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 getit 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. ’
Chapter 4
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