Master of Starlight

by Keith Short

  Leon felt calm and in full control by now. ‘It’s because this guy turns out to be an anomaly within Schumann’s anomalies. We’ve recorded him coming out of several of the Highgate brothels, but we’ve never seen him going in. He’s effectively slipped through the coincidence filters in our software algorithms’

  ‘Keep going, I’m getting interested.’

  ‘I’ve looked for him manually among Schumann’s ground-level stills and here he is.’ Leon revealed a montage of photographs showing a tall, thin man with blond wavy hair flopping in front of his eyes.

  ‘You’re not trying to suggest this is Rodin, are you? Look at him – he looks so effeminate. You’ve read our psychological profile.’

  Leon continued, unfazed. ‘Next, I turned to the data I procured from Fusion’s security records. ‘Sequence forty-eight.’

  ‘Sequence forty-eight, Mahler,’ said the Melomet.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Pavel, sounding exasperated as he watched the video recording of the comings and goings in the Fusion entrance hall. ‘Just look at him, mincing along like a pansy. Surely you can’t think he’s the vicious brute we’re looking for?’

  Once again, Leon carried on as if Pavel wasn’t there. ‘I’ve developed my own mathematical correlation programme to evaluate the likelihood of this character matching the profile of Rodin that you supplied. I constructed an adaptive learning network using parameterised data from the images of every anomalous visitor and by comparing—’

  ‘Just hold it there, Mahler. You’re losing me now.’

  ‘Sorry, I got carried away. In simple language, what I’m saying is this. From the look in these punters’ eyes and from the way they move around, you can deduce a lot about their characters. My programme digitises the images of their faces. Then it analyses their facial expressions and their movements. I’ve compared the results for this guy with those I’ve run for all the other anomalies. It turns out he has a sixty-three per cent probability of matching Rodin’s profile. The nearest candidate from the rest of the group comes out at eight per cent.’

  ‘You may be out of my league when it comes to statistical analysis,’ Pavel conceded, ‘but my cop’s instinct tells me you’re wrong.’

  ‘There’s more to come,’ Leon said, smiling. ‘The presentation isn’t over yet.’

  Pavel sat back and sighed. ‘OK, go ahead and convince me.’

  Leon called up an annotated plan view of the individual brothels in the Highgate area.

  ‘It looks like a wagon wheel,’ said Pavel.

  ‘That’s because it is. Taking account of our latest personnel movement data, I can now confirm that Goldhurst’s situation at the group’s geographical centre is not just a fluke. My predictive model shows that each of these buildings is connected directly to Goldhurst and there’s no cross linking between them. Everything emanates from Goldhurst. The man who oversaw that human destruction we’ve just watched has been observed entering Goldhurst on twenty occasions. He’s been recorded leaving Goldhurst four times and one of the other Highgate brothels on a total of thirteen occasions. It looks like we’ve missed at least three of his exits.’

  Pavel was sitting upright, slack-jawed.

  ‘The analysis shows that there has to be something big going on in Fusion’s headquarters.’ He called up a final still photograph that spanned the video-wall from floor to ceiling, the portrait of an intelligent looking forty-year-old man with a feminine complexion and focused ice-blue eyes. ‘And, yes. He’s our man, all right.’

  CHAPTER 29

  He could tell that Pavel was dejected the moment he spotted him walking into the opera house refectory. The call earlier that morning, requesting an urgent meeting, was a surprise to Leon. It sounded like bad news so soon after his discovery of Rodin’s identity, and the first sight of Pavel left him in no doubt.

  ‘Why are we meeting here?’ Pavel asked as he sat down stony faced with his coffee. ‘These tickets cost a fortune and I don’t even like opera.’

  ‘I told you, I’m getting a bit paranoid these days. Always looking over my shoulder. Besides, it’s good to move about. Safety in numbers, mingle with the crowd, just Classicos enjoying a night at the opera. Anyway, what news? Have you apprehended him?’

  ‘It’s not that easy, Mahler. We can’t just go about arresting Russian diplomats. Even politically agnostic people like you must know what that could trigger.’

  Leon sat up, rigid with surprise. ‘What are you talking about?’ He could see that Pavel was angry as well as grumpy.

  ‘Our surveillance teams have been watching out for him over the past week at the exits you specified. We eventually spotted him leaving a Hampstead Lane brothel and followed him across the Heath to Hampstead tube station. He minces along at one hell of a pace, I can tell you – it took all our expertise to stay close to him without being spotted. We managed to get a man into the same train carriage and he followed him as far as Notting Hill Gate where Rodin got off the train. From there, our agent tracked him to Kensington Palace Gardens where he disappeared into Number Thirteen – the Russian Embassy. It was two days before he came out again.’

  Leon raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean—’

  ‘Yes, I do mean – he actually is a Russian diplomat.’

  ‘But how can that be? What’s he doing getting himself involved in the sex trade?’

  ‘You tell me, clever man. We puzzled over that ourselves. We’ve done our research, of course. We’ve discovered that Captain Alexei Rodin is their Defence and Naval Attaché. If you think about it, the Russian embassies were always overstaffed in the days of the Cold War. And their UK embassy is overstaffed again today. God knows what they’re up to now and who’s sanctioning their activities.’

  Pavel’s depressive mood was starting to rub off on Leon. ‘What do we do next? He’s holding Magda somewhere within this string of brothels, I’m sure of that. And I’m going to get her out.’

  ‘But you have to be patient. Don’t expect me to burst in there with my men and walk out with her. You know I can’t do that. There’s a whole new line of intelligence to be gathered and we just have to get on with it. I’ll let you know what I want from you once we’ve completed our initial analysis.’ Pavel got up and without a shred of courtesy left the opera house.

  Leon didn’t stay to watch Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, even though he had a ticket for one of the best seats in the house. By the time he completed the long journey home on the Metro and trudged up the stairs to his apartment it was nine o’clock. He slammed the lounge door behind him, summoned the video file containing the violent scenes outside the brothel then sat down with a stiff vodka to watch it all again. If Pavel isn’t going to apprehend Rodin, I’m free to do my own researches. With no particular strategy or objective in mind, he fast-forwarded to the point where Rodin faced the final adversary in the punishment line. He studied the 3-D images of the man in black. I wonder who he is and what they’re going to do with him. He hovered the cursor over the aerial view of the victim and called up the pattern recognition software. Let’s see if we can find him elsewhere in the data. As he waited for the correlation programme to complete its analysis, he picked up his wafer.

  ‘Schumann, I need you over here ASAP.’

  Schumann arrived within thirty minutes, impressing on Leon just how passionate these people were about rescuing their compatriots and bringing to justice those responsible for their abduction. God knows how much money they’ve thrown at this to date. But all the money in the world was no compensation for his own loss.

  Leon showed Schumann the video sequence of the retribution, as he’d come to call it, and together they scanned the satellite data files for overhead images of the final victim, the man last seen getting into a car.

  ‘He comes and goes from this place,’ Leon said, pointing to the wall-map. ‘It’s not one of our target brothels, but we’ve picked up
data from that location due to its proximity to a couple of Rodin’s brothels. In fact, I’ve visited that one personally.’ Leon recalled the evening with clarity – the scatty woman who ran the place, her delusion about her mother when she was shown the photograph. But he said nothing of this to Schumann. ‘Did you ever stake it out, Schumann?’

  ‘Let me take a look.’ Schumann scanned Leon’s copy of his own data. ‘Here it is. This file should contain ground-level photographs.’ Leon ran the pattern recognition software once again.

  ‘This is him,’ Schumann said, as he compiled a montage of photos on the video-wall. ‘I recognise him from my own surveillance operations.’ He spent five minutes perusing his personal notes among his word files. ‘I have it,’ he said, showing his delight. ‘His name is Dimitri Byelov. He’s the director of the brothel you’ve identified. There must have been some adverse interaction between him and Rodin.’

  ‘You can say that again. But there’s something about this that’s niggling me. I get the gut feeling that Magda is an ingredient in this inter-brothel conflict. Scientist’s intuition, you might say. I think I’ll pay Byelov’s brothel a visit. Right now, in fact. Let’s hope they’re still open.’

  It was almost midnight by the time Leon arrived at the brothel. The security guard opened the glass entrance door. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said in a strong Russian accent. Leon’s first impression was that the brothel’s security was much less in evidence than on his previous visit, but that made sense. And the brothel’s madame was still here, working alone front of house. Excellent.

  ‘Yes, sir, how can I help you?’

  ‘It’s Mary, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes?’ she said with a puzzled expression. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Mary, I want you to stay calm and listen to me. I’m not here to cause any trouble. We can talk in front of your security guard if you like.’ He looked across at the guard who was watching him. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you? I’m Leon. I was making enquiries about my missing girlfriend when I was last here.’

  She gasped. ‘I’ve been looking for you. The photograph. My mother—’

  ‘Shush! We can come to that,’ he whispered, ‘but first I need to ask you a few of my questions. Trust me, Mary. I promise we can discuss your mother once I’m through.’

  ‘OK, but you look so different. We don’t get many Classicos using this place – they consider themselves better than us, you see. Your up-their-arse colleagues use the more sophisticated houses in Highgate, they do.’

  Ignoring her comments, Leon took a deep breath and said, ‘Her name is Magda. I have a photograph of her, by herself this time. Take a look.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her,’ she said, ‘but I know someone who might have done.’

  Leon’s heart was racing. ‘Who is it? Who saw her?’

  ‘Wait a minute, I’ll be back.’

  Mary disappeared down the corridor. The guard’s eyes were clamped on him as if he were his prisoner. Leon sat on the couch at the side of the reception desk and nervously tapped his fingers on the arm. To his relief, Mary returned three minutes later.

  ‘This is Gina,’ Mary said, introducing a frail little girl.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’ Gina curtseyed and offered her hand.

  Leon stood up and shook her hand; her fingers were so tiny that he felt he was meeting a ten-year-old schoolgirl.

  ‘You want to know about Ana?’

  ‘Ana? What are you talking about?’ he said, raising his voice. The security guard took a step forward but Mary waved him back.

  ‘Can I see your photo please, sir?’ Gina took hold of the wafer-pad. ‘Yes, that’s Ana, though her hair was shorter. She was so beautiful. She—’

  Leon could contain himself no longer. ‘You’re absolutely sure, are you? This is someone you met and you knew her as Ana? Where did you meet her?’

  ‘In the Fantasyworld.’

  ‘The what? Sit down next to me, Gina. Tell me everything you can remember.’

  It took fifteen minutes for Gina to recount her story. It was a garbled and excitable account and Leon only interrupted to stop her from falling over her own words.

  ‘You’re saying you didn’t actually meet her in the flesh, but you’re convinced she was down there at the same time as you and that they were going to make her your team leader?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, sir. The Fantasyworld was my home for months, but I don’t know where in London it is.’

  ‘Thank you, Gina. You’ve been helpful.’

  ‘Can I go now, Mary?’

  ‘You can, my petal. I’m sure the gentleman is pleased with you.’ She nodded at Leon with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Thank you, Gina. You’ve been really helpful.’ Gina gave him a clumsy curtsey and skipped away down the corridor.

  ‘Now it’s my turn,’ Mary said.

  ‘Not quite. First I want to ask you about Byelov.’

  Mary looked taken aback. ‘You know where he is?’

  ‘Sorry, no. I don’t know where he is, Mary. But I’d like to know who he is? You told me, when we first met, that he owns this brothel. Is he sometimes known as Alexei Rodin?’

  Mary laughed. ‘No, he’s not Rodin, I can guarantee you that. Byelov actually hates that bastard.’

  It was a dummy question. Leon had to cover every possibility. And he also needed an excuse to broach the subject of Rodin. ‘You know Alexei Rodin don’t you, Mary?’

  ‘I admit, I know of him. He owns the posh places up Highgate, so I’m told. Never met him myself. I’ve never even seen him. And from what they all say, I never want to. He’s a stuck-up ponce, that’s all he is. Do you have the photo of my mother?’

  That’s all I’m going to get out of her. Leon considered this business about Mary’s mother to be nothing but nonsense. He’d come here with every intention of avoiding the issue second time round, but it was his bargaining point and he had no option but to placate her. At least he knew that Magda had ended up in London as Pavel had predicted and he’d closed out what to him was the only remaining uncertainty over Rodin’s identity. He brought up the photo on his wafer-pad and handed it to Mary. She expanded the image until his mother’s face filled the screen.

  ‘Yes, that’s definitely her, that’s my mother,’ she said with tears in her eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure before but I am now.’

  ‘Mary, the woman you’re looking at is my mother. I’ve lived with her for the whole of my life. Her name is Lynne Dabrowski.’

  ‘You think a daughter wouldn’t recognise her own mother, do you?’

  ‘OK, Mary. Let’s take a logical look at this. My mother is English, I’ll grant you that. She emigrated to Poland while she was carrying me. I was born over there. Now tell me about your mother.’ He leaned back into the couch and held out his palms, inviting her to convince him.

  ‘My mother was Jean Douglas, the lady in your photo. Dad left us when I was about fourteen years old, I think. He was a right bastard, he was. Hardly ever there. And when he was, he’d beat the living shit out of me and my brother and Ma. It’s him I blame for Robert turning to drugs and setting me up working the streets.’

  ‘Robert’s your brother?’

  ‘He’s dead now. We didn’t really get on but he was my brother. What happened to Ma? Well that’s a bit of a blur. I was on drugs at the time. It all goes with being on the game, you realise? It’s the only way you could stomach all those old drunks who wanted a quick shag in the park. It wasn’t my fault she disappeared. I promise you that. I didn’t ask her to go. But it’s all so fuzzy now.’ She covered her mouth and nose with one hand, sniffing back the mucous and blinking away the tears that were welling in her eyes. ‘What’s he like, your father? Is he taking care of my mother?’

  Her question came as a surprise, but she was rambling. ‘Mary, we haven’t established yet whether we’re talki
ng about the same person. But if it helps, yes. He is a good husband and a good father. In fact, my stepfather Szymon is a kind and decent man all round.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she said, smiling through her wet eyes and sniffing again.

  ‘Tell me what you remember about your mother’s disappearance, Mary. Did you just wake up one day to find that she’d gone?’

  ‘That’s the problem, I can’t remember. I was never clean or sober in those days. The whole of my teenage life is just one big blur with the drugs. It’s all gone from my head so I never expected to find out what happened to her – until you came along, that is.’

  ‘But you’re clean now, aren’t you? Have you ever thought of looking back over old newspaper records from around that time? They do exist.’

  ‘It crossed my mind. But I didn’t know where to start. I don’t even remember the year all this happened. All I remember is Robert said she’d pissed off and left us. He said she didn’t give a shit and we shouldn’t worry about her anymore. He reckoned she found another job somewhere. Anyway, someone was paying for the gas and electricity, so what did we care? I decided it would be a waste of time looking at old papers. Besides, she was a nobody. Just another missing person.’

  I know where you’re coming from. ‘Mary, if there’s nothing else, you’re going to have to accept that the woman in the photo is someone who bears a striking resemblance to your mother. But we’re not talking about the same person.’

  ‘I don’t accept that. I tell you she’s my mother and I have the right to see her. You hear me?’

  ‘Look, Mary, I won’t stop you from going over to Poland and seeing my mother, if you felt that would provide the close-out you seek. You’d see for yourself she wasn’t the person you’re talking about.’ He paused to collect himself. It was going to be difficult to break it to her. ‘But even if you’re convinced that the person in the photograph is your mother, it wouldn’t do you any good to see her. It would be a waste of time and money. She has dementia and hardly recognises me – her own son. She’s dying, Mary.’