by Jessie Keane
Rob got back to polishing the car.
No. Best to steer well clear of the complications. Find a nice single girl down the pub, no kids, no hassle, no crazy lunatic exes or unwanted connections, and let off steam with her instead.
It was all Daisy could do to stay awake, but she forced herself to get up out of the cosy armchair in the twins’ room and make her way downstairs to join her mother. The previous evening she’d been so exhausted she’d gone to bed as soon as she finished bathing the twins with Jody and tucked them in for the night. She didn’t want to make a habit of being in bed by seven thirty.
She sat down on the sofa beside Ruby, kicked off her shoes and gingerly rubbed at her ankle. It was still sore, but she wasn’t limping any more. No permanent damage. Not enough to cry off work tomorrow, which was a pity. Fucking store work.
‘You OK?’ asked Ruby.
Daisy looked up at her mother, wondering whether to come clean, but the strain on Ruby’s face stopped her in her tracks. ‘I’m fine, but what about you? You look as if you’re worried sick.’
Ruby sighed. ‘I can’t stop thinking about what happened at the funeral yesterday . . .’ She told Daisy about Kit showing up, and Bella’s words to her.
‘God, that sounds serious,’ said Daisy. It certainly put all her petty concerns into perspective.
‘It’s that all right. But if Bella can rein in Vittore and Fabio, Kit might yet get away with it.’
‘Do you think she can?’
‘Let’s hope.’
19
Kit woke up alone and in pain. No luscious blonde Alison today, kicking off because he called her by someone else’s name. Now, he couldn’t remember whose name he’d called her by. Same meat, different gravy. It didn’t matter, anyway.
The pain was a familiar morning companion. His head felt like someone had taken it off his shoulders and kicked it all around a football field, then booted it right out of the ground for an encore.
The drink.
He knew he had to stop that. He’d come home from his mother’s late yesterday afternoon after the funeral – was that wise, taunting the Danieris as they buried Tito? – and then he’d got drunk again. Roaring, shit-faced drunk. He must have fallen across the bed fully dressed, and now he was awake, and he felt like death warmed over and served up as freshly minted.
He opened his eyes and it was light, it was morning, and oh God he didn’t want another day, another fucking day without Michael, without Gilda. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and his brain started banging away inside his skull.
‘Shit,’ he groaned. There was a three-quarter-empty bottle of Bell’s on the bedside table. He reached for it.
Hair of the dog, right? Make it all better. Maybe a prairie oyster later, settle my stomach, feels like it’s doing backflips in there, what the hell . . . ?
Her face rose up in front of him, sea-green eyes laughing into his, the faint fairy jangle of gold that had followed her everywhere like her perfume, which was sweet strawberries and hay meadows. Not that he’d ever smelled a hay meadow, but if he had he just knew it would smell the same as her skin.
Gilda.
He’d truly loved her, and now she was gone.
He screwed up his eyes, wrenched out the cork, put the bottle to his lips and drank. Then he set it aside, tossed the cork fuck knew where, and lay back, eyes closed, feeling the whisky burn a hot tingling track all the way down to his toes.
Now he could see another face. Granite-jawed, set with a strong mouth and dark grey eyes that matched the thick thatch of hair. Those eyes were looking at him with disapproval.
Michael? Boss . . .
Kit felt his eyes fill with tears that spilled over. It was the drink. He was turning into a pitiful, booze-soaked alkie, maudlin and seeing faces of dead loved ones and blubbing like a fucking baby. Michael was looking disgusted with him. Well, he was disgusted with himself. He knew it was getting to be a major problem, the way he felt the pain and then automatically reached for the bottle to take it away.
He was scared of the pain. Physical pain he could handle. He was a gladiator, right? That was how he saw himself: tough as you like, nothing touched him. Rip his arm off, he’d come at you with the other one. But this – this soul-eating sense of loss, of something precious that was never, ever going to be replaced – this was too much.
So maybe he was, in fact, a fucking coward.
And what use was he, falling-down, rat-arsed drunk? He had . . .
Oh shit he had something important to do. What the hell was it?
Yeah, he had to . . . find out who murdered Michael, who really did it, because Tito and his brothers didn’t. Was that true, though? Could it be?
Oh, and incidentally, just a minor detail, Kit, but didn’t you kill Tito because you believed he did Michael?
‘Fuck,’ he muttered.
He hauled himself back into a sitting position. Looked again at the bottle and felt an uncomfortable stab of self-loathing. He was like a sodding baby with that bottle, a baby on its mother’s teat. Gimme comfort, take the pain away, don’t let me think, don’t let me feel, it hurts.
He had no regrets about taking out Tito: Tito had been a bastard through and through, and he was now frying in hell, Kit was convinced of that. But what Ruby told him tormented him. That there could be someone still out there, laughing in secret because they’d done it, got away with it, they’d taken Michael Ward’s life and never been made to pay the price.
Kit swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Everything in the room spun. Bile surged into his throat.
Somehow, he kept it down. Managed to stand up, too.
Up and at ’em, soldier! he told himself, and then he looked at the whisky bottle again, and he could taste it, it was good and it was as cosily enfolding as a warm blanket on a cold night, the booze, the blessed booze.
He picked up the bottle. No cork – where was the cork? Ah, no matter.
Raised it to his lips. Smelled it, rich alcohol, so soothing, taking the pain away.
But . . . he paused.
Maybe he had to feel that pain to be able to do this, find whoever had robbed Michael of his life. Maybe. He took a couple of steps over to the bathroom door, opened it, with the whisky bottle still in his hand. Then he went over to the sink, fully intending to pour all the remaining golden happy-juice down the plughole.
Instead, he left the bottle in the sink – careful now, don’t be a cunt and spill it! – and looked at himself in the mirror. Café au lait skin looking a little grey, a little bleached, black hair, a handsome, well-sculpted face and blue, blue eyes with big dark shadows underneath them. His face. The face of Kit Miller. Only not. The stranger in the mirror was a nameless, unwanted boy, and ‘Kit Miller’ was actually a construct of some long-ago care worker in a children’s home. His mother was Ruby Darke. His father was Cornelius Bray, who had also fathered Daisy – and neither of his parents had ever wanted him. He’d been cast aside, left to rot.
‘So who the hell are you, pal?’ he asked his reflection.
And his reflection answered: ‘Michael’s right hand. His number one man.’
Except, he wasn’t that any more. Because Michael was gone. Now, everything that had been Michael’s was Kit’s – the restaurants, the boozers, the clubs, the wedge from the streets, the fortune Michael made on the Albert Docks development. Kit hadn’t totted it all up, but he guessed he was now a sodding millionaire, and that was funny, because once upon a time money was the one thing he’d wanted. He’d been destitute as a child, not a pot to piss in, reliant on charity in children’s homes. Now, he had it all. And he didn’t want it.
What he wanted was a home life, a real life, a family maybe.
Gilda . . .
He wanted her back. And he wanted Michael back too.
Ah, impossible dreams.
He looked at the bottle.
My little friend.
He picked it up, took a swig.
Hold it down
to a dull roar, right?
There was still some left in the bottle. He placed it carefully back in the sink, went towards the shower. He’d clean up, and then there was that nice liquid treat waiting there, a little something in reserve, right?
Right.
And then . . . maybe he’d try and start to think. Or maybe . . . maybe he’d decide not to face any of it. Maybe he’d take a razor blade, skip the shower, have a nice deep hot bath instead, you didn’t feel it in a bath. Maybe that would be a plan: finish the drinking, finish with the whole stinking sorry mess that his life was these days, just open his wrists and lie there until it was over.
He thought of Vittore Danieri – those hate-filled eyes beneath that widow’s peak of receding dark hair, the guy looked like fucking Dracula or something – Vittore hissing at him ‘I’ll rip the heart out of you . . .’
Vittore had marked him, like Cain. Vittore had made a promise, a solemn oath that one day, one day soon, he was going to hurt him, maybe hurt Daisy or Ruby too. But maybe, Kit thought with a grim little smile, maybe he’d jump the gun, how about that? Take himself out of this whole shitty scene before Vittore took the matter out of his hands and did it for him.
He looked at the bath for long, long moments.
Then he leaned in and started the shower running.
OK, maybe not today. Maybe tomorrow.
20
‘Please, Vittore, don’t,’ said Maria.
Ah, that was music to his ears. People begging, pleading, he loved it. What Vittore Danieri liked best about being the boss was seeing the abject fear in people’s – even his wife’s – eyes when he talked to them. He loved that. Relished it. He’d waited a damned long time for it, too, and would have had to wait a damned sight longer, if Tito hadn’t come to such an unfortunate end.
In Vittore’s eyes, Tito hadn’t been right for the boss’s job anyway. Like their father Astorre, Tito had been too easily distracted by bedding dirty puttas both male and female, and forging dubious connections to MPs and to the nobility, neither of which held any interest for Vittore.
What Vittore loved above all else was control, power.
As the middle son, he’d felt the lack of it for most of his life. Tito had been their father’s chosen one, his first born. Astorre Danieri had doted on his eldest boy: Tito could do no wrong in his eyes. Fabio was the one who hadn’t been the girl Mama craved.
No need to mention Bianca, the longed-for girl Bella so wanted. Girls didn’t even figure in Vittore’s mindset, beyond their obvious talents for keeping house and popping out babies – and Bianca didn’t seem prepared to settle down and do that. She wanted to fiddle in the business instead, and of course Tito had yielded to pressure from Mama and given her the Southampton place to try.
For years Vittore had occupied the middle ground, the dead zone of the sibling forever doomed to go unnoticed by the father he always tried so hard to impress. Oh, his mother adored him. He was her favourite. He knew people saw him as dull, blockish, but Mama cooed over him, couldn’t bear the thought of him marrying, desperate to keep him all for herself.
‘Those dirty girls, you don’t want to mix with them, my angel, my little Vittore,’ Bella told him as a child, a teenager, a young man, all the while the music of Italy, of their homeland, playing in the background as Mama wore the old vinyl out.
‘Torna a Surriento’, that was a favourite of hers. And ‘O Sole Mio’.
‘They carry on like puttas, like whores these days! This “permissive society”, I spit on it. You could catch anything from them. Diseases. Your cock could drop off.’
Mama was right, no doubt about it. He’d had no interest in women, until Maria came along, black-haired, doe-eyed, a body like a fallen angel. For the first time in his life Vittore had felt the strong sexual pull of a woman. Maria had seemed so pure and innocent, and they had dated.
‘She’s a nice enough girl,’ said Bella after the first couple of dates.
At this point, Vittore had been allowed to kiss Maria, deep and long.
‘Still seeing Maria?’ Mama asked after the fifth date, the sixth. Not looking too happy about it, not really.
Around about this time, Maria had let him undo her bra, gaze at her amazingly full naked breasts and touch her large dark nipples. It drove him crazy, touching them, feeling how soft her breasts were.
‘I heard she’s a putta,’ came his mother’s warning after the tenth date. ‘You want to be careful. I won’t always be here to protect you, Vito. You know my health’s not good.’
Putta or not, he wanted this. When Maria let him lift her skirt and stare at the dark bush between her legs, oh God, he wanted all there was of this.
‘How come you’re still seeing that girl?’ raged Bella after the twentieth date, when it was obvious that Vittore and Maria were ‘going steady’. ‘Are you trying to break your mother’s heart? Didn’t I tell you what these women are like?’
There were hysterical tears from Bella at news of the engagement, and then a flat refusal to attend the wedding.
‘I may not live that long,’ sniffed Bella, clutching at her chest when they named the date. ‘I have this condition, as you know. My heart.’
I have a condition too, thought Vittore. It’s a pain in the arse, and you know what? It’s you, Mama.
He knew there was fuck-all wrong with his mother’s heart. Her nose had been put out of joint by her favourite son finally growing a pair, that was all. He wanted a normal life, a family. And whether his mother liked it or not, he was going to have it.
Not that it had all been plain sailing. His mother’s drip-drip-drip of acidic words seemed to have penetrated deep into the core of him. Girls are dirty, he heard in his head. You want to catch something off them, syphilis maybe? Your penis will rot with sores – you want that, Vittore?
Despite all that he wanted to bed Maria on their wedding night. Though he knew he was a bit undersized, on his own he could achieve a decent hard-on and jerk himself off to his complete satisfaction. But when they climbed into bed together, he couldn’t do a thing. She was so pretty, big-breasted, small-waisted, with opulent full buttocks. Jesus, he wanted to fuck her so badly! But his cock was limp.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Maria. ‘We have all the time we need, don’t worry.’
Maria couldn’t believe she’d finally got Vittore up the aisle. Bella had pulled all sorts of tricks to prevent it, but here they were at last – married.
Vittore’s little problem persisted for six, seven, eight months – by which time he was so desperate to have her that he felt he was going out of his mind. Then came the erections – full, amazing erections – but the mere sight of her naked body was enough to make him fire off too soon, before he could get in the bed with her.
Finally, a year into the marriage, consummation was achieved. He got drunk, fell into bed one night and there she was, his wife, and the drink relaxed him enough – not too much – to allow him to roll onto Maria – who was still a virgin – and shove his cock hard into her. It was over in three seconds.
Thereafter, that was the way it always seemed to be. And by that time, he suspected that Maria really didn’t care any more.
But miracles did happen. His love life might have been blighted, but other things were going good. Tito’s debauched reign had been swept away. The sign over the door of the club had been changed from Tito’s to Vito’s. Petty drug dealers who had circulated in the club selling their wares were ousted, and now Vittore’s own doormen did discreet deals instead. The sex palace Tito had run above the club, pimping highly paid prostitutes to his upmarket friends, Vittore had quickly, with a shudder of distaste, swept away.
At long last he was in charge. But he’d come home to find that Maria hadn’t even cleaned the place up. Was it too much to expect that she should keep their rooms clean and tidy, the way Mama would? Maybe Mama was right: all girls were dirty slovens.
‘You think I want to live in a place like this, in a tip?’ he shou
ted.
This was supposed to be where she would bear and raise his children; the place should be pristine, the way he liked it. That was all he wanted in life – a wife who did as she was told, as any good wife should. But today he’d come home to find the clumsy bitch had dropped a pot plant and now there was dirt all over the living-room carpet, the carpet he’d paid for, sweated for, and there was orange juice spilled on it by the fireplace and not mopped up, for God’s sake, and the mantelpiece was caked in dust. Mama always kept an immaculate home.
Vittore was still seething over Kit Miller showing up at the funeral. He had promised the bastard that retribution was on its way, but when he had taken Mama home, she had told him, yet again:
‘You won’t touch him, Vittore. I told you, and you swore to behave yourself. This ends here, you understand?’
Actually he didn’t understand. Actually he thought she was crazy and he was sick of hearing her opinions about what didn’t concern her. Who was the boss now, after all? She was just an old woman, her time was done. He loved her but at the same time he hated her for what she had done to him, ruining him as a man. And was she crazy? That bastard Miller had insulted them, having the audacity to show up at Tito’s funeral and crow about his death. There had to be revenge for that.
And what if the low rumble of rumours and suspicion should prove to be true? What if it wasn’t one of Tito’s other enemies but Miller himself who snatched Tito’s life away? Wouldn’t they be justified in taking action then? But no. His hands were tied by an old woman’s apron strings, and he resented it, hated it.
He was sick of listening to Mama.
Why should he pay attention to what an old woman had to say about anything? Tito might have done. And Fabio might, too. But he, Vittore, was the boss.
Now all he wanted was to release this pent-up resentment, and here was Maria, who didn’t seem to have a clue how to keep a house decent and tidy, and whumph, he slapped Maria, knocked her down, and suddenly he was aroused, he got down on the dirty floor with her and slapped her again, then pulled her pants down and unzipped himself, wild with lust now, he knew his cock wasn’t very big but now to him it looked huge, impressive. He pushed her legs open and thrust it into her, pushed once, twice, three times, and then came.
