Miss D? Did she dish up all the goss?”
I shook my head. “It’s good that you’re still getting down with the kids.” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “But, that’s not gonna help us here.”
Tommy fluttered his eyelashes. “Oh, I don’t know. While you were in there chatting away to the sunshine girl, I was pairing my phone with hers.”
“What?” I genuinely had no idea what he meant.
Tommy showed me his pearly whites. “I saw it in
Person of Interest.”
Like that made sense.
Tommy carried on. “It’s where you pair one mobile devicewith another, so you can synchronize data between them. Say between your tablet PC and phone.”
My brother Shug had tried to show me how to do that once, but it was over my head.
“That’s to do with Bluetooth, right?” It was the only thing I did remember.
“Aye. Anyway, it means I can read Little Miss Sunny D’s text messages.”
He paused as if he was waiting for a drum roll. He’d have a very long wait. My session with Donna had tired me out.
“Christ, Nancy, if we’re gonna do this you’ll need to know this kind of stuff.”
Still no reaction from me.
“Okay,” he said, eyes twinkling. “After you left, Donna sent a text message to someone called Lorna, saying, and I’m quoting this…” He looked down at his phone. “They know about Sheena. Assuming they mean us, what do you think they’re on about?”
“It could only be that Sheena lied about Fredericks coming onto her,” I said, “But, how’s that linked to Sheena’s disappearance?”
There was one way to find out who Lorna was.
Tommy dialled using a cheap disposable phone he’d bought from Tesco. “We don’t want the number being tracked back to us,” he explained. He was turning into a proper spy.
He outlined his plan. He’d pretend to be from Lorna’s bank and say that her account had been accessed illegally and been emptied of funds. Hopefully, she’d be too flustered to be suspicious and she’d give out her details, including home address.
It wasn’t until the sixth ring that he got an answer. Tommy reeled off his lies, hoping the person on the end of the line wouldn’t think it was strange he referred to her by her first name.
A woman’s voice came over the line. “I’m sorry but I’m not Lorna. This is her phone though. She must have dropped it when she was last here.”
“Hold on.” The woman sounded harassed. “I need to take this.”
There was a click but she hadn’t ended Tommy’s call, so we heard her when she said,
“Helping Hands Outreach
, how can I help you?”
She must have realised he could hear because the connection went dead.
We’d never heard of the place, so I looked it up on my phone. It was a centre that specialized in helping sex workers and drug addicts.
“How would Donna Di Marco know someone from a place like that?” I said.
Tommy thought about it for a minute, then said, “I think our mysterious Lorna must work there. Why else would they know her name? I bet most of the people who visit those places use aliases.”
He was right. We were onto something.
“What are the chances Sheena visited this place?”
Tommy grinned. “Let’s head over there and see if Lorna comes back for her phone.”
Chapter 7
The outreach centre wasn’t what we’d expected. When we walked through the doors we were met not by hospital grey or that ugly olive colour everyone used to paint their bathroom in until they realised it looked awful, but by a calming sky blue. Along the walls there were black and white photographs depicting happy scenes: picture postcard children playing on the beach, a family walking in the snow with their two black Labradors and a happy young couple strolling along a Glasgow street, arm in arm. From what I could tell, there were no puke stains on the dark blue and white swirl patterned carpet. And the place didn’t reek of desperation either.
If it weren’t for the posters on the wall advertising the centre’s
Janwillem van de Wetering