Behind Dead Eyes

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Get her away from here,’ Dean ordered, and Helen struggled to steer the other girl from the room. ‘Get in there, Susie!’ Dean shouted, and between them Helen and Dean managed to manoeuvre the injured but still furious girl into the empty room. There was blood on her face but she was still shouting.

  ‘Calm down, Susie,’ ordered Dean, ‘and stay in here! Don’t let her out,’ he warned Helen, who nodded, for she had no desire to witness a repeat of the highly one-sided fight.

  Dean closed the door on both of them and returned to Callie. ‘You!’ he shouted. ‘With me now! You’re on report.’ Callie seemed to slump on hearing those words, giving up the fight all at once.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ she whined. ‘Susie stole Diane’s jacket!’ Bitter, frustrated tears fell.

  Dean snatched the jacket from her then handed it to Tom, who released his grip on the now calm girl. ‘Look after it,’ Dean said, placing a firm hand on Callie’s shoulder before marching her out of the room.

  ‘Don’t give it to Susie!’ shouted Callie.

  ‘He won’t,’ said Dean. ‘Keep an eye on it till I get back,’ he told Tom, who nodded. Anything to keep the peace, he thought.

  ‘It was her favourite,’ sobbed Callie as Dean led her away.

  ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ he told Tom. A moment later, the journalist found himself alone in the room. All was still now; the photograph of Callie and Diane that Helen must have dropped during the scrap the only evidence there had ever been a disturbance here at all.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said to himself. Helen was still in the other room with the injured girl. He knew she would look after her somehow and his presence would probably not be welcomed, so he stayed put. He marvelled at the way Susie had taken several blows to the head, some deep scratches and a kick on the chin as if this was just a normal day for her.

  And all over a jacket.

  He was still holding the offending item and he sat down on the bed with it. The suede jacket was nice enough, Tom supposed, but it looked quite old, probably a charity shop purchase. It had two breast pockets with press-stud buttons and a brown leather collar that matched the colour of the rest of the jacket. There were two further side pockets and one inside.

  Tom reached inside the jacket, stopped, paused for a moment then persuaded himself he was doing the right thing. He glanced at the open door and listened. All he could hear was Susie’s voice as she protested her innocence and railed at the injustice of the attack from Callie while Helen acted as counsellor. There was no other sound and he knew Dean must have taken Callie to the far end of the long corridor they had marched up to get here.

  Tom slipped his hand into the inside pocket but felt nothing. He didn’t really expect to find anything. If Diane had been wearing another jacket when she went she would hardly have left anything valuable behind, assuming she actually owned anything of value, which he doubted; and the jacket’s new owner would surely have found it by now if she did. Next he checked the open side pockets but all he found was a bus ticket for a local journey. Finally, and with little expectation, he opened the buttons of both breast pockets and fished inside. There was nothing in the first but he felt something in the second and pulled it out.

  Tom was now holding a smart and expensive business card. He glanced at the front, which had a black silhouette of a naked woman on a red background. There was one large word printed on it in embossed gold lettering.

  ‘MIRAGE’.

  Underneath this in a stylish, italicised font was written, ‘Where your fantasy becomes reality.’

  He turned the card over and found an address in Brewer Street and a phone number with a London area code. Brewer Street rang a bell and Tom remembered how he’d once written a piece on Soho clip joints that featured a place on that street.

  He heard a door slam and immediately pocketed the card. He listened as footsteps came from the corridor. Just before they reached him he made an instinctive decision. The photograph of Callie and Diane was still on the floor. He knew this was one of Callie’s few precious possessions but he bent and quickly snatched it up. He had just finished stuffing it into his pocket next to the Mirage business card when Dean appeared in the doorway looking harassed but a little calmer than when he had left the room with Callie.

  ‘All quiet on the western front,’ he said. ‘Callie’s in the dinner hall and won’t be going anywhere. I’ve got a doc coming to look at Susie, though she’s as tough as old boots, that one. Not the first time she’s taken a beating,’ he observed sadly, ‘poor little cow,’ then he remembered Tom was still holding the jacket and he stretched out a hand. ‘I’d better take that,’ he said. Tom duly handed it over.

  They trudged back to the car together. ‘That was … unexpected,’ said a shocked Helen when they were both inside the vehicle.

  ‘Did Susie say anything while you were with her?’

  ‘Just that Diane had given her the jacket before she left.’

  ‘Why would Diane give it to her and not take it with her, if it was her favourite?’ asked Tom. ‘Why not give it to Callie instead of Susie if they were best friends?’

  ‘I tried to ask those questions but she just got very irate.’

  ‘Know what disturbed me the most,’ he asked her when they reached the car, ‘and I’m not talking about the fight?’

  ‘The way they kept telling us how safe they felt?’

  He turned to face her. ‘And we never even asked them.’

  ‘Sounded like they were all reading from the same script to me,’ observed Helen. ‘I wonder who wrote it.’

  It was DC Malone who answered the phone. ‘Yes, he’s here,’ she said, eyeing Bradshaw. ‘Ian,’ she called, ‘it’s the bloke from the garage, about your car.’

  ‘Thanks, put him through.’ DC Malone stabbed at some more buttons then waited until Bradshaw’s landline began to ring.

  He gave Malone a thumbs up before answering, ‘Ian Bradshaw speaking, have you found the problem yet?’

  ‘Sorry, pal, she’s a total write-off,’ said Tom.

  Bradshaw swivelled in his chair so he was facing away from his colleagues. ‘How did you get on at Meadowlands?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘It was … interesting.’

  ‘How so?’

  Tom briefed Bradshaw on the fight at Meadowlands and the way all the girls there seemed brainwashed, except for one. ‘Diane Turner,’ Tom told the detective, ‘who absconded around the same time as Sandra Jarvis.’

  ‘You want me to some digging about this Diane Turner?’

  ‘Not unless you can do it under the radar. If you start asking questions about Diane it’ll be noticed and, forgive my paranoia here, but we don’t know who we can trust.’

  Tom expected a lecture from Bradshaw about not every policeman on the force being in the pay of gangsters but instead the detective said, ‘Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they ain’t out to get you.’

  ‘Exactly. You can check it out discreetly but something tells me Diane’s disappearance wasn’t reported.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ confirmed Bradshaw.

  ‘How could you possibly know that without checking?’ asked Tom, then he remembered the case Bradshaw was working on. ‘Because of the burned girl?’

  ‘Believe me, I am familiar with every missing persons report from the past year.’ Bradshaw’s immediate thought was that if Diane’s disappearance had gone unreported she might even be the burned girl but he knew that was a long shot and she was probably just another runaway.

  Tom must have realised that’s what he would be thinking. ‘Diane is alive and well and living in London apparently. She’s been in touch with Callie but finding her won’t be easy. We have no address and she doesn’t want to be found.’

  ‘A missing teenage girl in London,’ observed Bradshaw dryly.

  ‘I know,’ admitted Tom, ‘a needle in a haystack.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ said Bradshaw dryly, ‘I’m not remotely busy.’
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br />   ‘There’s one other thing,’ Tom told him and he reached inside his pocket, drew out the business card and looked at it.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Bradshaw.

  ‘Mirage,’ Tom told him, ‘where your fantasy becomes reality.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tom’s train into London was half an hour late. It was met by an army of impatient cleaners and station staff keen to shoo the passengers from it as quickly as possible so they could turn it around for the return trip that evening. It hadn’t taken Ian Bradshaw long to come back to him with information about Mirage. As Tom had guessed from the business card, it was a ‘Gentleman’s Club’.

  Places like Mirage had been springing up all over London lately, thanks to the relaxing of attitudes around the sale of sexual services. Stripping in working men’s clubs or the back rooms of dodgy pubs had been replaced by more open, respectable and far more lucrative lap dancing clubs like Mirage, which was owned by a man named Andre Devine. He was seen as ‘pretty clean’ for that world, with no known connections to organised crime but Bradshaw had stressed the word known and warned Tom to be careful. ‘So you’re off to conduct research into naked women?’

  ‘The things I do to solve your cases for you.’

  Mirage seemed like just the place for a troubled young runaway like Diane Turner and if she was there maybe she could shed some new light on the disappearance of her confidante, Sandra Jarvis.

  Tom stepped out of King’s Cross station and made straight for the Underground, taking the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square. He cut through Chinatown with its myriad restaurants and exotic grocery stores before entering Soho from Greek Street. He knew his way around well enough from a six-month stint on the country’s biggest-selling tabloid. Soho was always good for stories.

  In any other town, a sex shop with painted-out windows would be relegated to a quiet side street. Here, on Old Compton Street, bondage and fetish gear was openly modelled in shop windows by mannequins with loose morals. However, Soho wasn’t given over completely to the sale of sex and the contrast was striking. Ronnie Scott’s famous jazz club was just a few doors from a scruffy property with a handwritten sign on a wall that offered a ‘new blonde’ in its cellar and the Groucho Club lay opposite an opened doorway which led to a steep staircase promising a ‘model’ on the next floor. There was nowhere else like it in England.

  Mirage was housed in a large building that straddled a corner of Brewer Street. A big red sign featuring a shapely girl in naked silhouette hung above its door, promising a sexual heaven behind its blacked-out windows. A single finger was pressed to her lips as if to imply Mirage was a secret only a few were permitted to know.

  Graham bought Helen a curry. It was to thank her, her editor said, for all of her hard work but he seemed a little nervous and she got the impression he didn’t do this sort of thing all the time. He was preoccupied when they ordered but it was a good meal, served at a curry house in a street just off the Bigg Market. They chatted amiably enough and the subjects varied from their families to earlier jobs and he told her some of the war stories he’d accrued during his years in journalism.

  ‘Were you one of the fifteen million then?’ asked Graham during a lull in conversation.

  ‘Is that how many tuned in?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Well, it was compulsive viewing,’ she said.

  ‘What was that line again?’

  Helen recited it for him: ‘ “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” ’

  Graham nodded. ‘Devastating to Charles, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The woman who would have been the next Queen of England admits adultery in a TV interview? Who could ever have imagined it? Apparently James Hewitt could actually be charged with treason for sleeping with the wife of the monarch. He’d have been hanged, drawn and quartered in Henry VIII’s day.’

  ‘So what? The royals have been doing it for centuries. Everybody’s at it these days.’

  ‘Not everybody,’ said Helen quickly.

  When Graham politely enquired about Helen’s boyfriend moments later it put her at her ease again. She liked and respected her editor too much to simply brush it off if he turned out to be one of those men whose wives didn’t understand them.

  It was only after he had asked for the bill that his tone turned serious. ‘I had an uncomfortable meeting the other day,’ he confided, and when she didn’t know how to respond to this, Graham expanded: ‘The managing director and one of the group’s in-house lawyers came down,’ he explained. ‘I was being warned off. It wasn’t as explicit as that but I could tell they were worried.’

  ‘Because of the stories I’ve been writing?’

  ‘Partly,’ he admitted. ‘They were careful not to mention specifics and they stressed that I retain full editorial control, but they were very keen to talk about the future and how rosy it could be for me …’

  ‘If you didn’t rock the boat?’

  ‘You catch on quickly, young lady,’ Graham told her. ‘We must have stepped on some very important toes lately and that invites scrutiny from worried investors. No one is entirely immune from that in journalism, even us, especially us, since our parent company is losing money hand over fist these days.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said they needn’t worry about me. I’m in it for the long haul. I said I knew what I was doing. They didn’t seem convinced. The stakes are getting higher,’ he told her and for the first time he looked genuinely nervous. ‘Editors can be dispensed with for any number of reasons. I’ve seen it happen.’

  So this was the reason for the curry and more than an hour’s idle chit-chat. Graham was finally coming to the point.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ She expected he would tell her to back off then. Unlike Helen, he had a wife and family to worry about.

  ‘Nothing, for now,’ he told her, ‘you carry on being our top investigative reporter; just make sure that you’re right, that’s all – or we could both be out of a job.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  So much for print and be damned.

  Tom must have looked respectable enough, as the doorman let him in unchallenged. Getting beyond the girl who took his money was harder; he had to pay her twice. There was a membership fee then a one-off admission charge before he was even admitted to the club. This place was a licence to print money.

  The sight that greeted him was a surreal one. Aside from the bar staff, the only men in the place were dressed in suits and surrounded by a large group of girls who played the room. The girls were all dressed in elaborate lingerie but nothing else. A handful of them marched straight up to Tom and encouraged him to buy a private dance before he even had time to order a drink.

  ‘Not just yet.’ His refusal was greeted by disinterest or outright hostility from the girls.

  ‘You can’t just sit here,’ one of them told him, as if he planned to enjoy the view without paying for it.

  He ignored her, went to the bar and ordered a single bottle of beer, which cost him a fiver. This was going to be an expensive night and he doubted that DCI Kane would allow any of it to be claimed back on expenses.

  Tom sipped his beer and watched the girls coldly. He had no interest in their hustling of the businessmen or the gyrations that followed. He was looking for Diane Turner but none of these girls looked anything like her.

  A girl approached him then. She was a strikingly attractive brunette who was less direct than the others. ‘Taking your time?’

  ‘I’m looking for a girl …’

  ‘Then you’re in the right place.’ She smiled.

  Tom took a chance. ‘I’m looking for this girl.’ He slid the photograph of Diane Turner from his pocket, keeping his hand over the image of Callie so she wouldn’t confuse the two.

  Her smile vanished. ‘You a copper?’ The accent was harsher than before, betraying her East End origins.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m just …�
� But she was already leaving and he thought he detected a look she had given someone.

  Seconds later, Tom’s instinct was proved right when two huge doormen appeared out of nowhere, blocking his path. ‘Can I help you?’ asked one as if that was the furthest thing from his mind.

  ‘Possibly …’ offered Tom, who was unsure of the best tactic to employ if he was not going to be thrown out on the street, or worse.

  ‘Show me,’ demanded the man and he held out a hand. He must have seen Tom show the picture to the girl.

  ‘I’m looking for her.’ He handed it over.

  The doorman glanced at it for a moment but did not say whether he knew either of the girls and he held on to the photograph. ‘Why are you looking for her in here?’ There was a definite hint of menace in his voice as if Tom had brought trouble to the establishment.

  ‘I heard she might be working for Mr Devine,’ said Tom, ‘and I’d like to speak with him if I may.’

  ‘And who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m a journalist and I’m investigating the disappearance of a young girl. I think Mr Devine might be able to help me.’

  ‘Doubt it,’ said the doorman. ‘You wait here.’ And he walked away, taking the photograph with him, to Tom’s alarm, since he didn’t have a copy. The other doorman remained, towering over Tom, who took a long drink from his expensive bottle of beer. He had a feeling that, either way, he wouldn’t be standing with it there for much longer.

  Moments later Tom was in a first-floor office with his arms outstretched while one of the doormen ran his hands briskly up and down his body. ‘First time I’ve been patted down before an interview,’ said Tom, ‘but I suppose you can’t be too careful.’

  ‘You claim you’re a journalist,’ answered Andre Devine from behind his desk, ‘but I cannot afford to believe everyone I meet.’