Bumping Uglies

Chapter Eighteen

I was fishing and thinking. Thinking and fishing. I was sitting on the centre of an old wooden bridge that crossed a small river that ran along one boundary of the farm with a line and lure in the water.

I hadn't caught anything aquatic, but I had landed several mental whoppers.

In trying to rank-order the size, velocity and viscosity of the turds falling around my ears I had come to a single important conclusion; it was definitely raining shit.

I ticked off the litany on my fingers...

I could be linked to the scene of a murder. Moreover, I had frequented the brothel that harboured the perpetrators and a large supply of potential victims.

I was harbouring my client whose well-being seemed to be under threat, erroneously, from the aforementioned murderers.

I was trying to suppress feelings for the same client, who I also felt that I could not trust on the basis that her former relationship rang false on any one of a dozen levels.

I was mentally and morally obligated to attempt the rescue of a sex worker to whom I felt I owed a debt of honour simply for having performed her job.

I had no leads to finding the errant fiancé, who would be necessary to clear my name, when inevitably the police caught up with this trail of events. He would also be needed to prove or disprove my hesitation with regard to my client.

I was, in short, fucked.

Something else was nagging at me; causing me to miss any nibbles on the lure, and everything else.

The people who ran The Tunnel of Love were a pretty sophisticated operation. The laptop, facial recognition and a complex hidden camera network and recording capability all bore witness to that.

I wasn't too worried that they had my car registration. The Beetle was registered to my old flat, and I had never updated it. There were no other ties that would enable them to locate me out in Pebble Deeping, except...

... Except they also had my phone number, and I could not shake something that Elira had said. They could send the video to wives, bosses or the papers. Why would the papers care if Joe Nobody spent his evenings balls-deep in an Albanian sex worker on an industrial estate in Tipton?

The uncomfortable answer was that some of the clients at The Tunnel of Love were not Joe Nobodies, but rather more important than that.

The Tunnel of Love operators were not brazen, but neither were they operating in a particularly covert manner. The authorities must surely know about the club and there must therefore be some degree of protection being provided from people more important than my hypothetical Joe Nobody. Particularly if they felt so emboldened as to be shooting people in broad daylight.

Protection could be offered in return for a pile of cash, or as a quid pro quo for time with the women and the subsequent threat of videos being released.

If even some of that were true, it could give the people at The Tunnel leverage over individuals who could potentially track and trace mobile phones via cell tower data.

Someone within the police, the judiciary or the tech and communication industries could pose a risk to the security of my location.

It would be difficult to persuade someone on the force with that kind of juice to deploy it, but it was definitely possible and would likely depend on what level of depravity Madam Poon had managed to record for posterity. She had made it clear that they could cater for pretty much any tastes with enough warning and a commensurately thick wodge of wedge.