by Jessie Keane
‘Only one fractured rib – you were lucky,’ said the nurse. ‘I’m Gemma. You were in a pretty bad way when they brought you in on Saturday. How are you feeling now?’
‘Shitty,’ said Annie, not feeling very lucky at all.
Gemma smiled. ‘We’ve sedated you to help with the pain. But there’s nothing major – just the rib, and that’ll pretty much mend on its own, it’s not too bad a break. You’ll find you’ll be able to shower in a few days with the strapping on, and in a couple of weeks that can come off. Take some ibuprofen for any discomfort. Six weeks’ time, you’ll be right as rain. Could have been a lot worse,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Could have punctured a lung. What happened? The old man’s team lose the match then?’
Annie gulped again. ‘Something like that,’ she said. Six weeks?
‘The police want to speak to you,’ said Gemma. ‘When you’re ready. They always do with assaults. You might want to do that. Press charges. Make him think better of it next time.’
Press charges, thought Annie. How quaint.
‘Who brought me here?’ she asked.
‘Some men dropped you off in the car park. What were they, your brothers or something? They didn’t want to hang around, anyway. They grabbed one of the ambulance crews and left you with them. Me? I hope your folks have gone back and given the old man the pasting of his life.’
It hurt to lay on her back, she felt she couldn’t get her breath. Painfully, with the nurse’s help, Annie manoeuvred herself on to her side. Then she closed her eyes, and let the darkness take her again.
When she awoke, the windows across the ward showed that night had come. People were talking, and a woman in a dark green tabard was wheeling a tea-trolley up near the nurses’ station. Annie rang the bell and after a moment a nurse came – not Gemma; this one was a brunette.
‘I need to go to the loo,’ said Annie, and started to swing her legs off the bed. Instantly she felt her head swim, felt the grey fog descend. Her whole midriff was a hard ball of agony.
‘Whoa, easy!’ The brunette dashed forward and caught her before she collapsed to the floor. She eased her back on to the bed. ‘Too soon for that,’ she scolded mildly. ‘Tomorrow, maybe. We’ll see. I’ll fetch the bedpan.’
Annie lay back on the pillows, winced, turned on her side again and thought: Those bastards!
They had reduced her to this; her, Annie Carter, mob boss, madam, Mafia queen. And here she was, confined to bed and having to shit into a bedpan. A slow seething anger started to coalesce in her beaten, aching guts then. Eyebrows and Baldy. She knew them.
And now? They’d be sorry.
58
The brunette was right; next day, Annie felt a little better. The night had been bad. When she turned over, the pain woke her and then there was too much noise to get back to sleep, people talking and laughing, people crying out, some mad old lady trying to get into bed with one of the other women in the ward and the nurses having to come running. Annie didn’t know what time that happened, maybe three; and then when things died down again, when they’d ushered the old dear back to her own bed and finally she did sleep, there was another nurse, at six in the bloody morning, nudging her awake to take a painkiller.
Christ, I’ve got to get out of here.
She was given a brisk bed bath at nine, and then breakfast was wheeled in. She didn’t touch it. Felt sick to her stomach to even look at food, to even think about it. And then at eleven, DCI Hunter and DS Sandra Duggan came to see her.
‘Oh Gawd, look what the cat’s dragged in,’ she moaned, closing her eyes. When she opened them, they were still there; Hunter looking solemn, DS Duggan looking suspiciously pleased to see her come to this.
‘What happened, Mrs Carter?’ asked Hunter, ignoring her remark. ‘Ask too many questions or something?’
Or something, thought Annie.
‘The nurse tells me that you have bad bruising and a cracked rib,’ he said.
‘Give that boy a coconut,’ said Annie, propping herself up a bit, wincing.
‘Who did it?’
‘Two men. Don’t know their names.’
‘Could you describe them?’
‘No.’ A vision of Eyebrows and Baldy flashed into her brain. She could describe them perfectly well, but she didn’t have to. ‘I couldn’t. It all happened too fast.’
‘The nurse said you were left in the hospital car park.’
‘I got nothing to tell you,’ said Annie tiredly.
‘Hm,’ said Hunter. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive,’ she said, and closed her eyes.
‘You want us to notify anyone for you? Any relatives?’
Annie thought of Ruthie and shook her head. Whatever was going on, it had already brought grief down on Ellie’s head, and her own. She didn’t want Ruthie getting dragged into the mix too.
‘You can tell Mrs Brown at the Shalimar. If she’s interested. And the hotel I’m staying at, they must be wondering what the fuck’s going on.’
She gave him the hotel’s name and address and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Hunter and Duggan were gone. And she needed to get to the loo; no way was she using a fucking bedpan again. She levered herself to the side of the bed and her head started swimming like a bastard. She tottered to her feet, grabbed at the metal headboard and just about stopped herself going sprawling to the floor.
‘You want to take it easy, love,’ said the gummy elderly woman in the next bed. Her teeth grinned from a glass on the bedside table. ‘Call the nurse, she’ll help you.’
Or sit me on that ruddy contraption again.
Annie ignored the advice and somehow got to the foot of the bed. ‘Where’s the loo?’ she asked the woman.
‘Over there,’ she said.
Annie launched herself across the room, and with her head reeling, her guts in pain and her legs unsteady, she made it. In the loo, she did what she had to do and then washed her hands and looked at her reflection.
Jesus, the state of you! she thought.
Her face was grey-toned, as if her warm Barbadian tan had never been. She was sheeny with sweat, her eyes dark-shadowed with anguish. The hospital gown was the least flattering thing ever made in the whole of creation. She turned away in disgust, and staggered back to the ward, back on to the bed, which had felt like a hard stony horror all night, but now felt like absolute bliss. She fell into it, dragged the covers over, and fell asleep.
59
Tonight, Dave Waterman was going to get laid. Sabrina, one of the dancers at the Blue Parrot where he worked as a doorman, had been giving him the come-on for weeks now, and they’d gone on one date, then another, and now it was the third date, and that was pay-off time, was he right or was he right?
He grinned at himself in the mirror as he splashed on the old Paco Rabanne, spruced himself up for the big event. Granted, he was no oil painting. He had a big dish of a face and nothing seemed to shift those blackheads on his nose, but he was big in all the departments that mattered and he worked out, kept himself fit – needed to in that job, all sorts of nutters out on a weekend spraying champagne at each other and sniffing lines of coke in the bogs, you had to be able to handle yourself.
He waggled his thick eyebrows and hummed along to the radio, it was the Quo, he loved them. Wondered if he should get something done about those eyebrows, met in the middle, that was a bad sign, wasn’t it, meant you had a short fuse? Well, he did have a short fuse, that much was true. He hoped Sabrina was going to put out tonight, or he’d be very annoyed.
The doorbell rang and he grabbed his jacket and tore off down the stairs, opened the front door; she was early.
It wasn’t Sabrina, though.
Dave stared at the two men standing there. They were very well-groomed, wearing identical smiles, and one of them held a snub-nosed automatic in his hand. Dave felt his bowels turn to liquid as he stared in disbelief at the gun.
‘Hi,’ said the one holding it. He sounded American. ‘We’re
takin’ a little trip. Come on.’
Evan James was looking in the mirror too, and thinking that having acne as a kid had scarred him badly, but that was also good, because his bald head, mean eyes and scarred skin meant that he looked ferocious, and he was.
He’d just been in the showers at the boxing club, and he’d had a good bout tonight, beaten the crap out of his opponent, and his trainer had said he could almost go pro, he was that promising.
Now here he was, drying off, getting dressed, stuffing his shorts and gear into his bag and trotting off to the door of the club, calling out cheerio to the kids pounding the punchbag, but they were intent, head down, training hard, and didn’t hear him, and that was OK.
He went outside into the early-evening rain and trotted over to his car, and it was then that two well-dressed men approached him. One of them showed him a gun.
‘What the fuck?’ he said aloud, staring at it, mesmerized.
‘Let’s take a ride,’ they said.
‘Hit him again,’ said the one who seemed to be in charge of proceedings, the one with the American accent and the gun in his hand.
The other one hit Evan again, as instructed. Evan’s bloody head, which was already looking like a squashed watermelon, bounced around on his shoulders. He was tied to a chair in the depths of Smithfield meat market, and Dave Waterman was beside him, also tied to a chair, and looking pretty well done over, his features damned near unrecognizable, so Sabrina wasn’t going to get laid tonight, not by Dave anyway. Not tonight, and not, he was beginning to suspect, at any time in the future either.
‘This is nothing personal, guys,’ said the American. ‘This is just a lesson in manners, you understand me? And also, a lesson in who not to pick on, not ever.’
Neither man responded. Blood and urine was dripping on to the concrete floor.
‘Let’s wrap this up,’ said the American.
60
When Annie woke again, Dolly was standing beside the bed. She started to crack a smile, and then she realized that this was in fact impossible because Dolly was stone-cold dead on a slab somewhere. She blinked, shoved herself up against the ghastly hospital pillows.
Ellie.
It was Ellie, not Dolly. How could she have confused the two? Ellie was standing there wearing a powder-blue skirt suit, clutching the metal end of the bed and biting her lip as she looked at Annie.
‘I shouldn’t be here,’ said Ellie.
Annie cleared her throat. Ellie was wrestling with some big internal problem, so she gave her a moment.
‘I really bloody shouldn’t,’ said Ellie. ‘But the police, that Hunter person, he told me you were in here. What the hell’s happened to you? He said someone worked you over, I couldn’t bloody believe it, and fuck it, I shouldn’t be here.’
‘But you are,’ Annie pointed out.
‘Is it true, what he said?’
‘Yeah, Doll, it is.’
‘Doll? What you calling me Doll for? I’m Ellie. Did you take a knock to the fucking brain or something?’
Annie shook her head. For a moment, she truly had thought it was Dolly standing there. Stupid. Her head was fuddled with painkilling drugs, that was all.
‘No, I . . . I dreamed Dolly was standing there. And I’m drugged up to the hilt. Sorry, Ellie.’
Ellie glanced around as if expecting a ghost to appear; she looked genuinely spooked.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Two blokes decided to give me a kicking.’
‘But why?’
‘No idea.’
‘Chris would be spitting blood if he knew I’d come here,’ fretted Ellie, looking left and right like her husband was going to appear out of thin air and give her a bollocking.
‘Why’s that?’ asked Annie.
Ellie was back to biting her lip again. ‘I can’t say.’
Annie gazed at her, hard-eyed. ‘Can’t or won’t? Look. You’re here. So it’s time to shit or get off the pot, Ellie. Tell me what you’ve heard about me.’
‘I can’t,’ she said, desperately shaking her head. ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t.’
Annie sat up straighter. ‘Draw the curtains, Ell. Give us some privacy.’
Her face unhappy, Ellie drew the curtains around the bed. Annie eased the covers back, winced, and swung her legs to the floor. ‘Get my stuff out of that locker, will you?’ she asked.
‘Why . . . what are you doing? You can’t just do that, you can’t just walk out of here – you have to be signed out, the doctors have to see you, they won’t—’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up,’ snapped Annie. ‘And pass me my clothes.’
Ellie hesitated, then did as she was told. As she turned to the bed, Annie grabbed her wrist. It was a hard clench, startling Ellie. She’d come in here thinking Annie looked weak as a kitten but she should have known better. Annie Carter was strong at the core, and that was where it mattered.
‘Tell me,’ said Annie.
Ellie shook her head dumbly.
‘Tell me, or I’ll tell Chris you came here.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘I would. You know it.’
‘It’s none of my business . . . ’
‘You got that right. It’s my business though, isn’t it? If people start beating me up and targeting my friends and treating me like dirt, it’s very much my business.’
All the colour left Ellie’s face suddenly. ‘Oh Jesus, you don’t think Dolly . . .? God, could it be that? Because of you, because of what you’ve done?’
‘I don’t know. Because you won’t tell me what’s happening, and I think you know.’
‘It’s all over town,’ said Ellie, hopelessly shaking her head.
‘What is?’
‘Oh God . . .’
‘Ellie!’ Annie tightened her grip.
‘They’re saying that you’ve been making a fool out of Mr Carter.’
‘What?’
Ellie nodded. ‘They’re saying – and this is crazy, right? This is mad – they’re saying that Constantine Barolli didn’t die. That he’s alive. And that you’ve been seeing him behind Mr Carter’s back.’
Annie froze.
‘But it ain’t true,’ said Ellie with a little disbelieving laugh, ‘is it? It can’t be true.’
Annie just sat there, staring at the floor.
‘Is it?’ asked Ellie again.
Annie didn’t answer.
Ellie’s smile died on her lips. Now her mouth was hanging open. She shut it slowly as she stared at Annie. ‘Oh. Dear. God,’ she said.
Annie looked up at her friend’s face. ‘Ellie . . .’ she started.
Ellie began to shake her head wildly. She waved her hands in front of her face, making no, no, no gestures, as if warding off something evil.
‘Don’t you dare say it! Don’t tell me a damned thing, because if it’s true, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to get involved. What, you think I’m out of my tree or something?’
‘You’re the only friend I’ve got left, Ellie,’ said Annie.
Ellie was still shaking her head. ‘No! Count me out on this one. Count me right out. You think I’d cross Max Carter? You’re off your bloody head.’
‘Ellie—’
‘No!’ shouted Ellie, and she twitched the curtain to one side and was gone.
61
‘All right, Boss?’ asked Gary as Max Carter came out of the arrivals gate at Gatwick and strode over to where he stood waiting.
All around them, families were hugging, mothers greeting daughters, couples embracing, throngs of taxi drivers holding up boards with names of travellers. The tannoy droned on in the background, and the noise of voices and incoming aircraft was deafening.
Gary took a look at Max’s angrily set face and thought, Shit. Better tread careful here.
‘Do I look fucking all right?’ snapped Max, shoving his hand luggage at Gary.
Gary put his face straight, twisted it into a fake look of sympathy. Inside,
he was triumphant. That cow Annie. He’d been waiting years to get the knife in on that bitch, and now he’d succeeded.
‘I know it’s bloody rough. And I didn’t want to tell you. But shit, what could I do? You had to know.’
‘Yeah,’ Max said.
‘I would have spared you this if I could,’ said Gary. ‘You know that.’
‘Yeah. I do.’
‘So no shooting the messenger, OK, mate?’ said Gary with a sad, sorry smile.
‘No,’ said Max, slapping Gary’s shoulder. ‘None of that. You’ve seen her then? She’s still here?’
‘Too right. She came back when Dolly Farrell got done. I told you about that.’
‘Yeah. Fucking tragic. Right.’ Max sighed and straightened. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, shall we? We got places to go, things to do.’
62
Annie left the hospital, hailed a cab and made her way back to the hotel in Kensington, ignoring the odd looks from the driver as he took in her mud-spattered clothing. As she paid him from the back of the taxi, the usual red-uniformed hotel doorman opened the cab door for her, his smile freezing for an instant when he saw the state she was in; then it was back in place. Stupidly, he asked if she’d had a good day. But it was his job to be pleasant to the guests, she knew that, even in the face of disaster.
‘Fine,’ she smiled, and walked into reception, pausing there to talk to the familiar receptionist, who also did a double-take as she saw the yellow mud stains on Annie’s clothing.
‘Any messages for me?’ Annie asked, still smiling but in anguish. She wanted to lie down, really quickly, because her middle was throbbing hard and she felt sick. She clutched at the reception desk to hold herself upright.
‘Oh! Are you all right? We were told you’d been admitted to hospital. We were worried about you.’
‘I’m fine. Messages?’
