On A Dark Sea (The DCI Dani Bevan Detective Novels Book 2) (12 page)

Chapter Twenty Four

B
evan was reminded of her conversation with DI Lyons as she liaised with the officers of the Vice Division. Lyons had informed her the previous day that they had no record of underage girls working at the Fisherman’s Bar in Aberdeen, which of course didn’t mean that they weren’t doing so.

              Dani had brought Phil Boag along with her. She wanted to make him feel involved in this line of inquiry, sensing he was mortified about Georgina’s part in facilitating Maisie’s secret life.

              DI Grant was running through with them what that life might have consisted of. ‘Folk often assume that if a young girl is associated with the criminal underworld in Glasgow, it has to be to do with the sex trade. Mostly that’s true, but there are other roles these girls can play. The hotels need serving staff and cleaners. Some kids take part in cabaret acts, not always of the seedier variety.’

              ‘Hang on,’ Dani said. ‘Didn’t Andy mention that Maisie sang? She had a favourite band – her and the boy next door used to perform covers of their songs.’

              ‘I can’t recall the name of it off-hand,’ Phil added.

              Grant nodded. ‘If she had a skill set to offer, other than the obvious, Maisie might have made money that way. Or, she could have been pushing drugs for them, of course.’

              ‘Have you got anyone on your files by the name of Anton?’ Dani enquired.

              ‘I don’t need to look that up. Clive Anton. Not his real name, I’m sure. He operates in the south-east of the city, out towards Celtic Park. Clive owns several night clubs and bars. We’ve never been able to make a solid case against him but we know that class C drugs change hands in his establishments and probably class A. I’m certain he has illegals working for him - his staff tend to come and go.’

              ‘Could you give us the addresses of his premises? Where are we likely to find him during the daytime?’

              ‘I’ll print you off a list,’ Grant replied amiably. ‘He’s got a flat above one of his bars on London Road. I’d try there first.’

*

It proved tricky for Phil to find a place to park. They ended up pulling right onto the pavement, with heavy traffic whistling past their wing mirror. The pub that DI Grant had directed them to had its shutters down. There was a door next to it which seemed to give access to the residence on the first floor. Phil pressed on the bell. They heard a sash window above scrape open and saw a bald, semi-naked man leaning out into the freezing cold air. He slowly took in their appearance.

              ‘How may I help you, Mr and Mrs Bobby?’

              ‘Can we come up and have a word?’ Phil called back, holding up his warrant card quite unnecessarily.

              ‘What’s it about?’ Clive Anton rested his belly on the window frame, looking quite comfortable, despite the biting chill.

              ‘We aren’t from Vice, Mr Anton,’ Dani explained. ‘We’re investigating the disappearance of Maisie Riddell.’

              He abruptly vanished from the window. A few seconds later, the door buzzed open.

              Phil led the way up the dark staircase. The internal door on the landing had been left ajar. The DS shouldered his way in. Dani had to fight an urge to put a hand up to her nose. The smell within this cramped flat was nauseating. As she glanced about her, she could see that Anton kept the place fairly clean and tidy, but the atmosphere was thick with the fumes of a sweet and sickly sort of perfume. This aroma was artificially created, but it reminded Dani of the smell that tended to linger around a decaying corpse.

              ‘Take a seat,’ Clive offered, having thankfully pulled on a shirt.

              The officers perched on the edge of a purple velvet sofa. ‘Do I take it you knew Maisie?’ Dani asked, getting straight to the point as she wasn’t sure how much longer she could remain in the place without being sick.

              ‘She was a customer of mine,’ he replied blandly, sitting on a throne-like armchair opposite them.

              ‘A
customer
, so she didn’t work for you?’ Phil asked.

              ‘Maisie was a regular down at the Basement.’ When Dani looked bemused he added, ‘it’s one of my clubs near the centre of town. The music we play there is popular with the student types. It’s not my kind of thing, but you need to give the punters what they want, eh?’

              ‘How often did Maisie frequent your club?’

              ‘Once or twice a month.’ Clive selected a cigarette from a silver box on the table and lit up.

              ‘Then how can you possibly remember her?’ Dani asked in disbelief, whilst silently hoping that the cigarette smoke would help to neutralise the dreadful stench.

              ‘Because she was going out with one of my DJs. Ray, his name is.’

              ‘Can we have this man’s address please,’ Dani said forcefully.

              ‘Now, I couldn’t possibly give you that, but come down to the Basement tonight after ten. I believe he’s doing a set.’

              Dani immediately jumped up. ‘We’ll certainly do that, Mr Anton, thank you.’

              As they made their way to the door, Phil turned back towards the man and said, ‘you do realise that Maisie Riddell is only fourteen years old?’

              Clive smiled broadly. ‘Oh yes, Detective. That’s just the age that Ray likes them.’

Chapter Twenty Five

A
s they stepped out into the street, Dani couldn’t prevent herself from releasing a couple of dry retches.

              Phil placed a hand on her back. ‘I quite understand. The man made me feel physically sick, too. I don’t think I could ever work Vice.’

              Once they were back in the car and Dani had taken several sips from a bottle of water stashed under the seat, she recovered her composure. ‘It was that awful smell in the flat. I just couldn’t stomach it.’

              ‘The perfume, you mean?’ Phil replied. ‘I think Sorcha’s got it at home. It is a bit cloying, but we’ve got used to it now. All the young girls are wearing the brand. The scent is endorsed by some celebrity type.’

              ‘It should come with a bloody health warning. What’s it called, ‘Eau du rotting corpse’?’

              Phil chuckled. ‘Clive Anton was very forthcoming about Maisie. He didn’t hesitate to let us know they were acquainted.’

              ‘As long as we can’t prove he served her alcohol, employed her in his businesses or had sex with her, he’s in no danger from us. I expect Clive’s pretty confident that we’ll never be able to find the evidence of any of those things. Vice never had in the past.’

              ‘Bastard. Do you think this
Basement
place is where Maisie was going when Georgie gave her a cover story?’

              ‘I think she must have done. Although Clive says she was only there once or twice a month, yet she used Georgie to provide her with an alibi more often than that.’

              ‘Maybe this Ray chap will tell us more.’ Phil glanced across sheepishly. ‘I can’t come out undercover with you that late. Jane’s got a ‘do’ at the Town Hall tonight.’

              ‘Not a problem, Phil. I wouldn’t expect you to.’ Dani had another plan in mind. Besides, she had absolutely no intention of getting on the wrong side of Jane Boag.

*

Dieter had dressed in dark jeans and a navy blue sweater, which clung to the contours of his muscular upper body. Dani put on the only black dress she possessed and a pair of old biker boots which she’d noticed had recently come back into fashion.

              ‘Do we look like cops?’ The Norwegian asked with a raise of his eyebrows, as they stood drinking wine in Dani’s kitchen, waiting for their cab to arrive.

              ‘Probably,’ she replied with a laugh. ‘We’ll stick out like a sore thumb anyway, for being a couple of decades older than their usual clientele.’

              ‘You could pass for much younger,’ Dieter said quite genuinely. Dani decided for once to take it as a compliment and not as the highlighting of a professional weakness.

              The taxi dropped them outside a non-descript set of double-doors, half-way along a grimy side-alley off Renfrew Street. Steep steps led them to a subterranean ticket office and cloakroom. Dani made sure that she removed all her over garments, down to her thin strappy dress, suddenly recalling the fundamentals of clubbing – very quickly she was going to get extremely hot.

              The pair stood by the bar, ordering whiskies and coke. Dani vaguely recognised the thumping playlist of alternative anthems from her own student days.               ‘We have some places like this in Oslo, but nothing similar in Stavanger,’ Dieter hollered into her ear.

              ‘Glasgow still has plenty of these kinds of clubs,’ Dani shouted back. ‘Something about them seems to appeal to us.’

              They stood side by side for a while, watching the mass of sweaty bodies gyrate within the tiny dancefloor. Conversation was pretty much impossible over the music. Dani nudged Dieter’s arm as the tempo of the beat subtly changed and she noticed a new DJ behind the decks. ‘Let’s go and have a word,’ she mouthed.

              The man, whom Clive Anton referred to as Ray, looked to be in his early thirties, although in the dim light it was hard to tell. Dani tapped him on the arm and flashed her warrant card. He said nothing but gestured for a younger lad to take over and led them through a door into a side room, where amps and speakers were piled up in the corner.

              ‘My name is DCI Bevan, this is my colleague Detective Karlsen. We are part of the team investigating the disappearance of Maisie Riddell.’

              The man stood up straight. In this light, Dani could see he was probably older than she’d thought. ‘My name’s Ray McCoughlin. How can I help you?’

              ‘We’ve been informed that you were Maisie Riddell’s boyfriend.’

              He winced. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I knew her a bit, that’s all.’

              ‘Maisie came to this club a lot, did she?’

              Ray shrugged his shoulders. ‘Look, I never slept with her and I never got her drinks. I know she was younger than she seemed. I saw her in town with her school uniform on once. After that, I didn’t use her again.’

              ‘
Use
her?’ Dieter said with emphasis, puffing himself up to his full height.

              Ray lifted his hands in the air. ‘Maisie sang, right? She had a really great voice. I got her doing the vocals for some bands that I work with. It was all cash in hand, I’ll admit to that. When I realised she was still in school it stopped – that would have been about a month back.’

              ‘How long had she been working for you?’

              ‘At least a year. Maisie did really well out of it. I never exploited her.’

              ‘Why did the person we spoke to think she was your girlfriend?’ Dani stared at him hard.

              ‘You probably won’t believe me, but it was safer for her to pretend she was with me. Some of the guys who come to these places are into younger girls. Maisie would always put her arm around me if a bloke was sleazing up to her and we might snog occasionally. That was it. Maisie was a smart girl. She knew how to steer away from trouble.’

              ‘You keep talking about her in the past tense, Ray. What do you think has happened to the girl?’

              ‘Maisie’s split, just like she always said she would when she’d saved enough cash. That girl could be anywhere by now and wherever she is she’ll make it big. Maisie’s got a lot of talent.’

              ‘Did she ever tell you where she would go if she had the money?’ Dieter asked.

              ‘I was always suggesting she head to the States. Folk really appreciate her kind of voice over there. Now I think about it, Maisie never agreed or disagreed with me when I said it. She kept her cards close to her chest that one.’

              ‘Thanks for your time,’ Dani replied, feeling that she wasn’t going to get much more out of him.

              Before they returned to the noisy throng which lay beyond the padded door, Ray hesitated and then added, ‘I’ve got a few recordings, if it would help.’

              ‘I beg your pardon?’

              ‘Of Maisie singing. They’re on my phone and not of great quality. I took the videos the first time she ever performed for me. It was like a kind of audition and I used to play it to the managers of the venues I was pitching to.’

              ‘I would like a copy of that very much, Ray.’

              ‘Okay,’ he nodded his head cockily, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

*

They sat on the sofa in Dani’s rarely used sitting room, the lights down low, watching the grainy image that Ray had sent to Dieter’s phone.

              ‘Maisie’s voice is really beautiful,’ the man said quietly. 

              ‘But it’s so melancholy,’ Dani muttered.              

              Dieter gave her a puzzled look.

              ‘She seems so sad. Her eyes are full of misery.’ To her horror, Dani found that tears were escaping onto her cheeks and a huge sob shuddered through her chest.

              Dieter placed his phone down on the coffee table and pulled Dani towards him, tracing the passage of her tears with his warm lips. She allowed him to slide his hands beneath the straps of her dress and slip them off her shoulders. Dani closed her eyes as Dieter’s lips reached her mouth, knowing she should be putting a stop to this but quite unable to do so. Instead, she pulled his sweater up over his head, shivering with pleasure as she enjoyed the sensation of his bare skin pressing down onto hers. Dani was vaguely aware of the phone ringing but ignored it, knowing nothing else was more important in this moment than the powerful physical desire she was feeling.

              It was completely different from anything she’d experienced before.