The cutting place, p.18
The Cutting Place, page 18
‘Your manager who was there that evening didn’t mention it to you.’
‘Of course not. And she would have told me immediately if there was anything to concern us.’
‘My understanding is that the girl was raped.’
She gave a tinkly little laugh. ‘I don’t think you can call it rape when the girl is very keen to meet handsome, wealthy young men and … get to know them. Paige told me this girl approached them. Maybe things went further than she had expected. Maybe she was disappointed that it didn’t lead to a closer relationship. Whatever her reason for complaining to Paige, she didn’t go to the police.’
‘Not immediately.’
A dent appeared between Edina Gould’s immaculate brows. ‘Has she reported it now? Formally?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
Her mouth puckered as if her lips contained a drawstring. She unpursed them to say, ‘She would be very unwise to make this a police matter.’
‘It’s already a police matter.’ I leaned forward. ‘Paige Hargreaves died, Miss Gould. Someone killed her, and cut her up, and dumped her in the Thames.’
‘One would think that should be enough to make anyone think twice about causing trouble.’
‘Do you know who killed Paige, Miss Gould?’
‘Of course not. No one at the Chiron Club would bother with something like that. They’d get any negative stories killed before they were published. These people don’t need to worry about bad publicity. Nothing ever makes the papers.’
‘What about the internet? Anyone can publish anything these days.’
She shrugged. ‘All deniable. And all open to litigation if you want to take that route. There aren’t many journalists willing to take that kind of risk, personally, and there aren’t many crusading websites with deep enough pockets to bear a long, expensive legal process.’
‘You sound as if you approve of them silencing their critics.’
‘It’s how the world works. There’s no point in trying to change that.’ Edina sat up straight and rearranged her swag. ‘Everyone backs down in the end.’
‘Luckily for me, this is my job, and I’m not backing down,’ I said quietly. ‘Did you send Paige Hargreaves to the Chiron Club to work?’
‘No. She asked me to, but I said no. I told her it would breach my contract with the club and I wasn’t prepared to do it for any reason.’
‘Did she find another way in?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. You’ll have to ask them.’
‘I will.’ An idea had been percolating ever since the receptionist had mistaken me for a job applicant. ‘Do the Chiron Club have any functions coming up that require extra staff?’
‘Yes, there’s a dinner next week that I—’ She stopped and her eyes went wide. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I most certainly would. I’d like to be sitting at a table, with the guests.’
‘You don’t look right.’
‘I scrub up well,’ I said. ‘And I have a colleague who would make a brilliant waitress.’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘It’s really not. I want to get a closer look at how the Chiron Club operates and I want to do it without them noticing I’m there. You can make that happen. We are very discreet and very good at our jobs and if it works out as I anticipate, they won’t even know we were there.’
‘What if you arrest someone?’
‘For what?’ I blinked, bland as milk. ‘You said you were sure there was nothing illegal going on there. How could I arrest anyone if they’re not breaking the law?’
‘I’m not comfortable with this.’
‘These girls – these intelligent, beautiful, ambitious girls you provide. They seem like the kind of girls who might think of suing an employer who knowingly exposed them to a hostile and dangerous working environment. It’s only a matter of time before one of them thinks of it. What do you think would happen if a civil court heard that not only did you fail to take steps to protect your staff, but you refused to help with a police investigation aimed at rooting out the people who were causing them to be raped, or to disappear?’
‘Disappear?’ Edina Gould’s voice was sharp. ‘You mean Paige?’
‘I mean Iliana Ivanova. Remember her?’
The name unsettled her, that was clear. ‘These girls come and go. They go home. They get other jobs. They may drop out of sight but that doesn’t mean I need to be concerned.’
‘She was never seen again after the party on the twenty-second of July the year before last. She didn’t leave the country by any official routes as far as we’ve been able to tell, and no one seems to remember she existed.’ I leaned forward. ‘But I do. And I’m going to find out where she went.’
Now
It was done, it was over; he could stop worrying about it. He only wished he could stop thinking about it. He pulled his chin above the bar, the muscles in his arms and shoulders and chest and stomach screaming, then lowered himself down again.
They hadn’t been pleased.
‘That’s what we’re here for.’
‘You weren’t handling it,’ he’d snapped into the phone, cupping his hand over his mouth so no one in the park could hear what he was saying, or read his lips.
‘With respect, you have no idea what we were doing or not doing.’
‘You were letting them get too close.’
‘We were letting them look. They won’t find anything.’ The same level voice that had spoken to him when he called the number on the back of the photographs, two years before, his whole body shaking. A woman. He’d never seen her. Voice like velvet, heart like a stone. ‘There’s nothing to find.’
‘There are pictures.’
‘Not where they can find them.’
‘You need to destroy them.’
A note of amusement in her voice. ‘If we destroyed everything every time someone was interested in us, we wouldn’t have much left to work with.’
‘Maybe that would be a good thing.’
‘Really? Am I to understand you don’t want our help any more?’
He hesitated. How he wanted to say no. He really didn’t want them involved in his life. But if he said that, he had an awful feeling they’d hang the whole thing on him. And he wasn’t guilty. Or at least, not as guilty as some people.
Anyone who’d got hurt had deserved it. And it had sent a message that anyone who tried to get in his way would get hurt. You had to take control of these situations. You had to make it clear you weren’t going to let them take advantage of you. You weren’t going to let anyone betray you.
(What are you doing? Roddy’s face, white in the moonlight, and the other man holding the bottle, uncertain, staring at him like he was a stranger.
This is what happens to people who talk.
But I didn’t say anything? His voice making it a question, shaking with fear.
Even then, Roddy hadn’t realised it wasn’t him he was talking to. It had been a warning for the man with the bottle, and given the way he’d looked afterwards – white knuckles on the steering wheel, shock making fathomless holes of his eyes – it had sunk in.)
Whatever he’d done, he told himself, levering up again, grimacing with effort, he’d done the best he could in a bad situation. And no one could blame him for that.
25
‘Do you want some champagne?’ The red-faced man – Roddy Asquith as he would have been if he’d lived another twenty years – grabbed the waitress’s arm and towed her back to face me.
‘I shouldn’t, but I will,’ I said, and giggled, and made eye contact with the stony-faced, sulky waitress for the briefest moment as I lifted a glass off her tray. If Georgia didn’t watch out, she was going to get a proper telling-off from the Delahayes manager, the general herself, who had put us through a quick and brutal training programme so we would pass muster. It was thanks to the manager that my hair was currently wider than my shoulders, and my dress was as abbreviated as it could be while still counting as clothes. I’d worried beforehand that someone would recognise me but I’d walked right past Sir Marcus Gley as I came in and his eyes had been riveted on my legs and chest rather than my face. Orlando Hawkes wouldn’t be there, with his housemate lying in a Hampshire morgue. I wasn’t completely at my ease but with the hair and make-up I thought I could pass for a Delahayes girl. Georgia had been told to smile, and pay attention to what the men were saying to her, and to be polite. Currently she was looking as if she was ten seconds away from ramming her tray in someone’s neck and making a break for the exits. I didn’t blame her completely; it was difficult to carry a single champagne flute through the throng, let alone a whole tray of them. She forced a more pleasant expression on to her face as she offered her tray to someone else.
‘Down in one,’ Roddy’s lookalike urged me, and I giggled again.
‘I couldn’t! I’d be on the floor.’
‘I’d look after you,’ he said gallantly, and squeezed me around the waist, which rucked my dress up. I managed to get a hand to the hem in time to tug it down and preserve my modesty, although we were all so thoroughly packed together there was no question of anyone seeing anything. In fact, the champagne reception was proving to be a bit of a challenge. It was so crowded that I couldn’t move, let alone circulate, and I hadn’t seen anyone I recognised so far. The noise level was extraordinary – a string quartet in the corner were scraping away but I couldn’t hear a note. I could only imagine what the cacophony sounded like for the occupants of the unmarked van that was parked a short distance from the Chiron Club’s front door. They were listening through the button microphone I had clipped to the centre of my bra (despite Pettifer’s kind offer to help me to fit it). It was a tiny device, and even if the neckline of my dress slipped down, no one would ever spot it. The police hadn’t really moved on from the old days in terminology – a wire was still a wire, even if it relied on digital transmission now – but I was glad we were past the days of actual recording units. My tiny, strappy, sparkly little black dress didn’t offer many places where you could hide an old-fashioned wire.
‘Hope you’re getting all of this,’ I said behind my champagne glass and Derwent’s sigh gusted through my earpiece.
‘That was some of the least competent flirting I’ve ever heard, Kerrigan. You need lessons.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to encourage them, Josh,’ Liv snapped.
‘She’ll have them all lining up to take her in to dinner anyway, looking like that.’
‘Shut up, Chris,’ Derwent and Liv said in unison, which was precisely what I would have said to Pettifer if I’d been able to reply.
‘What about a canapé? Are you hungry?’ My companion was mainly ignoring me in favour of talking to his friends, but every now and then he remembered his manners.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ I smiled at him, and then at the waitress who was offering me a platter of tiny vol-au-vents. Her eyes went wide and I recognised her with a start. Bianca Drummond, kitted out in the black dress and polished make-up of the Delahayes girl. It shouldn’t have surprised me that she’d followed the same trail to the office in Victoria, but it did. I could cheerfully have strangled her, and then moved on to Edina Gould, who hadn’t thought to mention that Bianca would be joining us too.
‘Actually, no. I will take one.’ I covered for both of us, in case anyone had noticed anything strange, but my companion had already returned to his conversation.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded under cover of the noise around us.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ The canapé was a horrible, squelching thing and now that I was holding it I really didn’t want to eat it.
The dimples flashed in Bianca’s cheeks. ‘They’re disgusting. Here, put it back.’
I dropped it on her platter. ‘How did you talk Edina into letting you do this?’
‘Promised I wouldn’t mention her in my story. You?’
‘Threatened her, basically.’
She laughed, and moved away from me before I could ask her what she was planning and the crowd instantly closed around her. I looked past her, trying to spot Georgia so I could alert her, but there was no sign of her. Typical.
‘Did someone recognise you?’ Derwent sounded tense.
‘Hold on.’ I detached myself from the man beside me. ‘I need to pop to the ladies.’
‘Don’t be too long – we’ll be sitting down in a tick.’
‘I’ll be quick,’ I promised, and slid away from him.
‘Where are you going?’ Derwent demanded. ‘Don’t wander around. I don’t want you disappearing too.’
I reached the edge of the room, feeling like a swimmer clambering out of a crowded pool. Bianca had disappeared. I stepped out into the hall, pretending to look through my bag.
‘Are you all right, madam? Have you lost something?’ It was the tall, granite-faced man I’d seen when I interviewed Sir Marcus Gley – Carl Hooper, the head of security. I felt a thud of alarm as he crossed the black-and-white tiled floor and took my elbow, but there was no recognition on his stern face. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘My lipstick – it’ll be in here somewhere – and the ladies room, please.’ I kept my head down, still fossicking in my bag. I didn’t want anything to jog his memory and I thought my usual voice might remind him we’d met before, so I had switched to a gentle, rural Irish accent. I had worked hard at school to shed the influence of my parents’ soft voices – the ‘r’ that most English accents didn’t pronounce, the hushed consonants, the longer vowel sounds, the very rhythm of their speech – and it was nice to let it seep back. Edina had agreed, reluctantly, that sometimes they did have Irish girls and that they were quite popular with the members, so I could be Áine O’Driscoll for the night.
‘I’ll take you to the ladies.’
‘Oh, there’s no need. Directions will do me fine.’
‘I love it when you talk Irish,’ Pettifer said reverently in my ear, and I cheered silently as he gave a yelp of pain. ‘No need for that, Josh.’
Two men came out of the room behind us, their voices raised, drunkenness turning to the faintest hint of aggression. Hooper’s head snapped up and I saw the watchfulness that was habitual to people whose job involved stopping trouble before it started. He let go of my elbow, which ached as if it might bruise.
‘Up the stairs, second door on your left. Don’t be too long. Dinner starts on time and you mustn’t be late.’ He walked away, his attention still absorbed by the men he’d noticed. As I ran up the stairs I heard his clipped, slightly metallic voice. ‘Gentlemen, are you enjoying your evening?’
I was in the Chiron Club for two reasons: to see what they got up to behind closed doors, and to look for anything that might connect the place to Paige Hargreaves. It did occur to me that I might take the opportunity to have a quick look around – hadn’t Sir Marcus said there were offices upstairs? – but as I turned the corner of the stairs, I saw a man sitting on a chair on the landing. He was wearing a grey suit, like Hooper, and he had the muscle and general demeanour of a prize bull as he got to his feet.
‘What, miss?’
‘Ladies room.’
He was blocking the entire hallway behind him. One massive hand gestured to his left. ‘Please. This way.’
Meekly, I went where he had pointed. It was a tiny bathroom with a single cubicle and a basin the size of a teaspoon. Luckily for me, it was deserted.
‘Right, can you let Georgia know that Bianca Drummond is here?’ I said, keeping my voice low in case the man outside was listening. I couldn’t talk to Georgia via my mic; they would have to relay the message. ‘She’s one of the other waitresses. Georgia knows her, so she might have recognised her already.’
‘Got it,’ Pettifer said. ‘What’s she doing there?’
‘Same as us, presumably,’ Liv said.
‘I’d say so, but I don’t want her to get in our way. Or get hurt, if it comes to that. I can’t really talk to her in public again so Georgia will have to do it.’
‘How’s it going?’ Derwent asked. ‘Any sign of Ash?’
‘No.’ I said it reluctantly. In a team meeting before we’d left, it was Derwent who had pointed out, almost as if he wanted to prove he was able to be objective, that Luke Gibson was the only person who had mentioned Ash to us – that sending us on a wild goose chase looking for him might suit Luke very well indeed. I really didn’t want to find out that Luke had lied to us. ‘No sign of Ash or anything suspicious so far. The security staff are everywhere. Anyone in a grey suit is staff, and most of them seem to be muscle. Can you run a guy called Carl Hooper through the box? He’s their head guy – he’s the one I was talking to in the hall. Something about him feels off.’
‘Consider it done,’ Liv said. ‘You’d better hurry up. They’re starting to sit down.’
I reapplied my lipstick and sighed. ‘I wish I’d brought my pepper spray.’
‘If they get too handsy, stab them with a fork,’ Derwent said.
I’d assumed the gathering would become more sedate when we sat down for dinner, but I was mistaken. I had found my way to a table of younger members, thinking that they were more likely to be able to tell me about Ash. They were already drunk, shouting in each other’s ears, eyeing the women in the room with predatory intent. There were four women at the table and eight men, and I spent the first course trying to get the men on either side of me to stop groping me under the tablecloth. The one on my left was so drunk he could barely sit upright, but the man on the other side, Harry, was alert enough. I set out to charm him, and by the time the waitresses had delivered our main course plates, he was staring into my eyes.
‘So,’ I purred eventually, ‘I have a friend who told me his friend was a member of this club. Ash, I think he said his name was?’
‘Ash? I don’t know him.’ Because he had been brought up to be polite and helpful, Harry turned and nudged the guy next to him. ‘Do you know a bloke called Ash?’
