‘We met in club, in Soho, few weeks ago. Oh, sorry, you know me as — ’
‘Ivana,’ Tom said aloud. The stripper he had interviewed when he’d been looking for Nick Roberts. Tom strained to hear the woman’s voice as there was music playing in the background; perhaps she was calling from the club where she danced.
‘I suppose you heard about Ebony — you are policeman, after all — but I wanted to talk to you about the man who used to come and see her dance all the time. Other police are not interested in talking to him, but I not so sure. Call me.’
Ivana — or Olga — left a mobile phone number and that was the end of his messages. Tom replayed the message and wrote down Olga’s details.
He sat on a stool at the stainless-steel topped breakfast bar and tapped his front teeth with the end of the pen as he thought. When he and Shuttleworth had discussed it on his return to England, they had assumed Nick had been set up by the black stripper, Ebony, and that it was she who had lured him into the terrorists’ clutches. Subsequent inquiries had showed that she never returned to work or her flat. She had simply disappeared.
Tom knew from Carla of Nick’s predilections for African women. Carla had presumably also passed this on to her comrades and they had used Ebony as bait to capture Nick.
Why, he wondered, was a black South African table dancer in league with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists? There hardly seemed a less likely fit, and the same went for the promiscuous Carla. Money would surely have been a more likely motivator for both women.
Tom tore off the page with Olga’s number and started making notes on a fresh sheet. He wrote Money at the top, then underlined it. Next he wrote the following:
Kidnap/ransom.
Why Bernard?
Why the Iraq angle?
A cover?
It didn’t make sense to him, and he scored a line through all of the points. He had talked himself out of the idea that Greeves had been abducted for money, though he was still unsure about the women’s roles.
He played Olga’s message back once more. ‘ I suppose you heard about Ebony.’
He hadn’t heard a thing about the dancer. What did she mean by that? Tom walked back upstairs, his stomach protesting all the way at its lack of food and coffee, and grabbed his cell phone off the bedside table. As he walked down again, he scrolled through the saved numbers until he came to the one he was looking for.
‘Morris,’ the voice on the other end of the phone said.
‘Dan, it’s Tom Furey. All right, mate?’ Detective Constable Dan Morris was another protection officer. He’d been one of the officers who was following up leads on Nick’s disappearance when Tom had left for Africa.
‘Oh, Tom. Hi. Hang on, I’m driving. Let me pull over.’
Tom waited, taking his seat at the breakfast bar again. He flipped the pad over to a new page and kept the pen in his free hand.
‘Sorry, mate. How’s life, anyway? Keeping your chin up?’
‘Just about. It’s no barrel of laughs, Dan, but I’ll know more after the inquiry.’
‘Well, you know all the lads are on your side.’
It was a statement rather than a question, but Tom thought it sounded like Morris was just going through the motions. ‘Dan, are you still following up this end on what happened to Nick?’
‘Um, you know Shuttleworth told everyone that you were no longer working the case or any part of it?’
‘Yeah. Look, this might help you, Dan. Don’t mess me about and I won’t mess you about.’
‘All right. Yeah, we’re trying to find out more of what he was up to, but, I’ll tell you the truth, all we’re getting is dead ends.’
‘You mean literally or figuratively,’ Tom said, writing the word dead on the notepad.
‘Do what?’
Dan was a plodder. A good copper, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. ‘You mean dead as in bodies?’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘Maybe,’ Morris said.
‘The strip club you and Chris visited — remember it?’
‘How could I forget it? Wish every job was like that one.’
Tom thought the laugh was forced. He knew he was getting close.
‘She’s dead. The stripper I told Shuttleworth about. Ebony, the black girl Nick had been seen talking to a couple of times. The one who did a bunk from work.’
‘Tom, that information hasn’t been reported to the media. In fact, it’s subject to a D-notice. How did you know about it? If Shuttleworth finds out you’ve been poking your nose into the Minx club he’ll have your guts for garters.’
Tom wrote Ebony’s name on the piece of paper, followed by D-notice?
‘Tom? You still there?’
‘Got to go, Dan. Thanks, mate.’
‘Thanks? What for? You said you had something that might help us.’
‘Bad line. You’re dropping out, Dan.’ Tom pressed the end button.
He shuffled the pieces of paper in front of him and dialled Olga Kamorov’s cell phone number. As it rang he checked his watch. He wondered if she would be sleeping in, if she’d been working late at Club Minx the previous evening. Too bad if she was.
When she answered, it was in a whisper. ‘Hang on,’ she urged him.
Tom tapped the pen on the benchtop while he waited. ‘Sorry, I was in class.’
‘Class?’
‘I am student.’
Student as well as stripper. She wouldn’t be the first to pay for her studies by working in the sex industry. ‘Olga, we need to talk about Ebony’s death.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Other policemen don’t want anyone to talk about it. They tell all girls at club no one is to talk to friends or journalists about Ebony. But that is problem, and I try to tell them that but they don’t listen to me.’
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that last rambling remark, and was about to tell her to slow down and explain when she cut him off before he had a chance.
‘I must get back inside for lecture. I meet you at lunchtime, yes? One o’clock?’
She was setting the ground rules and he didn’t like being in that position, but he had little option save to play along. Besides, he had nothing else in his diary for the day. ‘Okay, where?’
‘There is a Burger King in Euston Road, opposite St Pancras, near Kings Cross. You know it?’
‘I’ll find it.’ He hung up and walked over to the refrigerator. Inside was a single egg in a soggy carton and a half-pack of bacon. He put the frying pan on the gas hob and dropped in some oil. His stomach rumbled, so he put all the bacon in and cracked the egg. In the pantry was half a loaf of stale bread. He selected the least mouldy piece and chucked the rest in the bin, along with an assortment of pizza boxes and takeaway curry containers from the benchtop.
He continued to clean up while breakfast sizzled mouth-wateringly nearby. Working back from one o’clock he mentally planned his day. It would take him the best part of an hour to eat and get clean and dressed. He’d booked the Jag in for a service on his first day of suspension. He’d discounted the idea of going away anywhere and figured — correctly, so far — he would spend most of his time either drunk in a pub or drunk at home. He hadn’t been wrong until now. He would have to take the tube to meet Olga.
He scooped the bacon and egg from the frypan, added another half-inch of oil and dropped in the slice of bread. He devoured the lot in seconds. Cooked breakfasts always seemed like a lot of effort for little return. He hoped that wasn’t an omen for the rest of the day.
Upstairs he showered and scraped three days’ worth of growth from his face, put on his charcoal-grey suit pants, black brogues and socks, and took a clean white shirt downstairs to the laundry to iron. Olga wouldn’t know he was suspended — unless, of course, she had read a newspaper in the last week. Tom figured that if she had, she wouldn’t have called him. He mightn’t be on duty officially, but he wanted her to think he was. He wondered if the dancer would give him anything that might help Sannie’s investigations back in Africa. He doubted it, but perhaps the South African police could run a check on Precious Mary Tambo.