Kiss Me When I'm Dead

by Dominic Piper

  And one more thing comes to mind. It sounds silly and it might be me, but I didn’t like the way that Raleigh and Fisher – whichever one of them it was – had gone to the trouble of getting Viola’s bra size on that sheet of paper. The beach photograph would have been more than enough. I’m trying to track her down, not buy lingerie for her. I get an unpleasant picture in my head of Raleigh rifling through her belongings until he finds an old bra to get the size off the label. What was he thinking of? How does he think I work? ‘Hey, punk. I’m looking for a stacked blonde dame. Sports a 38EE. Partial to tight sweaters. You can’t miss her.’

  The hotel might be worth a visit. Maybe someone remembered her. Someone must have registered her when she arrived, unless she was using a different name, which is extremely likely. The ‘friend’ who reported her missing would have to have told the police what her real name was, otherwise they would never have contacted Raleigh in the first place.

  The hotel staff, however, may never have known her real name and would only know her by the fake, assuming she was using one. If I’m going to have a useful conversation with anyone at The Bolton Mayfair, I have to know what the fake name was.

  Maybe someone saw her leave. They probably have CCTV, at least in the lobby. Do they keep everything on their computer system? How long for? It’s probably wiped every couple of weeks to save space and stop the system slowing down too much. I wonder if the police thought to take a look at it. Somehow I don’t think they’d have bothered. I have to keep reminding myself that this is only a missing persons case for them, and they probably wouldn’t bother exhuming deleted security camera footage. The police probably think Raleigh is a bit of a joke and is wasting their time.

  He’s an interesting personality type, though. Lots of inconsistencies in the way he was behaving; narcissistic and crowing one moment, then insecure and sentimental the next. I have no idea how you’d run a business like his, but I can’t quite square employing someone like Fisher with brokering arms deals. Perhaps it’s a more dangerous occupation than I’d imagined. Also, the charade with the two goons seemed totally unnecessary and collapsed as soon as I wouldn’t go along with it.

  A red minicab slows down right next to me and the driver leans over and asks if I need a car. When I say no, he says, ‘Fuck you, man!’ and drives away.

  The more I think about Raleigh, the more confused I feel, but I can’t quite put a finger on the reason. OK, so he finds out his missing daughter isn’t dead after two years. It must have been an incredible relief for him. But this time, he’s not going to trust the police. He’s going to go private. He asks around his buddies and comes up with me; someone with no experience in missing persons cases at all, but who, with the promise of all that money will certainly have a go and will maybe even succeed where the police have failed.

  But if I was in his place and money was no object, I’d hire one of those big security firms full of ex-CID and have maybe half a dozen people working on this at the same time. On the other hand, some of the people I’m going to try and talk to may be able to smell former policemen a mile off and will clam up just because they can. Raleigh may be smarter than I’m giving him credit for.

  I’m just on the outskirts of Notting Hill Gate when I decided I’m fed up with walking and hail a passing black cab. The driver sniffs when I tell him Covent Garden. At least he doesn’t say, ‘Fuck you, man.’

  4

  SELECT METROPOLITAN ESCORTS

  I’m dropped off in the middle of Long Acre and take my usual, totally random, convoluted route home. For me, at least, Covent Garden is a great place to live; always busy, day and night, and full of tourists, workers, shoppers, drunks, clubbers and people in transit. There are also a lot of shop windows, which come in useful when you need reflective surfaces to check if anyone unwelcome is behind you.

  Despite the variety, it’s got a definite atmosphere and population and you can feel if something or someone is wrong. I walk eastwards along Long Acre, cross the road suddenly as if I’m heading for the tube station, but pass it by and turn down James Street, walking straight towards the market, stopping to look at a silver-painted mime, then stopping again to look through the window of The Nag’s Head, as if I’m looking for friends.

  I cross over to look in Fossil’s window for a few seconds, then walk slowly over to the market, losing myself in the crowds and taking a hard left past the cafés, shops, classical buskers and street performers until I’m outside again. I slip around the back of the market into Tavistock Street, then down Burleigh Street and take a swift left past the No Entry sign into Exeter Street, where I live. There’s no real need for any of this, of course, or at least I hope there isn’t. I just like to keep my hand in. At least that’s what I tell myself. Actually, I think I’m just suffering from a healthy paranoia.

  Exeter Street is one of those strange roads which is dead in the centre of London but looks like it belongs nowhere. Thirty seconds south and you’re in The Strand and across the road from The Savoy Theatre, but you’d never guess it from the dingy buildings, the permanent scaffolding, the graffiti and the bins.

  Many of the buildings are the back end of those in the adjacent roads and don’t have obvious entrances, and it’s more like a road you take to get to somewhere else. But the stage door for The Lyceum Theatre is on the south side of my section and across from that is Joe Allen, the obscurely located London branch of the famous New York restaurant, always busy and serving American food to the denizens of Theatreland. Further down, there’s a bar and a cookie shop. I live virtually on top of Joe Allen, three floors up. I never eat there.

  I turn the keys in both enhanced Yale cylinder locks, let myself in and walk down the short hallway, carefully avoiding the nightingale floor that I had installed shortly after I moved in here, just over two years ago. In case you’re not familiar with nightingale floors, they’re a seventeenth-century Japanese invention, reputedly used as a defence against ninjas, though I’m not sure there are many of those in the vicinity of Exeter Street. All wooden floors creak, but these have flooring nails underneath, placed in a criss-cross pattern that makes a terrible, loud, high-pitched, squeaking, creaking noise when anyone walks on them. Sounds like birds, so they say, hence the name.

  It sounds eccentric and primitive, but it works, and I have a lot of reasons for being so charmingly low-tech. Plus if anyone breaks in here while I’m asleep (if they’re professional enough to get past the cylinder locks), I’ll know about it in exactly one second. There’s a secret, silent path through the nightingale floor, which is known only to me and Mr Oe, who built it for an extremely reasonable three thousand pounds.

  Once past my archaic security zone, I’m in the large kitchen, which leads to the other rooms. I have the whole floor to myself, but it wasn’t cheap, and I had to make a lot of changes, mainly to the rather flimsy windows and the hatch leading up to the roof. I didn’t want any of the Exeter Street ninjas breaking in, so all of the fixed bars and window grills were a necessity, and, to my surprise, ended up looking quite cool. This floor and the one below it used to be used as a wood storage area for a local carpentry firm and there’s still a faint smell of pine about the place that doesn’t come from the current wooden floors, which are made from American Black Cherry.

  Once in the kitchen, I take my jacket off, turn the heating on, load up my Siemens coffee maker with Bourbon Espresso beans, hit the switch and sit at the kitchen table, staring through the barred kitchen windows at the building across the road. Despite the triple glazing on the windows, I can hear people laughing on the street below. Theatregoers, maybe, but it’s more likely that they’re tourists or shoppers who have got lost.

  I make myself a coffee and empty the contents of Fisher’s folder onto the kitchen table. I take a look at Viola’s portrait first. I stare hard at it, willing the solution to everything to somehow jump out of the photograph and reveal itself to me. No such luck.

  Raleigh said that she had this photograph and some o
thers done by some photographer. I flip it over and look at the back, in case there’s a stamp from a photographic studio, but there’s nothing. What happened to the other photographs and why did she keep this one? Perhaps this was the only decent one, and by that I mean that the others were possibly indecent.

  Would she need photographs to sell herself? Would her pimp need photographs to show potential clients? What sort of photographs would they have to be? How do you go about getting a call girl nowadays? I still see cards in telephone kiosks in the West End, but these are quickly removed. But then if Viola was a high-class call girl, she wouldn’t use that method.

  I fire up the computer and while I’m waiting for it to do all its stuff, take another look at Viola. Such a beauty. I don’t know her, but I rather hope that she’s not dead. It would be such a shame. She was twenty-two when this was taken; an age when most young women are just beginning their lives and hers was already royally fucked.

  Maybe it was vanity, getting these done. Maybe she just wanted some nice photographs of herself while she was still beautiful. Who knows? Maybe she left this one in Raleigh’s place as a souvenir of herself, perhaps out of spite if they didn’t get on. Maybe she left it there by accident.

  I’m not really sure what to Google, so I type in ‘high class escorts London’ and, as I somehow suspected, there are loads of websites. I click on the third one down for the sake of randomness. It’s called Select Metropolitan Escorts. Girls are classed according to colour, age and body type. I click on ‘busty’ and look at the first girl that comes up. Her name’s Jasmin. No surname. There are seven photographs of her, all showing off her body. Two are in sexy lingerie, two are in a bikini and two are in what I would call business clothing. There’s also one where she’s topless, but her arms are crossed over her breasts. I assume there are rules about how much you can show on these sites if you don’t want to get shut down.

  To the right, there’s a panel which gives information (which I think you’d have to take with a pinch of salt) about her age, measurements, eye colour, hair colour, build, sexual orientation and nationality. Jasmin is bisexual, Brazilian and charges three hundred pounds per hour. That’s for in calls. Outcalls are three hundred and fifty, the extra fifty presumably covering travelling expenses. Each additional hour is two hundred and fifty and the overnight charge is two thousand. Jasmin doesn’t look very Brazilian to me, but she certainly is busty.

  At the bottom of the page, there’s a section for reviews, but Jasmin doesn’t have any, at least not yet. I can’t imagine that many of her clients would be interested in recording their experiences, but I can see how it would be helpful, just like when you’re buying stuff on Amazon.

  I look at two more girls, Izolda and Raina. Both are very pretty, like Jasmin. They all have the kind of look that if someone told you they were glamour models, you’d have no cause to doubt them. There’s a slight difference with Raina, though. In all of her photographs, her eyes are gently fuzzed out. Presumably there are women on these sites who don’t want to be identified. It would hardly make much difference if you were a punter. If you were interested in Raina, you’d still know what sort of body she had (if that’s really her in the photographs) and you’d get a good impression of her facial beauty. You just wouldn’t recognise her if she walked by on the street, which is guess is the important thing. There’s a chance you wouldn’t even recognise if you worked with her.

  In fact, the fuzzing of the eyes makes it likely that these are genuine photographs of the girl calling herself Raina. Presumably, no business like this would last long if you booked one girl and another one, perhaps less good-looking, turned up at your hotel room.

  I decide to see what would happen if I decided to book Raina and click on the relevant oblong. A new page appears asking for my requirements. They want a lot of details, such as your name, telephone number, email address, service required and the length of time you’d want to book her for. Obviously, they want the date and time, too. You could, if you wished, just book her for a dinner date. Maybe book her for half a dozen dinner dates, to see how things went and whether you had anything in common, before you booked her for a three hundred and fifty quid outcall.

  There’s a CAPTCHA as the bottom of the page, presumably to protect the girls from being hired by a bot. In fact, it’s only this security measure, your name and your telephone number, which are the required fields. If it’s an outcall, you have to put in details of the meeting point and give the room number if it’s a hotel. So the client could book one of these girls using a pay-as-you-go mobile and a false name if they so wished. If anything happened to one of the girls, it would be very difficult to track down the perpetrator. Not impossible, just very difficult.

  I click my way through some more girls, while my eyes keep flicking to Viola’s photograph. Yes. This is a good, professional shot and there are photographs of this quality on each page of this site. So perhaps Viola was on one of these sites. The question is, of course, who booked her? And which site was she on? And what name was she using?

  If you’re a young woman and you fancy this type of work, there’s a page where you can apply for your details to be placed on here. There’s a section where you can upload up to a dozen photographs of yourself once you’ve been approved by whoever does the approving.

  That’s it, then. The photographs have to be genuine or whoever runs the site wouldn’t bother themselves with you if they turned out to be fake. They’d certainly want to meet you before they allowed you on here to make sure you were genuine and the real you matched your pics.

  So the site is the pimp, in a sense. They probably charge the girls for advertising themselves on here and take a cut of whatever money the girls earn. Once again, there’s a CAPTCHA at the bottom, to stop bots applying to be call girls. I shouldn’t really be surprised that it’s like this. Prostitution has always taken advantage of the latest technology, just like it did when telephones started to catch on. Would the girls on sites like this be called eGirls as opposed to call girls?

  I look at half a dozen more sites, but they’re all different. Different types of girls, different prices and different target audiences. Some are scuzzy, others are high class and insanely priced. Some have girls who have appeared in famous porn films, others are ‘students’, currently in university somewhere in the country. Makes you feel glad your student loan was paid off in full.

  Strangely, it gets a bit overwhelming looking at all this stuff after a while. All those bodies for sale, all those breasts, all those mouths, all that youth, all that beauty, all that fake eagerness, all those fake names, all those fake nationalities. An endless, unstoppable conveyor belt of lies and money and flesh and fucking; elite, exclusive, high class, choice, friendly, in call, outcall, busty, petite, Asian, ebony, English rose and mature. The clients don’t care about the girls and the girls don’t care about the clients. Fucking hell. Trying to track down a single, lost girl in this virtual sex world would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Well, at least I’m soaking up the atmosphere, but it still doesn’t tell me where Viola has got to. I take a look at the other photograph, the one where she’s a teenager on the beach. Seventeen years old. Four or five years later she’d be on the game and mainlining heroin, if what her father said is true. Her hair is being blown across her face, so I can’t really look at her eyes to see if she’s happy/distressed/fucked, but everything appears to be OK. The slightly shorter hair in this photograph suits her face shape and with that figure she must have been beating the boys off with a stick.

  The sheet of paper, which Fisher prepared, is a bit of a joke, really. It’s as if they were trying to do something really slick and impressive, but could only come up with four typed lines and a couple of names. I’ll certainly want to visit The Bolton Mayfair, but not until I discover Viola’s fake name. I could wave the photographs in the faces of the staff, but they see so many people it’s unlikely they’ll remember her, striking though she is. Doing
that is still a possibility, but only if nothing else useful turns up.

  DS Olivia Bream would have a lot of the information I need. She’d know who called in Viola as a missing person and she’d know the name that Viola was using in the hotel. The only problem with DS Bream is that Raleigh was afraid that hassling her might affect the quality of the police investigation into Viola’s disappearance. On the other hand, I don’t think that the police will be spending too much time on this anyway. On a personal basis, though, I’d prefer not to have to deal with the police and have found them to be pretty unhelpful in the past.

  Taylor Conway sounds like he’ll be next to useless. This is someone who may not have had any contact with Viola for four years. As soon as she moved out of his circle, it’s doubtful that they kept in touch. I’ll keep him on the back burner.

  So – hotel staff, old boyfriend and slightly involved police officer.

  I pick up my mobile and punch in the number of Seymour Street police station. I look at my watch to see what time it is. Six-fifteen. I can hear the pre-recorded messages telling me to do things. I press three, and listen to more instructions, then I press one and listen to further instructions, then I press four and finally I hear what sounds like a real telephone actually ringing. Christ – what if this was an emergency? After about three or four minutes, someone finally answers.

  ‘Hi. I’d like to speak to DS Bream, please.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s not here at the moment,’ says an impatient male voice. ‘Perhaps you could call tomorrow.’

  ‘When will she be in?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  While I’m holding on, I have time to make another coffee and drink it. My switchboard officer is doubtless doing the same thing. I know he’s there. I can hear him breathing.