Looking Good Dead

off. Doing escort work gives them an alternative. I like to feel we are doing our bit to help them.’
    ‘Well of course,’ Grace said, his voice corrosive with sarcasm. ‘I mean, all that cash coming in . . . all your altruism, and her private arrangements with Anton the butcher none of your concern.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking, then he asked, ‘How many girls do you have on your books?’
    ‘About thirty. And ten guys.’
    ‘You have pictures?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Let me see Janie’s.’
    She went to a filing cabinet, retrieved a folder, opened it, took out a photograph in cellophane, then handed it to Grace.
    It wasn’t like any of the photographs he had seen in her father’s house or in her flat. This was a wholly different Janie Stretton, a Janie of the night.
    She was lying seductively on a leopard-skin rug, dressed in the briefest of leather hot pants, a black lace blouse unbuttoned to the navel, with her breasts all but completely exposed.
    Grace handed it to Branson. ‘Just escorts ,’ he said to the woman sarcastically. ‘Women companions for social functions, that sort of thing?’
    ‘Yeah, that sort of thing.’
    ‘Claire, I didn’t just ride into town on the tailgate of a bloody truck, OK? She was on the game, wasn’t she?’
    ‘If she was, it was without our knowledge.’
    ‘Where do you advertise?’
    ‘Magazines, newsagents, on the internet.’
    Grace nodded. ‘And where do you get most of your clients from?’
    ‘It varies. We get a lot from word of mouth.’
    ‘And which magazines?’
    Claire hesitated. ‘Contact magazines, tourist ones, the local paper, one or two speciality mags.’
    ‘Speciality?’
    After some more moments of hesitation she said, ‘Fetishes, mainly. People who are into rubber. Bondage. Stuff.’
    ‘Stuff?’ Grace questioned.
    She shrugged.
    ‘So do we have any way of finding out how this Anton first got hold of your number?’
    She peered in the folder and pulled out an index card. ‘May sixth. Anton. I wrote down, “Strong European accent”. He said he’d seen the advert in’ – she squinted as if trying to read her own writing – ‘the Argus .’
    The local newspaper.
    The phone rang again. She ignored it and continued squinting as if trying to decipher more notes. ‘He wanted to see some picture of the girls, so I directed him to the website. Then he rang back about half an hour later, saying he’d like a date with Janie. I have his number!’
    Grace sat up and saw Branson’s instant reaction also. ‘You do?’
    ‘I always take a call-back number for our clients. It puts them on guard.’
    ‘Let me have it, please.’
    He wrote it down as she read it out, then immediately dialled it on his mobile phone. Instantly he got the unobtainable signal. ‘Shit.’
    ‘Is there anything else at all you could tell us about this Anton?’
    ‘I wish I could. Do you . . . think – that – that he might have been the one who . . . ?’
    ‘If he wasn’t her killer, he must have been one of the last people to see her. Do your girls ring in after their date’s finished?’
    ‘Sometimes, depends how late it is.’
    ‘She didn’t ring you on Tuesday night after her date with Anton?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And you were ringing her about another date on Wednesday?’
    ‘Yes.’ She looked at her notes. ‘Another gentleman. Do you need his name and number?’
    Grace nodded. ‘We’ll check it out.’
    ‘You’ll be discreet?’
    ‘I’ll put my most discreet man on to it.’ Grace grinned to himself. He’d delegate his new recruit Norman Potting to the task. The DS was about as discreet as a bull on roller blades in a china store.

29
    By four o’clock Tom’s office was starting to empty. Typical for a Friday, he thought. It was a fine, sunny afternoon in London, and the weather forecast was good. One by one his staff were clearing their desks, saying their cheery goodbyes and heading for the door.
    He envied them their carefree weekends, and tried to remember when he’d last had a weekend in which he had really relaxed and not thought about work, not sat at his computer, poring over a spreadsheet of his outgoings and income, not peeked anxiously over Kellie’s shoulder as she’d sat at her keyboard on the sitting room floor.
    His window was open a little despite the roar of the traffic and he felt the air, balmy and warm. Maybe this weekend he would switch off a little, as much as the dark cloud of that damned CD would allow. It