The Lipstick Killers

PROLOGUE
     
     
     
    August Bank Holiday Monday 1989. Party time at the Doyles and everyone was showing their best faces. Roxanne – Roxie for short – Doyle’s sixth birthday. Named after her father Mickey’s favourite Police song, she was. The spoilt baby in the family of four daughters. Frances known as Frankie, the eldest at thirteen. The clever one. University material, everyone said. Then Margaret – who would only answer to Mags. Eleven-years- old. Crazy like a fox. Smart too, but already showing a resentful streak when it came to authority. Next, Sharon. Nine. Sweet, but docile enough to be easily led into bad ways. And finally of course Roxie. The baby – the apple of everyone’s eye, especially their mother.
    ‘Five bleedin’ women,’ their dad used to say. ‘Five in one house, and just me to get stick day and night. I can’t get away with anything.’ The sisters fought each other like cats and dogs, or more like cats and bitches, but beware of any outsider sticking his or her oar in. Then they become one. A four-headed Hydra looking for a ruck. The bigger the better. Like when one of the bigger boys at school cut the end of Sharon’s plait one day, then was ambushed on the way home by the girls – four-year-old Roxie being let loose on his head with a pair of scissors whilst Frankie and Mags held him down. He looked like he had alopecia when she finished, and she always swore that it was that day she decided her later choice of career as a hairdresser.
    Their dad complained, but he didn’t mean it. They knew as well as him that he was secretly proud of his feisty brood. And the mock-Tudor mansion in Streatham, south London was big enough for him to get lost in if needed. From the playroom in the attic, down five floors to the basement where there was a juke box, wet bar, pool table, and the biggest colour TV currently available linked into a state-of-the-art video recorder and music centre, plus a vast collection of films, records and tapes. Or in the five car garage at the side of the house which held Mickey’s collection of vintage cars and top of the range Harleys.
    That boiling hot Monday though, all the action was outside in the back garden that stretched four hundred yards to a bank of trees that hid the South Circular road from view. A wooden floored marquee had been erected for the finest food and drink money could buy. Moet flowing like water. Nouvelle cuisine for the adults, and burgers and fries for the kids. ADJ had set up twin decks to play the hits of the day by Kylie, Jason, Madonna, The Bangles for the kids, but with plenty of golden oldies for the grown-ups when the dancing and boozing really got going after sunset. Sure it was loud, yeah. But fuck it, it wasn’t everyday, and besides the neighbours had been invited. If they chose not to come, well let them close their windows and doors and watch bloody Eastenders . They wouldn’t complain. At least not to the face of the lady of the house, Queenie Doyle. Real name Alice, which she detested. She christened herself Queenie at an early age, and the way she ran the south London scene like a monarch, it fitted perfectly. She scared the shit out of them, as did her daughters. The neighbours called them the Wild Bunch, despite seeing them in their private school uniform every day. They lowered the tone of the area, said the school playground gossip. Must be incomers from Catford or Lewisham or some such. Too much money and not enough manners they said – as long as Queenie or one of her clan couldn’t overhear them.
    Queenie didn’t care what those snobby bitches at the school gates said. She had family all over south London. No fucker messed with the Doyles. The house was theirs, bought and paid for. No mortgage. And cash was rolling in from all directions. Too much sometimes. So let’s have some fun, spend some dough. It’s party time, and that was all that mattered – for now.
    By three pm the place was buzzing. The private road the Doyles lived in was rammed with cars. Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Aston-M Cadillacs, Porsches, all shiny and new. A million quids’ worth of motors by anyone’s reckoning. The lounge was so full of toys for Roxie that Hamleys’ shelves must have been empty. Wrapping paper and cards littered the floor as she ripped open the parcels delivered by friends and family. Outside the disco was booming and the sisters were practising their dance routines with the few friends from school they’d