Walking with Ghosts

He’d arranged to meet up with the guys in the band. He needed to do something quiet, like maybe play some cards.
    ‘Did I tell you I was reliable?’ he said.
    ‘No, but you did say we’d spend the day together.’
    ‘I can’t get it on. The band’s got another gig tonight, somewhere up near Whitby. I need to sleep.’
    ‘Please yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s your life.’ When she left the house, J.D. didn’t look like he had enough ambition to make the trip to Whitby.
     
    When she got to the office, Joni Prine was sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for her. When she saw Marie, Joni developed a coy smile. There was more than a hint of apology in it, but it would have taken Raphael to disguise the underlying avarice.
    Marie waited until Joni got to her feet. She watched as the girl smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt, and continued watching as the same wrinkles cracked straight back into place. ‘Does this mean you want to talk to me about Edward Blake?’ said Marie.
    ‘Five hundred quid’s a lot of money to somebody like me,’ said Joni. ‘I’ve got Jacqui to think of as well, that’s my daughter. With that kind of money I could go back to Sunderland, get a place near my mum now the old man’s given up the ghost.’
    ‘Sounds like the right decision,’ said Marie, leading her into the office and showing her the clients’ chair.
    ‘Well, yeah,’ said Joni, ‘as long as Eddy doesn’t find out it was me that grassed him. If something happens to me who’s gonna take care of Jacqui?’ She became agitated, rubbing the backs of her hands on her thighs, gnawing away at her bottom lip.
    ‘You’re still not sure, then?’ asked Marie.
    ‘I think it could work,’ Joni said. ‘It’s a good plan, the way you explained it to me. But there’s still a risk.’
    Marie nodded. ‘Small one.’
    ‘What I thought,’ said Joni, looking down at her hands. ‘I thought I’d feel better about that risk if there was more money involved.’
    Marie felt a smile building inside her, but she kept her face straight. ‘How much were you thinking, Joni?’
    ‘Six hundred. If that’s possible. I’d feel a lot better if the pay-off was gonna be six hundred quid.’
    Marie put her hands on the desk and leaned forward. ‘Joni,’ she said. ‘If the story is as good as you say, and provided it’s all completely true, you’ll end up with six hundred as a minimum. If we get the timing right and catch Edward Blake with his proverbial pants down, you could et a lot more.’
    ‘A lot,’ said Joni. ‘What we talking here, a grand?’ Marie nodded. ‘Maybe. Just tell me the story.’
    ‘He’s working for the tobacco industry,’ Joni said. ‘I don’t know how much he’s allowed to spend, but it seems like there’s no limit on it. What he does, he has to get MPs to vote the way the tobacco companies want. They’re frightened that the government’ll be pressured into banning cigarettes, you know, by doctors; or they’ll have to put out adverts saying that smoking fags gives you heart attacks as well as cancer, and if you’re pregnant it makes the kid get born with two heads but no brains. Stuff like that.
    ‘There’s a few MPs who keep at it, bring up bills to ban smoking. What Eddy has to do, he has to make all the other MPs vote against the ban. And the way he does it is to make them realize that the tobacco industry is always gonna give them a good time.’
    ‘By paying them?’ asked Marie.
    Joni nodded. ‘Cash and sex,’ she said. ‘Booze, holidays, anything they want. Tell you the truth, I don’t know the half of it. I only really know the bits that’ve involved me. I’ve spent weekends with MPs, done more or less whatever they want, then at the end of it I’ve slipped them a brown envelope bulging with used notes.’
    ‘Can you give me names? Dates?’
    ‘Names, yeah. Dates I can probably work out. But I can do better than that. The last year I’ve been recruiting girls for Eddy. He’s got a couple of cottages in Wheldrake now, and he sets them up with an MP and one or two girls, whatever the guy wants.
    ‘Or if there’s two guys he’ll put three or four girls in there. Or boys if they’re that way. We stock up the bar, make sure there’s plenty of mirrors in the bedrooms, dressing-up clothes, everything they might need, and leave them to it. The girls do whatever the guys want. They’re young, they like them younger all the time, so we recruit runaways homeless