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‘Jesus, I dunno,’ he groaned, running a huge, shovel-like hand over his face. He looked at her wearily. ‘Hours. Fucking hours.’
‘Shouldn’t he have a brief here?’ Annie asked the cops.
‘Probably he should,’ said Prune Face. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Hunter, this is Detective Sergeant Lane.’
‘Oh. Right. I’ll get a brief organised.’ She looked a question at Chris. Wondered why Redmond Delaney hadn’t done this already.
‘Good. The sooner the better.’
‘What happened?’ Annie looked at Chris, who shook his head. Tears were still seeping out of his eyes, running unchecked down his face. ‘Chris, come on. What happened?’
He gulped.
‘It’s Aretha,’ he mumbled. He closed his eyes. His face was a mask of anguish. ‘She’s dead, Annie,’ he said, and buried his head in his arms again, and cried hard.
‘I know.’ She thought of her friend with the huge grin, the shock of dreadlocks, the wildly colourful clothes, wafting in to Dolly’s parlour just a few days ago shouting, ‘Hey girlfriend!’ and giving her a high-five and a warm hug.
‘She’s dead,’ sobbed Chris. He lifted his head and looked at her. Desperation and despair and deep, heart-wrenching grief were all written large across his face. ‘She’s fucking dead, and they think I killed her!’
‘No,’ said Annie. She looked at Chris, then at DI Hunter and DS Lane. She shook her head.
‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ said Hunter.
‘There has to be some mistake.’
‘There’s no mistake,’ said Hunter.
He nodded to Lane. The fat one stood up, went to the closed door, opened it, snagged a passing uniform and told him to fetch in some water. He closed the door, sat down again. DI Hunter was leaning on the desk and looking at Annie and at Chris as if they were both guilty as hell.
Annie looked up at him, trying to take all this in. ‘Does her family know yet?’ she asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
A PC came in with a tray, plastic cups and a jug of water. He placed it on the desk, then left the room.
Annie cleared her throat. ‘Look—Chris wouldn’t harm a hair on Aretha’s head. You’ve got it wrong. Whoever did this, it wasn’t Chris.’
But what about the blood on his hands? she thought, unable to help herself. What the fuck was that all about?
Hunter’s fixed expression of disapproval deepened. He raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if she had cracked a really good joke.
‘The evidence indicates otherwise,’ he said.
‘What evidence?’ demanded Annie.
‘Look, luv,’ chipped in DS Lane. ‘Fact is, this tart had a bag-load of S & M gear with her. Whips and rubber coshes and nursy outfits and peephole bras, stuff like that. She wasn’t exactly a nun. If you know her then you must know that’s true.’
What, and you think that means she deserved this? thought Annie in fury.
She said nothing, just glared at the fat, repulsive Lane.
‘We know she worked as an escort,’ said DI Hunter.
‘So where’s your evidence against Chris?’ asked Annie.
‘Mr Brown was waiting for his wife in his car, according to him,’ said Hunter. ‘Perhaps I’d better let Mr Brown himself fill in the details.’
Annie looked at Chris. He gulped, gave a shuddering sigh and wiped at his eyes. He looked at her.
‘Chris?’ she prompted.
‘I was waiting for her. Around the corner from the hotel. In the car. It was raining, raining hard. She’d told me she’d be finished by one o’clock in the morning, but by one thirty she still hadn’t shown and I started to get worried.’
He took a shuddering breath.
‘But I didn’t want to make a fuss. Aretha hates…hated it when I made a fuss. She was a free spirit. A real free spirit.’ He paused, gulped, gathered himself again. ‘At a quarter to two, though, I was getting really steamed up. Really worried. I got out of the car. It was pissing down, hard to see two feet in front of your own face, real hard torrential rain, a pig of a night.’
They sat there listening to him and suddenly they were there, right there; Chris getting out of his Zodiac, shrugging his collar up against the rain, cursing the weather, angry and worried, where the fuck had she got to this time? The rain beating down, cold as Christmas on his bare, bald head as he hurried around the corner towards the hotel; not a soul about, this fucking weather. Pissing down. Summer in England, what else would it be doing?
His shoes were getting wet, water seeping into his socks, bouncing off the pavements, and now his bastard trousers were wet too, right up to the knee, he was going to catch his fucking death out here, rain coming down like knives, deafening, blinding, and thunder rolling now, oh-ho, a summer storm to add to the fun, lightning flashing and crackling in the distance; oh, he was having a whale of a time out here, getting wet right through to his skin.
Bloody Aretha! Couldn’t she ever be on time, just once?
As they listened they could picture him shuffling along the rain-slicked pavements, traffic still on the roads, wheels hissing through the rain, wipers going full speed; poor bastards, didn’t they have homes to go to? But no one walking the pavements, no one about in the dark and the rain except working girls, and the guys who were unfortunate enough to be their pimps or their boyfriends or—more rarely, like Chris—their husbands.
‘Go on,’ said DI Hunter when Chris paused.
Annie poured out water, tried to force it down: couldn’t.
‘That’s when I found her,’ said Chris, his voice breaking. ‘I…I tripped over her. I thought…I thought some fucker had left a bag of rubbish on the pavement, I tripped, fell over her, I didn’t know it was her…’
Annie reached out, squeezed his arm.
‘Then I realized. Saw it was her. I thought…’ He looked up wildly at the two men seated opposite. ‘I thought she was just unconscious, you know? Thought she’d drunk too much in the hotel. I just thought, silly bint, you could catch pneumonia like that, laid out pissed on a sopping wet pavement in the middle of the night; you could catch any damned thing, ain’t that right?’
He was looking at Annie. She nodded.
‘Then I saw that she had this…this thing around her neck.’ His voice cracked again.
He stopped talking, shook his head.
Annie looked at Hunter. ‘What thing?’
‘A cheese wire,’ said Hunter. ‘Length of wire with a toggle at each end. What the French call a garrotte. They used them during the war, to knock out sentries without a sound. Swift and very effective. Five seconds at the outside and you’re unconscious, five seconds more and you’re dead. Mr Brown’s prints are on the toggles. And his blood is on the wire.’
Blank-faced with horror, Annie looked at Chris.
‘I saw it around her neck and I tried to get it off her,’ said Chris in a rush. ‘I thought—I thought, oh Christ, it’s choking her, cutting off the air, I had to get it off.’
But she was already dead, thought Annie, feeling truly sick now. She looked down at Chris’s huge, ham-like hands, looked again at the deep cuts there. Looked back at his face.
‘But it was sort of…it was stuck into her throat, embedded there. I pulled, yanked at it, I had to get it off her. I was…Jesus, I don’t know what I was doing, I was talking to her, telling her it was going to be all right, that I’d get it off, that everything was going to be fine…’ His voice tailed away to a whisper…‘But it wasn’t, was it? I tried to wake her, I talked to her, I tried…but she was dead. She was dead.’
Chapter 4 (#ulink_a6d3343c-90ff-5c88-8a71-878d9b85246b)
When they got back to Limehouse they sat at the kitchen table in a state of shock. Dolly had gone for the medicinal brandy, thrown it back, grimaced. Annie didn’t drink. Her mother Connie had been an alcoholic, the booze had killed her, so she had never developed a taste for it. She sipped her tea, and thought of Aretha with the big beaming grin, Aretha telling her funny stories about clients, Aretha breezing into this very kitchen and lighting the place up with her exuberance.
She’d never come here again.
‘They said two others had been killed the same way,’ said Annie numbly as they sat there listening to the ticking of the clock and wondering what the fuck had happened to their world.
Dolly shook her head. ‘I never heard about that.’
Annie had. Newspapers had mentioned it, but it hadn’t been on the front pages. Because these were whores. Who really gave a stuff if whores were killed? Many people would think they’d got their just deserts. Few would care. Few would want to know who did it. All they would say now was, well, they’ve got the bloke anyway, case solved.
Only it wasn’t. Not in Annie’s eyes.
Because she knew that Chris could never be a killer. She knew his opinion of men who beat up on women. To physically harm a woman would be beyond him. Like most of the real hard men around the East End, Chris had been raised to respect women, not batter them. He would look down on any man who did that. And to do it himself? No. It was impossible.
‘He did hate her going back on the game,’ said Dolly, looking awkward.
Annie looked across at her friend. She nodded. This was true.
Chris’s job as a security guard at Heathrow never paid much. They both knew that this had been a source of embarrassment for him. He wanted to keep his gorgeous wife in luxury, give her everything she wanted—and Aretha wanted plenty—but he couldn’t. He made a decent, solid living, but it wasn’t enough for Aretha, who loved the latest clothes, who loved to earn her own money, and the way she’d always done that and earned plenty was through tarting at Dolly’s. When Dolly had extended her business to include a small escort agency, Aretha had been right up the front of the queue for more work.
Oh, Aretha had loved money.
Through all this, despite his own unhappiness with the situation, Chris had supported Aretha’s choices. He’d known his woman since way before he’d ever married her. To him, Aretha had been exotic, exciting, beloved. Annie guessed he’d closed his mind to the rest of it. Made sure as far as he could that she kept herself safe. Waited for her in a parked car on rainy London nights. Didn’t want her on the bus or the Tube that late. Waited for her. Supported her. Loved her in the best way he knew how.
And now they were supposed to believe that he’d killed her?
‘They’ve got it wrong,’ said Annie, laying a hand flat on the table in absolute denial of this shit they were trying to stick on to Chris. ‘Chris did not kill Aretha.’
Dolly was silent.
‘Doll?’ asked Annie after a beat or two.
Dolly shrugged. ‘Yeah, but from what you told me they’ve got real evidence. Real evidence. That thing, that…’
‘The cheese wire,’ said Annie with a shudder. The garrotte.
‘Yeah, that. But…well, you said it had Chris’s blood on it. And his hands were cut.’
‘From where he tried to get it off her,’ said Annie.
‘Yeah, but is that how it really happened?’ Dolly frowned at her. She looked awkward. ‘Is that really it? Or…’
‘Or what, Doll?’ Annie looked at her.
‘Or—God, I hate to say this—did he get the cuts when he did the deed, you know? Did he get those cuts on his hands, cut himself, when he…when he strangled her with that thing?’
Annie was silent for long moments. Then she said: ‘You don’t believe that.’
Dolly swigged back the last of her brandy, slapped the glass back on to the table between them as if laying down a challenge.
‘Fact is, I don’t know what to believe,’ she said, shaking her head wearily. ‘But if the evidence is there…’
‘Well I do,’ said Annie firmly. ‘I believe that Chris loved Aretha. I believe that he injured himself trying to get the garrotte off her neck. And I believe that unless we help him out here, the plod are going to fit him up with this and with the murders of those other two poor bitches that were topped. He’ll be sent down for Christ knows how long, Doll, and I can’t let that happen.’
‘Yeah, fine words,’ sniffed Dolly. She poured herself another stiffener, held the bottle aloft to Annie. Annie shook her head. ‘But what can you actually do? Supposing he didn’t do it, and you know what? I think he probably did. Once the Bill think they’ve got the right man, do you really think you’re going to change their minds?’
Annie stared at the table, thinking hard with shock and disgust. How could Dolly believe Chris had done the deed? But she was right, up to a point. Convincing the police—particularly that cynical bastard Hunter—of Chris’s innocence would be an impossible task. She knew it. But didn’t they at least have to try?
‘The Bill must have informed Aretha’s Aunt Louella by now,’ said Annie.
Dolly nodded grimly. She’d given them Louella’s full name and address, the poor cow. Louella was Aretha’s only relative in England so far as they knew. Aretha had been sent to her Aunt’s to stay, by her parents in Rhodesia. Louella was childless herself and poor—she was a cleaner at the local hospital—but Aretha’s parents, who scratched a meagre living in a squalid township, were destitute. They had no doubt sent their precious daughter to foreign shores with a heavy heart, but with the sincere hope that she could make a better life than the one they had.
And now look.
Annie remembered sitting right here with Aretha, and Aretha telling her the tale of how she became a brass. The London of the Swinging Sixties had seemed like paradise to the teenage Aretha, and she had joined in a life where everything seemed possible: a golden future, no more hunger, plenty of money, free love—the Pill was a miracle!—and fun.
Her happy pursuit of fun had soon convinced her that all the fun she was having with boyfriends could be turned into a good living. So she started to charge for fun. She had no qualms about that. Her impoverished background had taught her that you got money wherever you could, by whatever means you could—who gave a damn how?
Soon Aretha was coining it. Aunt Louella, who was a fierce Christian, found out about it and was furious. They argued, Aretha left and moved in with Annie’s aunt Celia, who ran a quiet and orderly establishment in Limehouse before Annie and then Dolly took over the reins. And the rest was history. Aretha had settled right in as the house’s resident dominatrix, its biggest earner.
But now look, just look.
Aretha lay in the morgue. Her husband was being held and probably being charged right now for her murder. It was an unholy mess.
Dolly looked sick about all this. ‘That poor woman’s got a world of grief to get through. They were still quite close, you know. Even though she disapproved of what Aretha did, she made a point of never losing touch with her. Maybe thought one day she’d bring her back into the fold. Very religious lady, Louella.’
Annie nodded. She knew that Louella lived on the Carter patch, her patch. Max would have paid a call, sent flowers, helped out the bereaved in any way he could. When you ran an area, when you owned an area, there was a certain etiquette to be observed, certain dues that always had to be paid. Even Redmond Delaney, who owned these Limehouse streets and the streets of Battersea, even he would understand that. And now that Annie was in charge of the Carter manor in Bow, she was determined to fulfil her obligations too.
‘Give me her address, Doll. I’ll go and see her.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ said Dolly, and stood up and went to the drawer where she kept her books.
‘And I want to know who Aretha was with last night. And where.’
Dolly’s expression was irritable.
‘You’re like a dog with a fucking bone, Annie Carter,’ she grumbled, coming back to the table with books, paper and pen. ‘I wish you’d drop it. I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. You ought to leave it to the brief. That’s my advice.’
Ross, the young heavy on front of house, knocked at the kitchen door. He poked his head around it and looked disapprovingly at Annie.
‘Tony says a guy just handed him this,’ he said, holding out a scrap of paper.
Annie looked surprised and then suspicious. It was late. Who would want to contact her here, tonight? Who would even know she’d be here?
