The Manor

by Keane Jessie

  Milly’s eyes fell to the notebooks. Slowly, she shook her head. ‘Not mine. Mum’s. You remember? Part of her treatment. S’posed to help her straighten her mind or something.’ Milly’s chapped lips lifted in a thin ghost of a smile. She nodded toward a brown monogrammed holdall open on the floor beside the bed. ‘Did a load of the things. Don’t think it worked, do you?’

  With that, Milly lay back and closed her eyes.

  ‘Milly?’ said Belle loudly and got nothing back.

  She turned to Jack. ‘Someone is going to have to stay with her.’

  Jack turned to his twitchy blond-haired pal. ‘Stevie?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Stevie gave a grin and cracked his knuckles.

  Belle looked at Jack, worried at the relish with which Stevie had just spoken.

  ‘Stevie had his troubles with stuff like this,’ explained Jack.

  ‘Spent two years after yomping across Goose Green stoned out of my brains,’ said Stevie. ‘Can’t say I’m proud of it.’

  ‘He’ll know what to do. She’ll be in good hands,’ said Jack.

  Belle stood up. She stared down at Milly, then cast a glance at Stevie. ‘You’ll look after her?’

  ‘I will.’

  Belle looked again at Milly, at the mess she was in, the chaos surrounding her. The journals. She leaned down. Milly was starting to snore heavily. Belle picked up one. Date: 1983. Flipped open the page. January. Nula’s handwriting was neat as a schoolgirl’s, slanted backwards.

  Christ I hate all this. Having him here. I think I’m actually in danger but Charlie won’t have it, he never believes a word I say . . .

  Belle read that line, then flicked the pages on. Another one: He’s always down in that feed room by the zoo, he loves it in there, he’s weird and I keep telling Charlie but he won’t listen . . .

  There was information in here, maybe useful stuff about Nula and Charlie and Harlan. Nula had poured her heart into these notebooks, uncensored. Charlie had probably never seen them and Harlan certainly hadn’t – he would have burned them. One by one, she gathered up the rest of the diaries and added them to the ones in the bag by the bed. Nula had always puzzled Belle. A woman married to an immensely wealthy man, supposedly with everything in the world that she could want – and yet Nula had always seemed a tormented soul.

  I think I’m in danger . . .

  Nula had been talking about Harlan. Now Belle thought of the helicopter crash. The cartels? Or Harlan? Or both of them, working together to get Charlie out of the way?

  Belle zipped the bag shut and picked it up.

  ‘Right,’ she said with a brisk smile. ‘Time for some fireworks.’

  142

  The night after Belle’s visit to Milly, Harlan was in bed in the apartment overlooking Tower Bridge. The city lights winked alluringly through the big floor-to-ceiling windows and the girl he had with him had been most impressed by this whole set-up. All in all, things were fine. All was quiet and productive at the factories, all the street people were behaving themselves, product trade was brisk, fresh imports were due in the day after tomorrow and the day after that. Nothing too bad to demand his attention, and he was getting some very nice head from the petite blonde who – in the dark with the light behind her – could easily pass for Belle Barton.

  Ah, Belle.

  Such a fucking shame about Belle. But he’d had to put an end to her. That business about her knowing about Beezer, and Jake, well, what the Christ else could she have known? Anything. And that was a danger to him; he couldn’t risk letting her live.

  There was still nothing but silence from Ludo and Nipper. He’d sent others to find them, but they’d found nothing.

  He straightened, dislodging the girl lapping at his cock.

  ‘What’s up, hon?’ she asked, but the mood was gone. He felt himself deflating. She noticed and started working him with her hand. He slapped her away.

  ‘Ow! Babes!’ she complained.

  ‘Look, piss off, will you,’ he snapped. Actually her hair wasn’t the precise shade of blonde that Belle’s was. And her eyes were the wrong colour. This one’s were green like gooseberries, and round. Not dark and slanted, lush with promise, not like Belle’s.

  Fuck that girl.

  She wouldn’t cooperate. Wouldn’t play ball. She’d walked into one of the Stone offices uninvited and started making trouble. One of his people had told him all about it, they were sure it was her. That bitch. Then defying him like she did. So of course she’d had to go. But was she really gone? Until he heard back from that pair of useless bastards – or from one of the others he’d sent off down there – could he be one hundred per cent sure? No. He could not. She’d tormented him all his life. And even now, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, still she tormented him.

  He couldn’t forget the way she’d stood there, right on the edge of the caimans’ pool, and defied him, actually having the nerve to speak about Jake, saying she’d known what he’d done when it was all in the past, all forgotten, wasn’t it?

  It had been so easy. A pillow pressed over the little kid’s face, and it was soon over. And it had been entirely justifiable. He couldn’t ever be number two; he had to be number one, or nothing. But fucking Beezer, creeping about in the night! Harlan thought he’d managed to close the whole thing down, but Beezer must have talked before he shut him up for good.

  ‘Get the fuck out of it,’ he said coldly to the girl.

  ‘All right, I’m going, I’m going.’ She was grabbing her underwear and scrabbling around for her dress and shoes. ‘Christ Almighty, what a charmer you turned out to be!’

  ‘Go on, get out!’ yelled Harlan, chucking his boot at her head. It missed and went sailing on and knocked a priceless Jackson Pollock from the wall. The painting crashed to the floor, breaking the frame. The phone started to ring as the girl ran out of the flat door.

  Harlan snatched it up. ‘Yes? What the fuck is it?’ he snarled.

  ‘Boss, you better get over here,’ said the voice of one of his lieutenants. ‘You are not going to believe this.’

  143

  The Clacton office had been the first dedicated crack cocaine production unit in Charlie Stone’s empire. Now it was Harlan’s, everything was Harlan’s, and he had taken a great deal of pleasure in seeing the day-to-day functioning of the place as the workers – mostly dirt-poor illegals that were kept poor and housed in filthy sheds round the back – did the complicated chemical business that produced the crack.

  Harlan could remember the very first time Charlie had taken him on a guided tour of the manor. Charlie had – to be fair – taught him a lot. Told him about how you could smoke cocaine in its powder form by mixing it with tobacco – these were called ‘primos’, but they weren’t good for delivering a nice big hit of the drug.

  ‘Or you could freebase,’ Charlie had told him.

  Freebase was using alkalide ether to free the cocaine from the hydrochloride powder form.

  ‘Flammable,’ Charlie had told him. ‘Too fucking dangerous.’

  Harlan had taken it all in, soaked it up like a sponge.

  He drove up to the Clacton place and there was a bustle going on out front. People milling around on the pavement, shouting and screaming. And . . . he felt his heart literally falter in his chest.

  The house was on fire.

  His crack factory was on fire.

  Harlan got out of his Porsche and stared at it, not believing a thing he was seeing with his own eyes. The people in front of the building hadn’t seen him. And that was good. They didn’t know him, he didn’t know them. Alec, his boy, had phoned him, but Alec would never tell a soul Harlan’s name or anything else about him. He had more sense.

  Harlan got back in the car and drove away, back to the apartment.

  By the time he got there, the phone was ringing again.

  Another fire. Another crack production line at another fake office, up in smoke.

  Then another.

  Then half an ho
ur later, another.

  What the fuck was happening?

  144

  Harlan spent a ragged, sleepless night sitting on the couch, drinking coffee and intermittently picking up calls. His biggest fear was that one of the other gang bosses had cut a deal with the Colombians and planned to off him after they had destroyed his business. It wasn’t unheard of. But why would they trash the crack production lines? He wouldn’t, in their position. He would keep them, and off the man in charge and all his backers. That made better sense, didn’t it?

  The night went on and the calls kept coming. One, then another, then another, until dawn broke.

  Then the outcome was clear: all six of the bases where his imported cocaine was transformed into high-quality crack were gone. He phoned Javier, his contact with the cartel. Javier was in and out of England all the time, liaising between his Colombian associates and the Stone crew.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ was Javier’s first comment, his accent as thick as maple syrup.

  ‘You heard then?’ Instantly Harlan was on his guard, thinking that maybe Javier knew all about the fires. That maybe he’d lit the bastards – or had them lit, anyway. Unlikely he’d get involved in any direct action. The only reason that slick pussy Javier ever used his hands was to get his dick out.

  ‘You’re in disarray, my friend,’ said Javier, sounding almost pleased about it.

  Yeah, did you do this? If you did, you are dead, my Colombian friend, I promise you that.

  ‘Nothing that can’t be put right. We’ll set up again. It’s bad, but it’s solvable,’ he said, very bullish. He didn’t feel bullish, not in the least.

  Someone was taking the manor, his manor, apart, piece by piece.

  There was a pause at the other end of the phone. ‘And what about this week’s shipments? No problems there, I trust?’

  ‘All fine,’ said Harlan, thinking of his trips out to Bogota to press the flesh and do deals with Javier’s lot. This latest load of cocaine was going to be concealed in scrap metal ingots on board a freighter sailing out of Santamaria in Venezuela. It would journey to Rotterdam and from there to Southampton. He hoped to God it would be OK. And what the fuck to do with it once it got here, with crack production out? He’d have to market the pure coke instead. Profit would be way down, but there was no other choice. Meanwhile, there was a Spanish cannabis subsidiary causing him problems, because the Spanish government was getting stick over lack of control on drugs. The Spaniards had tightened up on it, making many more vehicle searches and increasing patrols.

  Maybe the whole damned thing’s getting too big, thought Harlan.

  The production lines going hit him hard. He sat in the apartment that night and literally shook with apprehension, convinced that his manor was falling. He’d been expanding hard since Charlie’s death, feeling invincible. He’d got rid of the old guard, all the old pals Charlie had gathered around him, Terry Barton, Beezer, the lot of them. But maybe he wasn’t as bomb-proof as he’d thought. Now he was transporting heroin, crack, cocaine, cannabis and a whole lot of recreational drugs besides, and he trusted no one – how could he? – so it was hard to stay on top of things sometimes. He’d spent a lot of these past few months motoring around Europe, even visiting Jamaica’s Burke Road – and missing a hail of bullets by inches that had killed five other men. He’d got used to attending meetings in other very dangerous places too, places where you fully expected not to get out alive.

  But he had. He was tough – a survivor. He’d escaped a rotten childhood, lived through having a disgusting junkie for a mother, adapted to the pressures of living in Charlie and Nula’s world, blending in like a chameleon. But somehow he knew he’d got it wrong. He didn’t connect as other people did. Charlie and Nula had obviously thought so, because they had preferred that fucking baby to him, had overlooked him after Jake’s birth, seen him as an interloper, unwanted.

  Well, he’d sorted that out. And he would sort this. He’d come through hell in his life. His mother had preferred heroin to him, his step-parents had preferred the new baby, and Belle? She’d preferred to meet a grisly end rather than be his girl. He was used to crap. So he would rebuild. And the Spanish muddle, he’d already laid plans to overcome that, getting guys with backpacks carrying the gear over the Pyrenees, staying in hostels and mountain huts then loading up in France when they reached the other side.

  Problems? They were for solving. And he was the man to do it.

  Then he got another call.

  145

  ‘You know Belle Barton went into one of the crack places? Well since the fires started they say she’s been back. One of the Vietnamese said they saw a dragon woman,’ said Alec, one of Harlan’s boys. ‘You know that funny thing they have, hanging mirrors on the outside of doors? One of them reckons he saw a woman reflected there and she was going to burn the place down. He said it was her, the same woman, but marked up bad. Scarred.’

  Harlan held the phone away from his ear. He stared at it. Then he brought it back. ‘What you bothering me with this stupid shit for?’ he asked.

  ‘She lit the fire. She had men with her, horrible big bastards, helping her. But it was her who set the fire. She was smiling, he said, and it was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. Then the whole place went up and he was lucky to get out alive.’

  Harlan thought of Ludo’s last call to him. A trickle of something cold touched his spine, making him give a shiver. ‘She’s scarred up something awful . . .’

  ‘Call me when you’ve got some actual facts,’ he said, and slammed the phone down.

  He sat there, thinking.

  Nah.

  Belle was . . . well, where was she, exactly?

  He took a shower, still thinking.

  Was Belle somehow doing this? Was this her revenge?

  Nah. He shook himself, dried off and got dressed.

  Superstitious bullshit.

  146

  ‘My advice? Don’t,’ said Jack when Belle told him at the breakfast table that morning what she intended to do.

  It had been a busy night for the team. Six crack production lines razed to the ground. Jack’s pals were still in bed, so Jack and Belle sat there alone, drinking tea and talking in low tones. Belle had another one of Nula’s diaries open in front of her. She was learning a lot.

  ‘I’ve got to,’ said Belle.

  ‘It won’t be pretty.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Stevie’s on it. He’ll take good care of her.’

  ‘Which involves what?’

  ‘Keeping her hydrated. Keeping her confined. It’s rough. And not pretty, like I said.’

  ‘Jack,’ said Belle. ‘I have to. She’s got no one. Only Harlan, and what fucking use has he ever been to her? Apart from him, all she has is me.’

  ‘You want me to phone ahead?’

  ‘No.’ Belle stood up. ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’

  Jack had been right. It wasn’t pretty at all, what Milly was going through. When they entered the Deptford house where Stevie was keeping her, the first thing they heard was Milly sobbing and begging him to let her out of the upstairs bedroom.

  They stood in the hallway with Stevie and he smiled.

  ‘She’s done a lot of that. And banging on the door. I boarded the window up or she’d have taken a run at it and broken her fucking neck more than likely.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Belle, rattled. Milly sounded completely insane, ranting that she would kill Stevie, and to let her out or by God there’d be trouble.

  ‘I’ve left water in there, big plastic demijohns of it. Wouldn’t trust her with glass. And there’s the bathroom right there if she needs it.’

  They stood there, all three of them, and listened to Milly making threats, sobbing, screaming.

  ‘How long will she be like this?’ asked Belle, horrified.

  ‘Maybe another couple of days. Then she should be in the clear. She’ll feel like shit, but she’ll be OK. She’ll always want it, thoug
h. That’s the real danger. Once you’ve had a hit of that stuff . . . it’s fucking evil.’

  ‘What about the neighbours? Can’t they hear all this going on?’

  ‘We cleared out the properties on both sides,’ said Jack.

  ‘Can I see her?’

  ‘Best not.’

  ‘I want to.’

  Stevie exchanged a look with Jack, who nodded.

  ‘Righto,’ said Stevie and led the way upstairs. At the top, he turned left and unlocked a door. Inside, everything went quiet. Stevie pushed open the door and stepped aside.

  Belle stepped into the doorway. The first thing that hit her was the smell. Unwashed bodies; vomit; shit. And there was Milly, sitting on the bed. Eyes so big in her white face. All her previous chubbiness had vanished. She looked like death warmed over and served up as fresh.

  ‘Milly?’ said Belle, scarcely believing it could be her.

  Milly lurched to her feet, her eyes fixed on Belle’s face. ‘You,’ she said.

  Then she came roaring across the room, arms up, hands hooked into claws, ready to rake her nails down Belle’s face. Stevie caught her and held her away from Belle.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ he said, almost gently.

  ‘You did this, you made them lock me in here, didn’t you.’ Milly’s eyes were wild. Spittle flew from her mouth. She stank. ‘Harlan told me about you. He warned me. You’re not my friend. You wouldn’t do this to me if you were my friend. I’m glad you’re scarred now, you bitch. Loved yourself, didn’t you. Well not any more. Now you’re ugly like me. Now we’re the same.’

  ‘She don’t mean it,’ said Stevie.

  ‘Yes I do!’ shouted Milly, glaring at Belle with bloodshot eyes, trying to reach her with dirty clawed hands.