by James Oswald
‘This is an outrage. Have you any idea who I am? Who I know? You can’t just break down my door in the dead of night.’
‘Running a brothel is against the law, ma’am. As is living off immoral earnings. Does the taxman even know about this?’ Ritchie gestured towards the open notebook, then noticed McLean standing in the doorway. ‘Ah, sir. I wonder if you could explain the situation to Miss Marchmont here. She doesn’t seem to want to listen to me.’
‘Sir? About bloody time I spoke to someone in charge.’ The woman whirled around, mouth open to tear McLean off a strip. He braced himself, seeing the fury in her eyes even as he noticed her sensible clothing, thin face hung with straight black hair. There was something hauntingly familiar about her eyes, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where he might have met her before.
‘I …’ Her voice died as a puzzled frown spread across her face. Or maybe it wasn’t puzzlement but something else. Fear perhaps. Whatever it was, the woman’s anger seemed to leach away like air from an old party balloon.
‘Miss Marchmont, is it?’ McLean strove to sound conciliatory even as he racked his brain trying to work out where he knew her from. Certainly the name meant nothing to him. She didn’t reply, giving instead the faintest of nods.
‘We’re acting on good information that this house is being used as a brothel. I have a warrant to search the premises for evidence to that effect, and given what is going on in the basement I don’t think I need to justify my actions any further.’
Marchmont let her head droop forward, as if the muscles in her slender neck had grown too tired to take the weight any more. Her long black hair slid across her features like a stage curtain. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
Something about her words, the way she spoke, made McLean believe her. It wasn’t a happy thought, the ramifications all too easy to imagine.
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he said, and at the same time realised what it was about the room that had been bothering him. Not that the bed was made, or that Miss Marchmont had clearly been discovered in here alone. It was the smell. The rest of the house reeked of sex, of cheap aftershave and booze. But this room smelled like a room in a house this old should. Like the spare rooms in his own house that he rarely had any need to visit. Not a place anyone spent much time.
He walked to the dressing table and picked up the notebook. Miss Marchmont’s handwriting was neat but tightly packed, difficult to read. The words weren’t any kind of book-keeping, though, nor a tally of names and addresses. McLean put the notebook down and picked up one of the heavy leather-bound books. On the outside it claimed to be a manual of corporate law, and a quick flick through the densely printed pages within showed that it wasn’t lying. He put it back down again, a sinking weight dragging in his gut. Turning around to face Miss Marchmont, he saw her hand covering her stomach, as if protecting herself against this invasion of her privacy. Her face was a white mask, emotionless and unreadable, her eyes locked on him, peering from behind that curtain of straight black hair, and for a moment he thought he knew where he had seen her before. Then she dropped her hand to her side, shook her hair from her face and pulled herself upright, and the moment was gone.
‘You won’t find anything untoward here. None of my guests are doing anything illegal.’
‘And yet you’re not – how shall I put it – joining in?’
The hand went up to the stomach again, the ghost of a smile appearing on Marchmont’s lips. ‘What can I say? These parties take a lot of organising, but this evening I really wasn’t feeling up to it. Didn’t want to put everyone off just because I’m a bit under the weather, so I let them get on with it. We’re all friends, after all.’
‘Think we might have a problem, Jo.’
McLean found DCI Dexter in the kitchen, at the back of the house on the ground floor. It looked surprisingly like the kitchen of any large, modern house; the sort of thing you’d probably find in the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. It was bright and shiny and didn’t feel all that homely to him compared with the lived-in warmth and omnipresent cat hairs of his own kitchen, but at least the coffee machine worked.
‘You’re telling me, Tony. We had it on good authority this place was operating as a brothel, but now I’m beginning to have my doubts.’
McLean pulled out a tall wooden stool and sat down at a long breakfast bar. Dexter was leaning against the other side of the counter, cradling a mug in both hands.
‘It’s got to be, though. I mean, I may be new to things here, but the last time I checked, a house where more than one sex worker was trading counted as a brothel. OK, a lot of the customers here are claiming they never paid for anything, but that’s not meant to matter.’
‘Not meant to. No.’ Dexter took a long swill of coffee, then placed the mug down on the perfectly clean work surface. ‘Bloody stupid law if you ask me. I wish people didn’t buy and sell sex at all, but I’m a realist. It happens and my job’s making sure nobody gets hurt. It’d be much easier to do that if these women could all club together and run things themselves, but the law says no. So here we are, busting open a brothel and turfing a bunch of sex workers out on to the street where no one can keep an eye on the sick bastards abusing them.’
‘At least we get a few more names and photos for the records.’ It wasn’t really any consolation at all, but McLean didn’t know what else to say.
‘That’s the thing though, Tony. All those women in the hall there. Not a single one of them’s on our database. Far as I can tell we’ve never seen any of the men before either.’
Without thinking, McLean reached out and took up the mug. It was still half-full, the dark liquid warm but bitter. Jo Dexter liked her coffee black and strong.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I don’t know. You know as well as I do that you can’t have a brothel without sex workers. What if none of these women are?’
McLean looked around the room again, taking in the decor. The counter Dexter was leaning against housed a large gas hob and a small preparation sink. The worktop was polished granite and oiled wood. The rest of the kitchen units were stylish, the built-in appliances all top names. Half of the room was taken up with a dining area that he could imagine young professionals chatting around while they sipped chilled Pinot Noir or ridiculously strong craft beers, waiting for their hostess to serve up something that had probably been prepared by a local restaurant but which she’d pretend she had slaved for hours cooking. It was, in short, a designer kitchen. Not the sort of place a dozen working girls might use to reheat their pizza, or as a retreat from the steady flow of johns through the front door.
‘Do we know who actually owns the house?’ he asked. Dexter gave him a stare that said quite clearly just how much of an idiot she thought him.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday. And if you’d been paying attention at the briefing you’d know anyway.’ She snatched back the mug and downed the coffee in one, grimacing at the taste.
‘The notes just said it was rented. Who owns it? And who’s paying the rent?’
‘It’s owned by a letting company. Sanderson Holdings. Probably part of some pension fund or something. Name on the tenancy agreement’s Heather Marchmont.’
McLean recalled the young woman alone upstairs, her strange familiarity. ‘Aye, I just met her. Not sure what to make of her, really.’
‘How so?’ Dexter raised a quizzical eyebrow, dragging the other one up with it into a comical frown.
‘Well, she’s up there in her room all on her own, fully dressed, working on something that looks a lot more like contract law than running a brothel while all around her there’s people …’
McLean tailed off, not quite sure how to describe the myriad ways in which the people they had found had been pleasuring themselves and each other. Not quite sure how they could have got something so simple as a raid on a brothel so spectacularly wrong. ‘I think we need to get her out of here and into an interview room. Quick as. Is it possible this really is a private house? These people are all just here having sex with their wives and girlfriends? I don’t know, some kind of swingers’ club?’
Dexter’s look of incredulity changed as her gaze shifted from McLean to a space just behind him. He turned to see DC Gregg standing in the doorway. She had her airwave set in one hand, an electronic PDA in the other.
‘Think I might have something, sir, ma’am,’ she said.
‘Is it proof these women are sex workers? Because if it is I’ll kiss you.’ DCI Dexter crossed the room with alarming speed, bearing down on the hapless detective constable like a seagull spying a poke of chips. Gregg backed away, out into the hallway.
‘No, ma’am. Sorry.’
Dexter stopped almost as quickly as she had started. ‘What is it then?’
‘It’s one of the … um … clients?’ Gregg held up her PDA even though the tiny text on the screen was impossible to read. ‘We got a hit from the PNC.’
Judging by the noises coming from the front hall, the women the police had found in the building had mostly recovered from the shock of the raid and were now moving into the angry stage. The sooner they were taken to the station and processed the better, really. Except, having met Miss Marchmont, McLean had a horrible feeling that wasn’t going to go as well as planned. He ignored them anyway, following DC Gregg as she led them up the stairs and back to the room where Mr John Smith was getting fully dressed. A bored uniform PC watched from the doorway and stood to one side to let them in. Smith was pulling on shiny black leather shoes and looked up as they entered.
‘Did you really think we wouldn’t find out, John?’ DCI Dexter asked.
‘Who’re you?’
‘See, that’s what the N in PNC stands for, isn’t it? National. That’s National as in the whole of the United Kingdom. Not just Scotland. You’re a long way from home now, aren’t you?’
‘Who is this?’ Smith turned his attention to McLean. ‘What is this?’
‘This, Mr Smith, is my boss, Detective Chief Inspector Dexter. You’d do well to answer her questions. Just bear in mind we probably already know the answers.’
Smith switched his attention back to Dexter, his head sweeping up and down as he appraised her, the slightest of sneers forming on his face. McLean watched and started to understand. It hadn’t been there before, when it had just been DC Gregg and him conducting the interview. There the woman had clearly been the underling, in her proper place. Now, presented with the senior officer conducting the entire operation and finding out that it wasn’t a man, Smith’s true colours were beginning to show. How was it he’d been found? With two women? The man probably thought one was too few to be worth bothering about. What a wonderful specimen of unrepentant misogyny.
‘Why didn’t you tell us you were on the sex offenders’ register, Mr Smith? Did you think we might miss a little thing like that?’ Judging by Dexter’s tone, she’d got the measure of the man too. He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again, shoulders slumping.
‘There’s the small matter of forgetting to check in with the local constabulary when you moved here too. That detail slip your mind?’ Dexter nodded at the uniform constable. ‘Get him down to the van. Sooner we get this lot all processed, the sooner we can all go home and get some kip.’
She stood to one side as the PC produced cuffs that were decidedly not fluffy, ordered Mr Smith to stand, put his hands behind his back. By the way the man complied, McLean guessed it wasn’t the first time he’d been through the routine. He was almost out of the door, pushed rather than led by the constable, when Dexter stopped him with a light touch to one arm.
‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said, receiving a puzzled scowl in return.
‘What for?’
‘For being here. I was beginning to worry we’d cocked up, if you’ll excuse the bad pun. Finding you’s enough to justify the raid, even if we can’t pin anything on anyone else.’
4
Dawn’s early light was pinking the cloudy sky as McLean pushed open the back door and walked through into his kitchen. The familiar smells comforted him, the warmth from the Aga a welcoming embrace after the chill outside. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat stared up from her usual spot in the middle of the big wooden table, her head bobbing up and down a couple of times as she tasted the air, decided he wasn’t an intruder worth bothering about.
‘Morning to you too.’ He dumped his case down on a chair, heaved open the stove top and put the kettle on to boil. It was a reflex action, the thing you did as soon as you got in from a long shift, but no sooner had he started fishing around for mug, teabag and the ever-optimistic biscuit than McLean realised just how tired he was. They’d made a start on processing all the people in the New Town brothel, and with each new identity confirmed so the mood in the SCU had darkened. They’d been acting on good information, raided what had all the hallmarks of a brothel, found a house with a dozen bedrooms all occupied by men and women engaged in sexual acts of varying degrees of perversion. And yet none of the women they’d identified so far were sex workers, not by any stretched definition. There was no evidence any had taken payment, and they all appeared to be gainfully employed in more traditional walks of life. If it hadn’t been for John Smith, they’d be screwed.
McLean smiled at the bad joke, poured boiling water on to the teabag and stared out the window at the garden beginning to extract itself from the darkness. Even with Mr Smith they were on dodgy ground, although it was unlikely anyone would complain too loudly that their swingers’ party had been disrupted. He didn’t much fancy the job of breaking the news to the Deputy Chief Constable, though. A lot of man hours had gone into the operation, a lot of overtime, a lot of expense. All for nothing. No wonder Jo Dexter was back on the cigarettes.
Clasping a mug of tea as much for the warmth as anything, he headed out of the kitchen, across the hallway to the front door. He scooped up a pile of mail, the fruits of at least two days’ deliveries if the weight of them meant anything. Moving back to the SCU had been a mixed blessing. It got him out of the way of the newly promoted Detective Superintendent Brooks and Detective Chief Inspector Spence, marking their new territory like badly trained spaniels. But it also meant working odd shifts and further disrupting his already meagre sleep patterns. McLean couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t felt weary, put upon and generally fed up.
It was still too dark to see properly in the hallway, so he took the pile of letters back to the kitchen. Leafing through the plastic-wrapped catalogues, offers of credit cards and other junk, he didn’t really expect anything interesting. It was months since the last postcard from Emma and he found it increasingly hard to remember her face. How long had she been gone now? Eighteen months? Two years? McLean had almost given up hope that she would ever come back. And even if she did, could they pick up where they’d left off?
The shrill jangling of his mobile phone cut through the kitchen silence. DC – no, of course, Detective Sergeant – MacBride had programmed different ringtones for various regular callers, not that McLean ever remembered who was who. This was just the generic ringtone though, and a glance at the number on the screen didn’t help. Five in the morning was a bit antisocial, too, but then it might have been desperation rather than rudeness. He thumbed the button, held the phone up to his ear.
‘McLean.’
‘Tony? Is that you?’
>
For a second McLean thought it was Emma calling, but only because he’d been thinking of her. It was a young woman’s voice, but not the right young woman. Familiar, even if he couldn’t quite place the name.
‘Um … Yes.’
‘I’m so sorry. Ringing so early and all that. Just didn’t know where to turn. It’s—’
‘Rachel?’ McLean finally made the connection, risked a quick look at the screen. It was a mobile number, but not international. ‘You’re in the UK?’
‘I’m in Edinburgh, actually. Didn’t know what to do. Jen’s away at some big fashion event, won’t be back for a week.’
‘Slow down a bit, Rae. Are you OK? Is Phil OK?’ McLean was trained not to jump to conclusions, but he couldn’t help worrying when his best friend’s wife rang up out of the blue. Even more so given she was supposed to be in San Francisco.
‘Phil?’ There was a bit of a pause, the line hissing slightly. ‘No, Phil’s fine. He’s off on a field trip in New Mexico. I just couldn’t … I needed to get away.’
McLean pulled out a chair, sat down at the kitchen table. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat stood up, stretched, and then presented her head to be scratched. When had he last talked to Phil? He couldn’t remember. So much for being best friends. Perhaps oldest friends was a better way of describing things.