Kiss Me When I'm Dead

by Dominic Piper

  This is clever, I have to admit. It’s what I would have done if I was manipulating someone like Eleanor; taking her through it step by step, as if it was just a harmless prank with sentimental overtones. Everything being organised for her; being told what to say and how to say it. Fisher, and possibly Raleigh, must have spent lot of time preparing this before procuring Eleanor to be their agent. And Eleanor would have been exactly the right girl to pull it off.

  ‘Where did the name Amelia Finch come from, Eleanor? Did you make that up yourself?’

  ‘Oh no. She had to be called Amelia Finch because that was the name on the credit card he gave me. He said that it actually belonged to someone called Amelia Finch and that it would work and I was not to worry about it. The only reason I had the card was for the hotel booking. He said that there was no other way around it. Everything else could be done with cash, but not the hotel. Not that hotel, anyway.’

  ‘How much cash did he give you?’

  ‘Apart from my five thousand, he gave me three thousand five hundred in a separate envelope. An overnight outcall with Natasha or whatever you called her was three thousand. The extra five hundred was for assorted expenses. It was very generous of him, though perhaps he didn’t realise quite how generous. I had four hundred and fifty left over.’

  ‘What were the expenses?’

  ‘Getting to Chiswick and hiring the courier to deliver the five hundred deposit to Sakura here.’

  ‘Why Chiswick? Why that courier?’

  ‘No reason. Mr Coleman said he’d picked the courier company at random. As long as it wasn’t in the West End, it was OK. He seemed to be a bit concerned that Sakura or whoever might try to find where the money came from for the deposit. He thought that if it wasn’t a courier in the West End it would be too much of a pain to visit it and check it out. He said that Chiswick seemed far enough away but not too much of an inconvenience for me. I got a cab there and back.

  ‘The deposit delivery had to be done by courier as he didn’t want anyone involved to see me before the meet with Natasha. If that happened, they’d know I was young and not the person I was pretending to be on the telephone. He didn’t want to do it himself, as he didn’t want to be connected with any part of this in case Natasha got suspicious and it would spoil everything for his nice old friend.’

  ‘Was he afraid that Natasha would recognise him? Did she know him?’

  ‘I don’t know. That never came up. I mean, she’d hardly be hanging around the courier’s office. He just wanted the whole thing to be handled by me, from beginning to end. It was just to do with that, I think. Just security. No link between me and him and his nice old friend. He didn’t want the fuss of doing the courier, was the way I read it. I’m babbling, aren’t I.’

  ‘You’re doing very well, Eleanor. Why did you wear a wig and glasses when you went to the hotel? Was that Mr Coleman’s idea, too?’

  ‘Yes it was. He said it as an afterthought, I think. I don’t think there was any real reason to do it; nothing sinister or anything. He put it forward as a bit of fun. Something to give the whole endeavour a little excitement and subterfuge.’

  So if Raleigh wasn’t directly involved with this plan, then it was certainly being done for his benefit. Fisher was wasting a lot of energy and time with the Chiswick courier thing and the disguise at the hotel; both had no point other than to excite Eleanor, if indeed she needed excitement as an incentive. Perhaps Fisher thought she did.

  In fact, the whole act that Eleanor had to put on during the initial phone call was a bit of a waste of space, too. As long as the client was paying the money and understood the protocol, I doubt whether Sakura would have turned down whoever was on the other end of the phone.

  But manipulating her into suggesting the tantric massage which led directly to Natasha/Viola was smart, but not that smart. She could have just asked for Natasha up front and Sakura would have been none the wiser. She could have just said she saw Natasha’s photograph and fancied her.

  Perhaps Fisher just got some sort of kick out of all that chicanery and felt muddying waters would be a good thing under the circumstances; just his inept way of playing it safe, perhaps. Or perhaps he’d anticipated that Sakura might take more notice of any booking that involved Viola, so a little artifice might be useful.

  ‘So that was it. He told you what to do, ran through the scenario, gave you the credit card, the expenses money and the first half of your fee…’

  ‘And he gave me a PAYG mobile, too. I was to make the call to Sakura on that then dump it after the meet. Until then, I had to hang onto it in case either Sakura or Natasha tried to contact me about anything, just for continuity’s sake. Once everything was over, I was to dump the phone, take the SIM card out and dump it separately.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have told Abigail about all of this,’ says Sakura.

  ‘No. This was nothing to do with my work for her. This was private and it was a lot of money. Oh yes – and I had to book two rooms, one for me and one for her. I’d heard of that, but had never done it myself.’

  ‘Sakura,’ I say. ‘How would Mr Coleman have come across Viola in the first place? Would it have been purely by chance? Raleigh, if he can be believed in the light of all of this, hadn’t been in touch with her for two years, in which case, he wouldn’t know about your involvement with Viola or your site. He wouldn’t know that you existed or that Viola was one of your girls.’

  ‘I don’t know, Daniel. I’m really at a loss. There’s only one explanation, really.’

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘If Mr Coleman looks at lots of high-end call girl sites. London-based ones, I mean.’

  ‘He does. Raleigh’s PA caught him at it. I think he hires call girls as part of his job. Raleigh has a lot of important, rich clients who like to be entertained with girls, as you might expect.’

  ‘Well, my site has links to twenty-two other sites. Three of them are like mine, the rest are more like Abigail’s. But they’re all high-end. He might have just come across mine and taken a look out of curiosity.

  ‘If he knew what Viola looked like, he may have recognised her from her photographs. Everything else was fake, basically, but Viola never had her features fuzzed out or her photographs cropped in any way. It’s usually students who have that done; sometimes glamour models do it, as well.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Eleanor. ‘Mine weren’t cropped or fuzzed out because I thought my face would sell me and so did Abigail. She thought I had lovely eyes and a sexy mouth.’ She giggles. ‘Plus the fact that I don’t give a tuppenny damn who sees me.’ She runs a hand through her hair several times to dry it off. I wish she wouldn’t do that.

  ‘OK, Eleanor. So you’ve got all the stuff he gave you; what was the next step? Would you be seeing him again?’

  ‘No. Well, there were no plans to at that stage, anyway. He seemed happy enough with my understanding of the whole thing. He kept going over details again and again, but there was no need to really. I got it all first time. To be honest, I don’t think he was as clever as he made out. The way he spoke, you know?’

  ‘So you left the hotel with your money, your phone and your Amelia Finch credit card.’

  ‘That’s right. I thought it was a really good deal, you know? On top of that, it seemed as if I’d be helping someone. The only thing that unsettled me slightly was Mr Coleman himself, like I said before.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, apart from the other stuff, there was a threatening tone in everything he said. He tried to disguise it and was cheery and chummy, grinning and smiling all the time, but it was as if he’d learnt it on a YouTube tutorial or something.

  ‘I’ve come across a lot of very unpleasant people since I’ve been doing this, and I could feel he was one of those. It was the way he kept eye contact with me while he was telling me what I had to do. It was as if – this is hard to put into words – it was as if he was giving me orders and if I didn’t carry them out to his liking
, say I skipped with the money and didn’t book Natasha for example, then I had better look out, you know?

  ‘There was like a simmering threat of violence beneath everything he said. It was as if he was angry all of the time and was just managing to keep a lid on it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’

  ‘But it was a bit insulting, too. I mean – for that amount of money, there was no way I would have not continued with the whole thing and gave no impression that that might be the case. I still had another five thousand coming, for a start. I already had plans forming in my mind about what I was going to do with all that money, you know? I was going to save half of it and blow the rest on clothes and perfume!’ She laughs again. I keep forgetting what a tough operator she must be.

  ‘OK. Can we go on to the night that you met Natasha in the hotel?’

  And now she goes pale again. She licks her lips and swallows a lot and I can tell she’s going to throw up. I pull her to a standing position, put an arm around her shoulder and quickly get her into the small toilet, where she vomits into the sink. I turn the tap on and splash water around, poking the solid bits down the plughole with my finger. There aren’t many solid bits. I keep on holding her shoulder tightly. Sakura is right behind me and fills a small glass up with tap water, holding it near Eleanor’s face for when she’s ready to drink.

  ‘Splash some water over your face and then drink some of this, darling,’ says Sakura, gently. ‘You’re OK. You’re going to be OK.’

  Eleanor spits into the sink. ‘But I’m not OK and I’m not going to be OK,’ she says, before throwing up again. I think about the fear that Raleigh and Fisher have instilled in Sakura and in this girl, then what they did to Anjukka, and then what Raleigh did to Viola and the knock-on effect that caused Rosabel to kill herself.

  All that money and all that power, and at the end of it they’re just a pair of toxic wankers. I already have an immeasurable amount of loathing for them, and have a feeling that it’s going to get worse. And I’m starting to experience that familiar revulsion that I have for myself; for helping people like this and for working for people like this. I stroke Eleanor’s hair and stare at my reflection in the mirror above the sink.

  21

  FERME TES YEUX

  It takes Eleanor about ten minutes to recover. Sakura makes some more coffee and the three of us sit around finishing Eleanor’s posh chocolates before continuing.

  ‘I’m sorry about your face,’ says Eleanor, as if noticing the scratches for the first time.

  ‘Oh, think nothing of it. It’s an occupational hazard.’

  ‘He’s used to being attacked by women. He gets tetchy if he misses a day,’ says Sakura, smiling at me and patting the back of my hand.

  ‘It wasn’t me that gave you that black eye, too, was it?’ says Eleanor.

  ‘No. That was her. Don’t ask. If you feel ready, Eleanor, can we talk about the next time you went to The Bolton Mayfair?’

  ‘Yes. That was about three weeks ago. It was strange. It was one of the few times I’d been to a hotel in London when I wasn’t working. When I went in, I felt everyone was staring at me and that they all knew I was a call girl, when actually I was the customer of one, so to speak. I was innocent!’

  She lights a cigarette, places it on the edge of the ashtray, then holds her coffee cup in both hands. ‘I felt a bit silly wearing the wig and the glasses, to tell you the truth. I mean, they looked good; I’m not saying they looked silly or anything. I spent about an hour getting the wig right before I went out that night. I don’t think anyone really noticed me, but you always think that they do when something is making you self-conscious and I felt self-conscious going into a hotel to meet this Natasha. I was also feeling a little trepidation about all the cash I had in my bag. The whole thing was a little unsettling for me.’

  I remember what Mr Kerrigan said about Amelia Finch’s beautiful green eyes, how they made you want to reach out and take her glasses off. I look at Eleanor and he was right. For a dizzy second, I forget what it is I’m doing here and allow myself to get lost in them. She notices, smiles quickly and looks at the floor. Great; now she thinks I’m just like all the others.

  ‘What time did you arrive at the hotel?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly. I think Mr Coleman told me to get there before eight. I think I may have been a little early, possibly before half past seven.’

  ‘The hotel said seven-fifteen.’

  ‘Was that it? Yes. That sounds about right. I checked into my room and then I went to the bar and had a couple of glasses of white wine. I read a book. That was weird, too. I was in the hotel for a perfectly innocent reason. Correction: a relatively innocent reason. But as I was sitting in the bar, I could feel people looking at me and I got the feeling that they knew, you know? That they knew what I was. Not what I was doing there on that particular evening, but what I was. It’s not as if I was dressed conspicuously. I was wearing a plain black skirt and a black sleeveless top and some subtle silver jewellery.

  ‘Though to be fair, I often wonder if hotel staff suspect what’s going on so much when it’s a woman hiring another woman for sex. In a lot of hotels, when it’s a man hiring you, you can tell they know the score, especially if you’re a regular visitor. But then there are so many hotels in London. Even with the number of outcalls I’ve done since I started, I’ve rarely visited any hotel more than three or four times. Just a thought. Anyway, I realised I didn’t like it. I knew how a normal woman must feel when she’s mistaken for a call girl. I felt quite indignant!’

  ‘I think they were just staring at you because you were beautiful, darling,’ says Sakura. ‘You have a very striking figure. Voluptuous and athletic. You would stand out in any hotel anywhere.’

  ‘Some guy came up to me and asked if I wanted a drink. It’s so annoying when that happens. Just because a woman is on her own in a hotel bar men think she’s a prostitute!’

  This gets a laugh from all of us. I can see why Eleanor does good GFE. She’s smart and funny. I like her.

  ‘OK,’ I say, still laughing. ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Well, after I’d been in the bar long enough, I went back up to my room to get ready for Natasha. I wasn’t sure how far we were going to go while waiting for her father. I mean, I wouldn’t mind trying a tantric massage, just to see what it was like, but I didn’t want to be naked and sweating and in the middle of a screaming whole-body orgasm when the old man came in, you know?’

  This puts an image in my mind which I have to eradicate immediately for the sake of my sanity.

  ‘Mr Coleman said that it wouldn’t be long after Natasha arrived that there would be a knock at the door. I was to say that it was champagne that I’d ordered from room service. I’d open the door and then this wonderful father/daughter reunion would occur. I’d smile at everyone, make my excuses and leave. Then I’d go online and spend my ten thousand pounds!’

  She laughs again, goes to light another cigarette and realises her packet is empty. She excuses herself and gets up to get some more in another part of the house. Sakura places her hand on mine.

  ‘I am starting to get nervous now, Daniel. Her moods are so up and down that I can’t imagine what we’re going to hear from her next.’

  ‘It’ll be OK. I think she’s quite strong, really. I think she has a lot of things going on in her head because of this. Most of her anxiety is because she doesn’t know what’s going on or who anyone is or what their motives are or were. This is taking a long time, but I think the soft approach is working with her. She’s being dying to talk to someone about all of this, even if it’s going to be painful for her.’

  ‘Well, at least she’s not wielding a poker anymore, Daniel.’

  ‘Yes. I miss that.’

  Eleanor returns with a fresh packet of cigarettes, takes one out and lights it. The smell of the smoke is quite unusual and not at all unpleasant. I take a look at the packet. They’re called Cigaronne. I’ve never
heard of them.

  ‘So there I am, waiting in my swanky hotel room for Natasha to arrive. I’d decided to create a persona for her visit so she didn’t get suspicious. It was rather like acting a role. I’d be a little shy, a little naïve, I’d laugh nervously, but I wouldn’t lay it on too thickly. I had to remember that I was trying to fool someone who was in the same profession that I was, so I’d have to be very good. I just hoped that I didn’t have to keep it up for half an hour or something.’

  ‘So then Natasha arrived,’ says Sakura, softly. This must be a curious experience for her. Not only is she getting a first-hand account of how one of her girls works from the client’s point of view, but she’s also hearing about what might be the last moments in the life of a former lover. Someone she rescued from heroin addiction. Someone she taught, probably in the most intimate way possible, the various tricks of the trade for being a call girl who only serviced female clients.

  ‘Well, yes,’ says Eleanor. ‘She must have arrived shortly before nine o’ clock. She’d already booked herself into her room and she called me on the hotel room telephone from there. Said who she was and would it be alright if she came to my room. I said yes. She was on a different floor.

  ‘She knocked on the door and I got up and answered it. I was quite taken aback when I saw her. I mean, she was incredibly beautiful, but it wasn’t that, particularly. It was the way she looked, the way she was dressed. She had ‘professional woman at a conference’ down to a T. She even had a briefcase. Quite clever, I thought. Of course she would have had a bag with all her bits and bobs and clothing with her. She’d have dumped that in her room. We kind of air-kissed just after she came in. I thought that was nice.’