‘I was semi-retired,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘Conducting some minor business to pay the bills. Making introductions. Giving odd jobs to foreign students who needed to pay their rent. Young actresses who were resting. Models who were not quite tall enough or not quite skinny enough or not quite pretty enough or no longer quite young enough. And then I received an offer to set me up in a new establishment. Someone was bringing large numbers of young women into the country and there was a surplus. The Hopewell Centre was where we would put them to work in a high-end, big-ticket environment.’

‘But why bring them in?’ I said. ‘Why go to all that risk?’

‘Makes for a passive, pliant workforce,’ Whitestone said. ‘This old pimp’s just like every other corporate employer in the world. She prefers her workers to be terrified of losing their jobs.’

I did not quite buy it. Running illegals across borders still seemed like a lot of heavy lifting for an upmarket knocking shop.

Unless it was far more than that.

‘Who was your sponsor?’ I said. ‘Who set you up in business? Troy?’

Her face twisted with genuine loathing.

‘That abomination? Fils de pute! That son of a whore was just a hired thug under the delusion he was some kind of revolutionary. I remember Paris in 1968 …’

‘Spare us the detours down memory lane,’ Edie said.

‘I am so sorry about what happened to you,’ Madam Theresa said to me. ‘I have always abhorred violence.’

I felt my left elbow throbbing with the memory of that hammer coming down.

‘No harm done,’ I said. ‘Why were you getting through so many girls a week? What happened to the ones that disappeared? You boasted to me about residencies – as if I could buy a woman. Not for an hour, or a night, but forever. As if they were there to be bought and sold.’

She waved a dismissive hand.

‘That was just sales talk,’ she said. ‘Women come and go in this field. Ask your little whore from Manila. Ask anyone. They get sick of it! They get a better offer! Some man with a soft heart and a hard cock takes a shine to them! That’s why there was a large turnover.’

Whitestone looked at me and I shook my head.

The old woman was lying through her pearly white teeth.

Whitestone placed an empty notebook and pen on the desk.

‘I want to know who set you up in the Hopewell Centre or I am concluding this interview.’

‘I never saw my sponsor,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘I never met him. I never spoke to him on the phone. It was all conducted by some kind of factotum. A driver, I believe. I would know the driver if I saw him, but not his boss.’

‘Not good enough,’ Edie laughed. ‘Nowhere near good enough.’