‘All right,’ said Quill, ‘if someone’s eavesdropping on our dreams, we’ve got a few hours left with us still having one up on them. So we’re going to follow up our major lead right now. We’re going into that brothel tonight.’ He went back to the board and pointed to the business card. ‘Tunstall, or persons unknown, turned over Spatley’s office looking for something. That card, an indication of Spatley having links with persons of ill repute, was in there to be found. We need to go into the brothel, find out if anyone in there knows anything about Spatley or any of our other victims, especially anything that could be a motive for murder.’

Ross went over to the wheezing PC and brought up her database about the brothel, showing photos that she and Costain had taken of prostitutes and their clients arriving and departing. ‘Nothing unusual on the surface,’ she said. ‘We know all the exits. There’ll be some muscle in there. There’ll be something to prevent johns shagging and running.’

‘So we do the simplest possible thing,’ said Costain. ‘I go in as a punter.’

‘I should go,’ said Sefton. ‘I’m better with the Sight. I’m more likely to find any anomalies.’

‘I’d recommend you both go,’ said Ross. ‘Having a look around isn’t something they’ll encourage punters to do. You’ll have to find some way between you to break out of the routine of being introduced to women downstairs and then being led straight up to the bedrooms.’

‘We’re not allowed to shag on duty?’ said Costain to her, with a raised eyebrow.

She looked calmly back at him, too professional to rise to that.

‘I’ll have to ask Joe,’ said Sefton. ‘I think he’ll be okay with it.’

Quill went back to the board and drew a vague shape in the air with his finger. ‘We have to move quickly, but we might suddenly run into something significant,’ he said. ‘It’s like when we didn’t know what Losley was, when the disparate things she did made no sense on their own. We keep hitting the outer features of a dirty great unknown. They’re all connected, but we can’t work out what the shape in the middle is. The elephant in the room, as encountered by a team of blind people, who each feel what they think is a different animal.’

‘It’s weird,’ said Ross, ‘how that expression’s come to mean something everyone should see and doesn’t want to mention, rather than something nobody could see. It’s as if fooling yourself is standard practice now.’

‘Except,’ said Sefton, ‘with the Sight, we’re the ones who should be able to see it.’

‘And ours,’ said Costain, ‘is going to be one sodding terrifying elephant.’

Chapter Fifteen

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