‘You must get that child to a hospital, Stephen, otherwise she’ll die.’
He laughed again and Donna saw the insane glint in his eyes. She realised that Stephen was over the edge.
‘Oh, I must, must I? You have no authority here, Donna. You are in deep shit, lady. It’s you who’ll be going to the hospital, love. Not the kid. You’ll be in the mortuary by morning!’
He saw the fear in her eyes and savoured the sensation it gave him. To see her brought low was like balm to his ego.
‘You’re like my mother, do you know that? All good outside, and wind and water inside. All the mouth and the talk. Oh, yes, it’s like you modelled yourself on old Maeve. Maeve the mother figure, Maeve who talked to us all as if we were kids even when we were grown men and women. I hate her, Donna, almost as much as I hate you. Do you know the funny thing? When the word gets back that you’re dead, I’ll have to identify you, won’t I?’
He laughed again.
‘I’ll enjoy that. It will give me a real good laugh.’
Donna was terrified. ‘You’re mad. Georgio will know what happened.’
Stephen rubbed her face with his hand, caressing the swollen cheek once more.
‘Georgio will be grateful, darling. He wasn’t going to stay with you, you stupid bitch.’
As he spoke Donna launched herself at him, hands and nails flying. It was so unexpected it took him and Candy by surprise but as she reached the door, Stephen caught hold of her hair, dragging her painfully back to the bed.
‘You’re not going anywhere, woman. Not yet anyway.’
Just then the door opened and Alan Cox walked into the room with two heavyset men behind him.
‘Hello, all. Entertaining the family, Stephen?’
Donna catapulted from the bed as if on a spring and ran to Alan, her face alight with relief at seeing him.
Stephen looked stunned.
‘Surprised to see me, Stephen?’ Alan put his arm around Donna and smiled down at her. Then, pushing her away gently, he walked towards Stephen.
He was still looking stunned as Candy, realising what was happening, went for Alan with her glass. Donna shouted to warn him and Alan turned around and slammed his fist into Candy’s abdomen. The glass flew out of her hand as she dropped to her knees.
Alan Cox stared at Stephen as he sat on the bed, his face a mask of surprise and fear. As Stephen went to rise, Alan began to lay into him, punching him with the full force of his considerable weight behind each blow.
Donna watched in shock as Stephen attempted to crawl across the bed, trying to avoid the rain of blows descending on him with premeditated regularity, battering his head and his face with a ferocity Donna would never have believed possible. As Stephen hit the floor, Alan was kicking him, kicking him so hard he was being shoved across the concrete, and all the time Alan was talking.
‘Hurts does it, Brunos? Frightened, are you? The big whoremaster is frightened, is he?’
In her mind’s eye Donna saw Alan kicking to death a Chinese man in Soho. In her heart she knew it was about to be re-enacted in a squalid hotel-cum-brothel in Sri Lanka.
Grabbing him, she began pulling him away. ‘You’ll kill him, Alan, you’ll kill him!’
He shrugged her off as if she was a fly.
She looked at the two heavies for help. They stood watching, stony-faced.
‘Stop him, someone, for Christ’s sake!’
But no one moved. Even Candy was watching in fascinated silence.
Pushing her way in front of Alan, Donna put her hands up to his face, cupping his chin.
‘He’s not worth going to prison for, Alan, especially not out here. Leave him. It’s over. Leave him alone.’
Alan looked down at her as if in a trance. Then his shoulders slumped inside his jacket, and his body seemed to relax.
His eyes moved to the bloody face below him, and his mind registered that Stephen was still breathing. Inside he was sorry for that fact; he wished him dead. Never had he wanted anyone dead so much.
He glanced over at the two men waiting by the door. Their faces remained devoid of expression or thought.
Donna pulled him away from Stephen’s inert form.
‘There’s an injured child here, a girl, in a lot of pain. Her windpipe’s crushed. We have to find out what happened to her, Alan.’
Candy pulled herself up with the help of the bed. ‘I told you, she’s gone to the hospital.’
Donna looked into the hard face. ‘What hospital is she in then, and we’ll go there?’
Alan looked at the woman and said through clenched teeth, ‘I’m going to raze this fucking place to the ground. My advice to you is to tell the lady what she wants to know or else I’ll kick the truth out of you.’
Candy looked from Alan to Stephen and then to the men by the doorway. She sighed.
‘She’s up in one of the rooms in the roof.’
Donna’s face paled. ‘But she was dying, the child was dying!’
Candy nodded. ‘I’m quite well aware of that fact, Mrs Brunos.’
‘Then you’d better lead the way, hadn’t you?’ Alan’s voice was loud in the room.
He looked at the men by the door and said, ‘You know what to do.’
They nodded and left the room quietly.
‘Come on then, we haven’t got all night.’
Candy led them to the attic room, and as the door was opened, the heat hit them. It was like opening an oven.
The child was on an old blanket on the floor. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. As Donna ran to her, there was the sound of shouting and Candy made a move for the doorway.
‘Stay where you are, lady, I haven’t finished with you. There’s another few men down there with my two. I came well-prepared. You ain’t going fucking nowhere.’
Alan picked up the child gently and ran with her from the room, Donna and Candy following. He took her to the room he had found Donna in and she saw Kassim inside with a large cut over his forehead, talking to himself in an Indian dialect.
Inside the room, Alan placed the child gently on the bed, but Donna knew as soon as she looked at her that she was dead. Her tongue was swollen, it was noticeable in the bright light, and her lips were blue. Her large brown eyes were half-open.
Donna stared at the broken body for a few moments and then she became aware of a high-pitched keening noise. For a while she wondered where it was coming from, maybe from the child, then she felt Alan’s arms around her and she realised that it was coming from inside her, and out of her mouth.
Alan stared down into the strained dirty face of Donna Brunos and felt his heart move inside his chest. All her longing and need was written in her eyes, every defeat etched into her face. Yet also, in the back of her eyes, there was an inner light, strength that hadn’t been there before. He had glimpsed it once or twice, but now it was the making of her. Donna Brunos, wife of Georgio, was gone.
Donna Brunos, Woman, had taken her place.
Holding her tight, he let her cry herself out. The child’s broken body was an outlet for everything that had ever befallen her and instinctively Alan Cox knew that.
It was this underlying softness, the capacity Donna had for caring deeply, that attracted him to her.
As he held her, he heard the destruction of the hotel all around them and felt whole once more, cleansed of every wrongdoing ever attributed to him. He likened the feeling to one the soldiers must have felt at the end of the war, when they opened up the gates of the death camps.
He was wiping out all his past misdeeds and writing a new page in his life.
A life he wanted to share with the woman in his arms.
She had become like a drug to him, and now he knew that he needed her more than he had ever needed anyone or anything in his life.
And with the destruction of Georgio Brunos’s memory, there was a chance he just might get her.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Donna was sipping a glass of lemonade, while
Alan and his henchmen were sorting out the last of the Bay View Hotel. One of the men, a bull-necked heavyset individual with deep brown eyes and thick wavy hair, was speaking rapidly into the phone in Urdu.
Alan smiled at Donna grimly. They both looked towards Stephen who lay slumped in a chair staring ahead as if in a trance. His face was blue and swollen, and he was covered in his own blood. Donna felt nothing as she looked at him.
‘He must have been off his head, Donna, to think he could get away with murder. Did Georgio know you were going to top his wife if needs be?’ Alan dragged Stephen’s face around to look at him.
The wounded man smiled, wincing as the move made his lips crack open once more.
‘He was going to leave her high and dry, mate. Even the money from the house, he planned to take that. He was going to leave you with nothing, darlin’. All this was his baby, he loved it out here.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Stephen!’ Alan’s voice was harsh and Donna, leaning forward in her seat, said, ‘No, let him finish, I want to know.’
Stephen shook his head as if she was a recalcitrant child. ‘You’re a stupid cunt, Donna, you always was. Even now you want to know the truth, don’t you? You’re like my mum; tell the truth and shame the devil.’ He laughed hysterically. ‘She didn’t know the devil was living in her house, the devil and his cohorts.
‘Lewis was unaware that his money was being used for all this. That’s where I was going to sort it all out, see - once Georgio was on the trot. Lewis really believed that I was investing his money, and he was getting a good return on it. I was shitting meself for a while, in case he and Georgio ever got to nattering. That line Georgio spun you about Lewis losing money on the hotels was shite - just a lucky guess. I involved Lewis, and then I was going to row Georgio out, see. Because I set all this up. All I needed was his money, but Georgio being Georgio wanted to run the whole fucking shebang. He even wanted the palatial hotel as well. It was me who fucked all that up. I know my market, see, something Georgio never gave me credit for.’
‘You’re a piece of fucking shite!’
This from Joey, the leader of Alan’s posse. It was delivered in a thick Geordie accent.
Stephen sniggered. ‘So what does that make you lot then, eh? It was the people on this island that made all this possible. They fought hammer and tongs for us to take their kids, buy them off them. Rent them for a year, and then renegotiate. Supply and demand, mate, the British way of doing business.’
Alan shook his head and said half to himself, ‘I still can’t believe what we stumbled on here. Are there any other operations going on? What about in the Smoke?’
Stephen shrugged. ‘What do I get for my information?’
Alan looked into the battered and swollen face and finally, after long moments, answered him.
‘You get out of here, that’s what you get. Then you disappear off the face of the earth, mate, because I’m going to put the word all over the streets about you, Brunos. About all this, about your wonderful achievements in Asia with little kids.’
Stephen had the grace to look away, knowing he was caught up in something that was now beyond his control.
‘So how are Jack and JoJo involved?’
Stephen dabbed at a trickle of blood and swallowed heavily before answering.
‘Jack wanted out pretty much from the start, but you know Jack and JoJo. Where JoJo leads, Jack inevitably follows. They sort out the printing of the merchandise over in England. The books are big money, you’d be surprised the number of men who want what we supply. Georgio’s brainchild was the modem. You know what he’s like with computers. It was one step on from what we were doing here, see? We videoed the kids, took photos, and then we marketed them. Georgio thought up the first batch of titles. Now we’re worldwide, thanks to a contact we found in a northern university. He marketed the stuff for us over the Internet, then we just decided to do it for ourselves.’
‘And what about the children, Stephen?’ Donna’s voice was empty.
‘What about them? Like I said earlier, they were bought and paid for, Donna.’
He grinned at her then, knowing it was killing her hearing all the gory details.
‘Some of the kids are quite good at it, you know,’ he went on conversationally. ‘In fact, with these Asian kids, it’s a kind of knack they’ve got. They’re scum, and we have a permanent supply.’
Alan’s fist hit Stephen on the side of the head with such force it split his ear open, nearly tearing it off.
‘I’ll fucking kill you, Brunos, do you hear me?’ he snarled.
Donna watched, expressionlessly.
Joey topped up her glass of lemonade and said in a low voice, ‘I was offered into all this like, but I knocked it back. I’m glad I did and all. Every time I look at my own kids, I’ll think of these poor little fuckers. Some of the kids here don’t even know where they’re from. We’ll have to take them to one of the Catholic missions, I think. Let them sort it out. When the parents finally arrive the locals will explain what’s happened. The trouble is, a lot of the time the parents sell the kids and then forget about them.’ He ran his hands nervously through his thick wiry hair.
Joey noticed the green tinge to Donna’s face and said gently, ‘Get the lass away, Alan, we’ll finish up here. It’s better if you disappear now anyway. Leave it to me and the local filth to clear this lot up.’
Alan held out a meaty fist. ‘Thanks, Joey, I appreciate it.’
He grinned now, displaying pristine white teeth.
‘You’re paying well, but in all honesty I’d have come here for nowt. I don’t know, Alan. There’s shite in the world these days, and yet it’s the armed robbers that everyone seems to hate. Property or other people’s money is sacred. Human life is a different ballgame altogether, eh?’
Alan nodded, and taking Donna by the arm, he led her from the room.
As they walked through the hotel, she looked at all the children. They were sitting quietly, their faces devoid of expression, no real feeling evident anywhere, accepting this latest development in their fate as they had everything else.
‘What’ll happen to them, Alan? What will be the end result?’
He opened the car door. ‘I can’t answer that one, darling. It was their parents who brought them here. Let Joey sort it out now. We’ve done all we can, haven’t we?’
She looked up into his face and said softly, ‘Have we? Then why aren’t I feeling any better?’
Alan sighed heavily and Donna looked at him properly. She saw the lines around his eyes and mouth, the deep hollows across his face through lack of sleep, and she shook her head in despair.
‘Who cares about them though? Who really cares?’
‘I don’t know, love. Now get into the car, will you? God only worked one day at a time, remember, and even He ended up having a day off.’
If Donna had had a chuckle inside her, she would have given it. As it was, she couldn’t even cry any more.
Jack Coyne looked worried and JoJo O’Neil was getting annoyed. ‘So you can’t get through. Big deal. You know what the situation’s like out there. Sometimes they can’t use the phones for days.’
Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t care, JoJo, there’s something not right. I can feel it in my water.’
JoJo laughed loudly. ‘Are you sure? You can feel it in your water! Now I’ve heard everything. Knowing Stephen, he’s on a pussy hunt with that piss-head Jake. Only knowing Stephen’s little foibles, Jake’s shagging the kids and Stephen’s after their grannies!’ He laughed uproariously at his own wit.
Jack was silent for a while, until JoJo said heavily, ‘Will you go home? I can’t stand you sitting there with a face like a wet weekend in Blackpool. I’ve got a little bird coming round soon, and I want to get her in the mood for shagging, not hanging herself.’
Jack wiped his large hand across his face.
‘I still think there’s something not right. I couldn’t even get a fax through to them. They’re s
upposed to be letting us know when the next lot of merchandise is coming through, and we’ve heard nothing. Even the modem line is dead.’
JoJo lost his patience. ‘Jack, fuck off home, will you? Play with the kids, play with yourself if you have to, but please, go home.’
Jack stared at JoJo’s bandaged hand. The stumps looked swollen and he knew JoJo was eating painkillers like sweets, on top of his usual bucketful of alcohol a day.
‘He might as well have shot you in the head,’ he said spitefully, ‘because since Nick blew your fingers off, you’ve been half-mad.’
JoJo’s face was dark with temper as he bellowed, ‘I’ll see me day with him!’ He looked down at his fingerless hand and said through gritted teeth, ‘Once the jump’s over, he’s mine. I promised that to meself. He’s mine and I’ll have that bastard screaming for mercy.’
Jack interrupted him, saying levelly, ‘The way you’re treating the businesses, you won’t be able to sort out your dirty washing, let alone Nick Carvello. Drink and drugs, drugs and birds, drink and birds. That’s all you do.’
JoJo looked at his business partner and only friend and said jovially, ‘So what else is new?’
Jack sighed. He knew in his heart that something was wrong in Sri Lanka, and also knew that until he could prove it, his friend and mentor just wouldn’t want to know.
Five minutes later a young girl with tits like rugby balls and a mouth like the Toxteth sewers arrived.
Jack went home then.
All he was interested in was his wife, his kids, and keeping out of prison. With JoJo going over the top like this since the run-in with Nick, he knew that everything he held dear was in danger, and he would cut his partner’s throat with a blunt razor before he let him destroy everything.
Alan sat on the splendid verandah of the hotel sipping a large scotch. The room was actually on the beach itself, about twenty yards from the sea. The sound of the waves coming in was reassuring. The sea was constant, dangerous, and commanded respect. He could identify with that. He loved to listen to it at times like this, with the only other sounds the high peeping noise of the insects, and with the reflection of the moon on the shimmering water.
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