GINI LEFT HER HOUSE at eight-thirty. She headed south for the News offices, through heavy traffic, cursing every red light. If she could reach the office around nine, she had a good chance of cornering Nicholas Jenkins before the crises that made up his editorial day barred her from entry. Jenkins, she was now certain, had been less than totally frank when originally briefing her and Pascal. He must have told someone else who would be assigned to the story. He might have told Daiches. She was also beginning to wonder if he could possibly have told Appleyard, even indeed, if the first hint of the story had come from Appleyard, and not McMullen, as Jenkins claimed. This made some sense: It was characteristic of Jenkins to snatch the credit entirely for himself; it was also characteristic of him to react strongly to one of Appleyard’s hints. She knew the two had been in touch in recent months. Now that she considered it, she realized that both the Hawthorne story and the telephone sex story had come her way the same week.
Halting at red lights outside the Barbican, she had a brief, ugly, and disturbing vision of Appleyard in that Venice room, two weeks dead. She closed her eyes. The driver behind her leaned on his horn. The lights were now green. Gini jerked the car into gear and drove on. A squall of rain smashed against her windshield. She switched on her headlights. It was a dark, cold, wet morning; she could already foresee a day of perpetual twilight.
Appleyard, she thought. Appleyard, who had always been Jenkins’s favorite tipster. Appleyard, who was a notorious gossip, though protective of his own leads. There was some connection, some link, she felt certain—but what?
On the fifteenth floor, Charlotte, the senior secretary, together with her two assistants, was already at her desk. The door to Nicholas Jenkins’s office was shut. And it would be likely to stay shut, Charlotte implied with a weary glance. Jenkins was in conference with his witchy familiar, Daiches; both had a meeting later that morning with their proprietor, Lord Melrose. In Charlotte’s opinion, as Gini well knew, Melrose had inherited his father’s newspaper empire but not his father’s aptitude: It was Charlotte who had to try to shield Jenkins when Melrose had one of his periodic flaps.
“Melrose is making waves again,” Charlotte said. “Something blew up over the weekend, apparently—don’t ask me what. You won’t get near Nicholas all day, Gini, don’t even ask, all right?” She paused, and gave a small, secretive smile. “Whatever it is you want, you can discuss it tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“This just came for you. By messenger.” She handed Gini a large vellum envelope. “I know what it is already. I had Lord Melrose’s personal assistant on the phone about it, at half past eight.”
Gini opened the envelope. Inside was an engraved invitation to a dinner given by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association that night. The chairman of the association was currently Lord Melrose; the dinner was at the Savoy, the guest of honor and main speaker was His Excellency the U.S. Ambassador; and the subject of John Hawthorne’s speech was to be privacy and the press.
Written across the top of the card was her name, in exquisite italic script. Gini stared at this thoughtfully. “Lord Melrose’s office sent this?”
“Oh, yes. At the behest of the great man himself.” Charlotte gave her a narrow look. “So what have you been up to, Gini? I didn’t know you hobnobbed with the great and the good.”
“I don’t. Not often.” Gini looked down at the card again. She knew precisely who had procured this invitation for her. John Hawthorne. Well, well, well: Under the circumstances she would be interested to hear his views on privacy and the press.
“Nicholas knows, by the way.” Charlotte grinned. “And he was beside himself with curiosity. He says you can drive there and back in his car.” She made a face. Be there. That was the gist of what he said. He’ll pick you up at your flat at seven-thirty. Can I tell him that’s fixed?”
“Sure,” Gini said.
The door to Jenkins’s office opened; Daiches came out. He gave Gini a pale glance. Charlotte, who had her back to him, seemed to sense his presence through her shoulder blades. She turned back to her word processor and began to type. Daiches made straight for Gini, a little smile on his face.
“Well, Gini,” he said, walking beside her toward the elevator. “I hear you’re now a friend of Melrose’s, no less. Congratulations. This should do your future career here a great deal of good. Friends in the right places—the secret of every lady journalist’s success.”
“Oh, fuck off, Daiches,” Gini said.
Daiches gave a little pout of delight “Gini, language, language! And you’re usually so polite. You’re going down? Me too. How nice.”
Daiches followed her into the elevator. He was carrying a pile of papers. The floors flashed by. Daiches turned to her, and indicated the topmost fax.
“Johnny Appleyard’s dead,” he said. “Had you heard? This just came in from our stringer in Rome. Murder, Gini—how about that?”
Gini glanced down at the fax. It gave some details of the killing, and they were already inaccurate. She made no response.
“Appleyard and that weirdo he lived with. What was his name?”
“Stevey, I think.”
“Stevey, that’s right. The farm boy with the pretty face. Bound hand and foot, Gini. One of those queer killings by the sound of it. Heartbreaking, the prejudice in this wicked world of ours.”
“Give it a rest, Daiches.”
Daiches gave her a long, cold, pale look. “Ah, well,” he said, shuffling the pages. “It is murder. Worth a couple of columns, don’t you think?”
They had reached the features floor. With relief Gini stepped out of the elevator; Daiches held the door open.
“Just one little thing, Gini, before you rush off.” His smile became sweet. “Don’t forget the telephone sex story, will you? Nicholas did mention it to you last Friday. I need it, and I need it soon.”
“When?”
“Not later than the end of the week.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Then make it possible, dear,” he said in his mildest and most dangerous voice. The elevator doors began to close. “Friday, three P.M. at the latest,” he called through them. “On my desk, Gini. On my desk.”
Back in the features department, Gini went through her notes. She took a pen and a fresh sheet of paper. A list of priorities, she told herself: a shopping list. She wrote:
1) Find McMullen. Call Oxford college. Try Jeremy Prior-Kent.
2) Trace/speak to Lorna Munro.
3) Where hire high-spec blondes? Escort agencies?
4) Appleyard. Any connection this & telephone sex?
5) Talk Mary’s crossword friend re codes.
The first two of these tasks were straightforward. She called Christ Church, and quickly discovered that McMullen’s tutor there had been a history don whose name she knew well: Dr. Anthony Knowles, a man with a maverick reputation who was something of a media star, a frequent television pundit, and a contributor to newspapers, as well as a very eminent historian. To her surprise, she was even able to speak briefly to Dr. Knowles himself, and most amiable he was. He gave her considerably more information about McMullen’s brief Oxford career. However, he proved no help at all when it came to the question of McMullen’s whereabouts.
“My dear, I wish I could be of help. But alas, I cannot. James used to call on me occasionally for old time’s sake if he was passing through Oxford. And I’m always delighted to see him—an excellent mind, one of my best undergraduates. But I’m afraid I’ve neither seen nor heard from James for at least a year. Let me see, whom might you try? There was a rather foolish young man who was at school with him, who came up the same year. They had rooms on the same staircase. I believe they remained in touch. Now, what was his name? Jeremy something, I think…”
“Jeremy Prior-Kent?”
“That’s it. Of course. And now, I’m afraid I must curtail this conversation.”
She tried the offices of Prior-Kent’s film production company in Soho. Unfortunately, his secretary said, he had changed his plans; he would now not be returning to London until late Thursday night. He and his location manager were scouting locations in Cornwall, and so could not be reached.
The woman made Cornwall sound like the Sahara Desert. She made Prior-Kent sound like Cecil B. De Mille.
“Of course, should Mr. Kent get in contact, I’ll pass on your message. You’re calling from the News? If it’s urgent…”
“It is urgent. Very.”
“I expect I could find a small window for you on Friday. Let me just check his diary….”
“A window? Thanks.”
During the long pause that followed, Gini leafed through the office directory of film production companies. Kent’s company, Salamander Films, had a few listed credits for TV commercials and minor documentaries; no feature films as yet. Windows, Gini thought; location scouting in Cornwall: pretentious idiots. Why were all film people, especially the minor ones, like this?
“Twelve on Friday.” The girl came back on the line. “It’s his only gap. He could spare you an hour then. After that he has a big lunch. Shall we say The Groucho? It’s right around the corner from here. It’s convenient for him.”
“Thanks very much. Luckily, I can spare an hour on Friday too. I’ll see him at The Groucho, then.”
She hung up on the girl’s wails about confirmation, and dialed the number of Lorna Munro’s Rome hotel. This would be her sixth call to the model, and none had been returned. It was of no surprise to learn that yet again, Lorna Munro had left. There was a contact number, though, for a French magazine. It took Gini fifteen minutes of toil, in rusty French, to discover that Lorna Munro was now in Paris. She called Pascal at once. It was ten, the time she had arranged to call him, but the telephone was answered by Helen Lamartine. It was a shock to hear her voice.
To Gini’s surprise, she sounded almost friendly, if brisk.
“Marianne?” she said. “Oh, she’s much better this morning, thank you, on the road to recovery. We’ll have to watch her carefully, just for the next twenty-four hours or so. But the penicillin seems to have done the trick. One moment, Pascal’s in the other room…Pascal, it’s London. Work.”
While she waited for Pascal to come on the line, Gini stared into space. That “we” had hurt. All the old familiarity of a marriage, that was what she had heard in Helen’s voice. Even if it had been an unhappy marriage, her own claims seemed beside it very tenuous, very frail. She felt an instant’s foreboding, but it passed the second she heard Pascal’s voice.
She told him quickly the news about Lorna Munro: That she was in Paris for just twenty-four hours; that she was doing a photo session of Gaultier dresses for Elle magazine—no, not in studio; the location was the left bank, outside the church of St. Germain.
“That’s fine,” Pascal said quickly. “I can cover that. Marianne’s much better today. She won’t miss me for an hour or two.” He paused. “Her temperature is still fluctuating. I ought to stay one more day here, Gini, just to make sure she’s well again. I’ll fly back tomorrow. Meanwhile”—his voice altered—“I miss you, you know.”
“I miss you too.”
“Darling, tell me, you were all right last night?”
Gini would have liked to tell him that she had been far from all right; she would have liked to tell him about the strange postcard, the footsteps, the power cut, the darkness, and that horrible whispering obscene tape. But it was better to wait.
“I was fine,” she said quickly. “I saw Lise, as I mentioned. Very strange. I have a lot to tell you. I’ll explain all the details when I see you. Now I’m tying up a few loose ends. Tonight I have to go to some grand newspaper dinner. With Jenkins.”
“Well, you know what to ask him. …”
“Yes. I do. Whether he’ll answer is another matter. Meantime”—she paused—“I’m going to work on the Appleyard connection.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. But I know there is one. I think it has something to do with women—and the different ways in which you can hire them, for sex.”
When Appleyard had given Nicholas Jenkins the original idea for the story on telephone sex, he had produced the names of three companies whose primary business this was. The first two of these were just as Gini had imagined them: small hole-in-the-wall affairs. One operated from a back street in Hackney, the other, which doubled as a minicab firm, appeared to be a mother and daughter operation. It functioned out of one-room premises behind King’s Cross Station, in the red-light district there. The mother, a hard-faced woman, said little. The daughter, a fat girl unwisely encased in Lycra leggings, explained in an antagonistic way that this work was easy money, that it was easy to find women to recruit.
“Look,” she said to Gini, “which would you prefer? Sitting at home with a tape recorder and a script, or turning tricks with some fat slob in a car behind the gasworks up the street?” She gestured out the window to the wasteland that covered several acres to the north of the station. “Which would you rather?” The girl’s voice took on a derisive note. “Five quid for a hand job up a back alley—or this? We look after our girls, Mum and me. And since you’re asking—I write the scripts. All legal and above board. Now, piss off.”
Gini obeyed. She moved on to Appleyard’s third company, and when she saw its premises in a bright terraced house in Fulham—Sloane Ranger territory—her hopes increased. If Appleyard’s tip could be trusted at all, if there were some more large-scale operator behind these businesses, this was the kind of front for it she would expect.
And the kind of front man she would anticipate too, she thought, when the door opened on a sharply dressed, gold-braceleted youth. His name was Bernie, and Bernie proved to be the perfect interviewee—garrulous, knowing, flattered to talk to a reporter, and unused to dealing with the press.
It was lunchtime, and Bernie responded favorably to the suggestion that she buy him a drink.
“What have I got to lose, right?” He eyed her. “I mean, the stories I could tell…And the beauty is, Gini, this is a one hundred percent kosher operation. Like, who gets harmed, right? We have a license for this.” He winked. “A license to print money—don’t quote me on that.”
He led the way to a wine bar around the corner on Fulham Road; it was filled with the kind of women who still wore velvet headbands and whose habitual tone of voice was a strangulated shriek. Gini ordered champagne and kir at five pounds a glass—Bernie’s choice. A few questions, just to kick-start him, and Bernie was off. He explained a few of the market-forces principles behind his work.
“The way I look at it, Gini, is this. …What makes the world go round? Sex. What’s the one commodity you can always flog? Sex. What’s the new, nice, clean, guaranteed-AIDS-free way to dispense it? Down the telephone line. This is a growth industry we’re looking at here, Gini, and you can quote me on that….”
He talked on, and Gini listened with only half her attention. She had worked on stories before that took her into this twilight zone. The needs catered for there were intense, and the methods used to salve those needs were many: street girls, call girls, escort agencies, models, magazines, strip clubs, peep shows, phone lines, books, videos. An empire for the unsatisfied to explore, an empire that could cater to every permutation of sexual taste. As Bernie was only too happy to explain, growth industries required dedication; some of the amateurs involved in the phone-line business failed to understand this.
“What you need, Gini,” he said, sipping his second champagne and kir, “what you need is market identification—and we’ve got that. You have to understand the punter’s specialized taste. For instance, our company—we do rubber. We do bondage. Spanking—we’ve got three spanking lines, don’t ask me why, but spanking’s big. Black girls, Swedish girls, French maids—okay, it’s predictable, Gini, I’ll say that before you do. But our callers don’t want surprises. They want what triggers them, if you get my point. Blondes, brunettes, redheads. We do gay lines, obviously. We do virgins—or sluts. Sluts, well, they mouth off a lot, they verbalize, right, so they’re always in demand. Plus, mentioning mouths, a lot of clients are what you might call anatomically demanding. So we do leg lines and bum lines. And then there’s our number one best seller—”
“Which is?”
“Breasts.” Bernie rolled his eyes. He made generous gestures with his hands. “Big breasts.”
He sighed. The predictability of his clients’ desires seemed to disappoint him.
Gini said, “How many lines do you personally supervise, Bernie?”
“Me? Eighty-six. And it’s rising each week.”
“That’s impressive. Bernie. Let me get you another drink….”
As Gini had hoped, the third drink relaxed Bernie quite a lot. He grew more garrulous still. Gently Gini steered him in the direction she wanted: Who was behind his company, and were there perhaps other aspects to their empire besides telephone sex? On the question of his employers, Bernie became cautious.
“No names, okay? Let’s just say I work for one smart operator, okay?”
On the question of this operator’s other activities, Bernie was more inclined to be drawn. Discretion fought a losing battle with the desire to boast. He first hinted, then confirmed, that telephone sex lines were just the tip of this iceberg, and that for an up-and-coming man—Bernie grinned—there were career opportunities here. Promotion beckoned. His company also had an escort agency arm—a high-class escort agency, he added hastily, top girls and credit card facilities. Finally, a recent diversification this, there was the company’s video arm. Not sleaze videos, he wouldn’t want her to think that, but the new sex education videos, one hundred percent legit, very explicit, fronted by doctors and therapists, on sale in the high street, on sale in ultrarespectable shops. His company’s most recent offering, Married Love II, had sold seven hundred and fifty thousand copies within six weeks.
Gini looked suitably impressed. “That’s fascinating, Bernie,” she said. “I’d really like to know more. Especially about the escort agency. Would they talk to me, d’you think?”
“’Course they would. If I’m with you. Hazel runs it. She and me, we’re like that.” He held up two fingers crossed. “You want to go over now?”
“Can you spare the time, Bernie?”
“Sure I can. That’s cool,” he said in a magnanimous way, and lurched to his feet.
Both the escort agency and the video film studio proved to be in Shepherd’s Bush. The agency, Elite Introductions, was surprisingly stylish. To the right of its entrance, another door, unmarked, led down to the video studio in the basement. Bernie jerked his thumb in its direction.
“The equipment they’ve got down there,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe. Three camera setups, top of the range sound equipment, a revolving stage—three quarters of a million at least. They’re filming now, so it’s off limits. Pity. It’s artistic. You’d be impressed.”
He opened the door to the escort agency and led her in. Hazel, a tall, brassy redhead, was sitting flanked by filing cabinets, telephones, and expensive flower arrangements. She was polishing her nails at her desk. She was aged about thirty, with green eyes and a green dress. She was painting her nails cerise. She seemed pleased enough to see Bernie, who gave her a hug and a kiss.
“Ooh,” she said, “Bernie, you really stink. You been at them champagne cocktails again? Fancy a coffee? I’m parched myself. You, Gini? It’s no trouble.” She made a face. “Tuesdays business is always a bit slack.”
Like Bernie, Hazel seemed unworried at talking to the press; it turned out she was a regular reader of the News, and her main interest, initially, was the identities of famous people Gini had interviewed in the past. Gini fed her a few names. Hazel, having dispensed coffee, settled again at her desk. She winked at Bernie.
“One or two of them are familiar to us, Bernie—yes? We get them all in here, you know, Gini. Movie stars, Arab princes, top businessmen—well, I mustn’t say more. We have to be discreet.
“Of course,” she went on, her eyes narrowing slightly, “we’re an escort agency, Gini. All above board. What you see is what you get. Our girls—and we have some very lovely girls—are there for company, light conversation, dinner on the town. No extracurricular activities. We’re strict about that.”
“Of course,” Gini said. “What are your rates?”
“It depends on the girl. Eight till midnight, that’s two hundred and fifty quid. After midnight we charge by the hour. For our very special ladies there’s a premium. Our two top girls can make five hundred a night, easy.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Eighty percent to the girls, twenty to the agency…” She paused, and gave Bernie a glance. “And then, if they’re enjoying themselves, and they want to make a private agreement with the client—well, that’s up to the girl concerned, right?”
Gini decided it was time to push. She said, “What interests me is the clients. Bernie was telling me earlier, with the phone lines, how he has to cater to very specific tastes. I guess you find the same thing? Some men will always want a blonde, others a brunette—do you find that?”
“And how.” Hazel reached for a large directory on her desk. She flipped it open and beckoned Gini to look. “That’s how we classify the girls, see? By hair color. We’ve found it’s the best. Sometimes we’ll get a punter with more specific needs—remember that one, Bernie, who liked Irish girls? He was sweet. I liked him. Said it had to be Irish, he liked the lilt in the voice. …”
Gini turned the pages of the directory in front of her. It resembled the model agency brochures she had borrowed from Lindsay, and many of the women pictured here might almost have made it as models. Neither Hazel nor Bernie had been exaggerating: The women pictured were all young and attractive; none looked in the least cheap. There was a section on blondes, on redheads, on brunettes. Beneath the photographs there were details of the women’s height and vital statistics as well as their names—noms de guerre presumably. Most seemed to end in a y. Among the blondes alone there were Nicky and Lucky and Vicky and Suzy. Suzy, in particular, had a beautiful face.
“I wonder,” Gini said, “you have regular clients, I guess. Do some of them like to see the girls on a regular basis? Every week, say, or every month?”
Bernie laughed. “Every week? At our rates? You must be joking. Not too many of those, Hazel, right?”
“No. But plenty of once-a-monthers.” She made a face. “Regular as the moon, some of them. Have to have their little monthly treat.”
“Maybe it’s like a ritual for them,” Gini said. “Do you ever feel that? Like they have to see the girl on a certain day of the week. Or at a certain time. Or in a certain place. That adds to the thrill, maybe?”
Hazel gave her a sharp look. “Hey, you’ve got the right instincts, I’ll say that. You want a job here?” She sighed. “There’s lots of them like that. There was one last year—I won’t mention specifics, but he’s a household name, put it like that. He had a thing about red. Every girl we sent, she had to wear a red dress. Then there was that Jap, Bernie, remember him? Had a thing about feet. Didn’t care about the hair color, the figure, the face—just the feet. One girl we sent over, she wore polish on her toenails, and this guy, he threw a fit.” She raised her eyes heavenward. “Men. They’re really weird, I’ll tell you that.”
This was not helpful. Gini persevered. “What about days of the week,” she said. “Do they ever insist on a certain day? Always a Monday? Always a Sunday, anything like that?”
“Not that I recall.” Hazel shrugged. “Maybe, if I went through and checked. It’s feasible—like it’s the one day a month their wife’s out of town, something like that? Mind you”—she smiled—“some of them, you wouldn’t believe how brazen they are. Couldn’t give a damn who knows what they’re up to. You remember that one last year, Bernie—that Yank who got his secretary to make the call? I felt so sorry for her, though I say it myself. You could tell she was nicely brought up, she had this really posh voice—”
“Really?” Gini leaned forward. “She was English?”
“Oh, yes. Very la-de-da, but nice with it. I mean, I could hear her blushing down the phone, poor kid. Three times he made her go through that…I’ve got it here.” She flipped the pages of the appointment book. “There you are, October, November, and December. A once-a-monther—and specific! I wonder he didn’t send the secretary round with a measuring tape. They had to be blonde. They had to be at least five foot nine and no more than five ten. Long legs, young—he liked them young. Big tits…Well, nothing so unusual about that. But can you credit it? Making some poor secretary spell that out on the phone? That’s why it sticks in my memory. Usually, they’re cagey. They always call themselves. What a creep.”
“Extraordinary,” Gini said. “So what happened?”
“Well, it was weird, actually.” Hazel lowered her voice to a confidential tone. She began to flick the pages of her appointment book. “Let me just check back…ah, here we are. When she first calls, this poor girl, she says her boss will be flying in from the States the next week and she has to set him up with a date. Then she goes through all these specifics, the way I said, then she says she’ll call back, and then the next thing I know, I have to send round a whole lot of pictures. This guy’s made a shortlist, would you believe? So, I send the pictures round to some hotel off Albemarle Street. Three times I do this. October, November, December. Christ knows why. He chose Suzy every time. So the secretary calls back again, and makes the booking and—oh, what do you know? How weird. He booked a Sunday, now I come to look. I’d forgotten that.”
“He did?” Gini felt herself tense. She looked down at the brochure in front of her. Suzy’s pensive features gazed back. She had thick blond hair that reached to her shoulders, and a very young, somewhat vulnerable face. She was wearing a white high-necked evening dress with long sleeves. She looked like a beautiful schoolgirl out on her first date.
“I’m not surprised at his choice,” she said carefully. “She’s very pretty. She looks terribly young though….”
Hazel winked. “Not as young, nor as innocent as she looks, our Suzy. But she is one of our top girls.” She shrugged. “Made no difference anyway. He canceled—or the secretary did, on his behalf. Said he’d altered his plans, something like that. All that fuss, then three cancellations. Can you believe that?”
“He canceled?” Gini stared at her. “You’re sure of that?”
“That’s right.” Hazel closed the appointment book. “Like I say, men are weird, right? Maybe just seeing the pictures gave him some kind of kick. Maybe he went to another agency, found a girl he liked better. Who knows?”
“You mean he never even met Suzy? Not once?”
“Not exactly.” Hazel smiled. “We reckon he saw her. Once.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because the last time the secretary rang, in December, she said he wanted to take a look at her. On approval. I mean, bloody cheek! So Suzy has to go round to some plush West End hotel, sit in the lobby for half an hour, then leave. Which she did.”
“And he was in the lobby too, you mean? Checking her out?”
“You tell me.” Hazel shrugged. “If he was, he never spoke to her—nothing like that. I thought, maybe he was so choosy, and when he saw her, she didn’t come up to scratch. Anyway, the secretary rang back, poor kid, and canceled again. Then I never heard another word. It cost him, mind you. Full fees for late cancellations, an extra fee for the hotel visit. The best part of two thousand quid. He must be loaded.”
“Credit card?” Gini said.
Hazel unscrewed the bottle of nail polish and began to apply a second coat.
“Cash. By courier,” she said. “The easiest money we ever made, right, Bernie? I wish all our customers were like that,”
On the sidewalk outside, Gini’s mind raced. It had to be Hawthorne, surely, and it was the first possible outside corroboration of McMullen’s story that she had. An English secretary on the telephone, an English voice calling ICD about those parcels: There must be a connection. The coincidence was too great. She glanced back at the agency office, wishing she had been able to examine that appointment book for herself. But it would probably have told her little: Hawthorne would use an alias. Besides, there was another way to discover more about this.
She turned to Bernie, who lingered at her side, to thank him for his help. As she did so, the door to the basement video studio opened, and a group of people spilled out. Two, a good-looking young man with long, dark, curling hair, and a very pretty young girl, might have been the stars of the sex instruction video. The others looked like technicians—cameramen, soundmen, perhaps.
They were followed by a tall, thin man in his mid-forties with reddish hair drawn back in a ponytail. He was resplendent, head to foot, in mustard-yellow Armani. At the sight of him, Bernie ducked aside and drew her into a store doorway until he had passed. He was clearly not eager to be seen.
Gini said, “Your boss, was it, Bernie?”
Bernie shuffled his feet “One of them. Put it like that. I’d better get back. Keep in touch, right?”
The Armani-clad man climbed into a brand-new black BMW. Bernie, looking shifty, sloped off in the opposite direction. Gini made for the tube, where she stood on the platform, thinking hard. The next person to talk to was Suzy, obviously. She did not have Suzy’s real name or her telephone number or her address. Further inquiries at Elite Introductions might cause suspicion. But Suzy’s company could be hired by the evening. Gini might not be able to hire her—but Pascal certainly could.