Strange Tide (15 page)

She had faith in him. She was sure he was just playing the audience, who had started to get fidgety and nervous.
Good call, Ali
, she thought,
we'll really get them this time
. She acted out a bit of stage business, pretending that she was really worried, enjoying the feedback she felt coming off the front rows.

But the can hadn't moved. Walking to the back of the churn she climbed the steps and tried to see if something really had gone wrong. The audience was highly agitated now, sensing trouble.

She tested the lid and found it wedged firmly down, as it always was. What could have happened? The clock had hit ninety seconds, the second-hand deep into the red danger zone. Her fingers fumbled around the edge of the lid. Then she realized; it was pushed further down on one side than the other. The metal had buckled, wedging it shut. She thumped at the edge with her fist but it would not budge a centimetre. There was no one in the wings to help her.

The churn was heavy with the weight of a human body and many litres of water, so she had to slam her back into it. On her third attempt the churn rocked and passed beyond its tipping point, crashing to the stage, where its lid burst off, allowing water to flood the stage and blow the footlights.

Ali was unconscious. She had to drag him out, and surprised herself by remembering how to clear his lungs of water, something she had learned at school. He spluttered back into consciousness, coughing.

Management was very upset about the state of the stage, because water passed through the floorboards and blew the main electrics. They didn't care that one of their performers had very nearly died, and charged him for the damage.

Back in the dressing room Ali was back to his usual ebullient self. ‘I should have oiled the lid,' he said. ‘Now we've lost the gig. We'll need to find a new revenue stream.'

Cassie held his wrists and made him look into her eyes. ‘Listen to me,' she said. ‘You're alive. You could have died. Do you understand?'

‘I knew you'd figure out what had gone wrong,' Ali said. ‘We needed this booking, and the milk can is wrecked. We'll have to start over.'

‘No,' she said, ‘that's our last time doing this. There are better ways of making money – maybe not easier, just better.'

Cassie was right. It was the last performance in the short-lived career of the Great Hidini. They fled their debts, and Ali decided to implement a new game which he hoped would prove more lucrative. This time it involved stepping closer to the edge of the law. Every step he took brought him closer to a future meeting with the PCU.

Janice Longbright arrived at the spot where the Cossack Club should have been and found nothing. This was an area, she reminded herself, where a fashionable cocktail bar could be hidden behind the frontage of a derelict newsagent's. At number 273, Dalston High Road there was a Turkish barber shop that shared its premises, in true Sweeney Todd style, with a butcher. A scratched black doorway stood between the two halves.

Then she saw the letters, gold italic diamonds that had lost their adhesive and slipped from their position above the letter box:

CO SACK CLU – Ring bell twice

Classy joint
, she thought, ringing and stepping back. The Victorian terrace had been carved into shops, bars, cafés and dingy spaces that defied glancing interpretation, each sublet property flirting inventively with the council rulebook.

The lock buzzed and she pushed inward to a claustrophobic hall of black-painted walls and sticky green carpet. Beyond that, a narrow staircase led down to a nightclub that managed to be both garish and penumbral. Nearly a dozen rooms ran off the lower corridor, which finally opened into a dance floor and bar. On the wall was a pair of crossed scimitars, vaguely Baltic in origin.

The man behind the counter, an ex-army type, now morbidly obese and mottled with the brick-coloured features of a heavy drinker, rested his tattooed forearms on the beer pumps, nodding at her warily. Janice could tell that he sensed the presence of a police officer, even though she was wearing the PCU's non-regulation winter uniform of black sweater and Puffa jacket. To settle the matter she flicked him her badge and asked his name. Joe Easter said he was the bar manager. He also appeared to be reading Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse
, if the dog-eared copy next to the beer pumps was his.

‘Lynsey Dalladay. Name ring a bell?' she asked, looking around.

‘Hang on,' said Easter. ‘Are you new CO14?'

CO14 was Clubs and Vice. The manager had obviously had his collar felt before, and wasn't bothered about letting her know.

‘Special unit,' she said. ‘Dalladay, twenty-four, dark-haired, petite, very pretty. Come on, it's not rocket science.'

‘Why, what's she done?'

‘Your turn first.'

‘She didn't turn up for her shift, if that's what you mean.'

‘When?'

‘She was due in Saturday night. I tried her phone but it was switched off.'

‘Any contact since?'

‘Not a dickey.'

Longbright looked around at the scarlet walls, the blue leather sofas, the absurd paintings of naked Eurasian women in gold plastic frames. The decor was either ironic or a genuine throwback to the clip joints of the late 1990s. The latter, she decided, noting the pink and green neon strip lights behind the bar. Even in her own days as a night-club hostess she had never worked in a place as grim as this. ‘First time she's gone missing?' she asked.

‘No. She hardly ever turns up when she's supposed to.'

‘Then why do you keep her?'

Easter scratched his neck and checked under his fingernail. ‘She makes the punters happy.'

‘Happy? Are we talking about a cocktail waitress or something more?'

‘Look around, love.' He nodded at the table lamp, which consisted of a tasselled shade balancing on a headless nude female torso. ‘What do you think?'

‘How far does she go?'

‘That's up to her, if you're fishing for a licence infringement. I never saw her do anything dodgy.'

‘What's a bit of posh doing down here? Do you get many girls like her?'

‘You having a laugh? Hardly ever.'

‘Then why her? Why here?' she wondered aloud. ‘What would bring her to a rathole like this?'

‘A bit of
nostalgie de la boue
, I imagine,' said the bar manager, taking Longbright aback somewhat. ‘Doing it for kicks. Some girls just get the yearning for it. The punters like that.'

‘What sort of punters?'

‘Turkish, mostly. Russians who fancy themselves as oligarchs just because they've bought a four-bedroom house at the wrong end of Islington. A few Chinese. The odd high-roller, but mostly meatheads looking for a cheap thrill on the way home. There's plenty of upmarket clubs they could go to before hitting Dalston, but the girls would be more . . . demanding. Lynsey knew which ones she was after, and picked off the best of them. I used to watch her sometimes, studying their form like she was picking racehorses.'

‘I guess that didn't make her too popular with the other girls.'

Easter snorted, then had to wipe his nose on his wrist. ‘They asked me to get rid of her, but why should I? She brought in bigger spenders.'

‘And you need the bigger spenders because . . .' She let the question hang in the air.

He tilted his head on one side and studied her coolly. ‘You know as well as I do that we don't have a gambling licence, so there's no gambling going on here, is there?'

‘What, no tables behind any of those doors?' Longbright asked. ‘You'd be the only club around here without them.'

‘What's she supposed to have done, anyway?'

‘Done? She's carked it, pal. Currently lying on a steel tray in the St Pancras Mortuary.'

‘Bloody hell.'

‘Who did you last see her with? Did she have regulars?'

‘Not really. Blokes asked for her but she was moody, rarely saw anyone twice.'

‘Because she didn't have to.' The air down here was unpleasantly beery and stale. Longbright was ready to get back out into the rain. ‘You kept her on,' she reminded him. ‘You must have formed an opinion of her.'

Easter scratched at himself again, thinking. ‘Well, it's a type, innit? She'd been here nearly four months, vanished every three or four weeks; I gave it another month or so before she quit for good. Stands to reason, a girl like that.'

‘What do you mean?'

Easter cracked his knuckles, or it might have just been his signet rings. ‘Come on, you know the type,' he said. ‘Lost girls, isn't that what they call them? The smooth life didn't work out so she was trying the rough. She had this idea she could start her life again. Into all that astro-bollocks, karma, crystals, Buddhism. You know, lady-science.' He checked himself. ‘No offence, love.'

Longbright smiled darkly. ‘Did you ever try it on with her? Force it a bit, offer to look after her?'

‘Not me. First, this is my place of work. Second, she was too hyper. Liable to stab you with an ice pick if you looked at her the wrong way.'

‘I want a list out of you before I go,' she said. ‘Every man she met in here; everyone who called her or asked for her.'

‘People don't give their real names—' Easter began.

‘You're a private club so you're legally required to keep membership documents with a name, proof of age and a valid contact number. If you can't furnish those from your ID scanner, consider yourself closed down as of this moment.' She tapped the cover of the paperback. ‘That's not her best book, by the way. Try
Orlando
.'

Half an hour later Longbright left with the membership forms in a box under her arm. Even if only a quarter of the names were real, at least she had somewhere to start.

The DS fished the pages from her overburdened desk and handed them over. ‘He knew nobody was likely to leave their real names and addresses at a dive like the Cossack Club, so he had them photographed at the counter in the corridor. Joe Easter isn't as dumb as he looks. He was a big deal in a jazz band back in the nineties, a clarinettist. Now he's got arthritis and can't do his collar buttons up, let alone play. His wife probably leaves them undone when he annoys her, just to get her own back. If he was my husband and he upset me I'd put things on the top shelves of cupboards.'

‘Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you.' John May turned over the sheets, mostly generic Russian and Turkish names. Attached were small photographs of the punters as they stood at the counter, waiting for entry.

Longbright tapped the notes she had added beneath the photographs. ‘He said the shots were for security purposes. The punters use credit cards to clear their tabs. Put their personal details together with their head-shots and I think you'll find the club is probably doing something interesting with the data. They're also running some kind of gambling deal. I saw card tables and chairs stacked in one of the rooms.'

‘That's not our concern,' said Bryant, who had been listening at the door. ‘If you get sidetracked into chasing down their extracurricular activities instead of following the girl you'll be heading away from the target.'

‘The club could be our only way of finding out who got Dalladay pregnant,' said May.

‘You mean it wasn't Freddie Cooper?' Longbright was genuinely surprised. ‘Damn, I had him pegged as the type.'

May stared at pages of unrecognizable faces, then handed the forms back. ‘Not according to Giles,' he said. ‘Cooper was telling the truth. He's definitely not the father. The samples came back negative.'

‘Then we need to look somewhere else.' Bryant manoeuvred himself above his green leather chair and dropped into it with a sigh.

‘We talked to Dalladay's parents,' said May. ‘She had—'

‘—a bright older brother who worked in the City and died of a heroin overdose,' Bryant interrupted. ‘I checked too. Her mother's a former dancer; her father was a professional tennis player who was forced to give up his shot at Wimbledon after a botched hamstring operation. You know what that means, don't you? Mother regretful, father bitter, favoured son lost, daughter obliquely blamed, hand-wringing and incomprehension at her lifestyle choices, the usual complaints: “We gave her everything”; “Where did we go wrong?” Some theatrics, but not enough to cover their selfishness at being denied perfect kids.'

‘You're assuming a lot – and being very cynical,' Longbright pointed out. ‘They're probably feeling pretty guilty right now.'

‘Cynical,
moi
?' Bryant's blue eyes widened so far that he looked like a lemur with conjunctivitis. ‘How many times have you heard that story before? The parents don't even realize they're not being original. I'm sure they expressed mystification for your benefit. They know what happened to their daughter, they just choose not to think too hard about it.'