Dolores

Dolores, known to her clients as the Lady of Pain, is a sex worker whose recurring meetings with Palinurus Maciver Junior and Jason Dunn connect a private sexual arrangement to the investigation of Palinurus’s death. She is not given a narrated interior life of her own: readers encounter her through Jason’s retrospective account, a recorded voicemail, and the questions her name prompts during the inquiry. That restricted perspective makes her at once a vivid presence in the men’s story and a person whose own motives remain largely undisclosed.

Identity and First Appearance

Jason first meets Dolores after a Wednesday-night game at the leisure centre falls through: the court has been double-booked, and Palinurus has already made other arrangements. Jason is disappointed to lose their usual game. Palinurus, by contrast, is relaxed, and eventually explains that he needs exercise and has called a woman he sometimes sees, someone he describes as selective and willing to meet two men if she likes them. Jason is curious as well as sexually frustrated; he says Helen Dunn had become less interested in sex after becoming pregnant. His account therefore places Dolores’s introduction inside his own explanation of why he accepts the invitation, not inside any account of what she wants.

Palinurus goes to the car park to check whether the woman has arrived, then calls Jason out. Dolores is waiting in the back seat of his car. Jason remembers her as very pale, with long black hair, and likens her appearance to an advertisement for a vampire film; he also considers her attractive. She looks Jason over and nods before Palinurus opens the door. Jason objects to having sex in the car park, worried that a rocking, steamed-up car might attract attention from young men using the centre. Palinurus drives them to Moscow House instead, while Jason and Dolores begin getting acquainted in the back of the car. The sequence gives her a decisive but spare gesture of acceptance, while nearly all the description and interpretation belong to Jason.

The Wednesday Arrangement

The meeting becomes a regular Wednesday routine. Jason and Palinurus meet in the centre car park, get into Palinurus’s car, and keep their heads down as they travel along The Avenue to Moscow House. They spend about an hour there before returning to the car park and going home. Jason’s account emphasizes the pattern’s discretion and convenience: it gives him sex without, as he sees it, directly troubling Helen, and he supposes that giving it up entirely might make Helen suspicious. He also assumes the arrangement will end once she has given birth to the twins and their sex life returns to normal. That forecast belongs to Jason; the narrative does not establish Dolores’s view of the arrangement or whether she shares his expectation that it is temporary.

Jason describes the threesome as heterosexual and says that, although the men necessarily have some physical contact during it, nothing kinky occurs between them. His explanation carefully draws a boundary around the encounter, revealing his concern about how the arrangement might be understood as much as it describes its participants. Dolores, meanwhile, is characterized as a willing partner in the meetings, but the account supplies no independent statement from her about the men, the recurring appointments, or the terms on which she meets them.

The Night of Palinurus’s Disappearance

The routine turns into a source of evidence on the night Palinurus fails to appear. Jason waits in the leisure-centre car park; after a while Dolores gets into his car. She says something must have happened and tries Palinurus’s mobile, which is switched off, then his shop, where there is no answer. Jason borrows her mobile and calls Palinurus’s home, speaking to his wife, who has not heard from him. Jason later recognizes that using Dolores’s phone was a mistake: he could have made the call from the leisure centre’s payphone. At the time, he says, he never imagined what would follow.

They drive down The Avenue past Moscow House and become more worried when they see a police car turning into the drive. They return to the car park and split up. Jason’s later account gives no further action or explanation from Dolores; after the pair separate, he says, events moved on and everything seemed to be falling apart. Her phone has nevertheless become important. When Andrew Dalziel challenges Jason’s claim that he tried to reach Palinurus on his mobile, at his shop, and at home, he plays a recorded message from the number Jason called. The voicemail identifies the speaker as Dolores and presents her as the Lady of Pain, with an invitation to leave a message and a teasing promise to respond when she is free and rested. Dalziel says that this is the only number recorded on all three of Palinurus’s phones at the relevant time. The phone call Jason recalls as an anxious attempt to find his friend is thus recast as a link between him and Dolores that he had not disclosed to the police.

Voice, Visibility, and Narrative Role

Dolores’s voicemail supplies a voice distinct from Jason’s visual recollection: husky, seductive, and foreign-sounding, speaking in a deliberately playful, stylized manner. Its performance turns an ordinary missed call into a recognizable professional greeting and makes the nickname Lady of Pain part of the investigation’s evidence. Dalziel uses the recording to confront Jason, who blusters that he does not know what the call has to do with him. The contrast between the message’s flirtatious invitation and the detective’s forensic use of the phone record gives the recording its force: what was private entertainment becomes a trace that can test Jason’s account.

Elsewhere, when Big Maggie asks whether the police need anything from her, she is told that her public advocacy for prostitutes’ rights might make her knowledgeable about Dolores. The suggestion is speculative: perhaps one of the women has changed her name, perhaps she came through an agency, or perhaps she is an amateur. Big Maggie denies knowing her. The exchange confirms that the investigation has little reliable information about Dolores beyond the name associated with the voicemail and the men’s account of her work. Her function in the plot is therefore substantial but sharply bounded. She helps explain Jason’s concealed routine and becomes the point of contact that exposes his use of a phone number; yet the story leaves her own history and perspective outside the evidence it presents.