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On the train back to the city, I searched a popular escort website and filtered my search down to the Sydney CBD using the name ‘Anastasia,’ and got two hits. The names appeared above a row of emoji’s featuring red lips, love hearts, and smiley faces. Each profile offered a short description along with a gallery of nine photos. The first Anastasia didn’t show her face, but the size sixteen frame and fake G-sized breasts made me scroll down.
The second Anastasia didn’t show her face either, but her biceps showed some definition and her stomach had the first hint of a six pack. Her hair appeared in one of the photos, brown, straight, and cut to blunt ends. I couldn’t be certain, so I called the number and waited. It rang out. I tried again with no luck.
If Ari’s testimony was true, I wondered what Tamsin meant when she said she’d never see him again? Did she feel her life was in danger, or was she merely leaving Sydney for greener pastures?
A hawker spruiked a bin full of cheap umbrellas at Central station, so I swapped him a fiver for the last one, and did my best to shelter under it on the walk back to my car at the university car park. Google maps said the Lotus brothel sat less than three clicks away in Surry Hills.
I fought my way through lane-swapping cabbies and speeding city buses east to Surry Hills, an old suburb laden with hotels and mixed businesses. Thai restaurants, pubs, and trendy eateries vied for tourist dollars on the main street, and senior citizens fortified themselves in their terrace houses worth millions of dollars.
From Albion Street, I made a hard right into an old toilet access lane, wedged the ute between a motorbike and a Mitsubishi Colt, and walked the four blocks back to the brothel’s front entrance, nestled within a semi-detached, two-storey house. I rang the doorbell, and a young blonde woman opened the door surrounded in a cloud of lavender and dressed in a black mini skirt, thigh-high sheer stockings, and heels. She glanced nervously to her right, then looked at me with large blue eyes. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, it’s not a good time right now. Are you able to come back in an hour?’
She started to cry.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I can help. What’s going on?’
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand in an upward sweep. ‘I just don’t know what to do!’
I made my way past her.
She followed close behind And said, ‘Keep going down the hall. She’s in the kitchen. It’s on the left.’
In a tiny kitchenette, a short middle-aged woman with her hair set in a perm sat with her back propped up against the fridge, her thick-calved legs straight out in front of her. Loose knee-high stockings peeked out from under her tie-dyed gypsy skirt, and a dark crescent-shaped bruise surrounded her swollen, half-closed left eye.
‘Bev?’ the blonde said. ‘I’ve got help. You okay?’
I put a hand on Bev’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, love, watch your head. I’m opening the freezer to get some ice out.’
She nodded weakly and murmured. ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’
The door cleared her head by a foot, and I dug out the ice tray and turned to the blonde. ‘Have you got a tea towel?’
She clacked across the scuffed timber floor, opened a cupboard, and passed two to me.
I cracked the entire tray into one of them, wrapped it up, and smashed the whole lot against the sink a few times.
‘Alex?’ Bev murmured. ‘Be a dear and divert the phone? That’s a good girl.’
I knelt next to Bev and gently pressed the towel against her face.
She nodded and took it with one hand. ‘You’re an angel, love. Fix us a drink, will ya?’ She pointed a shaky finger at some higher cupboards. ‘First one on the right. The Beefeaters, next to the toaster. Fix one for yourself, love.’
I poured a solid slug of gin into each of two glasses and passed one to Bev.
She gulped it in one hit, held the glass up, and offered half a smile. ‘Almost as good as Fentanyl.’
Alex returned and stood nervously in the doorway.
I said, ‘What happened?’
A muffled thud came from the hallway, and Alex met my eyes, shushed me, and whispered, ‘He’s still here.’
I rested my glass on a 1960s green Formica dining table and peered down the hall. I turned back to Alex and put a finger to my lips.
She nodded.
The hallway bent into an ‘L,’ then continued into darkness around a blind corner to the right. I gingerly stepped out of the kitchenette. When two floorboards creaked under the thick carpet, I stopped and preened my ears. A TV upstairs spruiked an advertorial. A cob web hung from the corner architrave and danced in an unseen breeze. I slowly stepped out into the hallway with blood pumping in my ears. A door stood open at the end of the hall, exposing a brown tiled floor. A soap dispenser and a bottle of green mouthwash sat perched on a vanity. Two doors stood to the left, both closed.
I hugged the wall and inched along until I reached the first door. I placed my ear against it, gripped the handle, and pushed it down ready for a fight. An unoccupied double bed occupied an otherwise empty room.
I stepped back out into the hall and edged along the worn and threaded carpet to the next door. Nothing came through the wood. I gripped the handle with sticky fingers, positioned myself like a runner, and quickly swung the door in.
A naked woman lay face down on the bed. An arm hung over the side and blood matted her dark hair. Sitting up on the opposite side of the bed was a shirtless bald man I recognised as Gav, the pommy bouncer who’d denied me entry to Lyons’ launch party in the Domain the previous Friday.
He scrolled his phone, then looked up and said, ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He stood and thrust his phone into one of his tight jeans’ pockets. The knuckles on his right hand were cut and bloodied.
I tried to fill up as much of the doorway as I could. ‘Get away from her.’
He raised his hands. ‘All right, all right, chill out. I’ve ‘ad my fun.’
I took a breath and sized up the situation. ‘What are you doing here?’
Gav spread his arms, Christ-like. ‘Thought I’d cop off with a slag while I was ‘ere. The old man always said don’t waste an opportunity.’
He casually crossed the room to a small lover’s seat, where he retrieved a tee shirt and turned it inside out.
‘I had you pegged from the uni, you pillock,’ he said as he slipped the shirt on over his hairless, wiry frame. ‘Jumped the same fuckin’ train, talked to that towelhead in the wheelchair. He told me you were coming here to see Lyons’ slag of a daughter. Haven’t seen her, have ya?’
I glanced over my shoulder.
Alex stood in the hall and stared at me, petrified. When I held my hand up, she nodded twice and slowly stepped back, toe to heel, out of sight.
‘She’s not here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you leave before I put your face through the wall?’
He reached into his back pocket and rotated his wrist. A blade clicked open, and he lifted the knife level with his eye. He watched how the light played on the metal. ‘Just stick it to her, he says. Give it to her up to the hilt, he says.’
‘Put it away.’
‘You gonna try and talk me down, cunt?’
I bunched my hands into fists. ‘Do I look like a negotiator?’’
‘Nah, you look like a cunt who’d dog-slot a bloke.’ He ran at me at a sprint, the knife straight out.
I’d barely stepped to the side as the blade pierced my skin under the collar bone, and I gripped his arm and wrenched it away. The blade came free, and he ducked away from my hands like a jackrabbit. I followed out a rear screen door into an alleyway behind the brothel, and lost sight of him as he rounded the far end of the building. By the time I’d reached the road and looked around, he’d vanished.
