by Tony Park
Tom shook his head. He recalled the somewhat obnoxious, persistent reporter from the media conference Greeves had given at the defence contractor’s offices prior to their flight to South Africa. Fisher was the one who was pursuing the line of questioning about Greeves’s frequent visits to Africa.
Olga gave up trying to outwait Tom and resumed her confession. ‘Ebony had a diary in her locker.’
‘You broke into her locker?’ Tom wiped his hands on a paper serviette.
‘Lock was broken. I started to worry about Ebony after your visit and that night I opened locker to see if she had left suicide note or something.’
‘Suicide?’
‘Not unknown in my line of work. Yours too, if anything like Russia.’
Tom let that pass unanswered.
‘Anyway, I look in Ebony’s diary and last entry is note to ring Michael. She wrote cell phone number down. I check with Fisher’s card and is same Michael.’
‘So, she was talking to him, outside of work.’
‘Yes.’
‘And when she didn’t call him, presumably because she’d been killed, Fisher came to the club and was “agitated” that he couldn’t find her and hadn’t heard from her.’
‘Exactly!’ Olga slapped the tabletop, causing another couple of diners next to them to look over. ‘Perfect cover.’
It would be easy, Tom reasoned, to get Ebony’s mobile phone records and find out if she had been called. He presumed Morris and Burnett would have done this as a matter of course, so he wasn’t as convinced by this theory as Olga was.
‘But what makes you so sure that Fisher had anything to do with her death?’
She shrugged. ‘Is hard to tell you – to explain. I see lots of men in that place, and I know the looks in their eyes. There are the drunk ones, out looking for fun; there are the desperate ones who could never get look at naked girl any other way; there are the chauvinist ones who like the power of having girl do what they tell them . . . and there are the scary ones.’
‘Scary ones? The stalkers, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘The ones who are there with something else on their mind. You can see it in their eyes. Fisher was one of these. He was man on mission, and I think that mission was Ebony.’
Tom regarded Olga. She was bright – she had to be in order even to be admitted to study medicine – and she knew men. He thought she was being a little paranoid, but there was obviously something going on between Fisher and Ebony – aka Precious – that transcended the normal ogler–stripper dynamic. It was worth a closer look. He pulled his notebook out of his suit pocket.
‘Presumably you told Detective Morris all this?’
She nodded. ‘Morris – he is your friend?’
‘None of your business. He is a colleague, though.’
‘He is ignoramus.’
Tom kept the smile at bay. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said he would call Fisher, but his eyes told me that he thought I was crackpot.’
Tom let the next smile through.
‘Don’t mock me. You are smarter than Morris.’
Flattery would get her nowhere. He said nothing.
‘Morris and other policeman came back to club yesterday and tell all girls and management that no one is to talk to media. I tell them, again, that media is where they should be looking and that Fisher came back to club again asking about Ebony and police investigation. Morris says to me, “You let me worry about Mr Fisher, darling.” Pah! I give him, “darling”. Creep.’
Tom held up a hand. ‘Sounds like they’ve checked him out at least.’
‘What happened to your policeman friend, the one you were looking for in first place.’
‘He’s dead.’
Olga placed a hand on the table and for a second Tom thought she might be about to reach out and touch him, in the same way Sannie had done on a couple of occasions. Perhaps there was something about him that inspired pity. ‘How did he die?’
‘He was tortured to death by terrorists. The same people who abducted Robert Greeves, the defence procurement minister, in Africa.’
Olga frowned, and Tom could see she was processing the information he’d just given her. She shook her head. ‘Ebony not working for Islamic terrorists. You were looking at wrong girl for that if you think she was involved in kidnap plot.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She was devout Christian.’
‘Christian stripper?’
Olga looked offended again and folded her arms with an ‘harrumph’. ‘I am trainee doctor exotic dancer. Why not Christian stripper?’
Tom was stumped. Olga resumed her defence of the dead girl. ‘She was more Christian than any other person I know. Church every Sunday and sent money home to Africa to mission where she was educated. Of course, she don’t tell missionaries what she was doing in England. She tell people in Africa she was working as nurse’s aide. I was trying to help her get job like this in hospital.’
Tom’s gut feeling was still that Ebony, having played her part in luring Nick Roberts to a location where he could be abducted, had been killed by the people who had used her. ‘Perhaps she did it for money.’
Olga shook her head vigorously. Most of her burger was untouched and she wrapped it up in the paper bag it had come in. Tom looked down at her hands. He figured he didn’t have to give a medical student a lecture about eating disorders. It did make him wonder, however, if Olga had some psychological problems.
‘Ebony was good person,’ she continued. ‘Fisher was up to something with her, though, and that’s where you should be looking.’
‘I’ll talk to Morris again,’ Tom said, pushing back his chair. ‘Did you find anything else in her diary?’
‘Not much. It looked new – like she had only been keeping it for last two weeks.’ Olga pulled a scrap of paper out of her handbag. ‘I found one other name, on same page as number for “Michael”. Other name was D Carney.’
She passed the paper over, and Tom copied the name and cell phone number into his phone book. He’d seen the name Carney before, but couldn’t quite remember where. He knew that once he had a few moments to himself it would come to him.
‘Thanks for your time, Olga. Do you know who this Carney is?’ Even as he asked the question he remembered where he had seen the name and number before.
She shook her head. ‘Talk to Fisher. He is one you need to put this puzzle together, Mr Policeman.’
Tom stood. ‘You probably know enough about my situation and police procedure to understand that Fisher has already been questioned and that it would be highly inappropriate for me to go harassing him when I’m suspended.’
She nodded. ‘But I know you will anyway. You are good person. Morris, Fisher, they are creeps.’ Olga tucked the remains of the burger in her day pack, shook Tom’s hand and started to walk out the door. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Maybe I see you in club again some time?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in a hospital one day.’
She laughed. ‘Maybe my turn to see you naked.’
What Tom couldn’t tell Olga, of course, was that there was a definite link between Nick and Ebony in the form of the message the dancer had left on Nick’s answering machine. Somehow he doubted that Nick had been planning to go to the club to hand over a donation to a Christian mission in South Africa.
After Olga left the restaurant, Tom stayed at the table and took out his notebook and pen. He wrote the name Ebony in the centre of a page and circled it. He drew a line off to the left to Nick and then extended out further to another circle containing Greeves. Off to the right of the stripper’s stage name he wrote Fisher. He tapped his chin with the pen and then returned to the page and linked the journalist and the politician with a stroke of his pen. A circle. But was it mere coincidence that the dancer had something going on with the reporter as well as with the minister’s protection officer?
There was only one way for Tom to find out – two, if he we
nt through official channels but he doubted the latter would work. Dan Morris would be suspicious now, and Tom wouldn’t put it past him to grass on him to Shuttleworth. Either way, he was unlikely to cough up the notes of his interview with Fisher.
As the train clattered back towards the city, Tom took out his mobile phone and notebook. He called the number for D Carney, though he recalled now that it was a man and his name was Daniel. A recorded voice answered the phone, though it wasn’t Carney: it was a message telling him the phone was switched off or out of range.
Next he dialled directory assistance. ‘Could I have the number for the World newspaper, editorial department, please?’
22
Tom tuned out from the image of the British Prime Minister on the widescreen plasma television monitor in the World’s foyer, which was broadcasting a satellite news channel owned by the same man who controlled the newspaper in whose offices he was waiting. The receptionist looked up from her computer and nodded to him. ‘Michael’s off the phone now, Mr Carney. He’ll be down in a mo.’
Tom thanked her. He’d taken the Northern Line from King’s Cross to Bank and then switched to the Docklands Light Rail to get to the newspaper’s offices. Out of the window he saw a jumbled landscape. Shiny new offices and apartments jostled with face-lifted brick warehouses that had been reinvented as fashionable homes for wealthy incomers. Yet, sporadic remnants of the old Isle of Dogs held on. The last of its undeveloped, soot-blackened buildings waited, destined either for demolition or to be reborn out of the ashes of their grimy past. The planners might have breathed new life into the area, but they had stolen its soul.
The news crawler at the bottom of the television screen was repeating the only part of the PM’s press conference that Tom had paid attention to: PM confirms at least one of Robert Greeves’s abductors, killed in South Africa, was Muslim. Tom heard footsteps and looked over his shoulder. He recognised the thin, pasty-faced, red-haired reporter immediately.
‘Daniel Carney?’ asked Michael Fisher.
Tom nodded and held out his hand, but Fisher kept his by his sides. He looked Tom up and down, and Tom prayed that Fisher had never met the real Carney. He also hoped Fisher wouldn’t recognise him from the press conference he had attended with Greeves.
So far, there had been no photographs of Tom published in the newspapers, as his identity was being protected by a Defence Advisory notice, more commonly known as a D-notice, on the grounds that the terrorist gang which had abducted Greeves was still at large and Tom had been involved in the killing of some of their number. The restrictions were voluntarily complied with by the media, but Tom knew his name and identity would not be kept quiet for long, especially if, as he assumed, things went badly for him at the inquiry. The journalists knew his name, which was why he’d been pestered continually for an exclusive. The fact he hadn’t given one meant the media would show him no mercy when his name was released.
Tom had called Fisher from the train and their conversation had been brief. He’d already gathered from Fisher’s tone that he wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with open arms.
‘I know who you are, Carney,’ Fisher had said when Tom had called, masquerading as the freelance journalist. ‘You’re the bastard who did me out of a cracking story. Well, you won’t get much from the stripper now, will you?’ Tom had simply said he needed to talk to him about Precious Tambo’s death. He had offered to come to the World’s offices and Fisher had agreed. Tom had no idea what he would find out, but it seemed that so far he was pulling off the charade.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’ he said.
‘There’s an interview room down the corridor. Is room one free, Sally?’ Fisher asked the receptionist.
She checked her computer screen and said, ‘All yours, Michael. For the next twenty minutes at least.’
‘We won’t be longer than that.’
Fisher led Tom down a hallway off the main reception area. They stopped at a garishly painted red door and Tom followed the shorter man in. He took the new spiral-bound shorthand notebook out of his right suit pocket. From his left, Tom pulled the cheap audio cassette recorder he had bought in an electronics shop on the way. He hoped the props would back up his impersonation of a reporter. He knew Daniel Carney was a journalist because he had seen the man’s business card under Nick Roberts’s refrigerator. He recalled thinking that the card looked low-budget. It was the kind you could make up on an instant printing machine, the sort often found at major railway stations. Whoever Carney was, he probably wasn’t at the top of his game. Tom had wondered if Nick had been handed the card at a function Greeves had attended, or if he knew the reporter socially. Given that his name was in Precious’s diary, though, it was possible Nick had crossed paths with him at Club Minx.
‘You can put that away and all,’ Fisher said. ‘I don’t want anyone taping me.’
Tom nodded and slipped the cassette recorder back in his pocket. He left the notebook closed, on the table, sat down and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.
Fisher looked at his watch. ‘Well? What have you got to say that’s so important?’
From Fisher’s comments over the phone, Tom realised that Precious had something to tell the media, and that a bidding war had been going on. ‘I’ve been told by the Old Bill that I can’t write anything about Ebony’s death.’
Fisher shrugged. ‘No shit, Sherlock. They’ve done the same to us, by slapping a D-notice on the story. Makes you wonder what else she was up to with Greeves, doesn’t it?’
Fisher was living up to his name, Tom thought, angling for information that he might have missed out on.
‘It’s why I’m here,’ Tom said, keeping his arms folded.
‘Well, I’ve got nothing to tell you, sunshine,’ Fisher said, leaning back and mirroring Tom’s body language. ‘So if you’ve got nothing else to say, you’d best be on your bike.’
‘I never got the whole story out of her,’ Tom said.
Fisher raised his eyebrows, then broke into a grin. ‘Do what? You outbid me by ten thousand quid and you didn’t get the bloody story? You’re fucking joking? Whose money was it?’ Fisher reeled off the names of a few newspapers, but Tom didn’t nod or shake his head to any of them.
‘All I got out of her was the same as what she gave you – enough to get us interested,’ Tom said.
‘What, that she’d been rogered by Greeves?’
Tom nodded.
‘Not bad in itself, but it wasn’t much good to us if she wasn’t going to let us publish her name and picture. She was a babe in the woods, thinking she’d get us to pay fifteen grand for an anonymous tip-off. I’m assuming you did get an agreement from her to go public with all the lurid details.’
‘Of course. The extra cash did the trick.’
Fisher nodded. ‘My editor wouldn’t risk it. Bleedin’ management’s watching the pennies these days. So, who bankrolled you?’
‘Can’t say until it gets a run, but at least we didn’t hand over the money before she disappeared. The coppers have been looking around the club, you know.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know. They were breathing down my neck at one point.’
‘Me too.’ Tom felt the barrier between them crumbling a little. Perhaps Fisher had finally accepted that the competition for Ebony’s story was over and neither man had won. ‘Funny about Greeves, though.’ Tom unfolded his arms and leaned forward a little, as if he was about to share something with Fisher. ‘Such a bloody ramrod-straight type, good family man and all.’
Fisher laughed out loud. ‘What do you mean? They’re always the worst offenders! Think about it. The straighter the public profile, the kinkier they are behind the scenes.’
Tom smiled and nodded. ‘True. Is that why your rag has been hounding him about Africa so much? Were you trying to shake him up, see if he’d been making a habit of bonking black women on his jaunts?’
Fisher relaxed a little as well, nodding as Tom spoke. ‘Yea
h, well, once I got an inkling that you were going to outbid us with the slag, I thought I’d try and shake his tree, see what other rotten apples fell out. Oi, and watch what you’re calling a rag, sunshine. That’s offensive.’
As opposed to slag, Tom thought, but said nothing. ‘The other strippers at the club reckon you killed her.’
‘Silly bitches.’ Fisher shook his head. ‘Look, when I found out you’d scooped us I went down there and I was pretty angry. I tried splashing a few tenners around to see if some of the others would talk – or if they’d give me Ebony’s home number. I might have come across like your garden variety stalker, but the cops know I’m clean.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. I was in Africa when she was murdered, wasn’t I.’
‘You went for the Greeves thing?’
‘Yeah. What a fucking shambles that was. I’ve got a snout whose given me some good stuff about the bodyguard copper who went over with Greeves.’
Tom swallowed, but hoped he’d hidden his flush of alarm. ‘Such as?’
Fisher laughed. ‘You think I’d tell you? Let’s just say the boys from Hereford aren’t as secretive as they like to make out when they’ve got some dirt to sling at the coppers.’
That bastard Fraser, Tom thought. ‘So who do you reckon killed her?’
Fisher shrugged. ‘Who knows? Probably was some stalker. She was raped, from what I’ve heard. If I was really into conspiracy theories I’d say MI5 or Greeves’s bodyguard killed her to stop her from blabbing about the big man knobbing her, but Greeves’s first bodyguard was tortured and killed by the terrorists, wasn’t he?’
Tom nodded, though he didn’t know how Fisher knew about Nick, as the circumstances of his death hadn’t been publicly released. He started to worry that the reporter knew a lot more than he was letting on.
Fisher leaned forward until his palms were resting on the table, and stared into Tom’s eyes. ‘And his replacement protection officer, Detective Sergeant Tom Furey, currently on suspension pending an appearance at a parliamentary inquiry into the abduction and deaths of Robert Greeves and Bernard Joyce, is sitting in this room opposite me, isn’t he?’