Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  Whitestone pushed herself off the wall.

  She came and stood between me and Edie, her eyes boring into Ginger.

  ‘Let me explain how it works now,’ Whitestone said. ‘You’re either with us or you are against us. You either play it straight with us or we burn you to the ground. What you can’t do is play both sides. Do you get it?’

  ‘I get it. The last time I spoke to Madam Theresa was a few weeks ago.’

  ‘What did she want?’ Whitestone said, and then answered her own question. ‘She wanted women, didn’t she? Of course she did.’

  Ginger nodded.

  ‘And I declined. Because I don’t like what’s happening up there. At this Hopewell Centre. They’re getting through twenty new girls a week.’

  ‘Twenty new girls a week?’ Edie said.

  ‘I know a knocking shop has a high turnover of staff,’ Whitestone said. ‘But twenty girls a week is ridiculous. What are they doing up there?’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Ginger said.

  ‘If they’re getting through that many girls,’ Edie said, ‘then it’s not even some high-end brothel. It’s a slave market.’

  ‘And how do you know this Madam Theresa?’ I asked Ginger.

  It was full disclosure now.

  ‘I worked for her,’ Ginger said. ‘When I first came to this country.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘That’s not the story you told me, is it?’

  The story I had heard from Ginger was that she had met a rich man – a very rich man, Victor Gatling, a property developer they called the Man Who Built London, and after that relationship had come to a natural end, with the money she had put aside she set up her business, picking up men in the bars of five-star hotels and putting them in contact with her ever-changing stable of college-educated, tattoo-free girls.

  I should have known it was all a bit too Pretty Woman to be true. I should have known that it was a far harder climb from arriving here with nothing to running her own Social Introduction Agency from a room in Chinatown.

  The kindness of one old big shot wasn’t going to be enough.

  ‘Was Madam Theresa before or after Victor Gatling?’ I said.

  ‘Madam Theresa was before Victor. In fact, she introduced us.’

  I shrugged, not understanding.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me the truth?’ I said.

  ‘A woman doesn’t tell a man everything,’ Ginger said, unsmiling.

  Whitestone and Edie laughed out loud.

  ‘And is that all she wanted from you?’ Whitestone said. ‘Fresh meat? Nothing else?’

  ‘And new business. She told me that she would welcome a handful of personally vetted, trusted clients, preferably men I have known for years.’

  ‘Who’s pulling the old girl’s strings?’ Edie said, still grinning. ‘She didn’t set herself up in the Hopewell Centre with her pension, did she?’

  ‘I don’t know who she’s in business with,’ Ginger said.

  Whitestone went to the window and thought about it. When she turned away, she had made up her mind. For the first time, Ginger Gonzalez looked genuinely frightened.

  ‘So do you think you can get someone in there, Ginger?’ she said. ‘Do you think you can get someone inside the Hopewell Centre?’

  I looked at Edie Wren and she looked back at me.

  She wasn’t smiling now.

  ‘A client or a working girl?’ Ginger said.

  Whitestone stared at me.

  ‘Are you still holding the line, Max?’

  I thought of Billy and what they had done to him.

  I thought of Hana and the life they had stolen.

  And I felt the anger flare.

  ‘This must be the place that Hana and those other women were being taken,’ I said. ‘So yes – I’m holding the line.’

  ‘Good,’ Whitestone. ‘Because I never know with you these days.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Who do you want in there?’ Ginger asked again. ‘A man or a woman?’

  Whitestone looked at Edie Wren and me.

  ‘Both would be good,’ she said.

  28

  I dialled the number that Ginger had given me for Madam Theresa, but it just kept on ringing.

  I shook my head at Sergeant John Caine as he brewed our tea in Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, the last stop before you enter the Black Museum.

  ‘Maybe she changes her number every week,’ John suggested, placing a mug of steaming tea before me. ‘They’re wary of phones in that game. Change them all the time. More paranoid than drug dealers. How old is the number?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘A few weeks is a long time in prostitution.’

  ‘This Madam Theresa gave it to Ginger when she was fishing for girls to run. And clients. Maybe she doesn’t need either of them any more. Business sounds like it’s booming. What do you know about her, John?’

  ‘Back in the day, Madam Theresa Defarge ran the slickest sex operation in London. A-list clients. A-list girls. She took prostitution off the streets and put it into prime real estate at a time when everyone thought sex should be given away. She claimed there was no such thing as free love. They say she invented the term ‘call girl’. Discreet. Expensive. Exclusive enough for big names. A real beauty in her time. One of those Carnaby Street dolly birds, all black mascara and a skirt that was hardly there. She was supposed to have had a baby with one of her clients. But nobody ever saw the child. And that was all a long time ago. She dropped off the radar around the millennium. I thought the old girl would be pushing up daisies by now.’

  ‘Any pictures of her?’

  ‘I can goggle her for you,’ he said, peering into the screen of his elderly computer, glancing up to see me smiling. He had said it once as a genuine mistake – ‘I’ll goggle it, Max, shall I?’ – and now he said it whenever he wanted to lighten my mood.

  There were two pictures of Theresa Defarge.

  Both were taken in a photographer’s studio.

  One showed a poster girl of London in the Sixties, a brunette, all panda-eye make-up and match-thin limbs, reclining on white satin sheets in a white baby doll nightdress. Her look was coquettish, inviting. She could have been a model for Mary Quant. The other photograph showed a woman in her late sixties, her hair that careful shade of white gold, wearing high black heels and a tight black basque against a pitch-black background, perched on what appeared to be a chair with a swathe of black silk thrown over the top. The look was challenging, defiant.

  I could not tell that it was the same woman.

  ‘But why did she do the photo shoots?’ I said.

  ‘Some of these old-school madams always kidded themselves that they were in a branch of show business,’ John said. ‘I heard that some Hollywood producer promised to film her life story, no doubt when he was in his cups and with his trousers around his ankles. I guess it got stuck in – what do you call it? – development hell.’

  I tried the number again, running through my lines.

  But nobody answered.

  I rang off and sipped my tea.

  ‘And what happens if you get in?’ John said.

  ‘Get positive visual ID on Rabia Demir and call it in for immediate response. The heavy mob will kick the doors down and come in with guns. If Rabia is in there – and she’s working – then it’s a trafficking case, enough to bust everyone up there. Human Trafficking, Smuggling and Slavery, the CPS will call it. Enough to put someone away for fourteen years.’

  I saw a look of real concern in his eyes.

  ‘Better get your call in quick. There will be some serious muscle up there behind all the canapés and small talk.’

  ‘They’re trying to get Edie Wren in there as back-up. Undercover. A new girl on her first night on the job.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Edie can take care of herself,’ I said, with slightly more conviction than I felt. ‘And we’re goin
g to be in and out.’ I realised how much I valued his call. ‘What’s wrong, John? Do you think this sounds like a suicide mission?’

  ‘Edie will be fine,’ he said. ‘She knows enough not to take anything, right? A lot of these places have got the women on flunitrazepam – you know, Rohypnol, the date rape drug. Roofies. No odour, no taste, no chance. Keeps them quiet, keeps them pliant – the poor little cows. Because I bet not every man who pays for sex at Madam Theresa’s is a movie star. Not back then and not now.’

  I thought about Edie up there alone and pushed the thought aside.

  ‘You think this Madam Theresa is fronting for someone?’ I said.

  ‘Trafficking doesn’t sound like her style. But who knows? Maybe she moved with the times. Maybe she lived longer than her money lasted. It happens with these old villains all the time.’

  ‘She never got busted?’

  ‘Not until now.’

  I tried the number again.

  But it just kept on ringing.

  I stood outside Broadcasting House, where the BBC staff and their guests wait for their cabs, the perfect place to loiter as I watched the Langham Hotel on the other side of Portland Place.

  A black cab pulled up and two young women got out. The taller of the two, a brunette in glasses, looked like a London businesswoman with her pink FT and iPad tucked under her arm.

  Ginger Gonzalez.

  And the other a woman was a slightly built redhead with make-up that made her face almost ghostly in the lights of the hotel. When her winter coat fell open you could see legs beneath a short skirt and leather boots that came up to the knee.

  My mouth went dry.

  Edie, I thought.

  They went up the short flight of stone steps on the left side of the hotel that led to the Artesian Bar. I watched the main entrance and I watched the steps to the bar. But I saw no sign of anyone who looked even remotely like Madam Theresa. After what felt like a hundred years, Ginger came out of the main entrance alone.

  The staff hailed her a black cab.

  Moments later my phone vibrated with a message from Ginger.

  She is in.

  I realised my hands were shaking. I felt sick. Fighting back my panic, I called the number yet again.

  But the phone just kept on ringing.

  It took me ten minutes to walk to West End Central, where DCI Whitestone was on stage in the first-floor briefing room. Our boss, the Chief Super, Detective Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Squire, stood behind her.

  On the screen behind them was a picture of the Hopewell Centre and a map of the neighbourhood it dominated.

  There was standing-room only in the briefing room. Uniformed officers in shirtsleeves. Special Firearms Officers in their black kit. Some plain-clothes men and women from SC&O 10, the covert policing department of the Met, undercover agents. With luck, the penthouse suite would not know we were there until the doors were kicked in and they had a Remington pump-action shotgun pointing at their faces.

  ‘The premises are located on the fiftieth floor of the Hopewell Centre,’ Whitestone said. ‘The penthouse suite. We will – we hope – have two undercover officers inside the building – DC Wolfe and DC Wren, both of West End Central. They will both be in radio contact.’ She paused and made sure she had their full attention. ‘When they have positive visual ID they will release a Grade A response code. You will have a target time of eight minutes to get inside, establish our authority and secure the building.’ Whitestone looked at the Chief Super. ‘Ma’am?’ she said.

  DCS Swire stepped forward.

  ‘Human trafficking is a blight on the modern world,’ she began.

  The Chief Super was a good speaker. She would make our people think that they were a part of history. But I could not concentrate on her words.

  Edie, I thought, slipping outside the briefing room.

  I remembered the words of John Caine in Room 101, New Scotland Yard.

  She knows enough not to take anything, right?

  I fought down my nausea.

  I dialled the number again.

  And this time someone answered.

  29

  ‘Mr Dempsey?’

  I looked up from my still mineral water. In the hour before midnight, the lighting was subdued in the Artesian Bar of the Langham Hotel. The man smiled politely in the expensive twilight. In his dark suit and tie, and with his air of calm efficiency, you would have mistaken him for a hotel employee.

  I glanced at my watch. He was exactly on time.

  ‘I’m Dempsey,’ I said.

  ‘Your car is outside, sir.’

  I paid my bill and followed him through the lobby. Guests were returning from the theatre and dinner, discreet security guards watched from the corners of the lobby, ensuring all was well.

  They did not look twice at the man I followed through the revolving doors of the Langham’s main entrance.

  A black Mercedes Benz was waiting outside. The man from the bar brushed past the Langham doorman and held the back door open for me. As I settled myself in the car, the uniformed driver turned to offer me a silver tray with a hot towel. The man on the pavement waited until we pulled away, acknowledging our departure with a small bow. The driver asked me if I was happy with the temperature in the car, told me about the Wi-Fi that was available and then fell silent as London glided by like a series of old-fashioned postcards.

  Broadcasting House. Marble Arch. Park Lane. Buckingham Palace. All lit up to inspire awe in the passer-by. At this time of night, it took just twenty minutes to the river. The Hopewell Centre soared fifty storeys high on the far side of the Thames, a circular tower of glass and money.

  The driver murmured, ‘Five minutes,’ into his headset as we crossed Westminster Bridge. Then we were too close to the building to see it. The Mercedes eased down into the underground car park where another polite young man in a suit and tie was waiting with an iPad.

  ‘Mr Dempsey? This way, sir.’

  We walked to a line of lifts. There was one that exclusively served the penthouse. The man with the iPad stood back as I entered, holding the lift door for me, and then stepped inside and swiped a key card. I wondered how our people would access the top floor without a key card, and then I stopped thinking about it as the lift rose above ground level and suddenly all of London was spread out below. We rose above the city so quickly that I felt the pressure in my ears.

  The man with the iPad smiled at me.

  The lift gave a discreet ping and the door slid open at the end of a long, hushed hall. A wider, larger man was waiting at the far end of the corridor. He rang the doorbell to the penthouse suite as soon as he saw me coming.

  ‘Enjoy your evening, sir,’ said the man in the lift, and the doors closed silently behind me.

  Madam Theresa was waiting in the doorway.

  ‘Mr Dempsey! How kind of you to join us!’

  She had loomed in my imagination as some kind of giant. The two photographs I had seen of her, taken fifty years apart, had given the impression of broad shoulders and endless legs, a woman who had successfully carved a career from the desires of men. But as I felt her fingers dig into my arm, guiding me inside, I saw she was barely five feet tall.

  Her face, once as beautiful as any face in London, was withered by the years but she beamed up at me with a smile so porcelain white it would have looked out of place on a twenty-year-old.

  She led me into what felt like a Victorian drawing room, so strict was the segregation of men and women, so rigid was the old-world formality fifty floors above the city. A line of young women sat along one wall, talking quietly among themselves and waiting to be approached. Edie Wren was not among them, a fact that I noted with a mixture of relief and dread.

  There was a small bar in one corner of the room, served by a bartender with a shaven head and a bow tie, and a handful of men in suits with no ties stood around, quietly conversing in their own language as they clutched their drinks and measured the women. Beyond the windows
and far below, London glittered like a box of jewels emptied by some careless god.

  ‘Sit with me,’ Madam Theresa said. She took my hand. ‘How’s our mutual friend?’

  ‘Ginger’s very well.’

  ‘Your first visit to us,’ she said, and called a waiter with a slight turn of her head.

  He held a tray with a silver bowl.

  ‘Adam will take your drinks order and – if you don’t mind – your telephone. We charge it for you while you’re here. And of course the absence of phones ensures the total privacy of other guests.’

  Her voice lilted with a French or Belgian accent, but deep beneath it I felt I could detect the eternal, undying vowels of a council estate in a small town somewhere in the north of England.

  I placed my phone in the silver bowl, my face impassive.

  The waiter took it away.

  Now I saw that the main room led to a corridor with a line of other rooms. A door opened and a man emerged with a tall black woman walking two places behind him. I recognised him as a senior politician. He did not look our way as he left the penthouse with the woman walking behind him. The waiter brought my water.

  ‘Mr Dempsey,’ Madam Theresa said, more businesslike now. ‘May I explain how our establishment works?’

  I nodded.

  And I tried not to stare as Edie Wren came out of one of the rooms. Rabia Demir was with her.

  She appeared to have trouble standing. Edie seemed to be supporting her.

  Edie nodded briefly without looking at me.

  Now, she was saying.

  Tell them now.

  Code A.

  Do it, Max.

  But I couldn’t do it. Because I had just placed my phone on a silver tray and watched it being taken away.

  ‘Do you know what a bar fine is?’ Madam Theresa asked me.

  I forced myself to look at her.

  ‘It’s a south-east Asian convention,’ I said. ‘A bar fine is the fee I pay to the house if I choose to leave with one of your employees. The bar fine compensates you for the loss of their employment for the evening.’

  She clapped her hands and smiled.

  ‘A man of the world!’ she said. ‘And of course, after the payment of the bar fine, any arrangement you make with the girl is up to you and her.’ She leaned closer. ‘But if you would like a more permanent arrangement, then we can discuss terms.’