by Roberta Kray
Iris lifted her face to look at him. Her mouth was trembling. ‘Nothing could have made this any easier. No matter how I heard it, or who I heard it from.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess not. But at least you could have been prepared.’
Another thought rose quickly to the surface. ‘God, they don’t know who I am, do they? Chris and Danny, I mean. They don’t know I’m their half-sister.’ They would be as happy, she was sure, to hear the news as she had been.
‘If they don’t, they soon will. It’s not as though he can keep it from them now.’
Iris groaned into his shoulder. If only she could make it all go away. ‘How could she?’ Iris whispered. ‘She’s my mother and I thought I knew her but . . . God, ten years of skulking around behind my dad’s back.’ And Sean O’Donnell had been her father in every real sense. He’d been the one to read her bedtime stories, to hold her hand as they crossed the road, to comfort her when she fell over. She thought of how he must have felt when he’d found out. No wonder he’d gone out and bought himself a gun. She could sympathise with the desire to shoot Terry Street straight through the bloody heart. ‘He should have taken me with him when he left. I wish he had.’
‘I’m glad he didn’t,’ Guy said. He lifted her face again and his eyes sought out hers. ‘We can get through this. I promise.’
Iris began to cry, great heaving sobs as if all her emotions had suddenly been unleashed. She gripped the back of his shirt with her hands. ‘I’m scared,’ she wailed through her tears. ‘I don’t know who I am any more. I don’t know what Terry wants. I don’t know—’
Guy wrapped her tightly in his arms. ‘I won’t let him anywhere near you. I promise. I’ll take care of you, Iris. I swear I’ll never let anything bad happen to you ever again.’
Chapter Fifty-seven
It took Vita a while to find her husband. Rick was slumped in a corner of the Dog & Duck, looking somewhat the worse for wear. She sat down beside him and he immediately started to talk about Michael. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his face slightly sweaty, and there was a damp stain on the front of his white shirt where someone had spilt half a glass of red wine as they pushed past. He’d been drinking heavily all afternoon and had now fallen into that rather rambling state of mind where one road led on to another but no destination ever seemed to be reached.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Iris?’ Vita said, interrupting his monologue.
‘Iris?’ he repeated. For a second he appeared confused as if the name didn’t mean anything to him, but then sighed into his pint and said, ‘She thinks Michael was murdered, doesn’t she?’
‘Don’t worry, she’s not pinning it on you. Not yet at least.’
‘She thinks the Streets did it.’
Vita stared at him. ‘Who told you that?’
His heavy shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Bound to, isn’t she.’ He lifted the glass to his mouth, took a drink and placed it back on the table. ‘Perhaps she’s right. I wouldn’t put anything past Danny Street. That bastard would have done it with a smile on his face.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Vita said. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in all that stuff about her dad coming back. Michael certainly didn’t.’ She paused. ‘Unless he told you something he didn’t tell me.’
‘It might not have been to do with that.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Rick seemed about to tell her, but then clearly changed his mind. ‘Nothing,’ he murmured. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It obviously does matter or you wouldn’t have mentioned it.’
He peered at the wall for a few seconds, at a spot just above her head and then slowly lowered his gaze. Suddenly, his whole body stiffened and his eyes widened in alarm. ‘Shit, Vita. What if I’m next? What if Danny Street’s coming for me too?’
Thinking all this was down to some drunken leap of the imagination, she started to laugh. ‘Don’t be crazy. Why on earth would he—’
‘Michael just wanted a bit of cash,’ Rick said quickly. He leaned forward, the words tumbling out of him. ‘An emergency fund. You know, in case he had to scarper. With Terry coming out of jail and . . . he couldn’t be sure, you see . . . it was different when Lizzie was alive, but when she was killed, it changed everything. All deals were off. You know what I mean?’
Now Vita was starting to get worried. Her stomach twisted a little.
‘Michael said he’d give me half if I helped him. I needed the cash. With Candice wanting this ski trip, with all the bills and everything . . . well, it’s not right that you have to pay out all the time.’
‘Helped you with what? Jesus, what are you saying?’
Rick looked quickly around, checking that no one was within earshot. ‘It’s to do with Toby Grand,’ he said. ‘Gerald Grand’s son.’
‘What about him?’ Vita had never been introduced but knew him by sight. In fact, she was sure he’d been here earlier. He was a young blond guy who Iris had occasionally talked about - a guy, if she remembered rightly, who had a pretty high opinion of himself.
Rick took a deep breath. Then he took another drink. ‘Shit,’ he said again.
‘Tell me. Tell me what’s going on.’
He stared at her for a while, his fear of Danny Street clearly vying with the consequences of confession. ‘It was at Lizzie’s do,’ he finally said, ‘at the Hope & Anchor. Toby was high as a kite, completely off his head. He got talking to Michael after Iris had left, started dropping hints about Danny Street and his unusual interests.’
Vita frowned. ‘What kind of interests?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
Vita was starting to lose patience. ‘For God’s sake, just spit it out. I’m a lawyer for Christ’s sake. You think I haven’t heard it all before?’
‘Okay, okay. He had a fascination with bodies, women’s bodies, and I don’t mean the living breathing kind.’
Despite her earlier protestations, Vita started. She jumped back in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting anything quite as gross as that. ‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ Rick said. ‘He’s a fucking nutter.’ He stopped briefly, ran his tongue across his lips and then continued. ‘Anyway, Michael kept on at him - at Toby I mean - trying to wheedle out whatever information he could. He said he didn’t believe him, that he was making it all up. Which, of course, made Toby even the more determined to prove it. He ended up by telling Michael that Danny Street had offered him five grand if he’d let him . . .’
Vita shook her head. She felt sick inside. ‘You’re kidding?’
Rick dropped his head into his hands. ‘I wish I was.’ He grabbed for his glass again and sank most of what remained of the pint. ‘Michael decided it might be worth following Toby around, just to see if he might actually . . . and found out rather more than he expected. That he was seeing that woman for example - you know, the one who does all the embalming.’
Vita’s head was starting to spin. ‘Alice Avery?’ she said.
‘Yeah. Not Toby’s type at all. And then Michael saw the three of them coming out of Tobias Grand & Sons late at night. And I mean late. After midnight. There was no good reason for them to be there. He put two and two together and figured that Toby might just have made all Danny Street’s dreams come true.’
‘No,’ Vita said. Her chest felt tight. ‘He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t.’
Rick, as if unwilling to meet her eyes, glanced up at that spot on the wall again. ‘Michael figured we could use it, you know, to put a bit of pressure on.’
As the penny gradually dropped, Vita stared at him, aghast. ‘You were blackmailing Danny Street?’
‘No,’ he hissed, ‘of course not. And keep your voice down.’ He looked around again. ‘It was Toby we went for. You think I’m bloody stupid?’
‘You want an honest answer to that?’ Vita wasn’t just feeling scared now, she was feeling angry too. And something else was welling up inside her: a deep and ugly disappointment. Five minutes ago
she’d had a husband who . . . well, she couldn’t have said that she trusted him absolutely, but she wouldn’t have believed him capable of anything as morally corrupt as blackmail.
‘Okay, so it wasn’t the smartest move in the world,’ Rick said bitterly. ‘And I know it was wrong. But that kid gets paid for doing fuck all. He struts around like he owns the place - which he will one day, without ever having lifted a finger. And I get paid a pittance for whatever scraps of work they decide to throw my way.’
‘And that’s a good enough reason to blackmail him?’
Rick pulled a face. ‘It wasn’t as if he was going to miss a couple of grand. We didn’t really have anything on him, except for his rather dodgy relationship with Alice. And we figured that had to be connected to this business with Danny Street. I mean, why else would he be screwing her?’
‘Perhaps he likes older women.’
‘Yeah, right. She’s hardly Joan Collins, is she?’
‘No,’ Vita said, ‘she’s about twenty years younger. And perhaps she has other qualities like honesty and kindness.’ Vita couldn’t keep the contempt from her voice. ‘So you asked him for money in exchange for keeping your mouth shut.’
Rick was either too drunk or too self-absorbed to realise how disgusted she was. ‘It had to be me who approached him. Michael didn’t want Toby to know he was involved. He was worried about Iris, about the kid making things difficult for her at work.’
Very considerate, Vita thought to herself.
‘I told Toby I knew what he’d been doing, that I’d seen the two of them coming out of Tobias Grand & Sons in the early hours. I said I’d tell his old man everything unless he paid up. He laughed it off at first, said I was talking crap until I mentioned about how I’d seen Alice Avery too - and how they seemed to have got pretty cosy recently - and that perhaps, if pushed, she might be more forthcoming than he was. He started to panic then, said it wasn’t what I thought, that they’d actually been buying some coke off Danny. However, as he didn’t want his father to know about it, he was willing to pay just this once.’
Vita put her head in her hands. She thought about how she’d defended him against Iris’s accusations. When she glanced up again, she wasn’t sure who she was looking at. Where had her husband gone? Where was the funny, charming man she’d been sharing her life with for the past four years?
‘You knew what he’d been doing and yet you still . . .’
‘I’m not proud of it, love,’ Rick said. ‘And as it happened, Toby didn’t come up with the two grand anyway. I met him outside Belles. He only gave me twelve hundred, swore that was all he could lay his hands on. I gave half of it to Michael and the rest was . . . shit, you know what happened to the rest. It was lifted by some little toerag.’
Vita sighed as she remembered Duggie handing over Rick’s wallet in her office. She’d had all sorts of ideas about where the cash might have come from, but never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined the truth. ‘And you didn’t think, not even for a minute, that Danny Street was going to get the hump over this?’
‘No, he wasn’t supposed to know about it. I told Toby that if he ever breathed a word, I’d expose him, tell everyone what he and Alice had allowed that pervert Street to do. I might get done for blackmail, but it was nothing compared to what they’d be facing.’
There were lots of things Vita could have said, none of them reassuring or in any way supportive. Rick didn’t seem to comprehend that he was equally culpable. By taking Toby’s money, by keeping silent, he’d allowed the whole vile business to continue. How could he? But that was something to be dealt with later. No matter how painful it was, she had to temporarily push it to the back of her mind. For the moment, she had to concentrate on getting the whole story out of him.
‘So why did Michael go and pick a fight with Danny Street? That was hardly a smart thing to do in the circumstances.’
Rick shrugged again. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with this. He was still pissed off over what Toby had told him that night at the Hope, about how Danny had had a go at Iris when he went to view Lizzie Street’s body. You know what Michael was like - act first and think later. I tried to talk him out of it, but he thought that Danny might be punishing her for what Sean had done. He was worried that it was personal, that Danny might not stop there, that he might go on and seriously hurt her.’
‘And now you think what? That Danny Street found out about the blackmail and murdered Michael as a result of it?’
Rick’s eyes got that scared expression in them again. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘But I thought you said you were the one who approached Toby. How would he have found out that Michael was involved?’
‘It wouldn’t have been that hard to figure out. I mean, we were friends, weren’t we? The little shit might have guessed I wasn’t working alone. He might have remembered what he’d told Michael that night at the Hope.’ Rick started gnawing on his knuckles. ‘What am I going to do, Vita?’
‘We’re going home,’ she said, standing up. ‘We’re getting out of here right now.’ She walked around the table, grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. ‘First you’re going to sober up, and then we’re going to talk to Toby Grand. We’ll find out what’s going on. I’ll shake the bloody truth out of him if I have to.’ Vita gazed angrily up at her husband. ‘And we’re going to pay that money back, every last damn penny.’
Chapter Fifty-eight
It was past eight o’clock by the time Iris got out of bed later that evening. She pulled on the white towelling robe, wandered back into Guy’s living room and went to stand by the window again. The traffic was lighter now, only a thin stream of cars passing by. It was snowing, great white flakes that fell against the glass, and she laid her fingertips against the pane willing the flakes to cling on, to grasp whatever was left of their slight ephemeral lives. She was feeling . . . What was she feeling exactly? Shame, guilt, confusion - and all of it intermingled with a strange exhilaration. She could still feel Guy’s touch on her skin, could still smell the scent of his body. How could they have made love at a time like this?
And yet she knew why. It was to do with that primitive connection between sex and death. La petite mort - the small death - wasn’t that how climax was referred to by the French? She had needed to get lost for a while, to lose touch with reality, to enter that place where nothing mattered but the touch of a hand, the sound of a voice, the slipping away from time and space.
She slowly ran her fingers down the glass.
Today, she had been overwhelmed by loss. Death had been all around her. She hadn’t just had to acknowledge the loss of one person she’d loved but two. Michael was gone and so was her father. Terry Street had taken him away as surely as if he’d stabbed him through the heart.
She jumped as Guy’s mobile started ringing.
‘Can you grab that, babe?’ he called out from the kitchen. ‘I’ll be through in a sec.’
Iris picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Your mother’s here,’ Noah said.
Iris could tell from his tone that he wasn’t too happy. ‘I don’t want to see her. I can’t. Just tell her to leave me alone.’
There was a short pause at the other end of the line. ‘I don’t think so,’ Noah said sharply. ‘If you want her to leave, you can tell her yourself.’ And he slammed the phone down before she had the chance to say anything else.
Guy appeared at the door. ‘Who was it?’
‘Apparently my mother is downstairs.’
‘Oh. You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t want to.’
‘Try telling that to Noah.’
‘Why? What did he say?’
Iris shook her head. She couldn’t blame Noah for being peeved about it all. He was just trying to run his business, to keep things running smoothly. From the moment she’d arrived on the scene she’d brought nothing but trouble for Guy - and, by association, trouble for the bar too. Guy was spending way too much time on he
r problems and not nearly enough on the business. ‘Nothing. It was just a bit of surprise, that’s all. I didn’t expect her to come here.’
‘You don’t have to talk to her,’ Guy said again.
‘No, I’d better go down.’ She walked through to the bedroom, slipped off the white robe and started to get dressed. Guy followed her in. He stood watching while she pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘No, but what choice do I have?’ Iris looked in the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Unless you want her camped on the doorstep for the next twenty-four hours. I know what she’s like. She’s not going to leave until she’s had her say.’
‘You can bring her up here if you like. I’ll make myself scarce.’
Iris shook her head again. This flat was the only place she felt safe and secure. She didn’t want it associated with anyone but Guy. As she went to leave, he put his arms around her and kissed her softly on the lips.
‘If you need me, just shout, okay?’
‘I won’t be long.’
Downstairs was busy and for the first time Iris noticed all the decorations. They’d probably been there when she’d come back earlier, but she’d been too distracted to take them in. The long strings of tiny lights glittered and blinked. She tried not to think about what kind of Christmas she’d be having this year.
Iris pushed through the crowd searching for her mother. She eventually found her at the very same table she had sat at with Guy the first time she’d come to Wilder’s. Kathleen had a cup of coffee in front of her but she was stirring it rather than drinking it, her hand moving the spoon in a motion of which she seemed barely aware.
