'Not this particular year,' Elder said, indicating the photographs.
'No, not that year.' Then, 'Watch what you're bloody doin'!' as the bald man's opponent clipped the yellow while attempting to pot the green.
'The two girls,' Elder said. 'Do you know what happened to them?'
She took her time answering. 'I know there was a problem. It got sorted.'
'Sorted?'
'Yes. I don't know how. Didn't want to know.'
Elder leaned forward and tapped one of the photographs, showing the girl on the floor beside the bed. 'This girl, she's dead. Neck broken, that would be my guess.'
'If you say so.'
'And this girl?' He was pointing at a young, dark-haired girl cowering, terrified, in the far corner of the room. 'What happened to her?'
Lynette's good eye flickered between the photograph and Elder's face, and then back to the screen in time to see one of the reds slide gracefully into the top pocket, the cue ball skewing back to cover the black.
'I said, they got it sorted. Ben and George between them. Made it go away.'
'Between them?'
'Fucking yes! Have I got to repeat every fucking thing I say?'
The anger in her voice brought on a fit of coughing, raising spittle to her lips.
Elder waited until the coughing had subsided. 'How exactly did they make it go away? Pay her off? What?'
'I'm trying to watch this,' Lynette said. 'And you're doing sod all for my concentration.'
'Who were they? The two girls? What were their names?'
Lynette started to cough again. 'Call Anton for me, will you? I need a fuckin' drink.'
'You used to get him girls, Mallory. Young girls. You must know who they were.'
'I need a fuckin' drink!'
Anton showed his face around the door.
'Out,' Elder said.
A drink.'
Anton hesitated, uncertain.
'Get out,' Elder said.
He went.
'You've helped us so far,' Elder said. 'Help us with this.'
'I've done nothing.'
He touched her hand and she pulled it away, turning her face towards the wall. Only gradually did he realise that she was speaking, the same sounds over and over, low, barely audible, the same names. 'Judy. Jill. Judy and Jill. Judy and Jill.'
He took hold of her arm, gently, not hard, and felt skin slip loose across bone.
'Judy and Jill,' he repeated. 'That was their names.'
She looked into his face.
'They were twins.'
Long after Elder had gone, long after one frame of the snooker had finished and another begun, Lynette propelled her chair out of that room and into another, guilt and uncertainty jostling up against one another in her brain. She thought she might still have Mallory's number somewhere. Perhaps she owed him that much at least.
54
Repton saw the police vehicle approaching from the opposite direction and checked his speed, lifting his foot from the accelerator and easing it down on the brake. Being stopped for driving under the influence was just what he didn't need. Not that he'd drunk a lot, not by some standards.
Checking the mirror to make sure the police car had continued on its way, he grinned. Not by some fucking standards! Christ! Times he and George had laid one on! Practically paralytic at five in the morning and still they'd turned in at their desk three hours later, ready for a day's graft, a day's hard sodding work. Not like today's bunch of puerile wankers! Binge drinking! They didn't know what a fucking binge was, didn't know how to fucking drink!
Shit! He'd only gone too far, hadn't he?
Too far down the fucking road.
Catching sight of his reflection as he readied to make a U-turn, he laughed out loud. Metaphors, Maurice? Fucking metaphors. Who the fuck d'you think you are? Too far down the fucking road, all right, and no mistake.
He nudged into a space between a clapped-out Escort and a white van, front wheel striking the kerb and maybe shaving the van's paint with the rear end, but good enough all the same.
Twenty past fucking two.
There was a half-bottle of Scotch in the glove compartment and he unscrewed the top and took a quick belt.
His breath came back at him off the inside of the windscreen like something out of a dog's arse.
Poetic, Maurice, he thought as he got out of the car. Fucking poetic.
'Green Lanes Sauna and Massage' was picked out in electric light above the curtained glass. Except close to half the letters were missing, bulbs gone or bust, and you had to be a regular or one of those sad shits who did the Times fucking crossword in five fucking minutes to know what it said.
Reaching for the handle and not finding it, he wondered for the umpteenth time why, when the place had had a new front door fitted a year or so back, they'd hung it the wrong way round, the handle on the wrong fucking side.
Fuck!
When finally he'd pushed it open, it sprang back too fast and he almost collided with the facing wall. Hallway the size of a kazi for fucking dwarves.
Immediately to his right, a curtain of coloured beads hung down from the ceiling almost to the floor, and he parted this with both hands and stepped into the room. Rosie, as usual, was seated at a stool behind her desk, peroxide hair black at the roots, make-up half an inch or more thick sandblasted into place. Hundred and thirty years old, God bless her, and as ugly as the day she was born. Nothing else to do, twelve hours a day, other than fill in her puzzle books, watch her pocket-sized black-and-white TV, drink cup after cup of instant coffee and smoke endless cigarettes.
'Maurice, how's tricks?'
The times he'd told the stupid cow not to use his name.
There were three girls occupying the chairs opposite the desk, two he vaguely recognised, one that was new, not one of his favourites in sight. Busy, maybe. Each of the girls in button-through white overalls and bare legs, two of them flicking lazily through magazines. Now or Hello! or some such bollocks, scarcely bothering to glance up when he came in.
The third girl, the one he didn't recognise, was leaning back, legs pulled up, bottom two buttons of her overall undone, one high-heeled shoe on the floor, the other dangling from her toes. Nails painted alternately red and blue.
'This all there is, Rosie?' His voice sounded slightly blurred to him, but who was going to give a shit? No one there.
'Veronica's upstairs.'
'That fat cow!'
'That's Edie over there. She's new.'
Edie, Repton thought, what kind of a name was that? Not that they used their real names anyway, most of them. He'd always reckoned Rosie picked them out of a hat.
'Knows what she's about, does she?'
Repton stared at the girl as he spoke and she looked back at him, holding his gaze, mouth opening in a smile. New, right enough, he thought, out to make an impression.
'Edie's from Slovenia,' Rosie said.
Heaven fucking help us, Repton thought.
He followed her up the stairs, a nice enough arse on her, the last door along the corridor standing ajar and in they went.
Repton removed his jacket as Edie closed the door behind them, reaching out to take it from him and laying it folded across the foot of the bed. Repton waving his hands and saying, 'Not like that. Not like that. Put it on a fucking hanger, for fuck's sake, you soft Slovenian cow. No offence.'
The girl taking a thin metal hanger from inside the rickety MDF wardrobe and fitting Repton's suit jacket on it, even smoothing down the shoulders – he liked to see that – before hanging it from the double hook behind the door.
It was going to be okay, Repton thought, as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and spread it over the pillow – well, you never knew – and lay down with Edie standing alongside him and bending to unbuckle his belt, slip it through the loops, and then attend to the buttons on his fly. Buttons, that was what he'd always insisted on, none of your fucking zips. Disaster waiting to fucking happen.