“How long did it take?”
“He never found out because that was when the incident happened. A man walked into the bar with a girl, and I was trying to work out what she was to him. Girlfriend? Daughter? She seemed too young for the former, but who would take a kid out to a shitty bar in the early hours?”
“A bad, bad parent.”
“Exactly. He sat with another man who’d been there for a while, they had a conversation that sounded more like an argument, then the girl left with guy number two instead. And she did not look happy.”
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
“That’s precisely what I said to Ravi. We didn’t understand a word they said, though. My Thai was limited to diving terms, getting directions, and ordering food, so Ravi asked his boss if he knew the man, and it turned out he did. He came in once a week, once every two weeks, always with a different girl. The bar was a handover point for sales.”
“Shit.”
“I think I said that too. But you know me—I couldn’t just leave it.”
“That was one of the things I always liked about you.”
“Past tense? Ouch.”
“I still do like that about you.” Emmy managed a tentative smile. “So, what happened?”
“I followed the original guy. The seller. Cut the head off the snake, right? But after a couple of minutes, I realised I wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea.”
“Judd?” Emmy guessed.
Alaric nodded. “I didn’t know who he was or why he was there, but I recognised what he was by the way he moved.”
“An operator.”
“And surprisingly not a bad one.”
“It’s like he has two modes—James Bond and dickhead.”
Succinct, yet entirely accurate. “That about sums him up.”
The drinks arrived, and Alaric paused to take a sip. The diner had changed from plastic to paper straws, proving the place wasn’t completely stuck in a time warp.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he told the waitress, ignoring Emmy’s eye-roll when the woman giggled.
“Food won’t be long, hun.”
She swished off in her pink dress and sensible shoes, and Alaric picked up the story.
“So I saw Judd, he saw me, and it was weird—we’d never met before that night, but we didn’t need words to know that we were both up to the same thing. He stayed one side of the street, and I stayed the other, and we followed the seller to a go-go bar. The Angels Playground. No apostrophe, and no paradise either.”
“Classy.”
“Definitely at the lower end of seedy. Girls in neon costumes, waitresses dressed as schoolgirls. We went in and had a few drinks. Watched the dancers. None of them looked underage, but we both knew what we’d seen. At that point, we still hadn’t talked much—I told Judd I was a scuba instructor, and he said he was writing a screenplay. Turned out neither of us was lying, but nor were we being entirely truthful.”
“Judd’s writing a screenplay?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anyone. Especially his mother.”
“What’s it about? Have you read it? Is it any good?”
At least Emmy seemed slightly perkier now. If Rune’s story took her mind off whatever had happened at Riverley, Alaric would talk the whole night.
“He’s written half a dozen, actually, all under a pseudonym. Sci-fi romance. One even got made into a movie.”
“What movie?”
“Stellarium.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“It’s surprisingly good. Give it a go.”
Emmy sort of…shrivelled. Fuck. “I think I’ll be skipping movie nights for a while.”
“Even with me? I’ll bring popcorn. And M&Ms. We can make s’mores if you promise not to set fire to the marshmallows this time.”
A tiny smile. “Maybe.”
“Maybe” was better than an outright “no.” “Anyways, back to the Angels Playground… We watched the dancers, and every so often, one of the waitresses would lead a guy through a door at the side of the stage.”
“For extra services?”
“That was our assumption. But we didn’t get to find out that night because the club closed. Four a.m. was kicking-out time, so we went back to the bar. Ravi’s boss wouldn’t say much because he was scared. The men who sourced the girls were bad news, and he didn’t want any trouble.”
“So you decided to investigate yourselves?”
“We did, and by that point, Naz had come over to see what was going on. He didn’t like the look of the men either, and while they were talking, he’d checked out just who was hooked into the bar’s Wi-Fi network.”
“Naz is a hacker? You’ve never said much about him.”
“Yes, he’s a hacker, and he shies away from the limelight, probably because he’s officially dead.”
“He faked his own death?”
“Since the Bratva wanted to kill him, it seemed like a sensible idea.” The Russian Mafia didn’t mess around. “By day, he was a government guy—GRU—but at night, he poked his nose into the wrong servers. Ended up bringing down a network of corrupt politicians.”
“I see how that could be a problem.”
“Now he’s got a new name and a Norwegian passport.” Among others. “And that night, he came up with another name for us. Sunan Thungchunkoksoong. We couldn’t be certain who it belonged to, but the guy who took the girl had been busy on his phone while he waited for his ‘friend’ to arrive, so that seemed like a good possibility. And here’s the funny thing about Thai surnames—they didn’t exist until 1913. Thai law says that each family has to take a different surname, and everyone using a given surname must be related. So not many people share the same full name.”
“Bet that makes police work easier.”
“Sure, if you can find a cop who isn’t corrupt. It made our work easier too—Naz found the guy online in five minutes flat. A local businessman. He ran a catering supply store. Family man. Wife, two kids, and he’d just taken possession of a young Thai girl. So, by then there were four of us and two problems.”
“Here you go, hun.”
The waitress was back, complete with a tray of food. Had the portions always been that big? Emmy’s burger was
