Scarlet Women (10 page)

Goods were moving around London and up and down the country all the time. It was money on the hoof and, usually, if you had your fences lined up ready, those goods were easy to dispose of. If security was the Carter speciality, then lorry hijacking was the Delaneys’. It was lucrative and easy.

A load of brand-new car parts had vanished overnight on the road to Basingstoke, and were already being taken to where a price had been agreed for them.
Money for nothing,
thought Redmond Delaney.

He and his twin Orla were in the static office of the family’s scrap-metal yard, having a celebratory whisky after a profitable day’s business. The fact that the car-parts depot that their boys had robbed was on Carter soil just made the heist that much sweeter. The Carter firm would get
hassle from their clients over security fees paid out for fuck all. So it was business and pleasure, all rolled into one.

It pissed Redmond off that the Barolli family were still proving resistant to his offers on the clubs, but it was a minor annoyance. He had been interested to see the interaction between Constantine Barolli and Annie Carter when they had chanced to meet at the Vista Hotel. Maybe there was more than a business interest going on there. He would look into that. Knowledge was power: that had always been Redmond’s motto. He’d discussed his suspicions with Orla.

‘You really think there could be something going on?’

Orla was sceptical. If Annie Carter was risking an affair with the Mafia boss, she was risking a great deal. Her own standing as Max Carter’s widow, for a start. The Carter boys would take it badly if she betrayed Max’s memory. She’d be tossed out into oblivion at the very least.

At that moment, Charlie Foster knocked on the door of the static and poked his head in. He had crew-cut pale brown hair, a blob of a nose and very light blue eyes that always seemed to be having a private joke—at someone else’s expense.

‘That fucking Carter cow’s here, says she wants a word,’ he said.

Both Redmond and Orla tensed.

Speak of the devil, and she appears
, thought Orla.

‘She’s alone?’ asked Redmond. ‘You checked her over?’

Charlie had reason enough to be careful around Annie Carter. He’d just patted her down with his own stunted hand. He had only seven fingers to everyone else’s eight, and that was down to Annie Carter. He’d love to get that high-toned bitch alone down a dark alley. In fact, he was determined to do just that, one of these days.

‘She’s got her boy with her. And she’s not packing anything but a good set of knockers.’

Orla stifled a grimace of disgust. Charlie Foster was like a wild thing, partially tamed but never completely stable. She hated his leering, ever-smiling face and his pale predatory eyes that seemed to strip every woman he encountered—even her. He might be Redmond’s right-hand man, but he was also a vicious thug without any conscience. He was dangerous. Redmond valued that, and used it. It made Orla nervous. She had a mental picture of him frisking Annie Carter down in the yard, and had to suppress a shudder.

‘Show her in,’ said Redmond.

Charlie opened the door wide. Not quite wide enough to let Annie Carter enter easily. She had to squeeze past him, and Charlie’s smile told them all how much he enjoyed that. Tony the driver
came in after, nudging Charlie out of the way. Charlie’s cocky grin widened. He stayed there, the door wide open, listening and watching.

‘Mrs Carter,’ said Redmond, not standing up.

They hadn’t changed, Annie thought. They were still beautiful, the twins, with their red hair and pale, clear skin—and still chilly as the Arctic tundra. Dangerous people. But you didn’t ever show fear when you faced down a foe—Max had taught her that. Be cool, be confident, be in control. Never let them see you wobble; never let them see you bleed.

‘What can we do for you?’ asked Redmond, his voice just the same as she remembered, a cool Irish lilt, almost soothing, almost lulling you into a false sense of security. But you had to be on your guard with Redmond. Redmond was smart, and he didn’t care who or what he flattened to get his way.

It had been a risk, coming here again. Tony hadn’t been happy about it. But things had to be said, and she had to show them that she was not afraid to say them.

‘You can back off from the Barolli club contracts,’ said Annie flatly. She could feel nervous sweat trickling down her back but she spoke steadily, clearly. ‘Constantine Barolli told me you offered to halve our charges.’

‘Did he also tell you that he hasn’t yet decided whether or not to accept our very generous offer, or to stay with the Carters?’ asked Orla.

Annie looked at her. Once, she had thought Max was all wrong about these two.
Vipers
, he’d told her.
Never trust a Delaney.
Once, she had tried to convince Max that this feud was madness. But not now.

Now, she saw things as they really were. Now she could not forget that Billy Black had died in her arms, dragged through the streets behind a Delaney car, on
Redmond
’s orders, the skin flaying from his body, every bone getting broken and every muscle mangled.

She looked squarely at Orla. Gorgeous pale green eyes, a long patrician face. Oh yes, they were beautiful, the Delaney twins. Beautiful, Machiavellian, and deadly.

‘He won’t accept your offer,’ she said flatly, although in her heart she wasn’t sure of that. ‘He’s loyal to the Carter firm.’

‘Is he?’ Redmond asked her curiously. ‘Or just to you?’

Annie sent Redmond a freezing glance, but her stomach was suddenly in a knot.
What
had made Redmond say that?

‘Barolli’s content to deal with the Carter firm because we’ve always given a good, solid, reliable service. And I’d appreciate it if you’d
back off.
’

They looked at her blankly. Orla sipped her whisky.

‘I mean it,’ said Annie, her heart thumping madly in her chest.

‘We’re really scared,’ said Charlie Foster from behind her.

Annie turned her head and looked at his sneering face. ‘You ought to be,’ she said, and Tony lunged at him and had him by the throat in a split second.

Charlie let out a half-strangled yell. Tony hoisted him off his feet and glared into his eyes.

‘You be careful what you say to Mrs Carter, you cocksucker,’ he growled.

Annie turned and looked at the twins, sitting there at the desk.

‘Back off from Barolli,’ she said, and turned on her heel and walked out the door and down the steps and off across the yard to the gate.

Tony gave Charlie a last shake and dropped him. He sagged, clutching at the wall, gasping in breaths. Then Tony followed Annie out the door.

‘
Fuckers
,’ hissed Charlie, his perennial smile gone for once. His eyes following the pair of them with hate. He had unfinished business with Annie Carter. He watched her go out of the gate, and promised himself that, soon, he was going to
get
her. Get her
good.

‘Try this,’ said Redmond, and he had given her a small brown bottle with white pills in it.

Mira took it listlessly.

She saw him looking at her, and knew what he was thinking—that she looked like shit, not like his bright, vibrant beauty at all, and he was annoyed at this; he liked things right. He’d told her that what she needed was pepping up, and he knew where to get things that would help. He’d got these from one of the suppliers his people knew on the street.

‘What are they?’ she had asked him, awkwardly aware of the big shadows under her eyes. Shit, she hadn’t even thought to apply her make-up. It wasn’t like her to let herself go this way. ‘Just some uppers to give you a lift.’

‘I’m not sure…’

Redmond had drawn her in close and kissed her.
Mira turned her head away, just a fraction, but she knew he noted it. Noted it, and was angered by it. She could see the anger in his eyes, could read his thoughts again. For fuck’s sake, he was thinking, she’d had an abortion. Millions of women had abortions. There was no need to go to bloody pieces over it.

‘What, don’t you trust me?’ he asked her. ‘I’d only ever do what’s best for you. You know that, don’t you?’

Mira nodded warily.

‘That’s good,’ said Redmond. ‘You love me, yes?’

She had nodded again. She didn’t, not any more. But he was holding her, his strong hands encasing her jaw, his fingers brushing her neck. He smiled his angelic smile and gazed into her eyes.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘You know that if you ever tried to leave me, I’d kill you, don’t you?’

Oh Jesus, thought Mira. But again she nodded.

He let her go, satisfied. He fetched water from the kitchen. Sun had been streaming into the flat and Mira stood there in shit order, unwashed—she knew she smelled stale, she knew he wondered where his glitzy girl had gone, the one who was scrupulously clean and drenched in Shalimar. She looked down at herself and found, almost to her surprise, that she was wearing a tea-stained
dressing gown, at four o’clock in the afternoon. What was happening to her?

‘Here, take a couple now, you’ll soon start to feel better,’ he said, and took the bottle and shook some out onto his palm. He held them out to her. She put out her tongue, as helpless and trusting as a child. He placed them there, and she took the glass of water from his hand and washed them down.

‘Good girl,’ he said, and kissed her brow. ‘Now go and get cleaned up, we’re going out tonight.’

Mira was surprised, but by the evening she did feel slightly better. Less gloomy. More energized. Redmond was right, the pills were just what she needed to lift her out of this maudlin state she was in. Next morning she took two more, and then at lunchtime two more, and then at dinner she took another two. By that evening she felt so wide awake, so up that she couldn’t sleep. At two o’clock in the morning she was pacing around the apartment, playing records and singing and drinking wine. When he told her to shut up and come back to bed, they had great sex, just like in the old days.

She no longer thought of it as making love. And she couldn’t forget what he’d said about killing her if she left him. She knew he meant it.

The uppers were great. They made Mira forget all her woes, but they also made her frenetic, jittery. The lack of sleep was the worst bit; she’d twitch and turn over, disturbing him, making him impatient with her. So Redmond brought her some downers, and she took them in the evening and was at last able to sleep properly again.

The problem was, she slept so heavily that she awoke feeling as if she’d been hit with a brick until she got the first uppers down her at breakfast—not that she ate much, her appetite seemed to have more or less gone—and then she was okay. Mira started to look forward to her first fix of the day, when her spirits would lift, when she would start to feel more like her old self again.

Redmond had changed too after the abortion. Sometimes he lost his erection, and then he got angry with her, blaming her, and then one particular Sunday night—she would never forget it—when it happened again, he rounded on her in fury.

‘It’s your fucking fault,’ he roared. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

And then he hit her.

Struck her full across the face, then when she screamed and recoiled he rolled over on top of her and his hands locked around her throat.

‘Bitch,’ he said, and she froze, not daring to move in case he squeezed the life out of her. ‘Whore,’ he hissed against her mouth, and she felt his cock rising against her thigh. He nudged her legs roughly open and this time he stayed erect. He pushed into her furiously, rode her, finished in record time. Then he rolled off her and she gulped in a breath and lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking:
He called me a whore.

He had never, ever called her that before.

There was a silence.

Then he said: ‘I’m sorry,’ and moved and was leaning over her. She kept very still. She could see his eyes glinting in the semi-darkness; see his teeth flashing in a smile. ‘Sorry, darling. But I like to do that sometimes, don’t be too shocked by it. I seem to enjoy it.’

He enjoyed calling her a whore and hitting her and putting his hands around her throat? She was shocked.

But now Redmond was cuddling her close, saying he was sorry, that she was wonderful, that she was his and that he would never, ever let her go, and she could see that she ought to object, ought to maybe call this off, stop it dead.

It was dead already.

She didn’t love him any more: how could she when he had made her kill their baby?

But she’d taken her pills before bedtime, and she felt so listless, so exhausted, that she said nothing, and soon she dropped off to sleep, still wrapped in her rapist’s arms.

Annie had learned from the stolen case notes that Teresa Walker, one of the murdered girls, had worked part time as an escort; but her
real
job had been as a stripper, doing lunchtimes and evenings—and some private dancing in between—with the punters at the Alley Cat strip club in Soho.

Teresa had been an enterprising sort of girl. She hadn’t worked for an agency; she had merely touted her own business in the club, which hadn’t gone down too well with management.

The following evening, when Annie got into the car, Tony folded his paper away with unusual swiftness, almost as if he didn’t want her to see it.

‘Something in the paper I should know about, Tone?’ she asked with a sigh.

God, please don’t give me any more trouble,
she thought.

Short of the sky falling on her head, she didn’t know what else could go wrong. She had a gutful to contend with, and now Steve and Gary had told her that a lorry working out of a car-parts depot that the firm protected had been robbed on the Basingstoke road, making the Carter security boys look like a bunch of useless tossers and costing them a lot in compo.

Delaneys
, she thought. Truck heists were their thing.
Yeah—but try proving it.

Tony handed the paper back to her and she looked at the front page. The headline shrieked at her: ‘“SCARLET WOMEN” KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.’

‘Shit,’ she said.

‘I know,’ agreed Tony.

Annie threw the paper down in angry disgust. It was so easy to point the finger, to disdain the girls who got into the game, to sneer and come over all superior and judgemental.

Yeah,
she thought bitterly.
And to use their tragedies to make juicy headlines.

But maybe these women were just more desperate and more alone in the world than other, luckier girls. Maybe they didn’t have the softening, civilizing cushion of a caring family or ready money to keep them from the game.

Tony drove Annie over to Dolly’s to drop off Layla for the evening—Kath was rebelling, saying
no way
—and then took her on over to Soho and
went with her into the subterranean depths of the club. What they found there reminded Annie of what had been happening to the Carter clubs in the absence of Max.

Topless girls were everywhere, serving overpriced drinks to semi-drunk and furtive-looking punters who skulked at tables in the half-dark. There was a small, semicircular stage on which two tired-looking girls gyrated in a simulation of lesbian sex, to the strains of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg murmuring their way through ‘
Je t’aime…moi non plus.
’

The two girls wore silver thongs and nipple tassels, nothing else. They looked as though they’d done the rounds and then some, and were bored to tears. Annie felt the same, just watching them. But she glanced around the room and saw that the punters seemed fascinated.

Men.
So
easy to please.

She exchanged a look with the manager, who sat at the small round table with her. The manager was Bobby Jo, a six-and-a-half-feet-tall drag act, tricked out right now in a tight-fitting gold lamé dress and a huge red wig. Bobby’s heavily madeup face and spidery false eyelashes would give you a hell of a fright if you came across him in a dark alley.

Bobby Jo didn’t own the club, he just managed it. Gave the punters what they wanted.

‘Which is very often lesbian action, as you see,’ he told Annie with a light shrug. ‘I know, it’s a mystery.’

Annie nodded. Several tables away, Tony was reading his paper. He glanced up occasionally, checked out Annie and Bobby Jo, checked out the lesbian action, shook his head gently, got back to the paper. One of the girls, a hard-eyed brunette, was glaring at him.

‘Can you tell your man not to read the paper? It looks bad. It upsets the girls, and that don’t take a lot, believe me. Plus, we don’t want to give the punters the impression that the acts are boring, now do we? Not at the prices we charge.’

Annie caught Tony’s eye, nodded at the paper, shook her head. With a sigh, Tony folded the paper and slipped it inside his jacket.

‘Thanks,’ said Bobby Jo.

‘So tell me about Teresa.’

‘I’ve done all this with the Bill,’ said Bobby Jo.

‘Yeah, but you’ve heard about the latest case?’

‘The black girl done up West? Yeah, I heard. Fucking shame.’

‘Friend of mine.’

‘Oh?’ The ferocious painted mouth turned down in an expression of sympathy. ‘Sorry.’

‘Thanks. So tell me.’

Bobby Jo told Annie about Teresa’s enterprising spirit, that she had been caught on several occasions
handing out business cards (‘Fucking
business
cards, I ask you, that girl’) in the club, advertising her services as an escort.

‘I mean you don’t do that, do you? Work for one business and set yourself up in another, in the business’s time? Ain’t that unethical or some fucking thing?’

‘Yeah.’ Annie wondered how much these girls got paid for parading up there on the stage pretending they were batting for the other side. Not much, she guessed. A little more wedge would come in dead handy. A little sideline—keep the wolf from the door. Sadly, Teresa’s little sideline had got her killed.

Annie looked at Bobby Jo. A big, lean man in women’s clothing. Bobby Jo was narked with Teresa because she’d been promoting her own business on his firm’s time. Maybe his boss had leaned on him to come down hard on her, and somehow it had got out of hand? But again, why go so far as to kill her? A sharp warning, maybe. Even the sack. But a terminal solution? No. And there were two other girls who’d gone the same way. Val Delacourt and Aretha. Which suggested someone who was developing a distinct pattern, not a one-off. Didn’t it?

‘She get on with everybody, did she?’ asked Annie. ‘Any cat-fights? I know what these girls can be like.’

Bobby Jo gave a low rumble of smoker’s laughter. ‘I’ve had the filth crawling all over the place asking me all this. Big tall bloke, dark hair, face like an undertaker.’

‘Hunter,’ said Annie.

‘That’s the one. I’ll tell you what I told him. These girls always have enemies. They scrap like wild dogs over the best-paying punters. They worry over who’s got the best tits, the flattest stomach. There’s no sisterhood in
here,
my dear. Far from it.’

A weary-looking hostess came wobbling over on ridiculous heels and put their drinks on the table. Orange juice for Annie, a bottle of Krug in a bucket of ice for Bobby Jo.

‘Perks of management,’ he said, pouring the champagne and giving the girl a wink as she departed. He held the bottle up. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’

Annie shook her head.

‘Your loss.’

‘What about her friends?’

‘Teresa? She didn’t do friends. She was a chippy little cow, rubbed everyone up the wrong way.’

‘She must have. After all, someone went and killed her.’

Bobby Jo was looking at Tony, sitting there peacefully watching the act.

‘I like the muscle,’ he said to Annie. ‘Thinking of getting myself a minder.’

‘What, you think you need one?’ Annie sipped her juice.

Bobby Jo turned back to her. His perfect teeth flashed in a shark-like grin. His eyes were like little black stones behind the dense false eyelashes.

‘These are dangerous times,’ he said. ‘People getting themselves killed, what’s the world coming to? It makes a person nervous. You want to watch yourself, Mrs Carter, poking around in this sort of thing.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Annie finished her juice and stood up, thinking that she really didn’t like Bobby Jo at all—in fact he gave her the creeps.

Tony rose too.

‘Thanks for the refreshments, Bobby Jo. If you hear anything of interest, let me know. You’ve got my number,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ said Bobby Jo, and sank some more Krug.

Half an hour later, Annie was sitting in Teresa Walker’s mother’s front room. It was shabby, dated, but very clean. Teresa’s mother was obviously poor, but proud. Like Aretha’s Aunt Louella. Also, like Louella, this woman looked totally crushed by what had happened.

Teresa’s mother had long, faded and brittle-looking red hair, a skull-like, careworn face, and pale denim-blue eyes that looked washed to grey by all the tears she’d shed. Tatty old slippers on
her feet. Shapeless clothes hanging off her tall, thin frame. A woman who’d had the shit well and truly kicked out of her.

There were pictures up on the mantelpiece above the bare hearth—pictures of a big laughing girl with a shock of red hair. Teresa certainly wouldn’t have looked like that now. Not after some lunatic had got hold of her.

Annie introduced herself and sat down opposite Mrs Walker. Tony was waiting outside in the car. The woman picked up a Bible from the arm of the chair and clutched it tightly, constantly stroking her bony fingers over it.

‘Mrs Walker, I need to know everything you can tell me about Teresa,’ said Annie.

‘I went through all this with the police.’ Mrs Walker sat opposite Annie and looked at her in confusion. ‘Are you connected to the police?’

‘I’m not connected to the police, Mrs Walker. There have been three…’ Annie suddenly found she couldn’t bring herself to say
murders
, not in front of this poor broken woman who looked as if insanity was only a moment away. ‘…
incidents
like the one involving Teresa. The last one involved a friend of mine. I want to find out who did this horrible thing. I don’t want to hear about anyone else having to go through the same thing that me and you are going through right now. I’m in a position to look into these things, let’s just say that.’

‘You said your name was Carter?’ Her expression was suddenly agitated. ‘Oh my God. You’re one of
those
Carters,’ said Mrs Walker. ‘You’re to do with them gangsters.’

‘The Carter family look after their friends, Mrs Walker. Always.’

Mrs Walker jumped to her feet. The Bible hit the floor. She looked frantically down at it, then at Annie. In that moment, she looked truly demented; the grief was eating her soul like a cancer.

‘No! No, it was by associating with people like you that Teresa ended up as she did.’

‘That’s not true, Mrs Walker,’ said Annie.

‘I want you out of my house! You and your kind never do anything for nothing. I know how it all works,’ said Mrs Walker.

Annie stood up.

‘Mrs Walker, if I can find out who killed your daughter, and Val Delacourt, then—’

‘
That
little tramp.’

‘You know Val Delacourt?’ Annie’s attention sharpened. ‘She didn’t work with Teresa, did she?’

‘No, she didn’t. Not at that disgusting place run by that
weirdo.
Oh, I knew all about that place, don’t you worry. Teresa thought she’d get into glamour modelling by working there. I told her it was beneath her, but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘Then where do you know Val from?’

‘She’s one of the Delacourt tribe.’ Now Mrs Walker’s bony little face was full of contempt. ‘
Everyone
around here knows the Delacourt family, and it’s no surprise one of
theirs
came to grief, believe you me.’

But one of yours did too,
thought Annie. She didn’t say it.

‘They live in the next street,’ said Mrs Walker, sniffing and folding her arms. She told Annie which number. ‘Rough lot. Bringing the whole area into disrepute.
Horrible
people.’

Annie said the address. She remembered it from the case notes that Lane had supplied her with.

‘That’s the place,’ said Mrs Walker. ‘Although I wouldn’t go round there, if I were you.’

‘Can you tell me anything else about Val?’

‘Only that she’s a whore,’ said Mrs Walker.

Annie cocked her head questioningly. ‘You mean that she worked the streets?’

Mrs Walker nodded emphatically. ‘With her own brother as her pimp. That family’s no good. Robert. Peter. Val. They’re all bad.’

On the way back to Dolly’s, Annie asked Tony to cruise past the Delacourt house. It was a pebbledashed estate house almost identical to Mrs Walker’s, but there the similarity ended; this house was grimy and the windows were dressed with filthy nets. A threadbare settee had been dumped out on what
passed for the front lawn. A dog barked constantly from inside. A big one, by the sound of it. All the lights were on. There was a heavy, constant thump of a boom box from within.

‘Nice place, Boss,’ sniffed Tony.

‘You know the Delacourts?’ asked Annie.

‘No.’

‘We’ll call tomorrow,’ said Annie, and Tony drove on, back to Dolly’s.

Layla was at the kitchen table, filling in her colouring book. Dolly was there with her. The kitchen door was closed, but Annie could faintly hear sexual activity from upstairs, grunts and gasps of pleasure. Ross was on the door. It wasn’t right, leaving Layla here, and Annie knew it, but Kath would have burst a blood vessel if she had asked her to baby-sit again so soon.

Layla grinned up at Annie in delight when she came in. Guilt crushed Annie’s guts in a vice.

Her darling little daughter. Max Carter’s child. And all the more precious for that, because she had loved him so very much. The merest touch from Max had raced through her veins like a drug. And then she thought of Constantine—glossy, polished, alluring Constantine. She felt the same high, the same delicious giddiness she had known with Max, whenever she was near to him, and it worried her. She
couldn’t
afford distractions like that, not right now.

‘Mummy?’ said Layla, as Annie and Dolly exchanged glances over her innocent head.

‘Yeah, darling?’ said Annie, ruffling Layla’s silky hair.

‘What’s a whore?’

‘Well, you can’t wonder at her picking up things,’ Dolly said when Annie turned up at her place next morning, having spent a lousy night churning everything around, unable to rest.

‘Not things like
that
, for Christ’s sake,’ said Annie. She pulled out a chair and slumped down at the kitchen table, bumping against Ellie’s bucket. Ellie gave her an exasperated look.

Annie gave her a look right back.

‘Do you
really
have to do that right now?’ she demanded.