“And what about Mr Baker? Did he use condoms when you started fucking him?” he spat.
She gulped and nodded her head.
He held up his hand. He didn’t want to hear any more. “When are you gonna get it into your thick head? If you hadn’t miscarried, I would have dragged you down to the abortion clinic meself anyway! You can’t be pregnant and be on the bash! How did you think you were going to make money? Most blokes don’t wanna fuck a pregnant bird!” Gina began to cry. His words were like a knife in her gut, but he didn’t relent. “To be honest, love, I don’t think it’s very professional you coming round here, fucking unannounced, like I want you here. You’re nothing special to me, G. You’re just the same as the other birds who earn my living…”
Aiden knelt down in front of her and gripped her chin between his fingers. His uncaring eyes bored into her face. “Do you fucking understand what I’m saying? I own you, and you do what I tell you to do. If I tell you to fuck the tramp on the stairwell, you fuck the tramp on the stairwell, and if you don’t, G,” he squeezed her chin harder, his eyes narrowing as his anger flared once more, “if you don’t… I’ll crucify you. Do you understand what I’m saying? ’Cos I’m sick of this shit. There’s only one girl I want, and you, with your greasy hair and fucking sour breath, just frightened her away. I didn’t choose you over her all those years ago, G. I just knew you’d be dumb enough to make me money…”
Gina couldn’t retort. Aiden had just destroyed her all over again. Her heart heavy, the only remedy would be to get out of it – reach oblivion any way she could. Aiden pushed her away and stepped over to the dresser. As if reading her mind, he pulled out a tin and knelt back down in front of her. Opening it, he took out a small plastic bag, a teaspoon and a syringe. Gina was sobbing before him, too wrapped up in her own drunken stupor to notice what he was up to.
He knew he had just unravelled the last of her self-respect. She had been a mess for months, and had got worse after the death of Mr Baker, and he knew she’d do anything nowadays to get through the long hours of each day. And he would need her every hour of every day, because business was looking up.
He was really establishing himself in the East End escorting market, with twenty-five girls on his books already. And this little drug they called heroin, the drug he was now gently emptying onto a teaspoon, could double that quantity and make him a mint. He would find new recruits, get them all hooked, and they would be his for the taking. He wouldn’t ever have to pay a wage again – life and everyone in it didn’t mean a thing once you relied on the big ‘H’. He would pay them solely in the drug itself. That was all they would need and, laughable as it was, that was all they would want. Once he had Gina on the good stuff, he wouldn’t have to deal with this shit anymore. As long as he promised her her daily buzz, she would be begging to work for the extra highs.
Gina finally looked up as Aiden prepared the needle. “I can’t do this anymore, Aiden. Without you… without Kieran…” She began to cry. “Why did you have to take away the one person who really cared about me?”
Aiden’s eyes shot up to hers. “We agreed not to bring it up anymore!” he barked.
She whimpered sorrowfully. She could see in her mind’s eye the body of Kieran Baker spread lifelessly on the floor of his hallway, all that blood gushing from the bullet wound in his forehead. It was an image that had plagued her dreams ever since. The walls were suddenly closing in on her. The ground was breaking into pieces beneath her. She felt the huge heavy void in her chest as, once again, she was reminded that she was entirely alone. She sniffed and made to leave, though she didn’t know where she would go. She couldn’t bear to go home and be alone once more.
Aiden interrupted her thoughts. “I want you to take this. It’ll sort you out.”
She sank back down on the couch. “That’s heroin,” she sniffed, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Yeah. It’ll calm you down. Then we can talk, sort things out.”
“You don’t wanna talk to me,” she slurred, even more incoherently now that the vodka was doing its job. “You love Lily, you always have… I should have known…” She shrugged and laughed lightly, as if her inner thoughts were part of some private joke. But her laugh was filled with sadness. “Maybe I have always known,” she added wistfully.
On his knees, Aiden shuffled closer to her, took her arm and pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. He proceeded to wrap a band around her arm. She let him. She knew that she would take the drug. She’d heard what it was like and she needed a way out of her own destructive mind right now. She wiped her eyes with her spare hand and took a deep breath. “Just get it over and done with. I hate needles,” she muttered.
Aiden smirked. “You’ll have to watch, ’cos you’ll be doing this for yourself soon.”
She nodded obediently and closed one eye tight, the other remaining on the arm that Aiden was now holding out in front of her. Tapping the blue vein that had appeared in the crease of her elbow, he carefully injected into it. She watched in morbid fascination as a little of her own blood appeared in the syringe, but once she had taken the shot, it didn’t take long before she felt the effects. She lay back on the couch and closed her eyes, feeling the rush, feeling herself flush, her mouth running dry. Oblivion at last.
Chapter thirty-three
“Was it you?” Aiden seethed as he strode into the centre of Kamal Kakar’s living room.
“Me what?” Kamal asked calmly, as he stepped casually into the room from the hallway where Aiden had barged in and proceeded to question him about what he assumed was Reggie’s murder. He could understand why the man thought it would be him. “Drink?” he added, glancing at Aiden as he made his way to the kitchen and began his usual routine of pouring out a neat vodka over ice for his associate.
“No, I don’t want a fucking drink!” Aiden replied.
Kamal smiled subtly to himself and, leaving the kitchen, he placed the drink on the coffee table and sat in an armchair, crossed his legs and stared placidly up at Aiden, who looked so overwhelmed with emotion that, for the first time ever in front of Kamal, he actually looked confused and vulnerable. “So, am I right in thinking you are accusing me of murdering Reggie Driscoll?” Kamal announced.
Aiden glared down at him and didn’t fail to notice that Kamal thought his accusation utterly ridiculous. “Well, who then?” he replied touchily.
He hadn’t really thought it had been Kamal. He knew Reggie was merely a drop in the ocean in terms of the threat he posed to Kamal’s businesses. But he’d at least wanted to broach the subject, if just to eradicate one person from the list of suspects he’d formed in his mind.
“I have no idea,” Kamal replied.
Aiden whipped the glass up from the coffee table and drained it. “Can I ask about?” he asked cagily, knowing that Kamal would have to give him the go-ahead for potentially causing what he would think was unnecessary trouble. Trouble captured people’s attention and attention brought the law sniffing.
Kamal took a deep breath and composed himself, because he knew his answer was about to cause World War III. “No,” he simply replied. There was no need for explanation; Aiden knew the score.
Aiden stormed over to the kitchen and, whipping the bottle of vodka up from the counter, he filled his glass and downed it in one. When he was done, he slammed the glass and the bottle onto the counter simultaneously and glowered at them, his eyes wide and ferocious. His hands were shaking as they remained clasped around the objects of his scrutiny. He wanted nothing more than to lob them across the room, preferably in the direction of Kamal.
Kamal stood. “Aiden, I know he was a close friend…”
“A close friend!” Aiden bellowed, directing his glower at his boss. “He was the best fucking friend I’d ever had, the best and most trusted friend I’ll ever have!”
Aiden’s glacial blue eyes were gleaming with his rage and his turmoil over the loss of his friend, the man who had been like a father to
him; his guide; his mentor; his counsel. He felt sick at the thought that he’d not wanted to go into partnership with Reggie, that he’d wanted to practically oust him from his life. The guilt he felt over such things hurt like a knife twisting in his gut. How could he have been so ungrateful?
He put his head in his hands and sighed. “Well,” he muttered after a prolonged silence. “He’s gone now, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He sniffed and wiped his running nose with the back of his hand.
He turned back to Kamal and, running a hand over his face, he walked over to the couch and slumped down on it. “Right, these flats I was telling you about.”
Kamal eyed him for a moment then sat back on his armchair. Crossing his legs once more, he said, “OK, what kind of money are we talking?”
“£300K a month, easy. If we buy up the whole block, we’d have enough flats to house fifty girls.”
Kamal nodded, his mind ticking over, shrewdly calculating the great benefit of Aiden’s proposal from a few days ago. “You’d have to run things. I can only be a sleeping partner. No shit leads back to me…” he replied.
“I’d take care of everything as normal. You’ll get your money back from the purchase of the flats within four months tops.”
“Alright… you got a site in mind?”
“They’re selling off a large block of one-bed flats on the Kingsland estate. They want it going to someone who will restore it, but the local council executive is a current client of mine… he won’t want his little secret being made public, so he won’t have a choice but to sell it to me. I’ll make sure all the paperwork doesn’t lead back to any of us… you don’t have any worries on that front.”
“You’ve gathered a lot of comrades along the way, Aiden,” Kamal added.
“Yeah, well, I knew what I wanted a long time ago… it only made sense to make sure people were on my side, whether they liked it or not.”
Kamal brushed his hands over his knees and stood. Aiden followed suit. “Tell me when you need the money. Kyle will sort the financials. Speak to him directly,” said Kamal.
Aiden was expected to make his own way out, as usual. Even the trauma of a dead friend didn’t persuade Kamal to become doorman in his own apartment. When Aiden got to the door of the living area, he turned to Kamal and said, “This will be big… we’ll be very rich men, you and I.”
“I’m already rich, Mr Foster,” Kamal replied, displaying a shrewd grin. It was an unsaid affirmation that Aiden needed the KKKs more than they needed him, and he took it as such. He nodded in reluctant resignation then left.
Despite what had initially gone down at Kamal’s earlier that day, Aiden couldn’t contain his excitement now as he walked swiftly up Victoria Park Road. Kamal agreeing to put up the money for the Kingsland flats meant he was finally on the road to establishing himself as the escort agency in East London. All his hard work and determination had counted for something and, for the first time in his life, he could realistically start thinking about buying a large family home, only made complete by the girl who lived behind the front door he now stood at.
Pressing the brass doorbell, he waited anxiously on the doorstep of Lily Summers’s home, nervously biting the side of his thumb. When the door swung open, it was Mrs Summers who stood staring at him. Lily had inherited all her looks from her mother. Mrs Summers was tall and slim with a heart-shaped face, bright blue eyes and a small puckered mouth, and her hair was bright blonde and cut into an immaculate, silky bob. She looked like Old Bill.
Her mouth popped open when she realised who it was standing before her. “Aiden, isn’t it?” she said, frowning and pursing her pink lips. “You look… different…” she added, clearly bewildered by the expensive suit and winkle-pickers he was wearing.
“Hello, Mrs Summers.” Aiden smiled smugly, basking in her bemusement. The last time she had seen him, he had been much slighter and probably had been wearing his school uniform.
“We haven’t seen you for a while…” she muttered, and it was clear that she had hoped they would never see the likes of him again.
He replied, “Lily came to see me the other day,” and treated her to his best smile, making it absolutely clear that her daughter had come looking for him first.
She raised a blonde eyebrow, poorly attempting to disguise her surprise, and disappointment in her daughter.
“Oh… well, I’ll just go and get her,” she announced grudgingly.
She disappeared. Aiden smirked to himself and noted that she hadn’t invited him in – not that he had expected her to. She had never approved of him. She had made that clear on several occasions, when he used to walk Lily home after school. She would peer out of the window with the look of a school teacher about to discipline a pupil, and Lily was never allowed to invite him in. Aiden didn’t much like Mrs Summers either, or her husband, who he recalled looked like Postman Pat. They were Old Bill. There wasn’t much more to say than that.
Despite his triumph over Mrs ‘Stickler’ Summers, he was extremely nervous coming to see Lily, for fear that she would reject him. It was an uncomfortable sensation, to feel so vulnerable, and it was a sensation he resented. No one had ever made him feel the way he felt about Lily Summers. He’d only ever had the desire to make one person happy other than himself, and Lily was that person. And now that he was going to earn an incredible amount of money, he could finally provide her with the things she’d been accustomed to all her life. But would it be enough?
He stepped back to look up at the three-storey town house before him, and he swelled with pride at the thought that he would soon potentially be able to purchase something twice its size. And at just twenty years of age!
He hadn’t realised that Lily had come to the door, and only her voice distracted him from his reverie. “Admiring the view?” she said, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed defensively across her chest.
He gazed at her. She looked stunning, in a knee-length, navy tea dress, grey tights and black ankle boots. “Now I am,” he replied, a smile creeping to the corner of his mouth.
Lily’s light blue eyes searched his handsome face. She couldn’t deny that every inch of her body longed for him to take her in his arms. She could see in her mind’s eye the images of them lying together, and she longed for his flesh to be against hers again. She desired to touch every inch of him. No man had ever made her feel the way Aiden had. No man would ever match his allure. He was totally and unequivocally inescapable.
Beneath her steely glare, she took in his dark ruffled hair, his square jaw and straight nose, his full lips, his kissable neck, his large shoulders hidden beneath his expensive suit jacket, and his eyes… those beautiful piercing blue eyes that she could get lost in forever.
Her desire was certainly palpable, yet seeing Gina again, knowing for sure that Aiden had not severed his relationship with her, and having been informed about their baby, had hurt her badly. She had not thought of anything else since, and seeing him now, as much as she basked in his presence, it inflamed the resentment and anger she felt from her recent discovery and the suffering it had caused her.
“What do you want, Aiden? I told you, I’m seeing someone,” she said, narrowing her eyes to convey her dissatisfaction.
Aiden fought all his instincts not to retort with something derogative about Tristan, and instead he stepped up to her and took her cheek. He felt her freeze beneath his touch, but that she did not pull away gave him the confidence to move closer. “Aiden, what are you doing?” she sighed hopelessly, as if this single touch had already sealed her fate.
“I love you, Lily… so much. I always have and I always will,” he whispered, and he sounded so earnest.
“Aiden…”
“I mean it… there’s never been anyone else.”
Her eyes glistened with the threat of tears. “That’s not true…” she whispered.
He took her hand and placed it on the breast of his jacket, over his heart. “There’s never been anyone els
e… in here.”
She gulped and slowly pulled her hand away. “What happened to your baby, Aiden? Did you make Gina have an abortion?”
He shook his head. “No, Lily. She had a miscarriage. At the time, I’d already called it off with her. I didn’t even know she was pregnant… she didn’t tell me.”
“Would you tell you?”
The recollection of the late Mr Baker’s identical words came back to haunt him and he stepped back, gulping down the urge to retort. “Will you take a walk with me?” he asked.
She eyed him warily for a long moment then, finally, she nodded her agreement.
Calling out to her mother, she quickly grabbed her coat and stepped out of the house to join Aiden before she changed her mind. He opened out his hand and she took it. Taking the footpath, they headed in the direction of Victoria Park in silence. It was a rarity, but Aiden felt entirely relaxed all of a sudden. It was a cold but bright day, and he breathed in the cool air and exhaled a quiet sigh of contentment.
“What are you so happy about?” Lily murmured.
He gave her a shy smile. “I feel content when I’m with you.”
Lily concentrated on the street ahead, yet her whole body was affected by Aiden’s hand as it tightened around hers. Despite herself, she had to think straight. Something had really concerned her on New Year’s Day. What had been wrong with Gina? She had been a mess – a shadow of the girl she had once been. To her, Gina had always been the strong one, the girl who wouldn’t take shit from anyone.
An unwelcome thought crept into the back of her mind. Aiden…. was he the cause of Gina’s disintegration? Whether he knew or not, they had been expecting a child and Gina had miscarried. It must have been devastating for her to go through something like that alone. Yet Aiden had treated her with such contempt.
“Did you love Gina?”
Aiden took a deep breath. He had been expecting this topic of conversation and he answered, “No,” with no elaboration.
Lily hesitated, then pressed, “How long ago did she miscarry?”
Human Conditioning Page 25
