Dangerous (26 page)

His eyes widened. ‘Who?’

‘Oh, come off it! Sal. The tall white blonde in the pictures, the one that bastard was fucking. What was his name? Sal told me.’

‘Frate,’ said David. ‘It was Yasta Frate.’

‘Oh! Selective memory. You know him, but not her?’

‘All right. I know the girl you mean. And I heard she’d been found dead, it was in the papers and on the news. What has that got to do with me?’

‘I don’t know. But the funny thing? You were right there, outside her flat.’

‘That’s who you were visiting then? Sal? Christ, did you find the body? Was it you?’ David was nodding now. ‘It was you. That’s why you looked so shaken up, wasn’t it? You were sitting on the bottom step looking like you were about to hurl up your breakfast. And that’s why.’

Clara ignored him. ‘So who did you sell that filth to, to raise the money so you could play with your expensive cameras?’

David shrugged and leaned his elbows on the bar. ‘A couple of club owners. A few doormen.’

‘My guess is you didn’t take those into Boots to get them printed off,’ said Clara sourly.

‘No. I printed them myself. I’ve got a darkroom – they’re black and white, not colour, it’s easy enough.’

‘And these random people, they can order more prints from you? You’ve got the negatives?’

His head swivelled round and his angry eyes met hers. ‘What is this, twenty fucking questions? Sure, I kept the negatives. And people can re-order if they want.’

‘Bet you do a brisk trade,’ sniffed Clara.

His gaze froze. ‘We all do things for money, Clara. You can’t talk.’

‘Oh, fuck off, David,’ she snapped in irritation. ‘Whatever I do, it has absolutely nothing to do with you. Keep your nose out in future or I’ll have someone cut the thing off, do you get me?’

He leaned in closer and the scent of liquor hit her in a wave. ‘You cold bitch. Married to an old man and then a bender! Does the money keep you warm at night, Clara? Does it?’

‘I said fuck off,’ said Clara sharply, drawing back. ‘You’d be well advised to do that before I have one of the boys on the door toss your drunken arse into the street.’

He stood up. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. I’m going.’

He walked away, weaving unsteadily through the tables, then up the stairs to the club’s entrance.

Sticks and stones
, thought Clara, as the brunette on the stage let out a last exuberant trill of sound. The audience clapped enthusiastically. Clara clapped, too. But inside, she felt unnerved, and his words echoed in her head.

Does the money keep you warm at night?

She knew the answer to that. It didn’t. But what else was there? The brunette left the stage to a round of applause. Clara ordered another G & T, and drank it down. She shuddered at the memory of those photos. So Saint David was no saint after all.

63

It was a shame about Sal, a real crying shame, but what the hell. Shit happened – Henry thought he was living proof of that, after all that had come crashing down on his head since he was a small boy in short trousers – but what could you do?

In her line of work, it was inevitable that sooner or later Sal would come to grief, and now she had. Not so shocking, really. Certainly not surprising. And him? He was all right. Life went on. De Gaulle was in town for talks with Macmillan, and the Immigration Bill was causing fights in Westminster, and here on the streets there were fights too and births, and deaths. After what happened to Sal . . . well,
happened
. . . and he was sorry as hell about it but there you go, that was life, he’d had to go get himself some other digs.

And not a moment too soon, as it turned out. Since then he’d learned that the Bill had pulled in a photographer called Bennett for questioning two or three times, and there was a black club owner called Frate who had been implicated in the porno stuff involving Sal – but everyone knew that Yasta Frate had the cops in his pocket, so nobody could make even a teaspoon of shit stick to that slippery bastard.

Henry was grateful to Sal for all she’d done for him – for letting him stay with her in her ratty, disgusting, leak-ridden flat. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the streets. And he was grateful to her for slipping him in the back door to see Fulton Sears, who was overseer of the doors on all the Cotton clubs and who also was getting a pretty impressive protection racket going among the businesses around Soho.

Of course there was the connection, the
family
connection. But was he even a part of that any more? Clara – big sis – had married Toby Cotton, signed up for a life of ease and privilege. But Henry was a
long
way down the pecking order from big sis, their paths need never so much as cross if he put his mind to it, and he would. He didn’t relish door work anyway, it was boring. No, he liked doing the milk round, collecting the cash payments from the traders. He was bulky now, muscular, he frightened the fuck out of the poor bastards.

Pay up and there’ll be no trouble,
he told them.

He admired the way the Triads over in Chinatown went about their business; it was stylish, he thought; they worked the streets – Lisle, Newport, the south side of Shaftesbury Avenue, Wardour, Gerrard and Macclesfield – demanding protection money, and getting it too. They called it ‘tea money’, a tribute; violence was only applied when a certain series of steps had been observed. If a restaurant owner didn’t pay on the first approach, a negotiator was sent in to take tea with the proprietor in a private room at a hotel. If he
still
refused to play ball, a knife wrapped in a Chinese newspaper would be presented as a final warning. After that, if the man continued to object, a ‘chopping’ would take place. He would be cut with a fourteen-inch beef knife.

And after that?

He would be killed.

Yeah
, thought Henry. That was
style
.

64

After David’s departure, Clara did what she always did in the clubs: checked and rechecked that everything was running as it should. And it was; the manager of the Starlight was doing a good job. She caught up with the singer Babs Morley in her dressing room, praised her performance and gave her a pay rise.

She knew that David would calm down, and eventually he would move on. He’d been drunk, making empty threats and swearing at her to ease his bruised feelings. Always playing the do-gooder, the friend of humanity, he’d been scorched with embarrassment to be found doing something most decent people would find disgusting. He’d had to lash out at something, and she was the obvious target. So be it. All the rest was empty posturing, nothing more.

It was after two in the morning when she finally left the club and headed home.

On the way there, a fire engine, lights flashing, sirens wailing, shot past her taxi.

‘Phew, someone’s got trouble,’ said the driver.

‘Yeah,’ said Clara, uninterested, tired. Exhausted, actually. And . . . David had rattled her.

The truth hurts . . .

Yeah, it did. It hurt a lot.

She was a cold, heartless woman, marrying for money, caring nothing for love.

Love . . .

Marcus Redmayne . . .

Jesus! How could she even think about
love
for a man who’d hounded her, trashed three of her and Toby’s clubs, caused her nothing but trouble?

Another engine roared past, and another, all heading in the same direction. As the taxi moved on, Clara became aware of a glow lighting the sky up ahead. The fire was close and it was big. There was still traffic about – in London, there was
always
traffic about – and as another huge red Dennis came past, lights blazing, sirens letting out a deafening din, the taxi driver and the other drivers coming up behind him were nudging their cars into the pavement, giving the engine space to get by.

The closer they got to Clara’s road, to her home, the more her guts clenched in anxiety. The fire was
very
close. And . . . fuck, she could see flames now, huge gouts of flame shooting up into the night sky, and . . . there were the engines, parked all ways across the road, across
her
road, barring any further progress, and the firemen were unravelling the hoses, sending mighty arcing jets of water up into the flames and . . .

‘You live right here,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t you?’

Clara couldn’t speak. Her house – her beautiful, fabulous house, the one she and Toby had bought treasures for, had decorated together, had debated over colour schemes for and had such fun with – was on fire.

She couldn’t think straight. Somehow she remembered to peel off some notes and thrust them at the driver, then she was out of the black cab and running.

Out in the street, all was chaos. Immediately the smoke choked her. The wind was strong and blowing thick black curls of smoke and burning cinders and ash downward so that everything at street level was grey and hazy. Clara coughed and held a hand in front of her mouth. Her eyes stung and started streaming. She could barely breathe. There were people coming out from their houses on the other side of the road to gawp at the spectacle. There were parked police cars, blue lights flashing, and there was shouting and manic activity at the front of the house.

There were only two thoughts in her head as she dashed toward the burning building.

Toby.

Bernie.

She was running for the front door, which was blackened, all the paint peeling away, and there was such thick awful oily smoke, enveloping everything, choking her. Mindless with terror, she was stumbling toward the door, she had to get to Toby, to Bernie, she had to get in there.

Someone grabbed her around the waist. ‘Whoa! Steady on, miss, you can’t go in there.’

One of the firemen. She twisted in his grip like a cat, determined to be released, to complete her purpose.

Now another man grabbed her too, and between them they held her steady.

‘Miss! You can’t go in there, you can’t,’ said the second officer.

And then Clara saw that there was a bundle laid out near the front of the house, a bundle of what looked like blackened rags.

‘Is that . . . ?’ she choked, and then she couldn’t speak any more, the smoke was too dense, too awful, it tore the breath from her lungs. With a gargantuan effort she pulled free and was off, stumbling toward the pile of rags. Ambulances were arriving now, medics piling out. Clara ran, fell, righted herself, ran on. Because that wasn’t rags, it was a
person
, she could see that now.

Bernie? Oh Christ! Not Bernie . . .

Here in the front garden of her lovely house she could feel the furious roaring heat of the fire; it seemed to blast at her skin, to snatch her breath. She fell to her knees beside the person laid out on the lawn. There was a fireman bending over the body, and he looked up in surprise when Clara arrived on the scene.

‘No – miss – go on, get back, get away . . . ’ he said, and he was choking too, coughing, trying to get the words out.

‘
Bernie?
’ Clara managed to say. She reached down, pushed back a section of blanket, and let out a gasp of horror.

It wasn’t Bernie.

It was Toby.

And he’d been burned.

65

Toby’s eyes were the same. That was all she could think as she stared down at him. His face was smeared with soot, his skin was scarlet and peeling away from his face in strips, his thick, gorgeous hair had been reduced to frazzled fluff, scorched to blackened tufts, his handsome looks were gone, never to return. He was nearly unrecognizable. But his eyes were the same, even if his brows and lashes were burned off. His left hand rested on the blanket they’d put over him, and it was like a mummy’s claw, dried and seared and ruined.

Oh God, he’d been afire, he’d stumbled out of the house in flames, hadn’t he. She could see it, could picture it in her mind. His hand was black and red and . . . she went to touch it, and she couldn’t. She was afraid to. It would feel . . . horrible. And she might hurt him even more than he was hurt already. But his eyes were still exactly the same, still recognizably Toby’s. Hazel-coloured and beautiful. They stared up at her and the expression in them was dazed, agonized and terrified.

He was alive.

Somehow Clara forced a smile onto her lips, willed her voice to be steady, to be strong. Inside she was screaming
Please, not Toby, please no!

‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be fine, it’s all right.’ Then she said: ‘What happened? Can you tell me what happened?’

He wheezed; couldn’t speak.

‘Where’s Bernie, Toby?’

Toby wheezed in another gasping breath. His eyes held hers. But he said nothing. Could he speak? Had the heat seared his lungs, damaged them? She thought it had.

‘We couldn’t find anyone else in the house, miss,’ said the fireman, crouching beside her. ‘Look, the ambulance crew are coming now . . . ’

Toby’s eyes were still on her face. Somehow Clara didn’t cry. He wouldn’t want her to cry. She had to be calm and resilient, to reassure him that this was only a temporary thing, that he would recover, that all would be well.

It wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t. She could see it.

‘Now, Toby, don’t worry,’ she said with terrible forced brightness. ‘The doctors will help. They’re going to take you to the hospital and make you well again.’

‘Clara . . . ’

He could speak! But his voice was cracked, and the effort of speaking was exhausting what little strength he had left.

‘I’m here, darling. I’m right here.’ Her tears were spilling over. She couldn’t stop them now.

‘Clara . . . ’ he gasped, and then his eyes turned up in his head.

‘Toby!’ Clara leaned in closer. ‘
No! Oh, please . . . Toby . . .
’

The medics came then, shoving her to one side. Choking, sobbing, she reeled back and the fireman pushed her away, further, out of the gate, to where it was safer. Her eyes were fastened on the pitiful bundle that was Toby, fastened on the people now clustering around him, talking, putting an oxygen mask over his ruined face, pumping at his burned torso.