The cards were the same schoolgirl advertisements that Lynley had already seen except that each had been defaced, with various sexually transmitted diseases scrawled upon it in bright felt pen.
“Terry found those when he was making his regular rounds of the boxes,” Vi said. “It was Shelly who did it, up to her tricks. She won't be happy till I'm ruined.”
“Tell us about Shelly Platt,” Lynley said.
“She was my maid. We met in C'est la Vie. Do you know it? It's a French bakery and caff over by South Ken Station. I had what you might call an arrangement there with the head baker—baguettes, quiches, and tarts in exchange for a few liberties in the gents’ loo—and Shelly was there one morning shoveling chocolate croissants into her mouth when Alf and I went below stairs. She saw him give me the food afterwards without taking any money, and she got interested in what was going on.”
“In order to blackmail you?”
Vi looked grimly amused by the question. “She wanted to know what she had to do to get her croissants for nothing. Plus, she liked the way I dress—I was doing a Mary Quant that morning—and she wanted a bit of that as well.”
“Your clothes?”
“My whole life, as things turned out.”
“I see. And as your maid, with access to your belongings—”
Vi laughed. At the drinks trolley, she took two cubes of ice from the bucket and a small tin of tomato juice from the bottom shelf. She deftly mixed herself a bloody Mary with the precision of long experience. “She wasn't that kind of maid, Inspector. She was the other kind. She took phone calls from punters and booked their appointments for me.” Vi stirred her drink with a glass rod surmounted by a bright green parrot. She set this neatly on a cocktail napkin and returned to the sofa, where she placed the glass on the coffee table and continued her explanation. She'd been employing a middle-aged Filipino woman to book her clients prior to meeting Shelly Platt in C'est la Vie. But everyone employed middle-aged Filipino women as their maids these days, so she thought it might be an added interest to have a teenager acting the part instead. Fixed up, Shelly wouldn't look half bad. And, more important, she was so ignorant of the ways of the profession that Vi knew she would be able to pay her a pittance. “I gave her room, board, and thirty pounds a week,” Vi told them. “And believe me, that's more than she was getting doing knee tremblers outside Earl's Court Station, which was how she was supporting herself when I met her.”
They were together for nearly three years, she went on. But then Vi met Nikki Maiden and saw how much more was possible if the two of them set up a business together. “We kept Shelly with us at first. But she hated Nikki because with her there, it wasn't just the two of us any longer. That's the way Shelly is, although I didn't know it when I first took her on.”
“‘The way she is?’”
“She gets her hooks into people and thinks she owns them. I should have seen it when she first talked about what had gone on with her boyfriend. She followed him to London from Liverpool, and when she got here and found out he didn't want to be her boyfriend any longer, she started her routine: following him everywhere, phoning him constantly, hanging round his flat, sending him letters, bringing him presents. Only I didn't know it was her routine, you see. I thought it was a one-off: her reaction to her first love not working out.” She took a stiff gulp of her drink. “Right bloody fool I was.”
“She did the same to you?”
“I should have seen, obviously. Stan—this was her boyfriend—came to the flat after she'd cut up his car tyres. He was all in a rage, and he must have thought he'd straighten her out. But he was the one who got straightened out.”
“How?”
“She cut him open with a butcher knife.”
Nkata glanced Lynley's way. Lynley nodded. A killer did generally have a favourite weapon. But why kill Nicola if Shelly's object was Vi? And why wait so many months to do it?
Vi seemed to recognise Lynley's unspoken questions. She said, “She didn't know where Nikki was. But she did know Terry was thick with her. If she followed him, it was only a matter of time before he led Shelly right to her.” She tossed down more of the drink, picking up a napkin to dab against the corner of her mouth. “Murdering little bitch,” she said quietly “I hope she rots.”
“‘This bitch has had it,’” Lynley murmured, now knowing the source of the note that had been found in Nicola Maiden's pocket. He said, “We'll need her address, if you have it. And we'll also need a list of Nicola's clients.”
“This isn't about clients. I've just told you that.”
“You have. But we've also been told that there was a man in London with whom Nicola had a relationship that was more than you'd expect between a client and …” He looked for a euphemism.
“His evening's companion,” Nkata supplied.
“And we may well find him among the men she serviced regularly,” Lynley finished.