by Jessie Keane
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.’
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?’
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 t
he 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?
There came another miscarriage.
Another stillbirth.
Edie seemed to shrink into herself, become like a shadow. She lost weight and her face was pale with misery; she was no longer the pretty, engaging and hopeful girl he’d married, and Sam felt cheated.
‘I don’t know what the fuck you want from me,’ he raged at her. ‘You’ve got a bloody good earner looking after you, you’ve even got help around the house now Dolly’s getting older. What the hell do you want?’
Edie never answered that question openly, but in her head she did: she wanted him to leave her alone. She wanted him to go out one day and never come home. That was what she wanted, and if she said as much he would kill her stone dead. So she didn’t; couldn’t. Worn out by the misery of endless pregnancies and bloody miscarriages and devastating stillbirths, she stepped back from the world. And in her heart she grew to hate him, her Sam, once her best love, her only love. All that had turned to dust.
5
Limehouse, 1955–57
When she was ten, Dolly Farrell considered running away from home. She was at primary school with her friends, and she liked primary school and never missed a day because it was much nicer than home. The school was a small Catholic-funded centre of education, and it looked like a church; in fact it had been built in the same year as the Victorian church just up the road, beside the recreation ground with its huge, terrifying slide for the kids to play on.
For Dolly, primary school was an escape. It felt safe and there were big brightly coloured posters up all around the room she sat in every day, saying A is for Apple (a big rosy-red apple to illustrate) and all the way through the alphabet to Z is for Zebra (a striped horse on this one). Even the teachers she hated weren’t too horrible. Mrs Lockhart took the kids for maths and clonked you on the head if she felt your work wasn’t up to scratch. Mr Vancy, who taught English, lobbed a rock-hard oblong blackboard duster at you if you chatted at the back of the class during lessons; and Dolly, who didn’t much care for education, was always chatting at the back of the class with her mates Vera and Lucy.
Dolly loved being a milk monitor and handing out the bottles from the crates to the younger kids, and having biscuits at break time, and the meals were okay, even if the cabbage was boiled to fuck and the custard was thin as cat piss.
She liked the priest, Father Potter, who came in every Friday and gave the kids a sermon in assembly. He played lovely classical music to them, saying in his super-posh voice that he wished them to learn a love of fine things, of beauty, and to go out into the world the better for it. She liked walking along the road in a crocodile-line of two-by-twos with all the other kids, one teacher at the front, another at the back, all the way to the church to sing hymns about praising the Lord.
She didn’t think she had much to praise Him for, not really, but she liked being in the church, she liked the stained-glass windows and the big angels with their luminous green and red feathered wings and the dumpy little cherubs with floaty hankies over their bits; it felt safe.
Then one day it was Lucy’s birthday and she and Vera were invited back to Lucy’s house for tea and cake. Lucy’s house was in between Dolly’s and the school; Dolly would call in there in the mornings, trailing her younger sister and her brothers behind her – eight-year-old Nigel, seven-year-old Sarah, little Dick and the youngest and frailest boy, Sandy, the poor bastard, who was always smothered in pungent Vick and goose grease over the winters to keep him from catching colds. Neither the Vick nor the goose grease seemed to prevent illness in Sandy, but Mum gave it a go when she was well enough to bother, which wasn’t often; so usually the task of greasing him up fell to Dolly.
Dolly and Vera and Lucy had a whale of a time at Lucy’s birthday tea, and Vera went home clutching a slice of sponge cake in a brown paper bag. A few minutes later, Dolly trailed out the door. Her brothers and sister had gone on home earlier, straight from school, and now the light was starting to fade as the sun set in the west, lighting the winter sky up like a huge apricot-coloured lamp.
Dolly stared at it, thinking it was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. Clutching her bag of cake, she sighed and started homeward, and was passing the recreation ground when she saw the slide there. She ambled over, pulling out cake crumbs from the bag and eating them, and calculated that she had time for a go on the slide before going home.
But what if she didn’t go home?
The thought entered her head and for a moment she felt a lift of the spirits, like those mighty angels’ wings had gently pushed her upward. The thought of that . . .
Oh, the thought of that was wonderful.
When she thought of home, she thought of Mum sitting slumped and staring into space in a chair at the dirty kitchen table, of Dad roaring about the place the worse for drink. It made her guts crease up in anguish. She would never be able to invite Lucy back to hers for tea, that was for sure. She would be too ashamed. It would be all round the school in no time that she lived in a filthy hovel with cockroaches crawling around the floor and you wouldn’t want to eat your tea there or even touch anything in the bloody place, it was all sticky and grubby with filth.
Dolly tried to help her mum around the house, she really did. But with five kids and two uncaring adults, the place was a tip. And now they’d started giving her homework and saying that soon she’d be off to big school, so she had to be prepared to work harder.
God, angels, are you listening? she wondered as the sky deepened to rose-gold. Streaky charcoal clouds drifted through it, like thick pencil-marks on a page. How the fuck can I work any harder? Don’t I work hard enough now?
She was the one who had to get her younger siblings ready for school in the mornings; she was the one who had to get in from school and cook something for the family. She was the one who did just about everything there was to do, and more besides.
Through it all Mum just sat there, ignoring the housework, barely even touching the food Dolly put in front of her. The doctor had given Mum some pills, but they didn’t seem to be working. Every morning when the kids set off for school, Edie would be slumped at the kitchen table, and when they got home she’d still be there, in the same chair, as if she hadn’t moved an inch all day. And Dolly thought she probably hadn’t.
Dolly finished off the cake, screwed the bag into a ball and threw it down. Then she climbed up the slide, ten steps. It had taken her years to overcome her fear of the slide; it was slippery as polished glass going down, and you shot off the end of it in the most fearsome way. If you weren’t careful, you’d fall awkwardly and break your leg – it had happened last year to one of the younger kids. And Dolly didn’t want to break her leg.
But then, if she did she’d be taken to hospital, and that would be good, better than home. Wouldn’t it?
It was nearly dark now.
Dolly released her grip on the hand-holds at the top of the slide and whizzed, flew, cannoned down it and whirled off the end almost laughing, breathless, exhilarated.
‘Dolly!’
She stiffened. Turned. Dad was pacing toward her, coming quick, and there was something angry about every short, bandy-legged line of his body. Suddenly all the magic of the day dropped away as if it had never been.
He bent over, enveloping her in the smell of Old Holborn and gamey unwashed clothes. She thought he might be reaching for the bag she’d tossed on the ground, but he wasn’t. He grabbed her arm, hurting her, and bent and slapped her hard across
the legs, twice. It stung like hell and she let out a cry.
‘What the fuck are you doing, worrying your mum like this?’ he shouted. ‘Come on!’ he said, and started dragging her off the field and back to the road, back to home.
For a while, she’d almost felt free.
But it didn’t last long.
It never did.
6
Dolly hated secondary school. The primary had been nice, tucked in near the church. It was small. But big school was just that: too damned big. She didn’t know anybody there because Lucy and Vera were put in the top stream and to her embarrassment she was put in the bottom, along with all the other no-hopers who had home troubles or who never paid attention in class.
OK, she admitted it; she’d never worked much at primary school. She’d mucked about and enjoyed it; it was a relief to be at school and not at home. Now, she was paying the price. Lucy and Vera had somehow cracked on, worked harder than her; but then, they had good backgrounds, nice parents. She didn’t.
Well, Mum was nice, to be fair. She just couldn’t cope, that was all. Edie was under the doctor now, taking a lot of pills and sometimes she’d be carted away in an ambulance. Dad had gathered the kids together the first time and told them that Mum was getting some treatment for her nerves, that it would help her, make her better.
For a while, it did. It was usually about three months, Dolly reckoned, before the wheels came off the truck in Mum’s brain once again. Then it was just her sitting in the chair all day, crying, and then it was off in the ambulance for another course of ‘treatment’.
‘What do you think they do?’ asked Sandy, the youngest, eyes wide with terror. ‘Do they strap her to a table or something, inject her with stuff . . . ?’
‘Plug her into the mains, that’s what they do,’ said Dick, looking quite excited.
‘No, they don’t,’ said Dolly, although it was true, more or less. Dad had told her, because she was the eldest and she was his special girl, his favourite, that the treatment Mum got at the hospital was electric shock therapy. But Dolly clouted Dick upside the head because he had a big mouth and couldn’t he see that Sarah was frightened?