A Rush of Blood

Twenty-two

Griff Montell looked at the forty-something woman in the chair opposite him, and tried to imagine her standing on a street corner, garish blond dye job, red shiny boots, bum-freezer jacket and short skirt maximising the legs that were still her best feature.

He failed, abysmally. Joanne Virtue’s hair was a lustrous brown, and he could tell that every visit to her salon of choice cost her plenty. Her suit had come, if not from Harvey Nichols, then from one of those designer sections on the first floor of John Lewis, where his sister did her clothes shopping. Her face was full of angles, from the sharpness of her chin to her dark, tick-shaped eyebrows, but the smile with which she had greeted them had been kind, and her eyes were expressive.

At that moment, they were expressing anger. ‘Let me get this right,’ she said, quietly, as if she did not want her voice to carry any further than the plush, velvet-draped reception room in which they were sitting, ‘you have come to my place of work to ask me about a part of my life that I’ve left behind me. Thank God we’ve got no clients here the now.’ Her accent was Scottish, but even the South African could tell that it had originated in Glasgow, not Edinburgh.

‘This is an urgent investigation, Miss Virtue,’ Alice Cowan retorted. ‘We’ve got a girl in trouble. We can do this interview down in our office if you’d prefer it.’

Instantly, the woman’s eyes turned icy cold. ‘You listen to me, kid,’ she whispered. ‘If you ever threaten me again, I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll call Neil McIlhenney. I hear he’s gone up in the world since I saw him last, so you’ll know who he is, for sure. “So what?” you might be thinking, he’s a nice guy. But he’s got another side that you wouldn’t want to see. There’s history between Neil and me. . not that kind, before you jump to the wrong conclusion. . and I’d only have to ask him the once to have you cut off at the fucking knees.’

Cowan looked at her colleague. ‘Griff. .’ she began, but he held up a hand.

‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I think we should listen to the lady. Miss Virtue, I apologise for disturbing you here, but it’s necessary. We have a kid in the Royal in her teens, still drugged out of her skull after twenty-four hours and unable to tell us what happened to her. However, we do know that it involved several men and that she was horizontal at the time. It may have been a domestic incident, but. .’

‘How old is she?’

‘Sixteen, maybe, possibly less. We know nothing about her, but we’re told she may be east European. She’s been fed GHB and booze, probably over a period.’

Joanne Virtue’s strong features twisted into a grimace. ‘Then whoever did it needs sorting out. You want my guess, she’s been brought here, either with the promise of a good job, or she’s just been kidnapped, and she was being broken in.’

‘Have you heard of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh?’ asked Cowan, seemingly chastened.

‘No, but I’ve been out of that life for a bit. For a short while, I managed a massage parlour, but I. .’ she paused, as if she was considering exactly what she had done ‘. . I made a complete break from what I’d been.’

‘Would it be worth us talking to the owner?’

‘The guy I worked for doesnae own it any more. The last thing I heard about that place was that he’d sold it: that he’d been pressured into selling it, even.’

‘Pressured by whom?’

‘By a Lithuanian guy; one of that lot runs it now. But the word was that a bloke called Tommy Zale was behind him.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Montell.

‘He owned pubs and the like. That wasnae his real name, it was something longer. There was a piece about him in the Saltire this morning. He was found dead yesterday morning; “no suspicious circumstances” according to your outfit. The Lithuanians have been taking over the massage parlour business in Edinburgh for years.’ She laughed, quietly, briefly. ‘Sorry, the public entertainment business, according to the Licensing Court. I never saw it in print anywhere, but they’re supposed tae control it all. If somebody’s been running girls into Edinburgh, then it’s either that lot, or they’ll be as keen as you are to find out who it is.’ She paused. ‘Where did you find this lass?’

‘She was brought into a surgery near Ocean Terminal.’

‘Mmm. There’s a massage parlour not far from that. If I were you, I’d be asking there about her.’