I See You(99)

A café provides the perfect financial detergent when you need to move large amounts of cash around. Who cares what the footfall’s like? Invisible customers can still pay the bills. Money comes in dirty; it goes out clean.

Over time, regulars become loose-lipped. We know your secrets, your ambitions, your bank details. Casual customers share confidences; the Formica counter acting as therapist’s couch. You talk; we listen.

It’s the perfect environment to source more girls, and – just occasionally – more customers. A card, slipped into the jacket pocket of a man who fits the brief. A man who’s already proved his mettle with his smutty comment to the girl on the till; whose pinstripe and braces mark him out as someone with money. A man who will, later, look at the invitation in his pocket, and be flattered enough to take a look.

An exclusive members’ club. The finest girls.

Access to a service he won’t find anywhere else in the city.

Access to you.





33


Melissa stands in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen. She registers the horrified look on Katie’s face; the unfolded Underground map in my hand, and slowly the smile disappears from her face. I realise I’m hoping she’ll deny it; that she’ll produce some plausible explanation for the evidence I’m holding.

She doesn’t even try. Instead she gives a deep sigh, as though our actions are tedious in the extreme.

‘It’s very bad manners to rifle through someone’s personal belongings,’ she says, and I have to swallow the automatic apology it prompts. She walks across the kitchen, her heels clicking against the tiled floor, and takes the Underground map from my hand. I realise I’m holding my breath, but when I let it out there isn’t anything there; my chest feels tight, as though someone is pushing against it. I watch her refold the map, tutting when a crease bends the wrong way, but not hurried, not panicked in the slightest. Her coolness disorientates me, and I have to remind myself that the evidence is incontrovertible. Melissa is behind the website; behind the London Gazette adverts. It’s Melissa who has been hunting women across London; selling their commutes so that men can hunt them too.

‘Why?’ I ask her. She doesn’t answer.

‘You’d better sit down,’ she says instead, gesturing to the long white table.

‘No.’

Melissa gives an exasperated sigh. ‘Zoe, don’t make this any more difficult than it’s going to be. Sit down.’

‘You can’t keep us here.’

She laughs, then; a humourless bark that says she can do exactly what she wants. She walks the few steps towards the kitchen counter; an expanse of black granite broken only by the coffee machine and a knife block next to the hob. Her hand hovers over the block for a second, her index finger playing a silent game of Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo, before she pulls out a black-handled knife around six inches long.

‘Can’t I?’ she says.

I sink slowly into the chair nearest to me. I tug at Katie’s arm and after a moment she does the same.

‘You won’t get away with this, Melissa,’ I tell her. ‘The police will be here any minute now.’

‘I very much doubt that. Judging from the updates you’ve so helpfully shared with me over the last few weeks, the police have proved themselves to be largely incompetent.’

‘But you told PC Swift where we were. She’ll—’ I stop even before I see the pitying look on Melissa’s face. How stupid of me. Of course Melissa didn’t really call Kelly Swift. The realisation is like a punch to the stomach and I fold forward in my chair, suddenly spent. There are no police coming. My panic alarm is in my bag at home. No one knows we’re here.

‘You’re sick,’ Katie spits, ‘or mad. Or both.’ There’s more than just anger in her voice. I think of all the time Katie has spent in this kitchen over the years; baking cakes, doing her homework, talking to Melissa in a way that sometimes isn’t possible between a mother and daughter, no matter how close they are. I try to imagine how she must feel, then I realise I’m already there. Lied to. Taken advantage of. Betrayed.

‘Neither. I saw a business opportunity and I took it.’ Melissa walks towards us, the knife held casually in one hand as though she has been interrupted in the middle of preparing dinner.

‘This isn’t a business!’ I say, so outraged I stumble over the words.

‘It most certainly is a business, and a very successful one. I had fifty clients within a fortnight of setting up the website, with more joining every day.’ She sounds like an advert for a franchise opportunity; like she’s bragging about adding to her chain of coffee shops.

She sits opposite us. ‘They’re so stupid. Commuters. You see them, every day, oblivious to the world around them. Plugged into their iPods, staring at their phones, reading their papers. Taking the same route every day, sitting in the same seat, standing on the same spot on the platform.’

‘They’re just going to work,’ I say.

‘You see the same ones every day. I was watching this woman once, doing her make-up on the Central line. I’d seen her a few times, and she always had the same routine. She’d wait till Holland Park, then she’d get out her make-up bag and start plastering her face. Powder first, then eye-shadow, mascara, lipstick. As the train slowed down at Marble Arch she’d be putting her make-up bag away. I watched her this one time, and as I looked away I caught a man watching her too, with a look in his eyes that suggested he was thinking about more than her face. That’s when I first had the idea.’