Stay Dead

by Jessie Keane

  ‘The club closed at one in the morning. Someone must have called after that, to kill Dolly.’

  ‘Really? What if they arrived earlier, while the club was open? Blended with the crowds going in, snuck up the stairs, kept her there until everyone else had left, then did the deed?’

  ‘Do the staff say she was upstairs? Not down in the bar?’

  ‘They confirm that she was upstairs from ten o’clock onward. The bar manager Peter Jones knocked on the flat door just after one to say he was cashing up, and Dolly said OK. Next morning he found her dead.’

  Annie was frowning at the ground. Then she looked up at Hunter’s face. ‘Thanks for that. It helps, you know. Hearing the details. Thinking that maybe we can solve this.’

  ‘Mrs Carter,’ he said flatly, ‘I can solve this. Not you.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Carter. Never doubt it. Can we talk about your Edinburgh trips?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The trips to Edinburgh from the heliport?’ Hunter pulled out a notebook and thumbed through. ‘Yes, here we are. The taxi service from Edinburgh airport confirmed that on a few of your trips you were going to a house not far outside the city, and the house is owned by a company that trades through a series of tax havens.’

  ‘I just stayed there sometimes, that’s all.’ Annie kept her face blank.

  ‘And sometimes you flew direct to the Highlands. To a place called the Mouth of Hades, I believe.’

  ‘It’s just a place I like to stay at.’

  ‘I see.’ Hunter snapped the notebook closed. Then he looked around. ‘Is it my imagination, or are you getting some disapproving looks?’

  Annie knew she was. People were staring at her with angry faces. Again she felt that spasm of insecurity; that sensation of no longer being safe on these streets, the streets where she used to stride around like a queen.

  She nodded to indicate the woman who looked like Dolly, the man who seemed to share the same genetic profile. They were lingering beside the grave. ‘You seen those two? You know who they are?’

  ‘I do. That’s Sarah Foster, nee Farrell. And that’s her brother, Nigel.’

  ‘Dolly’s brother and sister?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I never knew she had close relatives. She never mentioned them.’

  ‘Have you spoken to them?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘Yes, briefly.’

  ‘And?’

  He shook his head with a smile. ‘Police business, Mrs Carter,’ he said, and turned and walked away. Then he paused. His eyes swept over the milling crowds and then resettled on her face. ‘You don’t seem to be flavour of the month around here right now. So be careful.’

  75

  Annie watched him go, then turned back toward the graveside. Over to the left, she saw Max still there, in a tight huddle with Steve, Chris and Tony. Gary was gone. Ignoring them all, she went toward Sarah and Nigel. On the way there, a group of eight people, men and women, approached her, their faces grim, their eyes accusing. She was jostled, and she heard the words traitor bitch hissed at her. Someone spat at her feet, spattering her legs with phlegm. Shocked, she shoved and pushed her way through them and emerged shakily on the other side.

  Gathering herself, she took a breath and then walked on to meet up with Dolly’s relatives. She held out a hand that wasn’t entirely steady and said: ‘Hello? I believe you’re Dolly’s brother and sister? I’m Annie Carter. I was a friend of hers.’

  Up close, Sarah’s resemblance to Dolly was even more pronounced. She did have the same posture, the same sloping well-padded shoulders, the same tough stockiness of frame. But this woman had never hit the dye bottle like Dolly had, crisping her hair to the texture of straw; this woman’s was a soft mousy brown fashioned into an old-style set-and-shampoo which did nothing for her pallid features. Her eyes were light blue, reddened with tears. She wore an unflattering and overlong black coat with a silver spider brooch high up on the lapel. Her mouth was thin, her lips trembling. She looked at Annie’s hand and seemed to debate as to whether or not she was going to shake it. Then she made her mind up, and did. Her grip was limp, and damp.

  ‘Did she ever mention me?’ asked Annie.

  The woman shook her head. Annie was staring at her, thinking it was weird, to see Dolly’s features on this woman’s pale, set face – and yet it was obvious this woman was no Dolly. She looked timid, introverted, and Dolly had never been either of those things. Annie found herself wanting to shake the woman, to say, Come on, Dolly, show yourself, I know you’re in there.

  Stupid.

  ‘We never saw Dolly,’ said Sarah in a low lisping voice.

  Annie watched her curiously, waiting for explanation. When it was obvious she wasn’t going to get any, she turned her attention to the man standing there. Dark brown eyes on this one, but again – Dolly’s features. That hot surge of exasperation was overwhelming now, the need to shake some life into them. The man looked no more animated than the woman. He had the look of someone permanently undernourished, with a thin mouth, sunken cheeks . . . and yet, there it was, in the stance, in the build, sometimes even in the expression of the face, fleeting, there one moment, gone the next; an echo of Dolly Farrell, her friend.

  ‘Dolly left home when she was thirteen. She never kept in touch,’ said Nigel. His mouth thinned into a prudish line. ‘We heard she became a prostitute.’

  Maybe that had something to do with her own father fucking her in the first place, thought Annie, feeling an upsurge of anger at Nigel’s disapproving tone.

  Perhaps these two dour little creatures didn’t know anything about what the father had done. And was now really the right time to bring it up? She didn’t think so.

  ‘She was the salt of the earth, Dolly,’ she said. ‘The best friend I ever had.’

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t know about that,’ said Nigel with a sniff of disapproval.

  I don’t like you, thought Annie.

  Ah, but that was unfair. She’d only just met these two; it was too soon to decide that they had no balls, no guts, no drive and no feeling; Dolly had had all that and more. Once again it crashed in on her: the realization, the terrible knowledge of what she had lost. She swallowed hard and said, ‘She never talked about her family. Is it . . . are there more brothers and sisters?’

  ‘We have a younger brother, Sandy.’

  Then why isn’t he here too? wondered Annie. It was like drawing teeth, trying to get a word out of them. ‘Couldn’t he come?’

  ‘He’s in a home,’ said Sarah. ‘And Dick’s in New Zealand.’

  ‘And your parents . . . ?’ asked Annie, thinking of the father – that bastard.

  ‘Mum passed last year. Dad died years ago. An accident on the railway.’

  ‘He worked on the railways? I never knew that.’

  ‘Oh yes. Started out in the signal boxes but then he went on to be a wheeltapper, and a shunter.’

  That meant precisely nothing to Annie. ‘Shunter? What’s that?’

  ‘They connect the engines to the carriages. Dad’s accident was about five years after Dolly left home,’ said Nigel accusingly, as if Dolly being there could have prevented it.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Annie.

  They looked at her in dual disapproval. They didn’t like giving out personal information, or any damned information at all, she could see that; but fuck it and fuck them, she wanted to know.

  ‘He was crushed,’ said Nigel. ‘By one of the engines. It was a terrible accident. People don’t realize how dangerous it can be, working on the railways. Accidents happen all the time.’

  Or more likely it was an act of God, thought Annie, thinking of the dirty old goat mauling Dolly about.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she lied. People were still passing by, staring at her. Hunter was right. She had to be careful.

  Nigel and Sarah both nodded morosely, and stood there looking at the grave.

  �
��Now Dolly’s with Dad,’ said Nigel after a pause. ‘In heaven. If she repented of her sins before she died.’

  A shiver went through Sarah, so intense that Annie stared, wondering if the woman was going to collapse, fall right into the open grave and land, thunk, on her sister’s coffin.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, thinking that Dolly was bound for heaven for sure.

  But the father . . . ?

  That old bastard was cooking over a low light in hell, with Satan turning the spit. And a fucking good job, too.

  76

  They told Annie there would be a wake – cake and sandwiches and cups of tea, nothing fancy – back at Sarah’s place, and she would be welcome to come if she wanted. She didn’t think she wanted to spend one more second in this joyless pair’s company, but she took the address anyway.

  Then she went back along the gravel walkway toward the lychgate. A large crowd of mourners had gathered there. She looked around for Ellie, but she seemed to have gone. She felt a shudder, thinking of Dolly lying in the cold earth, alone. Soon the gravediggers would come and fill in the hole and that would be it; Dolly would be gone forever.

  Feeling apprehensive after that little tussle with the group near the grave, she walked on, head held high, but at the back of her mind was the kicking she’d got off Gary’s thugs, the unrelenting soreness of her broken rib, and she thought, I don’t want any more of that. She had thought Max and his boys had it in for her, for sure; but the fact that the bad news about her had already reached the wider population was chilling. She made a mental note to dig out her can of Mace when she got home. It wasn’t much, but it was something, at least.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have the chance to get home and do that, though. The mob by the gate turned and watched her coming, their eyes unfriendly.

  Christ, I could be in real trouble here.

  Her footsteps slowed and finally she stopped walking. Then there was movement closer to her, all around her, and she turned, startled. She had been so focused on a possible threat at the lychgate that she’d missed another. Tony had appeared on one side of her, and Steve came up in front of her. Her head whipped round and she started to turn further, but there was Chris, grim-faced, right behind her. No Gary. There was that to be thankful for, she supposed.

  Oh fuck . . .

  Her heart lodging in her throat, she spun back round to the front and there was Max, standing right beside her like a brick wall and looking at her blank-faced.

  She was closed in.

  She was trapped.

  Please no, not again, please, please . . .

  ‘Just keep walking,’ said Max.

  What else could she do? She had four big men surrounding her and an angry mob waiting for her at the gate. Her stomach clenched with terror, she did as he said. No good making a break for it, they’d catch her easily. And frightened though she was, she wasn’t about to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing that.

  She kept her head up, and somehow got her trembling legs to move forward. As she moved, so did the four men surrounding her. As one body, they walked to the lychgate, and the now silent, watchful crowd parted in silence to let them pass.

  The four of them walked her right to the car, a black Jag. It gave her a pang, just to see it. This had once been her car, the car Tony had chauffeured her about in, but it had passed to Dolly. Now Dolly wouldn’t use it any more. Tony got behind the wheel. Once, back in the day, Tony had been the jockey, the wheelman on heists pulled by the Carter gang; he could do things with a car that would make your eyes water. Turn the damned thing on a sixpence. Chris slid into the front passenger seat. Steve got in the back, and Annie was pushed in after him; then Max got in. And it was then it hit Annie, the truth; that her husband had just rescued her, put a steel wall around her to get her out of the church grounds and away.

  ‘Max—’ she said, turning toward him.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said.

  ‘Max—’

  ‘I said, shut up.’

  And having said that, he turned away from her and stared out of the window, jaw set.

  Tony gunned the engine and drove them back to Holland Park.

  She shut up. Tony drove on, through the steadily hardening rain. When the car pulled up outside her house in Holland Park and Max dragged her out, she thought maybe he’d go and leave her there. But he didn’t get back in. He slammed the door shut, and the other three men shot off in the Jag.

  ‘Come the fuck on then,’ he said, and grabbed her arm and hauled her up to the steps to the big imposing navy-blue doors of home.

  77

  Once inside, Annie went on unsteady legs across the hall and into the drawing room. She peeled off her coat and dropped it on to the carpet, then slumped down on a Knole sofa and put her head in her hands.

  ‘Shit,’ she said with feeling.

  Max was pacing about again. Suddenly, he stopped in front of her.

  ‘Oh, you think those at the church were scary? You ain’t seen fuck-all yet. What in the name of . . .’

  His words trailed away and he started his restless pacing again. Not a good sign, she knew that. Then he was back in front of her. ‘You low-life cow. I don’t know why I bothered to do that. I must be off my fucking head. You’ve been cheating on me with that flash Yankee bastard—’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Max’s eyes were blazing. ‘You admitted you’ve been seeing him. What, you been playing tiddlywinks or something? Or chess like in that film? Or have you been doing what we all know you’ve been doing? That is, dancing the horizontal tango with that American prick.’

  Annie sat there, head bowed. ‘You said you wanted a divorce,’ she said slowly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A divorce. That’s what you said. So what the fuck? What’s the use of all this? You want a divorce, you got one. Simple as that.’

  Max lunged forward and yanked her to her feet. Every ache in her body started setting up a protest, and Annie let out a yell.

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that, I ain’t even touching you. Do you know the lucky escape you’ve just had? That was a fucking lynch mob there at the church, all out for your blood, and I had to walk you out of there with a bodyguard of three blokes who were none too sure they wanted to bother. They did it because I told them to, that’s all. And that made me look like the world’s worst fucking fool.’

  Annie stared into Max’s eyes from inches away. It had taken her a while to realize it, but he hadn’t been trying to intimidate her at the church by surrounding her in that way. He’d been protecting her. And when he’d cornered her at his mum’s old house, he hadn’t been planning to hurt her; it had all been for the benefit of the three men waiting outside the door. He’d told her to scream, and she had. In actual pain, although he hadn’t known or intended that.

  Annie started to smile.

  Max glared at her. ‘What?’ he snapped.

  ‘I love you, Max Carter,’ she said, wincing as her damaged rib set up a riotous ache. ‘Every macho, hot-headed bit of you.’

  ‘You what?’

  Annie pushed herself free of his grip. She dragged her hands through her hair and stared intently into his eyes.

  ‘For God’s sake listen,’ she said. ‘This is me. This is not rumour. This is not someone talking in the pub after too many sherbets. I’m telling you that I never slept with Constantine when we met up again. I saw him, yes. But sleep with him? No.’

  ‘You must think I came upriver on the last banana boat,’ he sneered.

  ‘No, I think you’re smart. I know you are. When you stop behaving like a jealous arsehole and start thinking, you’ll work it all out.’

  Max stood there staring into her eyes for a long time. Then he said: ‘You know what? I don’t have to think about it, I can just beat it out of you.’

  ‘But you won’t do that,’ said Annie. ‘The great Max Carter, beat a woman up? Nah. That’s never going to happen.’

  ‘Oh, you think so
.’

  ‘I know so.’

  Max’s eyes narrowed. Then he turned away from her, walked a few paces, came back.

  ‘And while I’m working all this out, what are you going to be doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Finding Dolly’s killer,’ said Annie.

  ‘Yeah? On streets where everyone wants you strung up from the nearest lamp post? That’ll be a neat trick.’

  ‘One word from you would change that.’

  ‘Yeah. If I could be arsed.’

  ‘I need some help,’ she said.

  Max raised an eyebrow. ‘I heard you had help. For what it’s worth. Jackie Tulliver. That cunt’s a drunk these days, what use is he to you – or anybody?’

  Annie remembered that Max hated drunks, and would never tolerate them anywhere near him. He’d been scathingly harsh in the past about her mother, Connie, who’d been a useless alkie and so – in Max’s eyes – beneath contempt.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Jackie,’ she said.

  Max’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, have a day off. Me? No bloody way. You’ve made me look enough of a fucking idiot already.’

  ‘No, not you.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘I want Tony. I want my driver back.’

  78

  After Max left, Jackie showed up. Annie guessed he’d been skulking about outside, just waiting for Max to go before he showed himself. Maybe the man had some pride left, after all. Didn’t want his old boss to see the state he was in.

  ‘So what’s next?’ he asked when she let him in and led the way back across the hall and into the drawing room.

  ‘For you? Hopefully a bath. And a shave, would that hurt?’

  ‘Hey, no need to get personal,’ he whined.

  Annie sat down and looked up at him. ‘What happened with your mother?’ she asked.

  Jackie flinched as if she’d struck him. ‘What you talkin’ about that for?’

  ‘She died, Steve told me. What was it then? Heart? Cancer?’

  Jackie stood there, looking at the floor. ‘I ain’t talkin’ about this.’