by Roberta Kray
Delaney gave her a long hard look.
Jo instantly shut up. Had she gone too far?
‘Get out,’ he suddenly said. ‘All of you. Get out now!’
They didn’t need telling twice. As Gabe struggled to his feet, Jo grabbed the key off the table and with fumbling fingers eventually managed to get the cuffs unlocked. Leo, who could hardly stand up, had to be helped. Jo put her arm around him. His face was a sickly shade of white.
Gabe flexed his fingers, getting the circulation back in his hands and wrists. He threw a furious glance towards Marty Gull. ‘Where’s Susan? What the fuck have you done to her?’
‘You’ve got thirty seconds,’ Delaney growled.
‘Come on, Vic. I need to know where she is.’
Delaney shook his head. ‘None of my business, son.’
Gabe took a step towards Marty but Devlin immediately aimed the sawn-off at him.
‘Ten seconds,’ Delaney said. ‘Make up your mind. Staying or going?’
Jo could feel it all starting to go wrong again. ‘Please,’ she urged, tugging at Gabe’s sleeve. She knew what it meant to him but Susan was already dead. It was the living he had to think about now.
Gabe, after what seemed like an interminable pause, eventually nodded at Delaney.
He gave the slightest of nods back. ‘Close the door on your way out.’
Marty immediately started his goading again. ‘You just gonna let them walk, Vic? Christ, you really have lost your bottle. They’ll be straight down the cop shop. You’ll be hearing the sirens before—’
‘Shut up!’ Delaney yelled.
Suddenly all of Marty Gull’s bravado seemed to drain out of him. Panic invaded his face. He shuddered and gazed up at the three of them. ‘You can’t leave me here. You can’t. You know what he’s going to do!’
Jo hesitated but Gabe pushed her forward. She didn’t look at Marty again as they fled from the room. She knew there was pleading in his eyes and she couldn’t bear to see it.
Epilogue
Jo laid the white roses on the grave and stepped back. She shivered in the chill December air. It was now six months since Susan had been laid to rest. Her twisted body had been found lying between the swings and roundabouts of a kiddie’s playground. She’d been strangled, although not before she had put up a fight. The police were in no doubt as to the identity of her killer – forensics had scraped slivers of Marty Gull’s skin from beneath her fingernails – but as to who had despatched Gull with a single shot to the back of his head, and then dumped him by the side of a busy road, remained a mystery to them.
The funeral had been a sad, spare affair. With only five of them present to pay their respects – Susan’s mother and her partner, Snakey Harris, Gabe Miller and herself – their collective Amens had barely raised a ripple in the large draughty church. It had been July by then but a brisk wet wind had whipped around the building and rattled the old windows.
After the service, Pat Clark had taken Jo’s hands in her own. ‘Thank you so much for coming. I know what great friends you were.’ She had leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Her breath had smelled of booze. The boyfriend, a thin surly man in need of a shave, had stood to one side, impatient to be going and making no attempt to hide it.
Jo gazed down at the grave and sighed. Six months. Sometimes it still seemed like yesterday.
Gabe slipped his arm through hers. ‘You want to walk?’
She nodded. That Gabe Miller had been unfortunate enough to be connected to two murder victims in quick succession, Ritchie Naylor and his ex-wife, had raised more than a few eyebrows at the police station. But whatever their suspicions, they hadn’t been able to charge him with anything. He remained a free man or at least as free as his regrets allowed him to be.
Jo was still not sure if she was recovering from what had happened. Perhaps she never would. Perhaps it was more a matter of finding a way to deal with it. Her first attempt, involving a journey out to Sydney to see her parents, had proved singularly unsuccessful. If she’d been looking for a shoulder to cry on, she’d been searching in the wrong place; neither Anne nor Andrew Grey, although both moderately pleased to see her, had encouraged the sharing of any confidences. Jo had told them nothing of her nightmare and after two weeks of sightseeing had flown back home again.
Her next steps had been more practical. She had put the Barley Road property and the shop on the market. To her relief the flat had sold quickly and she was now living in a small rented maisonette in Highgate. Whether she wanted to stay in London or move on to somewhere else was still up for debate.
Gabe paused as they came to a divide in the path. With his spare hand he took his cigarettes from his pocket, eased one from the pack and lit it. ‘I still don’t understand why you’ve decided to flog Ruby’s to that woman.’
That woman was Deborah Hayes. ‘Why not?’ Jo said. ‘She has a wealthy husband ready to stump up the cash and she did help establish the shop in the first place.’
‘She was also shagging your old man.’
Jo looked at him.
He pulled a face. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s the truth.’ She dragged a heel across the icy path, scuffing up a narrow ridge of snow and dirt. ‘When she first put in the offer, I had the very same reaction. But the more I thought about it, the more advantages I could see. For one, she’s willing to keep Jacob on for as long as he wants to work, and for two … well, it’s better than selling to Ruby. I could hold out for another buyer but that might take months.’
‘So you hate Ruby more than Deborah?’
‘I don’t hate either of them.’ She saw his sceptical expression and shrugged. ‘Okay, so that’s not entirely true but I am trying. Let’s just call it a work in progress.’ She scuffed at the ground some more. ‘I’m done with living in the past. If Deborah wants the place that much, she’s welcome to it.’
Gabe took a long drag on his cigarette. He stared thoughtfully up at the sky before slowly lowering his dark grey eyes. ‘You get a good price?’
She grinned. ‘Mind your own business.’
Stevie Hills stood in the middle of the Green and drank in the cold winter air. Even after six months, he still couldn’t believe that he had got away with it. Well, not clean away – he could clearly recall that stinging black eye – but it was nothing compared to what Devlin might have done. The man was built like a brick shithouse and nicking his gun hadn’t been the smartest move in the world.
Mum had given him a mouthful of course, the usual bollocks about not taking stuff that wasn’t his – pretty rich considering her record – but she had still stood up for him. After Devlin had thrown his first punch, she had cursed and yelled and dragged him off. The big guy had stood back and laughed. He had said they should both be bloody grateful that the only thing he was planning on cracking open that night was the champagne.
Stevie didn’t know the ins and outs but it seemed Devlin had got himself some kind of promotion. The old gangster he worked for had unexpectedly found himself short of a right-hand man. ‘Stepping into dead men’s shoes,’ his mum called it, but that didn’t stop her from sharing her bed with him or spending his cash.
She claimed that his new boss was loaded. Devlin had told her a tale about how, after a late meeting one night, the geezer had left a case full of readies in his living room and gone upstairs to get some kip. In the morning he’d come down to find it gone. Some foreign maid, allegedly, had pissed off with half a million!
Stevie reckoned it was just one of Devlin’s tall stories. The guy was full of bullshit. He scratched absent-mindedly at his balls while he waited for a punter to appear. He wondered what had happened to the kid he had sold the gun to; he hadn’t seen him around for a while.
*
Together Jo and Gabe walked past the poignant rows of war graves, each one marked by a small white stone, and into the older, much wilder part of the cemetery. Jo found herself surprised by the stillness of the place. The main r
oad wasn’t that far off but the relentless flow of traffic could no longer be heard. There were no sounds here apart from the birds, the occasional rustle of a squirrel and their own light footsteps.
Some of the tombs had survived intact but most were broken or cracked, the stones listing to one side and tangled up in weeds. She gazed at the dates, at the endless roll call of births and deaths, the terrible toll of children lost, of husbands and wives separated, of parents reluctantly consigned to the earth. A grey stone angel, hands clasped in prayer, raised its eyes to the heavens. Jo sighed, her breath a steamy white cloud in the cold December air.
Gabe’s voice cut across her thoughts. ‘You heard from Leo?’
She nodded. Ruby, sticking to her side of the bargain, had managed to unearth some ‘misplaced’ shares in the Strong chain of stores that should have been allocated to Leonard Kearns. Constance was now a relatively rich woman. She had sold the flat and moved down to the coast. Leo had sent a few postcards telling Jo about his new school and the friends he had made. ‘He sounds happy enough but … I don’t know, do you think he’ll ever be able to get over it?’
‘If he’s old enough to buy a gun, he’s old enough to deal with the consequences.’
‘You don’t mean that. He’s only a kid.’
Gabe threw his cigarette down and ground it under his heel. ‘A kid who wanted to shoot me dead.’
‘Scare you, I think,’ Jo said, ‘rather than actually kill you. And I don’t suppose he ever wants to see another gun for the rest of his life.’
They left the path and wound their way between the graves. The snow was deeper here, nudging at their ankles. They were both, she knew, thinking about the same thing. That night would continue to haunt them for a long time yet. They could not forget what had happened in the flat or how close Marty Gull had come to wiping out all three of them. No, all four of them: he would, without doubt, have murdered Silver too.
Jo stopped, slid her arm out of his and stared into the distance. At the far end of the cemetery she could see flashes of green and red – Christmas wreaths that had been laid on the graves. ‘I prayed that night,’ she said.
Gabe looked at her. ‘Me too.’
But Jo knew that they had asked for different things. She had prayed to stay alive. He had prayed that Susan was still alive. And only one of them had been lucky enough to have their prayers answered.
They had grown closer over the past few months but it was still too soon to think about any lasting commitment. There was something between them, a bond, but she had no idea how lasting it might be. Shared trauma was hardly the basis for an enduring relationship. What did it say in the magazines? Never fall in love on the rebound. They were both still coming to terms with their own individual losses.
Gabe was the first to break the silence. ‘Any regrets about not reporting Carla?’
‘About making a deal with the devil, you mean? Yes, plenty, but the alternative was even worse. Mrs Dark, although I hate to admit it, was talking sense. I think I made the right decision. If nothing else, I have the consolation of knowing that Carla and Ruby will be at each other’s throats for the next twenty years.’
‘That family has a lot to answer for.’
‘Strong women,’ Jo said softly. ‘You have to watch out for them.’
Gabe Miller smiled as he slipped his hand into hers. ‘You could have a point.’
