Scarlet Women (16 page)

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 shag under the Mile End
Road, you probably weren’t going to be all that choosy.

Mira looked nervous, like she might bolt.

‘How did you know where to find me?’ asked Annie, wanting to embrace this stick-thin object that had once been her old friend Mira. Mira with the beautiful speaking voice and huge blue eyes. But she kept her distance. If she got too close, she feared Mira would run again. And she didn’t even
want
to get too close. Mira stank to high heaven.

‘Rizzo was talking about you to one of the girls in the pub. Telling her about how you had one of your boys kill his dog.’ The mouth twisted. ‘God, I hated that horrible mutt. I’m glad that boy of yours killed it. Rizzo was sobbing into his pint after that, looking for a sympathy hand-job,’ she added with a faint smile. ‘I remembered you mentioning this place, back in the day. I thought I’d find you here.’

‘Well, here I am.’ Annie sat down well away from Mira. Then she finally said it. Couldn’t hold it in a moment longer. ‘Fuck’s sake Mira, what went wrong? What’s happened to you?’

But Mira didn’t answer. She was looking around the room, taking in the soft furnishings, the spotless look of the place.

‘It’s nice here,’ she said wistfully.

Annie felt her heart wrench again, hard and
painful. She saw why Dolly hadn’t made Mira wait out there in the rain. Any one of the girls who worked here could have gone this way, tramping the cold and dangerous night streets with a rotten, uncaring male pimp in charge of them. This humble home-cum-brothel, so warm, so safe, must seem like heaven to poor Mira.

‘We didn’t really have time to talk much, did we?’ Mira smiled nervously. Her hands were constantly moving, tugging her short denim skirt down, fiddling with her grubby off-white top, scratching at her forearms.

‘No,’ said Annie, ‘we didn’t. You ran off before I could get over the shock of seeing you there.’

‘I knew Val really well,’ said Mira.

‘Did you? Rizzo’s sister. Can you believe that grotty pathetic little worm would put his own sister on the game? What was she like?’

‘She had a lot of attitude, just like Rizzo. Acted like the boss bitch in town because her brother was in charge.’

‘Mira…’ Annie looked at her intensely.

‘No!’ Mira said firmly, harshly. ‘Just let me talk about Val, okay? I came here to talk about Val. Not about me.’

Annie sighed and gave up. Instead, she held out her wrist, where the Rolex glinted. She slipped it off, and held it out to Mira. ‘Look. I’ve still got it. You and Jen and Thelma gave it to me on my
birthday, on the day we got raided up West, you remember?’

Mira didn’t touch the watch, but she nodded. ‘I remember.’

Annie put the watch back on. Mira wasn’t biting. She almost longed to say to this wrecked creature:
Come on, Mira, drop this peculiar disguise. I know you’re in there somewhere.
But maybe
her
Mira, the confident and stunning Mira of old, maybe that Mira no longer existed. Maybe this sad, shabby shell was all that was left. And if that was so, then digging around looking for the old Mira was only going to cause her more pain.

Annie took a breath, and got back to the here and now.

‘Okay. Rizzo gave us nothing, nothing at all. So he knows nothing, he can’t do, or Steve would have got it out of him.’ She paused, staring at Mira. ‘Do
you
know something about all this? Something that can help get Val, Teresa and Aretha’s killer?’

Mira nodded cautiously. Her eyes slipped away from Annie’s.

Annie found herself holding her breath. ‘You’ve heard they’ve arrested Chris Brown, who used to be bouncer here, and that the Bill have charged him with his wife Aretha’s murder. They’re trying to stick him with the killings of Val Delacourt and Teresa Walker too.’

‘And you don’t think he did it?’ asked Mira, her face curious.

Annie shook her head. ‘I know Chris Brown. He couldn’t do any of this.’ She looked at Mira. ‘It’s good to see you again, Mira. Really good.’

Mira ignored that. She hunched forward suddenly, clutched her bare mottled legs as if they were cold. The intense blue eyes fixed on Annie’s face.

‘Look, I shouldn’t even have come round here. But you were always good to me. I heard that you were doing something, trying to get to the bottom of this and I…no, I shouldn’t be here. But I don’t like all this going on. Working girls getting killed. We have to stick together. Be loyal. That’s all we have.’

Annie was nearly exploding with frustration. She kept quiet. It was pretty obvious that Mira had nothing much to tell, anyway.

‘There’s a parlour,’ said Mira after a pause.

‘A parlour?’ Annie echoed, thinking of
this
parlour, the front parlour. ‘Do you mean another massage parlour? Another knocking-shop? Did Val have connections to a madam, is that what you’re saying? Rizzo wouldn’t have stood for that, would he? He’d be spitting blood.’

Mira was shaking her head. ‘Not a brothel. Not that sort of parlour. I mean a
tattoo
parlour.’

‘Go on.’

Mira shrugged. ‘A lot of the girls go there. It’s
a sort of meeting place, you know? In Soho. Right next door to the Alley Cat club.’ She shuddered slightly. ‘Really freaky guy runs it, he’s Rizzo’s brother, Pete. Covered in tattoos. But he’s nice to the girls, makes them coffee, they sit down and have a chat between themselves there while they get their tattoos done. Pete runs it, but there’s another guy comes in and does a couple of days a week—or at least there used to be. Val had a tattoo done there a couple of days before she died; the other guy did it, not Pete.’

‘And?’

‘Val tried to talk me into getting one done at the same time, but I wouldn’t do it. I sat with her while she was having hers done. She said there was money in it, she was
paid
to have it.’

Annie stifled a sigh.
Paid?
What the hell did that mean? So Val had been tattooed, so what? What could that possibly prove, what use could that conceivably be? Precisely none. Mira was shot away, hyped up on something.

‘What’s the tattoo?’ asked Annie.

‘It’s a red flame, high up on the inner thigh.’

Annie was silent. This was crap, just total hogwash.

‘Only you didn’t hear this from me, okay?’ Mira added nervously. ‘I was never here. Okay? Annie?’

‘Yeah, sure. Okay.’

Mira nodded, bit her lip. It was chewed all to hell, Annie noticed. ‘I’ve been thinking it over, you know. All this. And I remember your friend, Aretha Brown. I
do
remember her. I know everyone thinks I’m just a stupid junkie, that my brains are fried, but I
do.
I met her at your party, the same day we gave you that watch, the same day as the police raid. She was great. Gorgeous.’ Mira’s ravaged mouth twisted into a grim smile. ‘Fuck it, we
all
were back then. Val Delacourt wasn’t great, and she wasn’t gorgeous either, but she didn’t deserve this. She was up against it, with rotten Rizzo and Pete Delacourt for brothers, that was for sure. And that’s why I’m telling you about it, even though I shouldn’t be doing this. Even though he’d kill me if he knew. I’ve worked it out. The flame tattoo’s like a marker, do you see? You have the tattoo, then you die.’

‘You really think that? Then why don’t you tell the bloody police?’ Annie asked, curiously.

Mira blew out her lips in exasperation.

‘Come on. Look at me. Do you think the police are going to take notice of anything I say?’

Both Annie and Mira jumped as the phone rang loudly out in the hall. Annie swore under her breath. She was letting herself be spooked by a junkie’s tall tales, and that was lunacy.

But then, this was still
Mira.
And Mira had never been anyone’s idea of a fool.

They heard Dolly pick up and speak. Her voice was muffled. Suddenly the door opened. Dolly poked her head around it, looked with disapproval at Mira, then at Annie.

‘Phone for you,’ she said.

Annie stood up, went out into the hall. Dolly went off into the kitchen and started noisily clattering plates into the sink to convey her mood.

‘Hello,’ said Annie into the phone.

‘So where are you, Mrs Carter?’ asked Constantine Barolli.

‘What?’ Annie said stupidly, caught off-guard at hearing his voice.

‘It’s one o’clock. Didn’t we say one o’clock for drinks, and lunch at two? We’re just leaving.’

‘Leaving?’

‘For lunch at the hotel. With the family.’

Annie drew a breath. ‘But I thought…’

‘What? That one pretty understandable little slip was going to stop this?’

He sounded very calm about it now, very confident.

‘You were pretty angry at the time.’

‘At the
time
, I was. But you were in an emotional state and I was being unfair. So hurry up and get your glad rags on. Want me to send the car?’

Annie’s head was spinning. Mira was in there perfuming the front parlour like a skunk, frightening her with fairy tales of flame tattoos, and
now she was supposed to go to lunch, lunch with the man she had called by her dead husband’s name in the heat of passion, and meet up with his ghastly family, and—oh God, she didn’t need this.

But…he was giving her a second chance. The question was—should she take it? She thought of the boys again. She knew she was skating on thin ice here. Did she want to carry on, despite the difficulties, despite any possible dangers? She took a deep, steadying breath.

‘Don’t bother with the car, I’ll meet you there. I’ve got some business to sort out first.’

‘Okay, honey. I’ll see you there.’

She put the phone down.

Honey.

It was the first time he’d used any sort of endearment with her, and it touched her. Made her feel…safe. Sort of protected. The way she used to feel with Max. But she hadn’t been safe at all, or protected. All that had been an illusion, shattered in an instant. Shattered forever.

The phone shrilled again. She picked up.

‘Hello?’

‘Who is that?’ said a male voice, deep and deadly cold, with a soft Irish lilt.

‘Who is
that
?’ asked Annie, but she knew. Way back when she’d been in charge here, she had received his calls every week. He liked to keep his
finger on the pulse, to know that everything was running as it should.

‘This is Redmond Delaney. May I speak to Miss Farrell please?’

Annie put the phone down on the little table. She went to the kitchen door and looked in at Dolly.

‘Redmond Delaney for you, Doll,’ she said, and turned back to the phone, back towards the front parlour. Suddenly the door on to the street was being thrown open and she saw Mira dashing out, slamming it hard behind her.

Annie ran to the door. But by the time she got to the gate, Mira was already haring off into the distance. Annie stood there, looking after her ruined friend.