Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  ‘And that’s when I made my decision – the only way out was to go overboard.’ He sighed. ‘But Amber coming in after me’ – he wiped his hand through his hair – ‘that was … awful.’

  ‘Who killed the old man?’

  ‘Another of Christos’s men—’

  ‘You piece of shit.’ She grabbed his T-shirt in her fists and yanked.

  ‘Listen to me. Please. Maybe it sounds hollow but I didn’t realise how Ricky would react to you as the witness at the trial, that he would make threats that caused such upheaval in your life. After I’d run, I couldn’t help it, I kept tabs on you. Then you disappeared into witness protection and I lost you. I lost you for years. That was the hardest, Kel, not knowing where you were, how you were coping. And then you reappeared, married to him. And then I understood. He was being clever and strategic. He wasn’t quite sure I’d really died, so keeping you and Florence close was insurance in case I ever came back. But also it was his way of showing his power – he was marrying my widow, living with my kid. People don’t walk away from Christos, we both know that. And so I waited, because I feared that in the end you would need my help, and I could right some of the wrongs.’

  ‘My mum always said you were bad, that no good would come of it.’ Her eyes misted with tears. She felt empty. She had yearned for so many years for reconciliation with her lost family, and it had come like this. ‘You owe me.’

  ‘I do. You didn’t deserve what happened in the Solent that afternoon in the fog. You’ve suffered so much and I’m truly sorry.’ He took her fists in his big hands and massaged them until they relaxed. ‘You’re a great mother, Kel, the best. Never forget that, yeah? I know because the life of being a father, a family man, in the end, that wasn’t me. Some of us are born to be parents, Kel, like you. And some of us find it harder to make the sacrifices and put in the hard work. Be proud, Kel.’

  She found it within herself to nod.

  ‘What’s this story with the kid?’ He motioned back at the bedroom door.

  She drew herself up. ‘You’ve got something Christos wants, and I need to get away, away from a controlling, lying piece of shit.’

  He smiled, the cheeky grin lighting his face for a flash before it was gone. ‘I’ll be happy to help.’

  ‘He’s looking hard for you. It won’t be long until he gets photos of all the crew and makes the connection.’

  ‘He can stop searching, I’m contacting him today. Where are you supposed to be?’

  ‘When I’m not kept prisoner by him? There’s a Halloween party this afternoon being hosted by his charity. It’s at a play centre next to the docks.’

  ‘Have you been there before?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Describe it in detail.’

  Ten minutes later they had come up with a plan. Kelly turned to leave but he caught her arm. ‘We can travel far, round the world and up the social strata, but sometimes only those you’ve known from home speak the language you do.’

  She looked up at the man she had once loved, and then walked away.

  She used a payphone in the lobby to phone Georgie and cursed that it went to voicemail. ‘I know what’s on the Saracen. It’s not what you think. It’s something that will destroy my family.’ She hung up and left.

  63

  The Wolf was short and to the point. ‘I’ve got your girl.’

  There was a long pause and the outbreath of someone who is deciding to take the call sitting down. ‘Who are you?’ The voice was the same, hard and without emotion.

  ‘The one you always feared would come back and fuck things up for you.’

  ‘Michael, the not-dead ex-husband. Is Isabella harmed at all?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘What value do you put on a man’s life? Each missing hour of it, each missing day. I’ve spent time trying to find a figure for all those lost years.’

  Christos puffed with annoyance down the phone. ‘Spare me the violins. I’m a businessman, not a counsellor. How much to get her back?’

  ‘This isn’t just about money.’

  ‘Yes, it is. It’s only ever about that.’

  ‘Kelsey wasn’t.’ Might as well kick the elephant in the room.

  ‘If you want a pound of flesh, you’re not going to get it. But you’re right, Kelly wasn’t about the money. There’s a pleasure in taking what others value. Your daughter calls me Daddy, hugs me every night. One day I’ll walk her down the aisle, tears in my eyes. That’s not going to change. Let’s do this deal and you can fuck off back to your hole.’

  The Wolf smiled. He was enjoying this. ‘You always did have a problem with women, Christos. You tended to get obsessed, you always wanted the women other men had, like you needed their validation. But I doubt it’s going to be so easy to make Kelly play happy families when the mistress has a new baby in tow.’

  ‘You don’t have a family, so you wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You have no idea if I have a family or not.’

  ‘Yes, I do. This takes careful planning. You have no space for anything but revenge. It’s all you have, and even that won’t work. I assume you’ve told Kelly all about our dealings back in Southampton. She’s done a runner today. I suppose she came to you. Her heart will be all fired up with revenge now, I imagine.’

  ‘I want five million.’

  ‘I don’t have that kind of money. I’ll give you half.’

  The Wolf cut the call immediately and stretched back in his chair. Eight minutes later he rang again. Christos answered at the first ring. ‘That was a minute for every year. You’ve got some idea how it feels now. I’ll meet you at five today at your Halloween party. I want the money in a rucksack, the rest you can figure out.’

  ‘No one has that kind of money just lying around. It takes days to get—’

  ‘You’ve had a day. You knew as soon as she went missing that you’d need money. You’ve got it, and we’re doing this today.’

  There was silence for a few moments before Christos agreed. ‘You think you need to worry about me, and you would be right. But there’s something you haven’t considered. You need to be very, very careful around Sylvie. No one comes between a mother and her child and lives to tell the tale.’

  The Wolf laughed. ‘Five o’clock.’ He hung up and jumped to his feet, in the room at the Savoy. ‘Right, everyone. We’ve got a lot to do, so listen carefully.’

  Sylvie stood behind her lover in the basement of the Malamatos Shipping offices, listening to the conversation and forced herself to stay quiet. There was no point having a three-way conversation – she had to let Christos deal with this.

  She studied Christos’s neck, the small bulge of skin that edged up over his collar as he held the phone to his ear. The problem was her frustration was keeping pace with her anguish. Christos hadn’t tied this off. He had not been clinical enough years ago. This ex-husband of the mouse had proved to be persistent and ballsy and had exploded back into their lives with potentially devastating consequences. Christos had been weak when he needed to be strong. She watched the skin on his neck wobble. Fifty years of sun and wind had weakened its structure and made it stretch. She didn’t like it.

  She refused to believe that the fiasco at the customs area when they’d lost Isabella had been her fault alone. They should have got the captain to accompany Isabella personally, right into their hands. But that plant of the Wolf’s had been good. Nobody talked to her like that and got away with it. No one. Women who thought they could play her needed to be taught a lesson, but her desire for the upper hand had made her take her eye off the ultimate prize.

  She swallowed back tears. She felt the separation from her child as keenly as if it had been actually ripped from inside her. For the first time in years she felt weepy and flaky, almost unable to concentrate on what had to be done. Children were our undoing, she realised.

  Christos turned round. ‘Only a few more hours and we’re back on track.’r />
  Sylvie forced a smile and looked at her watch. She had already phoned Medea and instructed the old woman to bring the kids out to the play centre. She could look after them there. She’d relish the idea of providing care to Kelly’s kids, just in case Kelly got the idea that they were hers to take. She’d done a runner from Christos’s men earlier, but without her kids she wasn’t going anywhere. For the first time the thought terrified Sylvie, that she was also going to succumb, like so many before her, to the biological pull of offspring. She would be left wide open by the love she had for the baby she hadn’t yet even seen. She turned and headed up the stairs, having to retreat to the toilet. She forced herself to calm down, forced herself to remember what she had been told, that love allowed you to grow. It would make her stronger, this love for her child. She walked into a cubicle and shut the door, saw a handbag hanging on the hook. She opened it to see whose it was and found Kelly’s driving licence inside.

  And a loaded gun.

  64

  Kelly had given Christos everything: her love and her freedom and her self-respect and still it was not enough. Adopting Yannis, giving him a new life and a new start, wasn’t enough. Their son and her child from her first marriage, whom Christos had professed to love, had been cast aside in the desire for a biological connection. She felt a fire of protectiveness towards Florence and Yannis. They were Malamatoses in everything except for the blood that pumped through their small bodies. And it turned out that to Christos, that was all that mattered. Christos wanted an heir. Like some bloated, syphilitic Henry VIII, he wouldn’t stop until he got his heir.

  Well, if the children weren’t good enough, he didn’t deserve to have them. All her guilt about separating them from their father evaporated like milk boiling dry in a pan. She stopped in the street, had to bend down to stop the bile bubbling up her throat. Sylvie wasn’t just the mistress, wasn’t just the lovesick other woman waiting hopefully in the wings for her lover to love her enough: she was so much more than that. A woman with a plan – a woman with a baby on the way. A woman with something Kelly could use. Kelly spun around in the street and stuck out her arm for a taxi. Sylvie had sneaked around her house in the middle of the night, revelled in getting into every corner, thinking she was clever. A black cab slowed to a halt. Tit for tat, bitch, Kelly thought as she climbed in.

  Sylvie’s flat was in a three-storey block in Maida Vale, set back from the main road. Kelly knew all about it; she had found out where Sylvie lived when she had discovered Christos was having an affair. She’d looked it up on Google Maps, had thought about it many times: the place where her husband’s other life was lived. It was a self-effacing block with pretensions to grandeur. It didn’t have a porter but it did have a small communal garden and bullying signs insisting that people couldn’t park by the doors. The windows were flat modern panes with no sills, most of them with nets or venetian blinds. It was anonymous, private, made for people not planning to stay long.

  She saw the CCTV camera trained on the doorway and immediately discounted it. She was an expert in surveillance, after all, she would bet it didn’t even contain film, was there only as a deterrent. She rang the bell of number 9. Nothing happened. She rang again and then started on all the other doorbells and got someone on an upper floor to buzz her in. She crossed the wide lobby and took the stairs to the first floor, coming through a set of glass fire doors to a series of four plain wooden doors, each set with a spyhole.

  She turned the handle on number 9 and leaned against the door. It didn’t budge. The hiss of a bus’s brakes and the screech of its wheels carried through the corridor window from the street. She realised she had nothing with her that she could use to force the door. She made a note of the flat numbers on this floor, retreated back down to the entrance and pressed the buzzers again. No one answered. It was the kind of place where people worked and came back late, their lives lived in more appealing places.

  She walked back up to Sylvie’s floor and saw a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall next to the swing doors. She unhooked it and marvelled at its weight. She stood by Sylvie’s door and swung the extinguisher at the lock. A great thud rang out, and a big dent appeared in the door. She did it twice more before the flimsy door crumpled near the lock and she could shoulder-barge the door open. She hung the extinguisher back on the wall.

  The door opened straight on to an open-plan living room. She closed the door as best she could behind her. There was a modern sofa in beige and a matching chair, set at right angles to the square room. The white blind cut a lot of the daylight. The coffee table was low and glass, with a celebrity magazine set neatly on top. The wall between the living room and what must be the bedroom was lined with a low bookshelf that contained a self-help manual, a fertility book and a baby care manual and a biography of a prominent businessman. There was also a photo in a silver frame – of Christos and Sylvie, her arms tight around his barrel chest. They were both laughing; it looked like it was taken at work, a world she never intruded upon.

  She moved into the small kitchen, touched the curved glass of the coffee percolator – cold. She opened a kitchen cupboard. A packet of spaghetti, a drum of salt. She opened the fridge. In the door was a pint of milk, a carton of orange juice.

  She opened the door to the bedroom and saw the light was still on in the bathroom beyond. It was gloomy in here, but she didn’t dare turn on the light. The bed was made, the brown silk cover pooling on to the floor around it. There was a bedside table and a neutral lamp. At the bottom of the bed was a cot. Sheets and a cot bumper decorated with blue teddy bears.

  She walked into the bathroom. It was cluttered with cosmetics, brushes, combs, bottles of perfume – the same perfume she wore. She opened the mirror above the basin. Her gaze fell on a lock of dark hair, like a sample hanging by the Clairol boxes in Boots. She picked it up, rubbed it with her fingers. It was real. With a flash she remembered Christos leaning over her when she was out cold after her escape attempt. He had cut off her hair. There were three boxes of hair dye under the basin in a further cupboard. She snatched at the bottles of dye; each was a varying colour of brown. Sylvie had been experimenting to find the exact matching shade to her own.

  Kelly didn’t attempt to stay quiet or hidden now. She went back into the bedroom in a hurry and flung open one of the wardrobe doors. There was a huge cardboard box, weighty and thumping when she pulled at it. There was a picture of a pram on the side. Sylvie was expecting to walk the streets of London with her new baby and she had posed as Kelly to get that child.

  Kelly threw open another wardrobe door and saw shoes lined up neatly in the bottom of the wardrobe. They were replicas of her shoes at home. She bent down and looked at the brand names – pretty much all the same. That is what Christos had been writing down in the notebook and what she had filmed with the Sleepchecker. She grabbed at clothes, pulling them from the rails so they fell to the floor in an untidy cascade. Her shift dresses, pairs of black trousers, the long-sleeved black number she wore to their recent party. In the next wardrobe were Sylvie’s usual clothes: gaudy skirts and pink trousers, patent shoes and flowery tights.

  Two different personalities in two different wardrobes; two different people claiming the same man. Kelly found a wig, long straight dark brown hair with a fringe, cut to mirror her own.

  She saw a recording machine and what looked like a projector. She pressed play and an image of herself jumped to life on the far bedroom wall. It was a recording of Kelly in her own home, taken by Christos’s cameras. Walking down the corridor in the flat, from the back, images of her doing the tiniest movements that distinguish one woman from another, throwing her head back to move her hair out of her eyes, inserting a finger under her shirt by her collar bone to reposition a bra strap, twisting her hands together to adjust a wedding ring, the way she planted her feet wide as she stood at the stove, how she pushed out her bottom lip when she was irritated – and there was her glassy-eyed look as she shrank back in fear from her tyrannical
husband.

  All her most personal details projected life-sized on to Sylvie’s wall, feeding a rival’s obsession, urging a rival on. There were more photos of her in this apartment than there were of Sylvie’s lover. Kelly threw things out of the wardrobe, looking for something. A few moments later she found it – a black beret, a little worn, a different brand, but just the same.

  Pinned to the inside door of the wardrobe were close-up photos of her: in profile, from the back, side on. Someone who was prepared to put in that much work on a mad project to imitate a rival was someone unhinged, and very dangerous indeed. Kelly ran back into the living room, sweeping items off tables, desperate to discover how far it went. She returned to the kitchen, reopening cupboard doors that she’d shut just moments ago. Her eyes snagged on the de Cecco spaghetti. The brand she tended to buy, because Michael used to buy it and she liked the fleeting memory. She flung open the fridge again, examining the contents forensically. A packet of pancetta pieces, squidged into their plastic square, a half-finished Parmesan cheese. She whirled round, saw a line of cookbooks leaning against the microwave and picked one up. Tuscan hills and Jamie Oliver’s grin. The book fell open at a recipe for spaghetti carbonara, the page splattered with oil spots and egg yolk. She picked up another book offering perfect pasta and scrabbled through the pages to spaghetti carbonara. The page was well thumbed, crispy flakes of dried Parmesan cheese like shed skin clinging to the crease.

  Her children’s favourite meal. Being perfected by her rival.