Lost (38 page)

After a few seconds of clicking his teeth, he says, “Might need some readies.”

“If I catch you drinking I'l dril a hole in your head.”

The women peel their eyebrows off their hairlines.

“Maybe I should go with him,” suggests Roger.

“Fine. Remember what I said. Under no circumstances do you approach Gerry Brandt.”

Roger gives me a casual salute.

“Philippa, Margaret and Jean, I want you to ring the hospitals, clinics and doctors' surgeries. Make up a story. Say you're looking for a missing friend. Rachel and the Professor wil contact Kirsten's family and any former employers. She grew up in the West Country.”

“What are you going to do?” asks Joe.

“Gerry Brandt had a former girlfriend, a skinny thing with bleeding gums and blond streaks. I'm hoping she might know where he's hiding.” Hel 's Half Mile is a road behind Kings Cross Station where the curbs get crawled and prostitutes hunt in packs. Some of these girls are barely sixteen but there's no way of tel ing. Even without the scars and bruises, a year on the streets adds five years to the faces.

Very few prostitutes work the streets anymore because the police have chased them indoors. Now they work for escort agencies and massage parlors, or they move around fol owing the political conferences, trade shows and exhibitions. Become a prostitute and see the world!

The walk-up places are open doorways leading to upstairs flats with signs in the windows announcing BUSTY YOUNG MODEL or something similar. Most have a maid, usual y an older woman, who takes the money and a smal tip.

Apart from the passing trade, they advertise with cards in phone boxes or rely on the patron saint of the horny—the London cabbie.

Cruising the street slowly I try to recognize any of the girls. A pixie with a pageboy cut and a padded bra saunters over.

“You want to ask me something?”

“Yeah, what was on
Sesame Street
this morning?”

Her face flushes. “Piss off!”

“I'm looking for a particular girl. Her name is Theresa. She's about five foot six. Blond. Comes from Harrogate. And she has a tattoo on her shoulder of a butterfly.”

“What's this girl got that I ain't?”

“Boobs. Cut the crap. Have you seen her?”

“Nah.”

“OK, here's the deal. I got a fifty here. You walk down the street, knock on the doors and ask if any of the girls know this Theresa. You get me the right answer and you get the fifty.”

“Are you a copper?”

“No.” For once I'm tel ing the truth.

“Why you want her?”

“She won the bloody lottery. What does it matter to you?”

“I'l do it for a ton.”

“You get fifty. It's the easiest money you ever made.”

“You reckon! Some of these guys blow just looking at me.”

“Sure.”

I watch her leave. She doesn't even know how to walk like a woman yet. Maybe it's an occupational trait.

The streetlights are beginning to glow purple as they blink into life. I take a table at a delicatessen on the corner which is doing a roaring trade in takeout coffee and homemade soup served by Czech girls with heavy accents and tight tops. I'm old enough to be their grandfather but that doesn't make me feel as guilty as it should. One of them brings me coffee and a muffin that looks half-cooked inside.

The place is ful of pimps and working girls, counting the wages of sin. A couple of them regard me suspiciously, sitting stil and very straight like a pair of magistrates.

Pimps don't look the same in real life as they do in films. They're not snappy dressers in long leather coats and lots of gold jewelry. Mostly they're dealers and boyfriends who'd spread their own legs if anyone would pay for the privilege.

The pixie with the pageboy cut has come back. She eyes the large pot of soup steaming on a burner. I buy her a bowl. An older black girl is looking at us nervously through the window. She's dressed in a microskirt and lace-up boots. Her hair is twisted into bangs that run back from her forehead between paler strips of scalp.

“She says she knows Theresa.”

“What's her name?”

“Brittany.”

“Why won't she come inside?”

“Her pimp might be watching. He don't like her slacking. Where's my fifty?”

She reaches to snatch it out of my fingers. I pin her wrist to the table and turn it over, pul ing her sleeve up her arm. Her skin is pale and unblemished.

“I'm not using,” she sniffles.

“Good. Go home.”

“Yeah, sure—you should see where I live.”

Brittany talks to me outside. She has ants in her pants about something and can't stand stil . Her jaw works constantly on gum, punctuating sentences with a sucking noise.

“What's Theresa done?”

“Nothing, I just want to talk to her.”

Brittany glances down the street, trying to decide if she believes me. Eventual y, she surrenders to apathy and a twenty quid note.

“She lives in a tower block in Finsbury Park. She's got a kid now.”

“Is she stil on the game?”

“Only a few regulars.”

Fifteen minutes later I'm climbing to the fourteenth floor of a tower block because the lift is out of order. Various cooking smel s mingle in the stairwel , along with the noise from dueling TVs and domestic disputes.

Theresa must be expecting someone else because she opens the door with a flourish, wearing only a black teddy and bunny ears.

“Shit! Who are you?”

“The Big Bad Wolf.”

She looks past me into the hal way and then back at me. The penny drops. “Oh, no!”

Turning away from the door she wraps a dressing gown around her shoulders and I fol ow her inside. There are baby toys scattered on the living-room floor and a monitor hums on top of the TV. The bedroom door is closed.

“You remember me?”

“Yeah.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder and lights a cigarette.

“I'm looking for Gerry.”

“You were looking for him three years ago.”

“I'm very patient.”

She glances at a pineapple-shaped clock on the wal . “Hey, I got someone coming. He's my best customer. If he finds you here he'l never come back.”

“Married is he?”

“The best customers are.”

I push aside a colorful baby rug and take a seat on the sofa bed. “About Gerry.”

“I ain't seen him.”

“Maybe he's hiding in the bedroom.”

“Please don't wake the baby.”

She's quite a pretty-looking thing, except for her crooked nose and the junkie hol ows beneath her eyes.

“Gerry ran out on me three years ago. I thought he was probably dead until he turned up again during the summer with a suntan and lots of big-shot stories about owning a bar in Thailand.”

“A bar?”

“Yeah. He had a passport and a driver's license in the name of some other geezer. I figured he must have pinched it.”

“You remember the name?”

“Peter Brannigan.”

“Why did he come back?”

“Dunno. He said he had a big payday coming.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Three days ago—must have been Tuesday night.” She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. “He came busting in here, sweating and yel ing. He was scared. I ain't never seen anybody that scared. He looked like the devil himself was chasing him.”

That must have been after he crippled Ali. I remember how terrified he looked when he took off. He thought Aleksei had sent someone to kil him.

Theresa dabs at the lipstick in the corners of her mouth. “He wanted money. Said he had to get out of the country. He was crazy, I tel you. I let him stay but as soon as he fel asleep I got a knife. I put it right under here.” She points to her septum, pushing up her nostrils. “I told him to get out. If he comes back I'l kil him.”

“And that was Tuesday night.”

“Early hours of Wednesday.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Nope. And I don't care. He's a bloody nutcase.”

The packet of cigarettes is crushed in her hand. Glossy eyes slide over the sofa and the toys before resting on me. “I got something good going here. I don't need Grub, or Peter Brannigan or whoever else he cal s himself, to mess it up.”

Three hours ago it was midnight. The desk lamp in Joe's office casts a circular glow, harsh in the center and soft at the edges. My eyes are so ful of grit I can only look at the shadows.

I bought pizzas at nine and the coffee ran out at eleven. The rest of the volunteers have gone home except for Joe and Rachel, who are stil hard at work. A large corkboard in the waiting room is plastered with phone messages and notes. Nearby there are box files stacked five abreast beneath the window forming a makeshift shelf for leftover pizza and bottles of water.

Rachel is stil on the phone.

“Hel o, is that St. Catherine's? I'm sorry to cal so late. I'm looking for a friend of mine who has gone missing. Her name is Kirsten Fitzroy. She's thirty-three, with brown hair, green eyes and a birthmark on her neck.”

Rachel waits. “OK, she's not there now but she may have needed medical help in the past few weeks. You have a clinic. Is it possible you could check your files? Yes, I know it's late but it's very important.” She refuses to lose this battle. “She's actual y my sister. My parents are worried sick about her. We think she might have hurt herself . . .” Again she waits. “No record. OK. Thank you so much. I'm sorry to have troubled you.”

They have al worked so hard. Roger and Dicko took a magical mystery tour of London's underbel y, visiting pubs, il egal casinos and strip joints looking for Gerry. Meanwhile, Margaret proved to be a genius at getting passenger manifests out of airlines, ferry and train operators. So far we've established that Kirsten hasn't left the country on any regular transport service.

London's major hospitals and twenty-four-hour clinics have no record of a female shooting victim in the week after the ransom drop. Now we're ringing individual doctors and hospices.

We know more about Kirsten than we did six hours ago. She was born in Exeter in 1972, the daughter of a postman and a teaching assistant. Her two brothers stil live in Devon. In 1984 she won a scholarship to Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset. She excel ed in art and history. One of her sculptures was accepted in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. In her final year she left the school under a cloud, along with two other students. Drugs were mentioned but nothing went on file.

A year later Kirsten sat A levels and won a place to read art and history at Bristol University. After several false starts, she graduated with a first in 1995. That same year she was photographed at a polo match in Windsor by
Tatler
magazine with the son of a Saudi Minister. Then she seemed to disappear, surfacing again six years later as the manager of the employment agency.

“I spoke to a few people at Sotheby's,” says Rachel. “Kirsten was wel known among the dealers and salesroom staff. She always wore black to auctions and talked constantly on a cel phone.”

“She was bidding for someone else?”

“Four months ago she bid £170,000 for a Turner watercolor.”

“Who was the
real
buyer?”

“Sotheby's wouldn't say but faxed me a photograph of the painting. I've seen it hanging in my father's study.” Her eyes, unnatural y wide, flick back and forth between my face and Joe's. Her thoughts are moving at a terrible speed—making her whole body vibrate.

“I stil can't believe she could have done this. She loved Mickey.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Ask my father.”

“Wil he tel you the truth?”

“There's always a first time.”

Joe's arm twitches as he reaches for a bottle of water. “We're a long way behind. Kirsten's family and friends have been contacted. Some have been threatened. One of Kirsten's brothers was beaten senseless only an hour after he slammed the door on a man claiming to be a debt col ector.”

“Do you think her family knows where she is?” I ask him.

“No.”

Rachel nods. “Kirsten wouldn't put them in danger.”

Why is Aleksei going to so much trouble? If he sat back he knows that Kirsten wil turn up eventual y. They always do, look at Gerry Brandt. This isn't just about the diamonds. It's more personal than that. According to the stories, Aleksei had his own brother kil ed for dishonoring the family. What would he do to someone who kidnapped his daughter?

Sitting opposite me, Joe continues making notes. He reminds me of my old primary-school teacher, who knew exactly how many pencils, books and paintbrushes were in the storeroom, yet would arrive at school with shaving foam on his neck, or wearing different-colored socks.

Julianne cal ed me. She made me promise not to let Joe drive home. His Parkinson's gets worse when he's tired. She also talked to Joe and told him to look after me.

Rachel begins picking up cups and carrying them into the kitchenette. There isn't much to wash. Jean has been manical y cleaning al evening.

Reaching into his pocket, Joe takes out a crumpled page of notes and smooths it on his thigh. “I've been thinking.”

“Good.”

“I want to forget about the kidnapping question and concentrate on the ransom demand. If you look at the letters there's no indication of psychological looseness or obsession.

They asked for a huge ransom but it was a feasible amount for someone like Aleksei to pay or even Sir Douglas. Enough to be worth the risk.

“We know there were at least three people involved. Kirsten was the likely planner. Ray Murphy did the logistics. Intel ectual y Kirsten is above average. Everything about her typifies carefulness and preplanning. She must have experimented with the packages, getting the right dimensions. She was aware of tracking devices and forensic tests . . .” The Professor is on a rol . I've seen him do this before—crawl inside someone's head until he knows what they know and feels what they feel. “The ransom plot was clever but overcomplicated. When people are faced with a complex problem they often only consider a certain number of options or scenarios. If there are too many unknowns, they get confused.

That's why people plan up to a point or in sections. Sometimes they leave out the exit strategies because they don't consider failure as a possibility.