in kidnap plot.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She was devout Christian.’
‘Christian stripper?’
Olga looked offended again and folded her arms with an ‘harrumph’. ‘I am trainee doctor exotic dancer. Why not Christian stripper?’
Tom was stumped. Olga resumed her defence of the dead girl. ‘She was more Christian than any other person I know. Church every Sunday and sent money home to Africa to mission where she was educated. Of course, she don’t tell missionaries what she was doing in England. She tell people in Africa she was working as nurse’s aide. I was trying to help her get job like this in hospital.’
Tom’s gut feeling was still that Ebony, having played her part in luring Nick Roberts to a location where he could be abducted, had been killed by the people who had used her. ‘Perhaps she did it for money.’
Olga shook her head vigorously. Most of her burger was untouched and she wrapped it up in the paper bag it had come in. Tom looked down at her hands. He figured he didn’t have to give a medical student a lecture about eating disorders. It did make him wonder, however, if Olga had some psychological problems.
‘Ebony was good person,’ she continued. ‘Fisher was up to something with her, though, and that’s where you should be looking.’
‘I’ll talk to Morris again,’ Tom said, pushing back his chair. ‘Did you find anything else in her diary?’
‘Not much. It looked new — like she had only been keeping it for last two weeks.’ Olga pulled a scrap of paper out of her handbag. ‘I found one other name, on same page as number for “Michael”. Other name was D Carney.’
She passed the paper over, and Tom copied the name and cell phone number into his phone book. He’d seen the name Carney before, but couldn’t quite remember where. He knew that once he had a few moments to himself it would come to him.
‘Thanks for your time, Olga. Do you know who this Carney is?’ Even as he asked the question he remembered where he had seen the name and number before.
She shook her head. ‘Talk to Fisher. He is one you need to put this puzzle together, Mr Policeman.’
Tom stood. ‘You probably know enough about my situation and police procedure to understand that Fisher has already been questioned and that it would be highly inappropriate for me to go harassing him when I’m suspended.’
She nodded. ‘But I know you will anyway. You are good person. Morris, Fisher, they are creeps.’ Olga tucked the remains of the burger in her day pack, shook Tom’s hand and started to walk out the door. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Maybe I see you in club again some time?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in a hospital one day.’
She laughed. ‘Maybe my turn to see you naked.’
What Tom couldn’t tell Olga, of course, was that there was a definite link between Nick and Ebony in the form of the message the dancer had left on Nick’s answering machine. Somehow he doubted that Nick had been planning to go to the club to hand over a donation to a Christian mission in South Africa.
After Olga left the restaurant, Tom stayed at the table and took out his notebook and pen. He wrote the name Ebony in the centre of a page and circled it. He drew a line off to the left to Nick and then extended out further to another circle containing Greeves. Off to the right of the stripper’s stage name he wrote Fisher. He tapped his chin with the pen and then returned to the page and linked the journalist and the politician with a stroke of his pen. A circle. But was it mere coincidence that the dancer had something going on with the reporter as well as with the minister’s protection officer?
There was only one way for Tom to find out — two, if he went through official channels but he doubted the latter would work. Dan Morris would be suspicious now, and Tom wouldn’t put it past him to grass on him to Shuttleworth. Either way, he was unlikely to cough up the notes of his interview with Fisher.
As the train clattered back towards the city, Tom took out his mobile phone and notebook. He called the number for D Carney, though he recalled now that it was a man and his name was Daniel. A recorded voice answered the phone, though it wasn’t Carney: it was a message telling him the phone was switched off or out of range.
Next he dialled directory assistance. ‘Could I have the number for the World newspaper, editorial department, please?’
22
Tom tuned out from the image of the British Prime Minister on the widescreen plasma television monitor in the World ’s foyer, which was broadcasting a satellite news channel owned by the same man who controlled the newspaper in whose offices he was waiting. The receptionist looked up from her computer and nodded to him. ‘Michael’s off the phone now, Mr Carney. He’ll be down in a mo.’
Tom thanked her. He’d taken the Northern Line from King’s Cross to Bank and then switched to the Dock- lands Light Rail to get to the newspaper’s offices. Out of the window he saw a jumbled landscape. Shiny new offices and apartments jostled with face-lifted brick warehouses that had been reinvented as fashionable homes for wealthy incomers. Yet, sporadic remnants of the old Isle of Dogs held on. The last of its undeveloped, soot- blackened buildings waited, destined either for demolition or to be reborn out of the ashes of their grimy past. The planners might have breathed new life into the area, but they had stolen its soul.
The news crawler at the bottom of the television screen was repeating the only part of the PM’s press conference that Tom had paid attention to: PM confirms at least one of Robert Greeves’s abductors, killed in South Africa, was Muslim. Tom heard footsteps and looked over his shoulder. He recognised the thin, pasty-faced, red- haired reporter immediately.
‘Daniel Carney?’ asked Michael Fisher.
Tom nodded and held out his hand, but Fisher kept his by his sides. He looked Tom up and down, and Tom prayed that Fisher had never met the real Carney. He also hoped Fisher wouldn’t recognise him from the press conference he had attended with Greeves.
So far, there had been no photographs of Tom published in the newspapers, as his identity was being protected by a Defence Advisory notice, more commonly known as a D-notice, on the grounds that the terrorist gang which had abducted Greeves was still at large and Tom had been involved in the killing of some of their number. The restrictions were voluntarily complied with by the media, but Tom knew his name and identity would not be kept quiet for long, especially if, as he assumed, things went badly for him at the inquiry. The journalists knew his name, which was why he’d been pestered continually for an exclusive. The fact he hadn’t given one meant the media would show him no mercy when his name was released.
Tom had called Fisher from the train and their conversation had been brief. He’d already gathered from Fisher’s tone that he wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with open arms.
‘I know who you are, Carney,’ Fisher had said when Tom had called, masquerading as the freelance journalist. ‘You’re the bastard who did me out of a cracking story. Well, you won’t get much from the stripper now, will you?’ Tom had simply said he needed to talk to him about Precious Tambo’s death. He had offered to come to the World ’s offices and Fisher had agreed. Tom had no idea what he would find out, but it seemed that so far he was pulling off the charade.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’ he said.
‘There’s an interview room down the corridor. Is room one free, Sally?’ Fisher asked the receptionist.
She checked her computer screen and said, ‘All yours, Michael. For the next twenty minutes at least.’
‘We won’t be longer than that.’
Fisher led Tom down a hallway off the main reception area. They stopped at a garishly painted red door and Tom followed the shorter man in. He took the new spiral-bound shorthand notebook out of his right suit pocket. From his left, Tom pulled the cheap audio cassette recorder he had bought in an electronics shop on the way. He hoped the props would back up his impersonation of a reporter. He knew Daniel Carney was a journalist because he had seen the man’s business card under Nick Roberts’s refrigerator. He recalled thinking that the card looked low-
