Red Light by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

been making so much money out of prostitution, Katie could almost have believed that he was sincere.
    She finished reading through the file and sat back. She knew that advertising brothels and prostitution was prohibited by the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act of 1994. But if a girl didn’t specifically offer sex on Gerrety’s website, was her advertisement in breach of the law?
    And what if a man answered the girl’s advertisement and had sex with her, could Gerrety be said to be living off immoral earnings, since he charged her 200 euros a month to post it? Or could he protest that what two people decided to do together once they had met on a social website had nothing to do with him whatsoever? You might just as well prosecute an online dating agency for living off immoral earnings. Or the
Examiner
even, for running a lonely hearts column.
    It was Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll who had insisted on charges being brought against Michael Gerrety. He was a deeply religious man and he despised Gerrety with a passion – he almost considered his disdain for the laws of brothel-keeping to be a personal insult. In Katie’s opinion, though, they had charged Gerrety prematurely, before they had gathered enough evidence that would stand up in court, and on reflection Chief Superintendent O’Driscoll had been inclined to agree with her. With his approval, Katie had set up Operation Rocker to dig out even more substantial proof that Gerrety was breaking the law.
    She took her cup of coffee to the window and stared out of it for a long time. Only one street away she could see the tall greenish tower of The Elysian. It was seventeen storeys high and the tallest building in the whole of Ireland. It had been built in the boom days of the Celtic Tiger, before the financial crash of 2008, and even now almost half of its apartments and offices were still empty. The people of Cork had been quick to nickname it ‘The Idle Tower’, after The Idle Hour pub nearby. But there was one apartment that she knew was occupied, right at the very top, with a commanding view of the whole of the city, and that was where Michael Gerrety lived.
    She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about little Corina, too frightened of punishment even to take a single square of chocolate – or of the girl who had been found with the headless, handless body in the bedsit in Lower Shandon Street, too terrified to leave the room.
    It was raining almost insanely hard now, as if God were trying to wash all of the city’s sins away. Katie’s jubilation at John’s finding a job at ErinChem had subsided, and she felt flat. She almost wished she had given up on Cork and gone to San Francisco with him.
    At least in San Francisco it wouldn’t be raining as if it were never going to stop.

Five
    Zakiyyah was woken up by the sound of somebody whistling and drumming a complicated rhythm on a tabletop.
    She lifted her head from the bed and looked around. Her eyes were unfocused and her ears were ringing, as if she had fallen over and hit the back of her head. She was lying in a large gloomy room with sloping dormer ceilings that were blotched with damp. The carpet was a dirty bright green and fraying at the edges. Through the grimy windows at either end of the room she could see wet slate rooftops, so she guessed they must be three or four storeys up.
    In the street below she could hear traffic and people’s feet pattering and clicking along the pavement, and somebody shouting ‘
Echo
!
Echo
!’ The man who was whistling and drumming was sitting at a table beside the door, bent over a newspaper, which he was reading with all the intensity of somebody studying an instruction manual. Every now and then he stopped whistling and drumming, sniffed, and turned a page. He was bald and bulky, a light-skinned African, wearing a yellow flowery shirt that was straining across his shoulders.
    Zakiyyah said nothing, but sat watching him. She had no idea where she was or how she