blackmail you. You’re hoping you can buy me off cheap or scare me into changing my mind.”
His eyes widened by an infinitesimal fraction, and his lips parted to show his clenched teeth. He was wound up very tight indeed—tight enough so that he might even break, without careful handling. But I didn’t know him well enough to tailor my approach to his tender sensibilities, so I gave it to him straight.
“You’re right,” I told him. “This is a shakedown. But contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about blackmailers, if you give me what I want, I’ll go away and leave you alone. And it’s not money, it’s just information. I want you to pull some police records for me. Three, to be precise. Do you think you can do that?”
Dodson gave a short laugh that sounded like it must have hurt coming out.
“Just information? You want me to steal files from the Met? Go against everything my job is about? Can you think of a single good reason why I shouldn’t punch you in the mouth for resisting arrest, and then arrest you?”
I nodded stonily. “Yeah,” I said. “Just the one. Davey Simmons. According to all the newspaper reports I could get my hands on, he asphyxiated after inhaling a cocktail of superglue and antifreeze from a plastic ASDA bag. Not a nice way to go.”
The color drained out of Dodson’s face, leaving it gray and slightly glistening, like wet cement. He sat down in the black leather office chair. I could tell he was staring death in the face. Not his own death—he looked as though he could probably have coped with that a fair bit better—but someone else’s. “Davey Simmons was a human train wreck,” he said without conviction.
“Yeah. I read that, too. Broken home, in and out of trouble, psychiatric problems, couple of convictions. But the police thought it was a bloody odd setup, all the same. Did any of your mates ever talk over the finer points of it with you?”
Dodson shot me a look full of hate. “No,” he said tightly. “They didn’t.”
“You see, there was glue in his hair. And on his right cheek. It was as though the bag had been held over his whole head, rather than just over his mouth and nose—which I believe is the preferred mode of delivery for fans of recreational Bostick. The bruises on his wrists got them thinking, too. Could someone have held him down and shoved a bag over his head, then held it there until he died? That’d be a pretty shitty thing to do to someone, wouldn’t it?”
There was a long silence, tense at first, but becoming slacker as Dodson’s fury surrendered to despair. “It was a joke,” he muttered, almost too low to hear.
“Yeah?” I said unsympathetically. “What’s the punch line?”
Dodson didn’t seem to hear. “Peter and his friends found . . . Simmons . . . in a toilet cubicle. He’d mixed the stuff up in the bag, and he was already inhaling it. They wanted to scare him. For a joke. Maybe teach him a lesson.”
I let the silence lie for a bit longer this time. Then I put the little sheaf of paper I’d got from Nicky down on the desk in front of him. He stared at it dully.
“These three,” I said, pointing. “The ones I’ve gone over in highlighter. They’re the only ones I’m interested in. I want autopsy reports, witness statements, and anything else you can lay your hands on. By tonight.”
He shook his head. “Impossible,” he said. “That amount of material—” Then he started to read the stuff and shook his head again, even more emphatically. “I’m not in Murder anymore. I don’t have access to any of this stuff.”
“I’m sure you can call in some favors from old friends, you being a big man in SOCA these days. And photocopies will be fine. Hell, at a pinch, even a disk will be fine. Just get me the stuff, and then we can walk out of each other’s lives again. For good, this time.”
I took a step toward the door. Dodson came jerkily to his feet. His arm shot out and he blocked me, stepped in close, and stared down at me from his full, imposing height.
“Peter didn’t mean for the boy to die,” he said with a menacing emphasis. “You understand me?”
“I wouldn’t have an opinion about that,” I said evenly, meeting his wide-eyed stare with a narrower one of my own.
“I’ve already punished him. I think his own guilt would have been enough, but I’ve grounded him for the rest of the school term, and I’ve canceled a holiday we had planned in Switzerland. It’s not as though I just let this pass. It’s not as though he doesn’t understand what he’s done.”
“Davey Simmons is dead,” I said in the same level tone. “So fuck you and the squad car you rode in on.”
I thought Dodson was going to hit me, but he just let his arms drop to his sides and looked away.
“Tonight,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“And then we never hear from you again.”
“Exactly.”
“I could make life very difficult for you, too, Castor.”
“I don’t doubt it. But let’s make each other happy instead, eh?”
I let myself out. Barbara had very sensibly made herself scarce.
What now? No word from Nicky about the laptop. No way I was going anywhere near the archive again, in case Ajulutsikael the sex demon was still staking the place out. What did that leave?
It left Rosa. I knew the odds were stacked fairly heavily against me finding her, but she could make this so much easier. I was certain she knew the dead woman—reasonably certain that she could fill in the last few gaps for me and give me what I needed to make sense of this mess.
Of course, I had to assume that Damjohn knew that, too. If he was as heavily mixed up in all of this as I thought he was, he’d have put Rosa somewhere where I couldn’t get close to her, so Kissing the Pink was probably a nonstarter. All the same, that was where I had to go.
It was the dead time of midafternoon, when the lunchtime City crowd had evaporated away like a bead of sweat on a pole dancer’s cleavage, and the sex tourists were still sleeping off the debaucheries of the night before. I walked in off the street to find the doorman—not Arnold, fortunately—half asleep in his cubicle and the club itself three-quarters empty. Evidently we were in between dances—the wide-screen TV was showing a soft-core porn movie so old and so labored that it had to count as kitsch rather than titillation.
I was a little afraid of running into Damjohn himself or, even worse, into Scrub, but there was no sign of either of them. A guy I didn’t know from Adam was guarding the inner door that led up to the brothel, and he nodded me through without a look.
“You’ve got a girl named Rosa,” I said to the blonde apparition who was serving behind the upstairs bar. She looked like a centerfold, which is to say that her tan was carotene-poisoned orange, and I was nearly certain she had two staples through her midriff. She flashed me a nonjudgmental smile and nodded vigorously, but the nod didn’t mean anything. “That’s right, darling,” she said. “Only she’s not in today. We’ve got some girls who are just as young, though. We’ve got Jasmine, who’s five foot six and very busty—only just turned eighteen, and you can help her celebrate—”
I cut her off before she could start taking me through Jasmine’s tariff in detail. “I’d really love to see Rosa again,” I said, hoping the implied lie would be taken at face value. “When is she here next?”
“She does Fridays and Saturdays,” the woman said, the smile slipping almost imperceptibly.
“Today is Saturday,” I pointed out helpfully.
She nodded again. “That’s right, sweetheart. Only she’s not in today. She took a day off on flextime.”
Flextime. Right. I kept my face straight because I’m a professional, God damn it. But I knew the next kite wouldn’t fly.
“Do you have her home number?” I asked.
The smile was folded away abruptly and put back into storage for a more fitting occasion.
“I can’t give out personal details, dear, you know that. I’ve got lots of other girls here. You have a look around and see if there’s anyone you like the look of.”
I took the brush-off with moronic good humor, which seemed to be the safest way to go. And then I took my leave as soon as I could without drawing attention to myself.
So Rosa had disappeared. Nothing more I could do there for the time being. Nothing much I could do anywhere until Nicky called. Probably the best thing I could do would be to go back to bed and sleep, because I’d probably need the energy later.
But there was something else nagging at the edges of my mind—something I’d dismissed as coincidence, once and then again. It’s funny how coincidences look less and less coincidental as they pile up against each other.
