Lawless

by Jessie Keane

  ‘Because if you think that,’ he snapped out, ‘then you’re right – we can’t go on with this. Oh, and incidentally? I won’t be looking out for your boy any more.’

  Now Ruby felt fury building up in her. He’d duped her, deceived her, bedded her; and now she was thinking that Daisy was right about all this and he’d robbed her of Michael, who had truly loved her, then made her doubt that love by feeding her lies about another woman. There had been no one but her. She was sure of that. Thomas Knox had done his best to twist the truth, make her question everything she had ever believed in.

  ‘I don’t want a damned thing from you,’ she told him furiously. ‘And Kit will manage just fine without your help.’

  ‘I dunno about that. He’s treading a dangerous road, wouldn’t you say? Getting mixed up with that crazy Danieri sister. Do you have any idea what he’s up against? That family’s Camorra, out of Naples – you don’t mess with those people. Vittore’s spitting blood over this. He’s a proud man, he won’t take any shit. If Kit wanted to, he could still name Bianca to the Bill as the one who shot him, and Vittore won’t risk that happening. And the Danieris won’t back down just because Kit’s boys have got Bianca. They’ll retaliate – maybe snatch Kit’s sister,’ he went on relentlessly. ‘Before you know it, you could be getting her back in pieces, through the post – an ear, maybe, or a tongue – how about that for a thought? Maybe they’ll snatch Daisy’s kids and—’

  ‘They’re in a safe place,’ said Ruby as his words struck home.

  ‘Yeah? How safe?’

  ‘Stop it! Shut up! I don’t ever want to see you or speak to you again.’

  Thomas’s eyes were hard on her face. ‘Sure about that?’

  ‘Completely sure.’

  ‘OK. But think about this: you got no proof I offed Mike. None at all. And everything I’ve just told you is true, so you’d better watch yourself. Oh, and what I told you before is true an’ all: Michael was tied up with another woman.’

  ‘Liar!’ shouted Ruby.

  ‘Nope. Not so.’

  ‘Then give me a name. Give me something.’

  ‘I don’t have it. Besides, I thought you didn’t want anything from me?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Then, sweetheart – you’re on your own,’ he said, and left the room.

  ‘You’re a liar!’ yelled Ruby after him.

  He opened the front door, went outside and slammed it shut behind him. Presently Ruby heard his car start up, heard the motor being driven fast into the distance. She threw her bag onto the sofa in impotent rage. He was lying. There was no woman. Michael wouldn’t do that to her. She knew it.

  She had to believe that.

  She had to.

  97

  It was getting late, the punters in Sheila’s restaurant were thinning out, those remaining were drowsing and talking softly over coffee and brandies at the candlelit tables while a gifted young man sat in the corner, playing Spanish guitar.

  Rob and Daisy headed straight through to the office, pushing the door closed behind them. The boys had been in, cleaned up the worst of the mess. Rob tucked a chair under the still-shattered lock to keep it that way. While Daisy watched, he went over to the desk, moved the chair aside, got down on his knees and lifted the rug to expose the floorboards.

  He prised at a loose edge, and up it came: a foot-long insert in the boards. With that one out of the way, he pulled up another, then another. Now he was looking down into a little cubbyhole, which appeared to be empty.

  He kept stuff tucked back there, out of the way, Kit had told Rob earlier.

  Rob leaned down further. He stuck in his hand up to the elbow, and groped around.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Daisy, almost twitching with impatience.

  Nothing.

  A hard pang of disappointment hit Rob. He’d been so sure that whatever the intruder had been looking for, it would be found here, in Michael’s favourite hiding place.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered.

  He took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves and got down further, pressing his whole body and his face into the floor. He inserted his arm again, right the way in, as far as it could go.

  Nothing, nothing, fucking nothing.

  His hand scrabbled around in there, he was blind, he didn’t have a torch with him and anyway he could feel sod-all in there and this was a total waste of . . .

  He stiffened. ‘Something here,’ he said to Daisy.

  His fingers had brushed what felt like cardboard. He tried to grab it, failed. Pushed his face hard against the floor, gave himself a millimetre or two more to play with. Groped back in there, caught the edge of the thing: it was flat and again it slipped away. Grunting with effort, he grabbed the edge once more, and aha! He had it. This time, he kept a tight grip on the cardboard, eased it towards him, pulled it out, rolled over on the floor and took a look at what he’d found.

  It was a stiff envelope, about fourteen inches by eleven, the sort pro photographers use to mail prints to clients. It was stuck down with brown tape. Rob sat up, slid his thumbnail under the tape, prised it free. Daisy got down on her knees and peered at it in excitement.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Hurry up! Open it.’

  Rob tipped it up. A small stack of ten-by-eight glossy black-and-white photographs fell out, into his hands. He put the envelope aside and they looked at what he’d netted.

  Presently, he let out a low whistle.

  Big surprise.

  ‘Oh, good Lord,’ said Daisy, mistress of understatement.

  Next day Rob picked up a few toiletries and items of clothing from Kit’s place, put them in a plastic carrier bag and went to the hospital. Kit was lying there, eyes closed. His skin had lost its deathly pallor. His left arm was tucked up in a sling, taking the weight off while it healed.

  ‘Hey, Kit?’ said Rob, sitting down at his bedside.

  Kit’s eyes opened.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  Rob had been thinking it over. In ICU, the situation had been secure and he could keep a lid on things. In a private room, security became more difficult. Out on the streets that Kit ran, they had their own tame private doctors, even a fucking surgeon on the payroll, no questions asked.

  ‘How you feeling?’ asked Rob.

  ‘OK.’

  Kit felt about a million times better, now that he’d seen Bianca and reassured himself that she was all right. The filth had – of course – been in, asking him more questions. Who shot him? Did he see anyone? He hadn’t, he said. Sorry, officer. They told him about a bloke who’d fallen or jumped to his death from a window just down the hall, Italian guy, no one seemed to know who he was or what he was doing in the hospital – had Kit heard anything about that? Kit said he hadn’t. And the police had gone away again.

  ‘You feel well enough to get the fuck out of here?’ asked Rob.

  Kit looked at his mate. ‘They trying?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘The jumper?’

  ‘Cops told you?’

  ‘They did. Hey, Rob . . .’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘I kept hearing a voice when I was out of it. Ruby said it was her.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Rob looked at his mate. ‘She stayed here with you the whole time. We couldn’t drag her away – and God knows we tried.’

  Kit returned Rob’s gaze. The Ice Queen of Retail, cold as fuck and putting business before her kids, had been here, talking to him, the entire time?

  ‘She wouldn’t leave you. All she did was stay by your bed, talking to you.’

  Kit looked at him dubiously.

  ‘It’s true,’ Rob assured him. Then his face darkened as he moved on to the subject that had been bothering him: ‘Look, we’ve got Bianca stashed away. But these Danieri boys . . . I dunno. They’re crazy. They might try again, whether we’ve got her for insurance or not. I don’t want to take the chance . . .’

  ‘So I guess we go,’ said Kit.

  R
ob held up the carrier bag. ‘Got your clothes in here.’

  ‘OK, let’s do it.’

  98

  Daisy slept late next morning. Ruby had departed for the store now that Kit was in the clear, and would then go on to the hospital to see him, but here she was, still in bed. Disconsolately she slipped on her robe and wandered up to the nursery. There was only silence; a few abandoned toys, the empty cots. She went downstairs and firmly resisted the impulse to phone Jody. Kit was right. The line might be tapped, and she could betray their whereabouts without meaning to.

  She showered, dressed and then phoned Rob’s flat number.

  There was no answer.

  Well, he was probably doing something for Kit. She knew better than to speculate as to what exactly that might entail. One thing she couldn’t put to the back of her mind was the envelope Rob had discovered last night, and the shocking images they contained.

  Neither could she shove away from her brain the fact that her brother seemed besotted by a madwoman who had damned near killed him. She had no idea where they were going to go from here with Bianca. She had no idea what mad scheme Kit was going to cook up next, and she dreaded going back to the hospital to hear about it.

  She phoned the restaurant; was Rob there?

  ‘Haven’t seen him since yesterday,’ said the bar manager.

  She phoned Ruby’s office.

  ‘Rob? No, I haven’t seen him since last night. Check with Reg.’

  Daisy then phoned Reg’s flat, all the while the tension and anxiety building in her until she felt just about ready to blow.

  Reg picked up on the first ring. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Reg? It’s Daisy. Do you know where Rob is today?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Reg. ‘Have you tried . . .’

  And so it went on. Daisy phoned pool halls, bars, restaurants, and no one had seen Rob.

  Finally she gave up, put the phone down and wondered what the hell to do now.

  What she was afraid of . . . no, she couldn’t bear to even think it, it was too awful.

  But try as she might she couldn’t shake off the fear that Rob had decided to act alone on the contents of the brown cardboard envelope he’d unearthed last night.

  If the man who had been searching for those photos was the same person who killed Michael Ward in that alley, then Rob could be walking into a very dangerous situation. The searcher would know Rob had seen the prints, would know the game was up, and he might decide that Rob needed getting out of the way, too.

  Gripped with anxiety, Daisy gave up on the phone. Instead she tore down the stairs, ran out and got into her Mini, and drove like a bat out of hell.

  She had made this journey a hundred thousand times, or so it felt. The whole route was so familiar to her that the car almost drove itself. Before long she was crossing over the bridge above the cress beds and turning into the driveway, barrelling the Mini full-pelt up the drive among the dripping rhododendrons until she reached the fountain of Neptune in front of the house.

  Her fears escalated to fever pitch when she saw that Rob’s car was there, on the drive.

  ‘Oh no . . .’ she gasped as she slammed on the hand-brake and turned off the engine.

  She almost fell out of the car, and ran up the steps to Brayfield’s front door and bashed her fist upon it. Nobody answered. Swearing, limp with fear, she hared off around the building to the back, heading for the French doors that led into Vanessa’s blue-and-gold drawing room. They were standing open and she could hear raised voices coming from inside.

  ‘I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about,’ came Vanessa’s voice, high with strain.

  Daisy all but fell through the doors.

  ‘Daisy!’ Vanessa said in astonishment.

  Rob was standing over Vanessa. And there was the cardboard envelope. It was on a low table, and the prints were spread out on top of it. They were grainy, clearly taken with a long lens, but the content was unmistakable.

  One showed Ivan and Vanessa, his hand on her shoulder in the garden; they were laughing together. Another showed them up against a tree, kissing. And another – most damning – showed Ivan, full-frontal naked, drawing back the curtains in what was clearly Vanessa’s bedroom.

  Jesus, it’s like something out of a D.H. Lawrence novel, thought Daisy. It’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  The shock of seeing the prints again was just as strong as it had been last night when Rob first discovered them. Daisy had lived with Vanessa for years, she knew how highly strung she was, always generating her own anxieties – mostly about the state of her position in society. Respectability was everything to Vanessa. If these prints should ever be revealed – if it should ever come to light that Lady Bray was having an affair with her gardener – then it would be truly disastrous for her. Her social circle would shun her, and she couldn’t bear that.

  And that’s precisely why Ivan was tearing up Michael’s flat and the office to find them, thought Daisy.

  Now she could see what had been happening here. Michael had been blackmailing Vanessa with these prints, threatening to show them to the press. And she thought she knew why. For all that Vanessa and Cornelius Bray had put Ruby through, tearing her children away from her, tormenting her, Michael had decided that they should pay. Well, Cornelius was out of it; but there was still Vanessa.

  As a motive for murder, getting rid of a blackmailer held a lot of weight.

  Vanessa looked mortified. It was bad enough, this stranger turning up here again, after she’d thought they’d got rid of him and that ghastly thug Kit Miller. But now she saw Daisy looking at the prints, and drawing her own conclusions.

  ‘It’s not how it looks . . .’ she said desperately.

  ‘It looks like you’re knocking off the gardener,’ said Rob.

  ‘Daisy, you have to believe—’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Believe what? That these photos aren’t genuine? I can see they are.’

  Vanessa’s eyes dropped to her lap. ‘This is very embarrassing,’ she said.

  ‘Michael was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘That vile man!’ burst out Vanessa. ‘He came here and said that if I didn’t pay up he’d show them to the press. So I agreed. I paid him. And then he said he was going to show them anyway, and—’

  ‘And then what?’ Rob demanded. ‘Ivan killed him, right?’

  Vanessa’s milky blue eyes opened wide. ‘No! How you can say that?’

  ‘It’s what I’d do, in his place,’ said Rob. ‘Remove the threat. Nice and clean. Always supposing Michael hadn’t lodged a set of the prints elsewhere with instructions to open and publish if anything should happen to him.’

  ‘Ivan was in the army, wasn’t he? He knows all about guns,’ said Daisy.

  There was movement at the French windows and a male voice spoke.

  ‘That may be true. But if I’d wanted to kill that bastard, I’d have done it with my own bare hands.’

  Daisy and Rob turned as one, and saw that wiry, bearded Ivan had just stepped into the drawing room holding a twelve-bore shotgun.

  99

  ‘Oh God,’ said Vanessa, putting a hand to her mouth. She surged to her feet, making entreating motions to Ivan. ‘No, you mustn’t . . .’

  Rob pushed Daisy behind him and stared down the barrel of the gun. Ivan was much smaller than Rob, slight and sinewy, but he had eyes like a tiger and they glared with purpose.

  ‘Get hold of the prints,’ Ivan ordered Vanessa.

  With trembling fingers, Vanessa did as she was told.

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Daisy, having to swallow hard to get the words out. ‘We have copies. Several copies,’ she lied.

  ‘What about the negatives?’ asked Ivan.

  ‘We don’t have those. We can’t find them.’

  ‘But you found these.’

  ‘Yeah, you missed them when you searched the office and the flat,’ said Rob. ‘But the negatives? No. Couldn’t find them.’

>   ‘It was worth a try,’ shrugged Ivan.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll give you that,’ said Rob. ‘Like offing Michael was worth a try too, I guess. End of blackmailer – end of blackmail.’

  Ivan’s lips twisted in a sneer. ‘What, you think that was me? Sonny, if I’d truly intended to see the man gone, I’d have done it quietly, not with a gun.’

  Daisy was staring at Ivan. She grabbed Rob’s arm. ‘Ivan was in the army,’ she said.

  ‘Special Air Services,’ said Ivan.

  ‘They’re taught silent killing.’

  ‘They’re also taught guns,’ said Rob. ‘Dum-dum bullets. That says military to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have needed a gun to put that bastard’s lights out,’ said Ivan.

  ‘But you’re waving a gun around now,’ said Rob.

  ‘We’re not interested in these prints,’ Daisy said. ‘I know Michael didn’t need your money, he was just winding you up. Paying you back for what you put Ruby through. The only thing we’re interested in is who killed him. That’s all we want to know.’

  ‘Ivan didn’t do it,’ snapped Vanessa. ‘Of course he didn’t. But I tell you – when that man died the way he did, we were just so pleased. So relieved the nightmare was over. Ivan decided he’d try to find the negatives, and any prints. Put the whole horrible incident safely away. But he couldn’t find them.’

  Daisy could feel herself shaking as she stared at Ivan holding the gun, pointing it straight at Rob’s middle.

  ‘Please put the gun down,’ said Vanessa, her teeth chattering with fear as she glanced at Daisy’s ashen face. ‘There’s really no need for that.’

  Ivan stayed motionless for a moment. Then, slowly, he lowered the shotgun. He looked straight at Rob. ‘I didn’t kill Michael Ward,’ he said, disgust obvious in his tone. ‘But I wish I had. He deserved it.’

  Daisy saw a muscle twitch in Rob’s jaw. She knew he had idolized Michael.

  Rob turned away from Ivan and looked at Vanessa.

  ‘Keep the prints,’ he said, and moved towards the French windows followed by Daisy, both of them passing close by Ivan.