by PJ Adams
I didn’t fancy her chances if it was just down to Salko, which is why I’d had that little word with Freddie. I’d always liked Maggie’s brother. He had fire, but he also had a level head, and a good sense of where his loyalties should lie. He was a man with at least the potential to come good.
And there was Reuben. My old mate was as crooked as a copper could be, but when it came down to it he was still a senior police officer, and he knew an innocent young woman was in jeopardy. I trusted that he would do whatever he could to ensure her safety, and I’d been sure to remind him of that responsibility to the community.
I’d made another personal call, too, before leaving London. A little insurance. I had to get Maggie out of there.
So yes, I’d walked away from the woman I maybe loved, but in a few economical brushstrokes I’d put several things in motion to maximize her chances of getting out of this mess.
Hell, I’d even told Freddie to get her as far away from here as possible: if she got out of this, I was sure I would never see her again.
That’s how much I loved her.
§
I’d done all that I possibly could, one man against many.
As few loose ends as possible.
There was nothing left for me.
Because that was how it was. I was alone. I’d dismantled the family business. I’d betrayed my brothers and they had left. And now I’d lost the woman who had, so briefly, allowed me to hope again.
My one regret?
The denial.
I’d fallen for Maggie, but I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t recognized the signs because I’d never been there before. And when I started to see, I denied that it was happening. I didn’t do that kind of thing. I didn’t fall.
I hadn’t understood until it was too late.
You should never miss an opportunity to say “I love you”. Because, one day, you’ll find you really wish you could have said it one more time – or even one time at all.
§
The call from Jess threw me.
I was resigned to my fate by then. Waiting for it. Inviting it, even.
But then as my Range Rover crawled along the rough track to my cliff-top house my cellphone went. I hesitated, saw that it was Jess and that was it, my resolve to stay detached gone. What could she want? Why would she be calling me again?
The only time she’d called me was a few days before, to tell me about Fearless.
What now?
“What is it?” I snapped, taking the call hands-free. “What’s happened?”
I pulled up before the house and sat there, engine still running, heart racing.
“Owen?” She sounded hesitant, which might confirm my fears that something was wrong, or could easily be a simple response to my own brusque tone.
“Sorry. Yes. Jess: what’s up? Is everyone okay?”
“We are, yes.”
Silence. Outside, a stiff autumn wind whipped around the car.
“So...?”
“It’s... I have some news, Owen. I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” It took a few seconds to sink in. I was going to be an uncle. “How pregnant?”
Another pause, then: “Totally,” she said. “One hundred percent.”
“No... no, I meant–”
“I know. I know what you meant. Nine or ten weeks gone, I reckon.”
“So what... April? May?”
Pregnant. A new generation.
They were getting on with their new lives.
And every tiny increment of them moving on only left me farther behind.
I know, it was a selfish response, but then I never claimed not to be selfish. All my life I’d been the man. The one in control. The one restaurant owners would clear tables for whenever he walked in. Selfish was a perk of my trade.
It was hard not to see this as a line drawn under what had been.
A reaffirmation that I’d played my part and the world had moved on.
But then...
She’d called me.
After months of not talking, now we were talking. Or at least, Jess and I were.
I’d never made the move because I was the one who’d fucked up. Why would Dean or Lee ever want to hear from me again? They could have been in jail right now because of a mistake I’d made. Or worse.
It had taken Jess to make the first move.
Fate, too. The loss of Fearless and now this.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “A bit of sickness, and all of a sudden I can’t stand the smell of garlic, which is a real bummer down here. Otherwise, yes, I’m keeping well. No complications.”
“And the boys? How’s Dean? I bet he’s over the moon.”
“He is.” I could picture her smiling as she said this, could hear it in her voice. “He’s thrilled. Are you okay, Owen? You sound...”
“Yeah. I’m fine, Jess. Just a spot of bother, but it’s all working itself out. Listen, I’ve got to go. Things to do, you know? Take care.”
Just when life had been simplifying itself. Why did fate have to do its thing and give me a glimmer of hope again?
19
He didn’t hang about.
Must have turned right round and followed me back that night.
Alfredas Petrauskas. Freddie the fucking German. Lithuanian. Whatever.
Maybe it was inevitable they’d send him. These Russian gangsters, they’re poets. Or at least they like to think they are. Poetic justice has an appeal to them.
Maybe it was a test, too: Freddie had once been one of mine, so perhaps he still had something to prove. A loyalties thing.
The first warning I had was the whine of an over-revved engine. I went to the window and looked out, but saw nothing in the dark. He must have killed his lights, which would have made that rough track from the main road even more hazardous.
There’s good reason I have a Range Rover.
I could have installed all the security systems in the world, but that rough track was as good as any, particularly against a city driver like Freddie.
I could picture the scene, him crawling along the track in that low-slung Mazda he drove. Grounding the thing every time a wheel found a rut. Wheels spinning in the muddy pools.
I found out later he’d only made it halfway before he had to abandon the car and complete the journey on foot.
I waited for him up in the attic room. Sitting at the Blüthner, I was tempted to pick out something appropriate – Chopin, of course. Perhaps his Nocturne in C Minor. Wistful, atmospheric, then rising to an angry peak before subsiding again; one of his most powerful pieces.
I refrained.
For once this was not about me, it was about getting things right.
§
Freddie was good, but then I knew that.
For a big, powerful man he moved with a rare lightness of foot.
I didn’t hear him on the stairs at all. Didn’t hear the opening of the door – he knew how to lift and ease an unfamiliar door to minimize the chance of creaking hinges and carpet scrape.
“Freddie.”
A scuff of a foot as he stopped partway across the room, the first sound he’d made after that petulant whine of the engine as he spun a wheel in the mud outside.
I allowed myself to look back over my shoulder.
He stood with his gun drawn, not even aimed but just casually hanging from one hand, ready.
“Don’t you have better things to be doing tonight? Like a sister to protect?”
He was thrown by my calmness, but he did his best to conceal any reaction.
“I am not Miglë’s keeper.”
The strain showed in his voice. He hadn’t come here to make conversation, and at least a part of him knew that the more he talked the harder this would be.
I like to think there was still at least some sense of loyalty there, too, to the man who had given him his first break in this country.
“You looked like her keeper earlier.” A dig. His jaw tighte
ned. That temper was his weakness, and it would be his downfall one day, if he let it.
“So what’s the big plan?” I asked him. That there was a plan was clear, because otherwise there would have been no need for this confrontation. A simple bullet to the head at any time after I’d passed the M25 would have sufficed.
With his free hand, Freddie reached into a jacket pocket and came out with a handgun in a clear plastic bag.
I guessed immediately.
“It’s the one that you used to kill Yvgeny Primakov.” The Russian we’d nicknamed ‘Putin’. “You will take it and you will aim it into the roof of your mouth and you will pull the trigger. When the police come, the forensic tests will show that this was the gun used to kill Primakov, and now was used for the self-inflicted wound that led to your own shameful death.”
That Russian thing. The poetic justice. Very tidy.
“You’re really going to hand me a loaded gun?”
Freddie nodded. “I am. And I am going to watch you use it. If you don’t, or if you try anything foolish, I will kill you anyway, but it is neater this way, no?”
“I should kill you.”
“I am faster than you.”
“But I’m even faster.”
To his credit, Freddie didn’t even flinch at that new voice coming from the shadows by the window. His gray eyes flicked in that direction, just as a third man stepped out into view.
You see, I lied.
Don’t blame me. I never claimed to be trustworthy or reliable, just not as bad as the other guys.
So yes, I lied when I said the engine was the first warning I’d had that Freddie was close.
It wasn’t.
There was the phone call, too. Reuben’s voice telling me he’d had word it was just a single car, one occupant: Freddie the German. “You sure about this?” Reuben had said. “What if the fucker just shoots you?”
I’d paused, weighing things up. If he was going to simply shoot me, he wouldn’t have followed me this far. As soon as I was on my own, unprotected, I’d have been an easy target. No, there would be a confrontation, I was sure of that. And it might easily come down to a simple question of me or him. Maybe a part of me was hoping for that. A real test to see if I still wanted this. Any of it. I’d lost everything, after all.
Lost, or given it up.
“He won’t,” I’d told Reuben. “He’ll want to talk. They always want to talk when it gets this far.”
And so now... Freddie stood with his gun half-raised towards me, and a man whose name I never even knew stood by the window, his own service handgun aimed at Freddie. And I sat at my fucking piano.
Freddie opened his mouth to speak, then stopped.
“You want to know who this is?” I asked him. “It doesn’t matter. Just think of him as a friendly firearms officer, sent along to protect me by my good friend Detective Inspector Glover.”
“Police?” The tone of disgust in that one word was unmistakable. That I should stoop so low as to turn to the law for protection. Had my standards dropped so far?
“It’s not going to happen, is it?” I said, when the limbo had dragged on too long for any of us. “You’re not going to shoot him. He’s not going to shoot me. So let’s just put the guns away, eh?”
“You’re right,” said Freddie. “He’s not going to shoot me. He’s a cop. So that gives me the advantage, no?”
I shook my head. “No, Freddie, you don’t get it, do you? Yes, my friend here’s a policeman. One of the finest, so I’ve been assured. But there’s something more important than that. This good officer was sent here by Reuben Glover and Reuben would only ever send someone he entirely trusted to do the right thing, because Reuben’s one of us. He’s one of the Bailey Boys. Always has been. Family.”
Still, Freddie hesitated. Torn between his loyalty to the Russians, his assessment of the situation, and maybe some lingering loyalty to me. And...
“They still have her, Mr Bailey. They still have Miglë.”
Salko was never going to let Maggie go in a hurry. Not while things between me and the Russians remained unresolved.
“They had to be sure of your loyalty, Freddie,” I said.
His gun hand slumped a little.
“If I do not do this...”
“I think you’d better give me that gun, Freddie.” I held my hand out, not for the gun he still held ready to use, but the one in the bag. The one that could put me away for life, now that I still had a life to be put away for.
“They still have her, Mr Bailey.”
I nodded.
Freddie. He was one of the good ones. I’d always believed that. And right now he was just trying to do the best thing.
I wasn’t angry with him. I didn’t need vengeance or anything stupid like that.
Right now it was time to get ruthless, but there were ways to do that.
I’m not an angry man.
I’m not impulsive.
I’m a thinker, a calculator. I work out the percentages.
It’s how I’ve survived this far, how I’ve done so well.
Think of me as a project manager, if you like.
I make things happen.
And right now, it was time to make things happen. Time to go after the big fish.
Or one of them, at least.
The bastard who’d taken Maggie.
20
It was worse without Alfredas.
She knew he was just one man, and not a good one at that. He could not stand up for her against these gangsters, if that was what it came to. Even if he chose to, and she did not trust that he would even do that.
But his presence made a difference. Knowing that he was at least somewhere nearby.
That gave Maggie some kind of connection to the world she knew. Her brother. Family.
And it might – just might – make them think twice before... doing anything.
§
The one Alfredas had referred to as Maliakov came to her. The giant with the mohawk that had almost grown out, the tattoos creeping out from the collar of his shirt, and the look of something missing behind his eyes.
He towered over her as she sat, her knees drawn up.
Nudging her with the toe of one big boot, he said in Russian, “My condolences. Your boyfriend will be dead by now.”
Ice in her gut.
She knew the rational thing was not to believe. They could say anything and she would not know what was true. He could be toying with her. They could be trying to break her down. It could be anything.
There was no reason to believe him.
She remembered Alfredas’s words before he had left her.
You will be released, yes. But first there is something I must do.
The sickening finality of his tone.
What might he have done? What might they have made him do?
“I have no boyfriend.” Just a man who had become familiar, charmed his way through her defenses, and then abandoned her. She could not allow herself to believe anything else because, in reality, she knew she could not mean much to such a man.
And right now she could not allow him to mean anything to her either, because that was a weakness she could not afford.
Maliakov leaned down, grabbed her arm roughly and hauled her to her feet.
Briefly, she was against him, dwarfed by him. She felt intensely aware of her own vulnerability, her isolation, and then he spun her, grabbed the handcuffs, unfastened them.
He gestured at the bucket, and said, “Piss. Shit. Whatever.”
For a moment she thought he would wait there while she did whatever she needed to do, then he turned and went to the door.
Pausing in the doorway, he looked back and said, “When this is over, I have been promised you are mine.” He gave an empty smile, his upper lip pulling back to reveal crooked teeth. “You are my bonus. We have fun, yes?”
The closing of the door was like a nail in her coffin.
She did what she needed to do, and tried t
o empty her mind of all thoughts because the only thoughts that came were of Owen and Maliakov, the loss and the threat, and both made her feel utterly, utterly sick.
§
Your boyfriend will be dead by now.
Maliakov had not returned, which was good.
Good because he could not do anything, or say anything more, but also good because it meant he had not cuffed her again, so she did not have to sit with her arms held awkwardly behind her back.
The aches and pains in her body were unlike anything she had experienced, and now, at least, she could flex her joints and massage the sore muscles.
On one of the shelves she found a box containing bottles of mineral water, packaged together in sets of six by shrink-wrapped plastic. She broke one out and drank.
There were glass bottles of wine and beer here, too. She could arm herself with those as weapons if she thought fighting might do any good.
She drank more water, and walked the perimeter of the small storeroom, rolling her shoulders and flexing and straightening her spine.
Did this relaxation of her regime indicate a shift in attitudes? Or was it merely that Maliakov had forgotten to come back and secure her?
When they came again, some time later, it was a man she had not seen before. He had a skull-like face, as if the skin had been stretched too tight, and he wore an immaculate blue suit with a silk handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket.
When he walked in, it was with the air of a man who owned the place and all the people within, and she didn’t doubt for a moment that he did.
He stopped before her, bowed his head slightly, and smiled.
Speaking in English, he said to her, “Miglë Petrauskė. Please, accept my apologies for the way you have been treated. My name is Alexei Davydov and I am here to set you free.”
She knew that name. Someone had mentioned it – Owen, perhaps? Or Alfredas? He was one of the two men who ran the Russian gang.
“Set me free? How? Why?”
“Your friend, Owen Bailey. He came to see me before he returned to his home in Norfolk. I was most surprised. He penetrated all of my security and was waiting for me in my office when I returned home this afternoon. He could have been killed, easily, breaking in like that. My security team would not have hesitated – if they had seen him, that is. I could have killed him, too, when I came upon him, but instead I chose to hear him out.”
