“What about you?” Jack said, turning to the other girl.
“Don’t say nothing,” Lola snapped before Anita could even open her mouth.
Jack shrugged. “Fair enough. Sergeant Brent, would you and your officers be kind enough to arrest everyone in the room for possession with intent to supply. Let’s see if any of them are willing to talk back at the station. If not, they can all be charged.”
“Be my pleasure,” Brent said, nodding for the officers standing quietly in the background to move forward and lay hands on the four prisoners.
“Oh, and let’s also arrest little Miss Smarty Pants for running a brothel, shall we?” Jack said jovially.
“Why not,” Brent said, grinning enthusiastically.
“That doesn’t include me, does it?” The man who had fallen asleep on Anita asked. He was hard-faced and sinewy, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else.
Jack couldn’t help but notice the letters ACAB had been crudely tattooed into the knuckles of his left hand in green ink. It stood for ‘ALL COPPERS ARE BASTARDS’ and was a homemade prison tattoo if ever he had seen one.
Another equally distasteful tattoo took up most of his left shoulder, only this one looked like a professional job rather than something which had been inked inside a cell. There were two circles, an outer one of claret and an inner one of blue. The outer circle contained the slogan: ‘THESE COLOURS DON’T RUN.’ The inner circle was home to a pair of crossed iron worker’s hammers. The initials ICF were also present, with the I to the left of the hammers, the C above them and the F to their right. Beneath the hammers was the British Rail emblem. The tattoo clearly denoted the wearer’s affiliation to the Inter City Firm, a well-organised group of football related hooligans who were mostly associated with West Ham United. They had been particularly active from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
The last bit of visible body art consisted of the letters NF – an abbreviation for National Front – which were tattooed on his right shoulder.
Jack took an instant dislike to him. “Are you in the room or not?” he asked politely.
The thug, who was called Harry Taylor, considered this as if it might be a trick question, and then he stupidly looked around to confirm that he was. “Er, yeah,” he eventually said.
Jack smiled sweetly. “There you are, then. You’ve answered your own question.”
Taylor held his hands out in front of him and waited for the arresting officer to apply the quick-cuffs.
Lola wasn’t so savvy. “Get your fucking hands off me, you cunt,” she screamed, trying to pull free from the female officer who had just taken hold of her wrist. Without batting an eyelid, the officer swiftly applied a rear arm lock that forced Lola to bend over double. A second officer took hold of the hooker’s other arm, and they expertly restrained her.
“Slap on the bracelets and get her out of here,” Brent said, shaking his head disapprovingly.
Watching on in amusement as the handcuffs were applied, Dillon started singing the words to Eric Clapton’s Layla, substituting Lola’s name in all the relevant sections of the song. This only served to infuriate the prostitute further, but with her hands now securely cuffed behind her back, she could do nothing about it.
Bobby Beach popped his head around the door. “Guv, could I have a word outside?” he asked, indicating for Jack to follow him with a quick jerk of his head.
Tyler glanced across to Dillon, who had thankfully stopped singing, shrugged, and then followed Beach out of the room.
“What is it?” Tyler asked when they were alone out in the hall.
“Couple of things, but first you might want to come up and speak to the girl who was asleep when we kicked her door in. She’s a little more with it now, and she’s quite chatty, unlike those two minxes in there.”
Signalling for Susie Sergeant to tag along, Tyler followed Beach up the stairs into a reasonably sized room on the left side of the building. A black girl in her early twenties was sitting lethargically on the edge of a dishevelled double bed. Jack dreaded to think what the various nasty looking stains splattered over the sheet were.
The girl had a faded and threadbare dressing gown wrapped tightly around her. She had a thin, blotchy face and there were dark bags underneath her eyes. As they entered, she ran a quivering hand through lank hair that was badly in need of a wash.
She was unquestionably an addict.
“This is Prudence,” Beach said by way of introduction. “Pru, be a love and tell these detectives what you told me a few minutes earlier.”
The girl looked up at the new arrivals with uncertainty. After a beat, her eyes nervously flickered back to Beach and he nodded encouragingly.
“I hear you’re interested in Angela,” Prudence said hesitantly, and her voice was every bit as listless as Jack had imagined it would be. She sat there worrying at her fingernails as she waited for him to reply.
“That’s right,” he encouraged. “Is there anything you can tell us that might help us to find her?”
“Is she in trouble?” Pru asked, deflecting his question.
Jack hesitated, wondering how best to respond. If he said yes, the girl might clam up on him. If he said no, he would be lying. He took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Yes, she’s in a lot of trouble,” he confessed.
The girl nodded once, seemingly satisfied. “Good,” she said, her voice laced with bitterness. “It’ll serve her right for being such a mean bitch all of the time.”
Tyler glanced over at Beach, who winked at him.
“Now tell the officers what you told me,” Beach encouraged her gently.
Prudence shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “Angela lives here,” she said, her voice a disinterested monotone. “Her room’s two doors along. She hasn’t been here for a couple of nights but she came back earlier this evening. Bitch was ranting and raving about someone stealing her phone charger;
