I should have known it was all a bit too Pretty Woman to be true. I should have known that it was a far harder climb from arriving here with nothing to running her own Social Introduction Agency from a room in Chinatown.

The kindness of one old big shot wasn’t going to be enough.

‘Was Madam Theresa before or after Victor Gatling?’ I said.

‘Madam Theresa was before Victor. In fact, she introduced us.’

I shrugged, not understanding.

‘But why didn’t you tell me the truth?’ I said.

‘A woman doesn’t tell a man everything,’ Ginger said, unsmiling.

Whitestone and Edie laughed out loud.

‘And is that all she wanted from you?’ Whitestone said. ‘Fresh meat? Nothing else?’

‘And new business. She told me that she would welcome a handful of personally vetted, trusted clients, preferably men I have known for years.’

‘Who’s pulling the old girl’s strings?’ Edie said, still grinning. ‘She didn’t set herself up in the Hopewell Centre with her pension, did she?’

‘I don’t know who she’s in business with,’ Ginger said.

Whitestone went to the window and thought about it. When she turned away, she had made up her mind. For the first time, Ginger Gonzalez looked genuinely frightened.

‘So do you think you can get someone in there, Ginger?’ she said. ‘Do you think you can get someone inside the Hopewell Centre?’

I looked at Edie Wren and she looked back at me.

She wasn’t smiling now.

‘A client or a working girl?’ Ginger said.

Whitestone stared at me.

‘Are you still holding the line, Max?’

I thought of Billy and what they had done to him.

I thought of Hana and the life they had stolen.

And I felt the anger flare.

‘This must be the place that Hana and those other women were being taken,’ I said. ‘So yes – I’m holding the line.’

‘Good,’ Whitestone. ‘Because I never know with you these days.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

‘Who do you want in there?’ Ginger asked again. ‘A man or a woman?’

Whitestone looked at Edie Wren and me.

‘Both would be good,’ she said.

28

I dialled the number that Ginger had given me for Madam Theresa, but it just kept on ringing.

I shook my head at Sergeant John Caine as he brewed our tea in Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, the last stop before you enter the Black Museum.

‘Maybe she changes her number every week,’ John suggested, placing a mug of steaming tea before me. ‘They’re wary of phones in that game. Change them all the time. More paranoid than drug dealers. How old is the number?’

‘A few weeks.’

‘A few weeks is a long time in prostitution.’