Silent Predator (35 page)

There was an internet cafe a few doors down and Tom went in thinking he might find his answer there. A long-haired man looked up from his screen and directed him to a machine. Tom took out his notebook and typed ‘primates of southern Africa’ into the browser. He filled two pages and left the cafe at five minutes to one.

There were a dozen people inside the Burger King when he arrived but none he could recognise as the alluring young exotic dancer. He walked back outside onto the footpath. Perhaps she was late.

‘Hey, Mr Policeman.’

He turned around and looked down. The girl who was talking to him had Ivana’s – Olga’s – voice, but he could have been looking at a different person.

She stood about five feet tall, much shorter than he’d remembered. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail and her lack of makeup revealed traces of acne scarring. She wore a baggy grey sports top with a hood attached, faded jeans and old trainers.

‘You didn’t recognise me.’ Olga craned her neck back and peered up at him through rimless Coke-bottle glasses. ‘You walked right past me.’

‘Sorry.’

She shrugged. ‘Not surprising. I have clothes on now and no five-inch stiletto heels.’

He smiled. ‘And the glasses?’

‘It should have been me not recognising you, instead of other way around. In club I can barely see the men who come in. All my time there is like in a – what do you say … haze.’

‘Probably better that way.’

She nodded. ‘We eat?’

They stood side by side in the queue, making small talk about the weather while they waited to be served.

‘What are you studying?’

‘Medicine at UCL,’ she said. ‘No jokes about anatomy or biology, though, please. I get enough of that from fellow students.’

The University College London campus at Bloomsbury was nearby. Tom was a little surprised she told her peers about her job.

‘Is legal and is not money for sex, like some people think. You would be surprised what some students do. Not all of it is legal, either.’

He muttered an apology and said nothing more until they were served and took their food to a red laminate-topped table.

‘Why you come alone? You not have partner, like TV policeman? Even in Russia, where government has no money, militia detectives have partner.’

Tom didn’t want to lose the initiative before the interview began. He wanted to remind her, as much as himself, who was who in this exchange.

‘What have you got to tell me, Olga, that you didn’t tell the investigating officers?’

‘So you talked to them?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘I thought that since you were suspended from duty over African business that other police would not cooperate with you.’

‘So you know why I don’t have a partner.’ As a medical student her IQ was no doubt higher than his. Still, he had a lot more experience in asking questions than she did. He placed his burger back in the paper bag and started to stand. ‘I’m wasting my time here.’

‘No, wait!’

He saw the panic in her eyes. ‘Don’t mess me about, Olga. I haven’t come here to hear conspiracy theories or to indulge your fantasies of being an amateur detective.’

‘Look, I know about you but I also remember that you came to club by yourself. This is personal for you. Something is going on here that is not right.’

Tom folded his arms, ignoring his food, and said nothing.

‘Other detectives say not to talk to media about Ebony’s death, right?’

He nodded.

‘But journalist is the one who did it, even though police say they have questioned him.’

Tom took the hamburger back out of its wrapper and took a bite. He washed it down with a mouthful of cola. He knew that if he stayed quiet Olga would keep talking, and he was right.

‘You remember when you come to club that I tell you about geeky-looking man with red hair who used to come often to see Ebony dance – in private shows.’

Tom nodded again.

‘Well, he come back night after you were there. He was asking for her, but boss told him Ebony not show up for work. He start coming on to all other girls, including me, asking where she is. I say she is not here and he starts to get angry – what you say … agitated. He even offer me fifty quid to give him Ebony’s home address, but I say no way.’

‘Doesn’t sound like he’s the killer, then, if he’s drawing attention to himself,’ Tom said, wiping his mouth and feigning a lack of interest.

‘Aha. That is what other policemen said. But can’t you see that it was act? He was doing this deliberately to look like he didn’t know where she was, but he was stalking her for two weeks before she disappear!’

Tom took another drink. ‘Stalking? I thought you said he was a regular customer. Presumably you have men who come to see you dance more than once.’

Olga nodded and finally started to eat her food. She pinched small chunks from the burger bun and chewed each one methodically, over and over, while she thought about her next response. ‘Yes, but Ebony met this guy outside of work.’

Tom sat back in his plastic chair. ‘You didn’t tell me this when I came to the club.’

‘You were asking about Ebony and other man – the policeman you were looking for – not Ebony’s stalker man.’

Tom nodded. At that stage he had been working on a theory that Nick and Ebony might have done a bunk together, not that she had been murdered by a nutter. ‘How do you know this, did she tell you?’

Olga shook her head, and seemed to hesitate,
picking again at her burger bun, but leaving the meat untouched.

‘Well?’

She looked up at him. ‘Geeky guy left his card when he couldn’t find Ebony and when no one would give him her address. His name was Fisher, Michael Fisher. He is –’

‘He’s a journalist, from the
World
.’

Now it was Olga’s turn to lean back, arms folded, in a parody of Tom. ‘Aha! So you know this man.’

Tom shook his head. He recalled the somewhat obnoxious, persistent reporter from the media conference Greeves had given at the defence contractor’s offices prior to their flight to South Africa. Fisher was the one who was pursuing the line of questioning about Greeves’s frequent visits to Africa.

Olga gave up trying to outwait Tom and resumed her confession. ‘Ebony had a diary in her locker.’

‘You broke into her locker?’ Tom wiped his hands on a paper serviette.

‘Lock was broken. I started to worry about Ebony after your visit and that night I opened locker to see if she had left suicide note or something.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Not unknown in my line of work. Yours too, if anything like Russia.’

Tom let that pass unanswered.

‘Anyway, I look in Ebony’s diary and last entry is note to
ring Michael
. She wrote cell phone number down. I check with Fisher’s card and is same Michael.’

‘So, she was talking to him, outside of work.’

‘Yes.’

‘And when she didn’t call him, presumably because she’d been killed, Fisher came to the club and was “agitated” that he couldn’t find her and hadn’t heard from her.’

‘Exactly!’ Olga slapped the tabletop, causing another couple of diners next to them to look over. ‘Perfect cover.’

It would be easy, Tom reasoned, to get Ebony’s mobile phone records and find out if she had been called. He presumed Morris and Burnett would have done this as a matter of course, so he wasn’t as convinced by this theory as Olga was.

‘But what makes you so sure that Fisher had anything to do with her death?’

She shrugged. ‘Is hard to tell you – to explain. I see lots of men in that place, and I know the looks in their eyes. There are the drunk ones, out looking for fun; there are the desperate ones who could never get look at naked girl any other way; there are the chauvinist ones who like the power of having girl do what they tell them … and there are the scary ones.’

‘Scary ones? The stalkers, you mean?’

She nodded. ‘The ones who are there with something else on their mind. You can see it in their eyes. Fisher was one of these. He was man on mission, and I think that mission was Ebony.’

Tom regarded Olga. She was bright – she had to be in order even to be admitted to study medicine – and she knew men. He thought she was being a little paranoid, but there was obviously something going on between Fisher and Ebony – aka Precious – that transcended the normal ogler–stripper dynamic. It was
worth a closer look. He pulled his notebook out of his suit pocket.

‘Presumably you told Detective Morris all this?’

She nodded. ‘Morris – he is your friend?’

‘None of your business. He is a colleague, though.’

‘He is ignoramus.’

Tom kept the smile at bay. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said he would call Fisher, but his eyes told me that he thought I was crackpot.’

Tom let the next smile through.

‘Don’t mock me. You are smarter than Morris.’

Flattery would get her nowhere. He said nothing.

‘Morris and other policeman came back to club yesterday and tell all girls and management that no one is to talk to media. I tell them, again, that media is where they should be looking and that Fisher came back to club again asking about Ebony and police investigation. Morris says to me, “You let me worry about Mr Fisher, darling.” Pah! I give him, “darling”. Creep.’

Tom held up a hand. ‘Sounds like they’ve checked him out at least.’

‘What happened to your policeman friend, the one you were looking for in first place.’

‘He’s dead.’

Olga placed a hand on the table and for a second Tom thought she might be about to reach out and touch him, in the same way Sannie had done on a couple of occasions. Perhaps there was something about him that inspired pity. ‘How did he die?’

‘He was tortured to death by terrorists. The same people who abducted Robert Greeves, the defence procurement minister, in Africa.’

Olga frowned, and Tom could see she was processing the information he’d just given her. She shook her head. ‘Ebony not working for Islamic terrorists. You were looking at wrong girl for that if you think she was involved in kidnap plot.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She was devout Christian.’

‘Christian stripper?’

Olga looked offended again and folded her arms with an ‘harrumph’. ‘I am trainee doctor exotic dancer. Why not Christian stripper?’

Tom was stumped. Olga resumed her defence of the dead girl. ‘She was more Christian than any other person I know. Church every Sunday and sent money home to Africa to mission where she was educated. Of course, she don’t tell missionaries what she was doing in England. She tell people in Africa she was working as nurse’s aide. I was trying to help her get job like this in hospital.’

Tom’s gut feeling was still that Ebony, having played her part in luring Nick Roberts to a location where he could be abducted, had been killed by the people who had used her. ‘Perhaps she did it for money.’

Olga shook her head vigorously. Most of her burger was untouched and she wrapped it up in the paper bag it had come in. Tom looked down at her hands. He figured he didn’t have to give a medical student a lecture about eating disorders. It did make him wonder, however, if Olga had some psychological problems.

‘Ebony was good person,’ she continued. ‘Fisher
was up to something with her, though, and that’s where you should be looking.’

‘I’ll talk to Morris again,’ Tom said, pushing back his chair. ‘Did you find anything else in her diary?’

‘Not much. It looked new – like she had only been keeping it for last two weeks.’ Olga pulled a scrap of paper out of her handbag. ‘I found one other name, on same page as number for “Michael”. Other name was D Carney.’

She passed the paper over, and Tom copied the name and cell phone number into his phone book. He’d seen the name Carney before, but couldn’t quite remember where. He knew that once he had a few moments to himself it would come to him.

‘Thanks for your time, Olga. Do you know who this Carney is?’ Even as he asked the question he remembered where he had seen the name and number before.

She shook her head. ‘Talk to Fisher. He is one you need to put this puzzle together, Mr Policeman.’

Tom stood. ‘You probably know enough about my situation and police procedure to understand that Fisher has already been questioned and that it would be highly inappropriate for me to go harassing him when I’m suspended.’

She nodded. ‘But I know you will anyway. You are good person. Morris, Fisher, they are creeps.’ Olga tucked the remains of the burger in her day pack, shook Tom’s hand and started to walk out the door. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Maybe I see you in club again some time?’

Tom shook his head. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in a hospital one day.’

She laughed. ‘Maybe my turn to see you naked.’

What Tom couldn’t tell Olga, of course, was that there was a definite link between Nick and Ebony in the form of the message the dancer had left on Nick’s answering machine. Somehow he doubted that Nick had been planning to go to the club to hand over a donation to a Christian mission in South Africa.

After Olga left the restaurant, Tom stayed at the table and took out his notebook and pen. He wrote the name
Ebony
in the centre of a page and circled it. He drew a line off to the left to
Nick
and then extended out further to another circle containing
Greeves
. Off to the right of the stripper’s stage name he wrote
Fisher
. He tapped his chin with the pen and then returned to the page and linked the journalist and the politician with a stroke of his pen. A circle. But was it mere coincidence that the dancer had something going on with the reporter as well as with the minister’s protection officer?

There was only one way for Tom to find out – two, if he went through official channels but he doubted the latter would work. Dan Morris would be suspicious now, and Tom wouldn’t put it past him to grass on him to Shuttleworth. Either way, he was unlikely to cough up the notes of his interview with Fisher.

As the train clattered back towards the city, Tom took out his mobile phone and notebook. He called the number for D Carney, though he recalled now that
it was a man and his name was Daniel. A recorded voice answered the phone, though it wasn’t Carney: it was a message telling him the phone was switched off or out of range.