Willing Flesh (17 page)

‘How did you kill them, Graham?’

He shook his head. ‘I took Yooce for a walk is how.’

‘What about the hotel?’

‘They said I was there for a party.’

‘You must tell the truth. Lies won’t end this for you. They seem the easy way, but it is never so.’ Staffe pressed a palm to each of Blears’ shoulders. ‘I can save you. With the truth.’

‘My priest has come. He will save me.’ He had smiled at Staffe and his eyes lit up, briefly. For a second, his wits seemed to have recovered, then his eyes grew heavy and his frail smile faded quickly, to the nothing of his mouth’s narrow slit. ‘I am tired,’ he said. ‘You should go.’

As the PO led Staffe away, he said, ‘He do it?’

‘What do you think?’

The PO shook his head, said, ‘Comes a point you can’t tell. Sometimes
they
can’t tell.’

Now, at the Atlee, Staffe steps away from the door he has just knocked on and waits for the mother of murdered Rebeccah to welcome him into her down-at-heel home.

He is surprised Nicola Stone is so young, but when he looks, again, the hair is split beyond repair and the make-up is thick. From within, the smell of fried meat and burnt-out chip fat loops and curls.

‘You’ll have to come back.’ Nicola squints at him, tilts her head to one side and makes a thin smile as she clocks that he is respectable. Handsome, even. She is drunk, even though it is day. ‘Who
are
you?’

‘Police.’

‘I’m not doin’ nothin’. He’s a friend. Int’ya.’ She steps aside and a sixty-year-old man smoking a fag and watching telly from the sofa with his trousers round his ankles waves at Staffe.

‘It’s about Rebeccah.’

‘I ain’t got nothin’ to do with that bitch. No fuckin’ way.’

‘I have some bad news. Could I come in, please?’

Nicola steps back and for a frozen glimmer of time she looks as if the life has just gushed away from her. Then she adjusts her footing and plants herself, hands on hips, says, ‘What is it?’

Before Staffe can answer, she turns to her gentleman friend and says, ‘You fuck off.’

‘What about my tenner?’

‘Come back later.’ As Nicola turns around, her housecoat falls open, shows her lifeless breasts and the apron of skin that folds down over her mouse-grey pubis. She doesn’t adjust because she is too busy summoning life into her heavy eyes, looking deep at Staffe.

‘She nicked my fella, you know. Four years ago.’ Her lip quivers. ‘She’s not dead.’ Nicola takes a step towards him. ‘Tell me she’s not dead.’ She carries on coming, faster, falling into Staffe’s arms and sobbing, saying over and over again, ‘Not my baby. Not my baby.’

The old boy squeezes past and Staffe kicks the door shut. He holds Nicola, tight. She smells of drink and cigarettes and something else, something warm and like tea-dunked biscuits and from long ago.

Eventually, Nicola releases and tells Staffe everything. In terms of the case, it is nothing; Nicola doesn’t know anything about Rebeccah’s Russian paymaster or her friend called Elena, or, saddest of all, her dream of tending pets in the sun.

‘Did she have pets as a child, Mrs Stone?’

‘A gerbil. She killed it, though.’

‘You mean it died?’

‘Maybe.’

Staffe thinks it odd that Nicola doesn’t ask how Rebeccah was killed or if she suffered. All her make-up cried away, all the dirty love rubbed raw, it is clear she knows how to protect herself – that some things are better not known.

Sixteen

Nick Absolom blows out his gaunt cheeks then sucks hard on his plastic cigarette, looking at the SOC photographs of Elena Danya and Rebeccah Stone. The photographs and potted biographies of the girls were delivered by a man in a motor cycle helmet. According to the receptionist, the courier had a Scouse accent.

Absolom has discovered that the Russian girl and Rebeccah Stone were both known by Vassily Tchancov, and when he had gone upstairs, the editor and proprietor had both got hard-ons for the Russian angle. ‘We should know all about fucking Russians taking over,’ they said. Absolom had heard the rumours about
The News
becoming the organ, the plaything of an oligarch, but he kept his mouth shut, his options open.

Now, he compares his two possible front pages. Absolom runs his nicotine-stained fingers through his fop’s hair and stares at the screen.

VLAD THE RIPPER

Twin Sex Murders Point East

Brutal murders within London’s sex industry hint at gang unrest in the capital’s sordid fleshpots.

He presses send, leaves it to the legal department to see what they make of it but is certain that this version will be good to go. Tchancov is not named directly and there is nothing actionable in his vague, scaremongering copy. Nevertheless, he ponders what kind of reaction it will elicit from the Russian. Absolom always has an eye for the bigger picture. It is what will make him great – one of these days – and it doesn’t escape him that Tchancov’s uncle Ludo is up for governor back in Russia. He also knows, in this climate, that times are tough for the Russians. They’re all being called upon to make payments, to mend the gaping holes in those billion-dollar blankets.

He picks up his coat and goes down to the cold streets for a smoke. In the atrium, thinking he is watched, he spins round, sees nothing untoward – save a flashlight image of himself in the plate window, looking like a man who has missed something. One package. One call. Too easy by half.

*

Staffe has not seen Rosa for months, yet here he is at her door in a tight December frost, the last summer coming back in a hot flush that sends a shiver. It reprises the touch of her flesh on his fingers; the taste of her in his breath. That one and only time.

His heart bumps. She looks brand new, her hair cut smart in flyaway layers, her eyes bright. Her mouth drops open when she sees him and she takes a step, so he can’t come in. ‘Will?’

Like an idiot, he says, ‘I’m here on business,’ as if that could endear.

‘Charming. You can see me any time, you know. We’re supposed to be friends.’

‘You look …’

‘Yes?’

‘Beautiful.’

She stands aside, nods into the lounge he knows so well. Now, there is a photograph of a man on top of the television. He is tanned and raising a champagne glass; behind him, a tumbling Italianate village and an indigo sea. ‘I’d like to talk about a couple of your friends.’

‘Girls?’ she says, with weight.

He nods, sitting at the opposite end of the sofa to Rosa. ‘Elena Danya.’

‘You’re right. She is a friend.’ Rosa’s eyebrows pinch together.

A lump establishes itself in Staffe’s throat; an equal and opposite pocket of nerves in the top of his gut. ‘And Rebeccah Stone.’ He tries to look her in the eye, but he wavers. She makes a choking sound. Then it is quiet. He looks up and her eyes are watery. He scoots along the sofa and wraps her in his arms.

Eventually, drawing back, the palm of her hand splayed on his chest, his shirt moist with her tears and smudged with her mascara, she says, ‘What happened to them?’

He shakes his head, slowly. ‘That’s what I have to find out.’

She laughs. A nervous gush.

‘What?’

‘You said “have to”.’ She falls into his arms again, says, ‘That’s what I love about you, Will.’

She is soft, warm, and his chest reverberates with the undulations of her voice. ‘I knew Elena, from a parlour I worked every now and then. I liked her straight away.’

‘Which parlour?’

‘One of Tchancov’s joints, out Ilford way.’

‘Ahaa. Tchancov.’

‘Within a month or so she was hooked into some heavy hitter over in Mayfair.’

‘Taki Markary?’

‘She was with him later, but I didn’t know this guy she left Ilford for.’

‘But she was still …?’

‘On the game? Elena didn’t want to be dependent on any man. It was money she loved.’

‘What about Rebeccah?’

Rosa smiles, as if she forgets for a moment that Rebeccah is dead. ‘There was a time she’d follow me round everywhere, but as soon as she met Elena … we were never so close again. Elena took a shine to her, as if Becx was a baby sister or something. I never could work it out, but Elena loved that girl.’ Rosa pulls away. ‘You know, I introduced the two of them. And now they’re both dead. If I hadn’t …’ A sob bursts and she swallows it back.

‘That’s nonsense,’ says Staffe.

Rosa wipes her eyes on the back of her hand and inspects, saying, ‘How about you, Will? You got a girl?’

Staffe nods at the photograph on the television and says, ‘Who’s the fella?’

‘I asked first.’

‘Sylvie,’ he says.

‘Aaaah.’ Rosa stands up, strokes her skirt down and plays with the zip at the back. She walks slowly towards the door, head bowed, opens it.

‘How did Elena end up with Markary?’

‘That was all tits up.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘She met him through the trick. You should meet the trick through the pimp. “Tits up”.’

‘You wouldn’t describe Markary as a pimp, would you?’ says Staffe.

‘Not really. He’s got the Executive, though.’

‘Did Elena work for him at the Executive?’

‘I wouldn’t say Elena worked for anybody – not after that first month or so – once she got to know the ropes. She was her own boss.’

‘How’s that happen?’

‘She’s beautiful and young and strong, and I suppose she got the right connections. It’s every girl’s dream.’ Rosa checks her watch. ‘She cottoned on to the bankers. Those pinstripe boys love Elena like a bad wife.’ She kisses Staffe on the cheek, holds for a second. ‘You’d have liked her. The real her.’

As he goes, Staffe feels as if he has betrayed somebody; which is nonsense, surely.

Here and there, Christmas lights twinkle in the windows of the Barbican’s mid-rise flats. Some people are still at work, but most have spilled onto buses, down into the Tube. Many have made a way west for late-night shopping.

He pulls up his collar and raises the clip of his stride to keep warm and he is soon passing the Port Authority building at the back of Livery Buildings, the station not far away, but he steers a course away from Leadengate and follows the snaking red tails of the traffic all the way back to the Square Mile. Between the steel and glass gulleys that run to the Thames, he glimpses the burnished copper domes of the Thamesbank Hotel.

The Colonial Bankers’ Club looks nothing from the outside – a slim, mullioned column of a building. Once you are in, it reeks of old England, as if it is decorated with white fivers.

Staffe shows his warrant card, which makes the doorman stiffen, and the steward, witnessing this, smiles with all his restrained might.

‘How might I help you, sir?’

‘I would like to see the visitors’ book.’

‘Do you have somebody to sign you in, sir?’

‘Not exactly,’ says Staffe.

‘Then I am afraid …’

Staffe whispers, ‘There’s no need to be afraid. Not unless I ticket all those cars on the double-yellows outside.’ Staffe makes a point of examining his watch. ‘I’ll be back with a warrant anyway. It could be very disruptive – for the lack of a little co-operation, Mr …?’

‘My name is Dickinson, sir.’