The girl behind the reception desk at Delahayes Opportunities gave me a long, assessing look when I walked in, her expression neither welcoming nor hostile. She was young, black and beautifully groomed from her braids to her manicured fingernails. Somehow, I passed the initial scrutiny because she slid a clipboard and pen across the desk to me and launched into an uninterruptable spiel delivered at high speed.
‘Fill out this form with your name, age, nationality and legal status, what languages you speak, your current employment and what hours you would be able to work. Don’t forget to reply to the questions on the other side about hair colour, eye colour, dress size and shoe size, height and weight. Don’t lie because we will be double-checking all the information you provide us with.’
She turned back to her computer as I took the clipboard and wrote my name and POLICE OFFICER in the space for current occupation, then slid it across to her with my ID.
‘You’re finished already?’ She looked at it. ‘Oh. My God. I’m sorry. I thought – I mean, I assumed—’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said kindly. ‘Is the owner available for a chat?’
‘I’ll give her a call.’ She picked up the phone and pressed a couple of buttons, then changed her mind. ‘I’ll go through and see her. That phone – it’s not working very well for some reason.’
‘That’s strange.’
‘It happens from time to time.’ She was starting to regain her composure. ‘Take a seat.’
I watched her sashay through the door behind the desk, tossing her weight of braids nonchalantly as she went. Then the thunder of a pair of feet running upstairs at high speed echoed through the building, and I smiled to myself. Not as calm as she pretended to be, not by half.
Delahayes occupied three floors of a narrow, dingy office building on the corner of a busy street near Victoria Station, the kind of place you could walk past a hundred times without ever noticing it. The communal hallway outside was dirty and bleak, but the reception area had been recently redecorated and was a tasteful symphony of black and grey. The company’s name was stuck on the wall in chrome letters, and a big vase full of white flowers looked impressive until you realised they were very good fakes. I thought of the roses Seth had sent me and suppressed a shudder. I had, in the end, sent him a text to say I’d got them, and he had phoned me, and we had talked for hours. He wasn’t happy with how he’d behaved. He’d never meant to lose his temper. It had been the end of a bad day, he explained, but that was no excuse. It had been my fault as much as his, I had insisted. I had been difficult, moody, silent during dinner. High maintenance, he joked, but worth it, and I’d felt ashamed of myself.
‘If I didn’t care so much, Maeve, I wouldn’t have lost my temper.’
‘It upset me. I wasn’t expecting that anger.’
‘It’s nothing more than another kind of passion.’
‘Not the kind I like.’
‘So what kind do you like?’ There’d been a smile in his voice again, and a lazy kind of anticipation that turned my icy reserve to meltwater. And since then, a barrage of messages and jokes and an email confirming a reservation on the Eurostar and two nights at a hotel in Paris in July.
So I could forget all about it, I told myself, even as I caught myself easing my knee where it still ached.
‘Miss Gould will see you now.’ The receptionist tiptapped into the room, smiling nervously. ‘You can go straight up. Top of the stairs, on your left.’
I hadn’t formed much of an image of Miss Gould in my mind, but she was a surprise all the same: fiftyish, short fair hair, an engaging smile, an armoury of rings across her knuckles and enough chains slung around her neck to act as a fairly effective breastplate. She stood up as I entered and held out a hand.
‘Edina Gould.’ Her voice rang with money and good breeding. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Detective Sergeant Maeve Kerrigan. I’m investigating a murder.’
The smile evaporated. ‘What murder? What do you mean? If it was one of my girls—’
‘I don’t think she was one of your girls officially.’ I sat down and took out my notebook, settling in, and after a moment’s hesitation Edina Gould sat too. ‘I’m here because of Paige Hargreaves.’
‘Who?’
‘Come on, Miss Gould. You can do better than that. Paige Hargreaves. She was a journalist. She came to see you a couple of months ago. She wanted to work for you because she had a story she was investigating, about young women being hurt for fun at the Chiron Club.’
Her face was mottled under the veneer of expensive foundation. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘I think you do. I think Paige came and asked if you would take her on and you turned her down, so she explained who she was. She told you if you cooperated she wouldn’t name this agency in her report. She wouldn’t blame you for putting vulnerable young women in harm’s way.’
‘First of all, they’re not vulnerable. That’s why we have such a long and careful screening process. I only supply girls who have a reasonable amount of spirit and can keep their head in any circumstances. Secondly, I never put anyone in harm’s way. I offer them an opportunity to work in a very high-end environment, among this country’s leading business people and most powerful men. It’s up to them how they take advantage of that opportunity. What you will find is that many of these girls embark on impressive careers having started out here. They make contacts, they listen, they learn. They’re ambitious and they know their worth. No one is being victimised. Nothing illegal is taking place at the Chiron Club. If there was illegal activity, I would know about it.’
‘You’re supplying young women knowing that they’ll be sexually harassed at best while they try to do their jobs.’
‘Not at all. I’m not a madam. This isn’t a brothel. I’m a professional recruitment consultant and I make it very clear to my clients that the girls are not there to be used. What private arrangements they make are up to them, of course, but I have nothing to do with that. It’s the same as meeting someone in an office, except that they have very little chance of meeting men like this in any office where they might work. Haven’t you ever started a relationship with someone you met through work?’
‘Rape isn’t a relationship,’ I said thinly.
‘I thought you were investigating a murder. Now you’re talking about rape.’ She flung herself back in her chair and rearranged the gold chains slung around her neck. ‘Either way, I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Did Paige tell you the story she had been told? About a woman supplied by you as a waitress being gang-raped in a cloakroom?’
‘Not at all. She told me that one of the girls had been paid off after having sex in a cloakroom with two of the club’s members.’ She smiled, not pleasantly. ‘No names, of course. No further details. I had to tell her, I have no record of this happening at all. No one complained.’
‘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.’