Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [71]
He nodded. ‘That’s what we do. Everything from swimsuits to lingerie to page three. This year we’ve had two girls in the Pirelli calendar and we’ve had page three eighteen times. The West Country produces some of the best-looking girls in the land. It’s the warmth and the rain.’ He winked. ‘And the clotted cream. You know – all that fat.’
‘These girls, these models, do they go further than topless?’
‘Of course. The human body is a great instrument for artistic expression. If a girl is liberated, comfortable being naked, then she can get a lot of satisfaction from this sort of work. Most of them love it – really love it.’
‘Do you believe that? Or, rather, do you expect me to believe that? I mean, really they’re in it for the money.’
He was silent. Only his jaw showed agitation: it moved, very slightly, from side to side, as if he was working a piece of food out from his teeth. At last he raised his hands. ‘You’re not stupid and neither am I. Of course not. They do it for the money. And most of the time it’s not cos they have to – it’s not cos they were trafficked, or cos they’re having to put food in the mouths of their disabled babies or their dying mothers or whatever. Not even to feed their drug addiction, because most of them are clean. No – in my experience most of the time they’re doing it cos it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day. Quicker and easier – and, honestly, you get more respect from the photographer than you do from your average shopper. And I say hats off to them. Not that I’ve ever, in my ten years in the business, ever seen a girl do something sensible with the money. No investing it or anything like that. They spend it on clothes and, frankly, tit jobs. So they can – what? Go on doing modelling. A bit of a mindless cycle, if you think about it – men getting what they think they want from women, women getting what they think they want from men.’
Actually, Mr Holden, Zoë thought, not all of them spend their money on clothes and tit jobs. Some of them spend it on escaping something. Buying their freedom. ‘Have you been watching the news? The local news? There was a murder in Bath the other day.’
‘I know. Young girl. Pretty. Lorraine, was it? Lorraine someone.’
‘Lorne. Lorne Wood. The name doesn’t ring a bell?’
He frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t remember her coming to you?’
‘She was a schoolgirl, I thought.’
‘Yes, but she wanted to model. And she might not have used her real name.’
She pulled from her satchel a laminated set of pictures that the reprographics unit had produced. A set of photos of Lorne. The billions poured into developing facial-recognition technology had done little more than raise an important issue: the human face is so multi-faceted that it can vary wildly just from the smallest change in angle and lighting. The chief constable had picked up on this and now the force was inclined to use a selection of photographs for identification purposes. On this sheet many of the photos collected from Lorne’s wall had been collaged. Zoë leaned half out of her chair and placed the sheet under Holden’s nose.
He looked at them. Frowned. Shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think so. I get scores of photos from girls who think they’re going to be on page three, or the cover of FHM. The faces, I’ll be honest, merge into one eventually, but I don’t think I remember her.’
She took the sheet back and sat for a moment, eyes on Lorne’s Hollywood smile. None of these looked anything like the photos on the camera chip. They were in a totally different mood. She reached into her pocket for her iPhone, to which she’d transferred all the photos from Lorne’s chip, and brought up one of Lorne in underwear on the bed. Not the topless one. She’d protect Lorne from that at least. ‘How about that?’
This time Holden’s face changed. ‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘That alters things. I do recognize