was actually calming to be back here. The sex-shop end of the business moving into the daylight across the way on Oxford Street had really taken the oomph out of the place, which now said gay and proud more than it said furtive. There was only one remaining peep show, and its signs sighed with the idea that this was the art of a lost age, like a freak show or a circus. Presumably because the area was still a popular brand, there were still over a dozen prostitutes working in walk-ups, stairwells with small advertising of their purpose that often seemed to lead to flats above independent television production companies (and there was an example of how rent levels created strange bedfellows). He assumed that meetings about new drama series were regularly interrupted by faked cries of encouragement. The TV people probably liked that. There was still a handful of men who made a living hawking to likely customers on the street and walking them to the stairwells. The prostitutes discouraged this parasitic trade. They preferred to have tips given to their ‘maids’, matronly figures who were, in effect, their PAs and lived in. There was a whole other industry of people who pretended to be prostitutes but were in fact thieves, and brothels that were actually high-priced drinking establishments which one was encouraged not to leave. There were also three or four genuine, surprisingly large, brothels in the area, including this one on Berwick Street, across from which Costain and Ross now sat, drinking coffee on a street-side table in the sunshine. The coffee was probably a bad idea. She looked as on edge as he felt. They had watched as a number of men had approached a completely nondescript door, had talked into an intercom and been welcomed up. Having established that the place was still working, in a while they’d take a wander around the map and work out back exits and boltholes.
‘You’re right at home here, aren’t you?’ Ross said to him.
He turned to look at her. They’d hardly talked on the way over. She was probably wondering if he’d meant what he’d said about helping her get her dad out of Hell rather than taking the Bridge of Spikes to save himself. He’d stared into the night worrying about that question himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he looked at her, the more he felt that, once again, he’d done the right thing; this time at least, the right thing felt good. ‘I guess.’
‘It reminds me of Whitechapel.’
‘Does it?’
‘I mean, all those dead women. Except here it’s all kept behind closed doors. How many container-loads of Belarusian teenagers do you reckon get decanted here every week?’
On impulse, he reached out and took her hand in his. She stiffened, but let him. ‘I meant what I said about your dad.’ He wanted her to ask about that third date. Perhaps it would, by default, be tomorrow, the night of the auction. Or perhaps that was putting too many stressful concepts together for Ross. He wasn’t sure she’d even recognize what ‘third date’ tended to mean in modern dating culture. She watched TV, didn’t she? He found it odd, distantly, that he was so attracted to someone who’d reminded him so fiercely of his glimpse of Hell. Or maybe he liked the idea of being with someone who cared enough to keep him on the straight and narrow.
‘I know you did.’ He wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not.
‘We should talk about what we’re going to do about the auction.’
‘Yeah.’
He decided he was going to risk it. Just to see her reaction. ‘You could call it our third date.’
She stopped what she was going to say, actually a little flustered, which was deeply pleasing. ‘Technically,’ she said.
TWELVE
The following evening, Sarah Quill watched her husband silently drink his coffee at the kitchen table. She never liked it when he was silent. ‘So they didn’t find an easy exit to the brothel?’
‘Nah, but I’m not ready for Christmas presents in the middle of summer. We spent the day trying to find the woman from the Ripper attack on the Soviet bar and her male friend, but we don’t really have enough to go on.’
‘What are you going to do next?’
‘Prepare to send Costain and Sefton in. Continue to pursue an interview with Vincent. Continue to search the victims’ histories for some connection.’
‘The announcement of the result of the postal ballot of Police Federation members is tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘If they have decided to take industrial action, coppers coming out illegally, won’t it all contribute to how bad London is feeling right now?’
‘And therefore to this ostentation malarkey. The thought had occurred to me. London will have been told it can do what it likes. And so it will. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen.’
‘The driver, Tunstall — you think he must have been in on it?’
‘It looks that way. We looked over Spatley’s two other offices, his constituency one and the one in the House, and didn’t find anything there. We spoke to the chief whip, and he told us that, if anything, Spatley had been focusing himself, cutting down on constituency work.’
‘To prepare for some sort of fight.’
‘Yes, but in politics you’d normally need to gather allies, put a gang together — that was the feeling I got from every civil service bod we talked to. Spatley, paranoid as he was, hadn’t told anyone what he was about to do, as far as we can tell. We got into the business of Spatley’s phone with SO15, Counter-Terrorism Command. They have serious hackers, and they took his mobile apart. There was nothing.’