by Jessie Keane
‘Messages?’ The girl behind the desk looked puzzled.
‘Yeah, for me.’
‘No, but . . . you were checked out over an hour ago.’
‘What?’ Annie stared at her blankly.
The girl nodded, referred to her list, then looked up again.
‘He took your things . . .’
‘Who did?’
‘Yes, it’s right here – he checked you out, said you’d been called away on business, and he paid the bill for your stay. I’m so sorry, haven’t you seen him . . . ?’
‘Who?’
‘Well . . . Mr Carter, of course. It was Mr Carter.’
Annie wandered out of the hotel and away down the street in a daze. Max is here. And he knows. Everyone knows. Then Jackie Tulliver ambled up.
‘There you are,’ he said, wafting alcohol fumes all over her. He wagged a finger at her. ‘You want to keep me informed, you don’t want to just go wandering off like that. Where you been?’ Jackie’s eyes went up and down her body. ‘And what the fuck? You been in a mud-wrestling contest? What’s all this?’
Annie ignored him; she kept walking.
‘Only, you know, for back-up purposes. It’s always useful, having someone keeping watch.’
Annie kept walking.
Jackie skipped along beside her, his dirty-denim-clad legs struggling to keep pace.
‘You don’t tell me what’s occurring, how am I to know? You been in a fight? You want to take it easy, let me take the strain—’
Annie stopped walking and spun round so suddenly that Jackie almost bowled into her. She grabbed the front of his moth-eaten denim jacket and shook him, hard. Then she stopped. It hurt like fuck, shaking him. And he wasn’t worth the effort, or the pain.
‘Listen,’ she spat out, eyes mad and cold with rage, ‘you fucking lowlife son of a bitch! Let you take the strain? Last time I needed your back-up, you were too busy trying to find an off-licence to give a fuck where I was and what was happening to me. When I was being hijacked by two thugs, where were you? Oh yeah – I saw you, on your way to the offy. So don’t give me any of your ruddy smarm, you little tosser – and don’t give me any of that bullshit about backup. You’re fucking useless, and you just proved it.’
‘Hey! No need to get abusive,’ said Jackie, dusting down the front of his jacket like she’d ruined the line or something.
‘You heard anything about Max being back in town?’ she demanded.
‘What? No.’
He was telling the truth, of course. Jackie Tulliver, who had once known everything that was happening on these streets, now knew nothing because no one included him. After all, what was the point? He really was useless.
‘I don’t know why you’re bein’ mean to me when all I’m doin’ is tryin’ to help you,’ he whined.
‘Shut. Up.’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s any call for that,’ he sulked.
‘What, for telling the truth?’ Annie glared at him. She rummaged in her coat pocket, found a fiver and flung it on to the pavement. ‘There’s what you’re after, right? Some cash to buy the next lot of booze. Well, there it is. Use it and stay the fuck out of my face.’
63
Jackie scuttled away, but not before he’d bent and snatched up the fiver from the ground. Annie watched him go, disgusted. He’d been one of Max’s best, and now look at him – not even the dignity left to argue the toss with her. Not even the dignity left to refuse the money, tell her where to stick it. If he’d done that, she might have thought there was some hope for him. But he hadn’t.
She walked on, with no idea where she was going to go or what she was going to do. Her broken rib and bruised body ached with every step. Her head ached too. People passed her on the pavements and the traffic roared through her throbbing brain like a nightmare. Once, a place of refuge would have been obvious: Dolly’s. But not now, not any more.
He knows.
The thought pinged into her brain and lodged there like a cold metal spike, before sinking to the pit of her stomach and stabbing her with icy dread.
Oh Christ, it’s true. He knows.
A two-stroke motorbike rushed past, the blank black helmet turning her way. Then bike and rider roared off, weaving in and out of the traffic up ahead. A white van pulled into the kerb and two men in navy boiler suits got out. Annie thought they were going to go into the audio shop she was passing in front of, and she went to step around them. They stepped in front of her. She stepped aside again. They blocked her way. Suddenly she thought of Ellie’s place, wrecked.
Six men in boiler suits, hadn’t someone told her that?
Yeah. They had.
Annie stopped walking. Oh Jesus, please, not again. She looked from one to the other of the men, total strangers to her.
‘Look . . .’ she said, dry-mouthed, thinking that she couldn’t take another beating, she just couldn’t.
‘Get in the front,’ said one of them.
‘Wait . . .’ said Annie.
He took her arm and pulled her out into the traffic, then when there was a gap in the flow he opened the passenger-side door and pushed her oh so gently but still very firmly inside the front of the van. He got in, and the driver did too, neatly pinning her between them. No knives in evidence this time, but these were hard men, people who wouldn’t think twice about using force if they had to.
‘Listen, I don’t know what this is about, but you’ve got the wrong person,’ she said quickly. ‘You don’t want to do this. Believe me. I have friends. Dangerous friends.’
They didn’t answer.
Annie gulped as the driver started the van and steered it out into the traffic. ‘Wait! It’s true, what I’m telling you. You’ll be sorry you did this.’
Neither one of them answered.
Annie fell silent, her heart hammering.
There was nothing else to say.
64
They drove her to the East End. As they wove through the streets she recognized the area and thought: No, it can’t be. Can it? But they carried on, and soon she knew the road, she knew the house, she recognized the little Victorian terrace.
Oh shit.
The house had a powder-blue door and a teensy front garden with a chequered pathway leading up to it. She’d walked up it in the past, maybe a thousand times. The driver parked the van, and the other one took her arm. With the same gentle firmness he’d employed before, he helped her down from the van, then he closed the door and took her round to the pavement. The driver opened the blue-painted wrought-iron gate, and together they escorted her up the pathway to the house.
The driver rang the bell.
Presently, the door opened and the squat bulk of Steve Taylor stood there. He looked at her, briefly took in her mud-stained state, then he looked at the two men and held the door wide. With nowhere else to go, Annie stepped into the entrance hall of Queenie Carter’s old domain. The house was empty – it had been empty for years – but for a big table and twelve chairs upstairs in the front bedroom, where Max and her and all the boys had once met up and discussed business.
Steve went on upstairs, and the driver nudged Annie that way too. She went up, feeling as if she was ascending the gallows.
He knows, he knows, repeated that panicky little voice in her brain.
Someone had done the unthinkable, broken the code of silence. But who, for God’s sake?
The driver and the other one came up too, hard on her heels so she had nowhere to run. When Steve reached the landing, he knocked on the first closed door he came to, and then pushed it open. He stood aside, so that Annie could enter first.
Oh Jesus . . .
Annie braced herself and stepped inside the room. There was the table, just as she remembered, and the chairs. Gary was seated in one of them, Tony in another. Another man stood at the window, his back to the room.
‘Blimey. Looks like a fucking courtroom in here,’ said Annie. She glanced around at them all, a bright smile masking the awful fear that was g
ripping her guts. She felt almost unable to move, she was so frozen with apprehension.
‘So who’s on trial?’ she quipped.
The man at the window turned and stared at her. Black hair, deep tan, dark navy-blue eyes and a piratical hook of a nose. Her husband.
Ah shit, she thought.
‘Looks like you are,’ said Max Carter.
65
‘Hi,’ said Annie.
Max didn’t say another word. He just stared at her.
‘You want us to step out on the landing, give you a bit of privacy?’ asked Steve, directing the query to Max, not her.
Max nodded. One by one they rose and left the room. Gary gave Annie a smirk as he passed by.
‘How are your two boys then, Gary?’ she asked, quick as a flash.
He paused. ‘What?’
‘The one with the eyebrows and the bald one. Your doormen. They OK?’
He hesitated. Knew that she was on to him, that he had ordered that going-over after she’d cut up rough with his girlfriend at Dolly’s. She could see it in his eyes.
‘They’re fine,’ he said.
‘What the fuck’s all this?’ asked Max irritably.
Annie turned to her husband with a bright smile.
‘Nothing! Just me and Gary having a little conversation,’ she said, and her eyes were resting on Gary’s face again, telling him this wasn’t over, this wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.
‘Fuck off, Gary,’ said Max.
Gary went, minus the self-satisfied expression. Annie was delighted to have wiped it off his face. It made the hot twinging pain of her broken rib more bearable, just to see that shadow of emerging fear on his ugly mug.
She watched the door close behind Gary, then turned to Max.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she asked. ‘And what are you doing, checking me out of hotels without my say-so?’
Max’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. He shook his head.
‘Oh, no. That won’t wash with me, you ought to know that. Turning the tables, making out I’m the one in the wrong? I don’t think so.’
‘I’m just asking, that’s all. You left Prospect without a word, not even a note. What was I supposed to think?’
Annie saw his eyes flash over her, take in the dried mud on her skirt suit.
‘Am I supposed to give a shit what you think? I had some calls from Gary saying that something was going on, so I went and checked it out.’
Yeah, he knows.
Annie could feel her heart beating very fast. She could hear Max’s boys talking in hushed whispers out on the landing. She felt sick now, really sick and terrified. She swallowed hard and managed to get the words out.
‘Checked it out where?’
‘Sicily.’
‘What was it all about then?’ she asked.
‘About you,’ said Max. ‘And about Constantine Barolli.’
Annie could only stare at his face. ‘Constantine? What about him?’
Max crossed the room and came and stood in front of her, very close. Annie forced herself not to take a step back. Fury radiated off him like heat from a fire.
‘He’s not dead, is he? He’s alive.’
‘Max—’
‘Don’t “Max” me. You know he’s alive.’
‘Look,’ said Annie desperately. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone.’
He grabbed her upper arms, bringing her still closer, cutting off her words. She felt the jolt of it all through her abused body; her damaged rib gave a red-hot spasm of protest that made her wince. His face was so close to hers that she could feel his breath on her cheek. This was the man she loved, Max Carter; she had grown so close to him that she hardly knew where she ended and he began. Now he was glaring at her with total hatred, and it chilled her to the marrow.
His head dipped down and she felt a shiver as he whispered in her ear.
‘Now you have to scream,’ he said. ‘Loudly. Make it good, so they hear it.’
‘Wha—?’ Annie’s eyes met his as his head drew back.
Without warning he shoved her backwards. She hit the wall hard, off-balance, and her broken rib set up a shriek all of its own. The pain was severe, and Annie screamed.
‘Again. Louder,’ said Max.
‘You bastard,’ she choked out, realizing what this was for; so that he looked the big man to the men out on the landing. So that they heard her being disciplined, and thought he was top dog, no question, tough as old boots for giving his lying old lady a thorough going-over.
‘Do it,’ he said, and shoved her against the wall again. It wouldn’t have hurt, not really, but her already beaten body felt it all and she screamed again in real anguish.
‘Shit, you bastard,’ she panted as he let her go. She sagged there, feeling bile rising in her throat, feeling sick with the pain. She felt a prickling of cold sweat break out on her brow and wondered if she was going to pass out cold.
‘You utter fucking . . .’ she gasped out, her voice trailing away to nothing, glad of the wall now because it was all that was holding her up.
He grabbed her chin, turned her face up to his. Out on the landing, all was quiet. They were listening. Just as he’d intended.
‘So he’s alive?’ Max’s voice was a low, angry hiss. ‘Well, not for very fucking long – and that’s a promise. I’m going to finish that cunt. And you know what? Then I’m going to finish you. But right now, there’s just one thing I want off of you.’
‘What? Ow!’ said Annie as the pain lanced through her mid-section again.
‘Oh, don’t give me that,’ he muttered by her ear. ‘I barely touched you. Don’t milk it.’
‘What do you want?’ asked Annie, gasping the words out, thinking that yes, she was going to faint, she felt that rough now, that shaken up.
‘A divorce,’ he snapped. ‘We’re through, you hear me? This fucking marriage is over.’
Then he let her go and surged past her, out the door, slamming it hard shut behind him.
66
Annie staggered away from the wall and slumped down into one of the chairs at the table. Her head was humming, her heart was crashing around in her chest, and she thought, That’s it, I’m going to pass out now. She heaved in air and put her head between her legs, which set up a fresh surge of agony in her middle. She stopped like that for a long time. Wincing, hurt, shocked, she straightened up again, feeling a little steadier.
Jesus, he knows, he knows . . .
The panicky phrase kept boomeranging around her head. Max knew about Constantine, and he wanted to divorce her. Of course he did. That was why she had made sure he would never know. But somehow it had all gone wrong. Now he was thinking all sorts, and accusing her of things, and this was where they’d landed up. Scuppered. Finished. Max wasn’t the type to make empty promises, either. He would kill Constantine. And then he would kill her.
‘Oh, Christ,’ she wailed, and slapped a hand over her mouth because she wasn’t going to give those clowns on the landing any more satisfaction.
She could hear them out there, talking in low voices. She thought that Max had gone straight out and down the stairs and away, she’d heard the front door slam after him; but Gary, Tony and Steve were still there.
Front it out, she thought. That was all she ever did.
Dolly was gone.
Ellie had washed her hands of her.
Chris, Tony, Steve, all once her friends, were now judging her, hating her.
And worse, far worse than any of that, Max. Max had turned against her, caught her out in this monumental deception. And he was going to destroy both Constantine and her. She totally believed that.
She stood up, steadying herself with a hand on the table. She tottered over to the closed door and took another breath.
Steady, she thought. You ran these streets once. You were a Mafia queen.
Yeah, once . . .
Annie opened the door. The three men, all of them massive and scary, turned and s
tared at her. She stepped out on to the landing, closing the door behind her. She moved past Tony, past Steve, and there was Gary, barring her way to the stairs.
‘You got something to say to me?’ she asked him.
‘Yeah. What was that bollocks about my boys?’
Annie shrugged, very cool. ‘I said it to them and I meant it. They shouldn’t have done what they did. I warned them.’
‘You’re in no position to warn anybody about anything,’ he sneered. ‘The boss is spitting mad at you. You’re finished, girl.’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up and mind out the way,’ said Annie, shoving past him.
Gary lunged at her, arm raised. Annie teetered on the top stair, clutched at the banister, thinking This is it, he’s going to knock me arse-backwards down those stairs, all the way to the bottom. Then Steve stepped forward and grabbed Gary’s upraised hand, forced it down.
‘This fucking bitch, I told him what she was like, but would he listen?’ burst out Gary, his face puce and his eyes fastened on Annie.
‘Calm down, you cunt,’ said Steve. ‘This ain’t our fight. Let him put it right, any way he wants.’ Then he turned to Annie. ‘You’d better go.’
Annie didn’t need a second telling. Feeling like she’d escaped by the skin of her teeth, she turned and went down the stairs and out the door.
67
Because she couldn’t think what else to do, she went to the Holland Park house and opened it up. Outside the front door, on the top step, were her bags and suitcase, dumped there.
Yeah, like I’m about to be dumped, she thought miserably.
Hunter was there too, just getting out of his car.
‘Mrs Carter,’ he said. ‘Feeling better then? I went to the hotel and they said you’d checked out, so I wondered if you might come here.’
‘Right,’ said Annie, uncaring. Her world had crashed around her, she didn’t give a shit about anything right now.
‘In fact they said Mr Carter checked you out.’
‘He did. Yes.’
‘I take it he’s here with you?’
‘Yeah. That’s right,’ lied Annie. She didn’t want to start explaining the perilous state of her marriage to anyone. It hurt too much.
