Dangerous (42 page)

And then Bernie spread her arms as if she was about to fly.

‘
No!
’ Clara turned, reaching out desperately, and Marcus moved too, but they were both too late.

Bernie leaned her waist into the edge of the fire escape, arms still spread, and overbalanced. She fell without a sound, without the merest suggestion of a scream.

‘Bernie . . . ’ said Clara, bursting into tears.

And then Bernie hit the ground far below.

111

It all came out over the next few horrible days. Numb with grief, Clara sat in the police station with Marcus beside her – no Henry. Henry had vanished after Bernie had committed suicide, without a word to his older sister.

They gave statements. Told the Bill that Sears had a grudge against Clara because his younger brother had become obsessed with her, that Ivan Sears had followed her to Bernie’s flat and it was there that he’d chased her out onto the fire escape; and it was there that her sister had saved her, knifed Sears to death, then flung herself from the fire escape in a paroxysm of guilt.

Clara knew the true explanation was nowhere near as simple as that, but it would do.

There were endless questions, it took hours: but finally they left the cop shop and went home to the Calypso.

‘I need a bath,’ said Clara vaguely, and she locked herself in the bathroom and ran a bath, stripped and sat in the hot water and cried bitter tears over the loss of Bernie. She’d been so stupid, so blind, not seeing what torment Bernie was going through, and blaming it all on Henry – who was totally innocent. No wonder he hated her, when she had treated him so badly, misunderstood him so completely.

Oh Christ. Bernie.

Her poor sister. In the end, the pain had all been too much for her. Trapped inside her own tormented head, she had done the only possible thing: she had set herself free.

Clara could see it all over again: Bernie taking flight from the fire escape, falling end over end to her death. The chilling, God-awful
smack
of her body hitting the pavement. They had all run down after that, as if they could do anything. Ridiculous, really. Pitiful.

Bernie had been lying on her back, her neck twisted, blood pooling out from the back of her head. Her eyes were open, staring up at the sky. She was dead, of
course
she was dead, what did they think, that they could reassemble her or something?

Henry, white-faced, had gone to a phone box, called the police.

They’d reported it. They had to. People had come out from neighbouring properties at the back of the building, there were witnesses.

And now it was over. Still so hard to believe that Bernie had done all that she did. Killed Toby, Toby who had been so kind to her, because of Clara objecting to her relationship with David Bennett.

David Bennett.

She thought of him, and Sal, and Yasta Frate. Yes, she believed Henry when he said he didn’t kill Sal – but she
had
to know who did.

She stood up and dried herself and put on Marcus’s towelling robe that was far too big for her. Then she went back into the sitting room. Marcus was there. He poured her a gin and tonic, himself a whisky. Handed her the drink as she sat down.

‘You OK?’ he asked. He knew she wasn’t.

Clara nodded. Sipped at the gin, put her glass aside. He sat down beside her and she cuddled in against him. He put his arm around her shivering shoulders.

‘I’m bloody sorry,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said in a small voice.

‘Anything I can do?’

Clara looked up into those black eyes. ‘Right now? Just hold me, will you? And later . . . ’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘I have to go and see someone. And I want you with me.’

‘OK,’ he said, and held her, stroked his hand over her hair.

At last, she had someone she could depend on. He wasn’t Frank. He wasn’t Toby. Maybe he
had
married her for Toby’s clubs, but right now she didn’t care. Agonized over Bernie, she could only be glad that he was here with her.

Bernie
was over.

No more pain for her, no more torment. Clara closed her eyes and wept and hoped that somewhere, somehow, her sister was finally at peace.

112

There was only one way Clara felt she could stop herself from going completely mad over Bernie’s death, and that was to distract herself. So within a couple of days she was up and dressed and wanting to make some visits. There would be a funeral soon to sort out, and they had already been to the registrar’s to register the death. It was all too awful to even think about.

So she didn’t.

Instead, she took Marcus with her to pay another visit to Yasta Frate.

‘Shit! Not you two again,’ said Frate when they came into his cellar club one evening, jazz pounding out, everyone hurling themselves around on the dance floor, the whole place reeking of cigarettes, the atmosphere thick with smoke and the scent of sweat and hard liquor.

There he was at one of the candlelit tables, elegantly dressed in his pony-skin coat. Clara wondered, didn’t he sweat to death in that thing in here? There was no air. But she guessed he wore it like armour, that coat and the rakishly tilted Stetson hat – he liked to make an impression.

He was certainly making an impression on Clara: she thought he was a nasty piece of shit.

‘Yeah, us two,’ said Marcus, and there were four of his boys with them tonight, white boys in black territory. They were getting a lot of hostile stares.

‘So what you want this time?’ asked Frate. He was puffing on a Havana cigar, sending out perfect circles of smoke into the fuggy air.

‘How about a confession?’ said Clara. One of the boys pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down. Marcus and the others remained standing.

‘To
what
?’ Frate asked.

‘Sal Dryden. You were her landlord last year, weren’t you. And you like to collect your rents in person because you don’t trust anyone else enough to have them do it for you. That right?’

‘So what?’ He blew a smoke ring in her face.

‘
So
: Sal lay there dead for quite a while. When a colleague of mine went there to check on her, the door was closed. When we went back later and found Sal dead, it was ajar. So
someone
had been in there. And I think that someone was you. Because the rent man would certainly have called during that time. Or the landlord, in this case, and that’s you.
You
called in that time, and you killed her.’

Yasta Frate gave a big beaming grin and picked a fleck of cigar leaf out of his teeth. ‘Imaginative! I like that. And you’re putting this together how? Because I had a little something going with the girl for a while? Because we had our pictures taken together?’

Clara’s eyes hardened. ‘No. Because you were her landlord. And you
must
have been there. Collected the rent. You always collect your own rent, don’t you. Or you tried to. Forget the pictures.’

‘That Bennett guy, he’s clever with that camera.’ Yasta grinned and waggled his eyebrows. ‘Gets the angle
just
right, yeah? Shows off a man’s finer parts. He’s not so smart when it comes to the money side, I heard though. Amazin’ what a man will do, when some hard cash is involved, don’t you think?’

‘I said forget the pictures. The Bill obviously have. Kind of them.’

Clara glared at him while he smiled complacently back at her. The coppers were in his pay –
deep
in, they must be, to let it all pass the way they had. She cleared her throat. She felt physically sick, just talking to him.

‘Were you jealous when she took up with Henry Dolan last year?’ she asked him.

Yasta shrugged. ‘What’s that to me? We done. Strictly business after that. Hey, you know what? Maybe it’s that
Henry
you should be questioning, girl. There’s a bad buzz around that fella. Heard all sorts.’

‘Like what?’ Clara’s heart was thumping.

‘He’s a bad motherfucker. Things back in his past, I heard. Word is, he was killin’ stuff when he was in short drawers. That’s what I heard. Now that ain’t right. And you come round here askin’ me about it? You’re lookin’ in the wrong place.’

Clara looked up at Marcus. He raised an eyebrow, shook his head.

‘You
must
have been there,’ she insisted. The pounding of the music, the mad swirling of the dancers, the smoke, talking to this piece of scum, all of it was giving her a headache.

Yasta leaned his elbows on the table. ‘You want the truth?’ He stubbed the cigar out in an ashtray.

‘That’s all I came for,’ said Clara.

‘Truth? Honey, the truth is, I
was
there.’

Clara went very still. ‘What?’

‘I was there. I went to collect the rent and the door was open. I looked in and there she was, laid out dead, slit right open.’

‘And you didn’t report it.’

‘You kiddin’ me? She was dead, what could I do?’

‘So what did you do?’ Clara looked at his face, sheened with sweat. Was he lying?

‘I took the money out of her purse – it was there on the table by the door. Truth was, I was shaken up.
Nasty
in there, she was
ripe
. I think I dropped a few coins on the floor, chucked the purse back down, and I vamoosed.’

Her brain was spinning. Sal. Toby. Bernie. Her whole world had crashed around her and she felt bereft, bewildered. And now he was saying
this
. Making her think
Oh God, Henry, did you? Could you?
If Bernie hadn’t killed Sal, then
had
Henry done it?

She stood up. She had to get out of here, get some air.

‘Hey, don’t I even get a thank you for helping?’ shouted Yasta Frate after her departing back.

Clara didn’t turn around. She walked out of the club with Marcus and the boys and stood panting in the night air outside, gasping in each breath, trying not to pass out.

‘Come on,’ said Marcus, taking her arm. ‘Let’s go home.’

113

Clara felt ill, drawn, a ghost of herself. The nightmares were back, and she was finding it hard to go on. But she had to. What else was there to do? She lay in bed at nights beside a slumbering Marcus and thought,
Could Henry have done that?
For so long she had believed the worst of her brother, but all that Bernie had confessed to her showed that she’d been horribly mistaken.

Maybe it’s just bad blood
, she thought.

That was possible. Their dad had fiddled the accounts, run out on them. Bernie . . .
ah Jesus, Bernie!
. . . had been twisted, wrecked by all that had happened to her. And Henry . . . Henry was the enigma. Misread all his life. Capable of strong-arm stuff on the streets now. More than capable.

But was he capable of murdering Sal?

Frate’s last words to her about his visit to Sal had the ring of truth to them. Poor old Sal, always desperate for money, desperate enough to sell herself, sell her soul, and yet never managing to hold on to the cash she craved so much. But Frate was a practised liar, was he
really
telling the truth? Was Clara mistaken? She’d been mistaken about so much in her life.

In the gloom of the night, she watched the dim outline of Marcus, sleeping. Her husband. Who didn’t love her, but wanted her in bed with him. Who kept a mistress in luxury.

Was he keeping her still?

She thought of Paulette and ground her teeth and wished . . . for what? That he was in love with
her
. That he would commit himself to
her
, not some tart. Because she knew she was in love with him, and it was a reckless love, a complete love, like . . . like Bernie had felt for David Bennett.

She rolled onto her back and stared into the darkness and thought about Bennett. She wished so much that Bernie had never met him, then she would not have intervened, and the whole train wreck that had become their lives would not have happened.

Too late for that now, though.

Bennett had been the thing Bernie fastened upon in a bid to save her sanity. Clara saw that now. A man who had a talent but was poor and also devious. Who couldn’t keep money and never made much and could put his scruples aside when it suited him. Who had to crawl to filth like Frate to scratch a living. Who’d been there on the spot when she’d found poor butchered Sal, who had been flush with extra cash before she died . . .

‘Marcus?’ she whispered. Dawn was creeping through the curtains, lighting the room with an ambient glow.

‘Hmm?’ he rolled over, threw his arm around her. ‘What?’ he mumbled.

‘Wake up.’

114

David Bennett was there at the desk, stamping the backs of small prints, each with a corner cut off. He looked up as they came in, her, Marcus and two of the boys – not Liam, he was off resting up. Ivan Sears had hurt him, but he would be OK.

‘Fuck! You again,’ said Bennett irritably when he saw her.

‘Yeah, me again,’ said Clara. Raw as she felt with pain over Bernie, she had to do this. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Sal.’

‘There’s nothing to say. It’s a pity, what happened to her. That’s all.’

‘Oh, I think there’s a bit more than
that
. Where do you keep your bank statements?’ asked Clara.

‘You
what
?’ Bennett half-laughed.

‘I want to see your bank statements.’

‘Fuck off!’ snapped Bennett, and stood up.

Marcus shoved him back down. ‘Where are they?’ he asked, his black eyes boring into Bennett’s.

‘What the f— what the hell would you want to see them for?’

‘Where are they?’ repeated Marcus.

‘None of your fucking business,’ said Bennett.

Marcus’s gaze was stony. He cocked his head, and the heavies went to the desk, started rifling through the drawers.

‘Hey . . . ’ Bennett protested.

They carried on. Then straightened, shook their heads.

‘Where?’ asked Marcus again.

‘I don’t think—’

Marcus hit him. Then he hit him again. Blood spattered all over the prints and Bennett let out a yell of protest.

‘
Where?
’ said Marcus again. ‘You’ve got three seconds to answer or you’ll get another one.’