Dirty Game

by Jessie Keane

  He staggered, then straightened. His face registered dumb surprise. Then he swung at her. She dodged, and fell over Annie. Dolly came charging in then, and hit him over the head with a bit of shattered picture frame she’d plucked from the floor. He went down like a sack of shit. Then he crawled up again.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ gasped Dolly.

  Blood was running down over his face where he had been cut by the sharp edge of the frame. They all watched in horror as he grinned around at them. Annie could remember Max telling her about men who got drunk and drugged and then into fights. You could hit them with a house brick, he said, and they’d just keep coming. They couldn’t feel a thing. They were dangerous because they could feel no pain.

  Jesus, she thought. We’re in big trouble here.

  There was no going back from this. They had attacked Pat Delaney. He would neither forgive nor forget it. He would make them pay in blood.

  Suddenly he charged at Dolly. Darren came up again and so did Aretha. Ellie was backed up against the banister on the landing, screaming the bloody place down. Aretha jumped on him, her hands locked around his throat. Darren started hammering at his massive head with his fists. Pat was still moving. He collided with Dolly and she went down under his weight with a screech of pain. Annie hauled herself up on to the bed and staggered to her feet. She locked eyes with Ellie, who looked frantic. Then Annie grabbed a sliver of glass from the floor and plunged it into Pat Delaney’s back.

  He let out a howl, more animal than human. Annie thought that she would never forget that sound. She tried to yank the shard out again. Her hands were slippery with blood, whether hers or Pat’s she didn’t know. She felt numb. Dolly scrambled out from under his bulk and incredibly he came up again, rounding on them with the glass still in him, roaring out his rage and hate.

  Annie looked at him. There was murder in his vile, pig-like eyes. He was going to kill them. She knew it. First her, then the others. He lurched towards her and she scuttled back, hobbling. Her leg was wet from the knee down.

  ‘Bastard stinking whore!’ Pat’s arms pin-wheeled as he fought to keep his balance. He was losing blood from several places, yet he was still going. Annie rolled back across the bed to get away, and she saw Ellie dash into the room holding the cuffs from the Punishment Chair. Aretha grabbed them and got one on to Pat’s wrist before he twisted on the bed and punched her away. She fell stunned to the floor.

  Dolly and Darren leapt on to him on the bed. The cuff was dangling, if they could get it fastened at least his arms would be pinned. Dolly almost had it, but he knocked her away.

  Annie piled back into the fray. They were all panting and grunting with exertion, like dogs on a bear. She poured all the hatred she felt for this foul bastard into one huge roundhouse punch to the jaw. Pat’s head snapped back. Annie saw that his shirt was soaked with blood. She hit him again. At last, she got the other cuff closed. She was sobbing and could smell her own sour sweat. He had reduced her to the level of an animal, fighting for survival.

  ‘Rope,’ gasped Dolly. ‘Ellie, fetch it!’

  Ellie was gone again. All four of them were on Pat, trying to hold him where he was. He was too strong. He was throwing them off, one by one. Darren went flying, then Aretha. Dolly was clawing grimly at Pat’s ankles while Annie sat on his chest, her hands locked around his throat. He was going puce with lack of air, but he was still struggling and cursing.

  Ellie was back. Dolly grabbed the rope and started trying to get it around Pat’s ankles, but he was kicking and lunging too much. She couldn’t do it. Pat threw Annie off and got back to his feet. Annie was slumped on the floor, Dolly in a tangle with the rope. Darren and Aretha were exhausted. Ellie was clutching at the doorframe and still screaming at the top of her lungs.

  We’re dead, thought Annie. This is it. We’re dead.

  Pat Delaney lurched towards her. He no longer looked even human. Blood was pouring down over his head, more blood oozed from his chest. He was making gurgling sounds and was cuffed but even so it was no good. It wasn’t enough. Annie looked up at him, he seemed to fill her entire world. She waited for death. The others were finished. Done for. No fight left. Pat came closer and leaned down towards her. She shrank back against the side of the bed, nowhere left to go, nothing left to do.

  Then there was a movement behind him and a screaming Ellie jumped on to his back. Annie saw the kitchen knife in her small hand, saw it come arcing round. It opened up Pat’s throat from ear to ear. Blood sprayed, soaking Annie, sluicing over the bed.

  Pat collapsed, taking Ellie with him. The hot metallic stench of blood filled the room. Annie felt herself starting to gag on the smell. He rolled. Ellie jumped aside, throwing the knife down with a cry of disgust. Pat lay on his back, gurgling. Then more blood came out of his mouth and his eyes went blank; they stared up at the ceiling and saw nothing.

  There was a sudden, shocking silence.

  They had killed Pat Delaney.

  And now the Delaneys would kill them.

  Annie’s eyes caught Dolly’s. She saw the panic she felt reflected there. Dolly knew the score. You didn’t fuck with a member of the family firm you paid your dues to and then walk away from it. Pat might not have finished them, but his family would.

  For a long while nobody moved. They were too exhausted from the fight, too fearful of what was to come. Ellie was sobbing gently. She crawled away from Pat’s body, and one of the cuffed hands twitched. Ellie started to shriek. Dolly scrabbled over to her, grabbed her and held on tight.

  ‘It’s all right, he’s dead,’ she said, her voice muffled by her swelling mouth. ‘It’s just a twitch, just the life leaving the body, he’s not going to hurt anyone any more.’

  Ellie’s shrieks softened to tears.

  Annie looked over at Aretha. She was drenched with sweat, but she looked okay. Darren had pulled himself up into a chair and was sitting with his head in his hands. Annie’s eyes drifted on and met Dolly’s again.

  ‘We’re finished,’ said Dolly.

  Annie didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  ‘We’ll have to get out of here,’ said Annie.

  Dolly looked around at the wrecked room in growing panic. Her face was a picture of fear and sickness. This place had become her castle, her stronghold against the outside world. To leave it would be unbearable. She shook her head.

  ‘I’m not leaving here,’ she said.

  ‘We have to, Doll,’ said Annie. ‘The Delaneys are going to want our blood for this.’

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ repeated Dolly.

  ‘Dolly.’ Annie’s voice was desperate now. ‘We have no choice.’

  ‘Yes we do. We could get rid of the body.’

  Annie snapped at this. ‘For fuck’s sake, Dolly, see sense. We couldn’t even lift him. He’s too bloody big for us to move. You know it, I know it.’

  Dolly moved her eyes to the Irishman lying at her feet.

  ‘Jesus, it stinks in here,’ moaned Aretha.

  She stood up and tottered off to the bathroom. They heard her retching. Annie had thought Aretha was tough, but this scene of carnage was too much even for her.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ moaned Darren. ‘Chris could come back at any minute. He won’t stand for this. He’ll tell Redmond Delaney. We’ll be fucked.’

  ‘Ellie,’ said Annie.

  Ellie turned a tearstained face to her.

  ‘You’re going to have to keep Chris busy. Get yourself cleaned up. Go and wait for him in the hall, and when he comes back take him into the front room. Close the door. He likes you, he’ll take the bait. Make sure he does.’

  ‘I can’t,’ whined Ellie. She knew what was expected of her. If Chris wanted sex, she had to provide it. But after all this, she felt too shattered to take on anyone.

  ‘Just do as you’re bloody-well told, will you!’ shouted Annie. ‘Get going. Hurry.’

  Ellie got to her feet like a weary old woman and staggered from the room. Dolly looked at Ann
ie.

  ‘There is something else we can do,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to leave.’

  ‘Dolly!’ Annie said in exasperation. ‘See reason. We can’t stay here. We can’t move him. We’ve got to go.’

  ‘No,’ said Dolly. ‘It’s obvious. I know what we should do.’ She was babbling now, the idea in her mind putting a mad light into her eyes. ‘Who would help us get rid of a Delaney? A fucking Carter! Max Carter’s still hung up on you, Annie. Everyone says so. You could phone him. He’d help you.’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘You have to. He’ll know what to do. He’ll send the boys round and they’ll take care of this mess.’

  Fuck it. The more she tried to extract herself from involvement with Max, the more she seemed to get sucked in. She felt like she was struggling in quicksand, sinking deeper by the minute. She knew what Dolly said made perfect sense. Max would help her. She knew he would help her. And this was his type of territory. He would know how to deal with this; she didn’t.

  Into her mind came Pat’s words when he had threatened Aretha. He’d implied that he’d been responsible for what happened to Celia. So did that mean Max hadn’t done it? But Celia had been told it was a present from Max.

  Annie clutched at her aching head. What did it matter, anyway? They were all violent bastards, intent on maiming any poor fucker who got in their way. She was best off out of it, and maybe she had always known deep down that she would have to let Max go if she was ever to stand a chance of getting Ruthie back.

  ‘Annie!’ Dolly’s voice was harsh, cutting into her thoughts. ‘For God’s sake, we’re in deep shit here. Get down there and phone the man before Chris comes back. Max Carter will work it out. He’ll know what to do.’ She looked at Darren and at Aretha, who had come back and was standing there in the doorway, her dark skin tinted grey with nausea. ‘Darren. Aretha. Get cleaned up and dressed, the pair of you. Quickly. Nothing’s happened here. Pat went home when all the other clients left. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Behave normally. Say nothing. Got that?’

  Darren and Aretha nodded tiredly.

  ‘I don’t want to phone him,’ said Annie. Her mind was spinning. The cuts on her hands and legs were starting to hurt. She felt sick.

  ‘Do it,’ said Dolly. ‘Or I’ll do it for you.’

  44

  In the early hours of the following morning, Billy stood in the shadows opposite the Limehouse parlour and watched as Gary Tooley and Steven Taylor carried something wrapped in a tarpaulin out to a car. They bundled the thing inside, shut the doors quietly, and were away.

  Max’s boys.

  Billy often liked to walk in the early hours. The streets were quiet, he blended into the darkness, became one with the night. You saw all sorts when you were out late. He walked, and walked, because he slept badly. He was on medication for his nerves, and that seemed to affect his sleep. So he walked. Often he ended up in the street in Limehouse, looking up at the house where his beautiful Annie lived.

  He knew which room was hers. He’d worked it out. The one on the left at the front. He stood there sometimes and gazed up at that dark oblong, knowing that beyond it she slept. It was comforting to be nearby. His mum didn’t care where he got to in the night. She had a boyfriend, he had to call the man Uncle Ted, but he wasn’t his uncle really. His mum was busy with Uncle Ted during the night-times. It was better to be out, to walk, rather than lay there awake listening to them making those animal noises through the wall.

  But his quiet stroll tonight had been different. Wearing his mac and deerstalker, clutching his briefcase as he always did, he knew that tonight there had been something going on. Something bad. All the lights had been blazing in the house. Then the boys had shown up and there had been nothing for a while, but he was patient. He had nothing else to do, so he waited. And an hour and a half later, the boys came out with the thing in the tarp. It looked the size and shape of a body, Billy thought. He made a note of it in his book.

  It’s as if Pat Delaney was never here, thought Annie as she looked around her room next day. Gary and Steve had done a thorough job of cleaning every trace of Pat’s death away. It had all gone like clockwork. The angels had been on their side. Chris hadn’t come back; he’d phoned through to say that his mum was ill and he was needed at home. They all knew he was just keeping the fuck out of it, but at least Ellie had been spared having to jump his bones. Gary and Steve had come in like shadows and did all that had to be done.

  ‘We’ll take the bastard for a swim,’ said Gary jokily, wrapping Pat up in what was to be his shroud. ‘A nice long dip, eh? We’ll take him down Newhaven way, no bother.’

  Annie couldn’t laugh with them. The callous bastards. It was too horrible. They’d killed a man, and even if that man was a total bastard like Pat Delaney, he had been a living, breathing human being, and they had taken his life, and the guilt was overwhelming. The lowest point had been when she had to limp into the hall and phone Max to ask for his help.

  ‘What sort of help?’ he asked. He sounded cold and uncompromising.

  ‘There’s been an … incident,’ said Annie. She eased her sore knee by taking the weight off it. It was bandaged – Darren had tended to all their cuts and bruises. Her hands were bandaged too, where the glass had sliced into them. She looked and felt a mess. And now Max was talking to her as if she was a stranger.

  She reminded herself that his coldness to her was a good thing. But she couldn’t get Pat’s words out of her mind. What if Pat really had done Celia, and not one of Max’s mob? No, it was no use thinking like that. She had to think of Ruthie now, and put her first.

  ‘What sort of incident?’ he asked.

  ‘A bad one.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Max, I’m not kidding around here. Take it from me that I wouldn’t be on this fucking phone asking for your help if I could avoid it.’

  ‘If that’s how you feel …’ said Max. He was going to hang up on her.

  ‘No!’ Annie shouted. ‘Please. Don’t hang up.’ Her voice broke with the strain of it. ‘It’s serious. Pat Delaney’s dead.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Max, and it all poured out.

  ‘What?’ Max demanded when she told him that Pat had come after her. She could hear his breathing, hard and heavy, could almost taste his anger. But she didn’t need that now, not more violence, not more bloodshed. She needed his help.

  ‘We killed him,’ she finished at last.

  ‘For fuck’s sake. Isn’t there a Delaney man on the door?’ Now Max’s voice had lost its distance. Now he spoke urgently.

  ‘Chris, yes. He vanished when it all started looking like trouble with Pat. It’s okay. He phoned through and said his mum was ill, but I think he’s just keeping out of it because he could see Pat was acting up and he didn’t want to get involved – and I don’t fucking blame him either.’

  ‘Do nothing. I’ll send someone.’

  And he put the phone down on her.

  ‘Max?’

  She couldn’t believe it, the bastard had just put the phone down. No goodbye, no nothing. And maybe that was it. Maybe he was just going to leave her to sweat, to stew in her own juice. Panic gripped her by the throat. Christ, what was she going to do if that was the case?

  But, true to his word, he sent his boys. His best boys, too.

  Next day she put her coat on and went out into the rain for a walk and stopped off at the phone box. She dialled his number.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, dismayed because her voice shook.

  There was so much more she wanted to say to him and it seemed she was able to say nothing. She wanted to broach the subject of Celia, and what she had thought he’d done, and what Pat Delaney had said, but she couldn’t get into all that. She felt too tired, too dispirited, too confused. She wanted to talk about Ruthie, and how she had found her, and how frightened she had been when she had thought Ruthie was trying to commit suicide. But it had been just a stupid mix-up with sleeping pills. Ha
d Ruthie died, Annie would have forever blamed herself. But she could say nothing because Ruthie would hate her even more than she did already if she started getting grief off Max. Annie felt drained of all emotion. She supposed dully that it was the shock of what had happened last night.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Max demanded. ‘Gary said there’d been damage done.’

  ‘A few cuts. Dolly lost a tooth.’

  ‘Nothing serious?’

  ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘You saw Ruthie.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. She’s … okay.’ She couldn’t talk about it. Ruthie would despise her if she did.

  ‘Right. You owe me for this,’ said Max.

  Annie stared at the phone.

  ‘What?’ she asked numbly.

  ‘You still owe me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I will call in the debt.’

  ‘Max, it’s over.’

  ‘I told you. Only when I say so.’

  And he hung up on her again.

  Annie planned to move out of the Limehouse parlour early. She didn’t want to stay any longer than necessary in the same room where Pat Delaney had died. She couldn’t sleep down in the front room on the sofa in case Chris got wind of it and thought it odd. And Max had said she had to behave normally.

  Normally. Like she would ever feel normal again, after she’d been party to murder.

  The others weren’t finding it easy either. All of them looked like death warmed up, their faces white and strained, and why wouldn’t they? It wasn’t every day you saw a Delaney die right in front of your eyes.

  Of course Chris soon noticed that Annie had injured her knee and her hands. He noticed Dolly’s swollen mouth and missing tooth. But they had already thought of this. They had covered all the bases.

  ‘Tell him that Annie and Dolly had a ruck on Friday night over Annie setting up in business,’ suggested Darren to Ellie.

  This was inspired. All of them knew that the two women had been finding it hard to come to terms with their changed circumstances; an imaginary catfight would be perfect cover for what had really happened.