Beg Me

Chapter One Home again. One day someone will tell me why Heathrow can simultaneously stay modern and yet keep this drab, dingy feel to the area around the luggage carousels. The atmosphere of oppressive gloom begins the minute you hit customs, continues through luggage collection, and pass the newsstands selling all the tabloid irrelevancies. Good thing was that Helena was on time to pick me up and drive me back into town. In style. A kiss on both cheeks, and then it was the back of the limo. "How was the flight?" she asked politely. "Pleasant enough. Thai Airways presents you with a wet flower when you get onboard that you don't really know what to do with. Then they punish you with an American teen comedy that you wouldn't waste even a minute on while channel-surfing." "He didn't make you fly coach, did he? I told Lee when he called you'd expect business class and" "It was fine," I assured her. "It's off season over there, and it wasn't a full flight, so I didn't care." Helena shook her head, muttering how she'd never put up with it over thirteen bloody hours from the Pacific Rim. Helena Willoughby. She enjoyed the best for herself, and she insisted on getting it for her friends, which I had always found both sweet and refreshingly uncommon for her class. Born in Knightsbridge, product of the best schools, beautiful and blond and in her late thirties, she ran the most successful male escort agency out of her house in Richmond-upon-Thames. Now she sighed at me, indicating our small talk was over. "Fitz is pretty shaken by Anna's death," she offered. "I expect so." Fitz was one of Helena's escorts and a past lover of mine. He was about to open his own massage clinic, and I knew that he'd wanted to lure Anna away to come work for him. She had even sent him an e-mail from New York suggesting that, yes, she was interested in coming home if the pay was right. She must have sent it when she became disenchanted with her new cult friends. This just made us all feel worsethat she had been close to extricating herself from whatever dark storm had claimed her. "Where do you think you'll start?" asked Helena. "With this Craig character. Her boyfriendex-boyfriend?" "Oh, God, that's right!" Helena said suddenly. "You don't know. You couldn't possibly . . ." "Know what? What are you talking about, darling?" "Craig Padmore? Anna's ex-boyfriend? He's dead, Teresa." And he was my one lead. At twelve-thirty the next day, I walked up the steps of the National Gallery, reminding myself I should really stop by sometime and catch the show about American painters in Paris in the Sainsbury Wing. In the midst of all the giggling students on vacation from Austria and the Koreans in shirts with bizarre tropical patterns and camcorders sat this pear-shaped fellow in a suit, who waved me over. He was quite swarthy, his five o' clock shadow come early at noon, and under his head of thick curly hair, two bushy black eyebrows were narrowing and wondering what trouble I was up to now. This was Detective Inspector Carl Norton of the Metropolitan Police. He had a packed lunch on his lap, a black leather satchel propped up against his knee, and was leafing through a thick tome called Impressionism and Nineteenth-Century English Poetry. If England is full of eccentrics, then Carl is on their electoral rollhe was working these days toward aLawrence, Lisa is the author of 'Beg Me ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385341042 and ISBN 0385341040.