Tony Park - Silent Predator

At the end of the noisy, jolting journey, he gratefully slid onto the crowded tube platform at Euston. Making his way out of this subterranean world, Tom surfaced in the brightly lit main-line station.

He left the bustling terminus, turning left into Euston Road and passing the gothic splendour of the recently restored and enlarged St Pancras International station. Just before King’s Cross station, Tom weaved across the busy road to the Burger King.

He was half an hour early. He felt like buying a packet of cigarettes, but knew he shouldn’t. His brain hadn’t been at full speed when he’d spoken to Sannie on the phone, but he remembered now there was something he wanted to ask her.

There was an internet cafe a few doors down and Tom went in thinking he might find his answer there. A long-haired man looked up from his screen and directed him to a machine. Tom took out his notebook and typed ‘primates of southern Africa’ into the browser. He filled two pages and left the cafe at five minutes to one.

There were a dozen people inside the Burger King when he arrived but none he could recognise as the alluring young exotic dancer. He walked back outside onto the footpath. Perhaps she was late.

‘Hey, Mr Policeman.’

He turned around and looked down. The girl who was talking to him had Ivana’s — Olga’s — voice, but he could have been looking at a different person.

She stood about five feet tall, much shorter than he’d remembered. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail and her lack of makeup revealed traces of acne scarring. She wore a baggy grey sports top with a hood attached, faded jeans and old trainers.

‘You didn’t recognise me.’ Olga craned her neck back and peered up at him through rimless Coke-bottle glasses. ‘You walked right past me.’

‘Sorry.’

She shrugged. ‘Not surprising. I have clothes on now and no five-inch stiletto heels.’

He smiled. ‘And the glasses?’

‘It should have been me not recognising you, instead of other way around. In club I can barely see the men who come in. All my time there is like in a — what do you say… haze.’

‘Probably better that way.’

She nodded. ‘We eat?’

They stood side by side in the queue, making small talk about the weather while they waited to be served.

‘What are you studying?’

‘Medicine at UCL,’ she said. ‘No jokes about anatomy or biology, though, please. I get enough of that from fellow students.’

The University College London campus at Bloomsbury was nearby. Tom was a little surprised she told her peers about her job.

‘Is legal and is not money for sex, like some people think. You would be surprised what some students do. Not all of it is legal, either.’

He muttered an apology and said nothing more until they were served and took their food to a red laminate-topped table.

‘Why you come alone? You not have partner, like TV policeman? Even in Russia, where government has no money, militia detectives have partner.’

Tom didn’t want to lose the initiative before the interview began. He wanted to remind her, as much as himself, who was who in this exchange.

‘What have you got to tell me, Olga, that you didn’t tell the investigating officers?’

‘So you talked to them?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘I thought that since you were suspended from duty over African business that other police would not cooperate with you.’

‘So you know why I don’t have a partner.’ As a medical student her IQ was no doubt higher than his. Still, he had a lot more experience in asking questions than she did. He placed his burger back in the paper bag and started to stand. ‘I’m wasting my time here.’

‘No, wait!’

He saw the panic in her eyes. ‘Don’t mess me about, Olga. I haven’t come here to hear conspiracy theories or to indulge your fantasies of being an amateur detective.’

‘Look, I know about you but I also remember that you came to club by yourself. This is personal for you. Something is going on here that is not right.’

Tom folded his arms, ignoring his food, and said nothing.

‘Other detectives say not to talk to media about Ebony’s death, right?’

He nodded.

‘But journalist is the one who did it, even though police say they have questioned him.’

Tom took the hamburger back out of its wrapper and took a bite. He washed it down with a mouthful of cola. He knew that if he stayed quiet Olga would keep talking, and he was right.

‘You remember when you come to club that I tell you about geeky-looking man with red hair who used to come often to see Ebony dance — in private shows.’

Tom nodded again.

‘Well, he come back night after you were there. He was asking for her, but boss told him Ebony not show up for work. He start coming on to all other girls, including me, asking where she is. I say she is not here and he starts to get angry — what you say… agitated. He even offer me fifty quid to give him Ebony’s home address, but I say no way.’

‘Doesn’t sound like he’s the killer, then, if he’s drawing attention to himself,’ Tom said, wiping his mouth and feigning a lack of interest.

‘Aha. That is what other policemen said. But can’t you see that it was act? He was doing this deliberately to look like he didn’t know where she was, but he was stalking her for two weeks before she disappear!’

Tom took another drink. ‘Stalking? I thought you said he was a regular customer. Presumably you have men who come to see you dance more than once.’

Olga nodded and finally started to eat her food. She pinched small chunks from the burger bun and chewed each one methodically, over and over, while she thought about her next response. ‘Yes, but Ebony met this guy outside of work.’

Tom sat back in his plastic chair. ‘You didn’t tell me this when I came to the club.’

‘You were asking about Ebony and other man — the policeman you were looking for — not Ebony’s stalker man.’

Tom nodded. At that stage he had been working on a theory that Nick and Ebony might have done a bunk together, not that she had been murdered by a nutter. ‘How do you know this, did she tell you?’

Olga shook her head, and seemed to hesitate, picking again at her burger bun, but leaving the meat untouched.

‘Well?’

She looked up at him. ‘Geeky guy left his card when he couldn’t find Ebony and when no one would give him her address. His name was Fisher, Michael Fisher. He is — ’

‘He’s a journalist, from the World.’

Now it was Olga’s turn to lean back, arms folded, in a parody of Tom. ‘Aha! So you know this man.’

Tom shook his head. He recalled the somewhat obnoxious, persistent reporter from the media conference Greeves had given at the defence contractor’s offices prior to their flight to South Africa. Fisher was the one who was pursuing the line of questioning about Greeves’s frequent visits to Africa.

Olga gave up trying to outwait Tom and resumed her confession. ‘Ebony had a diary in her locker.’

‘You broke into her locker?’ Tom wiped his hands on a paper serviette.

‘Lock was broken. I started to worry about Ebony after your visit and that night I opened locker to see if she had left suicide note or something.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Not unknown in my line of work. Yours too, if anything like Russia.’

Tom let that pass unanswered.

‘Anyway, I look in Ebony’s diary and last entry is note to ring Michael. She wrote cell phone number down. I check with Fisher’s card and is same Michael.’

‘So, she was talking to him, outside of work.’

‘Yes.’

‘And when she didn’t call him, presumably because she’d been killed, Fisher came to the club and was “agitated” that he couldn’t find her and hadn’t heard from her.’