‘Why did we come, anyway?’
‘We’d forgotten – if we ever knew – how many people there would be here.’
Matters weren’t helped by an encounter Wexford had on his way to the Mermaid. He was halfway down York Street when a man and a woman came out of one of the houses and the man unlocked a car parked at the kerb with a remote. Wexford recognised them at once as the Wardles, parents of the dead Jason. And they knew him. They looked, stared and ostentatiously turned their heads away.
‘I wonder,’ he said when he saw Burden, ‘what third thing is going to happen to make me feel guilty.’
‘You don’t believe in that stuff about things coming in threes, do you?’
‘I didn’t last week, but all this makes me nervous.’
Burden fetched Wexford a glass of claret and himself a Chardonnay. Nuts, once an enemy yet desired, had become no more or less than a pleasant adjunct to their drinks.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look quite different.’
‘That may be no bad thing. What were you going to tell me about brothels?’
‘We had one here,’ said Burden. ‘A couple of months ago.’
‘What, you mean a massage place or beauty and tanning and waxing, do you?’
‘This was in a flat over a shop in the High Street. It was a clothes shop, highly respectable and selling dresses and suits for sizes 16 to 28.’
‘If I’d been a transvestite they’d just about have suited me in days gone by.’
Burden laughed. ‘A lot of men had been seen coming to the door at the right side of the shops in the evenings. I sent DC Thompson in there, posing as a punter. The girls he had to choose from were presented to him, but he obeyed my prudish instructions, said no thanks politely and walked out. We raided the place on the following evening.’ He took a swig of his Chardonnay. ‘It was quite exciting.’
‘I can’t remember the rule. It has to be more than one girl to constitute a brothel, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s right. I wasn’t there but Thompson told me one of the men fell on his knees and swore on his mother’s head that if it didn’t come out that he was there he would never do it again.’
‘When I was a young DC in Brighton about a hundred years ago we used to come across them. Brothels, I mean. I suppose if I got someone to find “brothels” on the Internet I’d just get quantities of porn.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ said Burden. ‘Come to me instead. What is it you want to know?’
Wexford told him about Vladlena and the sale she had proposed to make. ‘Where would she go? Who would she have asked? There’s a perfectly respectable-looking massage parlour in Kilburn High Road near the Tricycle Theatre – sorry, you don’t know where that is – but it did occur to me she might have tried there. I shall have to find how long it’s been there, and you know how these outfits come and go. The girl in the vault has been dead at least two years.’
‘You know, Reg,’ Burden said, passing the nuts it was no longer necessary to avoid, ‘as you’ve rightly just pointed out to me, I don’t know London well, but I’ve enough knowledge of the way these things work to say that this girl is most likely to have tried Soho. If those places don’t outright advertise prostitutes everyone knows prostitution is what they offer.’
‘You mean she’d just call at some lap-dancing club or place where there are strippers.’
‘She might if she was desperate enough to get what was to her a large sum of money,’ said Burden.
But it was more than two years ago, Wexford reminded himself. Had she complied and been killed because of what she had done and what she might tell? It seemed a possibility.
CHAPTER TWENTY- FIVE
IT WAS MONDAY morning and Wexford and Lucy Blanch were on their way to see Mildred Jones. Neither of them looked forward to the visit. The day began badly with Martin Rokeby emerging from his front door and shouting at Lucy not to park the car in front of his house. She moved it a few feet, explaining that they had calls to make in the neighbourhood and there was nowhere else to put it. Rokeby began on a long peevish complaint, the gist of which was that the police had been investigating this case for months and still had got nowhere.
They walked round the corner and into Orcadia Mews. Wexford was glad to be back in London for no better reason than that his stay in Kingsmarkham had been horrible. Returning from his evening out with Burden, he was told by Dora, whispering, that another child had joined the household, a schoolfellow of Mary’s. The previous week Sylvia had promised this little boy’s mother to have her son for the night while the parents celebrated a wedding anniversary. Ben would have to share his room with this child, had at first refused outright, then agreed with an ill grace and after putting up a lot of conditions.
‘You and Dad might have given me a little more notice you were coming,’ Sylvia had said, causing Dora to explode.
‘This is
‘I wish we didn’t have to be here,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’m not getting any pleasure out of it. Thank God I’m back at work.’
Wexford had not even attempted to bring about a truce but had gone straight to bed. Guilty now because he and Dora were occupying the largest of the four bedrooms, he lay awake for a long time, to be awakened almost at once by shouts and running feet in the passage outside. The little boy guest had been sick. He needed comforting and cleaning up and his bed sheets changed. In the morning Sylvia refused her father’s offer to take all of them out for lunch, so he and Dora were on their way back to London by eleven.
Mildred Jones had had her once-pink front door repainted. Now it was lime green. Although Lucy had phoned her to arrange their visit, Mrs Jones behaved as if their appearance on her doorstep was the first she had heard of
