Black Widow (12 page)

‘The bitch should have got her present. She’ll toe the line now,’ said Danny confidently, his eyes jumping wildly between Vita and Phil.

Vita was sitting pale and shaken at the kitchen table again, head down. Right now she couldn’t even
look
at her brother.

Phil was quiet, pretending to read the paper when really he felt as if he was going to vomit.

Really
, he was shocked. When he’d gotten into this deal it hadn’t included harming kids. He looked up at Blondie. Danny.
Fucking lunatic
, he thought.

‘You got something to say?’ demanded Danny.

‘To you? No.’ Phil got back to his pretend reading, a muscle flexing in his jaw.

‘Good. Get your arse off that fucking chair then and get going.’

Phil closed his paper. He looked across at Danny. He looked at the gun on the table between them.

Danny’s eyes were challenging.
You think you’re hard enough, fast enough? Try it.

Phil stood up.

‘Fine,’ he said, and left the room.

Vita’s head was hung low, as if she was waiting for a storm to break. She looked at the painting laid out on the table. Ducks. Painting by numbers. Her brush was in a cup of water, she was going to do the Mandarin drake’s head next, and that colour was almost red, almost like blood. She felt her stomach start to roll.

Painting by numbers! Christ!

Vita had seen the kit and brought it along, thinking that the kid would be amused by it, but she’d ended up painting the thing instead, to stave off madness. The kid was hardly ever awake enough to do anything, anyway. Getting absorbed in the painting stopped her from thinking too much about the plight of the little girl in the cellar. They’d had to drug Layla Carter when they’d snatched her, and they’d had to keep on drugging her, keeping her out of it on the stuff, and that was good, Vita thought, that was very good. Because then she wouldn’t have really
felt
it, would she, what Danny had done to her?

That was what Vita had to tell herself. That way she could deal with this. She wondered all over again why she’d got involved with any of this. For the money? But she didn’t much care
about the money, not really. No, it was mostly because Danny had told her to go along with it, and she had gone along with pretty much anything Danny had told her to, ever since the cradle.

But now something in her rebelled. Hurting a kid. And what he’d done to that Majorcan couple. And she couldn’t forget that the kid had seen
her
face, not Danny’s, not Phil’s.
Hers.

‘She’s not eating much,’ she said to Danny.

Danny shrugged and sat down, pulling the paper closer.

He neither knew nor cared how much a kid that age ate.

‘Do you really think you should have done that?’ asked Vita quietly.

Danny looked up from the paper.

Vita quailed.

‘I mean, damaged the goods,’ she said quickly, in case he went off on one. ‘What if she gets an infection or something?’

‘If you do your part of the job right, she’ll be okay.’

Vita felt the dry heaves start in her throat again. The kid had been spark out of it when Danny had done
that
—she couldn’t even name it in her head—and afterwards he had told Vita to fetch the Dettol and bandages he’d brought along with them, he thought of everything, Danny, mad as he was,
crazy
as he was, he never dropped a stitch.

He had shown his sister how to hold the kid’s arm up to stop the bleeding, had shown her how to clean the wound, the
stump
, and bandage it up. Because it was Danny—and because she had never, ever, said no to Danny—she did it, but she had gagged all the way through and afterwards she had gone into the loo and vomited up her breakfast.

She had started to wonder what damage it would do the kid, the way Danny kept her drugged up all the time. Even when Layla was conscious, when she ate—and how little she ate, just a tiny amount, was that normal?—she was in a daze, not quite with it, poor little cow.

But Vita knew the drugs were necessary. Otherwise, Layla would probably start screaming her head off, they would have to gag her, and she’d still make a noise, and they couldn’t risk that. Not in the hen house behind the little place in Palma, because there were other people living close by, and Marietta coming and going. Not on the boat either, because Phil had carried her aboard in a large canvas holdall that Danny had slashed here and there to make air holes.

The fishermen on board didn’t ask questions. Probably thought they were transporting drugs, and they’d been paid well, what did they care?

But no, it was Layla, it was a little kid drugged to fuck, unconscious. And now Vita was really
worrying about it all. Would all this really not harm the kid? Would she really recover?

And now they were back in England. It was all building up to some sort of horrible crescendo, and she was full of fear, wondering where this mad scheme—which had seemed so easy, so simple, to start with—was going to end.

Danny was hopping to his feet again, all restless energy.

‘Get packed up,’ he told her. ‘We’re off up to the Smoke tonight.’

He left the room.

Vita sat there, looking at the ducks in the half-finished painting. Then her eyes strayed to Danny’s gun, just lying there on the table, and she thought of Layla, who would probably always suffer the after-effects of all that crap Danny had been dosing the poor little bitch with; Layla, who had seen her face.

Annie thought she would never stop being sick. She was crouched over the toilet bowl heaving her guts up and Dolly was there, stroking her hair, making soothing noises. Even when there was nothing left to bring up, still she was heaving and gasping, her innards rebelling at the outrage.

Lay la’s finger.

They’d cut off her baby’s finger, and placed it on the front doorstep and walked away.

Bastards.

How could they do that? How could anyone torture a child that way?

Of course it had been Dolly who had stayed calm, stoic to the last. Annie had screamed her head off when she saw it. Ellie had cringed back in disgust. Darren had turned milk-white and looked as though he might faint. Then Annie had fled the room, blundered into the loo and been sick.

Dolly had searched desperately for something to say,
anything
, that would help Annie’s pain.

‘Look, it means she’s alive at least. They’re trying to throw a scare into you, that’s all.’

‘That’s all?’
Annie straightened, tore off a strip of toilet paper and wiped her mouth and stared at Dolly. ‘I tell you what, Doll—they’ve fucking well succeeded.’

And the finger didn’t mean Layla was still alive
, she thought.
Of course it didn’t. They could have hacked it off after they’d killed her. They could post back her baby girl to her bit by bit to prod her into raising the cash, only to reveal at the end that Layla had been dead all along.

‘What the fuck am I going to do?’ she asked Dolly wildly.

Dolly flushed the loo and let out a sigh. ‘I wish I knew, Annie love. I really do.’

Annie stood up shakily and rested her head against the cool tiles on the wall.

‘I need help,’ she moaned. ‘I can’t handle this.’

‘Yes you can. You can handle any damned thing.’

Annie was shaking her head, her hair hanging in rat-tails around her ashen face.

‘No. I can’t. I need help. Get hold of Billy. Tell him to get Jimmy Bond to meet me at the Palermo and to bring the locksmith. We’re getting that fucking safe open.’

Jimmy didn’t bring the locksmith to the Palermo. He brought a tall, ginger-haired man with a potbelly and a long, hawkish face, carrying a Gladstone bag.

‘What the fuck’s this?’ she demanded when they came into the office and the ginger-haired one promptly pulled out a stethoscope.

Tony had driven her over to the Palermo, and she had twitched around the office for an hour waiting for Jimmy and the locksmith to show, and now he
hadn’t
brought the locksmith, and she was hopping mad with Jimmy Bond’s lack of cooperation, lack of respect, lack of giving a
fuck
about what happened to her and to her daughter.

‘Jimmy
…’ she started in, furious.

‘This is Ginge,’ said Jimmy. ‘I didn’t think the locksmith was a good idea. We don’t know what’s in there and we don’t want the general public knowing our business, do we? Ginge is safer, he’s one of our own, he’s good on combination locks. Go to it, Ginge.’

Ginge knelt down by the safe, pulled on a pair of thin cotton gloves, put the stethoscope in his ears and attached it to the metal beside the dial on the safe.

‘Jimmy,’
said Annie. ‘For God’s sake can we hurry this up?’

Ginge half turned and held a finger to his lips.

Fuck it all.

Annie sat down at the desk and waited. Jimmy stood there, hands in coat pockets, waiting too.

After ten minutes, Annie stood up.

‘For fuck’s
sake,’
she said, and left the room.

She went downstairs, went into the deserted club, walked around. Seeing nothing. Her footsteps echoed around the place. She walked around because she couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t rest.

Suddenly she grabbed a chair and flung it across the dance floor. Then another. Then another. Then she stopped, panting, the blood singing in her ears, her heart thudding, her hands shaking so badly she wondered if she was about to collapse.

I’m cracking up
, she thought.
I’m losing it. And I can’t afford to do that.

She drew a deep breath. Tried to steady herself, get a grip. But her mind was full of Layla.

All she could see in her mind’s eye was Layla’s finger. All she could imagination was Layla’s suffering.

All she
wanted
was the blood of these people who had hurt her baby.

She put the chairs straight again. Sat down. Gathered herself. After twenty minutes had passed she went back upstairs to the office.

Ginge was turning the dial and listening to the tumblers clicking over on the mechanism. Jimmy was perched on the edge of the desk. She sat down again in the big leather chair. Another five minutes passed.

Then there was a distinct
click
and Ginge swung the safe door open.

He drew back, repacking his stethoscope into his Gladstone bag, tucking away his gloves. He didn’t look inside the safe. He nodded to Annie, shook Jimmy’s hand briefly, accepted an envelope from him—no doubt an envelope stuffed with cash—and trotted off down the stairs.

They heard the club’s outer door swing open, then close.

They looked at each other.

Annie stood up and went over to the open safe door. She knelt and pushed it open wide, hoping against hope. She looked back at Jimmy Bond, and he came and had a look too. She held her breath, and looked inside.

Annie’s heart plummeted to her boots.

The safe was empty.

By three that afternoon, Annie was sitting in Dolly’s kitchen, looking at the closed box in the centre of the table. She’d brought Jimmy back here, put the box there on the table, told him to take a seat.

‘So what’s going on?’ he asked, sitting down opposite Annie. He looked at the box. ‘What’s that?’

‘Take a look,’ said Annie.

She was calmer now. For two hours she had raged and vomited and screeched like a wounded
animal, and then she had discovered that the Palermo’s safe was empty and raged about
that
, but now she was calmer. Calm as sheet ice with a wild river crashing beneath it. Holding in her fear, her hatred, her despair beneath a cool shell. Occasionally a shudder racked her guts, made her stop and hold her breath and wonder if she was about to die. Despair, disbelief, grief, and rage would sweep over her like a vicious tide. But she held that in too.

Jimmy shrugged and reached for the box.

‘I didn’t tell you, we did two of the Delaney places last night,’ he told her.

‘Right,’ said Annie flatly.

‘What the
fuck
…!’ Jimmy had casually opened the box and just as quickly he now flung it down.

The finger rolled out on to the table, the nail like a small delicate shell, the flesh pale blue with one frayed end. You could see the bone in the centre of the digit. The stained cotton wool had come out too, and there was a piece of paper. Annie had already seen it, read it. Now Jimmy looked at her, then picked up the little note. It said in block capitals:
ENJOY THE GIFT. CATCH UP WITH YOU A MONTH ON FRIDAY.

‘Someone left that on the doorstep,’ said Annie.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Jimmy.

‘I need help with this, Jimmy. They’re asking for big money, and somehow I’ve got to find it.
There was fuck-all in the safe, so I’m going to have to look elsewhere.’

Jimmy sat back. ‘How big?’

‘Half a million.’

‘Jeez.’

‘I thought of selling the clubs,’ said Annie.

‘You can’t do that.’

Annie’s mouth twisted in a ghost of a smile. She looked at the severed finger on the table. So tiny.

‘I can do whatever the fuck I like, Jimmy. Remember? I’m Annie Carter. Max Carter’s wife.’
Widow
, she amended to herself. ‘But even if I sold the clubs, even if that’s possible and I don’t think it
is
, because there must be legalities involved, and where the fuck would I find the paperwork for that? And anyway it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. So what’s the point?’

‘So what’s the plan?’

The plan, since she didn’t know where Max had his wealth stashed and had very little of her own, was simple—she was going to have to get out there with her begging bowl.

‘Max had friends,’ she said to Jimmy. ‘Powerful friends.
Rich
friends. I can remember when the clubs were heaving with celebrities and minor royals and members of Parliament, all Max’s friends.’

Jimmy snorted.

‘You really think any of those bastards would
help you out of a corner? You got another think coming.’

‘He was in tight with the Americans. They came over and they were doing regular business with Max, he was protecting their venues up West. They were
tight.’

Jimmy shook his head.

‘You don’t go cap in hand to those people,’ he said. ‘You’ll be in debt to them forever.’

Annie’s eyes were glittering with purpose as she stared across the table at him.

‘They’re letting me sweat for a month. Playing with me. Taunting me. Sending me bits of my baby girl. Okay. So we’ve got time. Time enough to contact the Barolli family and ask for help. Maybe use the clubs for security. Queenie’s old place too.’

Queenie was Max’s mother, long dead. Killed, it was always said, by the Delaney mob in a hit that had been a step too far. Queenie’s death had sparked a gang war. Annie would never forget it.

Jimmy was shaking his head.

‘You don’t know what you’re suggesting,’ he told her.

‘Yeah,’ said Annie. ‘I do.’

‘No you
don’t.’
Jimmy thumped the table. The finger jumped. Annie flinched visibly. Muttering ‘for fuck’s sake’, he picked it up gingerly and placed it back in its box, putting the cotton wool and the note in too, and replacing the lid.

Then he sat back and looked at Annie.

‘You think this is a bad thing?’ Jimmy indicated the box. ‘This is
nothing.
This is
nothing
to what the Barolli family would do if you ever tried to shaft them on a deal, I’m telling you. These people are
Mafia.
Once you’re in debt to them, you’re fucked.’

Annie nodded. Then she stood up, rested her fists on the table, and looked first at the box with its pathetic, fragile contents, and then directly at Jimmy. Jimmy thought she looked, in that moment, crazy. Totally freaked. Capable of anything.

‘Look at me, Jimmy,’ she told him. ‘Two good friends of mine have been hit. My brother-in-law has been hit. My husband too. And now someone is sending me bits of
my daughter
, my own
flesh and blood
, Jimmy. Now tell me.’ She leaned in closer. ‘Do you seriously think I give a monkey’s fuck about what happens to me? Do you seriously think I’m afraid of doing business with the Barollis?’

Now she was laughing, and he wondered if she really had gone mad, whether all this had finally made her crack wide open. Suddenly she stopped laughing and her eyes skewered him where he sat.

‘Look
at me, Jimmy. I’m dead already, dead and buried. All I want now is for Layla to be safe. Beyond that, who gives a shit?’

‘I can’t okay this,’ said Jimmy.

Annie fumbled at the chain around her neck, couldn’t find the clasp because her fingers were shaking too much. She grabbed the chain and pulled it, breaking it. Max’s ring fell on to the table and lay beside the pitiful little white box containing his daughter’s finger. Annie grabbed the ring and flung it at Jimmy Bond.

‘You think I need your approval? Think again. You get your arse out of here
right now,’
she ordered, ‘and tell Constantine Barolli I want a meet and that it’s urgent, like life or death, you got that?
Now!’