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.
But Dolly would still be dead.
Annie squeezed her eyes tight shut.
Ah, Jesus, why her? Come on, God, if you had to take somebody, why’d you have to take Dolly?
There were no answers.
It was just the heat coming off the lines.
Crazy, crazy dreams. What the hell did that mean?
She had no idea. She lay back down, flicked off the light. Thought of old friends, dead friends. Darren and Aretha and Billy . . . and now Dolly had joined them.
They’re up there now, in heaven, singing ‘Summer Holiday’ . . .
That thought at least made her smile. Her eyes closed. This time, she slept and the nightmares stayed away.