With another uncertain look at David, Millie set off down the path. He folded his arms and watched her go. She was very thin in her jeans, which were big in the leg but tight on the hips, and her hair bounced and gleamed in the sunlight. Sally watched the way he was eyeing her daughter. She slammed the car door, louder than she needed to, and he turned to her with a lazy smile.
‘What? Oh, Sally, I’m disappointed. You think I’m checking her out, don’t you? What do you take me for?’ He looked back at Millie, who was just disappearing behind the flower borders. ‘Do you think I’m some kind of pervert? A man of my age? A girl of that age? She’s far, far too old for me.’
Sally stiffened and he roared with laughter, nudging her arm. ‘I’m joking, girl. Joking. It was just a leetle joke. Go on – crack a fucking smile, can’t you? Christ.’ He sighed. ‘Did you have to pay extra for that stick you’ve got up your arse or did it come free with the convent education?’
Sally swallowed. Her mouth was dry. But she didn’t let it show. She went to the car boot and began to get out her cleaning equipment.
‘I’m only pulling your leg, girl.’
She took out the black attaché case she kept her notepads and pencils in and, without waiting, set off up the path, followed by David, who huffed and puffed and muttered darkly about people with no sense of humour. Inside the house was filled with the smell of bread. He must have been cooking, using the three hundred pounds’ worth of automatic bread-maker that sat next to the coffee machine in the kitchen. Sally sucked at the air, pulling it down into her lungs, willing it to calm her. The smell of food always made her nerves go away.
‘Know what, Sally?’ David said, when they got to the office. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have the feeling Sally Benedict doesn’t hold David Goldrab in very high esteem. Because that’s the way the world works, ain’t it? Now, you probably grew up in some place with turrets and stables. Me? Well, there were towers and drawbridges in my past too – a tower block with a fucking great iron security door to stop the junkies off the Isle of Dogs breaking in and shitting in the lift. Which never worked anyway, whether it got used as a toilet or not. Seventeenth floor and no hot water, no heating.’
He sat on his swivel chair, unstrapped the heart monitor, plugged it into the back of a white Sony laptop and began downloading his day’s workout readings. Then he used his heels to kick himself across the room to a larger desktop computer and switched it on.
‘1957 – that was when I was really born, not 1983, in case I had you fooled there. Youngest of three boys – it was two to a bed in those days, a mattress on the floor, and count yourself lucky if you got one scabby little square inch of peeling wallpaper to stick your posters on. Always getting your dick groped – had to sleep like this.’ He put his hands over his crotch and bent at the waist as if he’d just taken a cricket ball in the groin. ‘Oldest brother turned into a drunk at thirteen. Mum never even noticed, she was that taken up with herself and her own bloody misery. He’d come home shit-faced and crash on top of us. Can still smell him, the miserable cunt. One morning I wake up and the bed’s wet. He’s wet the fucking bed, and the moment I sit up in bed, see him lying there all covered in puke and blood and his own piss but still breathing, still snoring, I know for sure that if it takes every inch of my energy, every drop of my sweat, if I have to eat shit, kill for it, I’m going to get out of there – find my own space. My Lebensraum.’
He opened his hands to indicate the grounds outside the window. From there the hills rolled away. There was hardly anything, just a few telegraph poles in the far distance, to indicate that there were any other human beings on the planet. The gate Millie had gone through was surrounded by trees throwing giant shadows on to the grass below. She was nowhere to be seen.
‘Lebensraum,’ he repeated. ‘What Hitler wanted. Sometimes, you know, you have to wonder if Hitler didn’t have a point. And there’s me, Jewish name, and plenty of Jew blood in me, though not as pure as my arse of a father would’ve liked it – and I’m thinking Hitler had a point! My ancestors, God rest your souls, put your fingers in your ears, but Hitler was a vegetarian. And he did like animals. And most of all he liked space. Space to breathe, space to live, space to sleep. Space not to be groped and pissed on by your slag of a brother. And that’s what you’re here for, Sally, to run my Lebensraum. And to keep it like that. Peaceful. Lacking in human clutter.’
The heart monitor had finished downloading its data. David spent some time studying it. Then, seeming satisfied, he switched off the computer.
‘Course,’ he said, with a half-glance up at her, ‘if I had my druthers I’d have a woman in my life, little golden-haired thing with big knockers, a good head for figures, and a problem in the nymphomaniac department. But I know women – most of you’ve only got one thing on your mind, and it doesn’t begin with S. So, Sally, come and sit here.’ He drew another chair up next to him in front of the computer. ‘Come here and let me show you what I want you to do.’
Sally sat next to him. He smelt vaguely of sweat and aftershave. She couldn’t stop thinking about the women in the Balkans, about whether he’d told them his life story.
‘Now …’ he waved a hand around the office ‘… this is Tracy Island – the nerve centre of Goldrab Enterprises. We’re sitting in the personal section. That, over there, that’s the money-making part.’
He was pointing to where a desk sat piled high with files and another computer. There was a filing cabinet next to the desk and, mounted above that, a huge monitor showing the view of the driveway from the security camera in the front. Once she’d been cleaning here and had noticed a pile of paperwork on top of that cabinet. She hadn’t looked too closely but she recalled invoices in a foreign language. The name Priština had jumped out. At the time she’d thought it was the name of a city in Russia. Now, thinking about what Steve had said, she guessed it must be Kosovo.
‘Sally, I don’t want you going home with the idea I don’t trust you, because of course I do. But you won’t mind me pointing out that my work is confidential. I prefer to keep it that way. In other words, if I catch you snooping around there I’ll shoot you in the fucking eye.’ He gave a fat, pleased smile when he saw her reaction. ‘A joke. Another joke. Jesus, the sense-of-humour fairy is definitely AWOL this morning, ain’t she? Now, on this computer I keep the database for the house. See? So this is where you work. You enter the invoices here, and the receipts here. It’s not rocket science. You make the calls, get the estimates, organize the workers. Just try to make it so everyone comes on the same day so I’m not running around every morning thinking, I’ve got to get my drawers on pronto cos the bleeding plumber’s on his way.’
‘OK,’ she said quietly.
‘And smile, for fuck’s sake. Crack a bleeding smile. It’s like looking at a shagging slapped arse, looking at you—’
He broke off and jerked to his feet, staring at the CCTV monitor on the wall. ‘Holy Jesus,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘The scabby little bumsucker.’
On the lane outside was parked a small Japanese jeep in a metallic purple, with shiny chrome bull-bars. Sally stared at it. The dealer from Kingsmead? It couldn’t be. Here at David Goldrab’s? As if he’d followed them? The window opened and an arm came out, jabbing at the keypad on the gate. It was him. She recognized the hair and the suntan. She spun round and stared out of the window. Millie had appeared on the lawn. Maybe she’d already seen the pheasants, maybe she wasn’t interested anyway, but for some reason she had settled on the grass, lying on her stomach, her phone in both hands, busily texting or browsing, or updating her Facebook page. Sally got up, dithering, not sure what to do, whether to run through the kitchen and yell, or to get her phone and call her.
On screen the man was still jabbing in numbers, though evidently he didn’t know the code, because the gates stayed resolutely closed. David didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head, a nasty smile on his
face. ‘Oh, Jake,’ he said, to the monitor. ‘Jake the Peg. You didn’t ought to be coming back here, mate. No. You really didn’t ought to be doing that.’
24
Taking casts of footprints and comparing them to shoes was generally one of the quicker jobs forensics teams did. No waiting around for lengthy lab tests. By eleven o’clock that morning the results from the canal path had come back. The prints Zoë had found last night had been made by Lorne Wood. And when the police looked at the path that led away from the gap in the trees they saw there was only one route she could have taken to get there. From the canal the track led through a small wooded area, then along a path that ran between two horse paddocks, under a railway bridge and out to a bus stop. Nowhere near the shops. Lorne had lied to her mother about where she had been that Saturday and, in Zoë’s book, if a person could lie about something like that, there was no knowing what else they could lie about – the fibs could roll on and on, as far as the horizon.
She got one of the DCs to start warrants on the bus companies’ CCTV, then spent some time in the office looking at all the routes that passed through the stop near the canal. They snaked out for miles in every direction – there was no knowing which she’d come from. She could have been travelling from almost any direction, she could have changed routes – she could even have gone as far afield as Bristol in the time she’d been away from home. Zoë fished out the camera chip she’d found in Lorne’s bedroom and balanced it thoughtfully on her finger, considering it. Twice already she’d almost taken it into Ben’s office. But each time she’d stopped herself. She wasn’t sure who she was protecting by not speaking up – Lorne or herself. In the end she got up and pulled on her jacket. She needed to know more before she did anything.
The agency was in the centre of Bath. ‘No. 1, Milsom Street’, said the sign, and under it, written in tall, thin letters, ‘The Zebedee Juice Agency’. It was above a boutique, and when Zoë came up the stairs she found a wide room, daylight pouring into it through a vast glass dome in the ceiling. There was no reception desk, just an array of red sofas dotted with faux-fur cushions and piles of magazines on black lacquer tables. On the wall in an unframed LCD screen a video played silently – faces, boys and girls, morphing one into another.
The manager, a girl dressed in a polo-neck, denim shorts and spiked heels with metallic shadow on her eyelids, jumped up to greet Zoë with a neurotic-sounding ‘Hi, hi hi!’ She was twitchy, kept rubbing her nose and swallowing, and it didn’t take a genius to see she was itching to get to her next line of coke. Still, Zoë supposed, you didn’t get that super-thin look without a bit of help.
She poured two long glasses of Bottlegreen lemon grass pressé and took Zoë to sit near the window. In the street below shoppers and tourists bustled in and out of the shops. The manager admitted she’d half been expecting a visit from the police – she added that maybe she should have called them herself, because she remembered Lorne well. She’d come in with her mother a month ago. She’d been a very nice-looking girl, if a bit short and a little on the heavy side for the catwalk. And her eyebrows had been plucked to within an inch of their lives. ‘Most of our models aren’t what you or I would call conventionally pretty. Some of them, if you saw them in the street, you’d almost call ugly. What’s hot at the moment is a very animal look. You want to be able to see the ethnicity of a model. If someone walks in the room and I think, Yeah, he’s got all the anger of his race behind him, that’s when I know I’m on to a winner.’
‘Lorne wasn’t like that?’
‘No. Glamour, maybe, but not right for the ramp. Never.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did she react?’
‘She was upset. But it’s what happens all the time, girls coming in here all hopeful, going away completely miserable, rejected.’
‘What about Mrs Wood? What was her reaction?’
‘Oh, relief. You’d be surprised – I get that reaction more than anything else. Mothers just humouring their daughters, but they’re over the moon when someone else points out what they’ve secretly thought all along and just can’t bring themselves to say. The girls, though …’ She gave a small shake of her head. ‘Even when you’ve said it over and over some of the girls still won’t listen to you. For some of them it’s like a hunger – eats away at them. They won’t take no for an answer. All they care about is seeing themselves staring up out of some glossy page somewhere. Those are the ones I worry about. Those are the ones that’ll end up places they really don’t want to be.’
‘Places they don’t want to be?’
The manager wrinkled her brow. ‘Yes – you know what I mean.’
Zoë held her eyes. For a moment she’d thought the emphasis in that sentence had been on ‘you’. As in You, DI Benedict, know exactly what I’m talking about. So don’t pretend you don’t. She found herself wanting an explanation – wanting to say, ‘What the hell do you mean?’, but then she caught herself. This girl was twenty if she was a day. There was no way she knew anything about what had happened all those years ago.
‘So,’ she said levelly, ‘what do you do if you get a girl like that who won’t be put off?’
The agency manager picked up a little pile of business cards in a plastic holder on one of the tables. She pulled one out and passed it to Zoë. ‘We tell them they’re better off doing glamour and give them one of these. Want one?’
Zoë took the card. Studied it. It was shaped like a pair of lips. It read: ‘Holden’s Agency. Where dreams come true’. ‘Did you give one to Lorne?’
The manager ran a finger inside her polo-neck, thinking about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a while. ‘Probably not, because her mum was here. I can’t recall exactly.’
‘She didn’t take one anyway?’
‘Maybe. I honestly couldn’t say.’
Zoë tucked the card into her wallet. She sipped her drink thoughtfully, her eyes on the windows in the department store opposite. Something was niggling at her, something she’d seen, or something the manager had said in the last ten minutes. It wouldn’t come to her. She put her glass on the table. ‘Lorne didn’t mention a boyfriend, did she? At any point when she was here did she mention any names?’
‘No. Not that I can recall.’
‘Do you have a catalogue? Of your models?’
‘Sure.’ She opened a drawer to show Zoë a stack of pink-bound notebooks and a box of pink memory sticks. All with the name ‘Zebedee Juice’ emblazoned in lime green. ‘Hard copy or a stick?’
‘One of these’ll do.’ She took a book. ‘I want to check if you’ve got any models with the initials “RH”.’
‘RH?’ While Zoë flicked through the catalogue the manager sat with her thumb in her mouth, her eyes to the ceiling, mentally running a tally of her clients. By the time Zoë got to the end she was shaking her head. ‘No. And not even with their real names.’
‘Staff?’
‘No. There’s only me, and Moonshine who comes in in the afternoon. Her real name is Sarah Brown.’
‘Nothing else you can remember that sticks in your mind about Lorne? Anything that you think could be important? Anyone she spoke about?’
‘No. I’ve been thinking about it. Ever since I saw the news and put two and two together about it being the same girl who was here, I’ve been going through it. And I honestly can’t remember anything about the meeting that was odd.’
‘OK. Can I keep this book?’
‘Of course – please. Be my guest.’
‘One last thing, and then I’ll go. What do you think about Lorne? Do you think she was one of the ones who’d end up in those places you were were talking about? Did she have the hunger?’
The manager gave a short laugh. ‘Did she have the hunger? My God. I don’t think there’s a girl who walked through that door in the last two years who had it any worse.’
25
David Goldrab spoke into the intercom,
released the gates and told Jake to park at the front, come in through the front door, which was open, and wait in the hall. Then he disappeared upstairs to the bedroom to get dressed. The moment he left the office Sally dialled Millie’s number, her fingers shaking on the keypad. She stood at the window as the call went through and watched Millie on the lawn, frowning down at the phone. She seemed to be considering ignoring it. After a moment, though, she changed her mind and held it to her ear.
‘Yeah, what?’
‘He’s followed us. He’s here.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy in the jeep. Jake. That’s his name. Jake.’
Millie jolted at that. She got to her feet and stood for a moment, half frozen, not knowing which way to go.
‘It’s OK.’ Sally crept to the doorway and put her head into the gap, peering down the corridor. She could just see the hallway – a huge, galleried atrium with a central staircase done in granite and marble with black and white tiles on the floor. Jake was near the front door. His ebony hair was gelled into spikes, his distressed jeans and T-shirt showing off his muscles and the trim line of his belly.
‘He’s in the house,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘Don’t worry – he’s in the hall at the front. He can’t see you.’
She held the phone to her chest and cautiously leaned out of the doorway again to watch him. He seemed smaller and much less confident now he wasn’t in his car. He kept bending a little to crane his neck up the stairs to see where David had disappeared to.
Sally ducked back into the office. ‘I’m not sure what he’s up to,’ she hissed. ‘It’s weird – maybe he’s here just to see David. Go and hide somewhere – somewhere in the trees where he won’t see you from the back of the house. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.’