‘Madam Theresa was a pimp in the old days,’ she said, her eyes still on Ginger. ‘Started out in the Sixties and Seventies. When the rich and famous were hanging out with the Krays and the Warboys. Prostitution in the golden age of social mobility. Madam Theresa was meant to be French or Belgian, the black sheep of some European aristocracy. They said Madam Theresa Defarge could get you anything. Have I got the right pimp?’

Ginger nodded briefly. ‘That’s the one.’

‘But I thought Madam Theresa died years ago,’ Whitestone said.

‘She’s alive and working again harder than ever,’ Ginger said. ‘She made a comeback and now she’s operating out of that big luxury apartment block on the south side of the river. The circular one directly opposite Big Ben.’

‘The Hopewell Centre,’ I said.

‘When was the last time you saw this Madam Theresa?’ Edie said.

Ginger shook her head. ‘Years ago.’

‘And when was the last time you spoke to her?’ Whitestone said.

We watched Ginger Gonzalez bite her lower lip.

Whitestone pushed herself off the wall.

She came and stood between me and Edie, her eyes boring into Ginger.

‘Let me explain how it works now,’ Whitestone said. ‘You’re either with us or you are against us. You either play it straight with us or we burn you to the ground. What you can’t do is play both sides. Do you get it?’

‘I get it. The last time I spoke to Madam Theresa was a few weeks ago.’

‘What did she want?’ Whitestone said, and then answered her own question. ‘She wanted women, didn’t she? Of course she did.’

Ginger nodded.

‘And I declined. Because I don’t like what’s happening up there. At this Hopewell Centre. They’re getting through twenty new girls a week.’

‘Twenty new girls a week?’ Edie said.

‘I know a knocking shop has a high turnover of staff,’ Whitestone said. ‘But twenty girls a week is ridiculous. What are they doing up there?’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Ginger said.

‘If they’re getting through that many girls,’ Edie said, ‘then it’s not even some high-end brothel. It’s a slave market.’

‘And how do you know this Madam Theresa?’ I asked Ginger.

It was full disclosure now.

‘I worked for her,’ Ginger said. ‘When I first came to this country.’

I shook my head.

‘That’s not the story you told me, is it?’

The story I had heard from Ginger was that she had met a rich man – a very rich man, Victor Gatling, a property developer they called the Man Who Built London, and after that relationship had come to a natural end, with the money she had put aside she set up her business, picking up men in the bars of five-star hotels and putting them in contact with her ever-changing stable of college-educated, tattoo-free girls.