Stay Dead (20 page)

The senior guard looked at the fireman. Then he glanced around at the other men there.

‘We’re all straight on what we say?’ said the guard. ‘He slipped, and by the time he got back up it was too late, the engine crushed him. It was an accident. All
right?’

The fireman spat on the ground. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ he said.

The train driver couldn’t speak. He staggered away and sat down on the hard concrete. He couldn’t believe they’d done it, but they had.

They’d killed Sam Farrell.

When she came into the kitchen at teatime, the first thing that struck Sarah was that Nigel was crying. Sarah had never seen Nigel cry before. It alarmed her. And even more
alarming, a pair of policemen were sitting at the kitchen table with Mum, who was looking blank-faced as always. Dick wasn’t racing around like he usually did. Sandy sat and stared at the
kitchen table.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked, but Mum only looked up, then back down again, saying nothing.

One of the two Old Bill said: ‘There’s been a very bad accident, your mum’s upset.’

Sarah looked at Edie. Mum didn’t look upset. She just looked the same as always: disinterested.

Nigel burst out through his tears: ‘Dad’s dead, Sar! He’s bloody dead.’

Sarah pulled up a chair as her legs were about to go. She fell into it, stunned, and looked at the policemen.

‘
There was an accident,’ said the one who had spoken before. ‘On the railway. An engine crushed him. I’m so sorry.’

‘Was it . . . quick?’ asked Mum.

All the kids turned and looked at her. Mum hardly ever uttered a word these days; this was unusual.

‘Very quick, you can put your mind at rest on that.’

‘He didn’t suffer?’

‘No. He didn’t.’

Now Edie started crying too. ‘Ah God, poor Sam,’ she gasped.

Sarah sat there at the table and looked at Nigel snuffling into his handkerchief and Mum wailing away, and thought,
Why can’t I cry?

She really ought to. It was expected. Even Dick and little Sandy were looking on the verge of tears. She thought of Dad, dead, and still the tears refused to come and she was irritated at
herself for not caring as she should.

Didn’t she care at all that her dad was dead?

Deep in her heart she knew she didn’t.

The only thing she felt was relief.

Redmond Delaney phoned Celia Bailey later that same day.

‘It’s done,’ he said.

‘Good God.’

‘A terrible accident.’

‘Right.’

‘Tell your girl there.’

‘I will. And . . . thank you, Mr Delaney.’

‘It’s a pleasure,’ he said.

London, 1994

Jackie’s ‘contact’ turned out to be no bloody good – just one of his drinking buddies looking to tap up Jackie’s new source of income for a fiver
or two. Feeling she was being milked like some prize heifer, Annie left Jackie there in disgust and got a taxi back to the hotel.

When the taxi pulled up, she paid the driver. The red-liveried doorman opened the cab door for her, asked if she’d had a good day. She hadn’t. She’d had the day from hell
– they were
all
days from hell right now – but she smiled and told him yes, and thanked him and went into the cosy reception, resplendent with bowls of red carnations, and into
the lift and up to her room. She was barely through the door when the phone rang.

‘Mrs Carter? I’m sorry to disturb you but there is a police detective in reception asking for you, a DCI Hunter.’

‘Send him up,’ said Annie, shrugging off her coat and plugging in the kettle.

A minute later, there was a knock at the door. Hunter stood there, looking more sober-faced than ever. Annie stood aside and he came into the room. She closed the door.

‘What is it?’ she asked hopefully. ‘You heard something about Dolly?’

‘No, Mrs Carter, I’ve heard something about
you
.’

‘Tea?’ asked Annie.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Well, go on then. What is it?’ Annie gazed at him curiously.

‘DS Duggan says you tried to bribe her to get information.’

Annie stared at him straight-faced. ‘Really? She’s mistaken.’

‘Oh. Is she.’

‘I spoke to her, yes. Told her I was keen to help in whatever way I could. But bribery? She must have misunderstood me.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yeah. I do.’

Hunter watched her closely. ‘You know what? I think she understood your meaning perfectly well. I think you offered her money, and she refused.’

Annie shrugged. ‘Nah. As I say, she must have misunderstood.’

Hunter stepped forward so that he was almost nose to nose with Annie.

‘Understand
this
, Mrs Carter,’ he said quietly. ‘If I hear one more report of you trying to coerce a police officer in that way, you’ll be inside a cell quicker
than you can say knife. Is
that
understood.’

‘Yeah, fine.’ Annie nodded. ‘Any news then? On the case?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Do you want to know if
I
have any news, on the case?’

‘Mrs Carter. If you don’t share any information you might have with me, then you are impeding an investigation and that is a very serious offence.’

‘I know that. And I told you I’d share. Of course I will.’

Hunter eyed her sceptically. The woman was deep, unknowable. Utterly mysterious. Married to a man who’d evaded the law over many years, linked to the American Mafia.

He didn’t like these Scottish visits of hers, they made his detective’s nose twitch with interest. He’d looked into them, curious, but they’d led nowhere. When she went
up there, she always departed from London Heliport, sited by the Thames and opposite Chelsea Harbour, and was usually taken to a private residence outside Edinburgh. From there? He had no idea.
Yet.

‘Tell me what you know,’ he said, and started walking around the room, twitching the huge moss-green tasselled drapes at the floor-to-ceiling window aside to stare out at a sodden
Kensington Park. In the foreground, trees whipped about in the wind. The rain sheeted down, fogging the view of the palace over on the far side of the park.

‘Her father got her pregnant way back, years ago,’ said Annie. ‘There. Is that new information for you?’

Hunter turned his head and looked back at her. His mouth was pursed with distaste.

‘Are you
sure
about that?’ he asked.

‘Certain.’

‘Christ, that’s horrible.’

‘It’s the truth. And . . .’ She hesitated, but telling the Bill couldn’t hurt Dolly now. ‘She had someone organize a hit on her old man.’

Hunter sent her a sharp glance. ‘Who?’

Annie shrugged and said nothing. She wasn’t about to finger Redmond Delaney to the cops, not now, not ever. She wasn’t a grass and she wasn’t a fool, either.

Hunter let the curtain drop. He came back across the room to where she stood. ‘Tell me all about Dolly Farrell,’ he said.

Annie had to swallow hard to get the words out. ‘There’s not much to tell. Dolly was a tart. She worked in a whorehouse. That was
after
her father did that to her when she was
a young girl. After that happened in her own home, where she was supposed to be
safe
, I imagine anything else was pretty easy.’ Annie sat down on a bulky pink Chesterfield sofa. Dolly
would have loved it, this sofa. She felt sick, talking about Dolly this way, knowing how Dolly would have hated anyone knowing about the past she’d tried so hard to bury.

‘Later in life, she worked for my husband, and for me, managing clubs. She was good at it. Got on well with the staff, was tough enough to deal with any problems. She’d seen it all,
done it all. Nothing fazed her, nothing shocked her. Not surprisingly. I suppose the lines get sort of blurred, when you’ve had an experience like that.’

‘So . . .’ Hunter was watching Annie’s face ‘. . . despite her early setbacks, she was a woman to reckon with.’

‘Dolly was strong. She had to be, to survive. Stronger than anyone I ever knew.’

‘And she got on well with the staff.’

‘Have you heard different? I certainly haven’t. The one thing I do know? Everyone who worked for her
loved
Dolly.’

‘That’s what I’ve been hearing too.’

Annie ran an agitated hand through her hair. ‘I just thought . . . well, I had this thing stuck in my head and I thought that this awful thing happening to her . . . getting shot, being
killed . . . I just thought that it could be coming from anywhere, couldn’t it? A punter she upset, a supplier, a member of staff, who knows?’

‘I keep coming back to the idea of a lover,’ said Hunter.

‘Dolly didn’t have lovers. She didn’t rate men at all, and God knows that is no surprise. She had no kids, no family that she wanted to know of, no nothing. Her friends were
her family. Me, and Ellie.’ Annie swallowed hard. ‘That’s all she had. And I suppose she must have been lonely sometimes, but that never occurred to me when she was alive. Poor
cow.’ Annie shuddered and looked at Hunter. ‘Or maybe it could be coming from somewhere in her past. She had a
horrible
past.’

His eyes held hers. ‘Leave it to the police, Mrs Carter.’

‘Of course,’ said Annie. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘You said there was more,’ Redmond growled down the phone at Gary Tooley.

Days had passed since their meeting. He was beyond impatient now.

‘There
is
. I know there is. But the old bint, you don’t know when – or if – she’s going to call again. She’s crazy, unpredictable. I have to
wait.’

‘I paid you five grand,’ said Redmond.

‘Yeah, and I gave you the stuff you wanted for that.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘Tough.’

‘What use is that information to me? Barolli’s dead. This mad sister of his? Let the old bitch suffer and die at her own pace. Do I care?’

‘I don’t know what you want from me. I’ve told you—’

‘I want more. You said there would be more, and I want it.’

Gary heaved a sigh. ‘As I said—’ he started, and Redmond slammed the phone down.

Gary put the receiver back on the cradle with a satisfied smile. He hoped he wasn’t pushing this too hard. In fact, he already
had
the information Redmond wanted,
but Gary wanted him hungrier, willing to part with even more dosh this time.

Ten grand
, he was thinking.

Yes, Gary already knew these things, but he was holding on, keeping his powder dry, building up Redmond’s interest and anxiety until he was
desperate
for a word on all this. Gary
was playing a long game. Oddly, that batty old cow Gina Barolli hadn’t phoned him for a while now, but that didn’t matter – he
had
what he needed. That crazy-eyed cunt
Delaney might be snapping at his heels, but he could handle him.

He was sure of it.

Ten grand for the big one, for the best and most shocking thing of all.

The news that Constantine Barolli was
alive
.

Annie lay in bed that night and thought about Dolly’s past. She fell asleep and dreamed of chasing a murderer through a church with Hunter, and then the murderer morphed
into Darren, who had been her friend, camp as a row of pink tents and dead,
long
dead. Then he was laughing and joking with Ellie as they both sang along to ‘Summer Holiday’. At
first they were in the church and then the church became upstairs in Auntie Celia’s old knocking shop.

Halfway through the song, the flesh started to melt off Darren’s face and Dolly popped her head around the door – not Dolly as she had been then, a rough and uncouth brass, but the
Dolly she had been just recently, well-groomed, middle-aged.

Dolly told them it was the heat coming off the lines, nothing to worry about, but Darren just kept melting like a candle, his eyes vanishing under strings of waxen flesh, his cheeks dissolving,
his mouth slanting to one side like a stroke victim’s, and the music just went on and on, pounding into her head, louder and louder, and then Annie woke up abruptly, panting, sweating,
shooting up in the bed to stare wild-eyed into blackness.

She flicked on the bedside light, pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked at the big empty bed and wished that Max was here with her. You got used to a person being there, and Max’s
presence had always been so reassuring. With him around, you felt nothing could go too badly wrong. Without him . . .

Christ! Where is he? What’s going on?

Earlier, she had tried the Prospect villa number again; still, he wasn’t there. And he hadn’t even phoned home.

Anxiety gripped her. What if he was planning to leave her, and the next time she saw him it would be just so he could tell her goodbye? The terror of that crushed her chest like a vice. More
than anything she longed to go home, to go back to being in Barbados with Max, happy, unworried.

But she had to stay here in London. She was
needed
here. Dolly’s death could not go unpunished and the truth was she didn’t trust the law – not even Hunter, who had been
useful in the past, had even once pulled her cut and bleeding from a near-terminal wreck – to handle the job of tracking down Dolly’s killer.

She knew she was needed elsewhere, too: the
pizzino
, the note, hastily passed to her in the street.
Come at once
.

Well, she couldn’t. Not now.

They know
, she thought.
That’s what this is. Everyone knows.

And . . . oh shit, Max knows too.

She reached for a bottle of mineral water, poured herself a glass and drank half of it down in one swallow; she was parched. She looked at the bedside clock; a quarter to four in the morning and
already outside the traffic was starting. Soon it would be daylight and the birds would sing and London would come heaving back to her feet after the night’s rest and start her frenzied
daytime dance again.