Willing Flesh by Adam Creed Read Free Book Online Page B

want to cross him – especially if the baby wasn’t his.’
    ‘Sergeant Pulford reckons Bobo is our man,’ says Staffe. ‘Have you got those addresses from the numbers in Elena’s phone?’
    Josie slips him the list.
    In exchange, he hands her Elena’s pale lilac letters to Bobo. ‘Get these translated, would you? Quick as you can, and keep them away from Rimmer. Let’s meet back here at six.’
    On his way out, the landlady, April, bumps into Staffe. She is a decade or so younger than her husband, Dick, with impossibly blonde hair and ‘done’ breasts. She craics with the locals about Staffe being ‘all over her’ in a moll’s twang and getting a laugh from them all.
    ‘You off, Staffe?’ she says, with a lingering smile.
    ‘I’ll pop in later, when Dick slopes off for his nap.’
    She shakes her head and puts a finger to her lips. ‘Sshhh. He don’t know nothing.’
    *
     
    Rimmer is sitting smug on Pennington’s right. Staffe drags a straight-backed chair from the corner of his chief’s office.
    ‘I don’t want a mountain out of a molehill here, Wagstaffe.’
    ‘All we have is a body. I can’t dress it up as something it’s not.’
    ‘A prostitute,’ says Rimmer. ‘She was a coke addict and probably a Russian.’
    ‘She was seeing one of Vassily Tchancov’s boys,’ says Staffe.
    ‘Bobo Bogdanovich,’ says Pennington, as if he wishes he didn’t know such things.
    ‘She was a trick gone wrong, if you ask me,’ says Rimmer.
    ‘This wasn’t done in the heat of passion, Rimmer. Did you see the look on her face? You call that a trick gone wrong?’
    Rimmer smiles, for his and Pennington’s benefit. He turns towards the DCI as if seeking permission to go ahead. ‘The likelihood is, he is impotent. Sex crimes are often committed by men deficient in that area. Unable to do the deed , he becomes furious and kills her. This is what stimulates him. It’s why he leaves her naked. It gives him the upper hand, a last word.’
    ‘This wasn’t a sex crime.’
    ‘Then why was she naked?’
     
    ‘Who’ve you been talking to?’
    ‘They left her phone. That’s not a professional job. It’s a crime of passion, I tell you.’
    Staffe thinks about this. He looks out of the window. ‘She was killed in an instant, not during a struggle.’ The snowflakes are getting thicker, heavier, falling fast to the ground now.
    Pennington leans back in his chair. When he is impatient, he goes the opposite way. He talks, slowly, enunciating each syllable. ‘We shan’t make this case something it is not. Bear in mind what she was and where she came from. I know full well who lurks in the wings here, Staffe. You need to hold this in check.’
    ‘This isn’t a sex crime, sir,’ says Staffe, making to leave. ‘And I won’t pretend it is.’
    ‘She’s a prostitute, man.’
    ‘When I see a prostitute, a high-end, dead prostitute like Elena – I think about power and money. Not sex.’
    *
    Staffe thanks Miles the caretaker for letting them in to Elena’s flat. Miles is modestly built, with wiry grey hair in an expensive cut, and with dandruff drifts on the shoulders of his dark suit. He hands them a master key once he has studied Staffe’s warrant card, jotting down the details in a spidery hand.
     
    Elena’s place is on the New York model: exposed brickwork and high ceilings; on its surface, the flat is unstained as to the business she conducted here. You wouldn’t bring just any stray tom into this place – even if Miles was in on it. The living room has two vast windows that look onto the arching wrought iron of Smithfield’s meat market.
    Staffe pulls on his disposable crime-scene mitts and counts the years he has been in this neck of the woods. He would come to the market with Jessop for a fry-up and a few pints of Guinness at six in the morning after a surveillance vigil or a long night of incident-room follow-up.
    In the wastebasket by the sideboard there are a couple of envelopes addressed