“No, I’ve never seen her before. I did let the basement room that summer, I admit it. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He fixed Tennison with his rheumy eyes. “The big darkie complained about everything I did. He just wanted me out.”
“Why did you let the room, David? Did you know the girl already?”
“No, I’d never seen her before. It seemed such a big house for just me and I needed the money. I put a card in the newsagent’s window.”
“What was her name?” Muddyman asked, leaning against the back of the sofa.
“Tracey? Sharon? I don’t remember,” Harvey said wearily.
“How long did she stay?” Tennison asked.
“Couple of months.”
“What months?”
“June, July…”
“Not August?”
“No, she’d gone by then.”
“Did you know that she was a prostitute?” Muddyman said, his tone nowhere near as gentle as Tennison’s.
“No.”
“Could she have been friends with that girl?” Tennison indicated the photographs.
“It’s possible.”
“Could she have had a set of keys to the flat?”
Harvey’s narrow shoulders twitched. “Possible I suppose…”
“Could she and some friends have used the flat that Sunday you were at your sister’s?” Tennison pressed him.
“How should I know?” His eyes were upon her, but unfocused, as if he couldn’t quite make her out. “As you say, I wasn’t there…”
His shoulders started heaving as he went into a coughing fit. Muddyman hesitated when Tennison pointed to the kitchen, but then went off and came back with a glass of water, which Harvey gulped down with four more assorted pills.
“Just one last thing, David.” Tennison smiled at him encouragingly. “Could we have a photograph of you, please?”
Harvey wiped his mouth. Beads of water clung to the ragged fringes of his mustache. “Why?”
“It’ll help us eliminate you from our inquiries.”
“Will I get it back?”
“Of course.” Tennison watched him on his snail’s progress to the glass-fronted bureau. “One from the mid-eighties if you’ve got it.”
Harvey took a tattered, red album from the drawer and leafed through it. Tennison went over to stand beside him. She picked up one of the framed photographs, a moody sunset over a gray, restless ocean, which to her inexpert eye looked to be of a professional quality.
“Are you the photographer?” Muddyman asked, taking an interest.
“No. My nephew Jason.”
“They’re very good,” Tennison said, putting it back.
“Here.” Harvey gave her a snapshot of himself, a darker-haired, stronger-looking Harvey with a brown mustache. “Younger and fitter, eh?” he said with a wan smile.
“Thank you. I’ll get this copied and get it back to you as soon as possible.” She put it in her briefcase along with her notebook and snapped the catches.
They went through into the tiny hallway. Harvey leaned on the jamb of the living room door, resting. Tennison reached out to release the Yale lock when she noticed the front door key hanging down from the mailbox on a piece of string. “I’d remove that if I were you, David. Not very safe.”
“It’s so someone can get in if I collapse.” Harvey stated it matter-of-factly; no self-pitying appeal for sympathy.
Tennison gave him a look over her shoulder as she went out. “Even so.”
As they were going down the stairs, Muddyman said mockingly, “You’d make a wonderful Crime Prevention Officer.”
“Oh yeah?” Tennison drawled, punching him.
DS Oswalde lingered by the frozen food cabinets, not even bothering to put up a thin pretense that he was wondering what to buy. The supermarket wasn’t all that busy at this late hour, and Oswalde had an uninterrupted view along the aisles of Tony Allen, neat and dapper in his short dark-blue coat and polka-dotted bow tie, the plastic badge on his left lapel engraved in black letters: “A. ALLEN. TRAINEE MANAGER.”
Tony was aware of the scrutiny. Oswalde had made sure of that. The more rattled the young man became, the better he liked it. Esme Allen had called it an asthma attack. A load of old baloney. Tony had been scared shitless the minute he laid eyes on Nadine’s clay head. He’d recognized her instantly, of that Oswalde hadn’t the slightest doubt.
Oswalde stalked him around the store for another ten minutes, watching him openly, noting with satisfaction the jerky body language, the fumbling with the clipboard when he tried to make an entry. At last, deciding that Tony had stewed long enough, Oswalde moved in. He cornered him next to cooked meats and stuck the description, the one Vernon Allen had given of the girl living in the basement, under his nose.
“Your father remembers her,” Oswalde said, looking down on Tony, a good eight or nine inches shorter. “Bleached blonde, slim, about five-foot-two…”
“Well, I don’t.” Tony dodged around him and strode off.
“Do you like reggae, Tony?” Oswalde asked, matching stride for stride.
“What?”
“I do. Reggae, soul, jazz. Do you like jazz?”
Tony whirled around. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just talkin’, man.” Oswalde shrugged, all sweetness and light.
“Well don’t, just leave me alone…”
“All right, Tony,” Oswalde said with a glimmer of a smile, “don’t jump the rails.”
Tony started off, turned back, his face twitching. “I don’t remember any girl,” he said, grinding it between his teeth.
Oswalde stood watching him stump off. Nearly done, but not quite. Tony Allen needed to stew just a little while longer.
“This’ll do,” Tennison said, and Muddyman pulled over at the corner of Glasshouse Street and Brewer Street. She tucked her briefcase under her arm and opened the door. “I’ll get a cab home.”
Muddyman raised his hand. “ ’Night, Guv. Hope you get something.”
Tennison strolled along through Soho, past the strip joints with their garish neon signs and life-size color photographs of semi-naked women contorting themselves to entice the johns downstairs. Separating the strip clubs were shadowy booths peddling racks of soft porn, and at the back, behind a curtain of fluttering plastic streamers, the hard Swedish and German stuff wrapped in cellophane. There was plenty of business about, and groups of working girls in miniskirts and fishnet stockings, clustered around the concrete lampposts, their faces anemic in the harsh sodium glare, black slashes for mouths.
Tennison glanced across the street. A tall girl with a mass of dark hair piled on top of her head, wearing a lime-green shortie plastic raincoat, registered who it was, and gave a nod. Tennison strolled on. She stopped in a darkened doorway, waiting for Rachel, and hadn’t been there more than a few seconds when a man approached and leaned towards her. She smelled whisky on his breath.
“Oh, I wouldn’t if I were you,” Tennison said, and the man moved on, bewildered. A minute later Rachel appeared, and Tennison gave her a smile. “You look like you could use something to eat, darling.”
In the cafe on the corner they sat at a plastic-topped table while Rachel did justice to a hot salt beef sandwich and Tennison sipped an espresso.
“If he’s a pimp, I’ve never seen him before,” Rachel said, handing back the snapshot of David Harvey. She took another bite of her sandwich. “I’ll ask around about the bleached blonde, but it’s not much to go on.”
“You’re telling me,” Tennison said with feeling.
Rachel chewed while she had another think. “Maybe she was one of those that tried it for five minutes and decided it was no kind of life. One of the sensible ones,” she said, the corner of her mouth curling up in a bleak, sardonic smile. “I suppose someone might remember, since most of the girls who worked that area are black.”