And she would, as soon as she had something concrete to report. But the Dip Squad was as strapped for resources as any other department. With nothing concrete to go on, Cathy’s case might not be looked at for days. Someone had to make her a priority.
Three months before Lexi was attacked, she had gone to the police for advice. Someone had left flowers outside her room in student halls; there were notes in her pigeonhole that made reference to what she’d been wearing the previous evening.
‘Sounds as though you’ve got yourself an admirer,’ the desk officer had said. It was making her feel uncomfortable, Lexi had told him. She was too scared to have the curtains open in her room, in case someone was watching.
When her personal belongings went missing from her room, they sent someone out. Recorded a burglary. Could Lexi be certain she’d locked the door? There was no sign of forced entry. What made Lexi think it was the same person who left the notes; the flowers? There was no evidence to suggest they were connected.
A week later, when she walked home from a late lecture and heard footsteps too measured, too close to be accidental, she didn’t report it. What would be the point?
When it happened again, the following week, she knew she would have to go to the police. When the hairs on her arms prickled, and her breath caught in her throat from the fear that grew in her chest, she knew she wasn’t imagining it. She was being stalked.
But it was too late. He’d already caught up with her.
Kelly thought of all the crime prevention initiatives she’d seen rolled out over her nine years in the job. Poster campaigns, leaflet drops, attack alarms, education programmes … Yet it was far simpler than that; they just had to listen to victims. Believe them.
‘Detective Constable Swift?’ A woman was walking towards her, her head tilted to one side. Kelly didn’t correct her. She was in plain clothes; DC was a fair enough assumption. ‘I’m Tamir Barron, I head up the advertising team here. Would you like to come on up?’
The walls of the sixth floor were lined with advertisements from the last hundred years, framed in thick oak. Kelly spotted adverts for Pear’s soap, Brylcreem and Sunny Delight, as Tamir swept her along the carpeted corridor to her office.
‘I’ve got the results of the enquiry you sent through,’ she said, as soon as they were seated, ‘although I still don’t see the connection to – what was it you said you were investigating? A robbery?’
There had been no violence, which meant the theft of Cathy’s keys was a theft, not a robbery, but Kelly decided to gloss over that fact, in case the severity of the crime was directly proportionate to Tamir’s level of cooperation. Besides, if Cathy was right and the offender had followed her home, and had since been using her key to gain access to her house, there was something far more serious going on. A shudder ran through Kelly at the thought of someone creeping around Cathy’s house. What had he been doing? Touching her make-up? Taking her underwear? Cathy had said she thought someone had been in her house when she was at work, but what if that wasn’t the only time? Kelly imagined an intruder moving quietly around Cathy’s kitchen in the dead of night; creeping upstairs to stand by her bed and watch her sleep.
‘The victim was on the Central line at the time,’ Kelly told Tamir. ‘The offender made off with her house keys, and we believe he has since used them to gain access to her property. The victim’s photograph appeared in the classifieds section of your newspaper two days prior to the incident.’ She hoped Cathy had now changed the lock on her back door. Would that be enough to make her feel safe? Kelly wasn’t so sure.
‘I see. There’s just a small issue.’ Tamir was still smiling, but her eyes flicked down at her desk and she shifted slightly in her chair. ‘There’s a certain amount of protocol that needs to be followed in the case of chatlines: companies have to be licensed, and when they advertise they have to provide the advertiser – us, in this case – with their licence number. To be perfectly frank we don’t go after chatline advertisers. You’ll have seen the section is quite small. They’re what I’d call a necessary evil.’
‘Why necessary?’ Kelly said.
Tamir looked at her as though the answer was obvious. ‘They pay well. Most of that sort of advertising – sex lines, escorts, dating agencies and so on – is all online nowadays, but our print readership is still high, and advertising is what pays for it all. As you can imagine, the sex industry is open to all kinds of abuse, so our measures make sure any chatline operators are properly licensed and therefore regulated.’ She looked down at her desk again.
‘But these protocols weren’t followed in this case?’
‘I’m afraid not. The client first approached us at the end of September, with adverts to run daily throughout October. Shortly before the end of the month they submitted a second batch of adverts, and they did the same for November. The account was handled by a new member of staff, a man called Ben Clarke, and he processed the order without a licence number.’
‘That’s not allowed?’