Another long pause, then Zack said, ‘SW7 or SW3.’
‘Kensington and Chelsea,’ Kathy said. ‘Can you get a closer fix?’
‘Give us a moment.’
‘Okay.’ Kathy looked up. ‘Back to work everyone. Bren, Mickey, Pip, Jenny, gather round. Let’s see what we’ve got.’
They sat around a table and listened several times to the recording of the telephone conversation, each making notes. Then Kathy said, ‘What do you think, Jenny? What can you tell us about him?’
‘Hm, nine words, that’s all. Not much to go on.’
‘Best guess.’
‘Well, on the face of it it’s Standard English RP-Received Pronunciation. Probably what we’d call Conservative RP, associated with older speakers of certain backgrounds, such as Home Counties, upper middle class. But it sounded to me like he wasn’t using his usual voice. Did you get that impression? Like he was playing the part of a roguish Don Juan, for her benefit, as if this was a game they’d played before.’
‘Yes.’ Kathy nodded. ‘She seemed to respond in the same way once she recognised him. But you think he’s a native English speaker?’
‘Rather than Russian, you mean? The trouble is, RP is what’s usually taught to people learning British English, and there’s so little to go on with accent and register. That phrase “if you please” sounds to me like a native speaker. But he may just be a good mimic.’
Zack at his screens called back over his shoulder. ‘Within a hundred yards of South Kensington tube station.’
‘Can you track it?’
‘Sorry. He’s switched it off.’
‘Damn.’ Kathy looked at Bren, who was tapping his pen impatiently on the table. ‘What do you think?’
‘What does “four” mean?’ he said. ‘Is he asking for four girls? Or is that code for the kind of service he wants? Or is the meet at four o’clock?’ He checked his watch.
Kathy looked over to Zack. ‘Check Gloria’s website, Zack. Does she advertise a Chloe?’
Bren shook his head in frustration. ‘I thought they’d confirm the meeting place, at least. They gave nothing away. It’s as if he knew the line was tapped.’
‘Yeah, he’s careful, isn’t he?’ Mickey said. ‘A phone he uses only to talk to Gloria, and then says as little as possible in a made-up voice.’
‘Yes, there’s a Chloe,’ Zack said, and they went over to look at the images on his screen of a pretty, wide-eyed blonde girl. ‘Looks young, doesn’t she?’
‘Let’s hope we’ve heard of her,’ Kathy said, and ordered everyone available to drop what they were doing and join in a search of the PNC database.
It was almost three thirty p.m. when they came upon Abigail Courtney Tierney, age twenty, charged three years before with four counts of shoplifting from stores in Saffron Walden. The woman in the police photograph lacked the make-up and hair styling of Chloe on Gloria’s website, but the similarities were nevertheless striking. A check of her driver’s licence and phone records gave an address in a modern waterfront apartment block, just across the Thames from Chelsea, in Battersea.
They took two unmarked cars, arriving at the riverside development at three minutes to four. Kathy went to the entrance door and spoke on the intercom to a resident caretaker, who let her into the lobby, a place of glass and marble that might have served as an upmarket art gallery.
‘We’ve had reports of a serial rapist operating in the area,’ Kathy said. ‘Targeting young women living alone. We’re checking possible people at risk.’
He took her into his office and gave her the names of three single women residents of the block, one of whom was a Ms Abi Tierney.
‘Do you know if any of them are at home at the moment?’ Kathy asked.
A check of the security system showed that the alarms in two of the apartments were activated, whereas that in Ms Tierney’s apartment was switched off.
‘I saw her come in half an hour ago,’ the caretaker said.
‘Alone?’
‘That’s right. Lovely young lady. She’s a model. You want to speak to her?’
‘No, we don’t want to cause panic. This may be nothing. Do any of these women bring men back here, do you know?’
‘Well, I don’t spy on them, but no, not really. Even Ms Tierney, attractive as she is, doesn’t have a boyfriend to my knowledge.’
‘Right. I noticed you’ve got a camera at the front door. I’d like to check your recordings if that’s okay. Say the last couple of weeks?’
‘Not a problem.’
Kathy returned to the car with the disks and they settled down to wait. By five p.m. the only people to enter or leave the building were a young woman with two small children.
When they got back to Queen Anne’s Gate they ran the CCTV images for the previous Monday afternoon. Once again, Abi Tierney had returned to the block mid-afternoon and not left again until seven that evening. But on the following day she had done the opposite, leaving her apartment at three thirty and returning at eight.
‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Kathy said. ‘If he wants a particular girl, it would be a bit late to phone up that same afternoon and hope she’d be free. Maybe he phones the day before the meeting. We’d better go through all of this footage and get a timetable of her movements last week. The appointment could be for four o’clock two days later, or three.’
‘If that’s what “four” means,’ Bren grumbled. ‘And if Abi Tierney is Chloe.’
‘Come on, Bren,’ Kathy urged. ‘Abi didn’t get herself a luxury Thames-side apartment by shoplifting.’
After an hour they had established that, as far as they could tell from the CCTV records, Abi could have kept a four p.m. appointment elsewhere on any day of the previous week apart from the Monday.
‘Then we put a tail on her,’ Kathy said, ‘and identify all of her clients until we find something.’
TWENTY
T he Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God and All Saints looked to Kathy more Italian than Russian. With its basilican front flanked by a stone campanile and not an onion dome in sight, it looked like a Tuscan hill town church that had inexplicably found itself dropped at the end of a London cul-de-sac beside a small park. When she arrived, the end of the street was crowded with mourners in dark suits and darker glasses, conferring together with that sombre camaraderie that funerals inspire. She looked around and caught sight of one of her team standing discreetly to one side, taking photographs of them all.
Inside, the atmosphere was more as Kathy had expected, the dark interior glittering with the light of candles, perfumed by clouds of incense and reverberating with the deep mournful sound of a male choir. There were no seats, the mourners standing packed together in the nave, overlooked on three sides by a balcony. Kathy took an order of service sheet, printed in English and Russian, and found the stairs to the upper level from which she could get a view across the congregation towards the east end, where three bearded priests, wearing heavy silver and gold robes, stood in front of an altar and a panelled screen hung with icons. They faced Mikhail Moszynski’s coffin, around which his family clustered.
The harmonies of the choir subsided into an expectant silence, broken at last by the voice of one of the priests. ‘Blessed is our God,’ he chanted, ‘now and forever and to the ages of ages.’ There was a murmur from some of the crowd, and the priest continued, alternating between English and Russian.
It was an impressive service, Kathy thought, with its sense of ancient ritual, and most of all the spine-shivering voices of the choir, unaccompanied by any instrument, whose deep chords throbbed through the whole building and every body inside it. There was only one discordant moment, when the priest gestured to the family and both Mikhail’s mother and wife got to their feet. Marta tottered and Shaka made to take hold of her arm, but the old woman shook her off with a hoarse cry, clearly audible in the silent cathedral, that sounded very like a curse.
Afterwards, blinking outside in the sunlight, Kathy watched the people queuing to pay their respects to the bereaved family, all except Shaka, who was somewhere among a mob of photographers heading towards a limo. As Kathy wove her way through the crowd her ears were straining for voices, hoping to catch something.