Working Girl

by Graham Ison

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A fast-moving, intricate and compelling contemporary mystery, starting with the brutal murder of a prostitute in London's West End, and uncovering a politician with feet of clay, a bent ex-policeman and a baggage handling scam at Heathrow airport. Brock and Poole might seem mismatched in age and temperament, but their verbal sparring hides a genuine mutual respect.

Release date: October 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 347

Sample

She’d been a good-looking girl. Once. But now the body, with its matted blonde hair – black at the roots – tangled and soaked in its own blood, had become
just another piece of evidence for me to work on.

The room looked like an abattoir. There was blood all over the place. It had puddled on the sheets around the victim’s head, and from there it had spilt on to the threadbare carpet. Which
is how the antiques dealer downstairs had noticed it. Dripping through the ceiling. One day I’ll come across a storybook murder: dead blonde spread decorously on the floor of the library up
at the manor house and not a sign of plasma, entrails or brains anywhere.

I put my hands in my pockets – always a good place for a detective to put them: it avoids leaving accidental fingerprints all over the place – and surveyed the scene of carnage,
wondering why the hell I did this job. What a way to make a living.

My brother Geoff is in the travel business – nine-to-five, Monday to Friday – arranging holidays for people who want to get away from it all, just like I did right now. They were
pleased to see Geoff, went to him willingly, made a friend of him, threw money at him to make their dreams come true. Me, I made people’s nightmares come true. The last person they ever
wanted to see was me. I was the bloke who hammered on the door in the dead of night to confirm their worst fears.

I’m sorry, sir, but your daughter – or for that matter your wife, mother, sister or girlfriend – has been the victim of an incident. An incident, for Christ’s sake?
She’s been bloody well murdered. No, sir, I’m afraid it’s bad news, really bad news, I mean.

Then comes the counselling. Counselling’s nothing new. Believe me, I know. It’s just that a whole load of two-two psychology graduates have turned it into an art form. You can be
counselled for everything now. Tell the police that some son-of-a-bitch has nicked the hub caps off your car, which you have to do or the insurance won’t pay up, and the next thing you get is
a call from some well-bred do-gooder with a plum in her mouth telling you she’s from Victim Support. Terrific.

I learned counselling as a very young, trainee CID officer. An old detective sergeant took me out to a burglary at a seventy-year-old widow’s terraced house in Victoria. I don’t know
what the bastard who broke in got – the woman didn’t look as though she’d had much to start with – but the callous sod had wrecked the place. The sergeant was marvellous.
Bald apart from tufts of grey hair sticking out at the sides of his head, and thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles. And no hope of promotion. Didn’t stop him from being caring though. Dusted
the place with fingerprint powder. Everywhere. Window frames, doors, tables, glasses, crockery. Told me to make the tearful old girl a cup of tea.

‘Are we going to catch this bastard, Sarge?’ I asked quietly.

‘No chance, son,’ he said.

‘Then why all the fingerprint gismo?’

‘It’ll make the old dear feel better, son. She’ll think that right now she’s the only person in the world the police care about.’ He’d produced a Sherlock
Holmes-type magnifying glass and made a full-length novel out of a short story.

But that’s counselling, real counselling. Not some silly bitch asking if you were ever abused as a child – thus making you a natural victim – as a result of which some
glue-sniffing infant has broken in to your house and purloined your video, your television, your computer, your camcorder and anything else he can lay his grubby little rubber-gloved hands on.

However, enough of this cynicism. Back to the present.

The body was on its back, naked, spread-eagled, wrists tied to the brass rails of the bedhead, ankles tied to the rail at the foot. Briefs stuffed in the mouth. A sex game that had gone wrong?
Or made to look like it? Unlikely, I thought: no lone prostitute would ever put herself at the mercy of a punter, no matter what he paid. But there again, strange things happen in Soho.

‘Her name’s Monica Purvis, sir,’ said a uniform.

‘How d’you know that?’

‘I nicked her last month for tomming. She was a regular at Marlborough Street.’

‘Well, that’s saved a bit of time.’ Marlborough Street was the magistrates court off Regent Street where most of the prostitutes who plied their trade in and around Soho
finished up in front of the stipendiary. If they weren’t quick enough to avoid the PC on the beat, that is. And with the state of the police today they had to be damned slow not to avoid him.
Unless they’d got so used to not seeing any coppers on the street that they didn’t look for them any more.

The pathologist arrived and put on his rimless spectacles. He peered at the human detritus on the bed. ‘Hmm!’ he mused thoughtfully, which seemed to sum up the situation.
‘Dead,’ he added.

‘Thanks,’ I said. I’d more or less come to that conclusion myself. What a bizarre sense of humour pathologists do have.

The technicians of murder arrived in their white boiler suits and latex gloves. Photographers, fingerprint experts and scenes-of-crime know-alls, humming and nodding like they knew all the
answers, and muttering about exhibit labels and continuity of evidence.

‘OK to remove the rope, guv?’ one of them asked.

I looked at the pathologist and he nodded.

I stood around, still with my hands in my pockets, jingling my loose change, while they got to it. The pathologist created a macabre little cameo out of putting on his own, superior-quality,
latex gloves and turning the cadaver. He always called a body ‘the cadaver’. Me, I just called it a body.

‘Well?’

‘Looks like a single stab wound to the jugular, Harry, which would certainly have been enough to cause death.’

Funny that, the way he and I came to the same conclusions, over and over again. ‘So?’ I raised an eyebrow.

‘If you’re going to ask me the time of death,’ said the pathologist, ‘you’ll have to wait for the post-mortem.’ He waved a rectal thermometer at me as if to
emphasise the point.

‘I know,’ I said. We had this same conversation at every murder scene. The pathologist was called Mortlock, Henry Mortlock. It seemed an eminently suitable name somehow and we only
ever spoke across a dead body, either at the scene or in the mortuary. I wondered what sort of dinner guest he’d make, what he’d talk about. Did he have a sense of humour, and was it as
morbid as mine? Probably was. We didn’t have a lot to laugh about in our respective trades.

But I was once a patient of a staid, apparently humourless, little Maltese doctor. It was only later that I learned he was a trad jazz enthusiast. He used to take a holiday every year in New
Orleans, stay up half the night every night, and get smashed out of his brains on rum. And when he got back he’d tell me that if I drank more than twenty-one units a week I’d kill
myself. Funny people, medics.

‘We’re about wrapped up here, guv.’ The senior SOCO – they call them scenes-of-crime examiners now, but to me they’re still scenes-of-crime
officers – ambled up, peeling off his gloves.

‘Find anything?’

‘Apart from the body?’ The SOCO grinned.

‘Yeah, apart from the body, smart-arse.’

‘What looks like the murder weapon.’ The SOCO handed me a plastic-shrouded sheath knife, the sort Boy Scouts used to carry before they were deemed to be offensive weapons.
‘Lifted a few dabs from round and about.’

‘Any money?’ I asked.

‘No. Unusual that for a tom.’

Well, if robbery had been the motive, the murderer didn’t have to kill the girl. Just the threat would have been enough; it had happened before, many times. No, if he’d taken the
money it was an afterthought.

‘There’s an imprint of a shoe in the blood on the left-hand side of the bed,’ continued the SOCO. ‘Looks hopeful. Let you know, guv. And there’s this.’ The
SOCO held out his hand. A solitary cufflink, now in a small plastic bag, complete with obligatory exhibit label, stared up at me. The cufflink said NO. ‘No discernible prints on it,’ he
added with a grim smile. ‘And this.’ ‘This’ proved to be a cigarette end and, as an exhibit, was entitled to its own little plastic bag and exhibit label. He scribbled a few
notes on his clipboard and wrinkled his brow. ‘DCI, er – ?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Harry Brock,’ I said. ‘Haven’t changed it since we last met. Can’t seem to find the time to fit it in.’

‘Yeah, right.’ The SOCO wrote it down laboriously. If he’d been using a pencil, he’d’ve licked it, but ballpoints make a mess on the tongue. ‘Esso One Two,
right?’ he asked, a surly expression on his face. It was shorthand for Specialist Operations Department One, Serious Crime Group Two – in other words SO1 (2) – which covers the
west part of the great metropolis.

‘OK to shift the body, guv?’ Detective Sergeant Dave Poole had worked with me on five murders now. He was a scruffy bastard. Tie slackened off, top button undone. Mix-and-match suit
– which is another way of saying his trousers, with creases everywhere but in the right place, didn’t match his jacket – and shoes that would have made Ken Clarke’s Hush
Puppies look the height of footwear elegance. He lived out Kennington way with a blonde virago called Madeleine. Fought like cat and dog, so I heard, and I think Dave got the worst of it. He turned
up one morning sporting a swollen eye with a half-closed lid. I told him to apply for a self-defence refresher course at Hendon. He didn’t laugh.

‘Sure, Dave. And do your bloody tie up.’

The white-suits beavered around, making a big thing of taking the late Monica Purvis out of the room.

‘So, what have we got, Dave?’ It was a rhetorical question. I didn’t know the answer and neither did he. Well, I knew some of it. A tom called Monica Purvis had been carved up
in a sleazy room in Talleyrand Street, off Shepherd Market in the heart of London’s West End. Outside – and unaware of the sordid little dramas being played out almost daily in their
midst – unsuspecting punters nightly flocked to the bright lights just waiting to be ripped off by the sharks in the shadows.

‘Live sex show, sir, just starting. Real girls.’ Real girls, eh? What other sort were there in a live sex show?

Housewives, shop-girls and female clerks huddled in dark caverns and stared open-mouthed and screamed and had orgasms as male strippers leaped about a microscopic stage like hairless
orang-utans, their panting audience hoping that these prancing poofs, who used gallons of baby oil a week, would reveal all, not knowing that they daren’t because it was largely padding.

Perhaps I’m a cynic.

‘What time d’you make it, Dave?’

‘One o’clock, guv.’

‘Great.’ This was one o’clock in the morning, you’ll understand. It is a fact of death that prostitutes are not generally found dead at one o’clock in the
afternoon.

‘House-to-house?’ Dave pulled out a battered packet of cigarettes and offered it to me.

‘I’ve packed it in,’ I said. ‘Remember?’ I’d started smoking at school and once got a thick ear from a master who’d caught me at it behind the bike
sheds. He told me that his brother had died from lung cancer. I’ve been trying to give up ever since.

‘So have I,’ said Dave gloomily and started his usual feverish search for his lighter. He found it and puffed smoke towards the ceiling.

‘What houses?’ I asked.

‘What houses?’ Dave looked blank, pulled his cigarette from his mouth and swore as it stuck to his lip.

‘You just said house-to-house.’

‘Yeah, well, isn’t that what we always do, guv?’

‘Not at one a.m. in an area that hasn’t got any houses, you prat. This is Talleyrand Street, for Christ’s sake. People don’t live here. We’ll start local
inquiries later this morning and work through the day. At least you will.’

‘Thanks, guv.’

‘And get someone going on this.’

Dave looked at the cufflink called NO before taking it gingerly. He held the transparent little packet between forefinger and thumb. ‘There are hundreds of these about, guv. See ’em
in every shop window, every shirt catalogue. There’s others, too. Like HOT and COLD, LEFT and RIGHT, MILD and BITTER, ABC and XYZ, and all that sort of stuff.’

‘Good. You’ve just proved you’re a cufflink expert.’

Dave didn’t look happy.

There wasn’t much in the room. But then Monica Purvis didn’t live here. Any more than I lived at my place of work, even though my estranged wife Helga thought I did. Before we became
estranged, that is. But Helga is very German and very logical. She just didn’t believe I was working the hours I was. And that was because her uncle had some cushy number in the German police
and was never late home for supper.

She hadn’t always been like that, though. We’d met at Westminster Hospital, sixteen years ago on St Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t as romantic as it sounds. A couple of
weeks previously, I’d got involved in a punch-up with some drunken louts outside a wine bar in Whitehall, and finished up having to go for a course of physiotherapy on my shoulder. And it was
Helga Büchner who did the business.

We’d hit it off straight away. She was a twenty-one-year-old, flaxen-haired beauty, with brief underwear clearly visible through her white coat, probably by design. That same night I took
her dancing – all right, it was only a police dance at Caxton Hall – and over the next few weeks we went out to dinner, often, almost bankrupting myself in the process. And we slept
together. I could not get enough of her and she couldn’t get enough of me. It was idyllic. I was hooked and we were married within two months.

It was only later, much later, that the sour comments of a woman sergeant at the nick turned out to be prophetic. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she told me, and for good
measure, added, ‘Change the name and not the letter, marry for worse and not for better.’ I was sufficiently arrogant to think that she was jealous.

However, that’s a whole lot of water under several bridges. Right now, I had a murder to worry about.

I cast my gaze around Monica’s ‘workshop’. A double bed, a threadbare carpet and a washbasin.

And a pine chest of drawers.

Only the top drawer had anything in it. Some colourful underwear, mainly red and black. A couple of pairs of fishnet hold-ups, a packet of birth-control pills, a box of condoms, a whip and two
pairs of handcuffs. So why did this maniac use rope or whatever to tie her up with? Because he came prepared and didn’t know about the handcuffs?

There was a black skirt – more of a pelmet really – on the only chair, together with a shiny, skimpy, red top that would have left the midriff bare. And yet another pair of fishnet
hold-ups. All tossed there hurriedly, by the look of them. But toms didn’t waste time. Punter in, quick bang-bang and out again, looking for the next john.

There was a pair of stilettos underneath the chair, spindly and so high they must have been agony to walk in. But then Monica didn’t do much walking. And sure as hell she wasn’t
going to do any more.

‘What’s the name of the bloke who called the police, Dave?’

Dave peeled back a page of his pocket-book. ‘Xenophontos, guv. Frixos Xenophontos. Keeps the shop downstairs.’

‘What’s he? Maltese, Iraqi, Arab? Or none of the above?’

‘Cypriot, sir.’ Dave smirked.

‘Let us pay a visit to this upstanding member of the community then.’

Dave glanced at his watch. ‘It’s nearly twenty past one, guv.’

‘So? We’re up. Members of the public cannot decline to assist the police in a murder investigation merely because of the lateness of the hour.’

We walked downstairs. There was a long pause before a small brown face peered nervously round the curtain covering the door of his shop and mouthed, ‘What you want?’

‘Police,’ I said loudly, and felt it politic to display my warrant card.

He rubbed the glass with the sleeve of his woolly cardigan and peered closely at the ornate document. ‘It’s late,’ he shouted.

‘I know.’

A rattling of keys and a drawing of bolts, five probably.

‘Mr Xenophontos?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You called the police earlier, I believe?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Mr Xenophontos, clad in cords with a grubby singlet peeping from beneath the cardigan, and red slippers with turned-up toes, moved reluctantly back into the shop.
Reluctantly because he purported to sell antiques, and antiques dealers are by nature reluctant to allow policemen to look around their establishments. His eyes followed mine. For months I’d
been looking for a coffee table. To buy, although God knows where I would put it; we’ve sort of lost interest in home-making, Helga and me, since the tragedy that caused the rift.

But Mr Xenophontos thought I was looking for stolen property.

I put his mind at rest. ‘I want to talk to you about what happened upstairs.’

‘Is it a murder?’

He knew damned well it was a murder. When hordes of police appear late at night, illuminating the area with their revolving blue lights, and carry out a body, it is not likely to go unwitnessed
by interested parties. Or nosey ones. Of which Mr Xenophontos was, with any luck, one.

‘Yes, it’s a murder. Tell me what you know about it.’

‘I am sitting here’ – Mr Xenophontos waved a hand at a small desk towards the rear of the shop – ‘doing my books. This self-assessment is giving me a
headache.’ He sighed. ‘And I’ve got my books open here, like now.’ He tugged at my sleeve, pulling me towards the desk and, coincidentally, distracting my attention from a
rather fine set of candlesticks that I determined would later interest the Arts and Antiques Squad at the Yard. ‘Suddenly I see blood dripping on to my books, there.’ He pointed
dramatically at a number of red splashes that defaced the pages of his large ledger.

‘The Inland Revenue’ll like that,’ said Dave. ‘They’re bloodsuckers.’

‘I sniffed it and I thought to myself, it’s blood,’ said Mr Xenophontos. Not only was he an antiques dealer, but a haematologist too.

‘So then you called the police, yes?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s what every good citizen should do.’

‘Absolutely. How well did you know Monica Purvis?’

‘Is that her name?’

Not too well apparently. ‘That’s her name.’

‘Hardly at all. I knew that she had a room up there, obviously.’ Mr Xenophontos looked around furtively and waved vaguely at the ceiling. ‘And I think I know what she did for a
living. But it’s not my property, you see. I rent. Like she does. Did.’

‘Did you see anyone coming in with her this evening?’

‘No, sir. No one. When my shop is shut, I pull the curtain over the window, like now. I don’t see out and no one sees in.’ Mr Xenophontos looked disappointed that he was unable
to assist in this matter.

‘Did you hear anyone coming in with her tonight? Or did you hear any noises from up there, like a fight?’

‘All the time I hear noises. Of the bed-springs. I complained many times to the landlord, but he just shrugs.’

‘But tonight, did you hear anything unusual? Apart from the bedsprings, I mean.’

Mr Xenophontos gave this great thought, at least I hoped that he did. ‘No, sir. Not nothing. Apart from the bedsprings.’

‘And how often did you hear the bed-springs, Mr Xenophontos?’

The small Cypriot grinned. ‘From about six o’clock, maybe every half an hour, sir. But only for four or five minutes at a time. And then she’s going out again and
coming.’

‘That reckons,’ said Dave.

The helpful uniform who had identified the body as that of Monica Purvis had spoken briefly to the police station via the plastic box on his shoulder and come up with an
address. According to the records at West End Central police station she had a room in Charleston Terrace, Paddington. I decided, in view of the time, that I would delay calling there until early
the following morning. That is to say, later today.

One day I will have the good fortune to chance upon a murder victim who resides in an elegant house in Chelsea. Who has a Rolls-Royce languishing outside in the street and whose immediate
next-of-kin is a willowy thirty-year-old blonde who simply adores policemen.

Alas, that day is yet to come.

Charleston Terrace, within sight, sound and smell of Paddington railway station, was. . .