But then there she was. She was pacing up and down on the deserted street and when Tony pulled up alongside her, he could see she was agitated, distressed. Instinct made him stroke the accelerator, something telling him to get away from this girl, but then his brain kicked in and he put the car into neutral.
“You up for business?” he called out, keeping his voice steady.
The girl jumped as if startled, as if somehow she hadn’t heard the car approaching. She was dressed in black leggings, which emphasized her long, muscular legs. Her upper half was swathed in a military coat that seemed too big for her and was incongruous in comparison with the rest of her outfit—had she stolen it? Her face was striking, though—dark brown eyes, strong nose and full lips. Recovering her poise, she regarded him—making some mental calculation—then slowly, carefully she approached him.
“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, and then without being asked, the girl pulled open the passenger-side 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.
48
The incident room was full to bursting when Helen arrived. It was only six thirty 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 toshameher 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’s case, and to his workplace, in Christopher Reid’s, was guaranteed to createnoise. With the headlines in the latestEvening 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 ispersonal.”
“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.”
