‘Do you want some champagne?’ The red-faced man – Roddy Asquith as he would have been if he’d lived another twenty years – grabbed the waitress’s arm and towed her back to face me.
‘I shouldn’t, but I will,’ I said, and giggled, and made eye contact with the stony-faced, sulky waitress for the briefest moment as I lifted a glass off her tray. If Georgia didn’t watch out, she was going to get a proper telling-off from the Delahayes manager, the general herself, who had put us through a quick and brutal training programme so we would pass muster. It was thanks to the manager that my hair was currently wider than my shoulders, and my dress was as abbreviated as it could be while still counting as clothes. I’d worried beforehand that someone would recognise me but I’d walked right past Sir Marcus Gley as I came in and his eyes had been riveted on my legs and chest rather than my face. Orlando Hawkes wouldn’t be there, with his housemate lying in a Hampshire morgue. I wasn’t completely at my ease but with the hair and make-up I thought I could pass for a Delahayes girl. Georgia had been told to smile, and pay attention to what the men were saying to her, and to be polite. Currently she was looking as if she was ten seconds away from ramming her tray in someone’s neck and making a break for the exits. I didn’t blame her completely; it was difficult to carry a single champagne flute through the throng, let alone a whole tray of them. She forced a more pleasant expression on to her face as she offered her tray to someone else.
‘Down in one,’ Roddy’s lookalike urged me, and I giggled again.
‘I couldn’t! I’d be on the floor.’
‘I’d look after you,’ he said gallantly, and squeezed me around the waist, which rucked my dress up. I managed to get a hand to the hem in time to tug it down and preserve my modesty, although we were all so thoroughly packed together there was no question of anyone seeing anything. In fact, the champagne reception was proving to be a bit of a challenge. It was so crowded that I couldn’t move, let alone circulate, and I hadn’t seen anyone I recognised so far. The noise level was extraordinary – a string quartet in the corner were scraping away but I couldn’t hear a note. I could only imagine what the cacophony sounded like for the occupants of the unmarked van that was parked a short distance from the Chiron Club’s front door. They were listening through the button microphone I had clipped to the centre of my bra (despite Pettifer’s kind offer to help me to fit it). It was a tiny device, and even if the neckline of my dress slipped down, no one would ever spot it. The police hadn’t really moved on from the old days in terminology – a wire was still a wire, even if it relied on digital transmission now – but I was glad we were past the days of actual recording units. My tiny, strappy, sparkly little black dress didn’t offer many places where you could hide an old-fashioned wire.
‘Hope you’re getting all of this,’ I said behind my champagne glass and Derwent’s sigh gusted through my earpiece.
‘That was some of the least competent flirting I’ve ever heard, Kerrigan. You need lessons.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to encourage them, Josh,’ Liv snapped.
‘She’ll have them all lining up to take her in to dinner anyway, looking like that.’
‘Shut up, Chris,’ Derwent and Liv said in unison, which was precisely what I would have said to Pettifer if I’d been able to reply.
‘What about a canapé? Are you hungry?’ My companion was mainly ignoring me in favour of talking to his friends, but every now and then he remembered his manners.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ I smiled at him, and then at the waitress who was offering me a platter of tiny vol-au-vents. Her eyes went wide and I recognised her with a start. Bianca Drummond, kitted out in the black dress and polished make-up of the Delahayes girl. It shouldn’t have surprised me that she’d followed the same trail to the office in Victoria, but it did. I could cheerfully have strangled her, and then moved on to Edina Gould, who hadn’t thought to mention that Bianca would be joining us too.
‘Actually, no. I will take one.’ I covered for both of us, in case anyone had noticed anything strange, but my companion had already returned to his conversation.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded under cover of the noise around us.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ The canapé was a horrible, squelching thing and now that I was holding it I really didn’t want to eat it.
The dimples flashed in Bianca’s cheeks. ‘They’re disgusting. Here, put it back.’
I dropped it on her platter. ‘How did you talk Edina into letting you do this?’
‘Promised I wouldn’t mention her in my story. You?’
‘Threatened her, basically.’
She laughed, and moved away from me before I could ask her what she was planning and the crowd instantly closed around her. I looked past her, trying to spot Georgia so I could alert her, but there was no sign of her. Typical.
‘Did someone recognise you?’ Derwent sounded tense.
‘Hold on.’ I detached myself from the man beside me. ‘I need to pop to the ladies.’
‘Don’t be too long – we’ll be sitting down in a tick.’
‘I’ll be quick,’ I promised, and slid away from him.
‘Where are you going?’ Derwent demanded. ‘Don’t wander around. I don’t want you disappearing too.’
I reached the edge of the room, feeling like a swimmer clambering out of a crowded pool. Bianca had disappeared. I stepped out into the hall, pretending to look through my bag.
‘Are you all right, madam? Have you lost something?’ It was the tall, granite-faced man I’d seen when I interviewed Sir Marcus Gley – Carl Hooper, the head of security. I felt a thud of alarm as he crossed the black-and-white tiled floor and took my elbow, but there was no recognition on his stern face. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘My lipstick – it’ll be in here somewhere – and the ladies room, please.’ I kept my head down, still fossicking in my bag. I didn’t want anything to jog his memory and I thought my usual voice might remind him we’d met before, so I had switched to a gentle, rural Irish accent. I had worked hard at school to shed the influence of my parents’ soft voices – the ‘r’ that most English accents didn’t pronounce, the hushed consonants, the longer vowel sounds, the very rhythm of their speech – and it was nice to let it seep back. Edina had agreed, reluctantly, that sometimes they did have Irish girls and that they were quite popular with the members, so I could be Áine O’Driscoll for the night.
‘I’ll take you to the ladies.’
‘Oh, there’s no need. Directions will do me fine.’
‘I love it when you talk Irish,’ Pettifer said reverently in my ear, and I cheered silently as he gave a yelp of pain. ‘No need for that, Josh.’
Two men came out of the room behind us, their voices raised, drunkenness turning to the faintest hint of aggression. Hooper’s head snapped up and I saw the watchfulness that was habitual to people whose job involved stopping trouble before it started. He let go of my elbow, which ached as if it might bruise.
‘Up the stairs, second door on your left. Don’t be too long. Dinner starts on time and you mustn’t be late.’ He walked away, his attention still absorbed by the men he’d noticed. As I ran up the stairs I heard his clipped, slightly metallic voice. ‘Gentlemen, are you enjoying your evening?’
I was in the Chiron Club for two reasons: to see what they got up to behind closed doors, and to look for anything that might connect the place to Paige Hargreaves. It did occur to me that I might take the opportunity to have a quick look around – hadn’t Sir Marcus said there were offices upstairs? – but as I turned the corner of the stairs, I saw a man sitting on a chair on the landing. He was wearing a grey suit, like Hooper, and he had the muscle and general demeanour of a prize bull as he got to his feet.
‘What, miss?’
‘Ladies room.’
He was blocking the entire hallway behind him. One massive hand gestured to his left. ‘Please. This way.’
Meekly, I went where he had pointed. It was a tiny bathroom with a single cubicle and a basin the size of a teaspoon. Luckily for me, it was deserted.
‘Right, can you let Georgia know that Bianca Drummond is here?’ I said, keeping my voice low in case the man outside was listening. I couldn’t talk to Georgia via my mic; they would have to relay the message. ‘She’s one of the other waitresses. Georgia knows her, so she might have recognised her already.’
‘Got it,’ Pettifer said. ‘What’s she doing there?’
‘Same as us, presumably,’ Liv said.
‘I’d say so, but I don’t want her to get in our way. Or get hurt, if it comes to that. I can’t really talk to her in public again so Georgia will have to do it.’
‘How’s it going?’ Derwent asked. ‘Any sign of Ash?’
‘No.’ I said it reluctantly. In a team meeting before we’d left, it was Derwent who had pointed out, almost as if he wanted to prove he was able to be objective, that Luke Gibson was the only person who had mentioned Ash to us – that sending us on a wild goose chase looking for him might suit Luke very well indeed. I really didn’t want to find out that Luke had lied to us. ‘No sign of Ash or anything suspicious so far. The security staff are everywhere. Anyone in a grey suit is staff, and most of them seem to be muscle. Can you run a guy called Carl Hooper through the box? He’s their head guy – he’s the one I was talking to in the hall. Something about him feels off.’
‘Consider it done,’ Liv said. ‘You’d better hurry up. They’re starting to sit down.’
I reapplied my lipstick and sighed. ‘I wish I’d brought my pepper spray.’
‘If they get too handsy, stab them with a fork,’ Derwent said.
I’d assumed the gathering would become more sedate when we sat down for dinner, but I was mistaken. I had found my way to a table of younger members, thinking that they were more likely to be able to tell me about Ash. They were already drunk, shouting in each other’s ears, eyeing the women in the room with predatory intent. There were four women at the table and eight men, and I spent the first course trying to get the men on either side of me to stop groping me under the tablecloth. The one on my left was so drunk he could barely sit upright, but the man on the other side, Harry, was alert enough. I set out to charm him, and by the time the waitresses had delivered our main course plates, he was staring into my eyes.
‘So,’ I purred eventually, ‘I have a friend who told me his friend was a member of this club. Ash, I think he said his name was?’
‘Ash? I don’t know him.’ Because he had been brought up to be polite and helpful, Harry turned and nudged the guy next to him. ‘Do you know a bloke called Ash?’
The question went around the table until it reached a slight, fair-haired man on the other side of the table from me. ‘Yah,’ he called. ‘I know him. He’s here tonight.’
‘But I was looking for his name on the seating plan and I didn’t see it,’ I said, blinking as if I was completely befuddled.
‘It’s a nickname. His real name is Peter Ashington. Nice guy. We worked together for a while.’
‘Peter Ashington,’ I repeated for the benefit of the listeners in the van. So he exists. ‘And where’s he sitting?’
‘Why are you talking about him? Talk to me,’ Harry whispered wetly into my ear, and I giggled.
‘In a second.’
‘Now.’ He leaned over and kissed my neck an inch under my ear, open-mouthed. It tickled at first; then I felt a sharp pain as his teeth nipped my skin. I cried out.
‘What happened? Are you OK?’ Derwent’s voice was urgent, and I tried to laugh.
‘You can’t lean over and bite me! Not without buying me dinner first.’
‘Fucking hell.’ Derwent sounded as if he was on the verge of abandoning the surveillance van to deal with Harry.
‘She’s fine,’ Liv said.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Harry winked at me as he sloshed some more wine into my glass. ‘Couldn’t resist it.’
A glance around the room told me that the mood had changed as the waitresses cleared away the main course. Girls were sitting on the men’s laps, or kissing them openly at the table. One man had his hand inside the top of a very young, very scared-looking brunette on the other side of the room. Another was walking out dragging a blonde girl who was stumbling, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Here and there men had simply passed out, sleeping peacefully amid the debauchery. Sir Marcus Gley presided at an all-male table of older members who should have been better behaved, I thought, but even as I watched one of them hauled a girl into his lap and made her straddle him. Gley said something and a shout of laughter went up from them. A waitress leaned over so someone at our table could slide a twenty-pound note between her breasts. She laughed when he groped them as she straightened up. I wanted to ask the fair-haired man where Peter Ashington was, but as I looked over at him he was straightening up, glassy-eyed, rubbing his nose, and I thought I might wait for the cocaine buzz to fade. The man beside him called to Harry.
‘Oi, Hazza. We should take her with us to the house.’ He meant me.
‘What house?’ I asked, leaning my chin on my hand and blinking as if I was too drunk to concentrate.
‘A very big house in the countryside. You’d like it. Brilliant place for parties.’ Harry put his hand on my thigh and slid it upwards and I edged out of reach. ‘There’ll be more wine and we’ll have some fun.’
‘Will Peter be there?’
‘Who?’
‘Ash. Peter Ashington.’
The man on the other side of the table frowned at me. ‘Wait a second. Where are you from?’
‘Roscommon.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Southern Ireland,’ Harry drawled.
‘We generally just call it Ireland. Or the Republic of Ireland if you want to be formal about it,’ I said, forgetting for a moment that I was supposed to be looking pretty and saying nothing, and Derwent laughed in my ear.
‘You tell him. Why don’t you throw in a quick chorus of “A Nation Once Again” while you’re at it?’
Harry raised his eyebrows and looked across the table at the other man, who was shaking his head.
‘I don’t think so, mate. Too much trouble.’ He looked up as a wiry twenty-something with dark curly hair passed by. ‘Hey, Ash. This girl’s asking about you.’
‘Yeah?’ He checked himself and turned, looking puzzled as he saw me and didn’t recognise me. ‘What is it?’
‘Are you Peter Ashington?’
‘That’s me.’
I jumped out of my seat and hurried over to him, weaving as if I was drunkenly enthusiastic rather than closing in on my prey.
‘We’ve got a friend in common. Roddy Asquith.’
His face went white and his eyes flared with panic. He backed away from me, turned, and ran for the door as if the hounds of hell were after him, instead of one very irritated police officer in a skirt that was far too short and heels that were really too high for a pursuit.