“Then I’ll put a rocket up them, you watch,” snapped Land. “They’ll finish the job by lunchtime if I threaten to withdraw their pay.” He stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
You can’t say I didn’t try, Uncle Arthur, she thought. Checking her watch, she saw that it was nine-fifteen a.m. They had less than eight hours to solve the mystery of Oswald’s death before Oskar Kasavian presented the unit for public ridicule and closure.
35
Janice had marked the page in Lilith’s diary with a Post-it note. Straphanging in the tube on her way through the Piccadilly line, she reread the entries, virtually the only ones Lilith had bothered to make: a series of appointments over the last three months at a Knightsbridge beauty salon, including several training sessions in deportment. The entries had immediately struck her as being incongruous. Here was a girl who had mutilated her arm to please her new boyfriend, who was taking drugs and behaving irrationally. Why would she attend the kind of expensive salon usually frequented by wealthy middle-aged women? Everyone has their dreams, she thought, no matter how disillusioning they may turn out to be.
As she ventured in through the doors of The Temple, at least three pairs of women studied her before turning their heads and whispering to one another. Longbright realised it was because she was wearing a standard-issue black padded police jacket and what appeared to be men’s boots, the continuing inclement weather having finally forced her to abandon her usual array of exotic outfits.
As Longbright passed through, she had the all-too-familiar feeling of being looked down upon, because she was a woman in a man’s job, because she had a job at all, because she was large and unusual. It took extra effort to hold her head up and march through these pampered, supine women who were more like pets than adults.
The Temple was a hip take on the ladies’ salons of the 1950s, but now the red flock wallpaper patterns were finished in shocking retro pinks and crimsons, and for the price of a full day’s body treatment you could once have bought a car in Knightsbridge. On the salon’s faux-marbled wall was a photograph of a man in sunglasses with a bouffant hair stack, a sharkskin suit and a narrow black tie. Beneath it ran a caption: Monsieur Alphonse attending the Cannes Film Festival 2006. She understood now; it was a postmodern joke, the kitsch fifties setup that aped a dozen British films from the period, usually starring Peter Sellers or Norman Wisdom-the archetypal gangster-turned-hairdresser, all phony French accent and camp mannerisms. How knowing, how droll, his customers would think as they handed over their gold cards.
“I would like an appointment with Monsieur Alphonse,” she told the receptionist, a lacquered raptor who had been exfoliated and plucked to a life-threatening degree. She flicked through her suede-edged address book with a crimson claw, avoiding Longbright’s gaze. “Let’s see, we could fit you in at the beginning of March. Are you here for our extreme skin-care rehabilitation program?”
“No, I’m not,” said Longbright, affronted. “I always wear a heavy foundation. I’d like to see Monsieur Alphonse right now.”
The receptionist performed a double-take that nearly dislodged her from her perch. “Monsieur Alphonse can’t possibly take short-notice appointments. I’m afraid such a request is completely out of the question.”
Longbright flicked her badge onto the counter and gave her a hard smile. “Oh, it’s not a request.”
Monsieur Alphonse was, to her surprise, not a South London wide boy with a dodgy Parisian accent, but a Chelsea footballer from the mid-nineties called Darren Spender who had stumbled upon a way of extending his brief claim to fame. According to the tabloids, running The Temple was his way of making a fortune while searching for his next ex-wife, although Longbright could tell from his patronising attitude to women that, like so many men of rudimentary maturity, he had bypassed monogamy in favour of indefinitely sustained states of sexual tension. Unlike his customers, he preferred nothing to be cut-and-dried. As a consequence, he had been photographed leaving bars with a wide variety of pneumatically enhanced exotic dancers in the back pages of Heat magazine, as well as padding out On-the-Town features in brick-thick monthly glossies written by and for the brick-thick. None of this celebrity exposure cut the mustard with Longbright, who regarded him as one would a spider in the bath.
“It’s not good for business having the police come in here,” said Spender, inviting her to sit and twinkling moodily at her. “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Longbright, “at least, not since that rubbish penalty you took against Aston Villa. Know this girl?”
If Spender was surprised by Lilith’s picture, he betrayed no sign of it. “I wouldn’t have any idea,” he said. “We have a high turnover of clients, as you can imagine. I don’t deal with them all personally, you know. This is a business.”
Your name is in her diary for three of the five appointments, so I assumed you were acquainted.“
“There’s a sliding scale for my second-, third- and fourth-level assistants.”
“Her name was Lilith Starr, and I’m using the past tense because she’s dead.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” He didn’t miss a beat. “How can I help?”
“One of the things we have to do in a situation like this is establish her movements during her final days. She came to see you forty-eight hours before she died, hence my need for this visit. Lilith lived in a squat in Camden Town. What does it cost to cut someone’s hair?”
“It depends on which stylist the client books. Let me call someone.” Using an old-fashioned desk intercom, he rang his outside office. “Can you get Sonya in here?”
A tall blonde in her mid-thirties, dressed in an iridescent pink trouser suit and heels, entered and seated herself beside Spender. Longbright passed her the photograph and waited for a response.
“How much do you charge for a consultation, Mr. Spender?” asked Longbright.
“My personal rate starts at five hundred pounds an hour.”
“I remember this girl,” said Sonya, tapping the picture.
Longbright turned her attention to the Barbie woman. “How much did Lilith pay for your services?”
Sonya attempted to show that she was analysing the question, but the effect merely looked guarded and secretive. “I believe we gave her a very healthy discount rate,” she said finally.
“I don’t understand. Why would you do that? You’re a beautician, not a philanthropist.”
Sonya gave a quick, insincere smile. “She was getting a full makeover. Skin care, dietary control, hair, manicure, body-wrapping, makeup, deportment, speech therapy, one of our best tailored lifestyle packages. She wanted to shed her origins. I remember when she first came in with one of our New Talent flyers. One glance at her told me she couldn’t afford us, but it also told me that she had the look.”
“What look?”
“Lilith had almost everything it takes to be a great model except height, and that’s only important if you’re doing catwalk work. Anyone can be pretty these days. She had something more elusive and mysterious, a quality that set her apart. A touch of the street. You invest money in girls like these and they repay you when they start to get press coverage. We make the money back in sponsorship contra-deals alone.”
“We’re about to launch a talent agency and our own line of cosmetics,” Spender explained. “This is the period when we need to make a lot of friends, some of whom already have high profiles, others who are just starting out.”
“I wouldn’t normally have picked someone quite so raw,” said Sonya, “but sometimes you have to take chances.”