6 Wednesday 12 July
“Holly, I have to say, you look like shit.”
“I feel like shit. Can you make me a coffee?”
Jazz’s voice takes me by surprise: I’ve just got up, and I thought she was still asleep. I’m staring out of the kitchen window. It’s going to be another searing day, and though it’s only 9.30am, the heat and glare of the sunlight makes me want to turn away from the window. But I keep looking out; our first floor flat has a view across the backyards of the neighbouring houses. Most in this street are still used as family homes, which is maybe rare for a place so close to a Zone 2 tube station; every property owner in London who can do it has divided their house into flats like mine, to exploit the rental market. I hear voices, music, traffic outside: I see brickwork, leaves, glimpses of gardens. London is spread out in the sun. Spread out in the sun, too, is a middle-aged lady who, I guess, thinks no one can see her, and on hot summer mornings when the light is on her corner of the yard, strips to her pants and lies on a lounger, topping up her tan. Shadows of her erect nipples run across her chest.
My trail, which I kidded myself that I’d followed so cleverly, led to nothing. Pretty much nothing. I tried the SIM in Wycherley’s iphone. There was one, just one number on it: I called it late yesterday evening: number unobtainable.
“There we go Hol, one coffee. Spying on Barbara Boobs again? You fancy her, don’t you, don’t deny it. Sure you won’t have an orange juice as well? – it’s going to be another scorcher.”
“Coffee might jerk my brain out of this stupor.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Well – I thought that I’d found a clue that might tell me something about Mr Wycherley. Something that could help me prove to the cops that I wasn’t involved. A SIM card. The original SIM from his phone. You see, that’s why there was nothing on the phone. He must have swapped SIMs so that he’d got a separate one for contacting escorts, or whatever else he was doing, and one for –”
“His normal family life.”
“Exactly. One from his real life. And that’s where, I’m sure, the killer is from.”
“So... you found a SIM – and...”
“I tried it in the phone today. There’s nothing on it, except one number. Which I’ve tried, of course, and I get the number unobtainable message. I thought I’d been very clever, but I’m still nowhere.”
“How do you know it was Wycherley’s SIM?”
I tell her about my trip to Alperton. “The thing is, I felt kind of – proud of myself. For doing a bit of detective work, I guess. For working out where Wycherley was staying, and...”
“But you’ve got nothing to actually show that it was him staying in that room, Hol. It could be complete coincidence.”
Even as Jazz is speaking, I realise how chancy my supposed chain of discoveries is. A till receipt, which might have come from that shop, or from a dozen other Manzoors in London. Someone staying above that shop, who left behind a pair of jeans with a SIM in the pocket. A bookie would say: odds a million to one against. It only occurs to me right now: I should have bought something at the shop and got a till receipt; that would at least confirm, or not, one part of my shaky little house of cards. All I’ve done is build one unlikely coincidence on top of another. Added two and two and made fifty.
Jazz interrupts my gloomy thoughts. “You could check that, of course. Call that Manzoor shop, they probably won’t think twice about telling you the name of the guy staying there. But also, what about Krasniqi?”
“I daren’t go back there. He might have done it, he might be a killer –”
“Well, you needn’t go back there. Because I have. I did my own bit of investigating for you, yesterday. Sherlock Jazz has been waiting to tell you. I have some news, I’ve found out something important.”
“Really? You spoke to Krasniqi?”
“No. I’ve not seen him. But I put on my deer-stalker and went to his house. I followed your description of your route, and I actually found the house. Number 52, you told me?”
“OMG. Thank you Jazz. You must have nerves of steel, going anywhere near that weirdo. What the hell happened?”
“Ready for a surprise?”
“Just get on and tell me.”
“Look”. She shows me a photo on her phone. It’s his street, his home, undoubtedly. But at the same time, almost unrecognisable. I’m looking at a blackened, burnt-out skeleton of a house. Bright blue sky shows through holes where windows, roof tiles once were. The charred front door lies askew in the doorway. The wheelie bin is a melted black shape, puddled out across the pavement and even down the kerb into the gutter, like a flow of tar. There must have been an inferno there.
“Dead?”
“Apparently not. I asked a woman across the road. I noticed her first at her window, then I saw her peering out of her front door once she saw me looking at the wreckage. A right Mrs Nosey Neighbour, what would we do without them? So I said hello to her. I think she thought I was a newspaper reporter. She said it has been a big job, two fire engines, the works. But no-one was in the house.”
“All those papers he had...”
“Yes, she said it went up like –”
“– a house on fire. Did you ask her? ...”
“About Krasniqi? Of course. She said she’d hardly ever seen him coming and going. Very quiet. She said she sometimes saw him carrying cardboard boxes to the house, then he’d dump the empty boxes in his front garden. She didn’t like him doing that, she thought rats were living there. That’s the beginning and the end of her knowledge of him. And she was such a snoop, if there had been more to tell about him, she’d have noticed it. But it’s clear, isn’t it? Krasniqi must have been part of a gang. Whatever services he sorted out for Wycherley and no doubt many others at that hotel, he was in the pay of someone else –”
“And he messed up. Either the Wycherley business, or something else.”
“Exactly. And they torched him. Or at least, torched his place, to teach him a lesson.”
“Makes sense.”
“Which means, the police will be onto them soon enough. There was blue police tape, of course, all round the front of the house. There, you can see it in the photo. You’ll be safe, Holly, I’m sure you will. The cops will make a connection between this and the murder.”
“If there is a connection.”
“It’s one hell of a coincidence if there’s not.”
“You’re right, Jazz. Thank you, you’ve been brilliant. What would I do without you? The cops have been useless, but even they’ve got to see that there’s some kind of link here. Someone else other than Holly Harlow to focus their investigation on. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I found nothing yesterday. Well, I have all my fingers crossed.”
“Like you said, Hol, the problem is: the cops stereotype our profession. They’re no better than the Daily Mail readers who see all escorts as desperate junkies or victims of pimps. Some human trafficking gang gets done over and it’s on the TV, you see girls like slaves being rescued from some basement. That’s how they see all sex workers. As if no woman can ever actually look after herself and make her own decisions. So fucking patronising.”
I smile. “Jazz, you’re doing that stereotype thing yourself. Some of my nicest regulars read the Daily Mail. I quite enjoy reading it myself sometimes, especially the Women’s Page.”
She ignores me and carries on ranting. “It just makes me angry, that’s all. Especially when society doesn’t actually help the vulnerable girls. You and me, we end up looking after our own.”
“You look after them. I don’t do a lot.” At least once a month, Jazz brings some homeless girl who’s ended up at Sexwork Helpline back to the flat, she sleeps on the sofa for a few nights, she can get cleaned up, new clothes maybe, we feed her up while the Helpline finds her a place to stay. Some don’t have a home: others are on the run from their pimps.
“I do wonder, sometimes, what will it take for us to break out of it, Hol?”
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“I don’t think there’s anything to break out of. Not for successful independents like us. Just good days and bad days, like most jobs probably.”
“You’d say we’re successful? What’s funny is, Hol: people in general despise us – or rather, they despise a false image of us. But we are respected by one group of people – our punters – yet people think that those are the very guys who don’t respect women...”
“But we’re small businesses, Jazz. Like the politicians say, the heart of the economy.” I grin at her. “We’re even environmentally friendly.”
She smiles back. “Self-starters, entrepreneurs. And we cater for diversity. And we’re sustainable.” But she seems to lose her smile on that last word, looks thoughtfully into the distance.
My phone rings. I go over to it. It’s an unknown number, not a Contact. I keep all my regular clients as Contacts. Because so many punter first names are the same, I give each guy a contact nickname on my phone, for instance Jack Gray, Jack Posh, Jack Croydon, Jack Young. So, unknown number can only mean one thing: a new booking.
“Hi, I’m Holly, the Girl Next Door. Who’s calling?”
“Geeta Pawan. Detective Inspector Geeta Pawan.”
“Oh.”
“I’d like to meet you. Unofficially, away from the station.”
We’re in a cheap diner round the corner from me, on Stroud Green Road. We both arrived at the same time, and she opened the café door for me, her manner almost friendly. She’s wearing a scarlet and green sari and I have to admit, even though she’s probably twenty years older than me and nearly a foot shorter, she looks fucking gorgeous.
We sit down: she’s careful with the sari, ensuring not to snag the material on the chairs, which like the tables are screwed to the floor. Although cheap, this place is run by Lebanese, and their salad is delicious. I’m enjoying my instant coffee less. She’s gone for a fruit juice: sensible.
“I’m not sucking up to you, but I do want to say, your – outfit. Fantastic.”
“That’s nearly a chat-up line. Do you say that to all Asian women?”
A smile. I could kiss her, for that smile.
“Very nice of you to say so. But down to business, Miss Harlow. Our witness. Mr Krasniqi. You’ll have to know his name now – and anyway, it’s appearing in the newspapers. The house where he rented rooms has been burnt down. And he’s disappeared.”
“Oh My God”. I pretend surprise: deliberately open my eyes wide. It’s the usual escort’s question: can she tell that I’m faking it?
“I’d like to ask you some questions – informally, at this stage – about that house.”
I keep my look of fake surprise. What’s coming?
“Have you ever visited that house?”
“No. I have no idea where it is.”
“Well, there is a witness who...”
“Sorry, Miss Pawan, but this is like a broken record. First this Mr Krasniqi, now there’s another witness spying on me?”
And I think: Nosey Neighbour.
“The witness – the new witness, that is – saw you enter that house at about 7.30pm, last Friday. And leave, about half an hour later.”
“Does this witness actually remember me?”
“She gave us details. We made up this sketch.” She shows me a picture on her phone. “Do you own a gray business suit like that?”
“Can I ask a question, before I answer? Could you tell me: why are you asking me all this here, rather than down at the station, all the works, like before?”
“Because I wanted you to give me your side of the story now, freely and openly. Before our questioning of you gets more – serious. You see, one conclusion that the police could draw would be witness interference. Knowing your line of work – sorry, I don’t mean any offence – but as police, we might conclude that you visited Mr Krasniqi, knowing he was our witness, and bribed him with sex to change his story.”
“But he didn’t change his story. Well, he did change it, but not in a way that helped me.”
“So you did go to that house.”
“Yes. It’s hard to say, because when I first lied to you and Mr Rainbow down at the station, and Rainbow came out with that stuff about a witness at the hotel, and I thought…” I trail off. She knows, she’s already worked out what happened. This woman has me sussed. It’s like every time I work out an escape route, I go that way, but then I see her already standing there in my path, smiling that knowing smile at me, saying Holly, don’t lie to me. Then I picture Rainbow, his greedy face so keen to nail me. Between her cleverness and his drive, I’ve got no chance. It’s that moment in the game where you realise you’re going to lose, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“You think I tried to burn this man’s house down?”
“There’s no ‘try’ about it. Someone succeeded. It was arson. One conclusion could even be that it was attempted murder. On that reading of the situation, you’re in the frame, badly. Witness has disappeared, house was completely gutted. One interpretation of what’s happened would be: you killed Wycherley – then, when bribing Krasniqi with sex or money failed, you tried to kill him, as the only witness.”
“It’s not true. I did go there, but only to talk to him, to plead with him. Isn’t it more likely that Krasniqi was in on the killing, and that he torched his own place to destroy evidence? Unlike your version of events, it would explain why he’s disappeared. Perhaps he’s with a gang, a gang who –
“Who do what?”
“I don’t know, what they do, or whether they exist. All I know is: you need to investigate Krasniqi, not me. He’s clearly mixed up in two bits of dodgy business. Isn’t that enough?”
I look at her. Those superserious brown eyes, calm, logical. She’s just sitting there, waiting for me to talk. You know what you’re doing, DI Pawan. If Rainbow hadn’t been in on that first interview, if he’d not overplayed his hand, if she’d done it all her own slow calculating way, maybe she’d have caught me there and then. Like before, I see her as the cat, me as the mouse. Play, play. Then kill.
She’s still quiet. I stir my coffee, just to make a noise, to break this silence. As I stir, it hits me like a surprise: I’ve not actually done anything wrong. Fuck, I’m innocent, after all.
Of course, the fact that I’m innocent won’t save me. But she’s brainy, and as she looks at me again I think: that story about me cutting a man’s throat and then burning another man’s house down, it’s like a cop fantasy. Hooker turned crazy killer. Too fucking clichéd, surely, for her to buy it. I look again into those eyes, and they no longer look deadpan to me, but instead clearsighted, shrewd. Maybe not the sort of eyes to see life as a cops-and-robbers TV drama. And as I look, I think: you’re meeting me here, dressed like this, acting like this, to show me: Geeta Pawan is not just a cop. She’s a woman.
Chancing my arm again.
“You don’t think I did it, do you?”
“Miss Harlow, I’m not paid to have hunches. My job is to go on evidence, pure and simple. There’s evidence which is not in your favour, to put it mildly.”
She says this while looking into my eyes. And despite the words she’s spoken, I somehow trust that look.
“But – you don’t believe that evidence stacks up, Mrs Pawan? You believe that if you charge me, between now and the courtroom, your case is going to fall apart?”
“Because you didn’t do it.”
A statement? or a question?
“That’s a question, by the way, Miss Harlow. Not a statement of what I believe. I look at you and I ask: cold-blooded murderer? Or a down-to-earth girl who reckons her best chance of a decent living is to sell sex, and who was in the wrong place at the wrong time? I don’t guess the answer to that question: I simply gather and evaluate the evidence. Until I’ve got enough information to know how to proceed.”
“And how far are you from that point? From ‘proceeding’?”
Now she’s paused. It’s not like a few minutes ago, wh
en she was watching and waiting for what I’d say. This time, she’s the hesitant one. Eventually she speaks, slow and careful, like she’s telling me something she shouldn’t. Does she have a hunch about Krasniqi?
“We’ve got – quite a few pieces of information. Not only about you. About others. But you could do yourself a big favour, by telling me more.”
So I go through my whole story again. But this time I tell everything – minus Wycherley’s cash and the iphone, of course. Except for that, I tell her everything, even my half-assed plan to bribe Krasniqi. I tell her about me going to his place, what happened there, although of course I can’t tell her the real reason he was able to force me to strip off. But my story seems to shock her. Yes, Geeta Pawan, you’re a woman, you understand that whatever I do for a living, it doesn’t lessen the horror of what I went through with Krasniqi. I start to talk more freely: words are forming, I’m speaking, and for the first time I can actually give a full account of everything that I saw on the night Wycherley died. For instance, I mention the plasterboard I saw in the corridor. I say that it looked like that part of the fourth floor was being refurbished; that it would be an ideal location for someone at the hotel, someone like Krasniqi, to provide a punter with a room for an hour on the quiet, without the hotel knowing. But all the time it’s like there’s another bit of my brain that is doing the real thinking, watching her, looking into those eyes to see a glint of – belief? understanding? sympathy even?...
I’m right. I’ve not imagined it. She believes me. Inwardly I want to breathe the biggest sigh of relief of my life, but I hold back from allowing myself to feel it. Because I know I’ve got a long way to go yet. Let’s test the waters.
“The other cops, they think I did it, don’t they?”
“Like I said...”
“Come off it, Mrs Pawan. You might have the ability to coolly weigh up the facts, but your chum Rainbow doesn’t. He sees his job as finding clues to prosecute me for something he already knows I did. Knows wrongly, I hasten to add.”
She’s silent again, and she looks almost embarrassed. Embarrassed by her colleagues’ jumping to conclusions? I push my luck.
“You can’t tell me that he’s as unbiased as you.”
Her silence is an answer. And I thank my lucky stars that she’s the DI and he’s the DS. But judging by everything I’ve ever heard about how the cops work, I’ve got a long way to go before I’m safe.
I speak my thoughts. “Guilty until proved innocent.”
“No.”
“It seems true from where I sit.”
I can tell by the ways she shrugs that I’ve guessed right. The other cops think I did it. If it weren’t for her, I’d be in a police cell right now. I hang by a thread. The thread is her.
“It’s not for me say, Holly, as to whether I believe you or not. I didn’t come here to accuse you. No-one’s charging you – yet. You’re free to go from here. But if you think of anything else – please, call me. Phone my mobile.”
With that she gets up, gathers that red-and-green swirl around her, and in a moment she’s gone. She’s left a business card on the table, with her number on it. She stops briefly on the pavement outside the café, makes a call on her mobile, keeps talking as she walks away. I know she’s speaking to Rainbow right now – and of course, although they have a different style, even different ideas, in the end they are both on the same team. I trace round the rim of my coffee cup with my spoon and think: she’s played me like a fucking violin. Every bit of what she did, everything she said to me, was to get me to feel exactly how I do feel now. Feeling that I’ve got a ray of hope, but that I need to work with the cops – more that that, I’ve got to work with her – if I’m to survive this God-awful business.
But despite knowing all that, I do feel like I’ve got that ray of hope.
I take another sip of my crap coffee. Funny, it tastes a bit better now it’s gone cold.
I suppose I could try that number from Wycherley’s SIM again. Perhaps I misdialled it. I wrote it on a Post-It note. I pull the note out of my purse, I look at it. No, I dialled it correctly: that’s definitely the number I called. I stare at it. Krasniqi. How did he find my GirlsDirect profile? He knows that website like the back of his hand, he was almost certainly lying when he told me that he found my GirlNextDoor page out of the blue, in that unlikely random way, by typing a phone number into Google.
But it’s worth a try. So, I do the same. I type the phone number on the Post-It note into Google.
And something comes up. One single result. I click on the link, it’s a web page headed with a picture of a building, surrounded by gardens and flowers. It looks like a stately home. “The Soames Hotel, Kingston-upon-Thames. Exclusive. Discreet. Unique.”
I sip my cold coffee, I hear the radio, I stare out through the café window into the glare of the street, the car windscreens reflecting the sun, people on the pavements, a woman with a push-chair, a young guy in sunglasses talking on his mobile, another woman holding a child’s hand, two old ladies in hijabs, chatting as they pull along their shopping trolleys. People all going about their daily business. For the last few days, ordinary life has seemed like the other side of a screen, of a pane of one-way glass. I’ve felt apart, unreal, like I was dead, and I’ve been watching my live body go through the motions of living. Moving around like a remote-controlled zombie: no feelings: no hope. Not even daring to hope. Now, as I look out into the sunshine, I realise that I feel just a tiny bit alive again.