really liked her.’
‘You left a message on her home phone at half-past four in the afternoon on Wednesday. You said’ – he paused to read from his notebook – ‘“I have something for you. Give me a call please.”’ He paused. ‘What was that about?’
She looked up, and again her eyes moved to the right and she appeared agitated.
Branson cut in, gentle, playing the classic soft man to Grace’s hard. ‘Claire, you might as well tell us. If you’ve got anything to hide, it will look much better for you if you tell us the truth.’
The words seemed to hit home. Her eyes raced around as if running for cover. ‘God, Barry’ll kill me. It stands for Barry and Claire Escorts Twenty-Four Seven. OK?’
Grace sat for some moments in stunned silence. ‘Janie Stretton was an escort? A hooker?’
Very defensive suddenly, Claire said, ‘We provide escorts for single men – and women. People in need of a date for a night out, that sort of thing. Not hookers.’
Grace noticed her eyes were still moving strongly to the right; they seemed to be trying to burrow their way as far to the right as they could get.
‘All innocent?’ Grace said.
She shrugged. ‘For us, yes.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Claire, I’ve heard it all before, OK? If the client wants to make a private arrangement with the young lady, that’s not your problem, right?’
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘I think I should call my solicitor.’
‘I’m not interested in busting your squalid little business,’ Grace said. ‘Call your solicitor and then I will bust you, just for the hell of it, I’ll bloody take you apart. I want to find Janie’s killer; that’s all I’m interested in. Help me with that and I won’t touch you. Do we understand each other?’
She grimaced. Then finally she nodded.
‘How much do you charge your punters?’
‘Sixty quid an hour.’
‘And how much do you get of that?’
‘Forty per cent.’
‘The girls keep the rest and any extras?’
‘They keep their tips,’ she said defensively.
‘Right. Who was she with on Tuesday night?’
She turned to her computer and tapped the keyboard. After some moments she said, ‘Anton.’
‘Anton? Anton who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know the names of your punters?’
‘Only if they want to tell me.’
‘And how many of them tell you?’
‘Quite a few. But I don’t know if their names are real or not.’
Grace found himself getting increasingly angry. ‘These girls sign up with you and you send them out on dates with single men – on which you get a fat commission – and you don’t even bother to find out their bloody names?’
There was another silence. ‘We always check on the girls, on a first date. We phone them after ten minutes. We have some code words; if they’re not happy, then we have security we can send over to help them. This was her fourth date with Anton. I wasn’t worried – I mean I didn’t feel I had any reason to be worried.’
‘It didn’t bother you that she was a young, innocent law student?’
‘We’ve lots of students on our books. They find it a good way to supplement their grants. Thanks to Tony Blair, most students leave uni with debts it will take them years to pay off. Doing escort work gives them an alternative. I like to feel we are doing our bit to help them.’
‘Well of course,’ Grace said, his voice corrosive with sarcasm. ‘I mean, all that cash coming in… all your altruism, and her private arrangements with Anton the butcher none of your concern.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking, then he asked, ‘How many girls do you have on your books?’
‘About thirty. And ten guys.’
‘You have pictures?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me see Janie’s.’
She went to a filing cabinet, retrieved a folder, opened it, took out a photograph in cellophane, then handed it to Grace.
It wasn’t like any of the photographs he had seen in her father’s house or in her flat. This was a wholly different Janie Stretton, a Janie of the night.
She was lying seductively on a leopard-skin rug, dressed in the briefest of leather hot pants, a black lace blouse unbuttoned to the navel, with her breasts all but completely exposed.
Grace handed it to Branson. ‘Just
‘Yeah, that sort of thing.’
‘Claire, I didn’t just ride into town on the tailgate of a bloody truck, OK? She was on the game, wasn’t she?’
‘If she was, it was without our knowledge.’
‘Where do you advertise?’
‘Magazines, newsagents, on the internet.’
Grace nodded. ‘And where do you get most of your clients from?’
‘It varies. We get a lot from word of mouth.’
‘And which magazines?’
Claire hesitated. ‘Contact magazines, tourist ones, the local paper, one or two speciality mags.’
‘Speciality?’
After some more moments of hesitation she said, ‘Fetishes, mainly. People who are into rubber. Bondage. Stuff.’
‘Stuff?’ Grace questioned.
She shrugged.
‘So do we have any way of finding out how this Anton first got hold of your number?’
She peered in the folder and pulled out an index card. ‘May sixth. Anton. I wrote down, “Strong European accent”. He said he’d seen the advert in’ – she squinted as if trying to read her own writing – ‘the
The local newspaper.
The phone rang again. She ignored it and continued squinting as if trying to decipher more notes. ‘He wanted to see some picture of the girls, so I directed him to the website. Then he rang back about half an hour later, saying he’d like a date with Janie. I have his number!’
Grace sat up and saw Branson’s instant reaction also. ‘You do?’
‘I always take a call-back number for our clients. It puts them on guard.’
‘Let me have it, please.’
He wrote it down as she read it out, then immediately dialled it on his mobile phone. Instantly he got the unobtainable signal. ‘Shit.’
‘Is there anything else at all you could tell us about this Anton?’
‘I wish I could. Do you… think – that – that he might have been the one who…?’
‘If he wasn’t her killer, he must have been one of the last people to see her. Do your girls ring in after their date’s finished?’
‘Sometimes, depends how late it is.’
‘She didn’t ring you on Tuesday night after her date with Anton?’
‘No.’
‘And you were ringing her about another date on Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at her notes. ‘Another gentleman. Do you need his name and number?’
