Stay Dead - [4]

‘She’s a very private person, she lives here,’ said Pete. ‘Up there. That’s her flat. I went up as soon as I came in, called out to her, asked if she was OK. She didn’t answer. So I knocked at her door, still nothing. I tried the handle and it was open. I went in. And I found her. Then I phoned you.’

Tears were slipping down Pete’s face. The female cop touched his arm, guided him to a chair. The male cop looked up at the staircase. Then, with a heavy sigh, he went over there, and began to climb the stairs.

An hour later, CID arrived in the unsexy buttoned-up form of DS Sandra Duggan, whose honey-coloured hair was scraped back to display knife-sharp cheekbones and eyes that viewed the whole world with hostility. With her was DCI Hunter: tall, dark-haired, grave-faced – literally grave-faced; everyone down the nick said he ought to be a fucking undertaker with a boat like that – with a down-turned trap of a mouth and inky-brown eyes that scanned everything around him like a computer.

CID spoke to Pete and then went upstairs with Pete trailing behind them.

‘Fuck,’ said Sandra as they opened the door to the flat and entered the little sitting room straight off it.

Hunter and Duggan stood there and assessed the situation. The dead woman was sprawled out on the thick shag-pile carpet, which was a soft dusky pink. Her head was on a white sheepskin rug by the unlit gas fire, and some of the rug had turned to red where blood had spilled out of the bullet wounds to her neck and forehead.

‘Not pretty,’ agreed DCI Hunter with his usual formal manner. Neither he nor his companion moved further into the room; they wanted to preserve the crime scene.

‘Oh God,’ moaned Pete, looking past Hunter’s shoulder and then just as quickly looking away.

The woman’s eyes were open and already glazing over with the film of death; they stared up at and through the ceiling, blank as a china doll’s. She was wearing a strawberry-pink boucle skirt suit that looked expensive, maybe Chanel; an inch of a paler pink silk lining was visible where it had rucked up over her knees.

Nothing special about the woman at all; a bubble-permed blonde of around forty or fifty, pale almond-shaped blue eyes, a round and maybe even pretty face if it hadn’t been for the blood and the brain matter. She looked good for her age, that’s what Hunter thought; and very, very dead. He sighed for all the loss and grief and anguish in the world, for the evils that were done every day to women, and men, and children.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked Pete, whose face was now firmly averted from this horror.

‘Dolly,’ said Pete, and started to cry again. ‘That’s Dolly Farrell.’

4

Limehouse, 1945-55

Dolly Farrell went to the bad early on in life, but when she was born, a blank page for history to write on, she already had one major distinction: she came into the world just as Adolf Hitler left it. She was yanked, already screaming, from her mother’s body on the same day the beaten Fuhrer, trapped in his Berlin bunker by the oncoming Allies, decided that the party was over, and put a bullet in his brain.

‘And not a minute too soon. Fucking shame the crazy bastard didn’t do that five years earlier,’ said Sam, Dolly’s father, as he heard the news while smoking a celebratory Player’s down in the sitting room of their rented terrace house. He could hear the new baby bawling its head off upstairs and thought in admiration, Jesus, the mouth on that kid.

My son, he thought, and smiled to himself.

The Farrells were Catholic; not practising as such – there was no church on Sundays for them, no confession – but more or less going by the Catholic creed they’d been raised with. Which meant that this first child, now Dad was demobbed and home from the war and wanting to work on the railways like his dad before him, was going to be followed by many more.

Sam went up after the midwife had done the necessary, cleaned all the muck away, and there was his wife Edie, looking flushed and exhausted, holding the new baby in a blue blanket. Of course it was blue. The blanket was blue because Sam had wanted a boy and refused to countenance anything else. He’d been convinced that the bulge on Edie’s front contained his son, who would play footie with him and be a big healthy lad, take after his dad.

‘My son’s in there,’ he’d once said happily, ecstatic that his wife had got pregnant so quick after he’d come home from the war. Hadn’t expected to live through it, not really, Adolf throwing so much shit at them all, but he had, and he’d climbed down off the train, come home, dropped his trousers and bingo! There was Edie, pregnant.

She’d wanted a girl, of course, but he’d said, ‘No, it’s a boy. Course it’s a boy,’ and he wouldn’t let her get pink stuff for the spare room, only the blue, he was that certain he was right. Sam was always right.

And now look at this. A fucking girl.

Edie’s face was sheepish; she knew he’d be disappointed.

‘It’s a girl, Sam,’ she said quietly.

‘Ah, never mind,’ said Sam, fag still in hand, exhaling an irritable plume of smoke all over the new baby as he peered in for a look. ‘Ugly little runt, ain’t she?’ he joked with a grin. Then he looked at Edie and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. ‘A boy next time, eh?’