1.1.
She was pretty, with a sulky mouth and short blonde hair cut in a bob.
Like all the girls I had seen since entering, she wore white leggings and a plain, short sleeved blue polo shirt that lent the place an air of class that one didn’t usually associate with a brothel.
Sorry. Did I say brothel? I do apologise. According to their advert in Yellow Pages, the Champagne Angel Club was “an exclusive Health Spa, deep in the heart of Glasgow, an ideal place to relieve the stress and worry of your busy lifestyle.”
To be fair, it did have a swimming pool. And a gym. Even some sunbeds. The fact that it also had a great many private rooms, and seemed to employ an inordinately high number of girls between the ages of 18 and 35 as “massage therapists” was purely co-incidental.
I’d arrived about fifteen minutes ago, paying the girl on the front desk fifty pounds, which I was told covered my admission fee and a short massage. When asked if there was any “therapist” in particular I wanted to be introduced to, I’d given a description: tall, about twenty, with short, blonde hair. No mention of the sulky mouth. I saw her on the street outside, I said. Thought she looked nice.
The receptionist lead me down a short corridor into a room, telling me to change into one of the robes that hung on a peg behind the door. The room itself was square, dominated by a massage table on one side and a small futon on the other. Soothing music drifted from a cheap stereo on top of a small bedside cabinet. I peeked inside the drawer, finding a small dildo, a tube of KY jelly and some condoms. I had no plans to use any of them.
I stripped down to my underwear and put the robe on. Five minutes after that, the girl – she of the sulky mouth and blonde hair – came in. She said hello and made inconsequential small talk while gathering up the small pile of my belongings and placing them in the lower compartment of the cabinet, closing the door firmly on them.
Clever. If I had been an undercover cop with a tape recorder in my pocket, there was no way I would have been able to obtain any usable evidence.
She wasted little time getting down to business. ‘Mr Stone, why don’t you take that robe off and lie face down on the table?’
I did as I was asked. ‘Call me Cameron.’
‘Alright then, Cameron.’ She climbed on top of me, her pelvis against the small of my back, her thighs pressed against my sides. I turned my head and caught a glimpse of the inside of her left arm. No track marks, which was encouraging, although there was always a chance she was left handed, in which case she would shoot up in her right arm instead. From the way she kneaded the muscles in my shoulders like a lump of dough, I suspected that she had no formal training in massage.
Her fingers stopped, hovering over my right thigh. ‘Does it hurt?’
I knew what ‘it’ was. ‘I was in a car accident. They had to rebuild my right hip. I’ve been told that the marks will fade in a few months.’
‘Oh.’
The scars were ugly and red-raw, laddering down both the inner and outer aspects of the thigh, the flesh twisted and hairless. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to touch them, but I felt a bitter taste rise in my mouth. After all, I was the one that had to live with them.
She leaned in, her breasts pressing against my back, her breath tickling my cheek. ‘How does that feel?’
‘Nice.’
She worked on, gently rubbing and stimulating my shoulders and upper half. Even though she was more than ten years younger than I was, I found myself responding to her on a physical level. I hadn’t been with a woman since the accident, and most of the time I didn’t miss it, but there was something about this girl, with her nice figure and her bold, consequence-free availability that I found arousing. I didn’t need to wine and dine her, I didn’t need to make her laugh, I didn’t even need to pretend to be attracted to her. She didn’t care who I was, or what I had done. All she was interested in was the money in my wallet.
Simple, easy sex. Anonymous, guiltless and on demand.
Five minutes later, I was glad when she climbed off me. It gave me the chance to count to ten and re-establish a sense of professional objectivity. I sat up on the edge of the table, crossing my legs to disguise my erection. She saw it anyway and smiled.
‘You look as if you enjoyed that.’
‘I did.’
She cocked her head to one side, and this time the smile didn’t stretch to her eyes. ‘Would you like anything else?’
I needed to be careful how I answered. Although tempted on a purely physical level, I had little desire and no intention of fucking her. To answer “No” however, meant that our business was concluded and I would be expected to leave. Saying nothing, I crossed over to the cabinet, took my wallet from the inside pocket of my jacket and removed some notes. Then I made sure to place everything except the cash back inside the cabinet and close the door firmly. She watched the whole procedure carefully, evidently making up her mind that I wasn’t a cop.
‘Alright. It’s fifty pounds for full sex. Blow jobs are sixty with a condom, eighty without. One hundred for up the arse. Anything else, we can negotiate.’
I held out five ten pound notes, fanning them like a poker hand so that she could count them. ‘How about we just talk?’
‘Talking takes up too much time. Wouldn’t you rather just fuck?’
‘Fifteen minutes. No more. I promise.’
I could see her mind working, trying to figure out if I was a weirdo who wanted something extra kinky, or if I maybe planned to do her some harm. Eventually she took the notes out of my hand. ‘Fifteen minutes.’
I put the robe on and checked my watch; it was just after eleven at night. It had taken nearly a month to find her, and now that I had, I didn’t want to scare her off by rushing into anything. ‘What’s your name?’
She shrugged. ‘What does it matter?’
‘I just wanted to know what to call you.’
‘You can call me anything you like.’
‘Fine. I’ll call you Susan.’
Because I already knew that was her real name.
Her eyes narrowed as she tried to figure out whether I made a lucky guess, or if there something else going on. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a cop?’
‘I’m a private investigator.’ That wasn’t quite the truth, but for all intents and purposes, it didn’t matter. ‘I was hired to pass a message on to you.’
She walked to the door and opened it. ‘Get out.’
‘Please. I don’t mean you any harm. I’m not going to tell anybody that I found you.’
There was a small red button on the wall next to the light switch; she pressed it. ‘You’re damn right about that.’
I spoke quickly. ‘Your real name is Susan McPherson. You’re eighteen years old and grew up in Inverness. Your mum and dad asked me to find you because they love you.’ I took my jacket out of the cabinet for the second time, rummaging in the pocket, acutely aware of the sound of pounding feet coming from the direction of the corridor. A man the size of a small house materialised in the door just as my fingers closed on the envelope. I tossed it at her. ‘This is for you.’
The bouncer lunged across the room. ‘Right, pal, time to leave.’
Moving quickly – or at least, as quickly as I could with a gammy leg – I dodged, putting the massage table between the two of us. Susan bent and picked up the envelope. The bouncer – bald, breathing heavily, a spider web tattooed on his neck – faced me across the table.
‘I’ll come over there, son. I fucking mean it.’
‘I’m not here to cause trouble.’
With a grunt, he leaned forward and put both hands on the table, the muscles across his shoulders bunching as he exerted pressure.
With a screech, the whole thing moved, bouncing off my upper thighs, forcing me to take a step backwards. And another. And another, until my back was against the wall. A hand the size of a football clutched at my neck. I put both arms up to defend myself, and felt my left wrist grabbed in a vice-like grip. The bouncer’s face turned red as he squeezed; there was a nasty clicking noise as bones that had previously occupied their own clearly defined territory were suddenly forced to share space. I screamed, tried to wrench myself free, couldn’t. The bouncer leaned forward and grabbed the front of the robe with his free hand, dragging me forward until I lay face down across the surface of the table. Then he transferred his left hand from my wrist to the back of my neck, holding me down, his bodyweight pushing the table against my legs and my legs against the wall, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, couldn’t do anything except wait for the blow to fall. . .
‘Kenny! Stop!’
Kenny stopped.
The hand on the back of my head let go. The pressure on my back released a little, enough for me to look up and see what was going on.
Susan was staring at me, a sheet of paper in one hand and a Polaroid picture in the other. The envelope – torn open, now – was discarded on the floor. Kenny glowered at me like a Doberman Pinscher ordered to release a particularly juicy trespasser.
‘I have a baby brother,’ she said, her voice stunned and disbelieving. ‘Mum had a baby.’ She turned the picture round and showed it to us: a chubby infant in a blue babygrow. ‘See?’
Absurdly, I congratulated her. Kenny didn’t.
She waved an impatient hand at the bouncer. ‘Oh, for God’s sake let him go. He didn’t do anything.’
Kenny muttered something underneath his breath, but stepped back. I stood up and started rubbing my wrist. The damn thing was already swelling.
1.2.
Ten minutes later, I was fully dressed, sipping a glass of orange juice. Susan sat opposite me, unable to take her eyes off the Polaroid.
‘I can’t believe it.’
I said nothing. The club’s bar was small and dimly lit, the only other customer a fat man in a business suit. He sat at a nearby table and sipped his glass, a girl on each side to keep him company. He saw me looking and winked, his face growing cold when I didn’t reciprocate.
Eventually, Susan put the picture down. ‘How did you find me?’
I shrugged. ‘Shoe leather.’
‘What?’
‘It’s what we do. Find people.’
William McPherson, Susan’s father, had contacted us a month ago, with a photograph and very little else. Just under two years ago, Susan had gone missing from the family home in Bonnydoon, a tiny village thirty miles outside of Inverness, leaving nothing but a hand-written note saying that she was leaving and not to try and find her. Of course, they searched, but once all the obvious places had proved fruitless, there was nowhere left to look. She’s over sixteen, the police said. She can do what she wants.
Two months ago a holidaymaking friend claimed to have seen the McPhersons’ missing daughter walking down Argyle Street one Saturday morning. Acutely aware that Glasgow’s a hell of a lot bigger than Bonnydoon, Daddy had sold his car and called in the professionals.
Neither my boss nor I had been particularly hopeful of finding Susan; there were too many ifs in the equation. What if the friend had made a mistake, or was playing a cruel joke, or even just making up the story in a misguided attempt to give the McPhersons a little hope? What if Susan had just been passing through, on her way to somewhere else? What if she was in Glasgow, but just didn’t want to be found?
Cruelly but necessarily we pointed out the Worst Case Scenario: maybe she was lying at the bottom of a loch somewhere, a tragic victim of an unknown accident or vile, secret crime? One of the few missing people who were truly missing, somehow completely, unequivocally lost? Sometimes, we said, it’s better not to know.
Wily McPherson shook his head and pleaded with us to take the case. A gentle, softly spoken man with a lilting highland accent and a sad, bloodhound face. It was easy to see the cost of his daughter’s disappearance in the slump of his shoulders and the way he tugged nervously at his greying moustache. I think we agreed to help him not only because he was willing to pay fifty percent of our fee up front, but because we felt sorry for him. People who don’t know what it’s like say that there’s always hope, but the truth is that perpetual, unfulfilled, unjustifiable hope is a terrible thing to live in.
Of course, Joe had delegated most of the hard work to me, the trusty sidekick. I was a new employee, and I suspected that he had used the case as a test, examining my attitude and dedication. Because Joe had given me a job when the rest of the world hadn’t wanted to know, I was determined to repay him. I spent my days and nights walking the streets, showing the out-of-date photograph in bars, in homeless shelters, in cafe’s. Train stations, bus stations, hospitals.
There wasn’t a Big Issue vendor in the city I hadn’t bought a magazine from. I tried the street girls. Blytheswood Square, Byres Road. The Anderston Centre. It was in Bothwell Street that I finally got a bite. A fifty-year old hooker name Rosie Hawes (aka Rosie the Whore) remembered a girl that looked a lot like Susan working the West End of the town. They’d shared a cigarette one cold night a few months back. ‘She talked about going into one of those massage parlours,’
Rosie had told me, tucking the fiver I had given her into the cup of her massive bra. ‘Said there was less chance of getting the plague in a place like that.’
It was only a hint, but I doggedly pursued it, using my knowledge of the city to check out every club, every massage parlour, every knocking shop and strip club. And then I had my one stroke of luck, spotting Susan walking along Woodlands Road, an area of the city that was notorious for the amount of brothels tucked between lawyers’ offices. The hair was shorter, the face two years older (and, I hate to say, twenty years wiser), but there was no doubt in my mind that it was her. After showing her picture to just about everybody in the city, I felt like I could recognise her face blindfold. From there, it was a simple matter to follow her to work, and even simpler to arrange a meeting.
Like I said, shoe leather.
‘So how did you end up working in a place like this?’ I asked her.
‘I just kind of drifted into it. I was homeless when I first came here, sleeping in squats and stuff like that, always cold. I ended up having a one nighter with some rich guy just so as I could have a place to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning he’d gone out, to get a loaf of bread to make toast or something. Didn’t matter. I cleaned out his flat and hit the road.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘I realised then and there that there was no reason for me to be cold and hungry all the time, not when I was young and good looking and not too picky.’
‘You’re still young and good looking.’
She blew a plume of smoke at me. ‘Tough luck, pal, your fifteen minutes are up.’
‘So why run away in the first place?’
She shrugged. ‘Did you read the letter my dad gave you?’
I shook my head. ‘I was only hired to find you.’
She took the page out, read through it quickly before tucking it away again. ‘I just got sick of them, you know? Mum had an affair with the next door neighbour. Dad knew about it, but just let it go. You could see how miserable he was, but he just didn’t have the balls to act, and all the time mum was just making a complete fool of herself.
She was talking about leaving dad, of upping sticks and going to run a bar in Ibiza, and everybody in the fucking village was laughing at her. I just got tired of the whole thing and moved on. My boyfriend was a few years older, said that we could make a go of it. I was dumb enough to believe him.’
‘Boyfriend?’ I’d asked about boyfriends, but her father had been unable to tell me anything. Now I could understand why. At the time, he’d been too concerned about his wife’s affair to notice what was going on in his daughter’s life.
‘Yeah. The bastard ditched me a week after we got here.’
‘Sounds like a nice guy.’
‘A prince.’
‘So why didn’t you go back to your parents?’
She shrugged, and in that gesture I realised that for all her adult mannerisms, she was barely more than a kid pretending to be a grown-up. ‘I figured I was old enough to look after myself.’
‘You were sixteen.’
‘Yeah, and about twice as bloody mature as my parents.’
‘They want you to go home.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because. . . ’ I wasn’t sure what to say. Even though she was still young, this girl had done things most people couldn’t imagine. It had changed her, making her seem not older, but more cynical. She was confusing life experience with maturity, but if I was to tell her that, she wouldn’t believe me. ‘Because they’re sorry.’
‘Everybody is, nowadays.’
I looked over at the fat businessman. He whispered in the ear of one of the girls at his side; a second later her hand slid underneath the table and into his lap. Her expression suggested that she would rather fondle a bucket of toads. ‘You’d prefer to stay here?’
Anther shrug. ‘The money’s good.’
I nodded in the direction of the opposite table. ‘It can’t be that good.’
She watched for a few seconds, her face expressionless. ‘You’d be surprised. It beats working in some call centre for six pounds an hour.’
‘Your parents love you.’ I told her, feeling hopelessly old. It used to be that selling sex was the lowest one could fall, and now this girl, this child, was telling me that it was nothing more than a life-style choice.
‘They love you,’ I repeated, my voice lame.
‘Stop telling me that they love me!’
The other two girls looked up briefly; the fat businessman was too busy enjoying himself. Susan lowered her voice. ‘I don’t care if they love me! I don’t care! I tried to talk to them, I mean really tried, but they didn’t listen.’
‘Which is why they’re sorry now.’
‘Jesus Christ, you don’t get it, do you? How can I go back? How can I face my parents after this? How can I tell them that I once let a guy pee on me for two hundred pounds?’
‘You don’t. Tell them what you want. They won’t care. All they want is to know is that you’re safe. When your dad came to hire us, we told him that you could be doing anything. We told him that you could be dead, that you could be working in a place like this. You want to know what he said?’
She nodded.
‘“It doesn’t matter. She’s a good kid, and a smart one. She’ll do what it takes to get by.” Bonnydoon is two hundred miles away. It’s not as if you’re going to be running into people that you’ve met in Glasgow every day of the week. And the guy that paid to. . . you know. . . you think he’s going to tell people what he’s into? You think he’s proud of the fact that he’s such a weirdo that he has to pay someone to be a part of his sick little fantasy?’
Whatever I said, I felt that I wasn’t going to get through to her. Still, I kept trying. ‘Look, you can sit there and pretend that you’ve been there, done that and bought the fucking T-shirt, but the truth is that you don’t know shit. You might at the time have thought you had a good reason to leave, but you know now that’s a load of crap. You know that your parents love you but, rather than admit that, you have the nerve to sit here and pretend that you’re the one that’s the victim in all this. Can you imagine all the worry and hurt you caused them?
Can you understand how their lives stopped the minute you went missing?’
I reached into my wallet and took out a business card and a pen, scrawling my home number onto the back before placing the card on the table in front of her. ‘Look, if you’re scared about facing your parents, call me first and I’ll talk to them for you.’
She just sat there, shaking her head as if by doing so she could discount everything I had said. I stood up, angry. ‘Fuck it. I said I wasn’t going to tell your parents where you were, but I think I will.
Because maybe then you’ll see. They’ll keep looking for you. They’ll come down here and ask questions, so unless you decide that you can handle it, then you’re going to have to move on. But wherever you go, they’re going to keep looking because, for whatever reason, they love you and will forgive anything. . . anything. . . you’ve done. You can’t run forever.’