Lost - Michael Robotham [117]
The place is full of pimps and working girls, counting the wages of sin. A couple of them regard me suspiciously, sitting still and very straight like a pair of magistrates.
Pimps don’t look the same in real life as they do in films. They’re not snappy dressers in long leather coats and lots of gold jewelry. Mostly they’re dealers and boyfriends who’d spread their own legs if anyone would pay for the privilege.
The pixie with the pageboy cut has come back. She eyes the large pot of soup steaming on a burner. I buy her a bowl. An older black girl is looking at us nervously through the window. She’s dressed in a microskirt and lace-up boots. Her hair is twisted into bangs that run back from her forehead between paler strips of scalp.
“She says she knows Theresa.”
“What’s her name?”
“Brittany.”
“Why won’t she come inside?”
“Her pimp might be watching. He don’t like her slacking. Where’s my fifty?”
She reaches to snatch it out of my fingers. I pin her wrist to the table and turn it over, pulling her sleeve up her arm. Her skin is pale and unblemished.
“I’m not using,” she sniffles.
“Good. Go home.”
“Yeah, sure—you should see where I live.”
Brittany talks to me outside. She has ants in her pants about something and can’t stand still. Her jaw works constantly on gum, punctuating sentences with a sucking noise.
“What’s Theresa done?”
“Nothing, I just want to talk to her.”
Brittany glances down the street, trying to decide if she believes me. Eventually, she surrenders to apathy and a twenty quid note.
“She lives in a tower block in Finsbury Park. She’s got a kid now.”
“Is she still on the game?”
“Only a few regulars.”
Fifteen minutes later I’m climbing to the fourteenth floor of a tower block because the lift is out of order. Various cooking smells mingle in the stairwell, along with the noise from dueling TVs and domestic disputes.
Theresa must be expecting someone else because she opens the door with a flourish, wearing only a black teddy and bunny ears.
“Shit! Who are you?”
“The Big Bad Wolf.”
She looks past me into the hallway and then back at me. The penny drops. “Oh, no!”
Turning away from the door she wraps a dressing gown around her shoulders and I follow her inside. There are baby toys scattered on the living-room floor and a monitor hums on top of the TV. The bedroom door is closed.
“You remember me?”
“Yeah.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder and lights a cigarette.
“I’m looking for Gerry.”
“You were looking for him three years ago.”
“I’m very patient.”
She glances at a pineapple-shaped clock on the wall. “Hey, I got someone coming. He’s my best customer. If he finds you here he’ll never come back.”
“Married is he?”
“The best customers are.”
I push aside a colorful baby rug and take a seat on the sofa bed. “About Gerry.”
“I ain’t seen him.”
“Maybe he’s hiding in the bedroom.”
“Please don’t wake the baby.”
She’s quite a pretty-looking thing, except for her crooked nose and the junkie hollows beneath her eyes.
“Gerry ran out on me three years ago. I thought he was probably dead until he turned up again during the summer with a suntan and lots of big-shot stories about owning a bar in Thailand.”
“A bar?”
“Yeah. He had a passport and a driver’s license in the name of some other geezer. I figured he must have pinched it.”
“You remember the name?”
“Peter Brannigan.”
“Why did he come back?”
“Dunno. He said he had a big payday coming.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Three days ago—must have been Tuesday night.” She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. “He came busting in here, sweating and yelling. He was scared. I ain’t never seen anybody that scared. He looked like the devil himself was chasing him.”
That must have been