‘No,’ she said flatly. Her voice and her eyes were dead.
‘All right, what was the nickname of the man you were with?’
‘Otter. He was all right. I liked him. He was keen on Tyler, too – he liked the very skinny, young ones. Liked ’em flat-chested. That was why it was funny when—’ She stopped.
‘Yes?’ Slider encouraged.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, looking away.
He waited. But she didn’t go on. So he primed her. ‘You were with Otter. Who was Tyler with?’
She seemed to hesitate. ‘Cheetah,’ she said at last, and stopped again.
‘Go on,’ he prompted. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, there was this ruckus, like, outside in the corridor. Otter got up and went to look, and I heard someone say Tyler’s name, so I went as well. The door of the other room was open and Cheetah was standing there stark naked, saying, “She’s dead.” I tried to run across to her, but Golden Eagle come up, and he stopped me. Told me and Otter to go back in the room and shut the door.’
‘And did you?’
‘Well, we did at first. But Otter, he was, like, terribly upset, ’cos he liked Tyler a lot, like I said. So he said, “Go and open the door a crack and see if you can see anything.” So I did.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘Well, I see Golden Eagle come back with Cobra, and Cobra went in the room and shut the door. And then he see me watching, and came over and threw the door open and told Otter and me to get some clothes on and go up on the terrace. So we had to. Everyone went up there, and we had to wait there until Golden Eagle said. Most of ’em didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t dare say anything, and Otter, he was too upset to talk. So we just stayed schtum, until Golden Eagle come up and said we could carry on. Otter didn’t want to go back down, so I was hanging around, wondering what to do, and Golden Eagle comes over to me and says Tyler’d had a heart attack, and it sometimes happened when people took too much coke, and he said it was all being taken care of, and not to talk about it to anyone.’ She took a deep, slightly shuddering breath. ‘And that’s the last time she was ever mentioned.’
‘The care home reported her missing,’ Hart said. ‘Didn’t you see the fuss in the papers?’
‘I don’t read the papers,’ she said simply.
‘Well, it was on the telly as well.’
‘I never watch that stuff, the news and that. Got better things to do.’
‘So you never wondered what happened to her afterwards?’
‘She was dead, that was it. What else could happen to her?’ Shannon said harshly. ‘Anyway, I was told not to talk about it.’
‘But you did talk to someone. You told Jessica.’
Shannon looked uncomfortable. ‘She was my mate,’ she said at last.
‘Why did you tell her?’ Slider asked.
She sighed. ‘She was scared. She thought maybe someone had done Tyler in. She didn’t want to come any more. I told her it was just an accident, from too much charlie, and there was nothing to worry about. But she was still scared. I s’pose she thought the same would happen to her. So she said she was giving it up, and I said as long as she never told anyone anything about the parties or anything, she’d be all right. So I told Golden Eagle, and he said the same, it’d be all right if she didn’t talk.’
‘Golden Eagle,’ said Slider. ‘He’s the boss, is he? The one who runs it all?’
‘Well, I think it’s his house, and he, like, runs the parties, but I don’t think he’s the boss.’
Slider and Hart exchanged a quick look. So there was a Moriarty behind it all, was there?
‘Do you know who Golden Eagle is?’ Slider asked.
‘I told you, we never knew their names.’
‘But you might know anyway. You might have recognized him.’
‘Well, I didn’t. I don’t know him,’ she said in that same flat, dead tone that denial seemed to require.
‘We’re trying to help you, babes,’ Hart said. ‘We can’t help you if you won’t be straight with us.’
Shannon set her jaw and stared at the wall.
Slider said easily, ‘How do you know that Golden Eagle isn’t the boss? If it’s his house …’
‘’Cos I’ve heard him asking Cheetah stuff sometimes, like asking for instructions, or if something’s all right. And I’ve seen Cheetah giving out to him – like, telling him off.’
‘So you think Cheetah’s the big boss?’
She looked alarmed. ‘I never said that.’
‘Yes, you did, darlin’,’ said Hart. ‘I just heard you.’
Shannon tried looking pathetic. ‘My mouth’s ever so dry. Can I have a drink of something?’
She had forgotten the water bottle in her hand. But Slider felt they both needed a break – the rage he was holding back was giving him a headache. And they were going to have to talk about Kaylee next, and that would not be easy.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ she said. And then: ‘Please.’
He was touched by the word. He nodded to Hart, who went to ring for it. Shannon got up from the sofa, stretched her skinny limbs, and walked over to look at one of the deliberately bland prints on the wall.
Then she turned abruptly and looked at Slider with less attitude than he had yet seen. She seemed very young to him. He thought of his own daughter, Emma, just of an age to be interesting to the likes of Peloponnos, and who would have loved to get dressed up like a hooker and go clubbing, if her mother and stepfather had not been so boringly old-fashioned and strict. A gripe of sheer terror seized his bowels at the thought of what could happen to her, if vigilance slipped for an instant. How had they, the nation, got to this point? What had gone wrong? Who was to blame? The culture, the zeitgeist, the internet, the entertainments industry? How did it come about that the only activity teens embraced with enthusiasm was meaningless sex? Whatever happened to stamp collecting?
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Shannon asked bluntly.
He knew what she was asking: Am I in trouble with the law? His mind ran rapidly over the things she had done that were infractions: procurement, the drugs, not reporting illegal activities – and whatever was to come with Kaylee, whatever her part in that had been.
But he said, ‘Nothing. You’re the victim here. We’re going to look after you.’
She held his gaze steadily for a moment, as if testing him; and then her eyes dropped, and she sighed. ‘Yeah, but you can’t, can you. Once I go out of here. They’ll know I grassed, and they’ll come after me. You can’t be with me every minute, can you?’
‘We’ll take care of you,’ he said. ‘I won’t let them get you.’
‘You promise?’
It was a child’s question, a little child’s. It hurt him to answer, ‘I promise.’
And it hurt him more to see that she knew exactly how much a grown-up’s promise was worth.
EIGHTEEN
Slouching Towards Kensington
‘So the whole thing was an under-age sex ring?’ Atherton mused. ‘I suppose they paid good money for it. If Georgie’s list of “donors” are the customers, they’re all big men, well-off. They could afford to pay for their pleasures.’
Slider made a face at the word ‘pleasures’. ‘See what you can find out about Shand Account Cabs,’ he said. ‘They could be the weak link.’
‘That’s the company whose number appeared in Georgie’s phone records,’ said Atherton.
‘It looks as though they were recruiting girls, as well as driving them to the house. If we can get them on procurement, they may give up the organisation to save themselves,’ Slider said.
Atherton read between the lines. ‘We need a more credible witness than Shannon?’
‘It couldn’t hurt,’ Slider admitted gloomily. ‘Is Mr Porson still here?’
‘No, he went home hours ago.’
‘Better give him a ring, bring him up-to-date,’ Slider
said. ‘He might want to come back in.’
It was that serious.
Hart had taken Shannon to the loo, and ordered her coffee and sandwiches.
Slider returned, and they resumed. ‘So tell me what happened to Kaylee that night.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said quickly. ‘I never saw nothing. I wasn’t on the roof.’
‘How do you know it happened on the roof?’ Slider asked.
She looked from him to Hart and back, as if testing how far she had betrayed herself. ‘You dunno what happened to her?’
‘She died as a result of a fall from a height,’ Slider said.
Shannon seemed relieved. ‘Yeah. She fell. That’s what they said. She was drunk and fooling around, and she fell over the … what you call that wall?’
‘Parapet?’
‘Yeah, like that.’ She folded her hands in her lap and stared at them.
Slider watched her, plotting his way in. ‘So, that Saturday – Otter rang her and asked her to come to the party. Was that the usual way?’
‘No,’ she said quickly, looking up. ‘Mostly they ask you when you’re there for the next time. Sometimes they’d ring me, if it was someone I’d brought in, like Kaylee or Tyler. I s’pose the drivers’d fix the ones they brought in.’
Limiting communications, Slider thought. They were cautious – but not cautious enough. Anxious to protect themselves, but believing they were invulnerable.
‘So Otter ringing Kaylee was unusual?’
‘That never happened. You weren’t supposed to have anything to do with them outside the parties. So when Kaylee told me, I said there’s something screwy about that. But she wanted to go. She was saving for the deposit on a flat and she needed a bit more. Anyway, she said she trusted Otter. She rang him back to ask if he was going, and he said he’d be there. But he wasn’t,’ she said bitterly. ‘I think it was a plot.’
‘A plot?’
‘To get her there. They knew she’d go if he asked her ’cos she’d been going a lot with him recently. Which was weird because she wasn’t his type. He liked ’em flat and boyish, and she was, like, a big girl. But he’d been picking her ever since—’
‘Since what?’
She bit her lip. ‘Since Tyler died.’
‘You think it had something to do with that?’
‘Well, they was both upset, her and Otter. But – well, I think it was something else as well.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, frustrated, and a bit tearful. ‘Her and Otter were always talking together, like, privately. And I was scared for her. She’d been asking a lot of questions, and I’d seen them looking at her, like, suspicious. You weren’t supposed to ask questions.’
‘What sort of questions was she asking?’
‘Like, trying to find out who the blokes were. Their real names. I told her to knock it off. I said she was drawing attention to herself. And I think she’d got a bit scared too, because she said she was giving it up, she wasn’t going to go any more. So I said, good thing too. So I told Golden Eagle she was leaving, and he said that was cool. But then she rung me to say Otter had rung her and asked her to come. He said someone was asking for her special.’
‘Who?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘How did he get her number?’
‘I dunno. Maybe she give it him. We weren’t supposed to do that. Like I said, we weren’t supposed to have anything to do with them except at the parties. I told her not to go, but she said it’d be OK, she trusted Otter. She said it’d be the last time.’ She shrugged her shoulders, acknowledging the irony.
‘She was picked up by a car – a black SUV,’ Slider said. She nodded. ‘You didn’t go with her.’
‘I had to go and get a new girl I was bringing in, Savannah. We got picked up by a Shand cab. Generally they pick you up outside a tube station. But sometimes you got the car.’
‘Whose car is it?’ Slider asked casually.
‘I dunno,’ she said indifferently.
‘So what happened when you got to the party? Did you see Kaylee?’
‘Yeah. Everybody was up on the roof, like, partying, and she was well away already. I said to her, you going for it? And she said it was her last time, she might as well make it a good one. She was drinking vodka an’ cranberry, and she’d had a coupla lines already. I said, where’s Otter, and she said he’d not turned up yet, and she weren’t waiting for him. She was going with the richest bloke she could find, she said. Sometimes they give you a tip,’ she explained.
‘Yes, I know. And who did she go with?’ He asked it casually, almost holding his breath.
But she said, ‘I dunno. I had to, like, sort out Savannah, and then I went downstairs with a bloke. She was still on the roof and I never see her again.’
The last part was said in a flat, empty tone. It could have been grief or shock; but from the tightness of her face muscles, Slider took it for a lie.
He tried a switch-hit. ‘You know Otter killed himself?’ he asked after a pause. She barely nodded, not meeting his eye. ‘Why do you think that was?’
‘How should I know?’ she said resentfully. ‘I didn’t know the bloke.’
‘Remorse?’ She looked blank. ‘He was sorry because Kaylee was dead,’ he translated. She stared at him, ungiving. ‘He felt guilty, couldn’t live with it, so he killed himself.’
‘He wasn’t even there,’ she said.
‘But he was the one who made sure she went to the party. And she died. So he felt responsible for her death.’
‘Otter never did nothing to her. She liked him. She said a lot of the time she went downstairs with him, they just sat talking. It wasn’t him killed her.’
‘So she was killed, was she? It wasn’t an accident.’
She went rigid, realising what she’d said. She looked at him, scared. ‘I never—’ She licked her dry lips.
Now he knew. His heart contracted with pity. ‘You were there,’ he said, not making it a question. He kept his voice even and unemphatic. ‘You saw what happened.’
Very slowly, she nodded.
He took a moment to gather himself. ‘I know you’re scared,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take care of you. Just tell me what happened. You’ll feel better when you’ve told me everything.’
‘It was Cheetah,’ she said in a husk of a voice. She licked her lips again. ‘I saw her with him on the roof at the start. He was, like, getting her going, giving her drinks, and lines and that, and she must’ve gone downstairs with him. She was really spaced, or I don’t think she would’ve. We didn’t like him, ’cos he liked rough stuff. He used to go with Tyler a lot because she was up for it, but Kaylee and me, we didn’t go in for that. But he give the biggest tips, and she was, like, going for broke.’ She shook her head slowly over her friend’s foolhardiness.
‘Go on,’ Slider said, wishing they could both stop there, and never have said what was coming next.
‘I was there when they come upstairs,’ she said. ‘They didn’t know I was there. I was in the bar getting a drink of water. I’d just finished with my bloke and I was on my own. The bar’s, like, this sort of glasshouse on the roof. It’s got that glass that you can’t see in from outside. Golden Eagle was there, outside, I mean, sitting on the parapet, on his own. He had his phone in his hand. He looked like he was waiting for something. Then Cheetah comes out. He had Kaylee by the arm, like dragging her. She looked like she was well drunk. Her legs were sort of sagging, and he was sort of holding her up. She was—’
‘Yes?’
‘She was naked,’ said Shannon, screwing up her eyes. Somehow, he saw, that had made it worse. Perhaps it had brought home to her the disrespect with which they were viewed. They had seen it as fun, but they were just a commodity.
And Slider thought, they dressed her afterwards. In haste. Hence the pants being inside out. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Shannon resumed. ‘Then he says something to Golden Eagle, and he says something b
ack.’
‘What?’
‘I couldn’t hear. But it sounded angry – Cheetah did, anyway. And Golden Eagle stands up and it’s like he’s arguing with him, but more worried than angry. And then …’
She was looking beyond him now, into space – into memory. Her eyes were wide and terrified.
‘Go on,’ Slider said grimly.
Her voice sank to a whisper. ‘Cheetah, he picks up Kaylee, just picks her up like she was nothing, and—’ she had to swallow – ‘he threw her, right over the wall. She never made a sound. But I heard …’ A long pause. ‘I heard when she landed.’
She closed her eyes and put her face in her hands. Hart went to her and put her arm round the thin shoulders.
‘So Doc Cameron was right all along,’ said Atherton. ‘A fall from a great height, not an RTA.’
‘Drunk as she was, she went down like a sack,’ said Slider. ‘It accounts exactly for the injuries.’
‘That poor kid,’ Swilley said. ‘Shannon, I mean. She must have been out of her mind with terror.’
‘All she could think of doing was hiding,’ said Slider. ‘She waited in the bar until the two men left the roof then went downstairs and hid in one of the bathrooms. When she finally came out, there were sounds of partying on the roof. She crept up there, found several couples having a good time, and joined in as best she could. She didn’t see Cheetah again – I suppose he was putting some distance between himself and the scene – but Golden Eagle came back, seemed completely calm, as if nothing had happened. She had to stay until the party broke up, so as not to draw suspicion to herself. But she kept thinking Golden Eagle was “looking at her funny”. So as soon as she got home, she grabbed a few things, wrote her sister a note, and legged it.’
‘But if they had seen her in the bar,’ said Swilley, ‘she’d have known it by the end of the evening, surely? Given they let her go home, why did she run?’
Slider shrugged. ‘She’s sixteen. She’s just seen her friend killed. She thinks she’ll be next.’
‘In her case, I’d’ve left Usain Bolt standing,’ said Hart. ‘Bloody hell, it’s a miracle she held it together that long.’
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