Harum Scarum (24 page)

‘Hang on a minute Angus.’ She held out her hand to him. ‘Let’s have another look at that card.’ After examining it for a moment she frowned and said to Monty. ‘This is the same picture as on the postcard in Emma’s room. I thought it must have been from Europe.’

Monty frowned. ‘I didn’t notice any postcard when I was in there with Stoppard. But hang on a minute.’ He delved into his briefcase, took out SOCO’s inventory of Emma’s room and shook his head. ‘Not listed.’

‘I don’t understand, what’s the big deal?’ Tash asked.

‘It was there, I saw it—I’m sure it was the same scene.’ Stevie looked to Monty to see if he could make sense of it. ‘The postcard was balanced on her teddy bear’s arms. I wonder if she’d done it deliberately, so it would be seen? At the time it didn’t occur to me that it was significant. But the picture is of Stoppard’s showroom, some kind of a European style castle in the hills. He must have taken it, don’t you see?’

‘Sure he could have—but it sounds a bit cloak and dagger.’

Stevie glanced at Barry, noticed the beginnings of a smirk. She was too tired to deal with this.

‘Look, can I get a word in, guys. I need to get out again,’ said Wayne. Stevie decided to keep her thoughts to herself for the moment, and responded to Monty’s raised eyebrows with a shrug.

Monty sighed and pointed his pen at Wayne. ‘Tell everyone what you’re up to at the moment.’

‘I’ve found the kid who’d been hanging around with Zhang Li. It seems he was with Li at the time he was killed. He told me he saw it happen, but then clammed up when I asked him for details. I’m waiting on a social worker now for the interview.’

‘So if we find Zhang Li’s killer, we’ll more than likely find Kusak’s killer. Some coup, eh?’ Barry beamed at the serious faces surrounding him.

‘Things are never as easy as they can look,’ Wayne cautioned.

With his curly blond hair, porn-star moustache and fish belly complexion, Julian Holdsworth was everything Stevie imagined a paedophile webmaster to be. Although he seemed genuinely shocked to hear of Emma’s disappearance, and Stevie felt inclined to believe him, she made no effort to hide the contempt in her voice.

‘You’ve been identified by staff at the Mt Lawley Internet cafe as a frequent visitor and your signature is scrawled all over the logs. You always choose to sit in the booth furthest away from the counter where no one can see your screen.’

‘Would you like a lawyer, Mr Holdsworth?’ Tash cut in.

Sweat gleamed on Holdsworth’s brow. He fidgeted with the collar of his open neck shirt and undid another button to reveal a glint of a gold chain through a tangle of dark chest hair.

‘Innocent men don’t need lawyers,’ he said.

Christ, how often had Stevie heard them say that? She reached for the file and opened it on the table, fanning the glossy hardcore photos before him. Tapping her pen on one of the photos, she said ‘For the benefit of the tape I am showing Mr Holdsworth exhibit C7.’

‘Oh God, that’s disgusting.’ Holdsworth turned away.

She pointed to another. ‘Look at this please sir. For the benefit of the tape I am showing Mr Holdsworth exhibit C3.’

He gave the photo a timid, sideways glance. ‘Christ,’ he put his hand over his mouth. ‘How can you even imagine I could be responsible for distributing these?’

He was a good actor; the man really did look as if he was about to puke, he’d turned as green as the interview room walls. Stevie scanned the room, wondering if there was a suitable receptacle available, but all she found was an empty coffee cup. She hoped it wouldn’t be needed.

She said, ‘These photos were sent from the Internet cafe you were logged in at, from your account, on two consecutive days last December.’

Holdsworth marshalled his strength, folded his arms and looked her in the eye. ‘I didn’t send them.’

‘What about these, these and these.’ Tash pointed out several more, reading out their identification numbers for the tape. ‘Coincidences don’t happen that often,’ she added.

‘They’re nothing to do with me.’

‘What about these photos, Mr Holdsworth, surely you don’t deny taking these?’ Stevie showed him the ‘art’ photos from Tall Poppies.

He glanced at them, gave a start then looked more closely. ‘Oh yeah, they’re mine, my God, where the hell did you get them from?’

‘These were sent from the same Internet cafe, the same account, on the very days you were logged in.’

‘I took them, yes, but I never distributed them on the Internet.’

‘Lolita,’ Tash said.

Holdsworth looked at her blankly, swallowed. ‘Wasn’t that a movie?’

‘All right Mr Holdsworth,’ Stevie said. ‘Let’s try something a bit easier. Tell me why someone like you, with a whole studio of computer equipment, needs to use the services of an Internet cafe?’

Holdsworth bit his lip and said nothing. He picked up the empty cup before him as if he were trying to read the tea leaves at the bottom.

‘Our experts are pulling your computer apart now,’ Stevie went on. ‘You may as well just save us all a great deal of bother. I’m afraid our techs aren’t always as gentle with impounded equipment as they could be.’

Holdsworth crumpled the cup in his hand. ‘Shit, okay, I’ll tell you, but you won’t find anything illegal on my computer, and certainly no porn.’

Tash who had been prowling around the room pulled up a chair next to him.

He took a breath. ‘Online gambling. I visit a US site that’s illegal in Australia. I use the cafe so no record is left on my computer. The gambling site is also riddled with viruses which I don’t want on my equipment.’

The detectives took their time to digest this, exchanging arch glances as they did so.

Tash straightened in her chair. ‘That’s not good enough, Mr Holdsworth, you’ll have to do better than that.’

‘I couldn’t go to prison for that, surely? A fine? Maybe I should call my lawyer after all?’

Neither detective responded.

He looked from one to the other of them, brow furrowed with thought as he undid another shirt button. ‘Christ it’s hot in here. Okay, there’s something else too.’ His eyes settled on Tash. ‘These kinds of pics are of no interest to me at all, not that they ever would be, even if I wasn’t ... gay.’

Tash slumped back in her chair.

Stevie slid a pen and paper toward him to write down names of people who could corroborate what he’d just said. What a waste of bloody time, she thought. The Dream Team site was devoted solely to the exploitation of underage girls, so it was highly unlikely that Lolita would be gay, or even bisexual. He might, of course, be running it as a purely business concern, but it was rare that people were into this kind of abuse just for the money.

Holdsworth scratched away with the pen for a while. ‘These guys will back me up.’

‘You’d have saved yourself a lot of bother if you’d told us that straight away,’ Stevie said, Tash’s expression hadn’t lost any of its early contempt. ‘Ashamed of being gay are you, Mr Holdsworth?’

Holdsworth placed a full stop after the last name and put the pen down. ‘No, but I work with children. It could easily be assumed by the ignorant masses that because I’m gay I’m into little boys, which I’m not. I keep my orientation to myself for the sake of my job.’

Stevie pushed the button of the tape recorder. ‘Stopping for a break at 12:45.’

Stevie and Tash pushed their way through the swinging doors into the operations room and made their way to Clarissa’s desk. ‘Is it possible to access someone’s Internet connection through a local area network in say an Internet cafe, and send stuff through it without the knowledge of the person who’s logged in?’ Stevie asked.

Clarissa squeezed her dimpled chin as she thought. ‘LAN sniff you mean? These cafes don’t tend to have the best security. Does it have a wireless connection?’

Stevie had no idea what LAN sniff might mean. She looked to Tash who’d been somewhat thoughtful and subdued since Holdsworth’s revelation. Tash nodded ‘yes’.

‘Then all it needs is someone in the know to be sitting in a car outside with a laptop to pick up signals from the cafe,’ Clarissa said. ‘He—or she—can log in from his own computer then log into a computer in the cafe to control it. If he deletes his system logs as he goes, it’s virtually untraceable.’

‘We think that might be what’s happened to Julian Holdsworth,’ Stevie said. ‘He visits the cafe several nights a week and logs in for a set time, regular as clockwork.’

‘Then it would be someone who knows his routine, knows him well enough to guess his password,’ Clarissa said.

‘But not well enough to know he’s gay,’ Tash said quietly.

Tash and Stevie split up, Tash to find out how the Emma Breightling search was going and follow up on Holdsworth’s friends, Stevie returning to Julian Holdsworth. If they were in an old movie, she thought as she stepped back into the interview room, the interrogatory spotlight would be dimmed, the swinging bulb now stilled.

Once he’d learned he was no longer under arrest, Holdsworth accepted her profuse apologies with as much alacrity as he did the free lunch she sent out for.

‘It was Miranda’s idea, that little scam in the Mall,’ he said through a mouthful of lamb kebab. Stevie’s serving still lay wrapped on the table in front of her. She picked away at the paper. If worry for Emma had diminished her appetite, revulsion at the sight of the gravy dripping from the side of Holdsworth’s butter yellow moustache killed it altogether.

‘To tell you the truth I’m glad you guys put a stop to it before too much harm was done,’ Holdsworth said, eager it seemed to restore some lost points.

Stevie thought back to the photo of the muslin-clad Bianca Webster and bit her lip. From where she stood, Bianca’s modelling session had kick-started the events that had ultimately led to her death.

‘I’ve never known such a greedy bitch as Miranda,’ Holdsworth went on. ‘Want, want, want, more, more, more.’ He drained his coffee and held out the cup, raised eyebrows indicating he’d like another.

Stevie took the cup and handed it to a uniformed constable passing by the open door and returned to her seat. She decided to capitalise on the distance Holdsworth seemed to want to put between himself and Miranda Breightling. Clasping her hands on the table in front of her she affected a tone of gossippy interest. ‘What about Miranda’s husband, Christopher?’

Julian Holdsworth finished chewing his kebab and dabbed at his mouth with the corner of a paper serviette, leaving small traces of gravy on his moustache. He licked his fingers and leaned conspiratorially towards her. With the metaphorical spotlight no longer shining in his eyes, she could see he was enjoying the drama.

‘Quite a bit older than she is, ten, fifteen years maybe. He’s a plastic surgeon, but dabbles in cosmetic surgery on the side—probably experiments on his wife, I mean have you seen her...’ he circled his hands around his chest area. ‘I think he used to be a bit of a philanthropist, one of those surgeons who was always flitting off to war zones to treat the unfortunate, correct deformities, patch up landmine victims—you know, the saintly type. His good deeds died somewhat of a death when he married Miranda—then the cosmetic side of things began to take over.’

‘More money in cosmetic surgery I suppose,’ Stevie commented, remembering Emma saying something similar. It was, after all, a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you were rich. ‘Do you think they might be having financial difficulties?’

‘You’d have to ask the accountant that, I wouldn’t know. She can be a bit slow settling her invoices, but that’s generally the way these days, isn’t it?’

‘Her accountant—would that be Aidan Stoppard?’

‘Yup.’

‘What do you know of him?’

‘Not much. He and Miranda were at school together, some high school or other on the wrong side of town. That’s part of Miranda’s problem, a huge chip on the shoulder. She told me once, after one bottle of bubbly too many, that when she first left school and started making new friends, she’d tell taxi drivers in a big loud voice to take her to an address in Claremont. Once she’d left the friends behind, she’d get the taxi to drop her off at a bus stop so she could bus it home to the outer suburbs with no one the wiser.’

‘A social climber.’

‘You can say that again, it’s obvious she only married Christopher for his money and social position. And he’s
still
besotted with her, I can’t see why, the silly bugger. He’s no dumb arse; he has to see through her—I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.’

‘And what do you think of Aidan Stoppard?’ she asked.

Holdsworth shrugged. ‘Okay, I suppose.’

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Do you know him well?’

‘Not really, only in passing. Enough to say hi when he drops in at the agency, sometimes work talk. Why the interest?’

‘With Emma missing, everything about the family and the agency is of interest.’ She explained the minimal details of the circumstances surrounding Bianca’s death, the paedophile ring that had somehow acquired copies of his photos, and why they had suspected him of supplying them.

He rubbed his moustache. ‘You think someone deliberately singled me out for this?’

‘Yes, someone who didn’t know you were a homosexual, I suspect.’

‘I told you I don’t advertise.’

‘But you do have a very predictable routine at the cafe.’ Stevie allowed a slight smile, which Holdsworth returned somewhat sheepishly.

‘I was trying to shake the gambling habit,’ he said. ‘I think maybe I have now, but I wish it hadn’t had to be like this.’

A constable shuffled in with fresh coffee.

Stevie went on. ‘Have you ever lost or suspected your photos stolen? Has someone ever tampered with your computer, you think?’

Holdsworth paused for thought. ‘No, but it wouldn’t be hard to scan the pics and put them back on my desk—my office door doesn’t have a lock, anyone could take them...’

‘They’re the kind of photos that would appeal to a paedophile—’

‘Oh come on, you’re not harping back to that again. I photograph what I’m told, nothing more, nothing less. And I don’t do porn. If you have a beef with anyone, take it out on Miranda Breightling, not me.’