Scarlet Women

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