The young woman, attractive if she made an effort, put her face in her hands and cried. ‘How?’ she asked.
‘He has been murdered.’
‘I saw him on Friday. He asked me out for a drink at the Duke of York on Dering Street.’
The woman said her name was Amanda Brocklehurst. To Wendy, who had grown up in Yorkshire on a farm and who had worked hard all her life, Miss Brocklehurst represented the very worst of people. She was, Wendy thought, one of the Sloane Rangers, if that term was used still, who milled around Sloane Square in Chelsea flaunting their wealth, their titles, their wealthy parents, and their willingness not to work. Still, Wendy assumed they kept the local shopkeepers happy with their gold and platinum credit cards.
‘Did he go there often?’
‘All the time. So did I, especially if Dennis was there.’
‘You fancied him?’ Wendy asked. Sara Marshall had told her that he had been a good-looking man.
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Amanda Brocklehurst was wilting again. With no one else in the house to look after her, Wendy opened a drinks cabinet in the main room, took a bottle of soda water, poured its contents into a glass and gave it to the young woman. She gulped it down in one go. Wendy had seen a bottle of brandy, the traditional pick-me-up, but did not give it to the woman. It was clear that she was suffering the effects of too much alcohol the previous night.
‘I’ve got a thumping head,’ Amanda said.
‘Your fault.’
‘You’re not my mother.’
For that Wendy was thankful. Her sons had come home drunk on a few too many occasions. Her solution with them was a berating at the door on entry, not that it did much good, although the cold shoulder for a few days, and her unwillingness to provide them with three meals a day, did.
‘Last night Dennis Goldman brought a woman back with him.’
‘That’s Dennis.’
‘Ladies’ man?’ Wendy asked.
‘He always had someone over for the night.’
‘Even you?’
‘We had an arrangement.’
‘Tell me.’
‘If he was lonely, or I was, then we would get together.’
‘Sleep together?’
‘Just friends, but yes, we would have sex. Not a crime. People do it all the time.’
Wendy could see that the rich and spoilt Amanda Brocklehurst did it all the time and that she had little worth, other than that she was young and attractive. ‘Duke of York. Would he have picked the woman up there?’
‘Dennis’s favourite place for pickups,’ Amanda replied.
Chapter 17
‘Dering Street,’ Wendy said to Larry as they stood in the street outside Goldman’s apartment. The team of door-to-doors were slowly working their way up and down the street.
‘Good looker,’ Larry said. He had seen the young woman from a distance.
‘Waste of space,’ was Wendy’s reply.
The Duke of York had been rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and apparently named after the Grand Old Duke of York who had marched his troops up a hill in France. Wendy remembered the nursery rhyme from childhood; Larry did not.
It was located in St George Hanover Square and was one of the trendy pubs in a trendy part of London.
‘Do you know a Dennis Goldman?’ Larry asked the woman serving behind the bar. It was still early and the end-of-day crowd had not arrived.
‘I’m only new,’ the woman replied with an Australian accent.
Another backpacker working for cash and less than the minimum wage, Wendy thought.
‘Is the manager here?’
The cash-in-hand wandered off. Two minutes later, a middle-aged man, red in the face, appeared.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘Detective Inspector Hill, Detective Sergeant Wendy Gladstone. We have a few questions.’
‘Fancy a drink? On the house.’
Larry was tempted to ask for a beer but did not. ‘Orange juice for me,’ he said.
‘The same for me,’ Wendy replied.
The landlord pulled himself a beer. ‘I need to check it anyway. Just changed the barrel.’
‘Dennis Goldman.’
‘Comes in here several times a week.’
‘Friday night,’ Larry asked.
‘He walked out of here with a woman.’
‘Tell us about the woman,’ Wendy asked.
‘Attractive, red hair, short skirt, tight top. Not much else to tell.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She was giving him the right signals. Coming in close, draping her arm around him. We could see that he was on to a sure thing.’
‘We?’
‘Those behind the bar.’
‘Had you seen the woman before?’
‘Never. Anyway, what’s this all about?’
‘Dennis Goldman was killed between the hours of 10 p.m. on Friday night and 2 a.m. on Saturday morning.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘Upsets you?’
‘It’s not something you expect to hear. How did he die?’
‘We’re from Homicide,’ Larry said.
‘Do you mean he was murdered?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the woman?’
‘She’s our prime suspect.’
‘We’ve got cameras in here,’ the landlord said.
***
On the northern outskirts of the city, the woman slept peacefully, or at least as peacefully as could be expected with the heavy traffic outside her window. She dreamt of happy times and happy thoughts interspersed with dark places and dark thoughts. She rolled in her bed, one arm hanging down. The bed, she had known when she agreed to take the room, was old and flea-bitten. She imagined how many sweaty bodies had lain on it, how many fornicating couples had tested its springs, how many murderers had used it.
Charlotte knew the answer to the last question: one.
She moved between rational and despair, anger and melancholy, sweet dreams and nightmares, although the nightmares were becoming more frequent. She wanted to be like everyone else, but they were mad, she was not.
She woke up, the banging at the door disturbing her. ‘You owe me for the next month,’ the voice said. She had heard
