Read Online The One a Month Man by Michael Litchfield - Free Book Online

old girl’s reactions, including emotions, were natural and spontaneous.’
    ‘She’s had years to rehearse them,’ countered Sarah, always a testing devil’s advocate.
    ‘Don’t forget, she told me much, much more than she needed to. She could quite easily have left out all the seedy escort agency stuff.’
    ‘True,’ she conceded, giving an inch, but no more. ‘But by doing so, it’s made her tale all the more credible. She could be cuter than you give her credit for.’
    ‘But let’s be generous and give her the benefit of the doubt, shall we?’ I said, democratically canvassing her vote.
    ‘You’re the boss.’ Now
that
was a concession. ‘Where do we start?’
    ‘No one can simply vanish from the planet these days,’ I said, maundering, my mouth lagging well behind my brain.
    ‘But Tina didn’t disappear in
these days.
’ Sarah was a long way from hoisting the white flag of surrender.
    ‘We’re talking thirty years – less from the time she left home – not the Ice Age,’ I pointed out, somewhat enervated by now. ‘She must have had a bank account, National Health Service and National Insurance numbers and an Inland Revenue file.’
    ‘But no mobile phone,’ said Sarah.
    I gave that some thought. ‘She’ll have one now, doubtlessly.’
    ‘If she’s still alive. And if she is, she won’t be Tina Marlowe, bank on it,’ she said.
    ‘And if she’s dead, we’re wasting our time, because Richard Pope will be well and truly off the hook. At the time of Tina’s disappearance, credit cards were in circulation, but not cellphones , so you’re right about a mobile trail being a non-starter, unless she has kept her maiden name.’
    ‘And credit cards were nowhere near as rife back then as they are today,’ Sarah elaborated on the points she’d been making.
    ‘So let’s start plodding, Sarah.’
    She waited, like a sniper, for her next target at which to fire.
    ‘Records of marriages and deaths,’ I said, in a tone that translated into,
I sincerely hope that this isn’t as exciting as it’s going to get.
    She considered this proposed starting-point for a moment.
    ‘Beginning with which year?’ she said, stoically.
    ‘The year of her father’s death,’ I suggested.
    ‘Too far back,’ Sarah opined.
    ‘Maybe not even far back enough, if your hypothesis is right and her mother’s lying. If the escort agency yarn’s a fable, Tina could have married soon after leaving Oxford.’
    She grinned. ‘You got me there, bastard! You want me to hunt the thimble in the marriages and deaths registers?’
    ‘Please. It could be productive, like some coughs. I’ll tackle the Inland Rev, banks, and also the escort agency, if it’s the one I suspect.’
    ‘Has any escort agency ever lasted that long?’
    ‘There are one or two long-runners. The well-organized ones.’
    ‘And what might
well organized
be a euphemism for?’
    ‘Usually gangster controlled.’
    ‘That’s what I thought. And you reckon they’ll do Old Bill a favour?’
    ‘More so than a legit outfit, if there is such a thing in that particular meat trade. The last thing they want is heat on their backs, sniffing around, balancing their turnover against their tax returns.’
    ‘So which agency is your money on?’
    ‘Well, Mrs Marlowe believed it had the word Venus in its name.’
    ‘Unless her story was plucked from the fiction shelves.’
    ‘Quite,’ I said, my voice transmitting the message that Sarah was labouring her point. ‘Venus for the Lonely has been around since the days of the Kray twins and the Richardson brothers. If my memory hasn’t started on the slope to senility, thirty years ago the agency was run by an ex-prostitute who’d gone prematurely into whore-management. She was living with one of the “directors”, a Maltese slimeball, related to “Big Frank” Mifsud. Heard of him?’
    ‘Sort of,’ she said, vaguely.
    ‘Mifsud was in partnership with the Jewish East End creep Bernie Silver,’ I