Stay Dead (12 page)

Meaning what?

There was some barbed point being made here, and she was afraid that she knew what it was. Steve wasn’t talking to her as Steve always had. Before, there had been respect; now there was a
veiled
something
going on.

Disapproval?

Mistrust?

‘You’ve done well for yourself out of the firm,’ said Annie, standing up and strolling around the office. Plush carpet. Expensive buttoned leather chairs. A big mahogany
desk.

‘Meaning?’ asked Steve.

Annie turned and looked at him coolly. ‘Oh, I don’t know. We’re all speaking in fucking riddles these days. You keep in pretty close touch with Gary still, do you?’

‘Gary?’ Steve shrugged. ‘Not much. As I said – he runs the club, I run security.’

Annie thought. ‘What about Jackie Tulliver? Where’s he got to these days?’

‘Jackie?’ Steve let out a
humph
of disgust. ‘Jackie’s a pisshead. Don’t see him, not now. He’s probably already drunk his stupid self into the
grave.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Listen. I’m sorry as hell about your friend, but it’s nothing to do with me. I know sod-all.’

Annie leaned in over the desk and stared straight into his eyes.

‘I think you’re holding back on something,’ she said. Her eyes narrowed. ‘And if I find out that you are, you’d better fucking well watch out.’

‘You do?’ Steve stared up at her, and his eyes were distinctly unfriendly. ‘Prove it,’ he said, and picked up the phone, dismissing her like she was nothing.

When Annie got back to the Shalimar, the place was in uproar. Chris was out on the pavement, twitchily smoking and pacing around. A Samsonite suitcase and a couple of bags were
on the pavement beside him, and one of the bags was split open. They were
her
bags, she realized. And that was her suitcase.

‘What’s up?’ asked Annie, paying off the taxi and approaching.

She glanced from Chris to the bags. They were Louis Vuitton, and one of them was wrecked, spilling a couple of lightweight dresses out on to the wet dirt. She bent, tucked the items back in,
gathered up the bags. She had known Chris was unhappy having her here for some reason, and it was clear he was chucking her out of the club, but he didn’t have to go and break her damned
bag.

‘What’s
up
?’ Chris turned to her with a snarl on his lips and his eyes spitting venom. ‘
You’re
up.
You
, coming back here. For fuck’s
sake, I
told
her, I
warned
her, but did she listen?’

Annie stepped back, shocked by this onslaught. This was
Chris
. He’d always liked her. Now, he was staring at her as if he’d like to kick her straight up the crotch.

‘What are you doing, breaking up my bloody bags?’

He looked down at them. ‘I didn’t do it.’ He flicked his head up and let out an angry snort of smoke. ‘They chucked them out the top window. Go and have a fucking look,
you
cow
,’ he said, and turned his back on her.

Annie flinched in surprise. Aggression from Chris was shocking. He was one of
hers
, one of her oldest and best allies. Now he was looking at her like he hated her guts. She went into the
club, taking her bags and case – which was still intact – with her. She held her breath and looked around – but everything was OK. In fact, it all looked neater than neat in here.
Chairs cleaned, carpets immaculate, bar lit up ready for trade. Not a soul about down here, though. No bar staff, no hostesses, no DJ warming up his decks, nothing.

Which was odd.

When she’d left the club, everything had been running like clockwork, getting ready for another busy evening. Now, the place looked dead. But she could hear noises coming from upstairs,
angry voices, shouts, cries.

Annie went across the empty club space and turned left. A girl in tears hustled past her, shouting something over her shoulder. Annie left the case and bags at the bottom of the stairs and
trudged on up, getting a bad feeling about this. When she got to the top she saw Ellie standing in the hallway, arms wrapped around herself, turning this way and that, her eyes frantic. They
settled on Annie, and then Ellie let out an angry breath like a bull about to charge and vanished through the door to the right, the one that led into the kitchen.

Letting out a sigh, Annie followed, and it was then that she saw, and understood. All Ellie’s glassware, her precious crystals, were in bits on the floor. The dresser with all the crystals
on it had been tipped over. The kitchen table was a pile of splinters, the chairs were matchwood. Food had been scooped out of the cupboards and now sauce and ketchup decorated the formerly
pristine walls. Ellie, the neat freak, stood in the middle of it, tears pouring down her face.

‘Oh
shit
,’ said Annie, halting in the doorway.

‘Look at this! Just
look
. They done the office too – poor Miss Pargeter’s going spare in there. Her papers are all over the damned place. And the girls’ changing
room, and some of the bedrooms . . . yours included. They tossed your stuff out the bleeding window, said if I let you stop here they’d come back and do it all over again, only
worse.’

Annie gulped in a breath. ‘They? Ellie, who?’

Ellie shrugged. ‘I don’t know them. They had masks on.’

‘Didn’t Chris try to stop them?’ asked Annie.

Ellie turned to her in temper. ‘Don’t be fucking stupid! There were six of them, bloody great blokes in boiler suits with pick handles. He’d have only come off
worst.’

‘This is because I’m here?’ said Annie numbly, staring around at the devastation that
she
had brought down on Ellie’s head.

‘Yeah,’ said Ellie tearfully, picking up a beautifully crafted glass swan with its wing missing. ‘I should never have let you stay. All this is my fault.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Annie.

Ellie turned brimming eyes on her. ‘Chris is hopping bloody mad at me over this.’ Ellie’s stare hardened. ‘Christ, it’s
you
, isn’t it – you
attract trouble like flies on shit.’ Ellie gulped. ‘Where will you go?’

‘I don’t know. Over to Holland Park maybe. Or a hotel. Anything.’
And it’s best you don’t know where, with all this kicking off.

Ellie stared at her. ‘Whatever you’ve done, it must be something pretty bad.’

‘I haven’t done a thing.’

‘Maybe they shot Dolly because of you.’

‘What?’

‘Who knows?’

‘I’ll go,’ said Annie. Her brain was spinning. Then she had a thought. ‘Ellie, did you think any more about what I asked you? If there was anything you knew about
Dolly’s family, or friends, or anything . . . ?’

Ellie rushed at her and for a moment Annie thought she was going to get a belt around the ear. But Ellie stopped inches away. Breathing hard, she stared into Annie’s eyes.

‘You come back here and all I get is trouble!’ she burst out. ‘Chris is mad at me, he thinks this is
my
fault because he said I wasn’t to let you stop here, but I
insisted. I told him, whatever she’s done, she’s still my mate. And now look! It’s a fucking disaster!’

‘Ellie . . .’ It
was
a disaster. There was no arguing with that.

‘Fuck off out of it!’ shrieked Ellie. ‘Just. Fuck. Off. You hear me? Just
go
.’

Annie nodded. She went out of the wrecked kitchen and along the hall.

At the top of the stairs, Ellie called: ‘Wait!’

Annie stopped walking. Turned.

Ellie stood there in the hall, clutching her head as tears washed her mascara down her face. She blinked at Annie, and then she blurted out: ‘Doll’s family. They used to live
Limehouse way, I remember she told me that once. Quite a way from Celia’s place. And they were Catholics. You know . . . you heard about her dad interfering with her?’

Annie nodded. She remembered – vividly – her Auntie Celia once telling her about that, and that Doll had suffered through a nasty backstreet abortion because of it.

‘Well,’ said Ellie, ‘there’s more. Back in the sixties at the knocking shop, I . . . I heard Dolly telling Celia that she wanted a hit on her dad.’

‘You
what
?’ Annie’s mouth dropped open.

‘It’s the truth. I heard her say it. Well, I
overheard
her.’

Annie remembered Ellie as she had been then, insecure, always skulking in hallways, listening at doors.

‘What else did you hear?’

‘That she wanted the Delaney family to see to it. You know what? Once I asked Doll why she didn’t go to church, to Mass, like Catholics always do. You know what she said?’

Annie shook her head.

‘She said it was because the church told lies. It said there was beauty in the world, and there wasn’t. I never forgot her saying that.’

Outside, she found Chris gone and DCI Hunter getting out of a black car at the pavement.

‘You sure you want to go in there?’ she asked, dropping her bags into the dirt again. She took pride in her appearance, and that extended to her accessories too; but what the hell
– the bags were fucked, anyway, one scuffed, the other torn. Only the suitcase had stood up to the scrum.

‘Why? What’s up?’ he asked.

‘The place has been bulldozed. Six men went through it like a bloody hurricane.’

He stared at her face. ‘And why’s that?’

‘What?’

‘People don’t do things like that for no reason.’

‘I don’t
know
the reason.’ She kicked one of the ruined bags irritably. ‘How’s
your
day going, Inspector? You got any news for me?’

‘Like what?’

Annie felt her hackles rise at his calm tone. ‘Oh, let me think. Like who killed my best friend, and why, and what the fuck’s going to happen about that?’

‘The investigation is ongoing,’ said Hunter.

‘You’re very bloody annoying, you know that?’

‘Heard it said.’

‘I need to get to the bottom of this. I
have
to,’ said Annie fiercely.

Hunter leaned in. ‘No, Mrs Carter. What
you
have to do is assist the police in the course of this investigation, in any way that you can. Don’t give me any of your shit. Is
that understood?’

Annie was silent, glaring.

‘
Is
it, Mrs Carter?’

‘Fuck off,’ she said, and turned and walked away.

The Grapes was busy at lunchtime. For many years, this pub had been the place where all the Carter boys went to meet up and get their jollies, a real old spit-and-sawdust
alehouse in the heart of the city with a host of hard-eyed regulars keeping curious tourists at bay.

Annie stepped into the main bar and thought that it had hardly changed at all. The Southern Comfort and Bushmills mirrors hanging on the dingy nicotine-stained walls, the rows of small flasks of
Wade pottery, with Gin, Sherry, Port and Whisky labelled on each one. There were bigger barrels too, in mint greens and iridescent pinks, and huge oak casks cut through and turned into seating for
the patrons.

On one of these big cut-down barrels sat a small gnome of a man, plug-ugly and wearing a stained pale blue denim jacket. A cloud of cigar smoke enveloped him, and a tumbler of whisky sat in
front of him on the table.

Despite all the hustle around him, and the happy chatter at the bar, he sat alone, drank alone. Annie stood there inside the door for a moment, looking at him while Amazulu cranked ‘Too
Good to Be Forgotten’ out of the juke. Max had always said drinking a few pints was OK, but if you were down in the dumps you never wanted to get started on shorts. Jackie had obviously got
started on the shorts a long time ago. As Annie watched, he threw back the amber liquid remaining in the glass and gestured to the barman, a big handlebar-moustached ex-RAF type, for a refill.

Annie walked over and slid into the seat on the other side of the table.

Jackie Tulliver looked at her like she’d landed from another planet.

‘Hiya, Jackie,’ she said.

‘Holy fuck.’ He wheezed and a splodge of ash fell from the cigar he’d just clamped back between his teeth. ‘What you doin’ here?’

‘Looking for you.’

Now Annie had found him she was wondering if it had been worth the effort. She was – literally – scraping the bottom of the barrel with him. Jackie was a mess. He had a three-day
white-whiskery growth of beard on his skinny chin, his cheeks were sunken, his complexion yellow. He’d never been a beauty, but now he looked fucked. He looked two steps away from a cancer
ward and a terminal prognosis, and his head was weaving about in that characteristic drunk’s nod that made her think for one moment, horribly, of her own mother, Connie, who had always been
pissed on the sofa and who had died of the drink.

‘Jesus, the state of you,’ she murmured.

‘Get you a drink?’ he asked, as the barman came over and plonked another whisky down in front of his best customer.

‘No. Thanks.’

Even before the barman turned away, Jackie fell on the whisky like a desert dweller on a watering hole. He threw it back, smacking his lips with relish, emptying half the glass in a single
gulp.

‘Jackie,’ said Annie.

‘Yeah. What you doin’ here then?’ he asked, obviously forgetting he had just asked her the same question.

‘Jackie,’ said Annie again.

‘What?’ he slurred.

‘Steve was right then.’

‘Steve?’

‘Steve. He was right. You
are
a pisshead.’

A hint of annoyance went chasing across Jackie’s face, then it was gone.

‘You got no call to speak to me like that,’ he whined.

Even the tone of his voice reminded her of Mum, lying drunk and shouting pitiful rants while the rent man hammered at the door and Annie and her sister Ruthie cowered in fear of eviction.

‘No? You’re saying you’re not a pisshead then? Only the evidence says different. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re downing whiskies. You’re
drunk. You’re unshaved. You’re not even
washed
, I can smell you from here, you stink like a polecat.’

‘Now hold on . . .’ His watery eyes were blinking at her.