Stay Dead (2 page)

The minute she set foot inside the hall and the door closed behind her, Redmond put his tongue in her mouth and slipped a hand under her dress to touch a silken cool thigh. As he kissed her, his
hand went higher, delving deeper.

‘Oh God . . . oh, Father!’ she gasped in shock and delight against his lips.

‘You’ve been driving me insane,’ he said, and kissed her again.

He said this to all of them, of course, all the little titbits he enjoyed, because it fed their female vanity, made them proud. They’d turned a
priest
, sworn to celibacy, their
charms so overwhelming that even fear of God left him unable to resist.

She was Sally Westover, who was married to Bill Westover, who almost certainly
hadn’t
strayed because he was such a dull bugger, but Father Delaney wasn’t going to tell her
that. Instead he took her upstairs to his single priest’s bed and gave her the hammering of her life.

Then . . .

‘Oh God, the phone. . .’ she moaned.

Damned thing was ringing, right by the bed.

‘Don’t stop,’ he ordered her, snatching it up. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Is that Redmond Delaney?’ asked a male voice.

‘Who wants him?’ asked Redmond, watching Sally’s large pendulous nude breasts bouncing around above him while she straddled him, impaling herself repeatedly on his manhood and
wheezing like an asthmatic chimpanzee.

Oh, she’s a good one
, he thought.

Later he was going to indoctrinate her properly into the ways of the flesh. She’d barely touched the surface, he could see that. She was a keen amateur, that was all. After this afternoon
she would be full of remorse. She was a wife, a mother (he could tell that because she was quite loose), and she would be so guilty. He would tweak that guilt, hang his head in shame, say she had
made him commit this sin, betray his vows.

Oh yes. Such fun and games he would have with Sally Westover. He would introduce her to the delights of pain and ice and fire, to bondage and choking, all those darker aspects of sexuality that
were his preferred territory.

‘This is Gary Tooley,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘You don’t know me, but—’

‘The one who runs the Blue Parrot?’ asked Redmond, thinking that Sally was banging away so hard now that it was getting difficult to maintain his control. He remembered Tooley.
Redmond had a good memory, a very fine brain in fact, and he knew that Gary Tooley worked for the Carters.

He wondered – briefly – how Tooley had got hold of this number. He didn’t like people tracking him down; as a rule, Redmond liked to do the stalking if there was stalking to be
done. In fact, he enjoyed it.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’ Gary sounded surprised. ‘I’ve got some information for you.’

‘What information?’

‘You won’t believe it,’ said Gary.

‘Tell me.’

‘Nah. Not over the phone. We need to meet up.’

‘That’s not convenient.’ Sally gasped and Redmond raised a finger:
shush
.

‘It will be when you hear what it is.’

‘All right.’ Redmond was mildly intrigued. ‘When and where?’

Gary named a place, a time. Redmond said: ‘This had better be worth my while.’

‘It is,’ said Gary, and put the phone down.

‘This is so good,’ groaned Sally, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing . . . and then all at once it was too much, and Redmond grabbed her hips and came.

At the same moment, as he gasped and writhed and thrust at Sally with abandon, there was a knock and the bedroom door opened.

‘Sorry, Father, I forgot the shopping list and I thought I’d better ask—’

Redmond’s housekeeper, Mrs Janner, stopped dead in the doorway and stared at the naked couple on the bed, her face a mask of shock. Sally daintily put her hands up to cover her breasts.
Redmond just lay there, thinking,
Well, that’s that then
.

That was the day Gary Tooley first got in touch with him, the same day that Mrs Janner phoned the bishop, the same day that Redmond Delaney was summarily dismissed from the priesthood.

Pity, really, because he had liked it.

While it lasted.

The Palermo Lounge nightclub, June 1994

The uniformed police got the call at 11.24 on a Friday morning, and by 11.42 they were there, talking to an hysterical young barman called Peter Jones.

‘She opens the front entrance door at eleven, every day. But today I got here and it was still locked. I thought she was ill in bed or something, so I used my own key. She don’t like
me doing that, but what else could I do?’

‘Why doesn’t she like you doing that?’ asked one of the uniformed police, his weary sigh and set face saying he’d seen it all before, and then some.

They were standing in the big bar, backlit with blue fluorescent lights, and all was serene down here. As in the other Carter-owned clubs, the Blue Parrot and the Shalimar, there was lots of
gold leaf on the walls, and angels and cherubs flying around the ceiling, dark tobacco-brown carpeting underfoot and about a hundred chairs decked out in faux tiger skins set out around circular
tables. There were teensy little podiums with poles for the dancers. Gold chain curtains concealed exits over at the far right-hand side of the vast room; and there was a staircase, roped off and
leading upwards, on their left. Neither of the two cops wanted to go up that staircase.

Pete was dragging his hands through his close-cropped blond hair, over and over, like he wanted to rip it straight out of his head, and his baby-blue eyes were reddened with tears.

‘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.’

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?’

Edie did have a boy next time – two years after Dolly arrived – and Sam got royally pissed down the Dog and Duck celebrating with his mates and then reeled home
and clouted Edie when she commented on the state of him.

It was a lesson learned – after that, Edie didn’t say a word when he got drunk, which he often did after a hard day on the railways. He’d started in the signal box after the
war, but it was all hours and he didn’t like being cooped up in there, pulling levers and listening for the many different-sounding bells. It was all too complicated. So he applied for
another job and went out on to the tracks as a wheeltapper. He liked that, all his mates were around him and they toasted him, slapped him on the back, said what a great feller he was.

Sam thought he was a very great feller indeed. After the boy was born – Nigel, they named him – Sam lost no time in climbing on board Edie and impregnating her a third time. A
girl this time, Sarah, and then he got to work on Edie again and – at last! – another boy to be proud of, little Dick. After that, Sam put his own little dick to good use, and then
along came Sandy, who was a boy but a bit sickly, prone to the sniffles.

‘She shouldn’t have many more,’ said the midwife, who’d attended all five of Edie’s births and could see that it was dragging the poor cow down. Not only having
the kids, but on a railwayman’s wage it was a fight to keep them all clothed and fed. Edie was struggling, anyone could see that. If they wanted to. Which Sam didn’t.

Sam wanted a big Catholic family, seven minimum.

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ he told the midwife.

Who’d asked for her opinion anyway? He was keeping the kids fed, just about, although of course he had to have his fags and beer first. After all, he was the breadwinner, wasn’t
he? There had to be something in it for him.

After Edie’s fifth pregnancy there was a stillbirth, then a miscarriage, then another stillbirth. Tired, depressed, Edie finally said to her husband, enough. He would have to use
something if he wanted to go on enjoying marital relations. That earned her another clout around the ear. He was from a good Catholic family, Sam told her in a rage; what she was talking about,
wasn’t that a sin?

‘I can’t go on with it, Sam,’ said Edie in tears. ‘It ain’t fair.’

‘It’s God’s will,’ said Sam, and that was an end to it. He was doing well on the railways, he was responsible for a small gang of men on the tracks now, his pay was
better than before. There was no reason he shouldn’t enjoy his own wife and have the big Catholic family he wanted. No reason at all.

‘I’m so tired,’ whinged Edie.

He was sick of the sound of her voice, always whining on about what a hard life she had. He supported her, didn’t he? Treated her all right. Wasn’t that enough?

Nothing would deter Sam from making her perform her wifely duties. Back from the pub, he would fall into bed and right away he’d be on her. Sometimes she protested, and then it turned
into straightforward rape, but if ever Sam felt a twinge of conscience over that he salved it quickly – because he knew that a man could never rape his wife, he had legal rights over her.
Conjugal rights, wasn’t that a fact?