Dead Heat

by Jessie Keane

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

The gripping new gangland thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller and Queen of the Underworld, Jessie Keane.

Once, he loved her.
Now he's going to put her away for murder.

Christie Doyle is living the dream: she has a beautiful mansion on the South Downs with an infinity pool and stables, and her husband, Kenny, spoils her rotten. It's her birthday and she is the centre of the most amazing party.

And then the bombshell drops. Kenny confesses to an affair and asks for a divorce. Worse is to come when the 'other woman'- Lara, nineteen years old and pregnant with Kenny's child - is found dead.

Suspicion falls on Christie and the Doyles' life is ripped apart as the police hunt for evidence: lead investigator DCI Dexter Cooper is a face from Christie's own troubled past and he knows better than anyone what she is capable of.

The race to unmask a killer is on...

Release date: February 1, 2024

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE

1994

At just turning forty, Mrs Christie Doyle looked damned good. She should have, too, with the amount that was spent on the upkeep of her toned body, her white-blonde hair and her serenely beautiful face. Looking good was all part of the deal she’d made years ago with her husband Kenny Doyle – she understood that and it was the least she could do, not to shirk her side of the bargain.

Sometimes, Christie looked around at the people they knew and she wondered about them. Were they happy? Bored? Contented? Restless? She herself was a bird in a gilded cage and she knew it. She had the house – well, houses, but this one she always thought of as home was a place in a countryside valley set just twenty miles outside of London. There was also the Primrose Hill house that was now worth into the millions, and the Malaga villa Kenny had kept after their brief Spanish sojourn, using it for boys-only golfing trips. She had the husband and the flashy sports car on the drive (which she hardly ever used; she was nervous of cars) while Kenny favoured his silver Roller.

She had everything, didn’t she?

Cue hollow laughter.

She had been Kenny Doyle’s wife for just over twenty years and only she knew the full story behind that. The sad tale of a young love thwarted, a lifelong affair of the heart missed out on by the merest fraction.

If anyone ever asked her about it she would have just shrugged and said it was all far in the past, which was true enough. Very true. Get half a bottle of fizz inside her and she might even tell you more. But mostly, she wouldn’t. Discussing it – even after all this time – was like a hot, burning pain in her gut.

Sometimes she still dreamed of Dex. And of the crash, the one that had happened when she was just four, the one in which her parents died. She still has a vague, troubling memory of her mother, crying in the front passenger seat, with her father at the wheel. The rain, the swoosh of the windscreen wipers – and then the huge whoomph of the fire as it took hold. Just bits and pieces, horrible hazy little snatches of memory. Meaning nothing, not now, not after all this time, but unsettling; disturbing – yes, haunting.

The past haunted her.

She thought it would haunt her until her dying day.

1

1958

The thing Christie Butler sometimes remembered about the crash that should have killed her was the rain. Then the lights, slashing through it and into the Ford Anglia saloon’s fuggy interior, dazzling her. Just those two things, really. Everything else was unclear. She was four years old and she was tired, drifting off to sleep. The windscreen wipers whooshed back and forth, back and forth, soothing her. The family had been to the seaside for the day and the weather had been bright blue and sunny. Wonderful. Now, the weather had turned and there was a rumble of thunder in the air, but she wasn’t afraid of that because she was a big girl, her dad always said so, and the noise was just the angels moving the furniture up in heaven.

Christie’s mum Anna was in the front passenger seat, holding her little red transistor radio on her lap, and the Everly brothers were singing ‘Wake Up Little Susie’. Mum’s right hand was on Dad’s thigh. They seemed tense, whispering: but it had been a good day, Christie was sure it had, down on the coast, taking in the brisk sea air, eating ice creams, collecting bits and pieces from rock pools, putting tiny pink crabs and bright anemones in the little red bucket Dad had bought her today, so that she could examine them more closely.

‘But you must always put them back in the sea where they’re safe,’ Mum warned her. Dutifully, Christie did.

‘I had to say something,’ Dad was saying to Mum. ‘How could I not, when that bastard . . . ?’

‘Graham!’ said Mum, glancing back at Christie. ‘I know. It’s awful. I understand.’

Dad had said a bad word.

Now they were homeward-bound and whatever the adult concerns of her parents, for Christie it was all good. She was so tired! There was just the slashing rain and the strobing lights of other cars, but inside, in here, there was warmth and music. Dribbles of water were running down the window beside her and they were nearly home – Christie knew that – nearly home and then Mum would tuck her up in bed and Dad would kiss her goodnight and all would be well. Her eyes flickered closed.

Then, the bend in the road. A sharp bend. Lights. Christie tipped hard sideways and her eyes shot open at a small shriek of alarm from her mother. The lights were blinding. And then there was a noise so loud, a sensation of impact so massive, that Christie tumbled off the back seat and into the footwell behind her mother’s seat. There was the hideous sound of tearing metal. Blistering heat.

Christie wanted it to stop. Wide awake now, she was frightened. Bewildered. There was an inrush of air, stark cold air from the front of the car and suddenly, shockingly, the car wasn’t moving anymore. The engine stopped. The windscreen wipers halted mid-sweep. Christie could hear the tick-tick-tick of the engine cooling. The Everlys had stopped singing ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ and she could hear her mother, crying. Nothing from Dad. Dad was her hero; he could cope with anything, do anything. Why wasn’t he speaking, moving, doing something?

Dripping.

The rain.

Or maybe not. She could smell oil like when Dad checked over his car engine, something like that. Still there was no sound from him. No movement.

She crouched there in the footwell for a long, long time; it felt like forever. Mum stopped crying and Christie was afraid to call out to her because if she didn’t get an answer, what would that mean?

Eventually there were sirens, and then someone with a big red face yanked the door beside her open and, his mouth smiling, his teeth crooked, he pulled her out.

‘Come on, lovey, let’s get you out of here,’ he said.

Christie was too frightened to move, though. She was only four, not much more than a baby, clutching the teddy bear she’d been given on the day she was born, that she didn’t like to be parted from, that she had even taken with her to the beach today.

She shook her head. She wanted Mum. Needed to hear her voice. But Mum wasn’t speaking; she wasn’t crying. And why was Dad not moving?

‘It’ll be all right,’ said the man reassuringly, but she could see something in his eyes that said different. Christie let him help her out then, let him drape a blanket around her and carry her quickly away – but over his shoulder she saw the soaking, petrol-shedding mangled mess that was Dad’s precious little Ford Anglia.

Christie had a horrible feeling that things would never be ‘all right’ again. She was bundled into the back of a big bright ambulance and there were shouts outside, people saying get back, get back! There was a boom, a rush of noise and the sound of crackling flames. People were shouting. Christie asked the people in the ambulance, were Mum and Dad coming too?

‘They’re coming later,’ said a man, smoothing a hand over her hair, pushing her down onto a bed. His mouth was smiling, like the fireman’s had been, but his eyes weren’t. ‘Sit down, poppet. Let’s look you over, all right? Everything’s going to be fine.’

It was a lie, Christie could tell.

Later, she would know that she was the miracle girl, the little blonde cutie who had been in the papers, the one who was meant to have died along with her parents in a tragic blazing wreckage when the family car had spun off the road. And quite a few times, over the years that followed, Christie wished that had been the case.

That she hadn’t been the miracle girl at all.

That she had perished; that her life was over and done.

2

Days followed after the crash – endless empty days. People came and asked her questions. Words, adult words, floated above her head but she just wanted her mum and dad. Grim faces stared down at her. Someone said adoption and there were raised voices, hushed meetings. While it all went on, Christie stayed at the house of her father’s brother and sister-in-law, Uncle Jerome and Aunt Julia. She sat on a little bed in their spare bedroom, in their big house that was so much grander, so much more fashionable, than her parents’ house had ever been.

Christie had loved her parents’ house. There, Mum had brushed out Christie’s hair every night, kissed her and called her ‘little angel’, then tickled her and laughed. Christie remembered that. And standing on a chair to kiss her father goodnight.

‘Go and pester your mother,’ he’d say, smiling as she dropped butterfly kisses all around his scratchy chin, fogging up his thick black-rimmed glasses. ‘Go on.’ He’d laugh, and lift her down and say: ‘Sweet dreams. I love you.’

Her parents’ house had felt warm, like Mum was warm, like Dad was too. But they were gone. Here, in this grand Victorian place with its high ceilings and big chandeliers, there was no warmth. There was nothing but a vast expression of wealth. Expensive wallpaper. Lush sofas covered in purple velvet. Persian rugs, all gold and blue. Tables made with marble from Italy and deeply padded dining chairs. Dazzling gold leaf. Money on show, wealth clearly visible, everything laid out to impress.

‘We had to take her in, of course we did,’ she heard Aunt Julia hissing to her husband as she and Uncle Jerome stood one day in the open door to their master bedroom. ‘You know that. What else could we do, Jerome?’

From where she sat clutching her teddy bear, the one she had taken to the seaside on that last trip with her parents, that she had clung to when the fireman pulled her out of the car, Christie could see them. They radiated tension. Big bearded Uncle Jerome was pulling his hands through his wavy dark hair – so like Christie’s father’s hair – and leaning into his wife, whispering replies. Then Aunt Julia’s eyes met hers. Christie saw Julia tap her husband’s arm.

‘She’s listening.’

Jerome looked back over his shoulder, gave Christie a sickly smile. Ever since the crash, Uncle Jerome had looked funny, like he was ill. He still did. Aunt Julia and Uncle Jerome went on into the master suite, and Uncle Jerome closed the door firmly behind them.

*

And so Christie’s future was arranged. This was the way her life was going to be, from now on. Mum and Dad were gone somewhere, up to heaven everyone said. A nice lady had sat her down in a strange office along with Aunt Julia and Uncle Jerome and it was all signed and sealed and agreed that Christie would be given permanently over into their care. They were her godparents after all and loved her very much. She would become a part of their family. Wouldn’t that be nice? the lady asked her.

Christie didn’t say a word. She thought nice would be to have her sweet, gentle mum and her lovely dad back again. And not to have to think, never to have to think again about that night, that crash, the awful moment when she heard the flames begin and knew that they were gone.

But somehow she couldn’t help it – she often thought about the crash. It truly haunted her, filled her dreams. To her intense embarrassment, she would sometimes wet the bed like a helpless baby, waking in terror, clammy, damp, tearful, humiliated by her own weakness, sobbing her heart out, crying out for her mum and her dad.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Aunt Julia would say, but Christie could see that the mess and inconvenience of this intruder child, relative or no, annoyed her. Tight-lipped, she would cram Christie’s dirty sheets into the washing machine, remake the bed. ‘Think nothing of it. Nothing at all.’ She would say it, but she didn’t mean it. There was anger in every line of her body.

‘She’s difficult,’ Aunt Julia told everyone, dismissing Christie’s symptoms of distress.

‘She’ll settle,’ said Uncle Jerome, who rarely spoke to Christie and didn’t seem to much care whether she did or not. Mostly, he ignored her, but one day he kindly put Christie’s dad’s surveying theodolite in the corner of her bedroom – to comfort her, she supposed: and it did. Just a bit.

Christie understood, even at so young an age, that Uncle Jerome had enough to contend with, raising his own kids. He wasn’t keen on the idea of raising his brother’s too, but they were godparents so what could you do? Social services had trampled all over everything in the early stages after his brother and sister-in-law’s deaths, and him and Aunt Julia had been filling in forms for what felt like months. He was irritable, grief-stricken, not himself.

There’d been arguments between him and Aunt Julia over the whole business. How would it look, Christie had heard Aunt Julia say, if they, as godparents, as close relatives of the dead couple, now refused to do what they had once solemnly sworn they would do – and look after Christie?

People would forget, Jerome said. Adoption might be best. But Julia was adamant. God’s sake, they had two of their own. What was the difference, one more?

Christie knew she wasn’t welcome so she tried to be invisible, silent as a ghost. She knew Uncle Jerome didn’t really like having her around the place. That he thought she was spooky. She sleepwalked, sometimes. Once, Uncle Jerome said he’d heard the back door being unlatched and, roused from sleep, he’d followed Christie out into the garden, down to the dark woods, near the biggest of the sheds where the cars and bikes and spare parts for lorries were kept. She’d been standing there, silent, eyes blank.

Jerome complained loudly to his wife – was that creepy, or what? He knew you mustn’t wake sleepwalkers. Wasn’t that a fact? So he had taken Christie by the shoulder and led her, unprotesting, back up to the house and indoors and up to her bedroom.

But after a fashion, eventually, Christie did settle. She lay in bed at night. No one kissed her goodnight; no one read her a bedtime story. She thought of her mother and father and sometimes it frightened her that she could barely remember their faces. She missed them so much. She thought of Mum’s orderly, scented, welcoming home and compared it to this one, which mostly went uncleaned, unloved. Christie had heard her dad once use the expression ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ and that did suit Aunt Julia. Aunt Julia would almost swoon with delight at the thought of dinner with the bank manager. She loved all that.

She’d come from a dirt-poor family struggling on a council estate and when Jerome and Graham had started their building business and the money began to roll in, Julia was in heaven. She would greedily lavish expensive dresses, suits, coats, jewels on her person and on her kids – though never on Christie. She had more chandeliers put up, fabulous settees brought in, costly wallpaper hung on the walls and rugs on the floor – but she would never wash up, or dust, or sweep. Piles of dirty laundry lay all over the kitchen. Julia threw dinner parties but the stove she dreamed up ever more elaborate recipes on was black and crusted with grease; the sink was filthy. The lino on the kitchen floor was usually sticky with grime.

Eventually – when the business was starting to do really well – Julia hired cleaners, but she treated them badly and so there was a high turnover of staff and long periods when the place went back to its normal shambolic state. Left to Aunt Julia, even little Christie could see they would all have drowned in their own muck.

And then there were her aunt and uncle’s own kids, Ivo and Jeanette. The favoured ones, the ones who had always received fabulously expensive presents while Christie got something far simpler. Mum and Dad had given her a home-made rocking horse and a little sweet shop toy so that she could play at grocers. Her parents had never been able to afford anything grand, because every spare penny had gone back into the family’s growing building business, but that hadn’t mattered to Christie. She had adored whatever her parents gave her because those presents had been given with so much love.

‘Is that all you got?’ Jeanette would say to Christie every time she got a present. ‘Look – I got this.’

And she would show her cousin some costly item, her eyes glittering with avarice and spite, all the while watching for Christie’s reaction. Always, Jeanette was disappointed, because Christie wasn’t jealous. Even early on in life, she knew the true value of what her parents had given her.

Jerome and Julia’s kids had never been especially close to Christie before the fatal crash occurred. They had mingled only at rare family parties – birthdays, bonfire nights, Christmases – so when they had, to their shock, found her suddenly installed full-time in their house, an unwanted interloper, they watched her like vicious cats given a new toy to play with. There was Ivo who was ten when Christie moved in, and Jeanette who was six.

‘I don’t suppose they’ll let you stay for long,’ Jeanette lost no time in telling her young cousin, coming in one day and plonking herself down on Christie’s bed without invitation. ‘And you needn’t think you can play with any of my toys.’

But where else would I go? wondered Christie, feeling a shiver of fear. She had seen pictures on the TV of people on the streets, without a home to stay in. Was that her, now? She had to stop wetting the bed! Aunt Julia was sick of it, and if Christie carried on doing it, there must come a day when Aunt Julia would take her out and dump her somewhere, leave her to cope on her own.

‘And what’s this?’ Jeanette snatched Teddy from Christie’s arms.

‘Teddy,’ said Christie. Teddy was bedraggled, chewed up, with brilliant amber-yellow eyes, a smiling mouth, a shocking-red ribbon around his neck. Christie loved him and always kept him close. He was a reminder of her life as it had been before that night; the way it had been before everything broke apart.

‘You’re a big girl now,’ snapped Jeanette. ‘Too big for teddies. And anyway he’s not even a Steiff. I’ve got a Steiff bear – they’re very valuable. This one’s no good. I’ll look after him for you.’

And Jeanette took Teddy away, throwing a taunting grin back at Christie over her shoulder as she left the room and went into her own. She was back within half an hour, bringing Teddy with her. She threw Teddy down on the bed beside Christie.

Christie took one look at the bear her dad had given her on the day she was born and she let out a shriek.

Jeanette had dug out his bright yellow eyes.

Teddy was blind.

3

There was a huge and, for Christie, bewildering crowd of people at the church for her parents’ funeral. Christie’s parents had been popular; there were lots of WI ladies there to see Christie’s mum decently buried, and men from the golf club, business associates and old pals of her dad’s, all wanting to pay their respects. People hugged each other. People cried.

Aunt Julia held Christie’s hand as they walked up the aisle and took their seats at the front of the church. Julia was nodding here and there, acknowledging the other mourners, and then she did the most peculiar thing: she leaned down and kissed Christie’s cheek.

‘Poor lamb,’ she said, loud enough for everyone within ten feet of them to hear.

Aunt Julia had never, ever kissed Christie before. She had never even seemed to notice her that much, not really, but now Aunt Julia had told her that she would be her ‘second mum’. Christie didn’t want a second mum; she wanted her own mum back again. Staring around at the faces of the other mourners, Christie could see that everyone looked both sad and approving of Julia’s gesture.

And then when everyone was seated, some black-suited men brought in the two long flower-laden boxes and laid them gently on covered tables at the front of the church. One of the black-suited men was Uncle Jerome, whose bearded face was paste-white and sweating. He lowered the coffin containing his brother Graham’s remains onto the table and came and sat by Aunt Julia, Christie and his two children.

Then the organist struck a chord and the congregation rose to sing ‘Abide With Me’. After that, they all sat and the vicar droned on about dust and ashes and being reborn in heaven. Then it was time for speeches. Some of the men who had worked with Dad on the building business he had run with Uncle Jerome, contacts on local councils, electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, the labourers from the many J & G Butler Ltd building sites, all said a few words. Then it was Uncle Jerome’s turn.

His hands shaking, his face bleached with stress, Jerome read from a pre-written note, saying that Graham had been the best brother imaginable, the best business partner, the best friend, and that he would miss him until his dying day. Then he folded the note, stepped down, said ‘sorry’ and rushed down the aisle and out of the church, his hand over his mouth. The whole congregation could hear him retching outside.

Then there were more hymns, and presently Uncle Jerome came back inside, still looking upset, and sat down. He glanced at Christie, then away. Jeanette, grinning, kicked Christie’s leg. What Christie couldn’t quite take in was that her parents, her sunny smiling mother, her big cuddly bear of a father, were inside those two boxes. That they were dead, never to return. People – the vicar, for instance – talked about meeting again in heaven, but did you? And if you did, then why was Uncle Jerome so upset? He would see his brother Graham again, and Anna his sister-in-law.

Then the thing was over. The men carried the boxes out into the churchyard, lowered them into the ground. Everyone went back to Uncle Jerome and Aunt Julia’s grand Victorian villa. There were cakes, drinks, and soon the thing became a party. Christie escaped into the garden, walked down to the bottom of the plot behind the vast sheds that housed the monstrous yellow JCBs and the HGV lorries, the dumper trucks and vans and tarpaulin-covered heaps of spares that were used on sites all around London and down to the Home Counties.

Christie thought she was alone, but one of the shed doors nearer to the house was standing open and Dad was always saying these were valuable items, these diggers and trucks; they were always to be locked up securely. Mostly, they were, and Christie had been told never, ever to go near those sheds, that it was dangerous. She went to the open door and looked inside.

Ten-year-old Ivo was sitting up in one of the JCBs, working the controls. Her cousin was fascinated by the diggers and she knew that Ivo couldn’t wait until he was old enough to actually drive one. Then he saw her standing there.

‘What do you want?’ he snapped.

‘Nothing,’ said Christie, and moved on, going right down to the bottom of the plot where there was a big line of oaks, a thick hedge, mounds of sharp brambles. Christie always felt she could lose herself down there, forget her new Butler ‘family’ and their horrible house, make-believe that everything was still all right and that soon Mum and Dad would come and collect her and take her home.

But now she knew Mum and Dad weren’t coming back for her. For a while, she had thought and hoped and prayed that they would; now she was sure they would not.

All she had was this.

When they’d had their fill of cakes and beer, people started strolling in the gardens and she hid away in the shrubbery, nearly invisible in her sombre black funeral dress, but she heard someone say as they passed by: ‘Such a tragedy. So awful. Poor little kid. It was a miracle she survived at all. They say they only just got her out of the car in time before the flames . . .’ The voice trailed away.

‘But she’s lucky to have Jerome and Julia take her in. They’re such good people,’ said another.

4

Christie’s Butler cousins, Ivo and Jeanette, were already attending the Church of England primary school nearby and when Christie was five she too was led to the school gate by Aunt Julia. She barely ever saw Uncle Jerome, who was usually busy touring the building sites, disturbing workers leaning on shovels and having to, as he put it, ‘fire their backsides’, immediately.

It was obvious even to Christie that Uncle Jerome struggled with the plans her dad had read so easily, getting into a bad temper over the pressure of running the business alone whenever he was at home so that they were all glad to see him go when he departed for work.

‘Lazy bastards,’ he would moan at the tea table, while Ivo stuffed his face and Jeanette pushed her food around the plate. ‘As if I ain’t got enough to contend with, with Graham . . .’ His voice tailed off. He couldn’t say it.

‘When I’m old enough I’ll be a site foreman,’ said Ivo.

At the school gate, Christie was left in the care of a grey-haired woman in a fur coat. She was taken into the tall red-brick school building, shown her cloakroom peg and the toilets, and then there was assembly, the headmaster bald and bespectacled, saying prayers and then playing classical music, the sort of music Christie could remember her dad liking. Sometimes she had gone out in the Anglia with her dad to the building sites. She’d loved that. Everyone seemed to have liked him. He never seemed to have trouble with his workers like Uncle Jerome did.

Christie could remember her dad at the kitchen table in their small cosy home, his dark head bent over site maps, his big square dark-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose. She remembered scrambling up onto his lap and looking at the plans in fascination.

‘How’s my girl?’ he’d say, kissing her cheek.

There was no Dad anymore. Now there was school and lessons and little bottles of milk to drink, and biscuits, then home for lunch while some kids stayed at the school as Christie would have preferred to do. But she was given no choice. She and Ivo and Jeanette were taken back down the hill to the house, given sandwiches and tea, then escorted back up to the school. Then there was needlework and English, the times table and painting, and then time for home again at three o’clock, and the best thing about the little school was that, because they were different ages, there was no need for Christie to set eyes on her cousins during the school day at all.

Christie did well at the quaint little school. She made a friend called Patsy, who joined the school on the same day she did. She did even better when Ivo hit eleven and departed for the local comprehensive, a couple of miles down the road. Then she never ha. . .