Stay Dead (23 page)

‘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.

‘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.’

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?’

‘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.’

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.

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 gripping 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.

‘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?’