Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“'Course she did. Both of them did. Tha's how they met.”

“Did you work for him as well?”

She snorted. “Not bloody likely, that. Oh I tried, I did. Right when Vi got hired, I tried. But I wasn't the type he was looking for, Prongbreath said. He wanted refinement, he said. He wanted his girls to make conversation and know which fork to use with the fish knife and watch an opera without falling asleep and go to a drinks party on the arm of some ugly fat bloke who wants to pretend she's his girlfriend for a night and-”

“I think we've got the idea,” Lynley cut in. “But let me make sure so there's no confusion: MKR is an escort service.”

“Posing as a financial management firm,” Nkata added.

“Is that what you're saying?” Lynley asked Shelly. “Are you saying that both Nicola and Vi worked for MKR as escorts until they broke away to form their own business? Is that right, Miss Platt?”

“Right as rain,” she asserted. “Right as a bleeding hurricane. He hires girls, does Martin, and he calls them trainees for some flaming money business that don't even exist in the first place. He sits them down with a slew of books they're supposed to study from to learn the ‘business,’ and after 'bout a week he asks them will they do him a favour and act like the date of one of MKR's big clients in town for a conference and wanting to go to dinner. He'll pay them extra, he says, if they'll do it just this once. And just this once turns into just another time, and by the time they figger what MKR's really about they're seeing they can make a lot more dosh acting like dates for Korean computer salesmen or Arab oil blokes or American políticos or… whoever than they could ever make doing whatever else they was doing when they came to work for Prongbreath in the first place. And they can make even more if they give their companion a bit more than their company for the evening. Which is when the Prong introduces them to what his business really is. Which has sod all to do with investing anyone's money anywhere, believe you me.”

“How did you learn all this?” Lynley asked.

“Vi brought Nikki home once. They were talking. I listened. Vi got hired by the Prong different, and they were telling their stories to each other to compare.”

“Vis was?”

“Different, like I said. She was the only escort he ever hired from the street. The rest were students. College girls who wanted to work part-time. But Vi worked the game by sticking her card in call boxes-”

“With you as her maid?”

“Yeah. Tha's right. And Prongbreath picked up one of her cards, liked the look of her-I s'pose he didn't have another girl who could look ten years old like Vi can when she sets her mind to it-and he rang her up. I booked him in like I always did, but when he showed up, he wanted to talk business .” She lifted her coffee and drank, examining Lynley over the rim. She said, “So Vi went to work for him.”

“And ceased to need you,” Lynley said.

“I stuck by her though. Cooking meals, doing laundry, keeping the flat nice. But then she wanted to take up with Nikki as her mate and her partner, and I was out. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “One day I was washing her knickers. The next day I was pulling mine down to give ten-pound pokes to blokes waiting to catch the District Line to Ealing Broadway.”

“Which was when you decided to inform Martin Reeve what they were up to,” Lynley noted. “It was a good provocation for you to seek revenge.”

“I didn't hurt no one!” Shelly cried. “If you want someone likely to do someone else in-I mean, to kill them-then you look at the Prong, not at me.”

“Yet Vi doesn't point the finger at him,” Lynley said. “Which you think she would do if she suspected him of anything. How do you account for that? She even denies knowing him.”

“Well, she would do, wouldn't she?” Shelly declared. “If that bloke even thought she sneaked on him to the cops about… like… well, about his escort business, on top of her already using him to build up a list of clients and then doing a runner to set up in business on her own…” Shelly drew her thumb across her neck in a mime of throat-slitting. “She wouldn't last ten minutes after he found out, Vi wouldn't. The Prong don't like to be crossed, and he'd see to it she paid for crossing.” Shelly seemed to hear what she was saying and to realise all of the possibilities that could grow out of it. Nervously, she looked towards the door, as if expecting Martin Reeve to come barreling through it, ready to wreak vengeance upon her for the sneaking that she had just done.

“If that's the case,” Lynley said, “if Reeve is indeed responsible for Nicola Maiden's death-which is what I assume you're suggesting when you talk about people paying when they double-cross him-”

“I never said!”

“Understood. You didn't say it directly. I'm drawing the inference.” Lynley waited for her to give a sign of comprehension. She blinked. He decided that would do. He said, “If we infer that Reeve's responsible for Nicola Maiden's death, why would he have waited so long to kill her? She left his employ in April. It's now September. How do you account for the five months he waited to take his revenge?”

“I never told him where they were.” Shelly said it proudly. “I pretended I didn't know. I reckoned he was owed the tale of what they were up to, but he was on his own to track them down. And tha's what he did. Depend on it.”

DI Peter Hanken had just got back to his office after his conversation with Will Upman when the news came in that a ten-year-old schoolboy called Theodore Webster playing hide-and-seek in a grit dispenser on the road between Peak Forest and Lane Head had found a knife buried in what remained of last winter's protection against road ice. It was a good-size pocket knife, replete with blades and the sort of miscellaneous gewgaws that made its inclusion in the equipment of a camper or a hiker de rigueur. The boy might have kept it hidden away for years for his own use-so his father reported-had its blades not been impossible to open without someone's assistance. Because of this, he'd taken the knife to his father for help, thinking that a few drops of oil would take care of the problem. But his father had seen the dried blood that was crusting the tightly closed knife, and he'd recalled the story of the Calder Moor deaths that had filled the front page of the High Peak Courier. He'd phoned the police immediately. It might not be the knife that had been used on one of the two Calder Moor victims, Hanken was told via his mobile by the WPC who'd taken the call, but the DI might want to have a look at it himself prior to its being sent onward to the lab. Hanken declared that he'd take the knife to the lab himself, so he barreled north to the A623 and headed southeast at Sparrowpit. This course bisected Calder Moor, running at a forty-five-degree angle from its northwest edge, which was defined by the road along which the Maiden girl's car had been parked.

At the site, Hanken examined the grit dispenser in which the weapon had been found. He made a note of the fact that a killer-depositing a knife therein-could then have proceeded on his way to a junction not five miles distant at which he could have turned either due east then north for Padley Gorge or immediately south towards Bakewell and Broughton Manor, which lay a mere two miles beyond it. Once Hanken had confirmed this bit of data with a quick look at the map, he went on to examine the knife itself in the kitchen of the Websters’ farmhouse.