Looking Good Dead

28

Grace buckled himself in tightly, told Branson to do the same, then floored the Alfa Romeo’s accelerator, driving as fast as he dared, weaving in and out of the traffic, horn blaring, flashing his headlights, wishing he was in a marked car.

As he crept over the line of his third red light in a row, all Grace could think was, If I hit anything, anything at all, I might as well start flat hunting in Newcastle.

The address Bella had given him was in a parade of shops in the street that ran south from Hove station. Grace screamed into a tight left-hander, passing a busy car wash on the right, then another tight left-hander, cutting dangerously across the bow of a taxi exiting from the station.

He saw a woman dressed in a trouser suit emerging hurriedly from the door between a bathroom tiling shop and a newsagent’s. She was about thirty, with a good figure, spiky red hair and a plain face with too much make-up caked on. She was carrying a large leather portfolio case.

Before the wheels of the Alfa had stopped turning, Grace was out of the car, running across the road, calling out to her: ‘Claire?’

She turned, too startled to deny who she was.

He flashed his warrant card at her. ‘Bit early to be knocking off for the day, isn’t it?’

Her eyes darted furtively to the right then left, as if she was looking for an escape route. ‘I… I was just – nipping out to get a sandwich.’ She spoke in a coarse east London accent.

‘We were talking on the phone a few minutes ago – I think we got cut off.’

‘Oh,’ she said evasively. ‘We were?’

‘Yeah, I thought it might be easier to nip round – you know what the phones are like…’

She watched his face warily, no hint of a smile.

‘Mind if we pop into your office and have a chat?’ Grace asked, watching Branson out of the corner of his eye walking across the road to join them.

Now she looked panic-stricken. ‘Well… I – I think I need to speak to my business partner.’

‘I’ll give you a choice,’ Grace said. ‘We can either do this the nice way or the nasty way. The nice way is we go to your office now, have a cup of tea and a cosy chat. The nasty way is I stay here with you while my partner goes off to get a search warrant, and he’ll come back with six police officers, who’ll take your office apart, floorboard by fucking floorboard.’

Grace saw the panic in her eyes turn to fear.

‘What exactly is all this about, officer?’

‘You mean apart from the fact I don’t like people hanging up on me?’

She blushed, not knowing what to say. A bus rumbled past, engine straining. Grace waited a moment. Then he said, ‘I’ll tell you exactly what it’s about. Janie Stretton is dead.’

The woman’s hand flew to her mouth in shock. ‘Janie?’

Grace sensed it was time to apply pressure. ‘On Tuesday night she was cut to ribbons by a maniac, stabbed to death and butchered. You’ve seen the news about the headless torso found in Peacehaven on Wednesday?’

All the blood was draining from the woman’s face, leaving her make-up looking even more vivid. She nodded, her fingertips toying with her lips.

‘Well, we’ve found out today that it’s Janie Stretton. OK to have that chat now?’

The office of BCE-247 Ltd was a second-floor room overlooking the street with a small kitchenette leading off. Apart from the outlay for a couple of gallons of a lurid shade of purple paint, which covered every wall and clashed with the pea-soup-coloured carpet, it did not look to Grace as if any effort had been made with the place for the purposes of appearances.

There were three plain, old wooden desks, three clapped-out-looking executive-style swivel chairs, four tall grey metal filing cabinets. It all looked as if it had been bought as a job lot from a second-hand office supplies store. Additionally there was a cheap-looking CD player and an equally cheap-looking television set, switched off. In contrast, on each desk were up-to-date computers and modern phones. One was ringing now, but Claire ignored it. She seemed in shock.

Branson and Grace sat in two fake black-leather armchairs in front of the woman’s desk, each nursing a mug of tea. Grace had his notebook out but he was watching her eyes really closely.

‘So your full name is?’

He saw her eyes swivel to the left. To the memory side of her brain.

‘Claire Porter,’ she said.

Grace wrote it down. ‘And this is your company?’

‘Mine and my partner’s.’

‘And his name?’

Again her eyes swivelled to the left. It was unlikely she was lying about either her name or her business partner’s, so the movement of her eyes to the memory side of her brain told him this was where her eyes would go each time she told the truth. Which meant if they went to the opposite side, she would be lying.

‘Barry Mason.’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘BCE-247 Ltd,’ he said. ‘Barry and Claire Enterprises?’

She shook her head. ‘No, but close.’

Balancing the notebook on his knees, he held out his arms expansively. ‘So, would you like to tell us?’

He watched her eyes swivel furiously to the right. Construct mode. She was trying to think of a convincing lie.

Then suddenly she buried her face in her hands. ‘Oh fuck, I can’t believe it. Janie. She was such a nice girl; I really liked her.’

‘You left a message on her home phone at half-past four in the afternoon on Wednesday. You said’ – he paused to read from his notebook – ‘“I have something for you. Give me a call please.”’ He paused. ‘What was that about?’

She looked up, and again her eyes moved to the right and she appeared agitated.

Branson cut in, gentle, playing the classic soft man to Grace’s hard. ‘Claire, you might as well tell us. If you’ve got anything to hide, it will look much better for you if you tell us the truth.’

The words seemed to hit home. Her eyes raced around as if running for cover. ‘God, Barry’ll kill me. It stands for Barry and Claire Escorts Twenty-Four Seven. OK?’

Grace sat for some moments in stunned silence. ‘Janie Stretton was an escort? A hooker?’

Very defensive suddenly, Claire said, ‘We provide escorts for single men – and women. People in need of a date for a night out, that sort of thing. Not hookers.’

Grace noticed her eyes were still moving strongly to the right; they seemed to be trying to burrow their way as far to the right as they could get.

‘All innocent?’ Grace said.

She shrugged. ‘For us, yes.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Claire, I’ve heard it all before, OK? If the client wants to make a private arrangement with the young lady, that’s not your problem, right?’

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘I think I should call my solicitor.’

‘I’m not interested in busting your squalid little business,’ Grace said. ‘Call your solicitor and then I will bust you, just for the hell of it, I’ll bloody take you apart. I want to find Janie’s killer; that’s all I’m interested in. Help me with that and I won’t touch you. Do we understand each other?’

She grimaced. Then finally she nodded.

‘How much do you charge your punters?’

‘Sixty quid an hour.’

‘And how much do you get of that?’

‘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.