Pop Goes the Weasel | страница 80

‘What are you after?’ she said.

‘Company.’

‘What sort of company?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Hour or the night?’

‘Just an hour, please.’

Tony cursed himself internally. What kind of punter says ‘please’?

The girl narrowed her eyes, perhaps trying to work out if he was as green as he looked.

‘Fifty pounds.’

Tony nodded, then without being asked the girl pulled open the driver’s door and climbed inside. Tony put the car in first and pulled away.

‘I’m Samantha,’ she said suddenly.

‘Peter,’ Tony replied.

‘That your real name, Peter?’ she countered.

‘No.’

The girl chuckled.

‘Married, are you?’ she said.

‘Yup.’

‘Thought so.’

The conversation was over. She told him where to go and the car drove off into the night.

The incident room was full to bursting when Helen arrived. It was only 6.30 a.m. but she’d demanded an early start and the team hadn’t let her down. As they crowded into the briefing room, Helen was surprised to see Charlie among their number. The two women looked at each other – a swift, silent exchange. Charlie had made her decision. What had it cost her? Helen wondered.

‘So one thing is clear,’ Helen began. ‘This is about exposure. The killer wants to shame her victims, wants to hold them up to public ridicule, to express her disgust for them. Cutting out their hearts and sending them to his home, in Alan Matthews’ case, or his workplace, in Christopher Reid’s, was guaranteed to create noise. With the headlines in the latest Evening News we can assume the killer has got what she wanted. The private lives of her victims will now be picked over in massive detail. They’ve already gone to town on Alan Matthews – he’s an elder of his local Baptist church with a predilection for unpleasant sex – and they are doing the same with Christopher Reid – the hidden secrets of the clean-cut family man and so on. So this is all about exposure. This is personal.’

‘Do we think she knew them then?’ DC Fortune interjected.

‘Possibly, although there is no evidence that they’d actually used her services before. That said, DC Grounds and his team have come up with something interesting. Andrew?’

‘We have found a concrete link between the two victims,’ DC Grounds announced. ‘They had both browsed a web forum called Bitchfest.’

He winced slightly as he said it, then carried on briskly.

‘It’s basically a forum in which local men who’ve used prostitutes share their experiences. They talk about where to find particular girls, what their names are, what they charge. They rate breast size, sexual prowess, the tightness of their… vaginas, the list goes on.’