Scarlet Women

worm of doubt that gnawed away at him, made him think: Could she be right?

He couldn’t shake the image of Annie Carter’s face from his brain. A gangster’s moll, by all accounts. Tough as nails and twice as nasty, with a murky past. But stunning, he had to admit that. And with such intense conviction in her dark green eyes, such certainty that Chris Brown was innocent, such determination to prove that Gareth Fuller had not killed himself, but had been murdered to cover a killer’s tracks. Her passionate beliefs made him ask himself the question again: could she be right?

That was why he was here, even though he wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else. To gain certainty. To know.

Now Penyard and his assistant were removing the heart and lungs, impersonal as butchers working on the carcass of a cow. They went on to remove the intestines, the brain. Hunter detached himself from what was going on here. Thought of other things. Like how he had to get this job done. Like his suspicions about DS Lane, too. The man was basically unlikable, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was untrustworthy. Hunter felt that strongly.

‘Hey Paul?’

Hunter looked up. Penyard was beckoning him over.

Groaning inside, Hunter stood up and walked over to the table.

‘Found something?’ he asked, keeping his eyes away from the gaping cavity in the corpse’s chest and the big skin flap on the head, where the skull was exposed. At least it covered up those bloody, staring eyes.

Penyard was looking at the neck.

‘The flex left a deep bruise,’ he pointed out. ‘Extensive capillary damage. Broke the hyoid cartilage.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The flex wasn’t placed around the neck after death.’

‘So?’

Penyard shrugged. ‘Could be suicide, but could be murder too. There’s no sign of struggle though.’

‘What if he was drugged?’ asked Hunter.

Gareth had a clear reputation as a drug user. What if his killer had come across him in a drugged state?

He could imagine that. The knock on the door. Gareth, half out of it on dope, opening it, letting his killer in. Too weak and spaced out by the drugs to fight, or even to protest. Hoisted up on the light fitting, killed.

Easy.

And all because he checked in Smith, and checked him out, on the night Aretha Brown was killed? wondered Hunter. All because he might have been able to identify him?

Hunter thought about that. Something about the Aretha Brown case was looking subtly different to the first two. Something was niggling at him.

‘You tested for drugs yet?’ he persisted.

‘Not yet. We will.’

‘Okay,’ said Hunter, and left the autopsy suite with a huge sense of relief, but also a profound feeling of frustration. He wanted to know. That was his driving force, his reason to be a cop, a detective. He needed to know. It was what had wrecked his six-year marriage, his dedication to the job. He’d got home one night and there was a note on the table, Goodbye. Simple as that. It was his own fault, and he knew it. He loved the job too much. And maybe…yeah, maybe he’d loved his wife too little.

When he got back to his desk, Collating were on the phone and they weren’t happy. DS Lane had been found down there taking out a couple of files.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘Well, not so much “taking” them out as sneaking them out without permission, you know the procedure. He was heading for the photocopier room with them,’ said the agitated voice on the other end of the phone.

‘Which files?’

‘The Aretha Brown murder. And the Gareth Fuller case too.’

Annie fucking Carter, he thought.

Chapter 26

Dolly met Annie at the front door when she called in again at the Limehouse brothel.

‘Someone here to see you,’ she said in a whisper, her mouth pursed in a cat’s-bum curve of disapproval. ‘She’s been here ages.’

‘Oh? Who?’ Annie took off her jacket, shook the rain off, hung it on the peg.

‘She wouldn’t give her name. Scruffy-looking little mare, looks sort of familiar but I can’t place her.’

Annie’s heart gave a leap. ‘In the kitchen?’

The cat’s-bum curve got deeper. The kitchen was sacrosanct to Dolly. It was the one place in the house where punters were never granted entry, where only favoured visitors were admitted.

‘Fuck me, no. Tart like that, you’re kidding. The girl said she wanted to have a word with you, and I said you might not call in, and she said well she’d wait until you did, and she whiffs a bit so I almost thought of letting her wait out in the street. But anyway, call me a soft touch, but it’s peeing down out there, I couldn’t do it. She’s in the front parlour, which by the way I am probably going to have to get fumigated after this, and the bill’s coming to you, Annie Carter, is that clear?’

‘It’s clear,’ said Annie, trying not to crack a grin at Dolly’s gruff but kind ways.

She went into the front parlour and found Mira sitting huddled on the sofa, clutching her thin bare legs with clenched hands. She looked up sharply when Annie came in, and shot to her feet.

‘Mira?’ Annie stood there at the door and shook her head. ‘Fuck, it is you.’

But this wasn’t the Mira Cooper she had known. The Mira who had once worked for her up West, as a high- class call girl, had been the most luscious creature, with a huge mane of shining blonde hair, a film-star gloss to her perfectly tanned skin. She’d had couture dresses to wear, and jewels and furs, all bought for her by doting admirers.

Annie found herself remembering that picture of Mira in the papers when the scandal hit and Annie’s knocking-shop ambitions had come crashing to the ground—Mira striding along Bond Street in dark glasses, wearing a priceless mink coat.

And now, here she was.

The deliciously polished and beautiful Mira who had stayed at Cliveden and dined at the Ritz with the country’s good and great. Mira, with the cut-glass accent of the Home Counties. Mira, who had made a fortune on her back.

She wouldn’t make any fortunes now, that was for damned sure.

This girl looked so different to the Mira Annie had known. Skinny, unwashed. Her complexion leaden and marred with sores. Her once magnificent hair was short, lying lank and greasy around her gaunt face. Only her eyes were the same—clear, lamp-like, vividly blue.

Annie’s heart clenched at the sight of her.

And Jeez, Dolly was right. Mira didn’t smell too good. Hadn’t washed her hair or had a bath in a month, Annie guessed. Out in the fresh air it hadn’t been so noticeable. In here, it was horrible. She couldn’t stop staring at the sores on Mira’s cheeks; sores that hadn’t been visible in the shadows under the bridge. Junkie sores, thought Annie.

When Mira opened her mouth, Annie noticed how yellow her teeth were, where once they had been pristine white. Dirty teeth, dirty hair, dirty body. There was a smear of what looked suspiciously like shit on Mira’s skinny white thigh. Pity the punters, she thought. But then, if you were going to have a quick