Virtual Justice (11 page)

“Yes, of course I will.”

“Thanks, Katy. I’ll be in touch soon.” Lorne disconnected the call and sat forward in her chair. “Can we trawl through your database? Or maybe if I show you a photo of the victim, you might recognise her?”

“I doubt that. I don’t sit here all day looking at the member’s photos, you know,” Ms. Fortenham snapped back.

Lorne tutted. That was probably true. She didn’t even carry out checks on her customers, after all. “Do you have a spare computer we can use?”

“Sure. I’ll see if Sandra can let you use her spare one for an hour or two.” Fortenham left the office and returned to give them the go-ahead before Lorne and Tony had a chance to discuss what had just happened. “If you’d like to follow me.”

Ms. Fortenham showed Lorne and Tony over to a small table with two chairs. Atop it, an open laptop was booting up.

“All our files are on there. You have the choice to look through gender or latest uploaded members.”

“That’s great. We shouldn’t be too long. Oh, one last thing. If members contact each other, do you have a record of that?”

Fortenham paused to think, then turned to look at her secretary. “Sandra, is that possible?”

“Nope. If you have the member’s account details, we can view things from there. You know, see who they’ve made a connection with.”

“Okay, we need to locate the victim first and go from there. Thanks.”

Once the computer had booted up, Ms. Fortenham put in the password to access the files. They painstakingly trawled through the files of hundreds of women. Some were pretty, but some were so horrendous looking that they would scare the life out of most men.

Tony spotted Karen’s picture first. “There. Isn’t that her?”

Lorne tilted her head from one side to the other. “I think you might be right.” She stared at the picture and then read the woman’s details on the screen. “Sally Short. So she did go under an assumed name.” Lorne turned to the secretary. “Can you get into this member’s account for us?”

The secretary dipped into the manager’s office and came out again to give them the all-clear. She put in another password, and a different page opened on the screen. On that page was a record of the connections she’d made with other members. All the members were male, obviously, and the messages consisted of general chit-chat. Lorne saw nothing significant in the file that would lead them to suspect she’d met any of the members face-to-face. She slammed her fist on the table. “Damn! Nothing.”

The secretary shrugged and went back to her own desk. “I’m sorry.”

“Come on, hon. We mustn’t give up now. This was our first call.” Tony nudged her with his elbow and stood up.

Lorne thanked the secretary, and she left the building feeling despondent.

Tony sat in the passenger’s seat and looked down the list for their next visit. “Suitable Partners. Where the heck do these people get these names from? I think this one will be closest.”

“Suitable Partners it is then.” Lorne squeezed the top of his thigh. “Good job I found mine. Christ, looking at some of those members back there is enough to put you off dating for life.”

“You’re right. Mind you, I don’t think Ms. Fortenham runs a very good ship. She was nice enough, but there was something about her I didn’t much care for. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said she was in it just for the money.”

“I guess we’re going to come across that a lot today. By the looks of things, this dating lark is big business. I couldn’t mindlessly sift through that lot every night. Could you?”

“Nope. It’s a good job we’re settled. A word of warning though, if you keep giving me hassle about seeing the doctor, I might ditch you and go after one of those beauties.” Tony winked at her.

She punched him playfully on the arm. “Some of those girls would eat you alive, matey.”

They both laughed as the car pulled away. Twenty minutes later, they went through the same rigmarole at the next agency. This time, the owner was a male. To begin with, Don Brown put up a barrier saying that all his members’ private details were confidential. Because the guy appeared to be talking more to Tony than Lorne, she left it up to Tony to make him aware of the situation and their need to find Karen’s killer.

Don Brown seemed shocked to learn the reason behind their visit, and he did everything he could to help them after that. Unfortunately, they ended up wasting a couple of hours and left after finding out that Karen hadn’t registered with the company either in her own name or under a pseudonym.

Lorne decided they could do with a break, so they stopped at a bakery and bought a ham and cheese baguette, which they ate in the car and washed down with the worst cup of coffee she’d ever had the misfortune of swallowing.

“I must admit, I’m not really enjoying this. Why are there so many sad people out there?”

“Pressures of work. They don’t have time to go out socialising, so they resort to sitting in front of the computer, surfing these sites for a suitable partner.”

“Then what? They’d have to go out and meet up with them eventually.”

“True. Hey, maybe it’s about saving money, too. Apart from having to fork out the cost of joining these agencies, the members don’t really have anything else to pay for, unlike if they met ‘a mate’ while they were out on the town. Then they’d have to buy drinks or pay for a meal, and the chances are that ‘the mate’ would be totally unsuitable for them.”

Tony laughed. “Christ, that’s a cynical way of looking at it. You might have a point, though.”

“Come on. We better go to the next one.”

The next agency they tried was Dates Unlimited, and the one after that, Destiny Dates. Both proved to be unsuccessful visits. The owners were obliging enough and willing to help all they could, given that there had been a murder. However, Lorne and Tony found no sign of Karen under her real name or any other name in either database. Frustrated and with time marching on towards four o’clock, they moved on to Love and Tenderness.

Vicki Thomas, the agency owner, couldn’t have been more helpful when they apprised her of the situation. In fact, she actually remembered Karen joining, and when Lorne told her of Karen’s death, Vicki appeared to be saddened and full of guilt. Again Karen had used her Sally Short identity with Love and Tenderness. Further inspection into her account revealed that she had contacted a few of the members, but not arranged to meet any of them.

“Final stop is the Love Conquers All agency. Fingers crossed we have better luck there.” Lorne sighed, feeling tired and disheartened about their day, as they got back in the car and headed for their last call for the day.

“Chin up, hon. All’s not lost.”

“Was it just me, or did those guys look creepier than the others we’ve looked at today?”

“Creepier and uglier by a country mile.”

Love Conquers All was a little hard to find compared to the others. It was tucked down a small back street, along with a candle shop, a second-hand bookshop, and a couple others. “Seems an odd place to find a dating agency.”

“It probably began life as an estate agency or something. Not sure there’s an ideal spot for a dating agency out there. It’s not really something you see a lot of in the high street, is it?”

Lorne shrugged and pushed open the front door. The double-fronted office was sparsely decorated, giving the impression that, if push came to shove, the owners could make a quick exit.
Or am I just being overly cynical again?

A pretty woman in her late twenties got out of her chair and greeted them with a smile. Lorne handed her a business card. She eyed it with concern. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Mind if we take a seat, and I’ll explain why we’re here?”

“Not at all.” The woman returned to her seat behind the desk, and Lorne spotted a name plate on the desk.

“Ms. Williams, we’re trying to locate any connections a Karen Meldrew has with this agency.”

“Please, call me Lucy. I don’t understand. Connections? What kind of connections?”

“We’ve spent the day going around other dating agencies in the London area with mixed outcomes. We were employed by Karen’s sister to find Karen. She went missing sometime last week.”

Lucy sat back in her chair. “Go on.”

“Unfortunately, since our enquiries began, Karen’s body was found in the river. The police are now treating the case as a murder.”

Lucy sat forward and placed her hands on either side of her face. “My God! Really?”

“Really. Despite the police being involved, I have promised my client that I will continue to work on tracing her sister’s final steps. Any help you can give us would be a great help towards finding out what happened to Karen and could eventually lead to her murderer being convicted.”

“She was murdered? But…”

“Yes. It’s a tragic case. Would it be possible for us to see if she was a member with this agency? As far as we know, she was in the process of writing a book, and it looks like she joined several agencies, some under her real name and some under an assumed name.”

“Of course. I’ll do anything I can to help find this murderer.” She turned her computer screen towards Lorne and Tony and started the search. It didn’t take long for Karen’s picture to fill the screen.

“She used her real name. That helps a lot. Can you look into her file and maybe see if she contacted any members?”

Lucy tapped the keys, and Karen’s profile page popped up, along with the profiles of five male members. “Interesting. She made contact with all these men. Had a few conversations with one or two of them.”

“Is it possible to see those conversations?”

Without hesitation, Lucy pulled up another page. The three of them read the conversations she’d had with three of the men. Nothing looked out of place. Then Lucy pulled up Karen’s messages to one of the new members, and they struck lucky. Apparently, there had been a mutual attraction, and the pair had decided to go on a date. What’s more, that date happened to be around the time of Karen’s death.

Lorne glanced at Tony, open-mouthed.

“He has to be the one,” Tony said, as if recognising what she was thinking. “Where’s his photo?”

“He’s a new member. We had a glitch in the system last week that dumped all the members’ photos who had recently signed up. We’ve contacted the members by e-mail, asking them to reload their images, and some have been slow to do so. Look.” Lucy opened up another tab and trawled through the latest members to verify what she had told them. To their dismay, several of the members’ pictures were missing.

“Just our bad luck. Where do we go from here?” Lorne asked.

Lucy shrugged. “Let me find his e-mail address and contact information. Maybe that will help you.”

“We’d be very grateful.”

Lucy scribbled down the e-mail address and the home address of one Morris Trotter, an accountant who lived in the centre of London. She handed the sheet of paper to Lorne.

“Excellent! We’ll get onto this right away. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give us the details of the other members with whom she had contact, would you?” Lorne asked cheekily since the woman appeared to be so obliging.

“Sure. I want Karen’s murderer found as much as you.” She paused for a second before adding, “Umm…‌any chance we could keep our name out of the papers in exchange for the information?”

Lorne cringed. She had a feeling something like that would crop up. Had she still been in the force, she could and would have done anything in her power to prevent the agency’s name appearing in the paper, but she had no way to guarantee that anymore.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t promise that. I can have a word with the officer in charge of the case to see what she can do about it. However, I don’t want to lie to you. I’ll understand if you don’t want to share the information with me.”

Lucy thought long and hard and exhaled a large breath before she wrote the information down on another sheet of paper. Tony nudged Lorne’s leg with his own. She didn’t turn to look at him, just nudged his leg back in response. If this Morris chap wasn’t the killer, then maybe one of the other guys Karen had contacted would turn out to be the one, although she hadn’t actually been brave enough to meet any of the other men she’d interacted with.

Information in hand, Lorne expressed their gratitude, and they left the agency. Lorne’s frustrations had given way to a feeling that she was finally getting somewhere. When they got back home, she planned to ring Katy right away.

Lorne drew into the courtyard to find a strange car sitting in the drive. “What’s this?”

“Maybe it’s someone visiting the dogs.”

“I think Charlie would have rung us. She knows I don’t like her dealing with unannounced visitors.”

Charlie came sprinting out the back door the second Lorne and Tony left their vehicle.

“I’m glad you’re home. That man has come back. You know, the one I was telling you about.”

With her mind full of the day’s events, Lorne frowned and shook her head. “Which man?”

Charlie stamped her foot. “Mum, you’re impossible at times. The man who visited the other day and was interested in the spaniels.”

Lorne threw her arm around her daughter’s shoulder, and together, they walked back towards the house. “Sorry, love. It’s been a hell of a day. Let’s see what he has to say before we start throwing our toys out of the pram, shall we?”

“But I love Rusty. I don’t want to part with him.”

“I know. Hang tight.”

When they walked in the back door, a man in his early fifties, greying at the temples, was sitting at the kitchen table. He smiled and stood up to shake Lorne’s hand. “Jeff Salter. Pleased to meet you.”

“Please take a seat, Mr. Salter.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to call by unannounced, but I was eager to see you.”

“My daughter tells me that you’re possibly interested in rehoming a few of the spaniels we have here at the rescue centre.”

“That’s right. Well, actually, one in particular.”

“Rusty?”

“That’s right. Here’s the thing. I train dogs for the police. Not every dog has the ability to become a drugs dog. I watched your daughter with Rusty the other day, and I see something special in him.”