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.
Chapter 17
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 lame dress and a huge red wig.
