#taken

by Tony Parsons

  Whitestone put her notebook on Ginger Gonzalez’s desk.

  Then she slapped it as hard as she could.

  ‘Names,’ Whitestone said. ‘Just give me the names of these men who want to make their own pornography. I know you have someone in mind, sweetheart. Just give me the names – give me one name – and we will leave you to your social introductions.’

  Ginger Gonzalez stared at the notebook.

  Then she shook her head.

  ‘It’s a fantasy,’ she said. ‘And that’s all it is. None of the women who work for me have ever been subjected to force. None of them are ever held against their will. They all want to make money until their career picks up or until they meet someone special. All of them are adults and my clients are all men who trust me. If I thought for one second that any of these men were hurting women, then I would tell you.’ She looked at Whitestone with defiance. ‘I’m not going to ruin their lives so that you can make an arrest,’ she said.

  Whitestone nodded. ‘OK,’ she said. And then to Adams. ‘Shut her down.’

  And as the red and gold lights of Chinatown spilled into the white room, TDC Adams formally arrested Ginger Gonzalez for inciting prostitution for gain.

  ‘These men who come to me,’ Ginger said as we took her down to the holding cells of West End Central. ‘They are all someone’s husband, someone’s father. You have to understand – they all have a family back home.’

  ‘And so does Jessica Lyle,’ Whitestone said.

  When I got back home someone was waiting for me in the shadows of Smithfield meat market, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness. Thin and beaky with a jet-black, spiky hairdo, he had spent a large part of his half-century on earth trying to look like the young Keith Richards but actually looked more like an elderly and unwell crow.

  He was a criminal informant called Nils. My favourite CI.

  He threw his cigarette away when he saw me coming because he knew I didn’t like it.

  ‘You still looking for that chick?’ he said.

  16

  Nils scanned the crowded pub.

  We were the only men who were not in the white coats of Smithfield meat market. And there were only men in here.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ he said.

  ‘This makes your trouble go away,’ I said. ‘Have a drink. You need a drink.’

  His hands were trembling.

  He took a nervous gulp of his beer. And then he began to talk.

  ‘I was making a delivery,’ he said. ‘Alprazolam.’

  I felt my stomach fall away.

  ‘It calms you down,’ he said. ‘It calms you right down. Sometimes it calms you down so far that you might never get up again.’

  ‘I know what it does, Nils.’

  ‘No need to snap at me, Max.’

  If you wanted to keep someone quiet and pliant then you would feed them Alprazolam, available under the trade name Xanax, among others. Alprazolam belongs to a class of medications called benzodiazepines which produce an intensely calming effect on the central nervous system without inducing any feeling of euphoria. No real high, but it knocks you right out, working on the brain and nerves to melt away feelings of anxiety and panic disorders.

  No matter what is being done to you.

  It is highly addictive.

  ‘So you’re dealing now, Nils?’

  ‘I wish,’ he said. ‘I’m just a delivery boy.’

  ‘So who are you delivering for, Nils?

  ‘Somalian drug dealers from Dagenham who will break both my legs if I give them up to the law. But do you want some low-level dealers or this woman who was taken?’

  We both knew the answer.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Belgravia,’ he said. ‘Eaton Square.’

  I pictured the beautiful white stucco-fronted houses of London’s most exclusive square.

  ‘One of those big gaffs that are left unoccupied for years by some rich thieving bastard who robbed his own people back in the old country,’ Nils said.

  I must have looked sceptical.

  ‘They’re not using all of the house,’ he said. ‘Just the basement. The rest of the place is locked up. From the street, it looks like one more oligarch’s holiday home. I made the delivery at the tradesmen’s entrance. You know those big houses in Belgravia have still got tradesmen’s entrances, some of them? As though we were living in ye olde Victorian days where the workers come around flogging their strawberries and fish every morning. Sharpening your knives and so on.’

  ‘Get on with it, Nils.’

  ‘You’ve been very short with me lately. The tradesmen’s entrance is at the side of the building. You can’t see it from the street. The order was for five hundred two-milligram pills at a tenner a time, delivered in an Amazon package. Guy I’ve never seen before gave me five grand in new fifties in an unsealed, unmarked brown envelope. I did the count, sealed the envelope and went away.’

  ‘And what are they doing in there?’

  He looked around the pub. ‘What do you call it? Fantasy enactment. That’s my guess, Max. Fantasy enactment – where you get to live the dream. Whatever the dream might be. Now, my problem,’ he said, moving on to what I could do for him, ‘is that I have this uniform at New Scotland Yard who has taken a real dislike to me. If you could have a word, get him to take a step back, tell him that I am your highly valued CI …’

  I stood up and took his beer from his hand.

  ‘Where we going, Max?’

  ‘Belgravia,’ I said. ‘Take me to this place.’

  We drove across town and then slowly cruised the vast expanse of Eaton Square. Nils squinted uncertainly at the pristine rows of white five-storey buildings. Many of the houses appeared to be shuttered for the summer or for longer. The only sign of life was the odd uniformed doorman.

  ‘I know it was definitely Eaton Square,’ Nils said. ‘And it had the – you know – the tradesmen’s entrance down the side of the building …’

  ‘You weren’t given the address?’

  ‘I was driven. Did a few deliveries around town. And I remembered Eaton Square because – well – look at it. It’s Eaton Square.’

  Nils was right. Eaton Square was beautiful, like somewhere fancy in one of those old musicals where London is full of singing street traders asking who will buy this beautiful morning?

  But Eaton Square is huge, far more like a highly exclusive neighbourhood than anything resembling a square. The residential gardens that occupy its leafy centre are so large that they are crossed by two side streets and have the King’s Road running right through the middle. And although we circled so many times the uniformed doormen were noting my registration plate, Eaton Square kept its secrets.

  ‘Were you stoned when you came here, Nils?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘Although I might have had a Xanax just to calm my nerves.’

  ‘And who were they? This crew you saw?’

  ‘They looked like Albanians.’

  ‘How do you know they were Albanians?’

  ‘I know what Albanians look like, don’t I? They’re just – you know – Albanian-looking.’

  ‘You go inside?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many of them in there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are they armed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know very much, do you, Nils?’

  He shrugged.

  I stared around the vast expanse of Eaton Square. Then I looked at Nils’ beaky, drug-ravaged face in the half-light of my car.

  And I believed him.

  ‘This place you went to,’ I said. ‘What makes you think they have Jessica Lyle in there?’

  ‘Because I could hear a woman screaming,’ he said.

  17

  It was so early that I was still on my first triple espresso when Whitestone and I walked into the interview room at West End Central where Ginger Gonzalez was waiting for
her lawyer to show.

  ‘We don’t need you any more,’ Whitestone told her, not bothering to sit down.

  Ginger looked at me through eyes that were sticky with lack of sleep and I saw something like hope pass across her face. Whitestone crushed it like a Ford Cortina getting flattened inside the car compactor at Auto Waste Solutions.

  ‘When our day staff show up in a couple of hours, you will be formally charged with owning, managing and running a brothel,’ Whitestone said. ‘Good luck with convincing the judge that you front a dating agency. If the prosecution can establish coercion, then you are looking at two to five years. If they can’t establish coercion, then you will do anything between six months and two years. Either way – you’re shut down and you’re going down.’

  Ginger was still looking at me.

  Whitestone answered her unspoken question.

  ‘One of DC Wolfe’s criminal informants has pointed us in the right direction,’ Whitestone said. ‘Which is good news for that CI and bad news for you. You see how this works? If someone helps us, we help them. Maybe give them a pass. Maybe give them a slap on the wrist instead of something stronger. Get one of our colleagues to take a step back. And if they don’t help us, if they choose not to – like you – then we leave them to their fate.’

  I saw the fight going out of Ginger. She stretched out her bare arms on the table. Weary, pleading. The end of a very long night and the start of what could be the hardest day of her life.

  Never for money. Always for love.

  ‘If I had any way of helping you, then I would,’ she said quietly.

  ‘So you’ve never heard of this place?’ I said, wanting her to help us and save herself. ‘Some kind of dungeon in Eaton Square? A private members’ club for perverts? That doesn’t ring any bells? Come on, Ginger!’

  She took a deep breath and let it go. ‘I did hear a rumour that there was somewhere in Belgravia,’ she said. ‘In one of those big houses that are always left empty.’

  Whitestone shook her head with disbelief.

  ‘I can’t believe it. We finally jogged her memory, Max!’

  ‘I didn’t know it was in Eaton Square! And there are all kinds of rumours about all kinds of places. All the worst fantasies – the very worst – are normalised online, made to seem OK, made to seem like some mainstream taste. These men sitting in front of their screens with a credit card in their hands and something else in the other. One click and they can make their dream come true. Any dream. Any fantasy. Everything you can think of and plenty you can’t. You heard about those sex dolls that put up a fight? Why do they make dolls like that? Because some men like it. Because there’s a market. There’s a market for everything these days.’

  ‘And sometimes these men – the men that want to make their sick dreams real – sometimes they come to someone like you,’ Whitestone said, more gently now.

  I watched Ginger making the calculation. From the moment we walked out of this room, it was all over for her.

  ‘Ginger,’ I pleaded. ‘You need to tell us who came to you.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Whitestone said. ‘Last chance. Don’t worry about client confidentiality. That’s a doctor. Not a pimp.’

  ‘But I sent him away,’ Ginger said weakly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘And I don’t know if he ever actually did anything,’ she protested. ‘I don’t know if he ever tried to act out his fantasy.’

  ‘And what was that fantasy?’ Whitestone said, very quietly.

  ‘He wanted a woman who was telling him, “No.” Not a woman who was pretending to say, “No.” Not acting out some S&M panto. Not playing those submission and dominance games.’ She hung her head. ‘He wanted to take it to the next level, he said. He wanted authenticity. A woman who was being held against her will. He wanted a woman who did not want him.’

  Whitestone’s fist slammed down on the table.

  ‘Rape!’ she said. ‘You’re talking about rape!’

  ‘Fantasy!’ Ginger said. ‘I’m talking about fantasy!’

  ‘It’s all a fantasy,’ Whitestone said. ‘Until they make it real.’

  ‘Just give us a name, Ginger,’ I pleaded. ‘Last time of asking.’

  I looked at Whitestone and she nodded.

  ‘Give us a name and address and you can walk out of here,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ Ginger said. ‘But he could be an innocent man.’

  Whitestone laughed out loud.

  ‘If there is one thing this bastard is not,’ she said, ‘it’s innocent.’

  We drove straight to a private road in Highgate.

  It had the feel of an exclusive village.

  Children off to the private schools in their uniforms. The girls in yellow and blue shirts and skirts, the boys in red and black blazers. And fathers off to work in Maseratis and Porsche 911s. Vanity cars for the man with everything. There were working women here too, plenty of them, but they got by without the vanity cars.

  And there was an army of nannies – young East Europeans, older Filipinas, even one in a starched brown and white uniform that made her look like the ghost of a nanny from one hundred years ago. The nannies were loading small children into large SUVs and family cars. The inhabitants of this private road had lots of children. They had lots of everything.

  The childminders were just the start. There was hired help galore, an entire servant class to walk the dog, clean the house, fuss over the large gardens, to fish a single fallen leaf from swimming pools that looked like they came from a David Hockney painting. And as the fathers roared off to sit in a traffic jam on the Finchley Road, they were waved off by mothers in their gym kit or dressed for their own high-flying gig in the financial district, walking to the tube in their Asics, their high heels in their bag, their phones in their hands. It was a world where privilege was in the air they breathed.

  ‘What does the man with everything want?’ Whitestone said as I parked the BMW. ‘Some terrified woman chained up in a basement.’

  The man we were looking for did not open his own front door. A housekeeper or maid in a black-and-white Upstairs Downstairs pinny opened it for him. Whitestone and I showed her our warrant cards.

  ‘Mr Greenslade,’ I said.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  Whitestone held up her warrant card slightly higher. ‘We don’t need an appointment,’ she said.

  ‘Sir?’ the maid called.

  Greenslade was a tall, balding, overweight man who was dressed for work – there was a fat black leather briefcase stuffed with legal documents waiting by the door – and he was in a hurry. He was clearly irritated at this unscheduled intrusion until he realised who we were.

  When he saw the warrant cards, his round, moisturised face seemed to crumble.

  ‘I’ll take care of it, Marilyn,’ he told the housekeeper, the authority in his voice ebbing away.

  We waited while the housekeeper had shuffled off to the back of the house. I could hear a woman’s voice, children. The family was busy with breakfast, bustling to get another perfect day up and running.

  I showed Greenslade the photograph of Jessica Lyle.

  ‘Mr Greenslade, we’re investigating an abduction and we think you can help us,’ I said. ‘Sir.’

  He took us to the back garden where, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, we could see the family at table. A good-looking woman in her middle years, three children, all very young, one in a high chair. Second or third marriage, I guessed. The summer morning was still cool in the garden but sweat gleamed on Greenslade’s scalp and stained his pale blue business shirt a darker shade, as if the shame was seeping out of his soft, squishy body.

  ‘You approached Ginger Gonzalez of Sampaguita looking for a particular service that she was unable to provide,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You need to think very carefully about how you play
this, because denial is just not going to work for you. Denial is going to be very bad for you indeed. We know what you wanted from Ginger. We know exactly why you went to Chinatown.’

  He glanced towards the house. His wife was watching him.

  ‘Your wife,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Whitestone said. ‘Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a man with all of this’ – her gesture took in his family, his home, the private road, the army of servants, all of green, rich Highgate, this gilded life of plenty – ‘want a woman who can’t say no? Your wife not enough for you?’

  He stared around the garden, seeing nothing. The stains on his business shirt grew larger.

  ‘After the birth of our last child, she lost interest,’ he said. ‘In me.’

  Whitestone nodded.

  ‘Ah, that explains it then. It’s the woman’s fault. I knew it was the woman’s fault. It’s always the woman’s fault. I just needed you to explain it to me.’ A beat. ‘Do you know what they do to rapists in prison?’

  Tears of fearful self-pity sprang to his eyes.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ he said.

  ‘You’re already in trouble, Greenslade,’ I said. ‘We’re trying to get you out of trouble. For the greater good. But you need to start telling us the truth.’

  ‘It was just a fantasy,’ he said. ‘I saw it online. Men taking women. Taking them. And then it was the only thing I could see.’ He ran a hand across his damp scalp, his eyes sliding away from us. ‘The only thing that worked for me. The only thing that got me excited.’

  ‘It all starts with a fantasy,’ Whitestone said, very calmly, and I saw again that she was at her best during the morning. It was at night when the vodka took over, it was after dark when the horrors happened. I thought of the broken body of the scooter rider lying in the shadows of that abandoned car wash on a road that looked as empty as the surface of the moon, and quickly pushed the thought away.

  ‘Every assault, every child abduction, every rape,’ Whitestone said. ‘Every act of cruelty starts off as the stuff of dreams. Always, it starts as a fantasy and then some idiot steps over the invisible line that skirts the stuff of dreams and dares to make it real – especially these days, especially now, where every vile impulse has got its own chat group, its own hundred dedicated pages on every social media platform – every sickness, every perversion, every twisted act of torture is made to seem somehow socially acceptable, as if everyone is at it, as if it is perfectly normal, as if you might actually get away with it. And then someone like us has to come along and clear up all the mess.’