Georgia said clearly. ‘I want to arrest all of them.’
‘This is the part where they were playing nice,’ I said. ‘It gets a lot worse later on.’
She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, as if she was cold, though the conference room was stifling.
‘Right, the next part is in a car, on the way to the house in the country for the after-party. According to Hooper, the premises will have changed a lot since this was filmed. He said the house belonged to an elderly club member who had died. His family were planning to sell the place but they hadn’t done anything with it apart from emptying it out, so it was basically derelict. Since this party it’s been sold and completely refurbished to turn it into a luxury spa hotel, so everything you see here is gone and you can forget being able to recover anything forensically.’
I pressed play and we watched two young men in dinner jackets groping drunk, slack-jawed girls while they were squashed together in the back seat of a car. The pair on the right progressed to full sex, unnoticed by the other couple who were drinking and pawing one another. Hooper had filmed from the driver’s seat. As he put the phone down it caught the passenger for a split second. He was asleep with his head turned away from the camera. Light-brown hair, a neat ear, a square jaw: I thought it looked like Luke, and from the way Derwent shifted uneasily, he’d thought the same thing. No one else in the room appeared to have noticed, I thought, and was glad of it. He had been in Peru, I reminded myself.
He had said he was in Peru, and I’d accepted it based on some Facebook posts. I didn’t want to find out I’d been wrong. But he wasn’t a member of the Chiron Club; they’d never have let him go to their private parties. It was just a coincidence.
‘This is inside the house, is it?’ Burt asked and I forced myself to focus on answering her.
‘Yes. Hooper explained this to us. Basically, these are the people he recruited as the entertainment for the evening. This is backstage.’
Two model-like girls looked up and waved as one passed a joint to the other. They looked dazed. The taller of the two wore a dress that had slid off her shoulder so one small breast was exposed, though she seemed oblivious. A beautiful dark-skinned man practised capoeira moves as a breeze moved the curtains of the open window behind him. A young man wearing ripped jeans and nothing else threw the camera a grin then dropped to perform a few push-ups, clapping his hands between each one. The tattoo on his arm flexed as he moved. I paused the video for an instant.
‘This is the man who said he was Jonah Powell.’
The camera panned away from him, to a girl in a black dress who was winging her eyeliner with a steady hand. I paused it again.
‘And this is Iliana Ivanova, the girl who disappeared.’
‘Is that it?’
‘There were a few others who came down in the cars. Hooper told us this was an exclusive little event. They only had ten members here, and half of them left early to go somewhere else. The club were targeting one or two of the men who hadn’t blotted their copybooks yet. The kids they hired in for the night were told they would double their money if they managed to provoke any bad behaviour. That was a lot of money for them. It was a competition, fuelled by drugs that Hooper supplied.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Belcott asked.
‘Ecstasy, for starters, and then GHB and mephedrine. It was designed to lower their inhibitions, along with the alcohol.’
‘Did it work?’
‘All too well,’ Derwent said. ‘This is Iliana dancing.’
She spun around and around on a terrace, her dress flying up as she laughed. One of the men, now without his dinner jacket, got up and caught her, then carried her away into the darkness.
‘Who was that?’ Burt said sharply.
‘Don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever happened to her in the garden didn’t kill her. You’ll see her again in a bit,’ I said. ‘This is Jonah again, in the pool.’
A naked man with dark curly hair and a beard ran into view, moving away from the camera. He was unrecognisable, no matter how much we’d played with slowing the images and trying to sharpen them. He leapt into the water.