Scarlet Women

‘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.’