Jessie Keane: Scarlet Women

A PC came in with a tray, plastic cups and a jug of water. He placed it on the desk, then left the room.

Annie cleared her throat. ‘Look—Chris wouldn’t harm a hair on Aretha’s head. You’ve got it wrong. Whoever did this, it wasn’t Chris.’

But what about the blood on his hands? she thought, unable to help herself. What the fuck was that all about?

Hunter’s fixed expression of disapproval deepened. He raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if she had cracked a really good joke.

‘The evidence indicates otherwise,’ he said.

‘What evidence?’ demanded Annie.

‘Look, luv,’ chipped in DS Lane. ‘Fact is, this tart had a bag-load of S & M gear with her. Whips and rubber coshes and nursy outfits and peephole bras, stuff like that. She wasn’t exactly a nun. If you know her then you must know that’s true.’

What, and you think that means she deserved this? thought Annie in fury.

She said nothing, just glared at the fat, repulsive Lane.

‘We know she worked as an escort,’ said DI Hunter.

‘So where’s your evidence against Chris?’ asked Annie.

‘Mr Brown was waiting for his wife in his car, according to him,’ said Hunter. ‘Perhaps I’d better let Mr Brown himself fill in the details.’

Annie looked at Chris. He gulped, gave a shuddering sigh and wiped at his eyes. He looked at her.

‘Chris?’ she prompted.

‘I was waiting for her. Around the corner from the hotel. In the car. It was raining, raining hard. She’d told me she’d be finished by one o’clock in the morning, but by one thirty she still hadn’t shown and I started to get worried.’

He took a shuddering breath.

‘But I didn’t want to make a fuss. Aretha hates… hated it when I made a fuss. She was a free spirit. A real free spirit.’ He paused, gulped, gathered himself again. ‘At a quarter to two, though, I was getting really steamed up. Really worried. I got out of the car. It was pissing down, hard to see two feet in front of your own face, real hard torrential rain, a pig of a night.’

They sat there listening to him and suddenly they were there, right there; Chris getting out of his Zodiac, shrugging his collar up against the rain, cursing the weather, angry and worried, where the fuck had she got to this time? The rain beating down, cold as Christmas on his bare, bald head as he hurried around the corner towards the hotel; not a soul about, this fucking weather. Pissing down. Summer in England, what else would it be doing?

His shoes were getting wet, water seeping into his socks, bouncing off the pavements, and now his bastard trousers were wet too, right up to the knee, he was going to catch his fucking death out here, rain coming down like knives, deafening, blinding, and thunder rolling now, oh-ho, a summer storm to add to the fun, lightning flashing and crackling in the distance; oh, he was having a whale of a time out here, getting wet right through to his skin.

Bloody Aretha! Couldn’t she ever be on time, just once?

As they listened they could picture him shuffling along the rain-slicked pavements, traffic still on the roads, wheels hissing through the rain, wipers going full speed; poor bastards, didn’t they have homes to go to? But no one walking the pavements, no one about in the dark and the rain except working girls, and the guys who were unfortunate enough to be their pimps or their boyfriends or—more rarely, like Chris—their husbands.

‘Go on,’ said DI Hunter when Chris paused.

Annie poured out water, tried to force it down: couldn’t.

‘That’s when I found her,’ said Chris, his voice breaking. ‘I…I tripped over her. I thought…I thought some fucker had left a bag of rubbish on the pavement, I tripped, fell over her, I didn’t know it was her…’

Annie reached out, squeezed his arm.

‘Then I realized. Saw it was her. I thought…’ He looked up wildly at the two men seated opposite. ‘I thought she was just unconscious, you know? Thought she’d drunk too much in the hotel. I just thought, silly bint, you could catch pneumonia like that, laid out pissed on a sopping wet pavement in the middle of the night; you could catch any damned thing, ain’t that right?’

He was looking at Annie. She nodded.

‘Then I saw that she had this…this thing around her neck.’ His voice cracked again.

He stopped talking, shook his head.

Annie looked at Hunter. ‘What thing?’

‘A cheese wire,’ said Hunter. ‘Length of wire with a toggle at each end. What the French call a 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. ’

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.