Darkness Falls (Kate Marshall, #3)(17)

“Who’s Lorna Luft?” asked Tristan, regretting it the moment he asked.

“Oh my Lord—call yourself gay? Or do you say queer?”

“No. I don’t say queer.”

“Good. Why are the young using queer? Queer is the slur that was hurled at me for most of my younger years. Queer is what the bullies and the homophobes called me when they beat the crap out of me.”

“But some people use that word to describe themselves.”

“And that’s fine, all power to them; just don’t call me queer. I want to be called gay, and I have the right to ask that.”

Tristan could see Ade was getting worked up.

“Okay, so you were saying about Noah Huntley.”

“No, I was telling you that Lorna Luft is Judy Garland’s daughter. Please tell me you know who Judy Garland is.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I don’t know why he chose to impersonate Lorna Luft. I said to him, ‘Have some ambition. Be Liza.’ I got into a similar row with a queen last Halloween who came dressed up as Tamar Braxton.”

“Anyway,” said Tristan impatiently. “You saw Noah Huntley at this gay club, Peppermintz, in August 1997?” he asked, guiding Ade back to the subject.

“No, he wasn’t in the club. I was a beat officer, and our beat took us past the club, on to an old bit of scrubland by the motorway underpass. On this night, there was a smart-looking car parked up by the curb in this completely desolate area, with overgrown bits in the road and just a few blinking streetlights. We’d been briefed that evening that one of the other teams would be doing surveillance on a local drug gang. I thought at first the car might be one of theirs. It was a BMW. So we held back, and the officer I was on shift with, I forget her name, called in the number plate to Control, and it came back that the car was registered to Noah Huntley. We then went to take a closer look and found our local Conservative MP was on the back seat with George, one of the lads who worked at Peppermintz.”

“Having sex?”

Ade rolled his eyes. “Yes, Tristan. Having sex. Either that or it was a particularly enthusiastic naked Heimlich maneuver.”

Tristan laughed. “What did you do?”

“I knocked on the window, and then we stood back and gave them enough time to make themselves presentable. After a few minutes, Noah opened the door. It didn’t help that the barman, George, said, ‘Hiya, Ade,’ whilst he was still doing up his belt buckle. I told them to move on and be careful and reminded them that what they were doing was a public-order offense.”

“Why didn’t you arrest them?”

“Labour had just won the election, and the whole issue of how the police dealt with gay rights had changed radically. They were in a deserted, lonely spot at night. Noah also looked shaken up and was very apologetic. If he’d been an arsehole about it or tried to use his clout as an MP, we’d have booked him and taken him down to the station.”

“Are you still in contact with this barman, George?” asked Tristan.

“I was never in contact with him—I used to see him around, but he went missing a few years later,” said Ade.

“What do you mean, missing?” asked Tristan.

“Vanished without a trace.”

“Were the police involved?”

“Oh, it was nothing like that. Some people thought he’d met a bloke with a bit of money and done a midnight flit. George was behind on his rent. Another rumor was that George turned a few tricks on the side—you know, the job called blow—but he hadn’t taken any money from Noah Huntley, or so he said.”

“Can you remember George’s second name?”

Ade took a sip of his drink and thought for a moment.

“No, he was George. He was Spanish, and he’d been living here for a few years, but I can’t remember his surname. I think I might have a photo of him somewhere at a fancy-dress party. It was before social media, and I’m not sure he even had a mobile phone. He was employed cash in hand at the bar, and I’d known quite a few young guys like him who’d done a midnight flit to avoid the rent.”

“Can you remember when he went missing?”

“Bloody hell. I know it was a while later, after the millennium, cos he was at all the parties . . . erm, maybe a year or two later, summer 2002.”

“Do you know if Noah Huntley was ever arrested or had a police record?” asked Tristan. Ade swilled the last dregs of his pint in the glass and downed it.

“Not when we caught him in 1997. I checked just after to see if he’d been caught cruising before. Do you think he had something to do with Joanna Dobson—”

“Joanna Duncan,” corrected Tristan.

“You think he had something to do with her going missing?”

“I don’t know. If she knew about him being in the closet. And knew he was using rent boys?” asked Tristan.

Ade shook his head.

“By the time Joanna Duncan went missing, being gay in government was no longer a sackable offense, and Noah Huntley had left politics. He was probably earning three times as much money as a well-paid consultant traveling around, able to have his pick of Spanish barmen. He didn’t have to worry about being exposed and then trotting out the wife, two kids, and the Labrador on his front lawn for a happy family photo shoot.”