Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
ERIN
‘… Argh…!’
I tear at the plastic bag from my head, cursing as I rip it off. It feels like it’s going to burst into flames at any moment.
Rushing into the bathroom, I grab the shower attachment, start rinsing the peroxide off in a panic, sweating and puffing as the cold water gushes onto my burning skin.
Twenty minutes it had said on the box. Only ten had passed and already I couldn’t take the pain anymore.
Marilyn Monroe must’ve been hard as nails.
Regrettably though, it meant I’d had no choice but to cut short my conversation with Detective Dan.
Just as it was getting interesting as well.
The detective has a nice voice; it’s deep, with a sort of gentle consideration to it.
It matches his face somehow. I can’t trust him of course – he’s still a policeman – but I get the impression that he’s something of a maverick by the fact that he’s given me his personal phone number.
Plus he’s a family man, and I like that about him, envy it I suppose.
He’d referenced his wife and children affectionately throughout the article I’d read on him, which makes me feel a touch regretful that I’m going to use him for my own ends, to get information from him.
But all’s fair in love and war – and justice, let’s not forget justice.
I picture Detective Dan right now, reading through my police file. I wonder what he’s thinking, and, moreover, what he’s going to do about it. I wasn’t lying to him when I said he has no idea who he’s dealing with. I wasn’t lying full stop.
My scalp feels tender and sore as I rub my now-much-shorter hair with a towel. Glimpsing myself in the old mirror, I drop the hairbrush, gasp.
I don’t recognise myself. My short, slightly uneven hair is now a bright yellow colour and looks like the bad DIY dye job that it is.
After the toner washes off and it dries though, it lifts slightly, looks a bit cooler and less brassy.
Anyway, it’s no Vidal Sassoon number, but it’ll have to do.
You see, in order to find Samantha Valentine, I have to think like Samantha Valentine.
To beat her at her own game, Erin Santos has to vanish into thin air, just as she did.
I find my small cosmetics bag and begin searching through it for a red lipstick.
It might work well with the blonde. I very rarely wear make-up anymore.
I certainly didn’t need it at Larksmere, though some of the more manageable inmates and I would make each other up from time to time, largely to relieve the monotony and to remind ourselves that we were women, women who once may even have been desirable.
It’s amazing what a bit of lipstick can do to lift your mood, it really is.
‘Wit-woo! You look nice, Molly.’ Pierced Pete raises his eyebrows in quick succession as I enter the bar from the guests’ entrance.
Maybe blondes really do have more fun. When I’d arrived at the pub earlier, I’d made sure that my long dark hair had been tucked up well inside my bobble hat so that no one would see the dramatic change when I revealed my new hair later on.
‘Hope it’s not on my account.’ He winks at me, affords me a glimpse of two gold teeth as he grins. Perhaps it’s the lipstick?
The Bull and Barrow is a typical old-school London pub with worn, burgundy velvet benches, low, orange replica Tiffany lighting, and ugly, dark wooden furnishings.
Years of ingrained nicotine and grime have turned the flock wallpaper a cack-brown and I can almost still smell the stale cigarettes in the air.
My eyes are drawn to a collage of sun-faded photographs on a wall featuring a timeline of people who have enjoyed a drink here – or two, given the look of some of them – over the decades.
Pete, at various stages and ages, features in more or less all of them.
‘We’ve had a fair few famous faces in here over the years, sister, let me tell you,’ he says proudly, nodding at them. ‘All sorts, from Hollywood legends to legendary gangsters, and everything else in between.’
I should probably say now that I’ve deliberately chosen the Bull and Barrow pub as my London HQ. I am not here purely by chance. Though there is a chance that what I’d heard from an inmate at Larksmere is a bunch of bull.
Sandra had mentioned this place, not to me directly, but I’d overheard her talking about it many times in the stories she told other inmates.
Sandra ended up at Larksmere after she became involved in drugs and subsequently, criminal activity, because one very rarely exists without the other.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression as a teenager and had spent what had sounded like a truly horrible life in and out of prison and mental institutions.
She claimed to have been a well-connected drug dealer for a time and, being from London, had mentioned the Bull and Barrow in King’s Cross as being ‘the kind of place where you could get anything, fake ID, drugs, guns, girls…’ ‘A proper den of iniquity,’ she’d called it.
Sandra had shot, and killed, a fellow drug dealer while high on her own supply.
Regrettably, the woman’s five-year-old son had been caught in the crossfire and was seriously injured, though thankfully survived.
Subsequently, Sandra tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the neck, only somehow the bullet missed every vital part that could’ve ended her life and exited her body without doing any lasting damage, save for the visible (and invisible) scars left behind.
I’d been terrified of her when I had first entered Larksmere.
She had the unsettling demeanour of someone who could switch on you in a hair’s breadth and was built like a barn door.
Largely though, she left me alone, and I never had any trouble from her personally.
Sandra liked to tell stories, so it’s still a long shot, coming here, but I had overheard her mention a heavily tattooed and pierced guy called Pete who ran this place. It has to be the same guy I’m currently looking at.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I say. I can’t help wondering, as I stare at their faces, what they might be doing now, these people captured in these photos, smiling and happy for that brief moment in time, and what’s become of them.
‘You want a drink before you go off out and make someone’s night tonight?’
Pete grins at me again, a touch lasciviously perhaps. Is he flirting with me? Aside from that mad moment with Malcolm earlier, which I’m still trying to process, I’ve been out of the game for so long that I can’t tell.
‘Go on, why not?’ I smile, hoping I haven’t got lipstick on my teeth. That’s never a good look. ‘I’ll have a Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke.’
‘A double for the lady?’
‘When in Rome…’
‘You’re looking at the photographs there…’ He starts to fix my drink. ‘Were you looking for someone in particular?’
The fact that he asks me this question makes me think that I’m definitely in the right place – he’s suspicious.
‘Actually, I was looking for my friend, Sandra. Sandra Morton, Morty.’
His eyes widen a touch in surprise and, I’m hoping, recognition. ‘I thought she might be in one of them.’
‘Big Sandra, South London Sandra, you mean?’
Well, Sandra was definitely ‘big’ and I believe she was from Peckham, originally.
‘Yeah, that’s her. She spoke highly of this place, and of you. She said if ever I was in London, that I should come and see you and that you’d look after me.’
He grins again. It’s definitely lascivious this time. I go along with it. I need his help.
‘Did she now? Well, that was nice of her, wasn’t it?’ He leans in towards me suddenly, his whole demeanour instantly changing. He appears aggressive, even a touch menacing, but he’s going to have to do much better than that to intimidate me.
‘I was at East Sutton Park with her for a while, regrettably,’ I sniff, lie.
East Sutton is an open women’s prison in Kent. I knew Sandra had been there at some point because she had talked about that too.
‘What were you inside for?’ He softens a little, though a touch of wariness remains as he grabs a bottle of bourbon from behind the bar and places it down hard on the wooden surface.
‘Drugs,’ I say. ‘My ex was a dealer. I wouldn’t rat him out so they gave me eighteen months for perverting the course of justice. I made a mistake,’ – I shrug – ‘getting involved with him, I mean.’
He pours another large slug of dark liquid into my glass, watching me carefully. ‘Cheers!’
He bangs it with his own and I swallow back half of it, relish the burn at the back of my throat.
‘Well, you’ll get no judgement here from me, sister.
Like they say, if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything.
So,’ – he pours me another shot of bourbon, his menace dissipating – ‘your accent tells me you’re not local, not originally at least. What brings you to the big smoke then?
Aside from the weather and fair prices – and the good-looking barmen, of course? ’
I let out a little breathy laugh, humour him. I really must work on perfecting different accents. Samantha was so good at them, a born natural.
‘Oh, you know, a bit of business, here and there. A change of scenery is never a bad thing.’ I smile at him. ‘And it’s always nice to meet new people, don’t you think?’
‘I’ll drink to that, sister.’
After topping me up once again, he screws the lid back on the bourbon and props his elbows up onto the bar. He moves his face close to mine – too close for my general comfort, I can feel his breath against my cheek – but I don’t flinch.
‘So, lil sister, are you looking for a mister?’
His breath smells of bourbon with a punchy top note of gum disease. Like most men I meet, I find him repellent and am mistrustful of him, but I remind myself that I’m simply playing a game. I just have to think like Samantha would. I shrug my shoulders at him, smile a little coquettishly.
‘I’ll go wherever Cupid’s arrow takes me.’
He grins back at me, his gold teeth illuminated in the low orange light.
‘So, what else did Big Sandra say about me, then, eh?’
I glance around me. It’s gone midnight and the place has emptied out a bit now; only a few shady-looking suspects remain, lurking behind in the shadows of the dark corners. I prop my elbows up onto the bar against his, shuffle in close and look him straight in his small, dark eyes.
‘She said that you could get me a gun.’