won’t get punished. Do you believe me?’
She closed her eyes. Then opened them slowly. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’
7
The moment Zoe crested the horizon on the lane at Lightpil House she knew Jacqui had been right and that something along the line had changed seriously for the London boy who’d come out west in the 1990s. The house on the other side of the wall looked more like a Mediterranean palace than anything else, with its white walls and balustraded terrace basking in the sun. David Goldrab must have discovered someone in Bath’s Planning Department on his porn mailing list to have got Lightpil House through the application. It was horrific. Truly horrific.
She slowed about twenty yards from the front gates, pulled the Mondeo into a small layby and studied her reflection in the mirror on the sun visor. If he was at home he would never recognize her after all these years. But he might recall the name Zoe Benedict. In her pocket she had her own police warrant card, but there was a second one too, with the name Evie Nichols on it. She’d found it years ago, kicked under a table at a riotous police party. She should have done the right thing and given it back, but she hadn’t: she’d kept it all these years, sure one day it would come in handy. Anyway, she told herself, she was fairly sure she wasn’t going to need it. If phone calls were going unanswered Goldrab probably wasn’t there. Even so, she was shaking as she nosed the Mondeo forward to the gate, leaned out and pressed the buzzer.
No one answered. She waited two minutes, then rang again. When still no one answered, she parked the car on the side of the lane and wandered along the perimeter fence until she found a gap in the hedge. She squeezed through, emerging in the garden, and stood on the lawn, brushing off her clothes, looking up at the house with its enormous windows and glass atrium. Lorne, she thought, did you ever stand in this garden? Or on that patio? Or behind one of those windows? Wouldn’t it be something if your life turned out to have this in common with mine, as well as all the rest?
She went silently up the steps on to the huge sandstone terrace, and wandered along the back of the house, peering into the two-storey conservatory at the tall palms and the wicker furniture. The place was flooded with sunlight. She put a hand against the window to shade her eyes, and saw the filaments of the halogen lamps all lit, a newspaper discarded on one of the cushions. A little bud of curiosity opened in her. She went to the glass door and tried it. It was unlocked. She put her head inside, looking up at the glass ceiling, waiting for the familiar beep- beep-beep of an alarm system. But there was nothing.
‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Anyone home?’
Silence. She sniffed. The air was stale and the house was hot, as if the heating had been left on. There was condensation on the ceiling panes of the atrium. Missing, huh? Missing? She ferreted around in her pockets and found a pair of latex gloves. Pulled them on and stepped inside, looking around at the huge space. Amazing, she thought. All this because people liked to watch other people having sex. She went into the huge kitchen and looked at all the gilt and marble and downlighting. Two glasses sat on the kitchen table, one half full of champagne. There was a half-eaten sandwich on a plate next to the fridge, going hard and grey. In the microwave oven she found a plate of pasta, also dried up and congealed. She opened the fridge and saw a bottle of champagne with no cork in it. She sifted through the other things in there – bottles of vitamins, cartons of orange juice, packets of bacon and sausages. There was a marble cheeseboard with four wedges of cheese on it, covered with clingfilm. She picked up a bag of salad and checked the date: 15 May. Yesterday.
‘Hello?’ She stood in the hallway and called up the stairs. ‘Mr Goldrab?’
No answer. She went up the marble staircase, her footsteps echoing round the hall, and checked all along the first floor, both wings of the house, opening doors and peering into rooms that looked as if they’d never been set foot in since the day the house was finished. There was a gym, a home cinema, a clawed bath with a tap in the shape of a swan, and a four-poster bed in one room that could have slept ten people. No David Goldrab. Back on the landing she noticed a glass case standing open, a picture of a night safari in the back of it. Two aluminium arms were mounted in the picture. It was a display cabinet. Empty. Zoe experimentally opened and closed the glass door, looking at the lock, then at the stand. Whatever was missing from it was important.
She searched downstairs and still found no sign of him. Overlooking the back garden, an office was filled with banks of computers and DVD players – all black, red lights blinking from their shiny surfaces. A bespoke bookcase made of a reddish wood, maybe walnut, lined one wall, full of photos. There were two computers, each with a light on. When she touched the mouse of the first, the screen came to life. A spreadsheet with figures entered in three columns. The second PC also sprang to life with a quick nudge. This one showed an array of video icons. She peered at the titles:
She closed the blinds, sat down in the swivel chair, and began opening files, watching them with her elbows planted on the desk, her mouth tight. Jacqui had been right about how nasty bukkake was. None of it actually broke any laws that she could think of, but it was pretty disgusting nonetheless, and Zoe had a high threshold for things like this. She truly, truly hoped she wasn’t going to see Lorne staring back at her from the floor of one of these bear-pits.
She was concentrating so hard on the faces of the girls that it wasn’t until the third video that she recognized the male star of the show. Jake the Peg. Jake the Peg! God, she thought, she could be as dumb as a bag of hammers sometimes. The whole station had been wondering how Jake had sharpened up his act lately – knowing he had to be up to something more than just dealing to the schoolkids. But a porn star? Old Peggie? No one had guessed that one. And no one would have guessed how he’d got his nickname. She gave a small, dry laugh. ‘So, Peggie,’ she murmured, looking at the screen, ‘
Zoe spent two hours going through the hard drives with a fine-tooth comb and by the end of it she was about 99.9 per cent sure Lorne wasn’t in the videos. The faces of one or two actresses who’d made brief appearances weren’t completely distinct. She made notes of the frames they appeared in. The girls weren’t blonde, like Lorne, but she could have been wearing a wig. When someone from HQ came over to pick up the computers Zoe’d ask for those faces to be enhanced. She pushed the keyboard away and gave the swivel chair a push with her foot, making it twirl. The bookcases sped by, then the window, with a view over the lawns, the swimming-pool and the trees outside. All the DVDs and the computers.
She brought the chair to a stop. Folded her arms and sat there, considering this situation. Half-eaten food? A computer like this left on standby with all the sensitive shit on it? Doors unlocked? Lights on and phone calls not answered? She didn’t know, just didn’t know, but if it wasn’t too good to be true, just too damned convenient for words, then the cop in Zoe would have guessed that Mr Goldrab, the only man who could link her back to that Bristol club, was no longer alive.
8
Even though their hours at David’s had been cut, the Polish girls were in a good mood that morning. Marysienka was going on holiday with her bus driver boyfriend next week, and Danuta had met a nice Englishman in Back to Mine, a nightclub in the centre of Bath. He was tall and he had plenty of… She rubbed her fingers together. ‘If you got that,’ she told Sally, on the back seat, ‘then you don’t gotta have that.’ She held her hands apart about nine inches, then shortened the distance to two inches. ‘It don’t matter.’ Next to her Marysienka let out a howl of laughter and banged the steering-wheel with the palm of her hand. ‘It really don’t matter!’ She laughed. ‘Don’t matter if you got a cocktail sausage down there.’
The sun was high in the sky when they arrived at Lightpil House. They stopped the little pink Smart car in the gravel car park at the foot of the estate. Sally couldn’t take her eyes off the ground. But there was no blood left, no stain. Nothing. She got out and gazed up at the house. The place seemed much quieter than usual but, of course,
