Jade and I were booked by Dunlop & Finch with some other girls for a night with an important Chinese delegation – some billionaires they were hoping to sign. They were getting the full works, this group: limos, champagne, fine dining, girls. We were often booked in groups for parties. This one was fairly intimate, just the Dunlop & Finch guys – Jon-Oliver, Giles Carruthers and the boss Markus van der Lupin. And the Chinese lot, about six of them. It was at the Carlton Mayfair. First of all there was some business chat around a polished oval table. Some of us girls were in there with them, handing out property brochures, refilling glasses.
After the meeting, there was a gourmet meal, prepared by that bloke off the telly, Yulio something. The girls were still pretty low-key at that point, just a bit of draping and cleavage. There was a lot of champagne: Krug 1998. The Chinese are weird about sex, very embarrassed. Not much looking, lots of bowing. Then, once they get going, it’s hard to get them to stop. Guess that’s what they’re like in business too: relentless with a strong undercurrent of shame.
Anyway, everyone moved to the lounge for coffee and for quiet lines of coke in dark corners. I told Jade not to touch the drugs. ‘Get pissed if you can’t get through it any other way.’ The drugs is how they kill you. There was a cocktail bar, music on. Some girls were dancing in a sexy way. Couples started making out, discreetly at first, sometimes two girls to one man.
In the Carlton Mayfair that night, I looked around to see where Jade was, to check on her. I looked into one of the bedrooms and through to the bathroom and there I saw a man, I don’t know who it was, handing her a rolled-up bank note and her bending over the sink and snorting a line.
Jade died that night. Cocaine overdose. Bleeding through the nose on the floor of one of the bathrooms. A few people began to gather around the doorway, someone thudding away on Jade’s tiny chest, trying to resuscitate her.
I said, ‘She’s only 15. She’s only fucking 15.’
I had the feeling I was underwater, watching Jade’s body being pummelled on the bathroom floor. Everything was slow and muffled. I’d had too much booze.
Jade was dead. They stopped giving her mouth-to-mouth. Jon-Oliver came up behind me and took my arm. He said, ‘Time to get out of here.’
We ran, him and me. It was raining, but summer rain, a break in the humidity and it was like we were being washed clean. London seemed deserted. It was as if we had the city to ourselves. We hid under some railway arches, I don’t even know where because I followed where he led me, and we had sex there. It was so warm and the rain had made the air fresh and soft.
Afterwards, I said, ‘The police will come, right? And investigate Jade’s death. It’ll lead back to Titans.’
He shook his head. ‘They’ll cover it up. The firm won’t allow its connection to Titans to come out, and the Chinese won’t do business with us if they’re dragged into some seedy police investigation, which brings shame on their families. No way. And her being underage? That just makes it worse. No, they can get rid of her body. Titans will deal with it. They’ve got connections with people who clean up that kind of mess all the time. All part of the discreet service.’
‘But they can’t – it’s not … right,’ I said. ‘She was just a child and they killed her.’ I was crying so much I could hardly speak.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ve worked for them long enough; this can’t be the first thing you’ve witnessed. You know what they’re like, what Moukie’s like.’
I couldn’t explain it to him, and I didn’t try – how I had a connection with Jade, how I saw her ruined by them, and in her I saw myself, my inability to get out. I saw that they had killed an important part of me, the part that could protect myself, the part that could fight for a good life. Jade had changed things.
‘I have to stop them,’ I said to Jon-Oliver.
‘Good luck with that,’ he said, and it was glib, a joke – like everything was with him. Nothing mattered. I hated him so much at that moment. I thought, you don’t care because you’re a man and none of this will ever happen to you. You can’t care about it like I can. It’ll never be your body or your daughter’s body.
Davy
A man wearing a yellow pastel golfing sweater has finally furnished them with footage off the temporary cameras in the park, which takes in the spot where Ross fell. Two cameras, two angles.
The team is gathered around Colin’s monitor.
Kim points at the grey grainy shot of the path. ‘So there were blood spots here, here and here, on the path,’ says Kim. ‘Right?’
‘Right,’ says Harriet.
‘And according to Derry Mackeith, the victim could not have walked any distance with his injury. So the blood drips, rather than coming from the body, must have come from the weapon – from the assailant.’
‘Right,’ says Harriet. ‘So who’ve we got on the path?’
‘Watch this.’
A hunched figure ambles across the screen with his hood up. ‘Well, I can’t tell who that is,’ says Harriet.
‘Wait a minute, the camera will switch to the one angled from the car park and then you’ll see his face.’
Harriet watches; they all watch in silence.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Play it again.’
They watch.
Harriet says, ‘OK, so before we all go crazy on this, he’s not in any hurry. He’s not rushing away. He doesn’t seem … pumped, like he’s just stabbed someone. Let’s look at it again.’
They are silent as Kim rewinds the footage and plays it again. They watch Fly Dent walking the path with a lolloping gait, half-rabbit, half-rapper.
‘He does not have the look of a boy who has just stabbed someone,’ Kim says. ‘And anyway, what possible motive could he have?’
People have returned to their desks, still stunned from seeing Fly on the CCTV.
‘I’ve literally never looked at financial records like these, it’s blowing my mind,’ says Colin.
‘How d’you mean?’ asks Davy.
‘Too many zeros. The sums involved – they’re beyond comprehension. He had half a mill in his current account. Nought point two five per cent interest.’ Colin shakes his head at this, as if it is incomprehensible that anyone would store money on this kind of bank rate. ‘That was his loose change. He moved ￡9million into a company called Pavilion Holdings, incorporated in Nevada, beneficiary unknown. Registered in the Cayman Islands so tax free.’
‘There must be a way of finding out who the beneficiary is,’ Davy says.
‘There really isn’t,’ Colin says. ‘Shell companies are notorious for this. The beneficiary is listed as some lawyer in Nevada, which will be the guy who set it up for him. True beneficiary is hidden until we find out the status of his will. Likely he died intestate, given his age, so it’ll take an awful long time for that information to come to light.’
‘Can I have a word, Davy?’
Davy jumps at the sound of Stanton’s baritone.
He follows the boss into his office. Harriet’s already perched at the side of the room.
Stanton closes the door after him. Is this a secret meeting of some sort? The door is normally left ajar.
Stanton goes to the window, looking out to the car park. ‘Think we need to focus. We’ve potentially got an armed assailant out there.’ He turns. ‘Look, there were texts between Ross and the Dent boy, so there was a relationship. That goes to motive. You need the Dent boy’s mobile.’