make up her mind what to wear,’ said Wagstaff. ‘I wonder what the bedroom’s like if she had to bring the choices in here.’ ‘More to the point, what’s in here that had her so twitched? This is the only room we could reasonably have entered if she’d been willing to come with us.’ DC Hicks nodded towards a flat screen on a desk against one of the walls. ‘Her computer’s still on. I can hear the fan working. She may not have had time to close out before she left.’ He walked over and nudged the mouse with the tip of a gloved finger. ‘Bloody hell!’ he said with amusement. ‘She’s seriously up her own arse if she has to admire her own pictures.’ Beale and Wagstaff joined him to gaze at the naked and half-naked images of Jen on the screen. They were standard soft-porn poses – fully naked on hands and knees with her arse raised provocatively, bare-breasted on a chair, cutely provocative in high heels and a bikini bottom.
The text beside the pictures read:
‘What’s with the soft Italian accent?’ asked Beale. ‘It sounded more like Estuary English to me when Barnard put the cuffs on her. Doesn’t anyone regulate this crap?’
Hicks grinned. ‘Shall I go back one? It’ll probably bring us to the home page of her escort agency.’ Beale nodded. The detective gripped the mouse between the points of his gloved thumb and forefinger and steered the cursor on to the ‘back’ arrow before using a pencil to depress the ‘click’ button. He took out his notebook and jotted down the name ‘Party Perfect’ and the telephone details. He nodded to the photographs of other girls running down the side of the page. ‘Look at the names. I should think most of them are Eastern European . . . unless they’re using pseudonyms.’
‘Try minimizing it,’ Beale told him. ‘Let’s see if there’s another window underneath.’
Hicks moved the cursor to the other side of the screen and clicked with the pencil again. ‘Microsoft Outlook. Three messages in the inbox. Do you want me to open them?’
Beale ran a thoughtful hand round his growing stubble, wondering how much leeway they had on this search. ‘Not at the moment. Click on “contacts”. We’ve a legitimate interest in looking for Lemarr Wilson or Duane Stewart.’
All three of them stared at the displayed page. Top left was ‘Robert Allan’. Bottom right was ‘Timothy Gains’. A third of the way down the second column was ‘Kevin Atkins’ and an inch below in the third column was ‘Martin Britton & John Prentice’.
Hicks pointed to an icon at the bottom of the screen. ‘She uses a cell-phone synchronizer to feed in information from her mobile. That’s why so few of the names have email addresses. All she’s recording are telephone numbers.’
‘In Britton’s case, there’s no number, just his address in Greenham Road.’
‘Maybe that’s all she knew.’ Hicks clicked on ‘P’. ‘No Harry Peel.’
‘Try “T” for taxi,’ said Beale. ‘If the gods are smiling on us, we’ll find Walter Tutting as well.’
Twenty-eight
BEN RUSSELL’S PROTESTS about being woken at six o’clock in the morning to be taken to Southwark East police station for questioning under caution were noisy and prolonged. He was sick. He wanted his doctor. He wanted his mother. He wanted his solicitor. The police were fascists.
He turned his ire on the ward sister. ‘You should fucking stop them,’ he snapped, pointing his pistol hands at the two uniformed constables.
‘I’ve no reason to,’ she told him. ‘Dr Monaghan feels there are no medical grounds to prevent you going. You’ve been given all the tools to manage your condition and you’ve been doing it successfully for several days now. We’d have discharged you yesterday if you’d agreed to live with your mother.’
‘Bitch!’
The sister ignored him. ‘There’s a doctor at the police station who will monitor your regimen during the interview. Your mother and your solicitor will also be there. You will be allowed regular rest periods, and both the doctor and your mother will ensure that you follow your instructions on blood testing for glucose levels and that you administer your insulin the way you’ve been taught.’
He stared mutinously at his hands. ‘You can’t make me go if I don’t want to.’
‘You’re due to be discharged this morning anyway. You will continue on Dr Monaghan’s list and attend for outpatient visits, but social services have found a place in a hostel where a qualified
staff member will keep an eye on you. This was all explained to
you yesterday.’
‘I’m not fucking going to a hostel.’
‘You’ll need support for a few months yet.’
‘Why can’t I get it here?’
‘You will . . . as an outpatient . . . but you can’t take up a hospital bed for the rest of your life just because you have diabetes. You know all this. Dr Monaghan has told you several times that a hostel placement is your only
