very pretty - you'd have noticed her.'
The man drew down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.
Jenny said, 'I know for a fact she was in this street two days ago. She might have looked anxious, wary of people.'
It seemed to stir his memory. 'English girl?'
'Yes. Have you seen her?'
'I'm not sure. Maybe. There's bed-and-breakfast places along there.' He gestured eastwards with his thumb. 'A lot of young people use them, mostly foreigners.'
He handed back her card.
'Thanks. I appreciate it.'
He frowned, gave a rattly cough and turned back to the TV.
The first one she arrived at, the Metropole, was a converted Victorian villa with flaking paint and a single bare bulb hanging in the porch. She approached the tatty reception desk, behind which sat a slender woman with premature crow's feet at the side of her eyes, and launched into a description of Anna Rose. The receptionist responded with a blank look, then explained in a heavy East European accent that the hotel's occupants were mostly foreign workers. Jenny noticed that the laminated signs taped to the wall behind the desk were written in Polish. The Metropole was a labourers' flop house. Anna Rose was not their kind of guest.
Freezing water seeped though the soles of her shoes as she dodged the angry traffic and ran up the steps of the Hotel Windsor, which stood opposite. It considered itself upmarket from its neighbours, but its feeble attempts at grandeur made it tackier. The chintz sofas in the lobby were stained and sagging; the fraying carpet was patched with duct tape. Jenny pressed a buzzer on the unmanned counter. A short, fat man with a stained navy waistcoat and matching tie emerged bleary-eyed from a back office. He wore a plastic badge that said, 'Gary, Assistant Manager'. His annoyance at being disturbed faded on seeing a passably attractive woman. He gave her a greasy smile.
'Good evening, madam. What can I do for you?'
Jenny presented the card she'd shown the store keeper and ran through her story. Shifting effortlessly from solicitous to unctuous, Gary said he didn't think any of his guests matched the description.
Jenny detected a note of uncertainty. 'You're sure about that? What about the daytime staff - is there anyone I can call?'
He scratched his head and thought again. 'There has been a girl staying here for a few days, but she had black hair, short, like a crew cut. . .'
'What was her name?'
'Sam, Sarah . . . something like that. . .' He tapped on his computer. 'That's her - Samantha Stevens.'
'Is she still here?'
'She checked out earlier this evening - about an hour ago.'
It figured. If she'd collected her messages tonight, there were bound to have been several from Mike. She would know about the American and that he was coming for her.
'Any idea where she went?'
'I know she caught a cab. I heard her call for it.' He nodded to a payphone screwed to the wall beside the counter.
'Did she have much luggage?'
'Just a rucksack, I think . . . she seemed in a hurry. Is she in some kind of trouble?'
Pretending not to have heard the question, Jenny grabbed the receiver and pressed redial. The call was answered by a controller at PDQ Cabs. Short on patience, Jenny demanded to know where the last fare from the Hotel Windsor had been dropped off. The controller, a hostile woman with a smoker's rasp, claimed the rules forbade her from releasing confidential 'passenger information'.
Jenny said, 'Let me spell it out for you - you don't have a choice. I've no doubt your office is pretty shitty, but I'm sure it beats a police cell.'
Gary stepped out from behind the counter and gestured for her to give him the receiver. 'Let me — '
Jenny reluctantly gave it up.
'Hey, Julie, my love,' he purred, 'it's Gary. Look, sweetie, I'm with the lady now, trying my best to help. So why don't you tell her what she wants or maybe we'll be recommending a different cab company in future . . .'
Jenny heard the controller give a bad-tempered grunt and tell Gary the fare had been to Marlborough Street bus station in the middle of town.
He came off the phone all smiles and asked if there was anything else he could do to assist, his eyes dipping downwards towards Jenny's breasts.
'No thanks. You've been more than helpful.' She drew her coat across her chest. 'See you around, Gary.'
As she pushed out through the doors she caught his reflection in the glass: he was flicking his tongue at her like a hungry lizard.
Chapter 26
Jenny didn't notice the midnight blue Lexus sedan tucked in two cars behind her as she gunned towards the city centre. The sleet had given way to big flakes of wet snow that were starting to lie. She was out of screen- washer and the street lights kaleidoscoped through the dirty windscreen. She jostled though the heavy traffic on the Haymarket, narrowly missed a jay-walking drunk, shot the lights and slewed into Marlborough Street.
She pulled up on a double yellow and ran into the bus station. Save for a handful of weary-looking stragglers waiting at a cab rank, the concourse was deserted. The only buses in evidence were parked up for the night. A metal grille was drawn down over the ticket-office window. Jenny hurried between the rows of silent vehicles: there was no sign of a young woman lugging a rucksack.
Fighting off a rising fear that Anna Rose had slipped through her fingers, Jenny headed back towards the timetables. She spotted a man in liveried overalls climbing down from an empty coach with a vacuum cleaner. She hurried towards him, fishing her damp and crumpled card from her coat pocket.
'Excuse me — ' Breathless, she handed it to him. 'I'm a coroner. I'm looking for a young woman who would have come through here about half an hour ago. Short black hair. Rucksack.'
The cleaner, a mild West Indian with heavy-lidded eyes and the weary expression of a man resigned to a lifetime of joyless, badly paid work, peered suspiciously at the card.
'Have you seen her?'
Cagy, the cleaner said, 'Don't think so.'
'Have any buses gone out in the last half hour?'
'The London bus would have left at a quarter to.'
Jenny glanced at her watch: nine minutes to eleven.
'Was that the only one?'
'Far as I know.'
'Does it go straight through?'
The cleaner shrugged. 'I never been on it.'
Jenny ran back to her car, her dainty work shoes slipping on the light covering of snow. The feet of her tights were wet, her toes aching with cold. Sliding into the driver's seat she turned the heater on full blast and took off, the back end of the car fish-tailing as she swung away from the kerb. Fifty yards behind her, the stationary Lexus flicked on its headlights and followed.
The main road out of town widened swiftly into the M3 2 motorway. Jenny pushed up the empty outside lane at eighty miles an hour, cutting virgin tracks through the slush. What would she do even if she did catch the bus? she asked herself. She could follow it all one hundred and twenty miles to London, but what then? Even if Anna Rose was on it, there was no reason why she'd cooperate, and God knows what she was carrying in her backpack. The rational thing would have been to call the police and assert her right to take a statement once Anna Rose was safely in custody. If they were obstructive she could come armed with a High Court order and insist. Cold, wet and painfully tired, it was an attractive proposition. Her phone was right there in her handbag. She could be speaking to Pironi in seconds.
