Chapter 38

IT TOOK SOMEserious cage-rattling through the strip clubs, bars, and brothels of Kings Cross to hunt down information on Hope. I heard fragments of her tale from homeless girls lounging in the back doorways of the supermarkets and kebab shops there. She was whispered about by conspiratorial old men in the upper rooms of Pussy Cats, Showgirls, and Porky’s, where the rubber stairs glowed all day long with neon lights.

A crowlike old madam on Ward Avenue with a split lip told us her full name—Hope Stallwood—and where she’d been staying. But like most working girls, Hope moved around a lot. She pissed off her roommates with her drinking and drugs and her loud, late-night entrances. She was always broke, downtrodden, sullen, tired.

I’d known plenty of girls like Hope in my time on the sex crimes squad. Mostly they ended up dead in a bed somewhere, and I was brought in to assess whether they’d been taken advantage of before they expired. They all looked the same after a while. Bruised thighs tangled in the dirty sheets.

Tox and I didn’t talk about the night before. But I’d stopped viewing our relationship with any kind of hope that it might be extended a minute longer than it had to be. When this case was over, I was getting the hell away from him. It wasn’t the ill treatment I was suffering from my colleagues that disturbed me. It was the calm and gentle way in which he’d said “Yes” when I’d asked him if he was a killer. I replayed it in my mind, over and over, whenever I looked at him.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It hadn’t seemed possible that a man who’d done what he was supposed to have done as a child could be so normal. Well, normal-ish. I realized that I hadn’t really believed he’d done it at the start. I felt shaken now that I could be so wrong about someone.

I followed behind him, lost in my thoughts as we moved from bar to bar and brothel to brothel. Everyone we spoke to about Hope Stallwood told us she was coming into money. Just like Claudia, she’d been on the verge of having it all.

I wondered if that meant we’d find her dead.