23 Saturday 23 October
Well this is a treat. Geeta’s letting me drive.
It’s not official business. She’s got someone she needs to visit, and I just fancied a day out. But mostly, we both want to chat over what we’ve been through. She’s got the day off, and I’ve hired the car. An Audi A6 in fact. Joy of joys, it’s got satnav. Which I’ll need: I’ve never been to Bristol.
“It’s Clevedon actually, Holly.”
“Bristol, Clevedon, all the same to me. Postcode is in the satnav. The satnav lady’s voice will tell me what to do. I just listen and drive.”
“Before we set off, I’ve got something for you.”
She hands me an envelope, with the one word ‘Holly’ scrawled on it. I open it. It’s a card, picture of flowers on it. I read what’s written inside.
“Holly. I wanted to say this in the police car on the way to Home Croft.
I’m sorry.
I admit it, I was prejudiced by your ‘occupation’. I had a stereotype, based on no knowledge at all.
I thought I was doing my job, and sometimes that involves us being a bit hard on suspects. But in this case, at times I was less than professional.
Please accept my apologies – and also, my thanks for all you did for us on this case.
Chris.”
It’s half an hour later. We’re onto the M4, heading out of London. A dull, murky day, spits and spots of rain now and then, but some people are still thinking of holidays: I’m overtaking a caravan, a big sticker, I ♥ Newquay, across its back window. I think of Mr Attwell. I wonder if he’ll ever get Derek as far as Europe? Geeta waits while I concentrate on the road, then starts speaking.
“You said to me, Holly, that you put the pieces of this case together like a jigsaw in your mind. Now the whole jigsaw’s nearly complete. You and I each have lots of pieces, but we need to share them to understand it all. And the first thing I want to know is, how you knew it was Jurgita Žukauskienė in the boot of that car?”
“So that’s her real name, what a mouthful. Better name than PantiesOff though.”
“Do you ever say panties? Sounds American to me.”
“I say pants… or knickers. I get the odd john who talks about panties. Maybe it’s a punter thing.” I grin at her. “Anyway, the car boot – I was guessing when I said it would be her in there, but it was a confident guess. I’d given Jazz her address. Jurgita had visited us, Jazz had talked to her. Jurgita said that Jazz listened, a lot, in her usual caring way. So Jazz knew she was another Lithuanian orphan, just like Klaudija. No-one would care, hardly anyone would notice, that she’d disappeared. She was ideal for what they needed.”
All the traffic’s bunching into the fast lane. It’s the usual: one lorry doing 57mph overtaking another doing 56mph, and everyone else has to get into the outside lane to get around them. I focus on the road for a bit, start speaking again once we’re past them.
“I also guessed that they’d taken Jurgita before they got the alert that the police might raid the Soames – and could find evidence that would sink them all. Once they knew that, they had to hang onto Jurgita, to stop her talking. So they put her in the boot of the car.”
“That fits with our reconstruction of events. While they still had Jurgita in the car boot, Johnson and McKay went to the Soames, to check what evidence the police actually had managed to get hold of. And it was at the Soames that Johnson and McKay bumped into you.”
“Those two names. I’m starting to think of them as a double act on the telly. Like the Chuckle Brothers.”
“Funny you should call them that. Like they’re The Famous Five – but in this case they were The Crap Two. See, what makes detectives’ work hard, usually, is not criminals being ingenious. Oh no. It’s exactly the opposite: criminals who are the Chuckle Brothers, who are incompetent, who leave random bits of evidence, too many clues, all pointing different ways, so that you can’t see the wood for the trees. Johnson and McKay were typical. Like that knife for instance. They thought they were being clever, they took great care there were no prints on it, but then they stupidly went and tried to hide it where we were pretty much sure to find it. To us, as the police, when we found it dumped among the hotel rubbish... it seemed sensible to assume that someone had thrown it there in a panic, simply because it wasn’t disposed of properly. Their stupidity led us the wrong way. Finding the knife in the garbage, it led Chris, in particular, to believe that it was not a planned, pre-meditated murder. Which made us suspect you again, of course.”
“Johnson and McKay were just doing a job, and taking their pay. That’s my impression of them.”
“I shouldn’t say this, Holly, but we’ve got information, we expect to catch those two goons within a day or two. We know that after abandoning Jasmine Cairns and the Audi in that woodland, they got to a nearby village, stole a car, and then they turn up on CCTV at Milton Keynes station, boarding a northbound train. We weren’t able to trace where they got off the railway network, but of course it was easy to guess that they’re lying low with their mates in Manchester. We’ve now got hard evidence of exactly where they’re hiding. And once we’ve got them, and got information from them, we’ll have our complete set of evidence to proceed against Evans and Cairns, and against a couple of other Home Croft staff who were working with Evans – but we expect those to plead that Evans put them under duress. Knowing what we do of Johnson and McKay, they’ll be all too willing, once they’re nicked, to drop Evans and Cairns right in it. So expect the trial soon. And, as you’ll definitely be a witness – this conversation of ours – it isn’t happening.”
“Of course it isn’t. But there’s something I don’t understand. What was the connection between Evans and our Crap Two?”
“Johnson has a conviction for a truly evil GBH, and McKay a conviction for battering a teenage boy. They met in prison, got out at about the same time, and used Johnson’s connections to get work, enforcing protection rackets in Manchester. They had connections with football clubs too, visiting women – and sometimes men – who threatened to kiss-and-tell about the antics of various footballers. One of the footballers who used them, he broke both arms of a girl at the Soames, she was taken to Home Croft. We have a witness – a receptionist at Home Croft has come forward, and is willing to testify that Evans did the surgery on that girl. Anyway, it was after that incident that Evans got his first visit from Johnson and McKay.
You can guess what happened when those two went to Evans’ house. What he said to them, we’ll never know, but after that, Johnson and McKay spent most of their time working for Evans. As you know from talking to Elspeth Corr, over the past few years records have been changed, so that the struck-off, discredited Mr Evans has almost disappeared from all official information. That means that people have altered records, databases, files. People out there somewhere who were doing their everyday jobs, sitting at a computer, going home to their kids, but then they got a house call from two very nasty guys. So those people, whoever they were, they were scared for themselves and their families, they went into work, they changed the records.”
“Threats, then, rather than actual violence.”
“There’s a funny parallel with what was going on at the Soames – all those vague threats that Cheriton dished out, Holly, to you and others. There was actually nothing to back it up. Even the rumours that a previous manager had disappeared... Cheriton started that story himself. So as to make his staff that little bit scared. Some of the members believed it too. But we’ve found nothing to show that the Soames was anything more than an up-market brothel. Cheriton owns it, you know – he’s worth about ten million, and he’s tied most of it up in that place, all for one purpose – so he can play his little games. He started it with his public-school connections, many of them became members, and it grew from there. It’s not owned by any gangland boss, no thugs lurking in the background... just the rumour that they existed. And also, a bit like Krasniqi’s ventures into pimping: his threats to
o were all bluff. Criminals: they gain much of their power by convincing people that they’re more powerful, more capable, than they actually are. I watch detective stuff on the telly, and it annoys me: whenever I see some master-criminal skilfully laying false trails for the police, I think: nonsense. Even Johnson and McKay: once it came to carrying out a real, planned murder, they were very typical criminals. That is to say: they were crap at it.”
“So it wasn’t all one way then, with Evans and those two. Evans fooled them somehow into working for him – but they fooled him into thinking they were up to the job. He might be intimidating, and totally unafraid of violent criminals. But I guess even he had a weakness: he didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know whether they were actually any good at what they did. Services?”
“Uh?”
“Motorway services. I could do with a coffee.”
The Starbucks is quiet. The place is a mess: stains on every table, abandoned cups, cold, half-drunk. A girl in a daydream is pretending to clear one table in the far corner. My coffee’s not that good: give me Brucciani’s any day. Geeta has a tea, she’s drinking it quickly. She casts her eyes round the tables. I can tell that she’d like to be gone from here, she’s nervous about getting overheard, about our voices carrying. So I ask her about an innocent party. Ruby.
“Ruby. I feel sorry for her. She needed that job. You know, don’t you, that Ruby is from Tower Hamlets? Two generations of her family were – still are – on benefits. She got herself to university, she was ambitious for a good career. She’d applied unsuccessfully for over a hundred jobs. She changed her accent, her style of dress. She got the job at the Soames believing it was hotel administration, then she found out she was merely” – she drops her voice – “the boss’s Girl Friday at a brothel. I don’t think it was so much a moral problem for her” – I raise an eyebrow at her, and she smiles back – “but it was another big dent in her confidence. She’d like to believe in herself – she tried to pretend that her job was a stepping-stone to a better future. But of course, she knew deep down that it wasn’t, and that she was selling out to Cheriton, and her career was going nowhere at the same time. I think she veered between anger at Cheriton and bouts of trying to prove to him that she was highly capable. Anyway, Cheriton had a Man Friday too, of course. Michael Potter.”
“What a sad man. He told me he was at school with Cheriton, but it had all gone wrong for him, he was broke, he needed work. Cheriton exploited that, enjoyed employing him as one of his little minions.”
“Yes, he’s pitiful. A lost soul. Maybe he’ll be able to move on in his life after he gives evidence at the trial. Get the Soames out of his system, restart himself. The ancient Greeks, they had a word for it. Catharsis. Potter needs catharsis. He believes he’s moral, but actually he was just massively jealous of all the sex and money and egotism that surrounded him, even though he could see how shallow it was. And every day Cheriton rubbed his nose in it. So the two of them, Ruby and Michael, they both hated what they were seeing – they shared their misgivings. Had lots of little secret chats together. They kept a record of everything they saw. But they needed to hold on to their jobs, neither dared to go to the police. They’re both full of anger, but they lack courage. They even convinced themselves that when girls were getting hurt, it was better to hang on, keep pretending, keep adding to their records, rather than simply come to us.”
“I guess you can put their records together with the other information you found at the Soames? Enough to put Cheriton behind bars?”
She looks around, and I guess she’d rather have this conversation in the car. I take another sip of my coffee, and decide to leave the rest of it. I pop to the skanky Ladies’, then we walk back across the car park to the Audi. Satnav Woman says “Rejoin the M4 Westbound...” Geeta talks over her.
“We’ve recovered some of the information. Cheriton tried his best to destroy records. He lied to Johnson and McKay about that. The Soames did backup information to the cloud: he deleted it, but we’ve recovered it. But there’s not a lot of useful information there. From the police point of view, the worst thing is that he burnt the hard drive of their office computer, and that was the only place, we think, that held their membership database. So we’re reliant on Ruby and Michael’s records, plus trying to track down some girls who’ve left. For instance, we probably won’t have enough evidence to charge Josh Borrowdale with anything. Green and Pleasant Land keeps pulling in the TV ratings, it’s more popular than ever.”
“No idea why. I thought it was shit even before I knew about Borrowdale’s antics.”
“That’s why you’re not a telly critic, Holly... Regarding the digital evidence, Cheriton told us that Potter, not him, had burnt the hard drive, but that’s clearly nonsense, because Potter’s been totally co-operative with us. But even though that disk is destroyed, the key evidence against Evans – on one of the two ipads which Cheriton stole from your flat… it’s 100% OK. The essential information about what happened at Home Croft and the other murders is all there in full detail: we’ve been able to access the email accounts and everything from Cairns’ ipad. Her emails to Evans and to Johnson and McKay, including instructions to kill Wycherley and to kill Krasniqi, plus full details about all the girls.”
“I remember how Jazz behaved, after the burglary. She was always calm in any crisis – but when that happened, she was totally in shock. I know now that she was stunned because her ipad had been taken, was in someone else’s hands. She knew that someone had now got the power to put her in prison for life. Even then, she thought on her feet – she told me that the burglary was a warning, in order to put me off the scent, and again she tried to make me believe that Krasniqi was behind it.
But what I’m thinking is, Geeta, how Cheriton would have known Jazz so well. That’s what horrified him, when he threw me out of the Soames. He looked at my phone, saw Jazz’s photo among my Contacts, recognised her, and it terrified him. The woman that he suspected was behind the disappearances of Agnieszka, Klaudija and Lucy. He’d sacked her after Lucy, because he was wondering about a pattern – Agnieszka and Lucy. At the time Lucy disappeared, he didn’t realise that Klaudija was part of that pattern too, although I later found out that he was worried enough about her, too, to offer £10k to her old boyfriend to find her. When I had my bust-up with Cheriton, and he looked at my phone, he realised that all three girls had met the same fate – although he wasn’t quite sure what that fate was – and he thought that Jazz and I were in it together.”
“You mean – he thought that you’d started working at the Soames in agreement with Jazz?”
“Yup. So that I could carry on whatever he thought she’d been doing there. No wonder he went wild and threw me out. He knew it was abduction, possibly murder, but he didn’t go to the police, I guess because he has no heart and no balls. But he must have talked to Ruby, shared his fears with her, because that’s how she got the information to come to you and report me.”
“You’re right – when she first contacted us, Ruby told us that she’d got her latest, most alarming information direct from Cheriton. But what we don’t know, although it’s not needed for the prosecution, is where Cairns met Agnieszka and Klaudija. Did she meet them through the Sexwork Helpline, and introduce them to the Soames? Or, did she first meet them because Cheriton was employing her to meet prospective girls for the Soames?”
“I haven’t a clue. All I know is, about three years ago, Jazz had a bad spell – restless, discontented for a while. Then she seemed to cheer up, and at the same time she started being away from the flat, telling me about day-long outcalls in the country, and visits to Mum and Dad. But of course she was at the Soames, with her sports edition A-Class Mercedes not looking too much out of place in the car park. My guess is that she made sure that Cheriton noticed that she was clever and capable. He began to rely on her for little jobs. Much like he did with me. Something he once said to me makes me believe that he asked Jazz to take charge of their me
dical records. Plus, she could drive, so she sometimes got the job of going over to Home Croft instead of Michael or Ruby.”
“Where she met Evans… And, although we don’t know where she met Agnieszka or Klaudija, we do know about Lucy.”
“Know what?”
“That Lucy went to Sexwork Helpline. When she disappeared from her parents’ home, the Wycherleys, as you can imagine, kicked up quite a fuss. They guessed she’d gone to London. I got to hear of the case, everyone else just thought it was a standard missing persons, but – and I’m pleased with myself here – I had some instinct that this was different. And I thought of Sexwork Helpline. I went to their office in early June last year, but I never saw Cairns at that stage. I spoke to someone called Jean Rogers. Who was very helpful, and kept extremely full records. Rogers said yes, she had details of a ‘Lucy Wilson’, who matched Lucy Wycherley’s description, and who had visited the Helpline office just a few days before me. She had booked to come in for a full advice session – but then never turned up for it.”
“Jazz half-admitted that to me. But of course, she told me don’t worry, don’t talk direct to Jean, I’ll look into it for you. Not.”
“Lucy didn’t turn up for her advice session because, of course, by then she’d met Jazz, who had taken her along for an ‘interview’ at the Soames. But the Helpline had no reason to believe anything was wrong, they deal with lots of people who come in once and never turn up again. Then, at the end of June, Wycherley himself reported to the police that Lucy had phoned him, she was still alive, she was fine. The case was closed, forgotten. But then, January this year, he contacted us again, told us that she’d stopped phoning him. Of course, we didn’t reopen the case, things like that happen all the time. Perhaps our lack of action was what prompted Wycherley to investigate himself. Six months later, Wycherley turns up murdered – Chris was asked to take on the case. He’s actually a really good copper, you know. The chief – she discussed it with us both, she took the view that there was probably no connection. I argued that we should look into that angle, a disappearance and a murder in one small family within a few months of each other, it was too much of a coincidence. On the other hand, there was no hard evidence to tie the two cases together. So the chief told Chris to lead on Wycherley’s murder, and I was allowed – after some argy-bargy – to make some more investigations about Lucy. As if they were separate cases, although of course we could pool information. So you see, when I heard of the burglary, and that your flatmate was involved in the same charity that Lucy had used...”
“You visited our flat and did your Florence Nightingale bit.”
“That’s a new name for me.”
“It wasn’t me that first called you that.”
“What’s important – critical in fact – is that when I visited, you gave me the names – Soames and Home Croft. At that time, I had nothing else to go on, I couldn’t justify any action, but I started investigating the Soames’ accounts. A private membership club, with an amazingly high annual membership fee... and it seemed to spend a fortune on staff salaries. It rang alarm bells, I talked it over with the chief. She said it wasn’t enough evidence to justify action. The last thing she wanted was some high-profile raid which later turns out to be groundless. We’re all affected by Yewtree, you know. Raids, charges, trials which later turn out to be a waste of public money, and appear to victimise celebrities for no other reason than that they’re in the public eye. I was warned off.
But then a few days later, Ruby Birch turns up at the door of Kingston police station and says, I work at an up-market brothel called the Soames Hotel, I’m here to report it, I didn’t want to be part of it, I’ve kept a record of what I’ve seen – but something much more serious is going on too, girls have disappeared, my boss is very worried, and someone called Holly Harlow is mixed up in it. Because you’d already volunteered the names Soames and Home Croft to me, I thought: you can’t be mixed up in it. Chris, I must admit, thought differently. He thought you were guilty as hell.”
“Yes, I got that impression… it wasn’t very nice, being on the receiving end of it. Did he give my address to Krasniqi?”
“Of course he didn’t. That would be completely out of order.”
“Well someone did.”
“He didn’t actually deal much with Krasniqi. Jackie Simmonds, she took his statement…”
“And? ... did you see them together?” I can guess what’s coming.
“Mmm.”
“Let me guess. They were flirty with each other. He turned on a bit of charm with her, flattered her. I could tell, first time I saw her, that she’d be the type to respond to that.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want me to look into it?”
“No, of course not. But... yes, do have a quiet word with her. For her sake. It might stop her doing that sort of thing again. But nothing official, please.”
“OK. Point taken. But – with Ruby’s evidence, and you mentioning both organisations in the same breath – I went back to the chief, discussed our suspicions. And after some discussions, she said OK, go to the Soames, get hold of their records – but in the case of Home Croft, she would only be willing to authorise a raid if more evidence turned up. But at least we were poised to act against Home Croft, and we put the local police on alert. Your phone call from the Savoy Hotel, you telling us that Evans and Cairns were in it together, abducting girls – it gave us that evidence, the information we needed to go ahead immediately with the Home Croft raid. Without your call, those two would have had the time to escape.”
London was gray, but blue skies are coming up from the West. Traffic’s a bit lighter too, now.
“I’ve known Jazz for eight years. She’s clever and ambitious, but she chose to work as an escort. The car, the designer clothes, and all her do-gooding – somehow, they were all parts of the same thing. I think our day-by-day life in Finsbury Park, Sunday morning shopping at Sainsbury’s and so on, was a kind of slow despair for her.
Then she meets Evans. A man who seems to have it all – material success and limitless confidence. And he’s done it by sticking up two fingers to the law, and to all ideas of right and wrong. He says to her “Work with me, be my partner in this, you and me, we’ll make millions.” After those eight years… can you imagine the effect on her? Like someone once said to me, it must have seemed like she’d won the Golden Ticket.”
“Enough to turn her into a murderer? …”
“I guess we all pretend to ourselves, sometimes. We mistake one emotion for another. Jazz was desperate to feel successful, and she had tons of energy. Like Sexwork Helpline. She accidentally-on-purpose kidded herself that all her energy was the same thing as actually caring for those girls. Every girl they helped – in her heart of hearts, it was just another tick in the box, another great achievement by that unsung heroine, Jasmine Cairns.”
“When I visited you – my impression was, she cared. Maybe she just believed her own acting.”
“Maybe. It would explain why the punters loved her – they genuinely thought she enjoyed being with them. Guys will pay silly money to feel like that. Or, the Soames. Jazz told me in her best Guardian-reader voice that it should be shut down, it sounded like a brothel for up-market Jimmy Saviles. She convinced me that she really felt like that, and in a way she did. But of course, she herself had worked willingly at the Soames for a long time, up until Lucy’s disappearance. Like I say, ambitious: if Cheriton had appointed her manager, she’d have grabbed it with both hands.”
I grip the steering wheel with both hands: some tosser’s just pulled out in front of us. Now he starts braking. Then he weaves into the outside lane. More brake lights are coming on, far ahead.
“Brake lights, Holly. Jam ahead.”
The traffic slows, grinds along, then halts. I’m looking at the arse-end of a 44-ton lorry.
“Jazz had so many ideas, too, and for years, there was usually only me – an uneducated dimbo – to share them with.”
?
??Dimbo?”
“Yes. That’s not fake modesty. She was attracted to big words, big ideas. She read books, she even had that Screw book with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in it. She couldn’t share those things with me: another frustration for her. Brains are like computers or phones. A good computer is not just about that microchip thingy that does the fast processing. You also have to have all the good apps loaded onto it. The only app that ever got loaded onto me was a St John’s Ambulance course. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’ve seen what Evans – and Jazz – have done with the education and the opportunities they’ve had. Killing people in order to get what they want... I think I’m lucky not to have the life-and-death powers that Evans seemed to enjoy. My crimes are confined to shouting and swearing at people occasionally, and I’m glad it’s like that.”
“Fortune and fame... not all they’re cracked up to be, is that what you mean, Holly? Well, even without the apps, you’ve managed to do a Miss Marple on this case.”
“The old lady on the telly? Oh yeah, I’m just like Miss Marple. Except I go to work naked.”
“We all go to work. I think that’s what Chris didn’t quite understand about you... at first.”
“Well, he is a man.” I smile at her. “I forgive him.”
I see other drivers around me, tapping their fingers on the wheel, impatient, annoyed. There’s no explanation for this jam. Hopefully we’ll be moving soon.
“I tried to read that Screw book, after everything that’s happened. You may understand it differently, Geeta – but to me, the woman who tells the story, and Miss Jessel, Quint’s sidekick, were both under Quint’s spell, although in the book Jessel appears as a ghost. Maybe she even was the woman who’s telling the story, appearing to herself, like in a mirror. She says at one point that she was sitting by a pond, with a little girl, and she becomes aware of a third person. Miss Jessel, looking back at her across the pond. Like I felt when Chris and I walked under Waterloo Bridge. I felt someone was there, behind us, and of course someone was. Jazz herself, watching us. Chris has been at our flat, he’d come to see me, but I was at the Soames. As I wasn’t at home, he’d talked to Jazz. I guess she overheard his phone call to me, and when he left to meet me, she followed him to the Embankment. Just like when she followed me to Krasniqi’s house, then she went back to that café in Wood Green and pretended to me that she’d followed me out of concern.”
“What you felt – when you were under the bridge. It’s something that happens to climbers, they say, high up on the mountains, when they’re exhausted, scared. Two climbers hallucinate together that there is a third person climbing with them. Sometimes they even share their food into three portions. There’s a line about ‘who is that, the other side of you?’“
“A line from...?”
“T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land.”
“Never heard of it. But I’ve read the Slimmer’s World sequel. The Waist Land.”
She smiles at my terrible joke. I hear cars going into gear all around me, and the lorry in front of me grunts forwards.
“Looks like we’re on the move at last, Geeta. You know, when I was thinking it over, that last night after you interviewed me at the station, I was silly enough to start wondering if Ruby might be Evans’ Miss Jessel. Elspeth Corr told me she saw a tall blonde, from behind, at Home Croft: I thought: Ruby, it was part of her job to ferry people over to Home Croft. But of course the jigsaw wouldn’t fit together that way, the pieces don’t match: Ruby’s not the type to fall for Evans. Like me, she’s too ordinary.”
The clouds have all gone now, there’s sunshine: autumn trees either side of the motorway like lines of gold. I ask Geeta to get my sunglasses out for me.
“Thanks, that’s better. This sun is a nice change, isn’t it? Like I say, when Jazz met Evans, she saw her escape hatch. She crossed some kind of boundary in her mind. Evans told her there was a market for organ transplants, if she could…”
“Supply the donors. Yes, I guess you’re right, Holly. That’s how her mind worked. Lizzie Bennet syndrome.”
“Meaning? …”
“The heroine of Pride and Prejudice gets asked when she first fell in love with Mr Darcy. She says something like ‘I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’”
“Grab the money and the man, while you still can... Once, just once, Jazz’s mask with me slipped, and she said “Life’s a time-bomb, Hol.” She thought this was her last throw of the dice. I can see all that. But what I can’t imagine, Geeta, is what happened inside her brain, in order to plan and do what she did. My mind’s not capable of it. Like I said to Chris once, I can’t even bear to see a spider stuck in the bath, I rescue it with a piece of toilet paper. If I could imagine how Jazz actually felt, I’d scare myself. Like you said in the police station interview, I’d be looking down a big black hole.”
“I’m glad you can’t imagine how that might feel. Neither can I. Interviewing either of those two – I was chilled to the bone, just being in the same room with them.” She smiles at me, like we’re sharing something that we’d rather not think about. I glance back at her, then concentrate on the road. The traffic’s crawling along, we’re into the roadworks themselves now. Signs flash up for “Average Speed Check 50mph”. I wish. Three miles of cones and crawling before we can start to motor again. She carries on.
“As you say, Jazz handled the Soames medical records, including blood group details. All you need for a liver donor is for them to be in really good all-round health, and to be a compatible blood group with the recipient. Or Blood Group O-, universal donor. So she had all the information, and access to foreign, friendless girls who wouldn’t spark a major police operation if they disappeared – but were also medically certified as healthy. Girls who were invisible in society.
Meanwhile, Evans was already using Home Croft to do operations on the quiet for the super-rich. Their so-called management were clueless about what he was actually doing, half the time. But he wanted to do even more. They were all liver transplants, the girls. Jurgita was to be the donor for another one.”
“And that was Evans’ specialist area?”
“Yes. He got struck off because of liver operations. As a top NHS surgeon, he was doing both orthotropic – that is, a whole liver from a dead body – and living donor transplants. Of course, a living donor – unless you’re at Home Croft under the knife of Mr Evans-aka-Franklin – has to consent, and they have to survive the operation. In order that the donor survives, only part of the liver is taken, the rest regrows over time. Like Prometheus.”
I’m keeping an eye on the lorry’s bum, but I glance across at her. Like I did once with Cheriton, I say “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Greek myth. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. Zeus, king of the gods, punished him by chaining him to a mountain. A vulture came each day and ate his liver, which then regrew each night.”
“Bloody hell. And I thought Anne Boleyn came to a nasty end.”
“Sorry. I just say stuff like that. The burden of a classical education. Anyway – the blood vessels in the liver are like the trunk and branches of a tree. A surgeon who cuts into a consenting live donor has to cut, as it were, a major branch off the tree but leave the trunk connected to the donor, so that the main part of the liver remains with the donor. Then the cut-off branch is sewn to connect into the recipient’s tree-trunk. But sometimes the branches in the donor liver are tangled. Taking off one branch becomes risky and difficult. The surgeon needs to evaluate images of the donor liver before the operation, and err on the side of caution.”
“You mean, cancel the operation?”
“That’s right. Sometimes the surgeon even needs to stop in the middle of an operation and sew the donor back up, because it’s too risky to try to cut away one branch. Evans was blasé and cavalier in making the image-based assessment, and hugely over-confident during surgery. He operated in practically every case, regardless of tang
led blood vessels in donors’ livers. Juniors who challenged him were belittled and bullied. His liver recipient patients had brilliant recoveries – but several donors had really slow, difficult recoveries: two died.
Evans was got rid of as quietly as possible. Although orthotropic transplants are better – assuming, of course, you can get dead but fresh donors – the NHS can only hope to meet the demand for liver transplants by encouraging live donors. A splash of news about deaths of liver donors would be –
“Counter-productive, is that what they say?”
“Exactly. I’ve looked at the records of those cases now, and I think Evans was lucky to get away without a manslaughter charge. But he didn’t get away scot-free – this country does have freedom of information. At first, there was plenty of information on the Net about him, the disciplinary charges and his striking-off, if you knew where to look for it. But given the fact that he thought he was God in the operating theatre, he wasn’t going to give up surgery for some desk job and a mediocre salary. Hence his work at Home Croft, his bogus claims to have qualified in the States, his false name.”
“And I guess, as long as the true information remained in the public domain, Evans’ position at Home Croft was at risk. So he used Johnson and McKay. I guess after a while, he started to feel safer again, wanted to try his hand.”
“There’s several million pounds to be made on a single operation, because of the demand for livers massively outstripping supply. Waiting lists are long everywhere in the world, and you only even get into the queue if you’re pretty badly ill. In the States, nearly a third of the people in the queue will die before it’s their turn for the surgery. Although, you can put yourself onto more than one queue. Have you got your iphone with you today, Holly?”
“Sure.”
“So have I.” She gets out the shiny, desirable little gadget, like a Show-and-Tell. “Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, needed a liver transplant in 2009. He got the operation earlier than he might have done, because he was on two waiting lists, one in California and one in Tennessee. He had the operation in Tennessee, even though he lived in California almost all the time.”
“Was that illegal, then?”
“No, although it sparked off an ethical debate about the rich being able to get onto multiple queues. It’s only an illustration of the extent to which demand outstrips supply, and of the fearful limbo of waiting in a liver-transplant queue. The much more sinister issue, of course, is if you’ve got money, and you’re willing to ignore moral considerations, you may want to seek a private option to jump the queue altogether. In fact, you want the surgery before you even become as ill as the people in the queue.”
“So that’s where Evans saw his market.”
“An incredibly lucrative market. As well as the queue-jumping, donation of a whole liver is much the best option for the patient. The surgery’s simpler and less risky, and the recovery is quicker and more certain. Basically, you’re getting a whole, fully-functioning liver; you can get better surprisingly quickly. Especially if the person it’s taken from was still alive on the operating table.”
“And one operation would have netted Evans millions?”
“It did. He received nearly five million after the operation in which Agnieszka died. Which I guess he promised to Jazz to share with her, although she never saw that money. It sat in a bank account in Switzerland while she dreamt about it. Her Pemberley. Evans carried on with the operations, once every few months, depending on the supply of donors from Jazz. I suspect he carried on because of ambition and arrogance rather than greed. He enjoyed doing what he was doing, and he was also cocking a snook at the NHS who had regarded him as ‘too risky’.”
Out of the roadworks at last: my favourite road sign; white circle, black diagonal. National Speed Limit. Thank God for that. I get past the lorry, and the road’s clear ahead. I ask a question that’s been rolling round in my mind for the last couple of months.
“I wonder if Jazz wanted them to stop, after the first operation?”
“It would be nice to think that. She claims that she thought that only part of the liver was taken, that she didn’t intend the girls to die. She blames Evans totally, and claims she didn’t really understand what was going on. She’d like us to believe that she was under his spell completely. You never know, if she puts on a good act in court, they might be taken in by that story. I don’t buy it, though. In her bedroom we found a sales brochure for a mansion in the Cayman Islands, price £20 million. That’s the kind of money she was after, and it must have seemed possible to her. And Evans wasn’t totally in charge: Cairns had the power to supply or not supply donors. So Evans was dependent on her. I think they’re equally culpable. But even if Jazz evades murder convictions for the three girls, we have emails and texts that prove that she instructed Johnson and McKay to kill Wycherley and Krasniqi. And Johnson will, we hope, confirm the phone call in which she instructed him to kill you, and exactly how to do it.”
Neither of us speaks for a moment. Despite what I saw in Room 412, and what nearly happened to me, it’s those that died at Home Croft that keep haunting me. Like I do at night, when I can’t sleep, I try to find ways in my mind to lessen the horror. I say “At least with Agnieszka and Klaudija…”
“I know what you’re thinking, Holly. They thought they were going to Home Croft for cosmetic surgery, they both had the anaesthetic willingly. They were probably feeling positive, excited even. They didn’t know that they were going to –”
I say it. “Be murdered.” Wish I hadn’t; the word tastes nasty in my mouth. I start speaking again. “Do you know who the transplants were done for?”
“There are names on the ipad. The most recent one, the one Jurgita was lined up for, he lives in Russia. He was at Home Croft when we raided, but we didn’t have grounds to detain him, and he got on the next flight home. He’s ridiculously rich and powerful, we don’t know if he realised they were using a live donor, I suspect from what we know of him that he did. But there’s no dice pursuing him. The other two names on Cairns’ ipad are fake names, we’ll probably never know for sure who they are. They could be from anywhere in the world, they could be British gangland bosses, they could be celebrity household names.”
The motorway is getting busier again: we’re approaching Bristol.
“But Vennery – that wasn’t planned ahead, Geeta. He was with Lucy when he collapsed. He wanted to have sex with her, to spite her lover.”
“Her lover, who is? ...”
“Someone known to George Vennery. Who asked Cheriton not to put Lucy with anyone else, and paid him. Cheriton took the money but ignored the request, because lies are his stock-in-trade. When Vennery showed an interest in Lucy, Cheriton was happy to let him have sex with her, and pocket the money he’d been given. If you absolutely have to have the man’s name for the investigation, then I guess you can compel me to. But in this conversation, in this car, you don’t need to know, and I’m not going to tell you.”
“You’ve got me curious now.”
“Well, you’ll have to stay curious. Anyway, the way I see it is: Vennery collapses at the Soames, while he’s with Lucy. Jazz was around; she takes him to Home Croft, Lucy goes along. Whether that was Jazz’s plan, or just bad luck for Lucy, I don’t know. Evans says: we could treat this man with drugs, but his liver’s failed, eventually he’ll die, or...”
“But, the records we found show that a liver transplant was already planned for Vennery. Liver disease, it’s a long-term thing. He was ready for an operation – Evans was just waiting for Cairns to provide the donor.”
“That may have been the plan. But then Vennery has a sudden collapse, he’s at Home Croft on a trolley in front of Jazz and Evans, dying. They both look at Lucy, young, healthy, standing there. Jazz maybe already knows that she’s Blood Group O-, universal donor. That’s what Elspeth Corr saw through the crack in the door.”
“Take the next exit...” Satnav lady again. Like my autopilot, that night
. I concentrate on listening and getting in the right lane. It’s busy, traffic is jostling for position as we change motorways. Once we’ve got onto the M5, I carry on talking.
“Time passed, and Wycherley didn’t hear from Lucy. He hadn’t got her phone number, because she wanted to be able to call him whenever she needed a shoulder to cry on – but she didn’t want him to be able to contact his runaway daughter whenever he liked. So she regularly used a friend’s phone to call him. That friend was Jazz.
“Daughter-father relationship.”
“Something, I guess, in those phone conversations between them led Wycherley to suspect that Lucy had become a prostitute. I guess that, when he didn’t hear from her for ages, he got to wondering… so he used the only thing he had. He tried something that I once tried, and it worked. He typed the friend’s phone number into Google. One result came up: the profile page of a hooker called GirlNextDoor. Like I said, Geeta, the question that came to me while I was hiding in the Embankment Gardens: why did Wycherley pick me? And another question, too: if Krasniqi wasn’t involved in the murder, how was it known to the killer that Wycherley would be in Room 412 of the Excel hotel at that time? But actually, those two questions have the same answer.
Mrs Wycherley, I guess, didn’t want to look for Lucy, I don’t know why. Maybe you’ll find out today. I guess people react in different ways when a child runs away from home.”
“And, we don’t know what the state of the Wycherleys’ marriage was.”
“Mmm... well, a few months passed, the phone calls to Daddy suddenly stopped. A few more months passed. Mrs Wycherley went off to Vietnam to find herself, do some trek in the jungle. Maybe that was her way of coping. She was away for weeks. Jonathan Wycherley took the opportunity to travel to London, stay for a few days, to try to find Lucy. He visited the Soames, and he got nowhere there. But also, thinking he was phoning Holly, the GirlNextDoor, he called the phone number he had, which was one of two numbers on my profile.
The two numbers are there, because Jazz and I cover for each other. I was when I thought of that, as I hid in the bushes in that park, that I realised – it had to be Jazz, behind all this. It couldn’t be anyone else. She wasn’t in the boot of that Audi under Waterloo Bridge: she was pulling all the strings.”
“So it was only that? That made you realise it was her?”
“Well, I guess you cops would call it process of elimination. Funnily enough, it was Jazz herself who talked me through it, soon after the burglary. She talked me through it, I guess, partly to check out whether I suspected her, and partly to try to put me off the scent.”
“So what’s this process of elimination then?”
“It goes like this, Geeta. Four people knew, or were in a position to find out, that Wycherley was going to be in Room 412 at that time. First person was me. Wycherley himself was the second, and OK, it’s possible that he told someone else. But knowing that he’d come to London alone, that he was doing a private investigation, that he was married, a family man, a doctor, and so on – I thought it was very unlikely he’d have told anyone else that he was meeting a prostitute.
Third, there was Krasniqi, but like I say, I knew he had no connection to Lucy, or the Soames – and after what happened to him, I knew he was out of it.
Which leaves only the fourth option. It only occurred to me there was a fourth option when I was shit-scared, hiding in the Embankment Gardens. And once I realised there was a fourth option, I knew it couldn’t be anyone else, it had to be her. Jazz, my occasional stand-in GirlNextDoor.
There were a couple of other things, once I realised that it was Jazz, that fitted, that suddenly made sense to me. The cocaine – obviously, she had opportunity to put it in my bag, far more than Ruby. Anything to try and make me look guilty, to distract attention from herself. But that was only a detail. The other thing was that I’d just been thinking, minutes before, when I was climbing down that slimy wall by the river: why go to all this bother to try to drown me?
And when I was in the bushes I realised: they needed to make it look like suicide, so all the ends appear to tie up nice and neat, put the blame on Holly.
You see, when I phoned Jazz’s number, Johnson answered the phone, told me they’d taken Jazz hostage. That was a deliberate ploy, so that everyone would believe she had been abducted. She could disappear, and everyone would think she was an innocent victim, at least for a few days. Giving her the chance to escape. It was a shaky, desperate plan to try to make her look like a victim, and me seem like the criminal.
But as for trying to make me look like the Suicide Blonde – I thought: the Thames is hardly Niagara Falls. It’s a chancy way to kill someone. Unless you know that Suicide Blonde can’t swim. And only one person in the world knew that about me.”
I see a motorway sign for Bristol Zoo, and think of Tiger for a moment. Silly.
“Anyway, Wycherley naturally phoned GirlNextDoor on the number he already had – so of course, he didn’t get me: he spoke to Jazz. He came up on her phone as Lucy’s Dad or something like that; Jazz knew who he was, and she was scared. So she spoke to him, but made no arrangement to meet. Instead, she told him to make a booking via the GirlsDirect website, while she thought about what she could do. She told me her mother had broken her ankle and she had to go to Watford, a total lie of course. She needed to be away from the flat, talk it over with Evans, put together a plan, contact Johnson and McKay, offer them money to kill Wycherley.
Meanwhile, Wycherley made the GirlsDirect online booking with GirlNextDoor, thinking: this is Lucy’s friend, I’ll meet her, pretend to be an ordinary punter, go through with the sex, then talk to her, find out what I can. He saw Krasniqi’s pop-up on the website, offering to arrange rooms, so he did that, and then added the details of Room 412 to the booking form.”
“And Cairns could see all those booking details.”
“Of course. We both had each others’ GirlsDirect passwords, so we could cover each other’s bookings if needed. She could see every detail of the GirlNextDoor booking.”
“Confidentially, I can tell you that she’s confessed to offering Johnson and McKay £50K each. She says Evans pushed her into it, of course, and of course Evans says it was all her idea and that he’s never heard of Wycherley.”
“And, while you’re telling me all this confidential stuff – what about what happened in Room 412?”
“Well, I’m in contempt of court now, so I might as well tell you more. Timing, first of all. They got there at 11.00.”
“When they thought the booking would be ended… that I’d have already left. Because the change of time from 10.00 to 10.30, it wasn’t on the GirlsDirect form. Wycherley texted me because of a delay on the Underground.”
“Exactly. It’s a bit like what I said about the fantasy of master criminals committing perfect murders. There’s another fantasy, which you see on telly every week, about planned murders going like clockwork. It’s like when you’re having a baby, and the hospital tell you to write a birth plan. As if you had some control. The one thing you can guarantee is: it won’t go to plan.
In this case, what went wrong – which resulted in you being still in Room 412 when Wycherley was killed – was a combination of a simple delay to Wycherley’s journey on the tube, and a natural assumption. Johnson and McKay got their information from Jazz, who of course had exactly the same information as you. She knew nothing of Krasniqi’s little scam – so, like you, she assumed that Wycherley was staying in that hotel room overnight rather than travelling there for the booking.
So Cairns would have told them: this is an outcall, the booking will happen on time at 10.00, it’s for one hour – so if you go into the room a few minutes after 11.00, you’ll find Wycherley alone. They had no idea that Wycherley was travelling to the Excel, and that he’d been delayed. They waited at the end of the corridor from 11.00, confident that they’d see you leaving at that time. When you didn’t appear out of 412’s door, and a few minutes had passed by
, they assumed that you’d left the room before they arrived, that Wycherley was now on his own. So they went into action.
Forensics shows that only Johnson entered Room 412. I guess that McKay probably hung around in the corridor to check no-one came along, ready if he was needed. If Wycherley fought back too much. My guess is that they planned it as a quick knifing. But of course, there’s no training courses in these things. Practically every murderer is a first-timer: a clumsy virgin. They botched it, just like they botched their attempt to get you to look like a suicide case. Like you told me, when they found you at the Soames, McKay gripped your arms hard, held you down on the floor. But then the instructions came in from Jazz about trying to make your death look like suicide. Cairns probably got the idea, by the way, of where to kill you, when she followed you and Chris, that really hot day. But anyway, if we’d fished you out of the river, Forensics would have spotted bruising on your arms, that someone had used force on you. As killers, our Crap Two are pretty useless. Victims rarely die as cleanly as the murderer expects. Wycherley reacted quickly, he fought back, creating a lot of noise, but unfortunately for him, because the other rooms were empty, there was no one around to hear it. And the only other person to enter 412 was, as you deduced, Krasniqi.”
I was there to hear it, I think. Could I have done anything? I guess I’ll always ask myself that. I concentrate on the road, we’re crossing a really high bridge. Wide views: I can see what must be the Severn estuary, away to my right. We’re nearly there.
“‘Deduced’ is a bit of a grand word for what happened, Geeta. I was terrified at Krasniqi’s house, my only hope was to do some hard thinking. And Jazz was to blame for that situation too, in a way. Once Jazz realised that I’d been in Room 412 when Wycherley was killed, and that I’d been seen by a member of the hotel staff, she guessed that that same member of staff might have seen Johnson and McKay. Maybe they’d really fucked it up, and other staff or guests at the hotel had seen them too – but the obvious risk to Jazz, the one she knew about, was the guy who’d seen me. When I told her about him, she thought the problem through, straight away. She did what she had to do: egged me on to meet him – in order that she could meet him.
I, and Krasniqi, both thought that he was sussing us out – but in fact the idea, and the purpose, of that meeting was hers: for her to find out about him.
When the three of us met, he asked me to go with him to his place, which was the perfect result for her. She followed me, although she needn’t have; I later told her where his house was anyway. So a couple of days later, she torched it, or got McKay and Johnson to torch it – not to threaten him, but to try to kill him. To eliminate the one witness who could provide information that might lead to her – but while the finger of suspicion was still pointing at me.”
“Forensics don’t show us which of them burnt the house. We’ll probably never know. But what about Jazz and you, Holly? How did she feel about you, do you think? On the one hand, it looks like from the start, she must have been happy for you to go to prison for murdering Wycherley, and maybe Krasniqi too. On the other, under her instructions, Johnson started by trying to frighten you off, rather than kill you. As if Jazz didn’t want you to be harmed, then she reluctantly decided that you had to be got rid of, because there was no alternative?”
“Maybe she only wanted to keep me alive in order for me to take the rap for what she was doing.”
“Well, that would fit with their attempt to fake your suicide.”
“I realise, though, that it doesn’t matter to me what she felt about me. Because the Jazz I knew was an act. The person behind the mask, the person who played that part – I don’t know that person, at all. I lived with that act for years, talked over the most intimate stuff with her, trusted her. She pretended to care for all those girls, the Helpline. I watched while she talked to Jurgita – she seemed so thoughtful, sympathetic – anyone would have thought she cared deeply. No-one would guess that what was in her mind was: here’s another one that we can kill. She was pretending to care, when she didn’t. But I guess we all do that, sometimes. Are we always truthful, even with ourselves?”
I’m pulling up to the pavement next to the driveway of a detached house. It’s the sort of place a doctor might own, I suppose. Big front garden where I guess Lucy played, long ago. Trees and ivy hug around the house, and all its windows look blank. As if the house has died.
“Phone me when you’re done, Geeta, and I’ll come and pick you up.” I see her walk up the driveway, knock at the door. A thin woman opens the door, lets her in. I drive on, just a few yards, until the car is no longer visible from the house, and park the car.
I sit behind the wheel, imagining the conversation going on right now inside that house. But after a few moments I find myself undoing my seat belt, opening the door, getting out. There’s something I need to find, and I might as well do it here as anywhere. It’s such a bright day, clear light, like glass. I start walking. My feet crunch new-fallen leaves on the pavement, crispy shapes of yellow and orange, glowing in the sun. The air smells fresh, like the whole world’s been cleaned, and I breathe deeply, filling my lungs. I walk two blocks, and suddenly I’m out on the seafront.
Lots of little waves glitter, stretching ahead of me. It’s not like London: the sky is huge here, a blue curtain dropping to a line of purple hills across the water. The big horizon, going on and on, makes me think: life is full of possibilities. I’ve hardly begun to explore yet.
I open my bag, and get out a small brown envelope. I’m not used to seeing my own handwriting: it looks like a child’s. But that’s as it should be, I think, for this letter. My writing says: Birth Parent Enquiries, General Register Office, Smedley Hydro, Trafalgar Road, Southport, Lancashire PR8 2JD. I’ve found what I was looking for: a postbox. I push the letter in, and look out at the sea.
The End
(but there will be more, one day, from Holly Harlow...)
Murder on the Titanic
The Outcall Copyright © 2015 Evelyn Weiss
Cover image used by kind permission of, and copyrighted to, Aurora Violet and Kev Robertson.
ISBN: 9781310917363
Licence and copyright statement
Hi, I’m Evelyn Weiss, and I assert all my legal rights as the author of this book, including my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
I reserve all legal rights to myself. No part of this book The Outcall may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without my prior permission.
The Outcall is total fiction. I invented all the events, entities and people described in it, and I didn’t intend any likeness of any event, organisation or character in it to anyone or anything. But I thank the Shenavall Library.
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