Times of Trouble (24 page)

‘
What is his name?’ I
asked.

The detective looked
thoughtful, wondering if it was ok to tell me. With a small shrug,
he decided it was.

‘
Matthew
Harrison-Brown.’

I let the name settle
into my memory, and then had another thought.

‘
Is he the only one
they blackmailed?’

‘
The detectives in
London assume not. If they got away with conning one client,
there’s likely to be others. They will be working on that at their
end. Doesn’t sound like Sporalli is much use, though.’

‘
And how did the
detectives know Sophie was in Sydney?’

Again he paused, not
overjoyed at giving too much information to me.

‘
I presume this
Sporalli fella told them.’

Of course, it
suddenly made sense. Just as Frank had given the information to
Liam (at a huge price) he would have easily folded, and given it to
the police. But who else had he given it to? If these people were
after him as well, it was possible he had given them Sophie and
Katie to save his own skin.

The detective was
looking at me as if to work out how I could be of use to him. I
wondered how seriously he and his colleagues were taking the search
for Sophie, and whether they cared that she was in danger. He
hadn’t mentioned Katie: did they know more about the events at the
train station than they let on? Or was this the first time a
connection had been made between the woman who died at Central
Station and the fax they received from London? I suddenly felt
uncomfortable at the way he was staring at me. The detective
shifted in his seat and looked ready to stand.

‘
I’d like you to give
a statement about the men who followed you, and what you know about
your sister’s case.’

I didn’t hesitate to
reject this idea. Liam had warned me about putting any information
on the official record. The fewer people who know I’m involved in
this situation the better.

‘
No, look, Liam and I
might have been imagining it. We are pretty stressed; it’s possible
the men weren't actually following us. It’s more likely that these
people have no idea we exist. I won’t make a statement today. I can
come back another time...’

The detective looked
cynical about people who don’t want to make statements.

‘
The sooner you make
the statement the better. And in the meantime, why don’t you leave
the detective work to us. Make the statement and then go back to
Adelaide. We will be on the lookout for your sister.’

I heard a patronising
tone, and I felt his main aim was to help the London police to
arrest Sophie. I hadn’t come all this way to help the police lock
her up. Imagine what she would think of me then!

‘
Take my card. If you
think of anything else helpful, and of course if you find your
sister, give me a call on this number.’

His large finger
obscured almost everything on the card, but I could see a mobile
phone number under some other numbers. I shoved the card in my
pocket and thanked him for his time, almost running down the
corridor before he could ask any more questions. He called after
me.

‘
Can you leave your
number with me, in case I need to contact you?’

I turned back,
wishing I had the guts to ignore his request, and run. But I was
always too polite for my own good. He took a notebook out of his
pocket, and eyed me suspiciously, sensing my
nervousness.

‘
0425325323,’ I
obediently recited, changing the last digit from a four to a three
in my head so not to give him a real number. I wasn’t going to have
him calling me if he wanted to arrest Sophie. Again I turned to
leave, confident it was the last time I would see Detective
Williamson. But before I could get out of the door, he called me
back.

‘
Is this the right
number? It says it’s disconnected.’

I can’t believe he
called it to check! He must be used to finding himself with a fake
number. I fumbled for my phone and showed him the screen. Detective
Williamson wasn’t impressed.

‘
Oh, it’s off, sorry.
I was about to turn it back on. I’ll just do that now.’

This time I turned
and ran, not looking back to see if he followed me. I went straight
down the escalator to the train, still reeling from what I had
heard. This had to be the break I needed to find out who was after
Sophie. It had to be something to do with Matthew Harrison-Brown.
He had to be stalking Sophie, and maybe me as well.

Chapter 21

Liam had left four
angry messages on my voicemail while my phone was off. He was still
seething by the time I called him back.

‘
I told you not to go
to the police,’ he almost screamed into the phone.

‘
I don’t care what
you told me not to do. You don’t own me.’

‘
And thanks a million
for the help with the car. I had to get a train back there, and
when I found the car it had about ten parking tickets on it
…’

I wanted to tell him
what I had found out, but it was impossible to get a word in
edgeways around his fury. At least he had retrieved the car.
Apparently someone had moved it off King St and left it in a side
street. They'd even locked it, and left the key on the wheel. This
was a huge piece of luck, it could just have easily been stolen or
towed away. But Liam was not in the mood to acknowledge this. I
hung up on him, and then texted him to call me back when he had
calmed down, as I had things to discuss with him. He hadn’t phoned
by the time I got back to Parramatta on the train.

The journey gave me
time to think. And in due course, it occurred to me that the member
of parliament, Harrison-Brown, might not be the only one with a
motive to harm Sophie and her friends. Was there someone else they
were blackmailing who didn’t pay up, but decided to get rid of the
problem another way?

Sophie sure wasn’t
making any of this easy for me. Not only did she have someone
looking to kill her, but I had to assume they also wanted to find
anyone else she was involved with. Obviously they were worried she
would tell other people about their working relationship. But who
would care so much about people finding out they visited a
prostitute, to the point of killing to keep the secret safe? It
would have to be someone who stood to lose a lot. The member of
parliament fitted this profile. But then why would he also go to
the police as well? Assuming Sophie, and possibly Frank Sporalli,
were the last ones he needed to get rid of, he had almost reached
that goal. But his complaint to the police had got Frank arrested
and now the police were after Sophie too. If she was arrested, all
her secrets would eventually come out, and the world would know who
her clients were. The more I thought about it, the more likely it
wasn’t Harrison-Brown. His reputation couldn't have been worth
killing over. If he was convicted of murder, he wouldn’t just lose
his career, he’d be in prison for the rest of his life!

I walked quickly back
to Andy’s from the train station. Liam wasn’t there when I got into
the apartment. I guessed once he got the car, he had gone back to
Dee Why, to our last sighting of Sophie. I felt nervous about being
outside for too long, potentially visible to blue Magnas, and
searching for Sophie meant being outside. If Liam was happy to do
that on his own, I was happy to stay in the apartment, doing my
best to investigate the people who were behind the murders. I
locked the door, and shut all the curtains. Even though Andy's
apartment wasn't on the ground floor, and no one could possibly see
through the windows, I somehow felt safer with everything closed
tight, cocooning me in the dark flat.

Liam had left his
laptop, so I opened it up and typed ‘Matthew Harrison-Brown’ into a
Google search. The first result was a website with the address
‘matthewharrisonbrown.co.uk’. It was his official website, with the
banner at the top announcing he was the member for Bethnal Green
and Bow. There was a photo of him; he looked like a pompous snob.
He had a little moustache, and his face had a greasy sheen to it.
He was overweight, and really unattractive, but his expression in
the photo gave the impression he thought he was a smug little man.
As much as I tried to avoid the thought of what he would look like
having sex, my mind couldn’t help jumping straight to that image.
Gross!

I tried to rub out
the thought by focusing on what was on the website, but it was so
dull, it didn’t do a good job of distracting me. There was a lot of
information about his constituency, and from the information on his
policies, and the style of the website, it was obvious he was a
Conservative MP. He had a section on his latest reports to the
parliament, which showed he was ‘anti-crime’, ‘pro tax cuts’ and
‘fighting for the rights of businesses affected by new EU
environmental regulations’. Boring! He also had a ‘contact me’ page
which invited people to book appointments with him.

I stared at the
‘contact me’ page, my mouse hovering over the ‘email me’ button. I
clicked onto it, and a form came up asking for my contact details,
so Matthew could make a time to meet with me. Before I could decide
it was a bad idea, I quickly typed ‘concerned friend’ in the name
field, and in the contact field I wrote Liam’s address:
[email protected]. It was Liam’s computer; the message could
be traced back to him either way, so I may as well use his real
email address. Then in the ‘details’ field, where people would
usually write ‘there are gangs hanging around my street’ or ‘I
don’t want a phone tower built in this suburb’, I typed ‘leave
Molly alone’. Short and sweet. I pressed send, and watched as the
page loaded to a ‘thank you for your email. Matthew will be in
contact with you shortly’ message.

Even though I was
almost sure that this person couldn’t be the one threatening
Sophie’s life, it didn’t hurt to let him know someone knew what he
was doing, if he was in fact a murderous psycho. I wondered if
anyone would be able to work out the exact location the message was
sent from, as Liam’s friend had with the internet café. But since
it was a laptop, there was no way of knowing exactly where the
computer was when it sent the message? I hoped so. The last thing I
wanted was to pinpoint us in this exact apartment. A lump formed in
my throat as I thought about the implications of the message I had
sent so impulsively. Had I just fucked things up? Liam was going to
spew. But my mind cleared as I thought about the slight chance
there was of anyone actually reading the email, let alone caring
who it was from.

As I thought back to
what the detective had told me this morning, something suddenly
struck me as important. 20,000 pounds. Danny had blackmailed this
guy for £20,000. Sophie’s notebook! I grabbed it from my handbag,
and opened to the first page to check if my mind was playing tricks
on me. But it wasn’t. I was right. The first garbled phrase was
followed by the number 20,000. This had to be a clue; there was no
way it was just a coincidence. I looked at the words again: ‘Busby
George Old Shoe’. Was it possible this really was a code, as I had
guessed? I thought back to the cryptic message Sophie had sent to
mum. She had used a code that would be familiar to anyone who knew
her well. Lyrics to The Beatles. As if this was the last piece of
the puzzle my mind needed to get the code sorted, the link fell
into place. Matthew
Harrison-
Brown.
George
Harrison
, one of The
Beatles’ names.
That had to be
it!

But what about
Matthew and Brown? I had heard Beatles songs so many times that
they ran through my mind in a list. Busby…busby…busby. It still
wasn’t making sense. I got back onto the laptop, and searched for
Matthew Busby. Some results came up for Facebook profiles of people
with the name Matthew Busby. That didn’t help me. So I tried
‘Beatles Lyrics’. The first search result brought up a list of
every lyric of every Beatles song. Thank god for the
internet!

I did a ‘find’ search
for ‘Busby’, and the curser leaped to the one place in the lyrics
that showed this word. I exhaled, as the proof I was right hit me
in the face. ‘Matt Busby’ was a tiny part of a tiny song that I
couldn’t remember ever hearing. It only had one verse:
‘Like a rolling stone, like a
rolling stone, Like the FBI and the CIA, And the BBC, BB king, And
Doris Day, Matt Busby. Dig it, dig it, dig it,
Dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it, dig it,
dig it, dig it’
. Just to prove
a point, I also searched for ‘old’ and ‘shoe’, and was unsurprised
to see this also now made sense. Harrison-Brown. ‘Old Brown Shoe’.
This was another Beatles’ song; this time one I remembered hearing.
So Sophie had coded Matthew Harrison-Brown as ‘Busby George Old
Shoe’, and recorded the amount they got from him as 20,000
pounds.

I felt pleased to
have figured this out. But at the same time, proof of blackmail was
devastating. I wondered how long it took Sophie and Danny to spend
all that money. And whose idea was it to start blackmailing people?
I preferred not to believe it was Sophie who came up with the
scheme. We had a bit of a disrupted childhood, and Sophie was a bit
out of control at times, but mum did her best. I hated to think how
upset she would be to find her daughter was involved in serious
crime. We weren’t brought up to feel like money was really
important to happiness. Well I wasn’t, anyway. As long as you had
enough money to live, and were doing something with your life, it
didn’t matter if you weren’t rich. But Sophie must have viewed
things differently. Having sex for a living couldn’t have been an
enjoyable job. I just couldn’t believe she wanted to do it. But she
did it for money, so money must have become important to her. And
maybe she needed more and more of it to make herself happy. Even if
it meant moving from escorting to blackmail. When she talked about
becoming a famous actress, I thought she was imagining her adoring
fans, and her name in lights. But maybe what she had was visions of
hundreds of thousands of dollars. How did this happen,
Sophie?