The Madam. Jaime Raven

all the way.’

      The Court was a four-star hotel that catered mostly for business types. It was less than ten years old and had been built overlooking a park in the city centre. The reception area hadn’t changed much. It was still cold and colourless.

      We checked in and made our way up to room eighty-three on the third floor. Scar held my hand going up in the lift. She could tell I was anxious. My breathing suddenly became laboured and my stomach began to curl inside itself.

      The corridor had a new carpet. The walls were lined with sepia prints of Southampton before German bombs ripped into it during World War Two. They too were new additions.

      Scar inserted the key card in the lock, stood back to let me go in first. The moment I stepped through the door it all came flooding back with alarming clarity.

      The room had been refurbished since that night, but everything was familiar. Bed, TV, sofa. All in the same places. The colours and shapes were different, but not the feel of the place.

      Scar closed the door behind me and I had a sudden vision of Rufus Benedict lying on the bed. Blood everywhere. The knife on the floor.

      I rushed into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. The regurgitated champagne made my eyes water. I stayed there for a few minutes retching into the pan, sweat prickling my face. When I went back into the main room Scar poured me a glass of bottled water from the mini bar.

      ‘Drink this,’ she said.

      It was cold and refreshing, but it failed to wash away the taste of vomit.

      ‘It must be weird coming back here,’ she said.

      I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. Saw myself in the mirror above the dressing table. Not a pretty sight.

      I’d had to come back. Reliving that night was part of the process I knew I had to go through. It was necessary to remember as much as possible.

      ‘Talk me through it,’ Scar said.

      She was sitting opposite me on the sofa, a can of Diet Coke in her hand. She’d removed her jacket, and I noticed she had a new tattoo. The name Lizzie was scrawled across her right forearm, and there was a red heart beneath it.

      ‘I got a call from Ruby that evening,’ I said, casting my mind back and feeling at once the sharp stab of bitter memories. ‘One of her regulars wanted someone new. I had to turn up at the hotel at eight and come straight up to the room. That was pretty much how it worked most times. All very straightforward.’

      ‘And businesslike,’ Scar said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And businesslike.’

      I’d actually been an escort for five months by then and I told punters to call me The Madam because I thought it had a saucy ring to it. The money was good and having sex with strange men wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it would be. It was usually over very quickly, and the guys were mostly decent and polite. There was the shame and guilt, of course, but it was something I was prepared to live with.

      After all, I’d started selling my body out of desperation, not because it was a chosen vocation. I was a single mum with a pile of debt and an addiction to soft drugs. It was an easy way to resolve my problems, or so I thought. The plan was to save enough money to pull myself out of the mire and secure a better life for myself and my son. But that’s not how it worked out.

      ‘Rufus Benedict opened the door in a hotel robe,’ I said. ‘He was a middle-aged guy with bad breath and a big belly. But he seemed harmless enough. We talked for a bit and just as we were about to get started there was a knock on the door. Benedict put on his robe and answered it. Outside the door there was a bottle of chilled champagne with a note saying it was with the compliments of the hotel.’

      Benedict was all smiles as he popped the cork and filled two glasses. He told me to undress and sat there sipping at his drink as he watched me remove my clothes to soft background music. I’d developed a well-practised routine that was designed to tease and titillate. My clothes came off with slow precision as I licked my lips and ran my fingers gently over every inch of uncovered flesh.

      ‘It all gets a little hazy after that,’ I said. ‘He took off the robe and asked me to get him aroused, which I did.’

      Scar was trying not to show her revulsion. I’d told her the story before, but never in so much detail. She looked away briefly and bit into her bottom lip.

      ‘We eventually moved to the bed,’ I said. ‘But nothing more happened because Benedict was suddenly struggling to stay awake and couldn’t even keep it up. I felt tired too and a little giddy. Then I heard someone’s voice and realised we weren’t alone in the room. I turned round and saw that two men had let themselves in.’

      ‘So what happened?’

      ‘Well, everything was distorted so I couldn’t make out their faces. Then I saw one of them attack Benedict and when I started to scream the other one put a hand over my mouth and pulled me down onto the floor. I could barely breathe. It was terrifying.’

      Scar put down her Coke and came and sat beside me. She placed an arm around my shoulders. I was trembling.

      ‘Take it easy, babe,’ she said.

      I downed some more water and said, ‘I took a blow to the forehead then and everything went blank. When I came to I was covered in blood and Benedict was lying here on the bed. He’d been stabbed once in the chest and he was dead. The murder weapon was a knife I’d never seen before and my prints were on it.’

      I closed my eyes and recalled the awful sense of panic that had consumed me.

      ‘What did you do?’ Scar said.

      ‘I couldn’t stop screaming. Before long there were people knocking on the door. When I finally managed to open it I was so worked up that I fainted. The cops arrived and I was arrested. As far as they were concerned it was an open and shut case.’

      ‘Jesus.’

      ‘There was no evidence to suggest that anyone else had been in the room. The security cameras hadn’t picked anything up, and the only prints on the knife belonged to me. I couldn’t convince them that someone had come into the room while we were having sex.’

      ‘What about the champagne?’ she said. ‘Did they check to see if it was drugged?’

      ‘There was no champagne. Whoever killed Benedict took the bottle and glasses away. The hotel’s room service claimed they hadn’t delivered anything to the room.’

      ‘But what about the post-mortem? They do toxicology tests, don’t they? That should have shown up any knock-out drugs in your system.’

      ‘Well, it didn’t. My lawyer said not all drugs can be detected during an autopsy.’

      I got up and walked around, touching things, while letting the memories crowd my mind. Benedict’s blood had been spattered across the sheets, the walls, the carpet. It was smeared across my own breasts and face and even now it was the dominant theme of recurring nightmares.

      ‘The police were certain that I murdered Benedict, but my lawyer put up a convincing argument that I was defending myself,’ I said. ‘There was the head wound and some other bruises. There’d obviously been a struggle, so the CPS agreed to drop the murder charge to manslaughter to make sure they got a conviction, provided I pleaded guilty.’

      ‘You were lucky you didn’t get life, Lizzie.’

      That was true. But I was unlucky to spend time behind bars for something I didn’t do.

      ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air.’

      A few minutes later we walked out into the car park. As we approached the Fiesta I noticed something white under one of the windscreen wipers. I thought it was a leaflet or a flyer. But when I pulled it out I saw it was a piece of lined paper from a notebook. There were two short