by Jessie Keane
Annie looked over at Max. Orla seemed very hot on ‘getting rid’. Of people, of places. Whatever displeased her, in fact. Anything and everyone. It struck her that Orla was a very dangerous woman indeed. Christ, and Annie had been walking around these past weeks believing the Delaneys to be in ignorance of Pat’s death. Fucking Ellie. Annie could easily have woken up dead one morning, yet Ellie had been behaving as if everything was fine. Which – for her at least, the treacherous cow – it was.
Max sat back in his chair and looked at Orla.
‘I have to ask – did you kill Tory?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘And I never would. Not until our parents had passed over, anyway.’
‘Then… you don’t know who did? You don’t believe the rumours that I did it?’ asked Max. He glanced at Kieron. ‘You accused me of doing Tory at your exhibition, didn’t you.’
Kieron gave a snort of laughter. ‘Yeah. But only so Red and Orla would believe it and get you out of my life for good, you bastard. I’m sick up to here of you treading on my toes. I thought that when they heard that, they might do the deed at last.’ He gave his brother and sister a sneering look. ‘But they didn’t. Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ He flung his arms wide in exasperation. ‘Don’t you get it yet? It was me. I did it. I shot the bastard.’
Once again shocked silence filled the room. Downstairs, the crowd roared. Donald had performed his finale. The band were taking their bows. The compère was talking loudly into the microphone, but the words were just garbled noise to the people grouped in the small room upstairs.
‘I’m not ashamed of it,’ said Kieron.
‘Well you should be,’ said Orla, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. ‘You know what it did to Dad.’
‘It needed doing. I can’t be like you, laying flowers and lighting candles for the bastard who caused you both such grief. I had to do something about it.’
So Max hadn’t killed Tory Delaney. Annie’s eyes met his and she read the question there.
‘So if this is the time for confessions, what about Max’s family?’ she asked, turning her gaze to Redmond and Orla. ‘What about Queenie? What about poor Eddie? Jesus, Max had reason enough to hate you all, don’t you think, when he believed you were behind their deaths?’
‘Jesus, trust you to come galloping to his defence,’ said Kieron angrily.
‘I’m not defending anyone. I just want to hear the truth, that’s all.’
Why didn’t the fool just shut up? Annie didn’t even glance at Kieron’s face, she was sick of his mouthing off. She’d spent all this time sitting on the fence that divided the boundaries of the Carter and Delaney manors. It hadn’t been a comfortable experience. Now there was a chance of finishing their feud once and for all, and Kieron was still putting his oar in.
‘It was Pat,’ said Redmond to Max. ‘Pat set a couple of local boys up to do Queenie at your home in Surrey. Make it like an armed robbery, shoot her… but her heart gave out before they could do it. I’m sorry. He bragged about it to me. Laughed about how he went down there and wore a fake moustache and a bowler hat in a pub one night and paid two locals to do it.’
Max nodded, his eyes icy. ‘I traced them. The Bowes boys.’
Redmond nodded too. He didn’t have to ask what had happened to the Bowes boys.
‘That was always Pat’s style, targeting the weak. Tory’s too. And then there was this business with your young brother.’
A muscle in Max’s jaw was flexing. His eyes were slits. Christ, he was going to hurt someone over this. Annie knew it.
‘Pat was a bigot,’ said Orla. ‘Of the nastiest kind. He hated blacks and he hated Protestants and he hated homosexuals. He had a great capacity for hate and very little for love, our Padraig. He knew your brother was attracted only to boys, and he loathed him for that and for the fact that he was a Carter. He killed him. He told us. On Delaney turf, in a parlour that paid protection to our family too. It’s a sort of justice, I feel, that Pat himself died in the place where Eddie was attacked. Pat had no sense. He was a creature of impulse, and some of those impulses were murderous.’
‘Max, we can stop all this now,’ said Annie. ‘Call a halt to it before anyone else gets hurt.’
Max’s fist came crashing down on the desk. Annie jumped.
‘Annie, go downstairs and wait for me there,’ he said.
Before Annie could open her mouth Kieron surged forward and planted both hands on the desk and leaned across to glare into Max’s face.
‘She isn’t yours to order about like a piece of dirt,’ he shouted.
‘Get out of my fucking face,’ said Max flatly.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Kieron roared.
Annie looked up at Kieron as if he’d gone mad. Christ, he looked mad. Max had been thinking of her safety, she knew that. If it had sounded like an order, it was because he was used to giving orders. He meant no harm by it.
‘All this acting like she’s your own personal property, I’m sick of it!’ Kieron gabbled on. ‘Gatecrashing my exhibition, to which she had come as my guest, and whisking her off God knew where. Now how the fuck do you suppose that made me look, eh? You don’t know? Well I’ll tell you! You made me look like a fucking idiot, and I don’t like it!’
‘Kieron, calm down,’ said Orla.
Annie had never seen him so steamed up. This was the real Kieron, she knew that now. Not a gentle artist at all, but the spoiled son of a mad family, determined that everything should go his way. It had made him a killer of his own kin. It had made him dangerous in the extreme.
Kieron turned from the desk. Redmond grabbed at his arm, but he spun away, shrugging himself free. Feeling a sudden frisson of fear, Annie got to her feet. Orla rose too. The small room was packed with bodies, it was too warm in here, too tightly enclosed. And then, without warning, there was a gun in Kieron’s hand and he was pointing it at Max’s chest.
* * *
Annie suddenly saw what a fool she had been in the past. She had been fearful for Kieron’s safety because of Max. Now she knew she’d got it wrong.
‘Well, we’ve all had our confession time, haven’t we?’ Kieron sneered. ‘All the little secrets have come out and we all feel better for it, don’t we? And now there’s only one piece of rubbish still in need of clearing away.’
He took aim. Max stood frozen. Orla screamed Kieron’s name, but he was deaf, triumphant at last to be destroying his enemy, his rival for Annie.
How deep blood runs, Annie thought in horror. Ruthie and Mum, drinking themselves steadily to death. Kieron and his violent family. He’d grown up mired in shady deals and strong-arm stuff, with intimidation and incest and a mob of boys willing to do anything the Delaneys told them to. He was no gentle artist. A predilection for mayhem had seeped into him, like arsenic into a victim’s skin.
Kieron cocked the gun, ready to fire.
The audience downstairs roared as the compère announced the next act. Redmond lunged towards Kieron. Not fast enough. Max was standing there.
Christ, why doesn’t he move? thought Annie, frantic and terrified.
She saw Kieron’s finger tighten on the trigger as if in slow motion. Without a thought in her head she flung herself around the desk. Orla’s screams rang in her ears. Annie threw herself at Max, thrusting him aside.
The bullet smashed into her, knocking her into the chair which fell beneath her as she crashed into the wall. Such an impact. A loud explosion, deafening. Then smoke and the stench of cordite and a fierce, all-encompassing pain.
She couldn’t breathe. She fell, seeing smears of blood – her blood – spattering over the wall behind Max’s desk.
The world began to float around her. She lay on her back, something digging into her hip, Max’s face leaning over her. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear. Everything was peaceful and warm and the pain was slipping away from her, going to another place.
I love you, she tried to tell him. I’ve loved you for ever.
But she c
ouldn’t speak and now it was strange but everything looked blurry, too. The world was going.
Dig deep and stand alone, she thought vaguely.
She was alone again.
But that was fine.
Peaceful.
She was gone.
59
Uncle Ted answered the door in a dirty vest and red braces that evening to find a uniformed copper standing on the doorstep. Beside him was a smaller man in a plain beige mac. He was middle-aged and had the narrow eyes and thuggish demeanour of a small-time crook.
Ted drew back a little, fearing the worst. All right, he’d bought a few cartons of fags off a docker mate and had sold them around the East End, but so what? Hardly a nicking offence, was it? Everyone was at it. Why pick on him?
‘Is William Black in?’ asked the plainclothes copper, ignoring Ted’s aroma of stale sweat. The man looked as if he hadn’t shaved or washed for days.
Ted looked truculent. ‘Billy? Who wants him?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Fielding.’ He flashed his warrant card. ‘This is Constable Lightworthy.’
Fucking hell, thought Ted. What had the simple sod been up to now? But he was relieved. At least they were after the loon, and not him. He always thought of Billy as the loon.
‘Who is it, Teddy?’ roared a female voice over the din coming from the telly.
‘Police, Hild,’ said Ted, opening the door wider. ‘Well, you’d better come in I suppose.’
The two coppers were escorted into a shabby fug-filled front room where a fat, grey-haired woman and a vacant-looking, hump-backed man were watching a black and white television. The woman watched them with malevolent eyes.
‘What d’you want with Billy?’ she demanded. Then she turned to her son and cuffed him hard around the ear. Billy cowered back. ‘You been up to no good again, you little shit?’
‘No need for that, Mrs Black,’ said the detective in distaste. ‘Billy’s been helping us with our enquiries. We just want to ask him a few more questions, that’s all.’
‘Oh.’ The jowls quivered, the mean mouth set in a line. ‘Well you’d better get on with it then.’
‘Is there another room we can use, Mrs Black?’
‘No, there ain’t. Anything you got to say to Billy you can say in front of me.’
Ted sank down into his armchair and resumed his telly-watching. Billy rubbed his ear and looked up at the policemen warily. Every surface was covered with dust and bags, the coppers noted. Gingerly they picked their way through the mess to get to where Billy was sitting. They couldn’t sit down, there was no room. The constable took out his pencil and notebook. Over the din of the television and under the hate-filled eyes of his mum, they talked to Billy.
‘You helped us out grandly with the Bailey case,’ said the detective.
Billy looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like to think about what he’d done to Annie, but he’d had no choice in the matter. He’d done what was right. He nodded warily.
‘And we were wondering what you know about Max Carter,’ said the detective.
Billy’s mum looked at him.
Billy shrugged. ‘I know him. Everyone around here knows Max Carter. But I don’t know anything about him,’ said Billy.
‘Is that the truth, Billy?’ The detective knew it was a lie. He knew that Billy did the milk run around the parlours and halls for the Carter mob, slipping easily around the harder areas of the streets because everyone knew he was harmless and under Max’s protection. The detective knew that Billy was always hanging around on the periphery of Max’s other business dealings; he must have seen things, heard things, that could be useful.
‘He just said he didn’t know nothing, didn’t he?’ snapped Hilda.
‘So he did, Mrs Black. Perhaps it would be better if we continued this conversation down the station.’
‘Don’t you go starting that!’ stormed Hilda, slapping her pudgy hand on the arm of her threadbare chair. Dust plumed up. The constable thought of his mum’s house, neat as a new pin. You could eat off the floor. Fuck it, if you ate off the table in this pesthole you’d be asking for the squits.
‘Then please don’t interrupt, Mrs Black,’ snapped the detective. ‘I’m here to talk to Billy, not to you.’
She huffed and turned her attention back to the telly. Billy was looking at the floor, one arm wrapped around his upper body as if to shield it from a blow.
‘Billy,’ said the detective. ‘Tell us what you know about Max Carter.’
‘I don’t know nothing about Max Carter,’ said Billy, looking up to watch the constable writing that down in his notebook.
Billy had lots of notebooks. He liked keeping notes. It was one of his little compulsions, he couldn’t help it. He thought of them all, years’ worth of notes, all hidden away up in his room in an old brown suitcase of his dad’s. Lots of things about Max and the boys in there. But things that would never be told to a soul. He was daft, but he wasn’t as daft as all that. He knew you didn’t rat on the Carter boys. You did that, there’d be trouble. Max would be upset.
Fielding looked at Constable Lightworthy. They’d had a long day. They were still looking into the department store robbery, trying to pin it on one of the big firms. Everyone knew the Carters and the Delaneys hated each other, and this had happened on Delaney turf. So the Carters were favourite. But try proving it.
Billy had given them some hope. He had been prepared to rat on Annie Bailey, who was known to have been Max Carter’s sister-in-law and his mistress too. The next step was to get him to spill the beans on Carter himself.
He was digging away at it all, patiently. The department store’s manager had been badly traumatized by the event, but he had said he had seen one of the men’s faces. They had pieced together an Identikit of the man they wanted to question. He didn’t bear any resemblance to Max or Jonjo Carter, or to any of their henchmen. It was frustrating, but still he kept with it, digging further.
The store job had been nicely done, you had to admit that. None of the missing cash had been found as yet. Personally, it looked like such a professional job that Fielding doubted the cash would ever come to light. Neat as anything. He’d been over it time and time again, the way the alarm had been disabled and finally he had thought to himself, wait a fucking minute.
Whoever did the job disabled the alarm by getting into the frame room and accessing the phone lines. He’d had a chat with some Post Office boys and they thought that only a skilled GPO engineer would understand the workings of a frame room. So maybe the man whose face had been spotted was a telephone engineer?
Maybe he’d even done work in the store before and was familiar with the line layout. Detective Chief Inspector Fielding had chatted it over with his superior, who had nodded and smiled.
‘Yes. All well and good, but how many thousand GPO engineers are there in England? Five? Six? That’s the ones that are working. What about those who are retired?’
It was a bugger. But Fielding was like a terrier. He didn’t ever let go. He was quietly confident of a result. There was also the question of whether or not an insider had been involved. He had his chaps checking that even now. Who’d moved on unexpectedly, who was suddenly flashing a lot of cash about, whose bank accounts had received an unexpected boost.
All in all, Fielding was satisfied with progress. Big strides were being made, but not big enough. The long reign of the powerful career criminal, much feared and much admired, might soon be over. Slipper of the Yard was getting quite a name for himself, and Fielding was feeling jealous. He was within two years of retirement, and he wanted to leave on a good note.
He wanted to go for the hat-trick.
He wanted to send down two big East End crime clans.
He wanted to nick the Carters, and the Delaneys.
‘Come on, Billy lad,’ he said. ‘Let’s get down the station and have a proper chat.’
Billy shuffled off to get his coat. Hilda glowered at the two men but stayed silent. Sh
e was a bully, and easily cowed if you called her bluff. They’d met plenty like her. Ted carried on watching the telly. It wasn’t his arse on the line, so what did he care?
It was only when they got down the station with Billy in tow that they heard about the shooting at the Palermo.
60
Ruthie was in the drawing room at the Surrey house with a glass of vodka and orange halfway to her lips when Dave barged in looking keyed up.
‘Can’t you knock?’ she snapped, embarrassed at the way he looked at her, the way his eyes lingered on the glass in her hand.
Her eyes followed his and then flicked back to his face. She felt her cheeks get hot.
‘Just having a nightcap,’ she said. ‘To help me sleep.’
‘Max just phoned through,’ said Dave, politely ignoring her feeble explanations.
Ruthie thought that it was typical of Max to phone the hired help, not her.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Carter. He said your sister’s been shot.’
Ruthie froze in shock. ‘What?’
‘I can take you up there, Mrs Carter. Right now.’
Ruthie gulped. Looked at the drink in her hand, then at Dave’s face. She nodded stiffly, feeling a sense of acute unreality.
‘Yes, I’d better…’ she started, then her face crumpled and she put a hand to her mouth. ‘Is she going to be all right?’ she managed to say.
‘They don’t know yet,’ said Dave, his eyes slipping away from hers.
Oh Jesus, it’s bad, thought Ruthie.
‘Where did it happen?’ she whispered, trying not to cry.
‘In the Palermo, Mr Carter says.’ He swallowed, looked awkward. ‘We ought to get going, Mrs Carter.’
Ruthie nodded, put the glass down, and went to get her coat. And that’s when the annoyance set in. No, it was more than annoyance, it was anger. She shrugged into her coat and then got into the car and felt suddenly furious with Annie, because this was bad news, the very worst, and getting it made her feel she might throw up at any minute.
