Stay Dead - [30]

‘Oh shit,’ said Annie, halting in the doorway.

‘Look at this! Just look. They done the office too – poor Miss Pargeter’s going spare in there. Her papers are all over the damned place. And the girls’ changing room, and some of the bedrooms… yours included. They tossed your stuff out the bleeding window, said if I let you stop here they’d come back and do it all over again, only worse.’

Annie gulped in a breath. ‘They? Ellie, who?’

Ellie shrugged. ‘I don’t know them. They had masks on.’

‘Didn’t Chris try to stop them?’ asked Annie.

Ellie turned to her in temper. ‘Don’t be fucking stupid! There were six of them, bloody great blokes in boiler suits with pick handles. He’d have only come off worst.’

‘This is because I’m here?’ said Annie numbly, staring around at the devastation that she had brought down on Ellie’s head.

‘Yeah,’ said Ellie tearfully, picking up a beautifully crafted glass swan with its wing missing. ‘I should never have let you stay. All this is my fault.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Annie.

Ellie turned brimming eyes on her. ‘Chris is hopping bloody mad at me over this.’ Ellie’s stare hardened. ‘Christ, it’s you, isn’t it – you attract trouble like flies on shit.’ Ellie gulped. ‘Where will you go?’

‘I don’t know. Over to Holland Park maybe. Or a hotel. Anything.’ And it’s best you don’t know where, with all this kicking off.

Ellie stared at her. ‘Whatever you’ve done, it must be something pretty bad.’

‘I haven’t done a thing.’

‘Maybe they shot Dolly because of you.’

‘What?’

‘Who knows?’

‘I’ll go,’ said Annie. Her brain was spinning. Then she had a thought. ‘Ellie, did you think any more about what I asked you? If there was anything you knew about Dolly’s family, or friends, or anything…?’

Ellie rushed at her and for a moment Annie thought she was going to get a belt around the ear. But Ellie stopped inches away. Breathing hard, she stared into Annie’s eyes.

‘You come back here and all I get is trouble!’ she burst out. ‘Chris is mad at me, he thinks this is my fault because he said I wasn’t to let you stop here, but I insisted. I told him, whatever she’s done, she’s still my mate. And now look! It’s a fucking disaster!’

‘Ellie…’ It was a disaster. There was no arguing with that.

‘Fuck off out of it!’ shrieked Ellie. ‘Just. Fuck. Off. You hear me? Just go.’

Annie nodded. She went out of the wrecked kitchen and along the hall.

At the top of the stairs, Ellie called: ‘Wait!’

Annie stopped walking. Turned.

Ellie stood there in the hall, clutching her head as tears washed her mascara down her face. She blinked at Annie, and then she blurted out: ‘Doll’s family. They used to live Limehouse way, I remember she told me that once. Quite a way from Celia’s place. And they were Catholics. You know… you heard about her dad interfering with her?’

Annie nodded. She remembered – vividly – her Auntie Celia once telling her about that, and that Doll had suffered through a nasty backstreet abortion because of it.

‘Well,’ said Ellie, ‘there’s more. Back in the sixties at the knocking shop, I… I heard Dolly telling Celia that she wanted a hit on her dad.’

‘You what?’ Annie’s mouth dropped open.

‘It’s the truth. I heard her say it. Well, I overheard her.’

Annie remembered Ellie as she had been then, insecure, always skulking in hallways, listening at doors.

‘What else did you hear?’

‘That she wanted the Delaney family to see to it. You know what? Once I asked Doll why she didn’t go to church, to Mass, like Catholics always do. You know what she said?’

Annie shook her head.

‘She said it was because the church told lies. It said there was beauty in the world, and there wasn’t. I never forgot her saying that.’

29

Outside, she found Chris gone and DCI Hunter getting out of a black car at the pavement.

‘You sure you want to go in there?’ she asked, dropping her bags into the dirt again. She took pride in her appearance, and that extended to her accessories too; but what the hell – the bags were fucked, anyway, one scuffed, the other torn. Only the suitcase had stood up to the scrum.

‘Why? What’s up?’ he asked.

‘The place has been bulldozed. Six men went through it like a bloody hurricane.’

He stared at her face. ‘And why’s that?’

‘What?’

‘People don’t do things like that for no reason.’

‘I don’t know the reason.’ She kicked one of the ruined bags irritably. ‘How’s your day going, Inspector? You got any news for me?’

‘Like what?’

Annie felt her hackles rise at his calm tone. ‘Oh, let me think. Like who killed my best friend, and why, and what the fuck’s going to happen about that?’

‘The investigation is ongoing,’ said Hunter.

‘You’re very bloody annoying, you know that?’

‘Heard it said.’

‘I need to get to the bottom of this. I have to,’ said Annie fiercely.

Hunter leaned in. ‘No, Mrs Carter. What you have to do is assist the police in the course of this investigation, in any way that you can. Don’t give me any of your shit. Is that understood?’

Annie was silent, glaring.

‘Is it, Mrs Carter?’

‘Fuck off,’ she said, and turned and walked away.

30

The Grapes was busy at lunchtime. For many years, this pub had been the place where all the Carter boys went to meet up and get their jollies, a real old spit-and-sawdust alehouse in the heart of the city with a host of hard-eyed regulars keeping curious tourists at bay.