He handed Robin his phone and she looked down at a news story dated 2010, topped by a picture of Jim Todd staring sullenly at the camera, captioned ‘Todd Jameson’. The cleaner had had more hair in the photograph, but the wide mouth and tiny eyes were unmistakeable. The headline read: BATTERSEA RAPIST JAILED
‘Category two rape, seventeen-year-old girl, sentenced to ten years, out in five,’ said Strike.
‘How on earth did you find this?’ said Robin, momentarily forgetting her antagonism.
‘Told you I thought Todd might be using a fake name. Started searching variations on Todd and James and that came up. Surprising how often people stick close to their birth names when choosing a fake one.’
Robin handed Strike back his phone. Strike, who’d recognised both the dress and the pendant Robin had worn to the Ritz on the night he’d almost kissed her, was reminded how recently he’d hoped for a situation like this – both of them dressed up, alone in a restaurant – to make the declaration he was now certain would have been fruitless.
‘There’s more,’ he said, trying to dispel this miserable thought. ‘Once I got Todd’s real name, it wasn’t too hard to find out he’s got a brother who’s a Conservative borough councillor. I rang the guy up. He wasn’t best pleased to hear from a private detective who’s interested in his pervert brother, but he became a lot friendlier when I asked him how old his grandmother is.’
‘He’s a mason?’
‘Certainly is. He jumped to the conclusion that we’ve been hired by Kenneth Ramsay to quash all masonic rumours around the murder. Needless to say, I didn’t correct him.
‘Bottom line: when Todd got out of jail after the Battersea rape, he went to his brother looking for money. His brother told him to sling his hook, and Todd threatened to spill a lot of family secrets to the local press, including the fact that their mother used to be on the game. Big brother caved and managed to get Todd a couple of cleaning jobs with some fellow masons, to keep him in gambling money. By the sounds of it, all Todd cares about is cards and girls.
‘Anyway, the brother assumed I already knew that Todd’s sex offending goes back years. I played along, probed a bit, and Todd was arrested in Belgium in ’97.’
‘
‘Yep. He was working as a coach driver, moving young Eastern European girls between brothels and abuse rings, and he was doing it under the name “Jim Philpott”, which was his mother’s maiden name. Look at this.’
Strike brought up a fresh article on his phone and handed it to Robin. There, among seven other mugshots dating from 1997, were Todd’s familiar tiny eyes and wide mouth, though back when the picture had been taken Todd had a full head of dull brown hair. Bruising to his upper cheek suggested he’d put up a fight when Belgian police had cornered him. He’d been arrested as part of a pan-European grooming and trafficking gang that lured young women with promises of modelling careers, or jobs as housekeepers for wealthy people in the UK.
Todd, Robin saw, had served twelve months for his crimes, receiving the shortest term of any of the men arrested. None of the girls rescued had accused him of physical abuse, only that he’d knowingly moved them around between brothels and groups of abusers in France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. Robin was sceptical that Todd’s role had been confined to chauffeur: there was no guarantee that every single victim had been found, and his subsequent conviction for rape in the UK suggested he’d been lucky to escape a longer sentence. However, as Robin saw, Jim Todd had been in jail when Reata Lindvall and her daughter vanished, so he definitely couldn’t have killed them.
‘Interesting,’ she said, passing Strike back his phone.
Still hoping for an improvement in the atmosphere, Strike said,
‘I’ve also found out what that text was, that made Pamela leave the shop early.’
‘How?’ said Robin, failing to repress a note of professional rivalry. She considered Pamela her own witness, and had been proud of getting so much information out of the woman.
‘Tracked down her husband and talked to him this afternoon. They’re separated. Pamela chucked him out, because he shagged an old girlfriend he found on Facebook.’
‘So what did the text say?’
‘It was supposedly from the old girlfriend, telling Pamela that she and the husband were having an affair and were deeply in love, and asking Pamela to meet her at Debenhams café on Oxford Street to discuss the matter. However—’
‘It wasn’t really from the girlfriend?’