budget. It was the kind you could make up on an instant printing machine, the sort often found at major railway stations. Whoever Carney was, he probably wasn’t at the top of his game. Tom had wondered if Nick had been handed the card at a function Greeves had attended, or if he knew the reporter socially. Given that his name was in Precious’s diary, though, it was possible Nick had crossed paths with him at Club Minx.
‘You can put that away and all,’ Fisher said. ‘I don’t want anyone taping me.’
Tom nodded and slipped the cassette recorder back in his pocket. He left the notebook closed, on the table, sat down and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.
Fisher looked at his watch. ‘Well? What have you got to say that’s so important?’
From Fisher’s comments over the phone, Tom realised that Precious had something to tell the media, and that a bidding war had been going on. ‘I’ve been told by the Old Bill that I can’t write anything about Ebony’s death.’
Fisher shrugged. ‘No shit, Sherlock. They’ve done the same to us, by slapping a D-notice on the story. Makes you wonder what else she was up to with Greeves, doesn’t it?’
Fisher was living up to his name, Tom thought, angling for information that he might have missed out on.
‘It’s why I’m here,’ Tom said, keeping his arms folded.
‘Well, I’ve got nothing to tell you, sunshine,’ Fisher said, leaning back and mirroring Tom’s body language. ‘So if you’ve got nothing else to say, you’d best be on your bike.’
‘I never got the whole story out of her,’ Tom said.
Fisher raised his eyebrows, then broke into a grin. ‘Do what? You outbid me by ten thousand quid and you didn’t get the bloody story? You’re fucking joking? Whose money was it?’ Fisher reeled off the names of a few newspapers, but Tom didn’t nod or shake his head to any of them.
‘All I got out of her was the same as what she gave you — enough to get us interested,’ Tom said.
‘What, that she’d been rogered by Greeves?’
Tom nodded.
‘Not bad in itself, but it wasn’t much good to us if she wasn’t going to let us publish her name and picture. She was a babe in the woods, thinking she’d get us to pay fifteen grand for an anonymous tip-off. I’m assuming you did get an agreement from her to go public with all the lurid details.’
‘Of course. The extra cash did the trick.’
Fisher nodded. ‘My editor wouldn’t risk it. Bleedin’ management’s watching the pennies these days. So, who bankrolled you?’
‘Can’t say until it gets a run, but at least we didn’t hand over the money before she disappeared. The coppers have been looking around the club, you know.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know. They were breathing down my neck at one point.’
‘Me too.’ Tom felt the barrier between them crumbling a little. Perhaps Fisher had finally accepted that the competition for Ebony’s story was over and neither man had won. ‘Funny about Greeves, though.’ Tom unfolded his arms and leaned forward a little, as if he was about to share something with Fisher. ‘Such a bloody ramrod-straight type, good family man and all.’
Fisher laughed out loud. ‘What do you mean? They’re always the worst offenders! Think about it. The straighter the public profile, the kinkier they are behind the scenes.’
Tom smiled and nodded. ‘True. Is that why your rag has been hounding him about Africa so much? Were you trying to shake him up, see if he’d been making a habit of bonking black women on his jaunts?’
Fisher relaxed a little as well, nodding as Tom spoke. ‘Yeah, well, once I got an inkling that you were going to outbid us with the slag, I thought I’d try and shake his tree, see what other rotten apples fell out. Oi, and watch what you’re calling a rag, sunshine. That’s offensive.’
As opposed to slag, Tom thought, but said nothing. ‘The other strippers at the club reckon you killed her.’
‘Silly bitches.’ Fisher shook his head. ‘Look, when I found out you’d scooped us I went down there and I was pretty angry. I tried splashing a few tenners around to see if some of the others would talk — or if they’d give me Ebony’s home number. I might have come across like your garden variety stalker, but the cops know I’m clean.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. I was in Africa when she was murdered, wasn’t I.’
‘You went for the Greeves thing?’
‘Yeah. What a fucking shambles that was. I’ve got a snout whose given me some good stuff about the bodyguard copper who went over with Greeves.’
Tom swallowed, but hoped he’d hidden his flush of alarm. ‘Such as?’
Fisher laughed. ‘You think I’d tell you? Let’s just say the boys from Hereford aren’t as secretive as they like to make out when they’ve got some dirt to sling at the coppers.’
That bastard Fraser, Tom thought. ‘So who do you reckon killed her?’
Fisher shrugged. ‘Who knows? Probably was some stalker. She was raped, from what I’ve heard. If I was really into conspiracy theories I’d say MI5 or Greeves’s bodyguard killed her to stop her from blabbing about the big man knobbing her, but Greeves’s first bodyguard was tortured and killed by the terrorists, wasn’t he?’
Tom nodded, though he didn’t know how Fisher knew about Nick, as the circumstances of his death hadn’t been publicly released. He started to worry that the reporter knew a lot more than he was letting on.
Fisher leaned forward until his palms were resting on the table, and stared into Tom’s eyes. ‘And his replacement protection officer, Detective Sergeant Tom Furey, currently on suspension pending an appearance at a parliamentary inquiry into the abduction and deaths of Robert Greeves and Bernard Joyce, is sitting in this room opposite me, isn’t he?’
Tom slumped back in his seat. ‘What gave it away? My picture hasn’t been in the press so far.’
Fisher smiled. ‘I paid that freelance photographer in South Africa to follow Greeves. The snapper said this prick of a security guard kept getting in his way. He emailed through the pictures of Greeves — nothing worthwhile — and pointed out the man who ruined the job for him.’
‘Me.’
‘You.’
Tom shrugged. He knew this could go very badly for him, impersonating Carney, but he sensed that the journalist wasn’t about to go running to Scotland Yard just yet. ‘What do you know about Carney?’
‘Nothing.’ Fisher held his hands out, palms up. ‘I’ve never seen or heard of him before, and no one here or anyone else I know has either.’
‘Unusual?’
‘Yes and no. You get a lot of people who wake up one morning and decide that as part of their midlife crisis they want to become journalists. There are plenty of dodgy correspondence schools advertising courses in travel writing and freelance journalism, no shortage of gullible punters who think it’s an easy ticket to fame and fortune.’
‘But he outbid you by offering Precious Tambo what… twenty-five thousand pounds?’
Fisher leaned back again. ‘Yeah. I wish I knew who he was stringing for. Not that any of the other newspapers would tell me. Maybe you could get a court order or something — force them to cough it up?’
‘Not me,’ Tom said.
‘Yeah, not you. What about those other jokers who questioned me — Morris and what’s his name?’
‘Burnett. Maybe. Did you tell them anything about the bidding war?’
Fisher shook his head. ‘None of their business.’
‘This Daniel Carney’s a suspect now. He could have been the last one to see Precious alive. It’s possible he was masquerading as a journalist — he might have found out what you were up to in the club.’
‘Not my job to catch killers, is it?’
Tom disliked Fisher, but he was right. It would be up to the police to find out who Daniel Carney was and who, if anyone, was bankrolling him. ‘Who told you Nick Roberts was dead?’
‘No way. I don’t reveal my sources,’ Fisher replied.
‘Your friends at Hereford?’
Fisher shook his head. ‘You won’t get that out of me. However, you might want to start thinking about what
