cooperate with you.’
‘So you know why I don’t have a partner.’ As a medical student her IQ was no doubt higher than his. Still, he had a lot more experience in asking questions than she did. He placed his burger back in the paper bag and started to stand. ‘I’m wasting my time here.’
‘No, wait!’
He saw the panic in her eyes. ‘Don’t mess me about, Olga. I haven’t come here to hear conspiracy theories or to indulge your fantasies of being an amateur detective.’
‘Look, I know about you but I also remember that you came to club by yourself. This is personal for you. Something is going on here that is not right.’
Tom folded his arms, ignoring his food, and said nothing.
‘Other detectives say not to talk to media about Ebony’s death, right?’
He nodded.
‘But journalist is the one who did it, even though police say they have questioned him.’
Tom took the hamburger back out of its wrapper and took a bite. He washed it down with a mouthful of cola. He knew that if he stayed quiet Olga would keep talking, and he was right.
‘You remember when you come to club that I tell you about geeky-looking man with red hair who used to come often to see Ebony dance — in private shows.’
Tom nodded again.
‘Well, he come back night after you were there. He was asking for her, but boss told him Ebony not show up for work. He start coming on to all other girls, including me, asking where she is. I say she is not here and he starts to get angry — what you say… agitated. He even offer me fifty quid to give him Ebony’s home address, but I say no way.’
‘Doesn’t sound like he’s the killer, then, if he’s drawing attention to himself,’ Tom said, wiping his mouth and feigning a lack of interest.
‘Aha. That is what other policemen said. But can’t you see that it was act? He was doing this deliberately to look like he didn’t know where she was, but he was stalking her for two weeks before she disappear!’
Tom took another drink. ‘Stalking? I thought you said he was a regular customer. Presumably you have men who come to see you dance more than once.’
Olga nodded and finally started to eat her food. She pinched small chunks from the burger bun and chewed each one methodically, over and over, while she thought about her next response. ‘Yes, but Ebony met this guy outside of work.’
Tom sat back in his plastic chair. ‘You didn’t tell me this when I came to the club.’
‘You were asking about Ebony and other man — the policeman you were looking for — not Ebony’s stalker man.’
Tom nodded. At that stage he had been working on a theory that Nick and Ebony might have done a bunk together, not that she had been murdered by a nutter. ‘How do you know this, did she tell you?’
Olga shook her head, and seemed to hesitate, picking again at her burger bun, but leaving the meat untouched.
‘Well?’
She looked up at him. ‘Geeky guy left his card when he couldn’t find Ebony and when no one would give him her address. His name was Fisher, Michael Fisher. He is — ’
‘He’s a journalist, from the World.’
Now it was Olga’s turn to lean back, arms folded, in a parody of Tom. ‘Aha! So you know this man.’
Tom shook his head. He recalled the somewhat obnoxious, persistent reporter from the media conference Greeves had given at the defence contractor’s offices prior to their flight to South Africa. Fisher was the one who was pursuing the line of questioning about Greeves’s frequent visits to Africa.
Olga gave up trying to outwait Tom and resumed her confession. ‘Ebony had a diary in her locker.’
‘You broke into her locker?’ Tom wiped his hands on a paper serviette.
‘Lock was broken. I started to worry about Ebony after your visit and that night I opened locker to see if she had left suicide note or something.’
‘Suicide?’
‘Not unknown in my line of work. Yours too, if anything like Russia.’
Tom let that pass unanswered.
‘Anyway, I look in Ebony’s diary and last entry is note to ring Michael. She wrote cell phone number down. I check with Fisher’s card and is same Michael.’
‘So, she was talking to him, outside of work.’
‘Yes.’
‘And when she didn’t call him, presumably because she’d been killed, Fisher came to the club and was “agitated” that he couldn’t find her and hadn’t heard from her.’
‘Exactly!’ Olga slapped the tabletop, causing another couple of diners next to them to look over. ‘Perfect cover.’
It would be easy, Tom reasoned, to get Ebony’s mobile phone records and find out if she had been called. He presumed Morris and Burnett would have done this as a matter of course, so he wasn’t as convinced by this theory as Olga was.
‘But what makes you so sure that Fisher had anything to do with her death?’
She shrugged. ‘Is hard to tell you — to explain. I see lots of men in that place, and I know the looks in their eyes. There are the drunk ones, out looking for fun; there are the desperate ones who could never get look at naked girl any other way; there are the chauvinist ones who like the power of having girl do what they tell them… and there are the scary ones.’
‘Scary ones? The stalkers, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘The ones who are there with something else on their mind. You can see it in their eyes. Fisher was one of these. He was man on mission, and I think that mission was Ebony.’
Tom regarded Olga. She was bright — she had to be in order even to be admitted to study medicine — and she knew men. He thought she was being a little paranoid, but there was obviously something going on between Fisher and Ebony — aka Precious — that transcended the normal ogler-stripper dynamic. It was worth a closer look. He pulled his notebook out of his suit pocket.
‘Presumably you told Detective Morris all this?’
She nodded. ‘Morris — he is your friend?’
‘None of your business. He is a colleague, though.’
‘He is ignoramus.’
Tom kept the smile at bay. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said he would call Fisher, but his eyes told me that he thought I was crackpot.’
Tom let the next smile through.
‘Don’t mock me. You are smarter than Morris.’
Flattery would get her nowhere. He said nothing.
‘Morris and other policeman came back to club yesterday and tell all girls and management that no one is to talk to media. I tell them, again, that media is where they should be looking and that Fisher came back to club again asking about Ebony and police investigation. Morris says to me, “You let me worry about Mr Fisher, darling.” Pah! I give him, “darling”. Creep.’
Tom held up a hand. ‘Sounds like they’ve checked him out at least.’
‘What happened to your policeman friend, the one you were looking for in first place.’
‘He’s dead.’
Olga placed a hand on the table and for a second Tom thought she might be about to reach out and touch him, in the same way Sannie had done on a couple of occasions. Perhaps there was something about him that inspired pity. ‘How did he die?’
‘He was tortured to death by terrorists. The same people who abducted Robert Greeves, the defence procurement minister, in Africa.’
Olga frowned, and Tom could see she was processing the information he’d just given her. She shook her head. ‘Ebony not working for Islamic terrorists. You were looking at wrong girl for that if you think she was involved
