Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)(76)

The private booth was accessed down a short corridor: a small room with a single black-blinded window and low lighting, it was suffused with the smell of sandalwood. A shower had been crammed into the corner. The massage table was of fake black leather.

“You want shower first?”

“No thanks,” said Strike.

“OK, you take off clothes in there,” she said, pointing at a tiny curtained-off corner in which Strike would have had great difficulty concealing his six foot three frame.

“I’m happier with my clothes on. I want to talk to you.”

She did not seem fazed. She had seen all sorts.

“You want top off?” she offered brightly, reaching for the bow behind her neck. “Ten pound extra, top off.”

“No,” said Strike.

“Hand relief?” she offered, eyeing his flies. “Hand relief with oil? Twenty extra.”

“No, I just want to talk to you,” said Strike.

Doubt crossed her face, and then a sudden flash of fear.

“You police.”

“No,” said Strike, holding up his hands as though surrendering to her. “I’m not police. I’m looking for a man called Noel Brockbank. He used to work here. On the door, I expect—probably the bouncer.”

He had chosen this particular girl because she looked so young. Knowing Brockbank’s proclivities, he thought Brockbank might have sought contact with her rather than any of the other girls, but she shook her head.

“He gone,” she said.

“I know,” said Strike. “I’m trying to find out where he went.”

“Mama sack him.”

Was the owner her mother, or was it an honorary title? Strike preferred not to involve Mama in this. She looked shrewd and tough. He had an idea he would be forced to pay well for what might turn out to be no information at all. There was a welcome naivety about his chosen girl. She could have charged him for confirmation that Brockbank had once worked there, that he had been sacked, but it had not occurred to her.

“Did you know him?” Strike asked.

“He sacked week I come,” she said.

“Why was he sacked?”

The girl glanced at the door.

“Would anyone here have a contact number for him, or know where he went?”

She hesitated. Strike took out his wallet.

“Twenty,” he said, “if you can introduce me to someone who’s got information on where he is now. That’s yours to keep.”

She stood playing with the hem of her suede skirt like a child, staring at him, then tweaked the tenners out of his hand and tucked them deep into her skirt pocket.

“Wait here.”

He sat down on the fake-leather massage table and waited. The little room was as clean as any spa, which Strike liked. He found dirt deeply anaphrodisiac; it always reminded him of his mother and Whittaker in that fetid squat, of stained mattresses and the miasma of his stepfather thick in his nostrils. Here beside the oils neatly lined up on a side cabinet, erotic thoughts could hardly fail to occur. The idea of a full body-to-body naked massage with oil was far from unpleasing.

For no reason that he could think of, his thoughts jumped to Robin, sitting outside in the car. He got briskly to his feet again, as though he had been discovered doing something compromising, and then angry Thai voices sounded close at hand. The door burst open to reveal Mama and his chosen girl, who looked frightened.

“You pay for one girl massage!” said Mama angrily.

Like her protégée, her eyes found his flies. She was checking to see whether any business had already been done, whether he was trying to get more on the cheap.

“He change mind,” said the girl desperately. “He want two girl, one Thai, one blonde. We do nothing. He change mind.”

“You pay for one girl only,” shouted Mama, pointing at Strike with a talon-tipped finger.

Strike heard heavy footsteps and guessed that the long-haired doorman was approaching.

“I’m happy,” he said, inwardly cursing, “to pay for the two-girl massage as well.”

“One hundred twenty more?” Mama shouted at him, unable to believe her ears.

“Yes,” he said. “Fine.”

She made him come back out into the lounge area to pay. An overweight redhead was sitting there in a cut-out black lycra dress. She looked hopeful.

“He want blonde,” said Strike’s accomplice as he handed over another hundred and twenty pounds, and the redhead’s face fell.

“Ingrid with client,” said Mama, shoving Strike’s cash in a drawer. “You wait here ’til she finish.”

So he sat between the skinny Thai girl and the redhead and watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? until a small, suited man with a white beard came scurrying out of the corridor and, avoiding eye contact with everybody, disappeared through the black curtains and escaped onto the street. Five minutes later a slim peroxide blonde who, Strike thought, must be around his own age appeared in purple lycra and thigh-high boots.

“You go with Ingrid,” said Mama and Strike and the Thai girl traipsed obediently back to the private parlor.

“He no want massage,” Strike’s first girl told the blonde breathlessly when the door was closed. “He want know where Noel went.”

The blonde eyed Strike, frowning. She might be more than twice the age of her companion, but she was good-looking, with dark brown eyes and high cheekbones.