JESSIE KEANE
Scarlet Women

Dedication

Cliff my darling—this one’s for you.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Jessie Keane

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Annie Carter opened her eyes slowly. Her first thought was what the fuck? Her head hurt; there was a sore spot behind her right ear. She saw semi-darkness and a dim, familiar interior.

She was in the car. Shit, they’d hit her hard. Her brain was spinning.

Her car, yeah that was it. Had to get a grip, think straight.

The black Mark X Jaguar.

She was lying across the back seat, which smelled of leather and cologne; familiar smells, comforting smells, but alarm bells were ringing in her addled mind. Her guts were clenched with unfocused anxiety.

Tony?

Where the fuck was Tony?

He was usually up there behind the wheel, weaving easily through the London traffic and asking where she wanted to go next, saying okay Boss, sure thing. But he wasn’t there now, so where the hell was he? She was the big car’s only occupant.

And now it came back to her in a rush. Now she remembered what had happened to Tony. They’d coshed him too. Put him somewhere. But where? Was he all right? Was he dead?

How long have I been out of it? she wondered, sitting up, wincing as her head thumped sickeningly in protest at the movement.

Then she remembered Charlie Foster, and Redmond and Orla Delaney. She remembered it all. She’d been knocked out cold, Tony was fuck-knew-where, and now they were going to drive her off in her own damned car to some remote spot, where they would blow her brains out, what little brains she had, because who but a fool would push their luck as far as she had done?

She thought of Layla. Her little girl, her little star. Had to get out of here because she was all that Layla had; she couldn’t afford to get herself wasted.

She was reaching for the door when the noise started—a high mechanical whine, deafening in its intensity. Her heart rate picked up to a gallop.

What the…?

Suddenly the car lurched, knocking her back against the right-hand door. Then her horrified eyes watched as the left-hand door started to buckle inward. There was a ferocious shriek of tortured metal. With a noise like a gunshot, the glass in the door shattered, showering her with fragments. She ducked down, covering her head momentarily with an upraised arm, then staring with terror as the door just kept coming, buckling inward, metal tearing, screaming, ripping.

And now the door behind her was coming in too. The noise was beyond bearing, beyond anything she had ever known before. The window imploded, and again she was covered in pieces of glass, felt her cheeks sting with the impact of it, felt warm blood start to ooze from cuts on her face.

‘Jesus!’ she screamed in panic, knowing where she was now, knowing what was going to happen to her.

Then the roof crashed in upon her, folding inward like cardboard. She felt the floor lift and she fell sideways, ending up in the well behind the front seats, nearly gibbering with fear. She was going to die, she knew that now.

Just make it fast, she thought desperately. Please make it fast.

She lay there, powerless, and watched the roof coming down towards her.

Closed her eyes, and waited to die.

Chapter 1

SUMMER 1970

Whack!

The whip cracked down across the nude buttocks of the man tied to the bed. He moaned but was careful not to scream. He’d had his orders.

‘This is a nice place,’ the woman told him, looming over him. She was dressed in a white topless PVC mini-dress and matching high-heeled boots. A white nurse’s cap was perched jauntily on her coal-black hair. Her ample and naked coffeecoloured breasts bounced as she drew back the whip to strike again. ‘Remember that. I don’t want you kickin’ off and yelling the sodding place down, now do I?’

The client strained to look back at her over his shoulder from his prone position. He said nothing.

Whack!

‘Answer Nursy when she speaks to you,’ trilled the woman.

‘No! I won’t scream,’ he panted.

‘Good, that’s good. You’ll take your punishment, yes?’

‘Yes!’ he groaned as she raised the whip again.

‘Right answer.’ The girl grinned and trailed the whip’s leather lightly down between his quivering white buttocks. ‘Now that’s good, now we’re starting to understand one another. Because you’ve been a very bad boy, ain’t that right?’

‘That’s right,’ he muttered into the pillow. He was sweating and his eyes were closed.

The woman watched him, judging her victim. Sure he was sweating, it was a hot night. Damp and clammy and airless—welcome to a summer’s night in England, folks! The windows were closed though. She’d opened them earlier and shut them pretty damned quick; the constant roar of the traffic was an annoying distraction.

So he was hot. She was pretty fucking hot herself. Rubber might light the man’s candle, but it was a bitch to wear on a humid night. Just for the hell of it, she gave him another swipe with the whip. He gave a faint cry, flinched and strained against his bonds. Hell, anyone would think he wasn’t enjoying this. She sure hoped he was—it was costing him enough, after all.

Actually it was costing her too, in terms of energy and stamina. After an evening of wining, dining and shagging, she now had to get down to the add-ons, the not-so-little extras that the man tied to the bed required.

Most men, you did an escort job for them, they expected a bit of straightforward hanky-panky too, and that was cool. This client had more specific needs and he was one of her regulars. Her reputation as a dominatrix was legendary. Her speciality was what this client wanted, and the price had been fair, she had to admit that, and the price was all that mattered.

Take the money and run, she thought.

But now she was tired. She wanted to crawl into bed with her man, get some kip if it was possible in this heat. When he closed his eyes again she glanced at her watch. The extra hour he’d paid for was nearly up. Soon she’d be out of here; soon she’d be home.

Whack!

Oh, how he writhed. She sort of enjoyed that, to tell the truth, when they writhed. Just a bit. But she’d been doing this S & M gig for so long that it was beginning to bore her. Once the thrill had been in doing it, socking it to the punters. But she was a married lady now, and maybe this was not the sort of thing that a married lady ought to do—not even with her loving husband’s consent, which she’d always had…

The woman frowned. And maybe, just maybe, this was a thing that a loving husband ought to have a bit of a problem with: how was that for a thought?

This was something that kept popping into her brain more and more often. Did he love her so much, if he could be so fucking cool about his wife dancing the horizontal tango with strange men and then whipping them into a frenzy, and then coming home to him?

But the money was good, and money was always tight, and oh how she loved the money. Money to buy Biba dresses and Bill Gibb blouses, boots by the Chelsea Cobbler, waistcoats by Kaffe Fassett, and going to shows and dinners up West: she loved all that shit. So she did things sometimes that didn’t make her proud. Like whipping this punter’s snowy-white arse and wishing she was gone.

Time to draw their little sesh to a close now. Thank God.

Tenderly she leaned over and released the leather cords that bound his wrists to the headboard.

‘There you go honey, that’s all for tonight,’ she cooed in his ear.

And the bastard turned and whacked her right across the jaw.

Agony exploded in her head.

The girl went flying off the bed and fell to the floor. She sat up on the expensive carpet amid a tangle of shoes, trousers and shirt. Her eyes were filled with tears of pain. She could feel her heart beating hard against her ribs with the shock of it.

Fuck, where had that come from?

She clutched her jaw and staggered back to her feet, staring down at him in disbelief. He’d collapsed back on to the bed, face down. As if what he’d just done was nothing. As if hitting her, hurting her, was nothing.

As if she was nothing.

She’d dropped the whip but now she snatched it up again with a grunt of rage. Bastard punters! They were like tigers in a circus act: you were the trainer and you never let your guard down, you never turned your back, you always had to keep control—or they’d maul you as soon as look at you.

She waded in with the whip again. This time she put a lot of force behind it. This time she was angry. She was the sadist here, wasn’t she? Or that was the act, anyway. And he was supposed to be the masochist. He didn’t do the beating up, she did.

‘Better,’ he moaned happily, rolling over to display an erection the size of a baby’s arm. ‘That’s better, sweetheart, oh yes…’

And then he grabbed the hem of her rubber dress, nearly pulling her off balance, and held it over his nose and mouth. Twisted bastard. He always did that with her. Always.

She was so tired of all this.

It wasn’t that big a thrill any more.

Seconds later, he came all over the thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

She watched him, her jaw hurting, her face carefully blank to hide her fear and disgust.

Boy, she was sick of all this.

Ten minutes later, she was out of there. She left the room with a big bundle of notes and a bad taste in her mouth—oh, and a jaw swollen to the size of a watermelon.

All in a day’s work.

It was raining by the time she left the snazzy hotel in Park Lane. The smartly uniformed concierge gave her a knowing look and a nod as she emerged from the lift in reception and went towards the revolving door. She’d been there before, she was no trouble, he wasn’t about to make a fuss.

Whatever the guest wanted, the guest got—that was his motto. A Roller to take them to the theatre? Certainly, sir. Champagne at a hundred quid a pop and a whole tin of Beluga caviar on the side? Mais oui, bien sûr. A nice tart to share it with? No problem at all.

And she was a nice tart. Tall, slim and with skin dark as cocoa. A shock of dreadlocks framing her gorgeous face. She gave him a grin. You couldn’t get churlish looking at that grin, although it faded quickly and she seemed to wince.

Flamboyant dresser, too. Trailing a purple boa, toting a big carpetbag and wearing skin-tight denim hot pants. One of those cool-looking but very smelly Afghan coats flapping loose around her and big hoops of gold clattering at her ears. Could dress a bit smarter, but then it was late: few guests about, only him and the boy on reception, so all was well and why rock the boat?

Really, who gave a shit?

‘Get you a cab?’ he offered.

The grin returned. ‘What, you think I made o’ money, boy?’

‘Bet you’re making more than me.’

‘Ha! Don’t I just wish that was true. Nah, it’s okay, honey. My man’s pickin’ me up.’

He nodded and smiled at her. Yeah, she was a nice girl. No harm in her at all. Stressed-out businessmen, tired travellers, they needed the release of a bit of female company now and then. It wasn’t for him to judge. It was for him to say yes, sir, of course, sir, anything you want, we can get. Discretion was his watchword. Can-do was his attitude. It made him one of the best concierges in London.

He watched her swing through the revolving door and vanish into the rainy night. And then he thought of his own grown-up daughters, girls around the same age as this one, his precious girls tucked up safe at home where they ought to be at this hour of the night, and he thought: Fuck it. What a sodding way to make a living.

She walked quickly, head down against the rain, heading for the usual corner, around which her man would be parked up in his ancient Zodiac, waiting for her. Asleep, probably, stretched out across the single front sofa seat.

They loved that sofa seat; they’d made out on it a time or two, but really he enjoyed that more than her. She preferred their bed: good old-fashioned bread-and-butter lovemaking; no risks, no thrills, just deep warmth and contentment and waking up together in the morning, which they could do now that he no longer worked permanent nights, thank you God.

She was going to have a nice hot bath first. Wash the day away. Then crawl into bed, snuggle down. Forget the whole evening. She was good at doing that; she’d had plenty of practice. Keep her chin turned away and he wouldn’t see the redness, the swelling. Maybe while she was in the bath she’d hold a cold flannel against it. That’d soothe it. She’d be careful to take the flannel away when he came in, brought her a glass of wine as was his usual practice. He was a good husband. Even if a little too forgiving of her profession.

It wasn’t the first time a punter had walloped her, she wasn’t about to get all girly and hysterical about it. She wasn’t about to tell her loving husband that it had happened, either—he’d want to rip the bastard’s arms off.

No, what she was going to do was forget it.

All in a day’s work, and that was a fact.

You took a knock, so what?

There were footsteps behind her. High heels. Another working girl, heading home after a long day, poor bitch. She glanced back, saw who it was, and stopped walking with an exasperated sigh.

‘Fuck it, I can’t talk now…’ she started to say, and then she was hit for the second time that night. It was beyond a bloody joke, that’s what it was. But when she fell this time she wasn’t falling on to Axminster. This time her head hit the pavement with a crack and suddenly the darkness came.

Chapter 2

Annie Carter was standing at the top of the stairs in the Palermo Lounge, looking down at the shell of the place that had once been her late husband Max’s favourite club. The builders were in—and running late. They were taking the curtains on the small stage area down. Huge red velvet drapes, a bit faded now, a bit tired-looking, like the rest of the club.

As she watched, a man up a ladder took out a hammer and chisel. He chipped loose the big gold letters ‘MC’ at the apex where the curtains joined together. He threw them down to his mate. The M hit the floor, and shattered.

And how’s that for an omen? she thought with a pang of the old sadness.

There was so much to be done, so much to think about. The brewery had been in and agreed—after some hum-ing and ha-ing—that they would continue to supply liquor to the club. The drinks licence was, after all, already in place. The dance floor—which was a total fucking mess at the moment, broken up and knocked all to hell—was going to be relaid, and there were going to be strobe lights, the works.

But first the red velvet curtains, the plaster cherubs, the flock wallpaper, all that old dated tat, had to go.

Sorry Max.

She’d hired a good accountant, set out her aims. She planned that this club—and eventually the two others, the Blue Parrot and the Shalimar, which were currently standing empty—were going to earn her a good living, support her and her small daughter in some style. That was the plan, anyway.

Of course, the first thing the accountant had done when he’d seen last year’s books, peering at her over his pince-nez spectacles, was to suck in his breath.

She got this all the time. From the brewery bosses. From the builders. Now from her accountant. She was a woman in a man’s world, and all the men in it thought she couldn’t cope.

‘It would appear the business has been running at quite a loss,’ he said, giving her a pitying glance.

‘Or could it just be that the profits haven’t been finding their way into the accounts?’ she suggested.

He’d shrugged, nodded. ‘Certainly, that could be the case.’

Ha! Certainly, that was the case. He’d departed, leaving her sunk in gloom. But then she had a stern word with herself. Okay, she’d been shafted—royally worked over. But now she had to pull it all back together, even if the going was tough. Hell, she was used to tough.

She had lost her husband. She had loved gang lord Max Carter almost beyond life itself, and losing him had cut her to the heart. But she still had her daughter. She still had Layla. And that was in no small part due to American mob boss Constantine Barolli.

Annie frowned.

When they’d last spoken, Constantine had said he’d be back from his home in New York soon to see her. But three whole months had passed. Three months without a word, without a telephone call, with nothing. She felt furious, rejected, and she knew she’d made a bloody fool of herself into the bargain by asking him to call her. Because, guess what? He hadn’t.

‘Fuck it,’ she muttered, her hands clenching around the wrought-iron banister. She closed her eyes for a second and instantly she could picture him—a smooth, slickly suited Mafia don, with armour-piercing blue eyes and a commanding aura, a tan and startling silver hair.

The silver fox.

The rumour was that his hair had turned from black to silver overnight when he was in his twenties and had been told that his mother and brother were dead, victims of a deliberate hit by another Cosa Nostra family in his native Sicily. That’s what they called him on the streets of New York, the silver fox. And like a fox he’d slipped away.

Hell, she’d probably panicked the bastard, been too keen too soon. And, of course, he’d run straight for the hills. She’d blown it. Fuck it.

She went up the second flight of stairs to her office and slammed the door closed behind her. She slumped into her chair behind the desk. Once it had been her late husband’s chair; now it was hers. Now she was in charge of the East End manor that he had once ruled.

It was a very different manor now. A very different firm. Times had changed. Gone was the old respectful Kray and Carter style no-drugs-but-plenty-of-the-hard-game rule of the Sixties. Now there was an active—and often violent—drugs scene in London.

Annie had made it clear from the start that she wanted no part of that sort of trade—but she had been quick to see how the firm could profit from its impact. The Carter firm was all about legitimate security now; the firm controlled an army of enforcers working all over London and Essex, keeping order at venues.

And shit, how it paid. The money was rolling in.

Even better, it was all above board. She’d come close once to going down, and she was never going to risk it again, not with Layla to consider.

So now it was her who took payment from the halls and arcades and shops, her boys who gathered at Queenie’s—Max’s late mother’s—house, to meet with her and receive their orders.

As it turned out, everything had worked out pretty much okay. The boys had accepted her, and they had also accepted that Jimmy Bond—who had been Max’s number one back in the day—was history.

She thought about that.

Yeah, they had accepted her, but she was concerned that it wasn’t a full acceptance. It was an acceptance of her role as Max’s widow, that was all. She knew her position was tenuous. These were hard men, men who’d grown up on the wild side—out on the rob, out on the piss; they took no shit from anyone. Legitimate business had been a shock for them, but—so far—they’d swallowed it. Or had they? She was never sure.

She looked down at her thumb, where Max’s ring glinted. A square slab of royal blue lapis lazuli set upon a solid band of gold embellished with Egyptian cartouches. Yes, he was long gone, but it calmed her to look at the ring, the symbol of his power and authority.

Only now, more and more, it was reminding her of another ring, the diamond-studded one that Constantine Barolli always wore.

Ah, what’s the use?, she thought. It’s done.

He’d gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

Now she had a job to do, and that was good. She had to lose herself in getting the clubs up and running again. She was lucky to have an interest, a business that demanded so much of her time, because, if you were busy, you couldn’t think too much of how you had fucked up your chance of a great love affair by playing it all so disastrously wrong.

There was a tap at the door and Tony, her driver and her minder, poked his bald head around it. The crucifixes in his cauliflower ears glistened bright gold in the summer sunlight streaming in through the office window.

‘First of the girls is here, Boss,’ he said.

She was interviewing staff now. Bar staff, kitchen staff, cleaners, dancers. Not the dancers that had been here before, swinging their enormous naked tits about for all to see. No, these would be discreet go-go dancers, twirling and whirling in fringed white bikinis on tiny strobe-lit podiums around the new dance floor.

She didn’t want the dirty-mac brigade coming back in here. She wanted a better class of clientele, and she was going to make sure she got it.

Annie sighed. Tucked all thoughts of Constantine away.

He’s gone for good, she told herself. So forget it, okay? Move on.

She got her mirrored compact out of her handbag and dabbed away the shine from her nose. Then she applied a slick of scarlet lipstick and paused, staring at the image reflected in the mirror; the steady dark green eyes, the arched black brows and thick black lashes, the good olive-toned skin, the straight fall of thick, cocoa-brown hair, the wide, sensuous, painted mouth. It was a face that could, in fact, be called beautiful.

Then why didn’t he call?

She let out an exasperated sigh and closed the compact with a snap. Dumped it back in the bag, gave Tony a brisk smile.

‘Right. Send her up, Tone.’ She had fifteen girls to see this afternoon and opening night was just three weeks away. Best to crack on. Distract herself. Get on with it.

Annie sat at the kitchen table at the Limehouse brothel later in the day, sipping hot strong tea and looking at her friend Dolly, who was madam there—Dolly with her blonde bubble perm, her immaculate make-up and nails, wearing a neat lightweight powder-blue suit. Incredible to think that Dolly had once been the roughest brass in the place; now she was in charge and she looked the part.

‘Good trade today?’ asked Annie.

It was Friday—party day at the Limehouse knocking-shop. Drinks, nibbles, and floor shows on offer—everyone was happy. Young Ross was on the door to keep order, but mostly he didn’t need to—his sheer size and presence was all the deterrent to bad behaviour that was needed. There was music coming from the front parlour, and laughter coming from upstairs. The place was packed with eager punters getting massages, blow-jobs and other personal services. Annie thought this would be enough for anybody to contend with, but Dolly had started up an escort business too. It ran alongside her well-run brothel like a Swiss clock. Slotted in just nice.

‘Yeah, really good. Takings are holding steady.’

‘And the new girls?’

Dolly pulled a face. ‘Dunno yet. Rosie’s a good worker, when she can be arsed to bother. But Sharlene’s a bit of a bloody nightmare, the attitude on her. And Aretha didn’t show up.’

Annie looked at her. ‘Hasn’t she phoned?’

Dolly shook her head.

‘Well she will,’ said Annie.

Aretha was Dolly’s S & M specialist, their resident dominatrix. Her room was kitted out with punishment chairs, whips, chains, any quirk or fetish the punter desired; she could cater to any individual’s particular perversion. She was tall, black and beautiful, strong as an ox and the best friend Dolly and Annie had ever had.

‘Probably got pissed last night,’ sighed Dolly. ‘She was working. Probably overdid it on the bubbly. Bet she’s sleeping it off. If she hasn’t called by eight, I’ll call her. Punters have been asking for her, it aint good.’

Annie stood up. ‘Well, I’m off to pick up Layla from Kath’s.’

‘And how is Kath?’

Annie couldn’t stifle a smile. Dolly had already passed judgement on Kath—declaring that she was a dirty mare, and beyond hope. But Annie didn’t think so. Kath was her cousin; they were family. She was prepared to give the poor cow a chance.

‘Kath’s fine. Starting to shape up,’ she lied. ‘Hasn’t Ellie kept you up to speed?’

Ellie had once been one of Dolly’s little band of sex workers. Now she was working as a cleaner here, and helping Kath out too. Kath had suffered depression after her mother’s death, and her husband had knocked her black and blue; she’d needed help. Ellie was busy providing it. Whether Kath liked it or not—which mostly she didn’t.

‘Ellie tells me Kath’s place is getting tidy, but I think you’d have to explode a fucking bomb in there first to get anywhere near it,’ sniffed Dolly. ‘Hey—you heard from that hunky American yet?’

Annie stiffened. ‘No. And I’m not likely to.’

‘That’s a damned shame,’ said Dolly. ‘What happened?’

I killed it, that’s what happened, thought Annie.

She was mad at herself, mad as hell. Because hadn’t she done something very similar with Max? She’d gone after him with no holds barred, full throttle, even though he belonged to someone else, even though the consequences had proved to be dire.

She had no subtlety, not an ounce in her entire body. Damn, why couldn’t she just hold back a bit? Why couldn’t she play those delicious, teasing cat-and-mouse games that other women played? No kissing on the first date. No groping above the waist until the third. No touching anywhere else until there was an engagement ring on her finger. No fucking under any circumstances until there was a wedding band right beside it. Was that so difficult?

But no. Not her.

She went at the damned thing like a bull at a gate. She was either on or off. No half measures, no holding back. She was either totally committed, or utterly detached. There were no in-betweens—and she guessed that she scared men shitless.

‘Nothing happened,’ she told Dolly briskly. ‘Nothing at all. And it don’t matter. I’ve got the flat straight, the club’s being refurbed, I’ve got enough to think about.’

The flat was the one above the Palermo where she had first slept with Max. It seemed sort of fitting that she should be living there with Layla now.

‘You could have stayed here while the work’s going on,’ said Dolly. ‘You know it’s no trouble.’

‘Doll, ain’t we had this conversation? I can’t keep a child in a knocking-shop, it just ain’t right.’

‘Well,’ pouted Dolly.

‘It’s kind of you,’ said Annie firmly. ‘But no. And besides Layla, I’ve got to consider my position. This is Delaney turf, Doll. I can’t stay here.’

The Irish Delaney mob, who ran the streets of Limehouse and Battersea, were the Carter gang’s bitter enemies. And although Annie had once associated with them, and even formed a business relationship with the chilly and devious Delaney twins, Orla and Redmond, the things they had done had turned her against them.

However, Redmond still allowed her to visit Dolly here, turning a blind eye to the head of the Carter firm walking his streets, and that was good of him. But she knew that what Max had always told her about them was the truth. They were vipers, he’d said, and not to be trusted. She knew now that he was right.

‘Well, whatever you think best,’ said Dolly.

Annie stood up. ‘I’ll catch you later,’ she said, and went off down the hall, nodding to Ross. As a Delaney boy, it pissed him off to see a Carter here; but he’d had his orders from the top. Her presence was to be tolerated.

For now, anyway, she thought.

Through the open front parlour door, she glimpsed half-naked tarts bouncing up and down on happy punters, and the sounds of sex drifted down the stairs.

Ross sat there, impassive.

She opened the front door and to her shock found Tony standing there. He pushed inside, closing the door behind him. She glimpsed two policemen coming up the path. There was a cop car parked just in front of the black Jag.

‘Shit,’ said Annie.

‘Don’t think it’s a raid, they’re not mob-handed,’ said Tony. ‘Still, better keep it down in here.’

Ross was already on it. He’d shot out of his chair at the word ‘raid’ and was already in the front room passing the word. The music was turned off. The laughter died. As the front doorbell rang he grabbed the visitors’ book from the hall table and ran off up the stairs to spread the word. Silence fell up there. Then he came back down and went into the kitchen, told Dolly. White-faced, she came out along the hall and looked at Annie and Tony standing there. She straightened her suit jacket, patted her hair and opened the front door.

‘Miss Farrell?’ asked one of the young coppers, politely removing his helmet.

Dolly nodded: yes.

‘Sorry to disturb you, miss. Can we come in?’

Oh hell, thought Annie.

They went on into the kitchen. Ross was gone, out the back way. Dolly gave Annie a quick ‘don’t you dare fuck off’ glance, so Annie followed her and the coppers into the kitchen and they all sat down. Tony went off into the front room, out of the way.

‘What’s this about?’ asked Dolly.

The coppers exchanged a look, then the older one spoke.

‘Miss Farrell, a body has been found. There was a card on the body that led us to believe that the person in question was working out of an escort agency run by you from this address.’

‘A body?’ Dolly looked whiter than ever.

‘A young black female.’

Annie felt as sick as Dolly looked. She thought of Aretha, not calling in this morning. Aretha had been out on an escort job last night.

‘Jesus,’ Dolly whispered. ‘Not Aretha?’

‘We’d like you to accompany us to the station,’ said the copper. ‘If you’re willing to identify the body?’

Ain’t that Chris’s job? thought Annie. She looked at Dolly.

‘It’s okay, Doll,’ she said, standing up, ‘I’ll come with you. Wait up while I phone Kath and let her know I’ll be delayed.’

Five minutes later they were in the back of the cop car being driven to the police station, both sitting silent and shocked, wondering what the hell was kicking off here, hoping against hope that the young black female was anyone, anyone at all, but not—please God—Aretha Brown.

When they reached the station they were led into the bowels of the place, into an antisepticscented room.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Dolly.

There was a body laid out under a sheet.

Annie grabbed Dolly’s hand and held it tight.

An attendant pulled the sheet back while the same two coppers hovered in the background. Annie stepped forward, but Dolly seemed rooted to the ground. But she was close enough to see who was there. Together they looked down on the dead face of their good friend Aretha.

‘Oh no. Oh shit,’ whimpered Dolly, putting a hand to her mouth.

Annie was silent, staring, her guts churning with shock and grief.

Aretha’s face was not her own any more: it was a mask of death, wet and greyish, all the life gone. The eyes were closed, the mouth half open. There was redness along the jaw and around the neck there was a thin, bloody line.

‘Do you positively identify this woman as Aretha Brown?’ asked the older PC.

Dolly nodded, unable to speak, tears starting in her eyes.

‘Yeah,’ said Annie shakily. ‘That’s her. That’s Aretha.’

When they were being led back through the station to the front desk they came across Chris—huge, bald, heavily muscled Chris: Aretha’s husband. Two more cops were taking him into a room. Annie saw to her shock that he was handcuffed. And his hands were bloody.

‘Hey!’ she said, quickening her pace. ‘Hey, Chris!’

All three men stopped and looked at her. One of the cops was tall and dark haired, the other one was dumpy and balding. Chris towered over them both.

‘I didn’t do nothing!’ Chris yelled out, tears streaming down his face.

Annie hurried over. The tall, dark-haired one had the air of being in charge, so she addressed her remarks to him. ‘What’s going on here? Wait up! You don’t think Chris had anything to do with Aretha…?’

The two plain-clothes cops exchanged a glance, then looked at her as if they’d stepped in something nasty.

‘And who are you?’ asked the tall one.

‘Annie Carter. This is Dolly Farrell.’

‘We’re interviewing Mr Brown. The officers will show you out.’ He turned away.

‘I’m going nowhere until I’ve talked to Chris,’ said Annie.

He turned back and stared at her with dark, unfriendly eyes. ‘What?’

‘You heard. Chris used to work for me. He’s a close friend of mine, I want to talk to him.’

He looked at her. Assessing her. He was going to tell her to bugger off, she just knew it. But then he surprised her.

‘All right. You can sit in on the interview for ten minutes, then you’re out.’

Annie nodded and moved forward. Dolly started to follow. The tall one blocked her way. ‘These officers will show you out,’ he said.

Dolly gave him a glare and turned to Annie. ‘I’ll wait,’ she said.

Annie followed Chris and his captors into the interview room.

Chapter 3

The room was small, bare and windowless. On the near side of an oblong table were two chairs, one of which was quickly occupied by the portly, bald and sweaty-looking cop. They seated Chris on the other side of the table. He slumped there, his slab-like forearms spread out on the table, his big ugly ex-boxer’s head resting upon them. He looked fucked.

Annie watched him worriedly. She’d known Chris for years. He was a big, hard man who had once been the bouncer on the door at the Limehouse brothel. He was a Delaney man, but he was rock solid. Tough as nails. Took no crap from anybody. Now when he looked up at her his eyes were full of desperation; his face was wet with tears.

‘Oh Christ,’ he said, and put his head back down again, and sobbed like his heart was breaking.

‘All right, what the fuck you been doing to him?’ Annie demanded.

The tall dark-haired one gave her that ‘stepped in something nasty’ look again. She was already getting a bit tired of it. He moved a chair to the other side of the desk, beside Chris.

‘Take a seat,’ he said.

‘I’ll take a seat when you start telling me what’s going on here,’ said Annie.

He looked at her. His dark eyes were unfriendly. ‘Take a seat. Then I’ll tell you what’s going on here.’

Annie sat down. She looked at Chris, hulking great Chris, sitting there crying like a baby. She had a very bad feeling about all this. She patted his arm. She noticed his hands were cut. She dug in her bag and pulled out a wad of tissues and handed them to him. He took them, nodded, wiped his face.

‘What’s going on, Chris?’ Annie demanded. ‘They been knocking you about?’

The fat bald cop let out a laugh. ‘You kidding? Look at the fucking size of him.’

Which was a point. Chris looked as if he could eat both these cops; put them between two slices of bread—even the tall dark-haired one, who had the look of a man who could handle himself in a tight corner. But she had never seen him upset like this. Never seen him shed a single tear.

‘I want to know what’s going on here,’ she said, looking directly at the one in charge, the dark-haired, sour-faced one, who was now standing there leaning against the wall. He loosened his tie and stared at her again like she was shit on his shoe. He said nothing.

She turned her attention back to Chris. ‘How long you been in here?’

‘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

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?

She stood up and took it. ‘Thanks, Ross.’

She sat back down at the table and spread out the piece of paper. Looked at it. Numbers.

‘Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar,’ she murmured.

‘What is it?’ asked Dolly, craning forward.

Annie sat back, shaking her head, her mouth twisted in a bitter smile.

Dolly looked at her. ‘Come on! What is it?’ She peered interestedly at the note. ‘Numbers? Haven’t you had some of these before? There was a name for them, I remember. Pizza somethings.’

‘Pizzino,’ said Annie.

‘That’s the feller. Oh!’ Dolly’s eyes widened. ‘It’s from that Mafia bloke. Barolli. Well, come the fuck on, what’s it say?’

‘What’s it say?’ Annie stared back at her in outrage. ‘Look, Doll, mind your bloody own will you? I can’t think about him now, how the fuck could I? Poor Aretha’s dead because of some psycho, and he thinks he can just waltz back into my life, after three months of nothing, with a note?’

‘Well, when you put it like that…’

‘There’s no other way to put it, Doll.’ Annie screwed up the note and lobbed it angrily into the sink. She took a calming breath and nodded to Dolly’s notebooks. ‘Right, Doll, let’s get back to business.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going to phone Jerry, get him down the station to speak to Chris.’

Jerry Peters was Annie’s brief from way back: a tall, overweight man with a shock of fluffy ginger hair, a florid complexion and a brilliance in legal matters that belied his shambolic looks. ‘While I do that, dig out Aunt Louella’s address. And—yeah—everything you’ve got about Aretha’s last client, and where she met him.’

‘Ah,’ said Dolly awkwardly.

‘What do you mean, “ah”?’

‘Fact is,’ said Dolly, her eyes downcast, ‘I don’t actually know who her last client was. A woman phoned in the booking, said room two-oh-six at the Vista in Park Lane and the time, asked for Aretha, and the client paid Aretha, so…’ Her voice tailed off.

‘You didn’t know this woman? You didn’t even take a name?’

Dolly looked up, her expression unhappy. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘no.’

‘Shit,’ said Annie.

Chapter 5

Mira Cooper would forever remember the first time she set eyes on Redmond Delaney. She’d been sitting in the luxuriously ornate dining room at Cliveden with Sir William Farquharson, married ex-member of the House, when they’d shown Redmond and his party to a nearby table.

He was just the most exquisite man she’d ever seen: tall and lithe, with red hair, lime-green eyes, smooth skin and an air of command about him. He was with a group of five others, and a darkhaired stunner was paying him a lot of attention. Redmond’s attention, much to the brunette’s visible annoyance, was fixed upon Mira, whose beautiful blonde looks had always been her fortune.

Chatting to William as they ate, her eyes were constantly drawn back to Redmond—and she couldn’t help but compare the two. William was short, pot-bellied, balding and plain. Redmond Delaney, however, was a god.

Oh yes, she remembered it all: being in the pool the following afternoon, wearing her best silver bikini, hoping he’d be there. And he was. Sir William was lounging on one of the chairs at the side of the pool, talking to another old man and smoking a Havana cigar. Mira’s heart almost stopped when Redmond appeared at the edge of the pool. He slipped off his robe and dived in, swimming a couple of powerful laps until he ended up leaning against the side of the pool, right beside her.

‘Nice day,’ he said.

She flicked a flirtatious glance at him. She knew how to use her looks to good effect. He saw her stunning blue eyes widen slightly, saw her pupils dilate, and that was good. She liked the look of him and she was determined to let him know it. He was a handsome man, a striking man. He wasn’t old or pot bellied—and he had to be rich to stay here; she knew that.

‘Lovely,’ she said, and smiled.

‘Staying long?’ he asked, glancing over at Sir William, who was deep into his conversation, noticing nothing, certainly not the way her eyes were playing with the younger man’s, certainly not the way her nubile body was half turning towards this new kid on the block.

‘Until the weekend,’ she said, smiling.

He smiled back at her. ‘Good. I hope we’ll meet up again.’

‘We might,’ she said playfully.

‘I think we should.’

‘That’s very forward of you.’ Her eyes were dancing; she was enjoying this.

‘I am forward,’ he said, ‘in most things. My name’s Redmond, by the way.’

‘Are you a businessman?’ she asked him, entranced by his soft southern Irish accent.

‘Yes.’ It was true, more or less. He owned the streets of Battersea and a little pocket of Limehouse. He did business. Not legitimate business, but it was business anyway.

‘I’m here with—’

‘Sir William. I know.’

Mira was silent for a moment, but her eyes spoke volumes. ‘Billy has a sleep after dinner,’ she said at last.

‘Does he?’

‘For an hour.’

‘You know what? A person could do a lot. In an hour.’

‘Yes. That’s true.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mira,’ she said. ‘Mira Cooper.’

She flicked her leonine blonde mane and was off, streaking across the pool, her blood fizzing with excitement. Oh yes, she remembered everything. The good bits…and the bad.

She’d told him all about herself, something she had never done before, not with any man. That she had once worked in a high-class brothel run by her friend Annie Carter—who’d been Annie Bailey then—in the West End of London. She told Redmond that, while they lay naked together in his sumptuous Cliveden suite.

‘I don’t want you seeing Billy again,’ he said as they lay back against the pillows, him lazily playing with her splendid breasts, her lightly caressing his flat, well-toned stomach. ‘Not after this week.’

She turned her head, looked at his face. ‘He’ll be upset,’ she said.

‘Fuck him,’ he said.

She grinned at that. Knelt up on the bed and straddled him.

‘I’d rather fuck you,’ she said, and bit his nipple quite hard.

‘Okay,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘Do it.’

Chapter 6

Annie was in church. She never went to church except for the usual stuff—funerals, christenings and weddings. Apart from those, she normally wouldn’t have been seen dead in such a place. She hadn’t been raised that way.

Her mum, Connie Bailey, had never even sent her or her sister Ruthie to Sunday school. Other kids had attended, collected those neat little stamps with pictures of Jesus to stick in books and get a gold star, got those little raffia crosses from the vicar on Palm Sunday. Annie and Ruthie had spent Sundays wondering whether this was going to be the day when their mother finally up and died on them. Choked on vomit, drank herself into oblivion, take your pick. Their mother had been a drunk, and Dad was nothing but a faint memory.

So, no church. No giving thanks to the Lord, because excuse me but what had there ever been to give thanks for, really? Annie and Max had been married in a no-fuss, no-frills ceremony in Majorca, and Layla had been christened there too. The Church of England, into which Annie had been born, was foreign to her.

But now here she was.

In church.

And a choir was lifting the roof off, singing ‘Praise the Lord, hallelujah!’ Twenty purple-clad black women were standing in front of the high altar, shafts of multicoloured sunlight illuminating them through the stained-glass window. They were moving rapturously to the beat. A dumpy, pop-eyed little man was at the organ, flapping one arm at the choir and mouthing along, obviously doubling up as choirmaster. The vicar was standing silently beside the lectern, listening and watching. The organ was belting out the backbeat, the beaming women giving it their all, the very rafters of the beautiful old building were vibrating with the power of the combined sound.

Annie sat in a pew and listened, feeling all the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Yeah, it was magic.

She’d called first at Louella’s address, expecting that a whole bunch of family would be gathered around to support her. But a neighbour told her that Louella had gone to church. Said Louella always went to church this time every week for choir practice. So Tony had driven Annie over, and now here she was, listening to the choir pounding and clapping and swaying and singing to the rafters and wondering what good she could possibly do here. But she had to be here, had to say how sorry she was, had to ask if there was anything she could do to help, if only for Aretha’s sake. She didn’t even know what Aretha’s aunt looked like—but, as it happened, that proved no problem, because there, on the left-hand side of the group, bellowing out the words of praise and swaying in time to the beat, grinning and clapping with all the rest, was a woman whose eyes were full of tragedy and whose cheeks were wet with tears.

It had to be Louella, singing and sobbing at the same time.

Annie gulped as it hit her again. Aretha was gone. Had Aretha ever come here, with her Aunt Louella? Had she ever sat right here and listened to the choir? Before Aretha and Louella had fallen out over Aretha’s career choices, had they come here together to worship?

Annie didn’t know. There was so little that she really knew about Aretha Brown. All she did know was that she’d been a friend. All she knew beyond that was that she couldn’t let Chris get stitched up for something he didn’t—couldn’t—do.

The choir roared out one last, bell-like note, and it echoed all around the great vaulted ceiling before finally fading away. Their organist clapped madly. The vicar clapped politely too. Annie stood up and joined in. The choir started to disperse. Annie walked up the aisle. Some of the women were patting Louella’s shoulder, murmuring to her. The vicar came forward and talked quietly to her. Annie waited until he moved away, then she stepped up and said: ‘Louella?’

The woman looked at her blankly. Her eyes were swollen with all the tears she’d shed.

‘Louella, I’m a friend of Aretha’s. I’m Annie.’

Louella’s face closed down. She looked at Annie with suspicion.

‘You one of them Delaneys?’ she asked.

Annie shook her head.

‘Only she was workin’ at a Delaney place,’ said Louella.

‘I know.’

‘And you ain’t one of them? You ain’t one of them that preyed upon my little girl?’

My little girl.

But Aretha wasn’t Aunt Louella’s little girl: she was someone else’s. Someone thousands of miles away, toiling under the baking Rhodesian sun, had lost a daughter. The Africans had extended families; they shared their children, their grandparents, their joys and their losses. The English did not.

‘I’m not a Delaney, Louella. I’m Annie Carter.’

Louella looked no happier. She rubbed a hand over her face, drying her tears.

‘She spoke about you,’ she said.

‘Did she?’ asked Annie.

‘Yeah, she said you was tight together. But you was involved with that place she worked, I know that. You and that Dolly woman, and there was a boy too who worked there…’

‘Darren,’ said Annie, swallowing hard. Darren was gone, and she still missed him.

‘He was homosexual, that’s against the word of the Lord,’ said Aunt Louella huffily.

‘He couldn’t help what he was,’ said Annie.

Louella looked at her. She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Anyway, the Lord says hate the sin, but love the sinner.’

‘Can we sit for a moment? Have a talk?’

‘They told you she’s gone, my baby?’ asked Louella, tears spilling over again.

Annie nodded sadly. She indicated one of the front pews. Louella heaved a sigh and sat down. Annie sat beside her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Oh, I sorry too,’ said Louella, choking on a sob. ‘I’m sorrier than I can say. The police, they come to me and they tol’ me what happened, they tol’ me they got the one who did it. I said to her so many times, don’t do that stuff, why you got to do that when you could get a nice job, be a good girl like I promised your mama you would be. How could I tell her that her little one was doin’ things like that when she sent her here to me, put her in my care, expected her to get a good life for herself?’

They tol’ me they got the one who did it. Annie’s guts churned and her mind rebelled. They had Chris; they were convinced he was the murderer. Annie was equally convinced he wasn’t.

So prove it, she thought. She had to, or Chris was fucked.

Louella was looking at her. ‘Yeah, she spoke about you,’ she said again. ‘You’re one of the bad people, the people my baby should never have got herself involved with. I know about the big gangs, the things they do. I know. You were with Max Carter.’

Annie took a breath. ‘I’m in charge now,’ she said.

‘Yeah, you’re bad people. I know that,’ said Louella.

‘I’m not a bad person, Louella. I was a good friend to Aretha. She was an even better one to me.’

‘Yeah, you say.’

‘Hate the sin, not the sinner?’

Louella looked at her sceptically.

‘That’s neat, turnin’ my own words back on me,’ she said.

‘We both loved her. That’s what matters. We both want to see who did this brought to justice.’

‘They got him, her husband, he done it.’

‘Did you know Chris?’ Because if you did, you’d know this is all bullshit.

Louella shook her head. ‘No, but I seen him at their wedding. He sure was frightening to look at.’

Being frightening to look at was going to prove a problem for Chris, and Annie knew it.

‘I was at the wedding, of course,’ Aunt Louella went on. ‘Even though I was angry with her for what she did to make a livin’. We’re talkin’ family. She was my baby. But we sort of drifted away from each other. I wanted her to change her ways; she wouldn’t. It made things…hard.’

Annie was silent. It was cool in the church, peaceful. Outside, traffic roared, people fought their corner in the heat and glare of the City. In here was tranquillity. Annie watched the vicar moving about at the altar, repositioning a highly polished candlestick, brushing a fleck of dust from the altar cloth. The dumpy little pop-eyed organist was gathering up his sheet music, fussily arranging the papers in order.

‘Do you need help? With the arrangements?’ she asked Louella.

Louella shook her head. She sighed.

‘They won’t release her body yet,’ she said. ‘I asked them. I said I wanted to lay my baby to rest, but they won’t do it, not yet.’

‘When they do, I can help.’

Louella shot her a scornful look.

‘You think I’d bury my baby with gang money?’

Annie looked at her steadily. Louella’s eyes dropped away.

‘It’s what we’re here for,’ said Annie. ‘To help our own.’

Louella shook her head. ‘I don’t want nothing to do with any of that.’

‘Well, think it over.’ Annie stood up. ‘Funerals are expensive. I know you can’t earn much…’

‘Whatever I earn, I earn by honest toil,’ said Louella sharply. ‘I’ll manage. Thank you.’

Annie nodded. The vicar had gone into the vestry; the organist was gone too. The church was empty, but for Annie and Aunt Louella. Their voices echoed when they spoke.

‘My door’s always open,’ said Annie. ‘If you should change your mind…’

‘I won’t.’ Louella’s face was closed off and truculent as she stood up too. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Carter.’

Annie sighed. She looked up at the altar, and then above to the glorious stained-glass windows. She stared at them and wondered where God had been when Aretha was fighting to stay alive.

Chapter 7

Tony drove her up West to the hotel where Aretha had met her last client. She was sure she was wasting her time, but if there was anything, anything, she could turn up by poking around, then she knew she had to try.

‘You want me to come in with you, Boss?’ asked Tony as they pulled up outside.

‘No, Tone. I won’t be long,’ she said, and jumped out of the back and trotted up the steps to the plush hotel. The doorman, resplendent in purple with gold braiding, tipped his hat to her.

‘Good morning, Madam,’ he said.

She nodded and pushed through the swing doors. She looked around as she crossed to the reception desk. It was some place. There was a lot of pink marble, a fountain in the centre of the lobby, big, cream, velvet-covered buttoned chairs and reading lights on console tables. She could see a guest lounge through an open set of double doors to one side, two lifts on the other, beside a huge, gold-painted sweeping staircase.

At the reception desk, a purple-suited and smiling blonde whose name-badge said ‘Claire’ asked if she could help.

‘I hope you can,’ said Annie. ‘Two nights ago a friend of mine died not far from here. This was the last place she was seen alive. With a guest of yours.’

The smile vanished.

‘I’m not sure I can help you with that,’ she said.

‘I’m not sure you can either,’ said Annie. ‘That’s why I need to speak to the concierge who was on duty that night.’

The phone started ringing. The girl turned to it with obvious relief. ‘If you’ll excuse me…?’ she said.

‘Sure,’ said Annie, and waited while the girl took a booking for the following weekend.

Claire replaced the receiver and turned back to Annie.

‘As I said, I’m not sure we can help…’

And then the phone rang again, and Claire gave Annie an ‘oh, sorry’ smile as she picked it up. She took another booking. Annie waited.

‘So sorry about that,’ said Claire, and then the phone rang again. She picked up. Then her professional smile died on her lips as Annie snatched the phone from her hand and replaced it on the base, cutting the call dead. Annie leaned over and pulled the phone jack out of its socket. Claire’s mouth dropped open. Annie gave her a tight smile.

‘The fact is,’ Annie said, pausing to glance at the girl’s badge, ‘Claire. The fact is that my friend is dead and I’m upset, so bear with me here and don’t even think about plugging that phone back in unless you want to be wearing it as a necklace, you got me? I need to speak to your concierge, preferably this year and not next. Preferably within the next five minutes. Preferably now. So call him up or have someone fetch him or whatever it is you have to do, and stop it with the fucking phone, please, because this is very, very important, do you understand?’

Claire nodded slowly. She’d gone pale.

‘That’s good,’ Annie congratulated her. ‘That’s very good, I can see we have an understanding here, Claire. Now, what’s his name, this concierge who would have been on duty two nights ago, at gone midnight?’

Claire fiddled about with some papers on the big curving desk. She found a list, and checked down it. She looked up at Annie.

‘That would be Ray Thompson,’ she said. ‘He’s on twelve to eight all this week. He’s not here right now.’

‘He’ll be here at twelve tonight?’ asked Annie.

Claire nodded, swallowing, her eyes wary.

‘Then I’ll be back to see him then. If he don’t come in for any reason, you call me, okay? I don’t want a wasted journey—that would upset me, do you understand what I’m saying?’ Annie took a notepad and pencil out of her pocket and jotted down her name and the Palermo’s number. She handed it to Claire. ‘My name’s Annie Carter, I’ve put it down right here so that you know. Reach me on this number, okay?’

Claire nodded.

‘I’ll be back at twelve if I don’t hear from you first. Oh, and can you tell me who was in room two-oh-six two nights ago?’

‘I shouldn’t…’ Claire started.

Then she looked at Annie’s face. She gulped and flicked back a page or two in the guest book, scanned down it. ‘A Mr Smith.’

Not exactly original, thought Annie.

Dolly had told her that a woman had made the initial booking and that there was no contact number because Rosie—being Rosie—had taken the call, and hadn’t asked for one. Aretha had to meet a man named Mr Smith in room 206 at nine, that was all.

‘Were you on duty that night?’ asked Annie.

Claire shook her head.

‘Write down the name of whoever was on duty,’ said Annie.

Claire wrote down a name and handed the headed compliment slip to Annie.

‘Thanks for that,’ said Annie, pocketing it. ‘And is this person going to be back on duty tonight?’

Claire nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘That’s good, I’ll see him too. Have you heard anything about what happened?’ she asked. ‘Anything that might interest, for instance, the police…maybe help them with their inquiries?’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Claire, shaking her head nervously. ‘I just saw the police out there when I came in next morning, and people were talking about it. They said it was the third murder in as many months. I’m just really glad I don’t do nights.’

‘Okay. If I don’t hear from you first, I’ll be back at twelve to see Ray and the receptionist.’

Claire nodded. ‘That’s Gareth…Gareth Fuller,’ she said.

‘Gareth Fuller. Thanks Claire.’

Annie turned away from the desk and started to walk back across the reception area to the door. It spooked her, that feeling that she was walking in Aretha’s footsteps, tracing the path the dead woman had taken on her last night on earth.

For a heart-stopping moment she felt she could almost see Aretha up ahead, swinging through the doors into the night, her feather boa trailing behind her, the smell of that horrible hairy Afghan coat she always wore clinging to the air, mixed with the attar of rose scent she favoured, dreads bouncing as she went, flashing a broad grin back at Annie.

Bye girlfriend, catch ya later.

And then the vision was gone, and it was daylight, and Aretha was dead.

It was too late now to bring her back. But not too late to find out who had taken her from them.

There were voices coming from the lounge, male voices, people moving on the edge of her vision. She’d paused there in the middle of reception, but now she moved again, heading for the door just like Aretha had done two nights ago. And then one of the men emerging from the guest lounge called out her name, and she turned and to her shock saw Redmond Delaney standing there—with Constantine Barolli.

They fell silent and stared at her. Shocked, Annie stared right back. Yeah, it was him. She couldn’t believe it. Smooth bloody American, standing there as bold as brass with Redmond Delaney, boss of the Delaney mob and—because she was a Carter—her enemy.

Antagonism between a Delaney and a Carter was not in any way new. This particular fight went way back to the Fifties, to when Davey Delaney had come over from Ireland and tried to muscle in on Max’s father’s patch. Some things were set in stone. All through the Sixties the Richardsons and the Frasers had the South, the Regans the West, the Nashes had The Angel, the Delaneys held Battersea—and a small pocket in Limehouse, down by the docks, often disputed over—the Krays had Bethnal Green and the Carters had Bow.

Now it was the Seventies, and still the Delaneys had to keep pushing their luck, and when they pushed, the Carter mob pushed back. There had been all sorts of disputes over the years between the two warring clans. Sometimes it had turned downright nasty. Major gang fights broke out; serious damage was inflicted. And earlier this year, Billy Black, Annie’s gofer—who for years had walked the Limehouse streets unmolested—had been killed, dissolving any illusion that there might be peace like flesh in quicklime.

For Annie, it was war.

Once, she had done business with Redmond and his twin sister, Orla. Once, she had even pitied them for their miserable backgrounds. Now, she looked at Redmond—tall, effete, red hair swept back from his white skin, his pale green eyes watching her, dressed in his usual sober black—and felt only hatred.

And what the hell was Constantine Barolli, who had for years been tight in business with the Carters, doing—having a private meet in a plush West End hotel with their worst enemy?

‘Annie?’

It was Constantine who called her name, not Redmond. Redmond had always called her Miss Bailey or Mrs Carter. Always very formal, that was Redmond. Cold as black ice and twice as deadly.

Constantine bloody Barolli.

Annie forced herself to look at him with cool dispassion. And that was hard. Because—damn it—he looked good.

In fact, he looked just the same as when she had last seen him—a stunning man in his early forties, tall and silver-haired, with vivid blue eyes and an all-American tan, wearing a beautifully cut grey suit. Exactly the same as when she had chased after him like an over-keen schoolgirl to Heathrow and told him to call her.

And—oh yeah— he hadn’t. He had called the Delaneys.

She looked at him, looked at Redmond—and walked on. She was down the steps and out on the pavement when Constantine caught up with her.

‘What, are you ignoring me now?’ he asked, catching her arm, and his voice was pure New York, just like she remembered.

Annie stared at his hand on her arm. He was very close, very overwhelming—even more physically imposing than she remembered. She could smell his Acqua di Parma cologne, she was dazzled anew by those intensely probing blue eyes, and she knew that she could all too easily fall under his spell again. If she let herself.

‘It looks like it,’ she said, voice cool, face blank. ‘Don’t it?’

‘You got my note?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. I got it.’

‘You didn’t come over,’ he said.

‘You’re right, I didn’t,’ said Annie as Tony pulled up in the Jag. ‘Will you excuse me? I’ve got a lot of business today.’

‘Why the big chill?’ asked Constantine. She could see a flicker of amusement playing around his mouth. Fuck it, she was angry and that amused him. As usual.

‘What big chill?’

‘All right, put it another way, why have you got that stick up your ass? What’s up with you?’

‘What’s up with me?’ Annie opened her eyes wide and stared at him. ‘What’s up with you, arsehole?’

Probably Constantine had done her a favour, leaving her out in the cold for three long months. It had brought her to her senses, made her rethink. Yeah, she was well out of this. Well out.

‘Excuse me, but people don’t generally talk to me like that,’ said Constantine, grabbing her arm again.

Annie saw Tony’s attention sharpen, and he started to get out from behind the driver’s seat. She shook her head quickly. She didn’t want him starting anything up with this one; he’d be placing himself in more danger than any of them could handle. She couldn’t see Constantine’s minders anywhere, but she knew damned well that they were there, watching. Tony stopped moving.

‘Excuse me, but I think you’ll find I just did,’ said Annie, and got in the car. ‘The Palermo, Tone,’ she said.

But Constantine still had the door open. He hunkered down and looked at her. He still looked as though he was finding this whole thing the biggest joke in the world.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to let this go.’

‘Well, good luck with that,’ she said.

‘You asked me to call you.’

‘Yes I did. Stupid of me. Hey, you’d better get back to your meeting. Redmond Delaney’s a big noise around here, you don’t want to go pissing him off. And if he sees you running after a Carter, that’ll do it every time.’

Constantine stood up. ‘Look, it was a business lunch. We met, discussed things, ate a little, drank a little, now I’m going home.’

‘Home to Holland Park? Or home to New York?’

Constantine pursed his lips and stared at her.

‘Is that what all this is for: you’re sore because I didn’t call sooner?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes you do. And okay, guilty, and you called me on it. But you know what? If I can finally find the guts to face this thing, then so can you.’

‘So you were just having lunch with Redmond Delaney?’ she asked.

‘Is there a law against that, two businessmen having lunch?’

‘Who invited who?’ asked Annie.

‘He invited me,’ said Constantine.

‘I knew it. He wants the contracts on your clubs up West. The Carter firm—my firm—has always held those contracts.’

Constantine nodded. ‘Yeah, well. Maybe he was making a better offer.’

‘Was he?’

‘I didn’t say that. And anyway, a deal’s a deal. I was happy to work with Max, and I am now happy to work with you.’

‘Big of you.’

Constantine paused for a beat. ‘You know, I’d forgotten what a complete pain in the ass you could be.’

‘Well, I’m glad I’ve refreshed your memory,’ said Annie, and pulled the door shut.

Tony put the car in gear and they moved off.

I’m not going to look back, thought Annie. But she did. Constantine was standing there, gazing after the car, shaking his head and grinning. When he saw her looking back, he waved.

Damn, he did look good.

Her heart was beating fast and hard. Her face felt hot. She was having a lot of trouble stopping herself from smiling.

Fuck it, she thought.

Chapter 8

Redmond Delaney bought Mira diamonds. She loved diamonds. He bought her furs. She loved those too, but she loved him more.

‘This is just between us,’ he said to her, meaning their love, their lust, whatever the hell it was that drew them together.

Mira nodded her acceptance, but deep down she felt uneasy and hurt. She knew he had parents in Ireland, but there was never any chance that she would meet them. He had a sister too—his twin, Orla. She had met Orla once; they’d been having lunch at a restaurant, and Orla had come in. Reluctantly, Redmond had introduced her to Mira. Orla had looked at Mira like she was contaminated.

So she had become his dirty little secret, one he kept well away from his family. She understood that, even though it pained her. She knew she wasn’t fit for polite society, fit for any society really. Sometimes she even shocked herself. That blackness in her heart sometimes made itself felt in dark moods, wild behaviour. She knew her own weaknesses. She knew that what had been done to her in her childhood had warped her somehow. There were lines that most other people, most normal people, would never cross. But she crossed them every day, with every breath she took, and only occasionally would she think: Jesus, did I really do that?

Not long after their affair began, Redmond bought her a flat in Battersea, close to his family’s breaker’s yard. Not Mayfair—which was what she was used to—but a nice flat in a decent area, a large and sunlit flat which she’d decorated in the latest styles at his considerable expense.

She was happy. William was a distant memory. The brothel she had worked in, the brothel where she met William, had been closed down long ago by the police—so that was all over. But then he already knew that. He made it his business to know things, particularly about Annie Carter and the mob of thugs she controlled.

‘I’m all yours, darling,’ she said, flinging herself into his arms one sunny Sunday afternoon in the sitting room of the new flat.

He’d told her how much he loved her voice, so mellow, so Home Counties. By now Mira knew that he adored the upper classes in general, and they got a kick out of mixing with him, because he was a bad boy and everyone knew it. A bad boy, but a rich boy too—a boy with clout; so the London glitterati flocked around him. From humble beginnings, he had climbed the greasy pole and now he was at the top, with a high-class mistress in tow. She adored him. He adored her. It was love.

‘I was all yours from the minute I first saw you,’ she said against his cheek.

‘Oh?’ Redmond buried his head in her fragrant neck. She wore Shalimar. He loved that too: it was a classic like her, he’d told her.

‘In the dining room at Cliveden.’

‘You noticed me too?’

‘I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. But I had to. Because of William.’

‘He’s the past,’ he said, pulling her in tighter so that she could feel his erection. ‘We’re all that matters now.’

They had christened the new bed in the new flat, and it had been dusk before they were sated, lying together in the warm afterglow.

‘I’m so happy,’ she murmured against his chest.

He was happy too. She was beautiful, polished, exotic—of course he was happy.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he’d said. ‘I want to know everything.’

He settled down for an erotic treat, and was not disappointed. She reeled out the background he had already imagined her to have. Old family money, pony clubs, private schools, a year at Egglestone being ‘finished’ followed by lavish country-house balls and wild, carefree summer parties at Henley. And then, of course, should have come marriage, babies…

Suddenly she fell silent.

Redmond looked at her face. She was crying, silent tears slipping down on to the pillow.

‘Hey…’ he murmured, and held her tighter.

Faltering, she went on talking.

There had been a pregnancy. Her parents had been ashamed. They had demanded to know who was the father of her child, but she hadn’t told them, she couldn’t tell them that her father’s brother, the beloved uncle who had dandled her on his knee as a child, had impregnated her.

‘What happened then?’ he asked her, wiping away her tears.

‘They sent me away to my cousin’s for the abortion,’ Mira told him, choking to get the words out through her tears.

‘Shh,’ he said, rocking her.

‘And after that,’ she said when she could speak again, ‘I never went home again. Never saw my parents again. Couldn’t stand to see the disappointment in their eyes when they looked at me.’

She sat up, hugging her knees to her chest. He stroked her back, feeling oddly relieved. She was like him after all. She too had gone to forbidden places, and lived to tell the tale.

‘You could tell them the truth. It wasn’t your fault. It’s not too late,’ he said.

She shook her head vehemently.

‘Yes it is. My father loves his brother better than anyone in the world, including me. He didn’t believe me then and he wouldn’t believe me now. Neither would my mother. It’s too late. It’s over.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, understanding completely, utterly. ‘So after that you became…?’

She shot a glance back at him. A tight smile.

‘A whore?’ With a heavy sigh she threw herself back on to the pillows. ‘It wasn’t that difficult a transition. Men flocked around me, wined and dined me, bought me jewels. Men always have. My family was dead to me, I had to make my own way and what was I good for? I’d never had any training. Anything beyond arranging a few flowers and making a perfect Sacher torte was beyond me. Stupid, yes? What a way to raise a girl to face the world.’

He said nothing.

‘These men coveted me, wanted to pay for my company on holidays in the Bahamas and dinners at the best restaurants, in exchange for sexual favours. So I drifted into that life. And you know what’s strange? I never felt anything for any of them, never felt a thing, until I met you.’

He nodded, pulled her in close against him. He knew that she had instinctively recognized that taint in his soul, the same taint that was in her. That was what had drawn them so swiftly together. It would never leave either of them.

‘My poor darling,’ he said against her hair, and pushed her hand down to his cock again, because the tale of what her uncle had done to her had aroused him.

Chapter 9

Kath, Annie’s cousin, was up in the flat with her three-year-old son, Jimmy Junior, her baby Mo—and Layla. Layla saw Annie coming up the stairs and threw herself at her mother’s legs. She clung on like a small, dark-haired limpet.

Annie scooped Layla up into her arms and smiled into her daughter’s face, although she felt annoyed with Kath because the door had been open, the stairs were a danger, the workmen had been down there with masonry and shit flying in all directions; the kids could get hurt here.

‘You didn’t have to come over, I’d have come to you,’ she said to Kath, who was cuddling her grizzling baby against her vast bosom.

‘Ah, they were getting bored and Layla kept asking for you and I needed some stuff from the shop, so I thought, why not?’ said Kath.

‘How’s she been?’ asked Annie.

Kath shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘A pain in the arse,’ she said, but her grin said otherwise.

Annie kissed Layla’s silky dark hair—so like her own—and inhaled the sweet scent of her daughter.

‘You been a good girl for your Auntie Kath?’ she asked Layla.

‘Yeah!’ said Layla.

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Yeah!’

‘What about you, little Jim?’ asked Annie of Kath’s little boy, who was at the table, his sandy head bent over his paper and crayons. ‘Been good?’

Jimmy gave her a tired smile and rubbed his eyes.

‘He’s ready for his nap,’ said Kath. ‘They’re all getting overtired.’

‘Can Layla stay with you tonight, Kath? I’ve got to go out late on business.’

‘Sure,’ said Kath with a sigh.

She didn’t ask what business. After years of being married to Jimmy Bond, who had once been Max Carter’s number one man, she knew better. But Jimmy Bond was history now, and Kath didn’t seem sorry. In fact, there was a new spring in her step. Jimmy had knocked seven kinds of shit out of her, and she didn’t have to put up with that any more. She was still a train wreck, though; still messy, still untidy.

Annie noticed that Layla had started to cling on tighter to her. She drew back and smiled into the little girl’s eyes—eyes that were the same colour as her own: a dark, dense green. ‘I’ll collect you after breakfast tomorrow, okay? That’s a promise.’

‘You promise, Mummy?’

‘On my life,’ said Annie, hating the anxiety in Layla’s eyes. ‘Uncle Tony’s going to drive you over to Auntie Kath’s with her right now, okay?’

This seemed to reassure Layla, and she nodded and allowed herself to be ushered out the door along with little Jim, baby Mo and a mountain of childcare products and colouring books, plus her overnight pyjamas and Bluey, her new fluffy toy bunny.

At last they were gone. Annie sat in the flat and turned on the TV to catch the news. The Manson trial was still going on in the States, the army had used rubber bullets for the first time in Belfast, and a plane had crashed in Peru, killing all ninetynine people on board. Her attention sharpened as the guy started saying that another escort girl had been found dead, this time in London’s West End, and that the girl’s husband was now helping police with their enquires into this and two earlier killings.

So they still hadn’t formally charged Chris yet. Maybe Jerry Peters had convinced them of Chris’s innocence, and maybe not. They might not have charged him, but neither had they released him. It was too soon to open the bubbly and start dancing on the frigging tables, that was for sure.

There was a different girl on reception when Annie got back to the Vista Hotel just after midnight. ‘Pippa’, the girl’s badge announced. Pippa had a mountain of dark hair on her tiny bird-like head, pale clear skin and blue laughing eyes; her purple fitted jacket and skirt suited her colouring. The place looked deserted, apart from this little bright beacon sitting behind the reception desk.

‘I need to speak to Ray Thompson, your concierge,’ said Annie, surprised to see this dainty little thing here and not Gareth Fuller, as expected. ‘Did Claire tell you about me? I’m Annie Carter.’

Pippa did a flickering downward sweep of the eyelashes. Annie guessed that this wowed the male punters. She waited, expecting that Claire would not have told her colleague about this. Expecting in fact that she was going to meet with more obstruction, more hassle, more of the ‘oh I couldn’t do that’ routine.

Should have brought Tony in with me, she thought. Tony’s appearance tended to galvanize people in a helpful direction. But Annie didn’t want to come over all heavy here. She just wanted to know what had happened two nights ago; she didn’t want to go busting heads if charm and negotiation could do the business just as well.

‘That’s Ray over there,’ said Pippa helpfully, surprising her.

Annie turned. A man in a purple uniform with flashy gold epaulettes had just stepped out of the lift. He walked with authority, shooting his cuffs as he came. He looked at Annie, half smiled, nodded to Pippa.

‘Can I help?’ he said.

He was a short man in his early fifties, full of bouncy East End confidence. He had dark curly hair turning grey, an elfish face etched with laughter lines, and he took in everything about Annie at a glance. She could see him briskly categorizing her. Expensive-looking female punter in a black silk suit. She could see pound signs flicking up in his sharp, acquisitive eyes.

‘Can you spare a few minutes? I’m Annie Carter. Did Claire tell you I’d be coming?’ said Annie.

‘Yes, she did. Of course,’ he said in his Cockney twang.

‘Can we talk in the lounge, get some privacy?’ Annie continued, aware that Pippa was sitting behind the desk, looking bored as tits, with her ears flapping like Dumbo’s.

He nodded and led the way in. The lounge was spacious and decked out in soothing greens, pinks and golds. No fire in the grate—too late in the day and too warm for that anyway; instead there was a display of tasteful dried flowers. Lots of big couches. Lots of table lamps casting a cosy glow, side tables stacked with newspapers. It was a proper little home from home for the weary guest.

Ray politely motioned that she should sit on one of the big couches, and he sat down opposite her, at a discreet distance.

Annie got straight to the point. ‘You were on duty the night Aretha Brown was murdered,’ she said.

This seemed to jolt him, but he must have been expecting it. There was a sudden wariness in his eyes. He looked down at the carpet, then up at her again. Nodded.

‘She was here, visiting a friend,’ said Annie carefully.

He nodded again, but he half smiled and his eyes said: A friend? Is that what prossies are calling their clients now?

‘Did you see her arrive?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Did you see her leave?’

‘Yes. I did. Look, I went through all this with the police. What’s your interest here? You a reporter?’

‘Do I look like a reporter?’

Ray gave her a quick once-over. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘You’re an East Ender, Ray. Which part?’

‘Bethnal Green.’

‘Then you’ll know my husband’s friends and business acquaintances, the twins.’ Annie watched as Ray’s expression froze. ‘You know the twins, Ray?’

Everyone from that area knew the twins. Reggie and Ronnie. The Krays.

Ray swallowed nervously and Annie could see that he’d made an important connection.

‘You’re Max Carter’s wife,’ said Ray.

Widow, thought Annie, but she let it go.

Ray looked at her. ‘The Krays are a spent force now,’ he said. ‘They’ve been banged up for over a year for doing Jack the Hat and Cornell.’

‘You think so?’ Annie asked him.

Annie knew different. Even behind bars the Krays were making a fortune off their firm. They had legitimate sponsorship arrangements going with many businesses—debt collection agencies were a favourite—and these businesses set up deals from which the twins got a cut of the profit in return for use of the Kray name. She was doing something very similar with her own firm now, using Max’s and Jonjo’s considerable clout in the business world to make a legitimate living in security.

‘Aretha—the girl who died—was a friend of mine,’ she told him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It was a horrible thing that happened to her. And her husband Chris is a friend too. He’s in the frame for this. I don’t like people doing bad things to my friends. And I don’t believe Chris would harm Aretha. So I need to find out anything I can about what happened that night, so that I can do something about it, okay?’

Ray nodded.

‘So,’ said Annie. ‘You saw her leave, but you didn’t see her arrive?’

He looked down, nodded again.

‘So, when she left. She left alone?’

‘Yes, she was alone.’

‘Did she seem all right?’

He shrugged. ‘She seemed fine. Happy. It was tipping down with rain and I said she ought to take a taxi, and she said she wasn’t made of money.’

Annie’s heart clenched with pain. If Aretha had taken that taxi straight home, and not walked the short distance to the corner around which Chris was parked up, waiting for her, then she would probably be alive right now.

‘Has she come here before?’

‘No, she was a new one here.’

Annie looked at him. ‘Room two hundred and six. Mr Smith. I’m assuming that’s not his real name.’

Again the shrug. ‘Lots of men sign in anonymously and pay cash when they check out. Wouldn’t you, if you were going to use a brass? He might be a man of some importance—probably is; this is a classy place, the prices we charge, I’m telling you. He might have a reputation to consider. He might be married. He wouldn’t want to draw attention to himself.’

‘Did you see this “Mr Smith”?’

Ray shook his head.

‘Did anyone?’

‘The police asked that too. But we see hundreds of people in a day here. No one remembers him.’

Anonymous and invisible.

‘He checked in and the time was recorded, yes? So someone spoke to him then, face to face,’ Annie persisted. ‘Who? Claire? Pippa? The other one, Gareth?’

‘I’ll find out,’ said Ray.

Annie sat back, waiting.

‘You want me to do it now?’ asked Ray.

Annie gave him the look. ‘You got anything else pressing?’

Ray got up and left the lounge. Through the half-open door Annie saw him in a huddle with Pippa at the reception desk. Watched him come back into the lounge, sit down again.

‘Yeah, that would have been Gareth,’ he said. ‘Mr Smith checked in at eight thirty-three in the morning three days ago. He booked in—with Gareth—for the one day and overnight, but no one saw him leave the next morning.’

‘Hold on,’ Annie told him. ‘No one saw him leave? He paid his bill, yes? Spoke to whoever was on reception? But no one saw him?’

‘No one remembers seeing him. As I say, we—’

‘—see hundreds of people in a day. What about the doorman?’

Ray shook his head. ‘People come in and out all day. Whoever’s on the door don’t know their names and barely even notices their faces unless they give a good tip, and you don’t get too many of those. And if this guy wanted to remain incognito, he wouldn’t be doing that, for sure.’

Annie stood up. ‘Gareth Fuller, wasn’t it?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And he’s here when?’

‘Actually he’s not,’ said Ray. ‘He left yesterday.’

‘Left?’

‘Manager fired him. Bit of a slacker.’

‘His address then?’

Ray went to get Gareth’s address.

Annie looked around the lounge and wondered what had really been going down between Redmond Delaney and Constantine that they had to meet here. Constantine slipped the Carters three grand a month to keep troublesome elements out of his clubs up West, save him the bother of importing his own muscle from across the pond. Maybe Redmond was undercutting the Carters, and Constantine’s true intention was to work out a better deal with him, or start a lucrative bidding war between the two rival gangs.

Damn, she had thought he was on her side. It hurt to discover that he might not be. And now this. She had to help Chris. She couldn’t just let him take the rap: she knew he was innocent. She wandered back out into reception.

Trouble, every way she looked. Nothing new there, though. She was used to digging deep, standing alone. If truth be told, she was getting tired of it, but it was what she usually had to do.

Ray came over and handed her a piece of paper with Gareth Fuller’s address on it. She thanked him and slipped him a fiver.

‘If anything else occurs to you, anything at all, you call me, okay?’ she told him.

‘Sure,’ he said, and smiled.

He wouldn’t call. She knew it. But she was more interested right now in Gareth Fuller, who had checked Mr Smith in, and checked him out—and who probably wouldn’t even remember what he looked like.

Chapter 10

Next morning at eight there was a knock at the Palermo’s main door. Annie was up and dressed. She went down the stairs and opened up. The club was quiet for once, peaceful. Too early for the builders.

The bald, portly man standing there peered at her with watery blue eyes, squinting past a curl of cigarette smoke. He threw the stub on the pavement and ground it out with his heel.

‘Detective Sergeant Lane,’ said Annie, looking up and down the street. There was nobody about, but still…

‘We’ve charged him,’ said Lane.

Shit, thought Annie.

‘Can I have a few words?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ said Annie, and ushered him in, up the stairs, into the flat. She closed the door, indicated that he should take a seat. He did. He looked an utter bloody mess, corpulent and red in the face, his stubby fingers stained with nicotine, his white nylon shirt yellowish and sweat-stained and straining over his belly. He didn’t smell exactly fresh. Annie sat as far away as she could get and thought about Chris, charged now. Poor bastard.

‘I thought the rule was that we were never seen together,’ she said irritably.

He shrugged. ‘You’re helping the police with their inquiries,’ he said.

‘Fair enough. What’s the new DI like?’

‘Like a bear with a sore arse. Just got divorced and transferred in and now I’m stuck with the picky bastard. I’m telling you, that sod’s suspicious by nature.’

‘But he’s got no reason to be suspicious of you, has he?’

‘None at all. I’m squeaky clean.’

Which was ironic, since DS Lane always smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a month. If we have to have bent coppers on the firm, can’t we at least have clean ones? she thought. But the boys had assured her that Lane was a very useful contact. She’d have to open a window the minute he’d gone. Either that or fumigate the fucking place.

‘What have you got?’ she asked.

‘She was at the Vista Hotel visiting a Mr Smith in room two-oh-six,’ said Lane.

‘I know that.’

‘But it fits the MO of the other two that got done.’

‘Not the same hotel?’

‘No, different hotels every time. This is the poshest one yet; our boy’s stepped up a notch on the social ladder. The other two got done outside three-star places in the East End. But same meat, different gravy. Prostitutes calling and getting killed for their trouble. Same pattern, same method. You really think Chris Brown didn’t do these?’

Annie swallowed a sharp stab of revulsion at his casual tone, his relaxed manner. He didn’t care that Aretha was dead. Or the other two. He didn’t care that Chris was innocent. He just had a curiosity about the case, an interest in the puzzle it represented. And he thought they’d already solved it.

‘Did you find any trace of him on the other women? Any reason to believe he did those two as well as Aretha?’ asked Annie coolly.

‘No. None.’

‘But he’s been charged for doing Aretha.’

‘Yeah. Look, I got to admire your loyalty, but let’s face it, the man’s going down.’

‘The wire could get lost,’ said Annie.

‘What?’

‘The cheese wire. Could go missing.’ Annie was staring at him.

‘And what difference would that make? There’re still the cuts on his hands, there’s still his blood on the vic. Hunter’s on it and trust me he won’t let it go. You could lose the fucking suspect on this one, and everyone would still be one hundred per cent convinced that Chris Brown did it.’

‘He couldn’t kill Aretha,’ said Annie.

‘No?’ Lane gave an unpleasant smile. ‘If my old lady was out tomming—hell, even I could do it. Think you’ll find men don’t like that sort of thing.’

‘He knew Aretha was on the game before he married her.’

‘Yeah? I find that hard to believe.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Then he’s a tolerant bloke and my hat is off to him, it really is. I’m just saying, most men would consider offing the old woman if she was out porkswording the whole neighbourhood. Ew, think of the stuff you could catch off it. And it was fucking with knobs on, let’s not forget. When I saw the stuff in that bag of hers, I damn near blushed.’

‘He didn’t do it,’ said Annie. ‘I want you working hard on this, finding out who did. I want to know about these other two girls. I need to see copies of the case files.’

He screwed up his face. ‘Tricky.’

‘I don’t care how fucking tricky it is, you do it.’ If there was any sort of link between the two other girls and Aretha, then maybe some sense could be made out of all this. Maybe they could find not only Aretha’s killer but their killer too. Find the bastard who’d killed them, nail him good. Or her. Best not forget that. A woman could have done this too. By doing all that, maybe she could get Chris out of the frame.

‘Look, I’ll give it my best.’ Lane stood up.

‘Do that,’ said Annie, standing up too. Christ, she was going to have to air this place with a vengeance. ‘You’ll be well rewarded.’

‘That’s always nice to hear,’ he smirked, showing yellow tombstone teeth.

‘So you don’t rate the new DI?’ she asked.

‘Hunter?’ He shrugged. ‘He’s a pain in the arse, the miserable bastard, but he’s a good cop. And there ain’t many of them about, as you know.’ He gave her a lopsided smile.

God, he was repulsive. On balance Annie preferred hard-eyed and tight-lipped DI Hunter to this rancid tub of lard. The immaculate and sourfaced Hunter might look at her as if she was lowlife, but at least he was straightforward in his intentions and she felt he simply couldn’t be bought. You had to admire that. If you cut DI Hunter open, the words HONEST COP would run right through him like BLACKPOOL runs through a stick of rock. Slice DS Lane open and all you’d find would be the stench of corruption.

‘Hey,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t take this lightly. And don’t let me down.’

The smirk vanished. ‘I said I’ll do my utmost. But I can’t part the fucking Red Sea or nothing. My name ain’t Moses.’

Annie stared at him. Then she crossed the room and opened the door. Tony was standing silently outside it, at the top of the stairs, waiting to usher the copper out. Neither of them had heard him come up. Tony could move like a ghost, and he could move fast too, for a big man. Lane looked at Tony’s huge bulk and swallowed hard.

‘Do your best, okay?’ Annie reminded him. ‘Let me down and you’ll be sorry.’

Annie cleared up, ushered in the builders for another day of hammering and banging, and gladly took her leave of the club. Tony drove her in the Jag over to where Gareth Fuller, the Vista’s former employee, lived. It was a dump in a block of flats. Washing flapped on badly strung clothes-lines. Rubbish swirled in the summer breeze on each of the outside landings as Annie and Tony walked up five flights of stairs.

The graffiti-strewn lift was working, but judging from the stink emanating from it, someone had been using it to piss in. So it was the stairs, or being lowered down off the roof with a fucking rope, Tony complained—could you believe people had to live this way?

‘Pardon my French, Boss,’ he added politely as they hit the top landing. Then, ‘Oh fuck,’ he blurted as he looked ahead.

Annie looked ahead. DI Hunter was standing outside a battered-looking door halfway along the grimy landing, his arm raised to knock on it. His head turned in their direction. Distinctly, they saw him mutter something under his breath and then return his attention to the door.

‘Wait here, Tone,’ said Annie, and she left Tony by the top of the stairs and strolled off along the landing to where Hunter, the warm updraught riffling through his dark hair, was still tapping at the door. ‘Hello, Detective Inspector,’ she said when she got to the door. She looked at the peeling paint-work. ‘How’s tricks?’

He looked at her, his face pinched tight with disapproval. He looked away. Knocked again at the door.

He wouldn’t be half bad looking if only he didn’t scowl so much, she thought.

A dog was barking in there. A high-pitched yap yap yap. It could drive you mad, a dog like that—pity the neighbours.

‘No one in?’ she asked. ‘Apart from Fido?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Same as you,’ said Annie. ‘Trying to find out what the hell’s been going on.’

He half turned towards her. Gave her the old beady brown eye again. ‘Don’t get smart with me, Mrs Carter. I know what you are, I know about you.’

‘Oh?’ Annie looked at him.

‘You know, I once worked for DCI Fielding, and do you know what his big ambition was? To nail Max Carter.’

‘Really,’ said Annie. ‘Well, he left that too late. Max is dead.’ She glanced at his left hand. He was wearing a gold wedding ring, but Lane had said he was divorced. ‘Hey, how’s your wife, DI Hunter?’ she asked him with deliberate cruelty.

His lips tightened. ‘In Manchester,’ he said. ‘The last I heard.’

‘Trouble on the domestic front?’

His eyes flared. ‘Just what the hell are you doing here?’

‘I told you, same as you. But in the meantime, we’re here outside this damned door. Which needs opening, by the way.’

‘Mrs Carter. This is police business, and best left to us.’ And he turned and knocked on the door again.

‘That lock don’t look up to much,’ said Annie. There was a pause. The dog barked on, yap, yap, yap. ‘A good kick could probably sort that door out,’ she suggested helpfully.

‘That’s breaking and entering, Mrs Carter,’ he said, giving her the look again.

‘Well,’ said Annie, ‘I understand your reservations, you being an officer of the law and all that stuff. But if you were to walk along to the end there, busy yourself in some way, my colleague there,’ she nodded to Tony, ‘could have it open in no time. And then we could move this along, because no one is going to answer this damned door. And that dog’s doing my head in.’

DI Hunter gave her an appraising stare. Looked at Tony, standing there all polite and besuited, big as a barn door with his bald head polished to the colour of oak from the summer sun, the gold crucifixes glittering in his ears. Looking as if he could demolish the building, never mind the door.

‘Don’t think I approve of this, because I don’t,’ said Hunter.

Annie nodded. Hunter walked off. Tony approached.

‘Open it, will you, Tone?’ she asked.

Tony pulled back and gave the door a kick just below the lock. It bounced open and the dog’s volume shot up by a few decibels. A Yorkshire terrier appeared in the doorway, yapping frantically but wagging his little stump of a tail. Tony observed the animal with disfavour.

‘God, I hate dogs.’

‘You a cat person, Tone?’ asked Annie. She could see DI Hunter coming back now, not hurrying.

‘Can’t stand them either. You know if you drop down dead, they’ll eat you? How’s that for loyalty? Shows their true nature.’

‘Thanks, Tone,’ said Annie, and Tony went back along the landing to stand at the top of the stairs again.

‘Hiya,’ she said to the dog, whose tail went into overdrive.

She nudged the door further open with her foot, and wrinkled her nose as a waft of something unpleasant hit her from inside the flat. DI Hunter was back. There was a brief tussle over who should go through the door first, so they pushed into the flat’s lounge together, the dog backing up on its haunches and still doing that irritating high-pitched yap-yap-yap business.

The smell of shit was suddenly overwhelmingly strong. Urine was slowly dripping on to a faded, threadbare carpet in the centre of the room. Above it, there was a young man hanging from the light fitting, flex twisted tight around his neck, dead eyes bulging, his tongue lolling swollen and black from his mouth.

Chapter 11

Annie was sitting with her head in her hands at Dolly’s kitchen table. She still felt as though she was going to throw up. It was nearly lunchtime of the same day, the day on which she and Hunter had discovered that Gareth wouldn’t be providing any evidence this side of eternity.

Dolly was busy ferrying covered plates of sausage rolls, tuna vol-au-vents and sandwiches through from the kitchen to the front parlour, in readiness for the rush. This only ever used to happen on Fridays—party day—but now it was something she tended to do most days of the week. Along with the bar, it kept the punters happy and kept them coming back for more. Plus, it added a bit to the takings. Everyone was a winner. All except Annie, who took one look at the tuna vol-au-vents and had to take a hasty trip to the loo.

Mungo Jerry was belting out ‘In the Summertime’ from the little trannie over the sink. Dolly was hurrying about the place, absorbed in her various tasks. Annie sat down again, flinching at the smell of warm sausage rolls. She envied Dolly that facility, to be content in your own four walls and to shut out the chaos. She had seen Dolly perform this act of denial before; it seemed to come naturally to her.

Lucky cow, thought Annie, wishing she could do the same.

Annie knew that this capacity for turning a blind eye to trouble came from Dolly having been kicked out of the family home in disgrace and left to suffer alone through a really bad backstreet abortion. Under circumstances like that, you’d have to build stout barricades in your brain to stop yourself from going mad, and this was obviously exactly what Dolly had done.

Ellie was mopping the floor and giving Dolly dirty looks because she’d just done that bit, for Chrissakes, and here was Dolly trotting around on her clean floor like a ruddy racehorse.

‘Someone certainly got out of bed the wrong side this morning,’ observed Dolly as Ellie irritably redid her work on the floor.

Annie looked up at Ellie. Ellie had been at Dolly’s place a long time, since before it had been Dolly’s place at all. She’d been there when it had been Annie’s, and there before that, when Aunt Celia had been running the show. It was no secret among them that the knocking-shop paid protection to the Delaneys, because the Delaneys ran Limehouse. It was no secret either that Ellie was the Delaney insider, which had caused them all a problem or two over the years, but Ellie had come to know which side she was batting for.

Annie knew Ellie was loyal to the house now before all else. She’d been on the game for years, the chubby-chasers had loved her ample curves, but she had not long since started displaying all the worrying signs of someone who couldn’t hack fucking for a living after all. Scrubbing herself, trying to get the scent of sex off her. So now she cleaned houses. She cleaned here, and she cleaned at Kath’s place. Made a really good job of it too. Liked to see a place all spick and span.

‘Jesus, you look just about ready to hurl,’ said Dolly to Annie as she passed by. She stopped and stared at Ellie too. ‘And you. What a face on you. You miserable mares.’

‘Doll, I have hurled,’ said Annie. ‘And if you’d seen what I’ve seen this morning, so would you.’

Rosie, one of Dolly’s new working girls, wandered into the kitchen in a transparent powder-blue peignoir and fluffy slippers. She was a small, pretty blonde with dynamite curves and a relaxed attitude. Yawning, she filled the kettle and switched it on, jigging sleepily away to the beat. She sent Annie a vague smile.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Ellie loudly, slapping the mop back into the bucket. Rosie stifled another smile.

Annie could understand Ellie’s bad mood. Ellie had carried a torch for Chris for years. To see him banged up and about to be sent down for a long stretch was upsetting her badly. And now Annie had to tell her even more bad news.

‘They’ve charged him,’ she told her bluntly.

‘Oh no.’ Ellie looked devastated.

‘Sorry, Ellie, I really am.’

Dolly came hurrying down the hall and into the kitchen to butter more bread on the worktop.

‘Rosie, for fuck’s sake will you get tidied up?’ said Dolly.

‘I am tidied up,’ protested Rosie. ‘All I want’s a cup of tea, for God’s sake.’

‘Well take it up to your room; we’re up to our arses down here. Poor Ellie’s trying to get the floor done. Stop winding her up.’

Grumbling good-naturedly, Rosie made her mug of tea and departed.

Dolly paused. Her face clouded as she looked at Annie. ‘Did I hear you right? They’ve charged him?’

Annie nodded and glanced at Ellie, seeing the pain on her plump, pretty face. She’d scraped her long dark hair back into a ponytail and she was wearing a pale blue overall that gave the effect of an overstuffed sausage. She looked hot, irritable, and above all, worried. But then she would be. She’d always adored Chris.

‘Oh no, it looks bloody marvellous,’ said Annie tiredly, ticking off facts on her fingers. ‘His wife’s dead. And if that ain’t bad enough, his blood’s on her body and on the murder weapon. Our only possible lead’s her last client, who nobody knows a damned thing about except that he’s calling himself “Smith”, and the only person who might have actually noticed this Smith bloke has decided to top himself. Or at least, that’s the story.’

‘What do you mean, that’s the story? It was suicide.’

‘It looked like suicide. There was a chair kicked over, and the flex was tied up just right…poor bastard. The cop in charge told me that he’d heard things in the hotel about the boy. That he was a loser. Always stoned out of his head on pot. Couldn’t hold down a job for ten minutes before he started screwing up.’

‘Well then,’ said Dolly.

‘Yeah, but ain’t that bloody convenient? We’re all after this “Smith” person like longdogs—and there’s no saying he’s the one who did this to Aretha anyway. In fact anyone could have rushed up behind her in the street and done this; any sly bastard with a length of wire in his—or her—pocket.’

‘Fuck me, you think a woman could have done this?’ demanded Dolly. She was looking at Annie in exasperation. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Who the hell knows? But still, we’re after Smith,’ she went on. ‘It’s all we’ve got. And our only link to him or her has just killed himself.’

‘Wait up,’ Dolly objected. ‘How’d this person who killed him—supposing that’s what happened—get into the flat?’

Annie shrugged. ‘Easy. Knock on the door, he opens it, they barge in, shut the door behind them, exit through the same door, no problems at all. No need to break in.’

‘What about the doormen at the hotel?’ asked Dolly.

Annie shook her head. ‘I had Jackie Tulliver talk to the doormen. They’ve got no recollection of the man, none at all.’

Jackie was an ugly, cigar-smoking little goblin who had been with the Carter firm forever. If Jackie said there was nothing, then there was nothing. End of.

‘So that’s that then,’ said Dolly firmly. ‘Now, will you just let it go, for the love of God? Chris did the deed. It’s bloody sad, but he did. I suppose she goaded him about how little he earned, she went back on the game, they argued—and he just snapped. So just let it go.’

There was a loud silence from Annie and Ellie.

‘Oh come on,’ protested Dolly.

They both ignored her.

‘What will you do now?’ asked Ellie, sitting down at the table across from Annie.

‘No idea.’ Annie stared at the table. Her brief Jerry Peters had phoned her early this morning saying that it looked very bad for Chris.

‘I fear for your friend, Annie,’ he had said gravely. ‘I really do.’

So do I, thought Annie.

‘This must have hit Aretha’s Aunt Louella like a sack of shit,’ said Ellie. She looked at Annie. ‘I hope the firm’s going to take care of her.’

Dolly looked up. ‘That’s the first sensible thing either of you has said.’

‘Yeah, but she don’t want our help, Doll,’ said Annie.

‘Look, make her take it. She can’t afford funerals and such: she’s poor but she’s proud. She’d probably like to accept an offer of help but it’s beneath her dignity.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Annie with a sigh, standing up.

‘So what now?’ asked Dolly. ‘You seen that Barolli bloke yet?’

Oh yeah, thought Annie. And instead of calling me, he’s been calling Redmond Delaney. The bastard.

‘No,’ she said. She really didn’t want to get started on all that.

‘Well, you ought to catch up with him. Have some fun, forget all this business.’ Dolly looked at her sharply. ‘You know what I’ve got to look forward to this afternoon? An assortment of fat naked arses and the frigging washing-up. Oh, and I’ve got to find a replacement dominatrix now that we’ve lost poor bloody Aretha. The silver fox, eh? Damn, that sure beats doing the dishes. Oh, and I forgot to say, your cousin Kath phoned. She was moaning about when were you coming over to get Layla, you said just overnight and she’s been there all morning. Kath says she don’t mind, but she’s got her hands full with her own two and you did promise Layla after breakfast at the latest, and Kath said where the fuck were you, in that charming way she has.’

Annie sighed again. Damn, it was true. She couldn’t keep dumping Layla on Kath like this while she addressed all sorts of business crap. She was going to have to sort out something more permanent, more settled, for Kath’s sake and for Layla’s. Within a few months she was going to have to think about schooling for Layla, too. But for now, she was going to sort out something else. Something she had already put off for too long.

The Holland Park mansion was just the same—it was a large and imposing William and Mary house with beautiful proportions, standing full square in an elegantly shaded plot. Lollipop bay trees adorned either side of the vast pillared doorway. It was the very picture of prosperous English gentility, probably owned by a banker who was something big in the City—which just went to show how far you could rely on appearances.

The mansion was in fact owned by the don of an Italian-American mob ‘famiglia’, greatly to be feared, who loaned money at ridiculous rates then had people apply baseball bats to clients who were slow to pay. Who practised the ancient arts of loan-sharking and extortion. Who ran all-night poker games for high stakes. Who paid off bent cops—just like the Carters did, Annie reminded herself.

Annie walked up the steps with the strangest feeling that someone was watching her. She paused midway, looked around. She’d sent Tony home; said she’d get a cab back to the club. She looked up and down the quiet, sedate street. There was a brief flare from a doorway about a hundred yards up the road, as someone lit a cigarette.

Hey, is that all it takes to spook you now? she wondered. Someone standing in a doorway taking a smoke?

Exasperated with herself, Annie went on up the steps. She was getting jumpy and she didn’t even know why—except maybe she did. Her friend had been killed. Another friend had been arrested. And then the horror in the flat today. Trouble, every way she looked, and it was putting her on edge.

And now she was remembering the last time she’d come here, distraught, almost senseless with grief and worry, her daughter missing, her husband gone, money to find and nowhere to find it. This time was different, but still she felt her stomach churn with nerves.

She knocked at the glossy navy-blue painted door. The door opened. A large mound of muscle stood there, looking at her expectantly.

Annie moistened her dry mouth. ‘Is he in?’ she asked. ‘I’m—’

‘You’re Mrs Carter. Yes, he’s in. Come in please.’

And now it was too late to do a runner like she wanted to. She looked around the hall, marble everywhere, discreet and tasteful flower arrangements set up on pale stone plinths. Long mirrors: those were new. She saw herself in them, dark clothes, dark hair, blank face. That was good, the blank face. At least if she felt terrified, she didn’t actually look it.

The heavy was knocking at the study door. Faintly she heard the familiar American voice call out, ‘Come,’ and then the door was opened.

‘Mrs Carter for you, Boss,’ said the heavy, and ushered Annie inside and shut the door behind her.

Annie told herself firmly that it was childish to want to wrench it open and bolt straight back out. She thought of Max, and fuck it, this wasn’t the time at all to be thinking about him, but there he was in her mind: Max, all piratical charm and black hair and steely blue eyes. Her late husband, Max.

And now here she was. Picking up where she had left off with Constantine Barolli. Another powerful, ruthless man. She never could resist the allure of bad boys. And she feared that this could only end the same way, in death and disaster—perhaps it was stupid, but she did fear the consequences: the whole thing was fraught with danger, littered with hurdles.

His damned children, for instance. His son Lucco had hated her on sight. His other son Alberto she didn’t yet know about, but she felt sure he was going to hate her too. Cara, Constantine’s daughter, who was newly married, was sure to see her as a rival for Daddy’s affection, and already Constantine’s sister Gina had looked at her like she was a turd on the pavement.

‘Well, are you going to come in, or go out again?’ asked Constantine from behind the desk.

The study was the same as she remembered. Big tan-coloured Chesterfields, rows of books, a big desk with a buttoned leather chair behind it and a yellow banker’s light casting a warm glow upon its tooled-leather top. There was a marble fireplace with a decorated screen in front of it. This was a clubby, masculine room, and she felt out of place in it, just as she had last time she was here.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

He stood up and came around the desk and over to where Annie stood against the door. He held out his hand, palm down. Expecting her to kiss his hand, she thought. Annie looked at it, then at his face, then shook his hand briefly. Constantine gave a slight smile.

The silver fox. After his mother and brother had been hit in Sicily, his grandfather had promptly shipped him off to join the family in New York where it was safer. He’d grown up running numbers around Queens and in the Bronx, learning the business, finally taking control.

Annie looked up at his face. It was a strong face, commanding. Tanned, with bright blue eyes. Deep laughter lines in the corners. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at her from just inches away.

‘So what now, Mrs Carter?’ he asked in that assured, deep American voice. ‘You gonna bolt for the door, or give this a shot?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Annie, although she did. She brushed past him, went to the desk, sat down. ‘I’m here to discuss your clubs.’

Constantine went back around the desk and sat down too.

‘There’s nothing to discuss,’ he said. ‘I’m perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.’ He looked at her. ‘Which isn’t to say it couldn’t be improved upon, of course.’

The West End clubs that Constantine owned were gold mines. Annie knew that. Famous people were in and out of there all the time, the Beatles, Howard Keel, George Segal, anyone who was anyone, all the big names. If you weren’t rich, famous or glamorous—and preferably you would be all three—you wouldn’t get through the door.

Constantine knew many film stars and singers, just as Max had done. They were pleased to appear in his clubs and to bestow extra kudos upon them. Those he didn’t know—the up-and-coming talents, the great emerging beauties flaunting their fabulous bodies and eager to press the flesh of producers and directors—people like that, he paid. For a couple of grand and a few freebies they’d be there, spotting and being spotted, adding new-face charisma and a sprinkle of stardust to the already heady mix.

His clubs—like the other top London nightspots, Tramp and Annabel’s—were always packed out with wealthy punters, and wealthy punters liked tight security, locally provided, right there on the spot. While Constantine did business here, his main base was New York. Rather than spread his own resources too thinly, he preferred to hire in native muscle—and, up until this point, that muscle had always been the Carters.

‘Look,’ she said quickly, ‘have the Delaneys made you an offer?’

Constantine gave her a look. ‘The Delaneys are always making me offers.’

‘Have they? What did Redmond have to say to you when I met you at the hotel?’

‘Okay. He said that whatever the Carter cut was, he’d halve it.’

Annie let out a breath. ‘I bloody knew it,’ she fumed. She looked at him. ‘And you didn’t buy that?’

Constantine shrugged. ‘Max was always a good friend to our family, he honoured his business dealings with us and I’m returning the favour.’

‘Although it’s costing you.’

‘Yeah. But that goes with the territory.’ He looked at her shrewdly. ‘The Delaney thing’s still ongoing then? I know they’ve spent years trying to muscle in on Carter territory, and now Max and Jonjo are not on the scene, I guess they’re thinking the coast is clear.’

‘It’s not clear,’ she said. ‘I’ve told them that.’

‘Well, that’s good. Because it’s tough, being a boss. And doubly tough being a lady boss. People looking to shake you down. Thinking it’s gonna be easy, you know?’

‘It’s not clear, okay?’

‘Okay, so that’s the business talk wrapped up. How is Layla?’

‘She’s fine,’ said Annie.

‘Good. That’s good news.’

He stood up and came around the desk and leaned back against it, then hauled Annie to her feet with one hand. Startled, she found herself standing between his legs, pressed up tight against him, his arms around her waist. ‘Can we now get on to what’s really on our minds?’ he asked.

‘Like what?’ asked Annie, although she knew.

Her blood was fizzing with desire; she’d wanted this for far too long. But her desire was tainted with unease now. What if he was lying, what if he’d already got into bed—in the business sense—with the Delaneys? What if he was her enemy, even while he appeared to be her friend?

‘Like this,’ said Constantine, and bent his head and kissed her. Her head reeled and pulse accelerated. After a couple of seconds, Annie pulled back, bunching her fists against his chest.

‘Wait,’ she said.

‘Wait?’ Constantine’s expression was amused disbelief.

‘You said something and I want to know what you meant.’

‘When did I say something?’

‘Outside the hotel. You said if you could find the guts to face this thing, then so could I. What did you mean?’

‘Right.’ His eyes lost their spark of humour. He looked at her, smoothed his hands over her back. ‘Listen to me. Five years ago I lost my wife Maria in a hit organized by a rogue soldier from one of the other New York families. He was aiming for me. He got her.’

‘I know that,’ said Annie.

‘Yeah, but maybe you don’t know what it’s like to have that sort of guilt on your shoulders, uh? Anyway, what I’m telling you is, bad things can happen to people who come close to me.’ His eyes were intense as they stared into hers. ‘You know what I am. You know I’m telling you the truth.’

Maybe I don’t even want to get close to you, she thought. Maybe I don’t dare.

‘I’m not afraid,’ said Annie.

‘There have been bad things done between the families. Terrible things. Thirty members of one family, wiped out in a vendetta. A boy of twelve killed, his body dissolved in acid. Getting scared yet?’

She was scared all right—scared of loving him, and discovering too late that he was a treacherous bastard.

‘You’re quiet,’ he said when she didn’t answer.

‘I think you’re on my side.’ Annie was staring at him. ‘So I’ve nothing to fear, have I?’

‘You think?’ He was looking at her curiously.

He was warning her of the dangers of involvement—but she wasn’t even sure she wanted to get in any deeper. ‘And I’ve got the boys. Max’s boys,’ she said. It was safer, better, to rely on them.

‘I’m glad you said Max’s,’ said Constantine. ‘Because they’re still his, you know, not yours.’

Annie shook her head. ‘No, that’s—’

‘Don’t tell me it’s not true, because it is. It’s a tough world out there: men run it and you’re a woman. Max’s people will think you should remain loyal to him. To his memory, anyway. So if you’re not—if you start something with me, for instance—although you know you’re free to do so, they won’t ever accept it. And trust me, they’ll be annoyed. They’ll see it as a betrayal.’

Annie said nothing. She knew he was right. She’d been thinking much the same herself.

‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ said Constantine. ‘After we parted last time, I thought…no. I didn’t want to go there. I’d already lost people I loved. I didn’t want to risk that sort of pain again.’

Annie opened her mouth to speak.

‘No, let me finish. But I kept thinking about you. And I realized that it was already too late, I was already involved. So I knew I had to go for it. And I hoped it wasn’t too late, that I hadn’t kept you waiting too long, that you had the balls to go ahead with this even though there could be dangers involved, there could be risks. You know what I really didn’t want to happen?’

Annie shook her head.

‘That you should feel grateful to me for anything I’ve done in the past. I didn’t want your gratitude, and I didn’t want you on the fucking rebound from Max either.’

He pulled her in and kissed her again, harder.

Annie melted. But again she pushed him away.

‘And the problem this time is…?’ asked Constantine.

‘Is Lucco going to walk in on us?’ Annie remembered Constantine’s oily dark-haired son sneering at her, warning her off, bursting in on them at every opportunity.

‘Lucco’s in New York,’ said Constantine, pushing her back a step. He took her hand, looked at the ring on her thumb. Max’s ring, with the Egyptian cartouches carved into the gold, the solid slab of lapis lazuli a gleaming pure blue. Looked at his own ring, gold with small diamonds scattered like stars. ‘Listen, if I kiss your hand, will you kiss mine?’

Annie started to smile. He could always charm her. His charm was her weakness. ‘Did you seriously think I’d kiss it?’

‘Wanted to see how you’d react.’

‘That’s cruel.’

He shrugged, his eyes playing with hers. ‘Hey, I can do cruel. If it turns you on.’

Annie was aware of her heart beating fast. Her cheeks felt hot, her nipples hard. They looked at each other and there was a hot crackle of sheer sexual need between them.

‘Let’s take this upstairs,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Annie, digging her heels in. She wasn’t sure about him. No way was she going to be rushed. She was determined to take things at her own speed.

He gazed steadily at her face. ‘Okay. I’ll wait. I’ll do the whole courtship thing, if you want. Why not come to lunch on Tuesday, meet the family properly?’

‘Oh shit, Constantine…’

‘They don’t bite.’

‘Are you sure?’

He laughed. ‘I’m not going to let this go,’ he warned her. ‘And this courtship thing? I won’t be patient for too long.’

She knew it. He knew it.

‘You need me,’ he murmured, trailing his lips lightly over her mouth. ‘You need me like a drug. And one day soon you’re going to admit it to me—and to yourself.’

‘You know what? You’re an arrogant swine,’ said Annie, but he was right, damn it.

‘Yeah, and you like that,’ he said with a smile. ‘So let’s get this thing rolling. Come to lunch.’

‘Okay,’ she said at last, and wondered what the hell she was getting herself into.

Chapter 12

They’d been so happy together, so very happy—two survivors clinging on to the wreckage of life; but to the outside world they were winners—a glossy, polished couple so wrapped up in each other, so much in love. Or so Mira had thought.

They were voracious in their appetites. Redmond had a taste for the high life and he also had a taste for excess, and she matched him in that. They ate at the finest places, mixed with TV stars and peers of the realm…and then there was the sex: they gorged themselves on stupendous sex.

And then suddenly one day she realized she was late. She was overjoyed. She knew he would be, too.

‘What do you mean, late?’ Redmond asked her when she told him, smiling happily.

‘Late.’ Mira threw her arms wide, let out a laugh. ‘As in, I could be pregnant.’

‘Pregnant?’ He stared at her. ‘But you’re on the Pill.’

‘It’s not one hundred per cent reliable,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

He did know it. She’d told him, but he’d said they’d chance it anyway. He hated to use condoms, he liked to be naked inside her: wearing a condom was like trying to scratch your toes with your boots on; he hated the things. He’d known this could happen. So why was he standing there, saying nothing, looking at her as if she was a stranger?

‘It…doesn’t have to be a disaster though, does it?’ Mira said hesitantly, the smile dying on her face.

Redmond ran a hand through his hair. He was still looking at her in that peculiar way, like he was wondering what the fuck she was talking about.

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