Stay Dead (7 page)

The only thing she remembered clearly was the furious reaction when they found out what she’d done. She’d heard shouting outside her room and women sobbing – someone calling
the nurses silly bitches, demanding to know why they hadn’t done as they’d been
told
and kept her away from the house phones, telling them they were fired. But when they came in
to see her, their voices were calm, telling her what to do. Stall him some more, this Max Carter person.

That was his name
.
Max Carter
.
She’d remembered!

So she’d stalled him. Told him she would meet him to discuss it here, then here, then here. And she hadn’t shown up, and then Antonio . . .

She’d remembered that too! Antonio!

Antonio had said, We will sort this, once and for all. We will go out, Bruto and me, and Bruto will pretend to be poor old Gina in her wheelchair, and all will be well. Tell him the old
amphitheatre, and we will finish him there, Antonio told her, his voice as patient and soothing as if he was talking to a naughty child. Yes, she had made some silly mistakes, maybe a
lot
of
them, but there was nothing too impossible to sort out.
He
was going to sort it.

Gina frowned as she heard doors slamming downstairs, raised voices, the sounds of a struggle, things crashing to the ground. Anxiously she twisted around in the chair to look at the open doorway
leading out into the hall. She tried to get up from her chair – she hated the thing, she spent so many hours confined to it – but she was too weak. With her skinny, shaking, blue-veined
hands she fumbled with the chair’s wheels, and managed to turn it so that she was facing the door.

‘Fidelia!’ she called in her querulous voice, a voice that had once made people snap to attention. Once she had been respected, even feared, because of her family connections. Not
any more.

Fidelia didn’t come.

Suddenly, all was deathly quiet in the villa. Stillness. Silence. And then she heard it. The stealthy tread of footsteps approaching. Frozen there, her heart stuttering in her chest, she
clutched at the blanket over her knees and anxiously watched the open door.

‘Fidelia?’ she called again, quieter, her voice trembling.

Then a man stepped into the doorway. He was carrying a gun. He was compact, muscular, with black hair and dark navy-blue eyes. He was aiming the gun steadily, straight at her. As he moved, he
left faint bloody footprints on the marble floor. Two other men appeared behind him, both of them armed, both of them looking dangerous.

‘Who are you?’ she asked the one in front, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

‘I’m Max Carter,’ said the man, coming into the room. ‘You wanted to speak to me, didn’t you.’

‘No, I . . . it was a mistake. That’s all.’ She looked bewildered, then she remembered. A faltering smile lifted her lips back from her yellowing teeth. ‘Antonio has put
it right.’

‘No. He hasn’t. Antonio’s in the hospital,’ he said.

Gina said nothing. If I say nothing, she thought, then I can’t do anything wrong. I can’t make another
mistake.
This mistake was clearly a bad one, far worse than everyone had
previously thought. Antonio was in the hospital. For a moment, groping around in her mind, she couldn’t remember who Antonio
was
, and then she had it. Antonio was the one who had got
very angry with her. Antonio was the one who said he’d put it right.

Max stepped further into the luxuriously appointed and sunlit room. He didn’t lower the gun. He was looking at a helpless, confused old lady in a wheelchair, but seeing something very
different: the latent, deadly power of the Mafia. The old woman had secrets and in her confused state she had spilled them – and those secrets were dire enough to make her send two men to
kill him so that they would never be revealed.

He moved closer to where Gina sat. Leaning in, he grabbed the blanket and threw it aside. Helpless old woman or not, he wasn’t taking any chances. But there was no weapon hidden there; no
knife, no gun. He knew these people were dangerous, unpredictable, like scorpions. The sting was in the tail, and the tail would strike when you least expected it.

Max stepped back again, watching her like a hawk. She looked bewildered, but it could be an act; he didn’t trust it. He put himself out of kicking distance, and placed himself so that he
could watch her and at the same time not block his back-up’s view from the open doorway.

‘Tell me your name,’ he said.

‘My name . . . ?’ she echoed faintly. Gina stiffened. A shot of pain, a bolt of white heat, went through her chest and she put a shaking hand there.

‘Yeah. I want to hear you say it.’

‘My name . . .’ For another of those frustrating, maddening moments she couldn’t remember. It would come to her. Be calm, be calm . . . but how
could
she be calm when
this man, this stranger and these other men were here, pointing guns at her head? And this pain! Worse than any she’d had before, it was nagging, growing, spreading.

But was the man a stranger, really? She seemed to know his face, his manner. And the name. She felt she knew that, too. But she could be wrong. She was wrong about so much, these days.

The name.

Her
name.

All at once, she had it. ‘I am Gina Barolli,’ she said, grimacing. The pain was increasing. Her left arm was beginning to tingle.

Max was nodding. ‘You may not remember me, Miss Barolli, but I remember you.’

‘Do you?’ For a moment she looked pathetically hopeful. Then she winced.

Is she ill? wondered Max
.
Or just bluffing?

‘Yeah, I do. You’re Constantine Barolli’s sister.’

Up in the kitchen over the Shalimar, all was quiet except for the radio playing; the girls weren’t in yet to get ready for the evening’s trade.

‘Chris is down the wholesaler’s,’ said Ellie, taking the teapot off the dresser, which was loaded, as always, with her ‘crystals’ as she called them; gemstones and
glassware fashioned into dainty swans, penguins, dragons. She made the tea and put the pot and two bone-china cups on the table. ‘Take the weight off, Annie,’ she said, and Annie sat
down and watched as Ellie took a seat opposite and poured the tea out.

‘This is awful,’ Annie said, voicing what they were both thinking. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Midway through pouring the tea, Ellie slapped the pot down on the table and put her head in her hands. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, and groped for a hankie, found it. Red-faced, eyes wet,
she blew her nose hard, tucked the hankie back in her pocket and looked at Annie.

‘Dolly! Why, for God’s sake? What did she ever do to anybody?’ Ellie gasped out.

Annie reached for her hand and patted it. ‘I don’t know. Have the police been here yet? Have they asked you anything?’

Ellie shook her head. With unsteady hands she picked up the pot and took another stab at it. This time, she got the tea into the cups. Slopped in milk. Pushed one cup across to Annie.

‘Thanks.’

The news came on the radio. Ellie jumped to her feet, went over to it, turned it off.

‘They keep talking about it. It’s horrible. It was such a
shock
,’ she said, and her voice was steadier. Then she looked at Annie. ‘I thought Mr Carter would come
with you. Being as it’s Dolly, being as it’s such a terrible thing to have happened.’

‘He’s away. Busy,’ said Annie.

Yeah, busy doing what?
drifted through her brain. Didn’t they say you should always trust your gut feelings? But that he was having an affair –
that
was too horrible,
too devastating, to take in.

But it’s possible, yes?

Yeah, it was. Max was a handsome man, charismatic; he drew women to him. Annie had
seen
it happen. Had actually seen the cheeky cows ignore her, standing right there beside him, and zoom
in on him like a missile. She had even laughed about it to herself, secure in the knowledge that Max would never stray. But now, well, who knew? She was eleven years younger than him, but she was
in her forties now, and loads of wealthy men in their fifties went for girls half their age. Young and nubile, the girls flattered them and looked so good as the men flaunted them in front of their
jealous friends.

He wouldn’t be the first man to do it, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. All those secret trips to Europe, those covert chats to Gary on the phone . . . But maybe some of those
calls hadn’t been from Gary at all. The way he’d pulled away from her, detached from her, getting up and going into another room, closing the door, talking low. And afterwards,
he’d been different with her, there was no denying it. She wasn’t imagining it; he’d been cold to her.

So was he really talking to Gary?

Or was he talking to some other woman?

‘Annie?’ said Ellie, seeing she was miles away.

‘Yeah,’ said Annie, coming back to the here and now. She took a swig of the tea, picturing the girl. She’d be a brunette, twenty-ish; keen-eyed and sniffing out wealth, power .
. . and of course she would be gorgeous. Annie had seen it all before. The young Eurasian beauty on the arm of a decrepit but wealthy-looking old man in Kingstown. The glamorous blonde flirting
with a man twenty-five years her senior in the Sandy Lane restaurant. She and Max had been sitting at the next table, had even smiled at each other, sharing the unspoken thought:
there it is
again
. Blondes had never done it for Max. No, it would be a brunette. Like her, only a lot younger. The pain of it clamped at her guts, made her feel sick.

‘You know what?’ Ellie was saying, hands clasped around the teacup as if trying to get them warm. ‘I spoke to Doll last Monday on the phone. We were going to meet up next
Thursday at the Ritz, our usual thing.’

Annie nodded: she knew. Tea at the Ritz. Once, she had regularly joined them there.

‘Now she’ll never make it,’ said Ellie, her face dissolving into tears again. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, going to the worktop and tearing off a hank of kitchen roll.
She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, chucked the tissue into the bin. She came back to the table and sat down with a shuddering sigh, then stared at Annie with reddened eyes. Ellie’s
mascara was all down her cheeks, she looked a mess.

‘Who the fuck would do a thing like that?’ asked Ellie. It was a howl of protest.

‘She was shot, Tone said when he called me,’ said Annie, swallowing past a painful lump in her throat.

‘That’s right. She was shot. God, poor Dolly.’ Ellie’s eyes were bright with tears. She gulped and stared at Annie’s face. ‘I thought Tone would’ve
collected you from the airport. You came in a cab.’

Annie shook her head, trying to think past this huge obstacle in her brain.
Dolly was dead
. Truth was, she’d been so devastated by what Tony had told her on the phone that she
hadn’t thought to mention transport to him, and he hadn’t offered. Which, now she thought about it, was odd. Usually, Tone was on the ball with such things. But then, he’d had a
shock too.

‘You got a spare bed, Ellie?’ she asked. She felt weary, right through to the bone.

There was a flicker of hesitation before Ellie recovered herself and said, ‘Course. There’s always a place for you here.’

Of course there was. Annie was the boss’s wife, after all. Right now, she was wondering how much longer that was going to be the case. It made her feel sad, hurt, angry. She and Max had
been through so much, and she didn’t want it to end this way, with him having a hole-in-the-corner affair and her having to cope all alone again.

She
loved
him. Worshipped the bones of him.

She drank the tea and let out a heartfelt sigh. ‘I need a kip. After that, maybe this is going to make some kind of sense.’

But I doubt it
,
she thought
.

‘Come on, I’ll show you to your room,’ said Ellie, standing up. She paused there, clutching at the kitchen chair. Her tear-reddened hazel eyes met Annie’s.
‘They’ll find out who did it, though, won’t they? The Bill, I mean,’ said Ellie. ‘They’ve
got
to.’

Annie nodded. ‘They will,’ she said.

Or I will
, she added to herself.

‘I do remember you,’ said Gina Barolli, her face screwed up, her hand still clutched to her scrawny chest.

Max moved a little closer – not
too
close – and he kept the gun trained on her.

Gina’s mouth trembled. The pain was bad, and growing. Then she said: ‘You’re the security man. In London. You called yourself Mark something then. You were guarding
her.
’

Max stared at her, wondering at her thought processes. So she remembered that time after Constantine’s death, when Annie had moved back to London to escape the poisonous influence of his
eldest son Lucco. But it seemed she didn’t remember what had happened later, in New York, when Max’s true identity had been revealed and Alberto, Constantine’s youngest son, had
taken over the reins as the godfather.

‘Where is Fidelia? And where is Antonio?’ Gina demanded.

‘Fidelia’s tied up right now,’ said Max. ‘And I told you. Antonio’s in the hospital. He had an accident. You’ve been phoning one of my clubs in London, the
Blue Parrot, talking about your brother.’

Had she? Gina couldn’t remember doing that, and if she had she ought to be
ashamed
, because that was a stupid thing to do, and dangerous.
Omerta
demanded her silence. She
knew that. She had lived by that code all her life.

‘I didn’t phone anyone,’ she said, her lips trembling as the pain clamped her chest tight again.

‘Yeah, you did.’ Max glanced back at the two men standing silent, watching, from the doorway. ‘Wait outside. Close the door,’ he said, then returned his attention to Gina
as they obeyed. ‘You spoke to Gary Tooley and you said something very interesting. You said that my wife ain’t my wife at all. You said that she’s still married to your brother,
Constantine.’