Pop Goes the Weasel | страница 94

He always locked the door. Despite his anger towards Ellie, he still didn’t want her to catch him at it. Was that out of shame or from some buried desire not to hurt her? He wasn’t sure, but he locked the door nevertheless.

The porn had been good to start with but recently he’d grown tired of it. Now his site of choice was Bitchfest. It was a whole new world for him. This was the new frontier of sex and he found in the forum a camaraderie he thought he’d lost for ever. Here men could talk frankly about what they wanted. And advise each other on how to go about getting it.

For a long time he’d held off acting on his impulses, but HappyGoLucky had given ‘Angel’ such rave reviews that he’d decided he couldn’t resist. A lot of men had cried off prostitutes in the wake of stuff in the newspapers and in other forums. Stories of blokes getting killed whilst on the job. And he wasn’t stupid, he knew you had to watch your back. The world was full of killers, liars and thieves. So he was taking precautions. He’d told Ellie he was seeing old army pals, but the contents of his holdall suggested otherwise. Inside was a pack of condoms and a change of clothes. And nestling underneath, unseen, was an iron bar.

‘So what do we know about him?’

Helen and Charlie were in a pool car heading for Woolston.

‘Real name – Jason Robins,’ Charlie replied, flicking through her notes. ‘But his alias in the Bitchfest forum was “Hammer”. He wasn’t the most regular contributor – I think that prize goes to “PussyKing” – but he posted every couple of days and when he did he went to town. A lot of bragging about what Angel had done to him, how he’d actually made her come, the usual crap.’

‘How did you find him?’

‘Most of the users are pretty discreet – they obviously use aliases and post on work computers or internet cafés. They are hard to track down even if you have the IP address. Jason’s not so bright. He uses the “Hammer” alias on other sites, one of which was a pay-per-view porn site. He used his credit card to pay for some material -’

‘And you got his home address from that.’

‘Exactly.’

Right on cue they pulled up outside a block of flats on Critchard Street. It was a bit shabby, a bit unloved, the small flats rented by people who were making do until something better came along. Helen and Charlie climbed out of the car, looking up and down the street. Night was falling and apart from the odd worker hurrying home everything was quiet. A light burned in the living room window of the house in front of them – ‘Hammer’ was at home.