Jail Bird (25 page)

Kings was buzzing and Si and Freddy were happy with their new Head of Security, Brendan Gibbs. He was a tough bastard but not a loose cannon like that fucking Jase – who was still hanging around like a bad smell, propping up the bar, acting like he was still cock of the walk. Freddy watched him and promised himself he was going to sort him, very soon.

‘Saz is in with the new hubby,’ Freddy told Si as they sat upstairs in the office throwing back a few single malts.

The news that his niece was in was not particularly welcome to Si. He had plenty of punters in here, the evening was going with a swing, and he knew most of them were high as kites on E and cocaine. Which was fine, but he didn’t want to hear that about his own niece. She was better than that – or she fucking well should be.

‘Have Brendan keep an eye out,’ said Si.

Freddy nodded. Maeve came bustling in with the books; she helped Matt out sometimes in the office. Freddy couldn’t stand the stroppy cow, sister-in-law or not. He gave her a
curt nod, threw back the last of his malt and went off downstairs.

Jase pushed through the writhing punters and got to the bar and caught sight of Saz. She had that limp dick Richard standing sullenly alongside her. Saz was wearing a brown polka-dotted halter-neck dress that was way up her arse and plunging to show off her boobs. She looked hot, but he wasn’t interested in that. He felt down tonight, and he kept shooting edgy looks at Brendan, who was patrolling the place in DJ and bow tie, patrolling
Jase’s
place, ordering
Jase’s
boys around. The boys kept their heads down and just did as he said, their eyes never meeting Jase’s. It was as if he had ceased to exist.

Christ, that made him furious.

Not long ago
he
had been in charge here. Now Jase was being treated like wallpaper. But all that would change, he
knew
it would change, the minute he came through for Freddy and did Lily King like he’d promised. Freddy and Si would fall all over him then; they’d be so bloody grateful, he could write his own cheque, have his door back, anything.

If only he could
get
to the bitch. He frowned. When she wasn’t safely tucked inside The Fort now, she was being squired around by bloody Nick O’Rourke, and he’d already had one near-miss in
that
department, so how to do it? He was driving himself apeshit, trying to think of a way. And Oli could never know. He’d make sure of that. After he’d offed the old girl, Oli would need a shoulder to cry on, she’d be back on side in no time. But…
how?
How was he going to get to Lily King?

As the strobes zoomed and flickered and the DJ cranked up Lily Allen’s latest, he looked at Saz standing there jiggling
her bits at the bar. He elbowed through the punters and pitched up at her side. She glanced at him, gave him a spaced-out smile. She’d been on the old happy pills, he saw straight away.

‘Hiya, Jase!’ she yelled, and leaned over and gave him a smacker straight on the lips.

‘Hi, Saz,’ returned Jase, trying not to laugh out loud at the expression on Richard’s face as he witnessed the clinch. Jase gave the wuss a look that said,
Want to make something of it?
and Richard looked away.

Jase tried to catch the barman’s eye. Yeah, he was
invisible.
He’d become the invisible man in here.

‘How are you, sweetie?’ Saz asked him, sipping her drink.

He leaned in close to her so as to make himself heard. ‘Cool. Don’t usually see you in here.’

‘Wanted a night out,’ said Saz. She cast a disparaging look at her husband. ‘Richie hates it here.’

And you don’t give a shit about that,
thought Jase.

He’d never liked Saz. Saz was everything Oli was not – snooty, shallow, a real pain in the rear. If
he
was Richard, he’d yank her out of here right now and take her home and give her a stiff talking-to.

Saz’s eyes were glassy. ‘Heard Oli and you had a bit of a row.’

‘Yeah. A bit.’ He didn’t want to discuss that with her. He tried again to catch the barman’s eye.
Another
one ignored him.

‘I heard you’d split,’ said Saz. ‘Jeez, get me another drink, Richard, will you? I’m parched.’

Her loving husband gave her a look that said,
You’ve had enough.

‘Look, I can’t stand this bloody racket, I’m going home,’
said Richard, giving her a cold stare and Jase a look of blank dislike.

‘Okay. You go. Uncle Si’ll drop me home later.’

Richard looked taken aback.
He thought she’d go with him,
thought Jase. How little the poor sap knew his own wife.

Richard gave Jase an uneasy glance. Then he looked at Saz.

‘Oh go
on,
Richie. I’ll be fine.’ She flapped a dismissive hand at him.

He nodded and reluctantly turned away and was suddenly lost in the surging crowds.

‘Let me get that,’ said Jase, what the hell, and he signalled for the barman and was again ignored.

‘I’ll get ’em in,’ said Saz. She held up a hand and the barman was there like lightning. Jase stared at the tosser while she placed the order, voddy and orange for her, a lager for him.

‘Oli and I ain’t really split up,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘We had a fight, that’s all.’

The drinks came and Saz fell on the voddy and orange. The E was making her so thirsty.

The barman was turning away when Jase said: ‘Hey.’

The man’s eyes wouldn’t meet Jase’s. Jase saw red. He leaned over and caught the dipstick’s tie and yanked him forward, over the bar, cracking his forehead hard into the man’s nose.

The barman let out a yell and fell back, blood pouring out of his hooter like Niagara Falls. He was staggering, blinking, eyes watering, blood sploshing all down the front of him.

‘Next time you see me, you fucking well
serve
me, yeah?’ snapped Jase.

The barman weaved unsteadily away. Jase glanced around, feeling buzzed. A couple of the bouncers –
his
men – were watching him. As he stared back, they looked away. He turned his attention back to Saz.

‘Whew!’ she said with a laugh. ‘
Very
macho.’

Silly tart.

‘Oli’s stupid,’ said Saz, her eyes playing with Jase’s. ‘You’re gorgeous.’

‘Tell her that, will you?’ The state Saz was in, he could make
her
drop her drawers if he chose to. Which he didn’t. But while she was here…Jase was thinking busily. He spun out a hopeful line. ‘It’d be nice to surprise her with something,’ he said. ‘Something real special. I may as well tell you, Saz, I want to propose to her.’

‘That’s so
romantic,
’ sighed Saz with a smile, leaning into Jase, her hand caressing the hard muscles of his forearm.

‘Yeah, I know she’d like that,’ said Jase. ‘But it ain’t possible, is it? The place is in lockdown, I heard.’

‘Oh. Yeah,’ said Saz, shrugging regretfully.

‘It’s a pity, because she’d love it.’

Saz glugged back the last of her drink. ‘Fill me up again, Jase, will you?’

Jesus – at this rate he was going to have to carry her out of here. He reordered for her, not for himself. It was a different barman, and this one didn’t ignore him.
Better,
he thought.

‘It’d make Oli so happy,’ he went on. ‘But there’s no way, I guess.’

‘Yeah. That’s right.’

Saz was frowning now, peering at Jase. She felt a little sick, to be honest. And suddenly she felt uncertain too,
sorry that she’d let Richard go. Richard was sweet, dependable, the best. Either you had the type of man you could rely on, the plodder, the unambitious one, who bored the arse off you most of the time if you were honest but who at least never tried laying the law down, or you had the type who excited you, who wanted to dominate you, who thrilled you but caused you tears and a world of hurt, a lion of a man.

Her dad had been a lion of a man. Named for the lion that had been his star sign.
Leo King.
She thought of her wedding day, the day when her dad should have walked her down the aisle, but he hadn’t been there.

Saz’s eyes filled with tears.

Uncle Si had stood in, but it wasn’t the same. It had
never
been the same, ever since…oh shit, ever since that awful night.

‘But I guess it’s out of the question, right? All locked up tight,’ Jase was saying.

‘What?’ Saz asked vaguely.

‘The house. Locked up. That right?’

‘Oh! Locked up, yeah,’ said Saz, and grabbed at the drink the new barman had placed in front of her.

‘Pity,’ said Jase. ‘That’s a terrible pity, don’t you think?’

‘It is, it is.’

‘Oli would have loved a surprise like that.’

‘Well, she would.’ Saz turned to him, tears forgotten, bright-eyed, smiling now. She nodded and tapped her nose. She nearly missed it.

Jesus, talk about rat-arsed,
thought Jase. ‘And why not, yeah? You can do it, Jase, and you know
why
you can do it?’

Jase shook his head.

‘You can do it, because there’s a way in.’ Saz frowned, as
if some stray thought had troubled her. She turned her face up to him and suddenly she looked sober, solemn.

‘What?’ Jase hardly dared breathe. What was she saying?

Saz shrugged. ‘I loosened some bricks in the wall when I was little. When it was first built and the mortar was soft. The security system’s always switched off on Thursday afternoons because the gardener’s in the grounds. I could always come in and out without anyone knowing, and I still can. Only on Thursdays, though.’ She looked at him and half smiled. ‘So it’s lucky that’s tomorrow. Right?’

When Lily got home she was sick at heart and shaking like a leaf. She double-checked all the doors and windows, then went straight into the sitting room, thankful that Oli was out and not able to see the state her mother was in and to start demanding explanations. Lily poured out a brandy and knocked it back in one. Her eyes watered. She slumped down on the couch. Shit, she never wanted to go through anything like that again, not ever.

Oh God. Jack.

All she could see was Jack propped up there in the chair behind his desk, a Jack that was unrecognizable, covered in blood, wrecked, dying…and then when she heard the noise and turned and Winston was there.

She’d thought right then that she was dead, too, all hope gone – just like Jack.

But
maybe
there was a sliver of hope for Jack. She and Nick had legged it after they’d applied the tourniquet to his arm to stem the bleeding and called the ambulance from Jack’s own phone.

There were CCTV cameras on the High Street but not on the smaller side road where Jack’s office was located, but even so they’d gone out carefully, separately, one at a time and no running, no calling attention to themselves. Even so, Lily was braced for a call from the Bill. There would be stuff in Jack’s office to link her to him, she’d been inside, she was…oh Jesus, she couldn’t go inside again.

She fetched another brandy and threw that one back too. Felt a tiny bit warmer, an iota calmer. Her hands shook a little less. She felt slightly less likely to vomit.

No.
Nick had assured her. Had said that there was no way the Bill could put them together with this: they’d wiped any trace of themselves away.

‘But your car,’ said Lily as they stood in the blood-spattered office, ‘the car. The CCTV. They’ll see the plates.’

‘They’re fake, stupid.’

Stupid.
Even in the depths of her terror and bewilderment, that had rankled. But maybe that’s exactly what she was. Probing around in things she didn’t understand. Nick had warned her, and he was right, as usual. It would have been bad enough if it had been her hacked to pieces. But Jack. Poor bloody Jack, who’d doubted her a few times, who’d advised her to call the whole thing off, but who had still stood by her, staunchly supporting her; and look where that had got him.

He could die.

He probably
would
die.

Oh God, please don’t let me have Jack’s death on my conscience,
she thought in anguish. But she knew that it was a faint hope her prayers would be answered. God hadn’t listened to her in a long, long time.

She sat there and her eyes fell on her bag. She put the
empty glass to one side and pulled the bag onto her lap. She took out the Magnum and sat there dumbly, looking at the gun and thinking,
I could have killed someone today.

When the situation in Jack’s office had arisen, her own reactions had both stunned and appalled her. Survival mode had kicked in almost instantaneously. She was not a violent person. She had
never
been that. But she had seen Winston there, bloodied, demented, looking at her, and the machete, and immediately the synapses in her brain had started screaming,
Threat, threat, threat!

The Magnum had been in her hand before she had even been aware of her intention to draw it. That was the seriously scary part. She sat there and stared at the gun with the same hypnotic fascination as if she was staring at a poisonous snake. She had to put the thing away now, stow it somewhere safe, somewhere neither she nor anyone else could snatch it up with deadly intent. She sat there for a long time in the silence of the big house, thinking, thinking. And then she had it. She stood up, tottered a little on her feet. The brandy and the fear had all rolled into one big battering ram and now it hit her, full force. But she wasn’t going to put this off. She went and got some masking tape from the cupboard under the stairs where a few household tools were kept. Then she trotted off, staggering only slightly, to put the Magnum away.

Later, she made a couple of phone calls. She knew it was late, but what the hell. The first was to Adrienne.

‘What do you want?’ asked Adrienne when Lily told her who it was.

‘Nothing, Adrienne. I just wanted to say I hope you’re being careful, that’s all.’

There was silence. Then Adrienne said: ‘What, is that a threat?’

Lily looked at the phone in exasperation. ‘No, for fuck’s sake, of course it’s not a threat. Look, things have been happening to the women on that list of yours.’

‘You
said
that. What the hell do you mean?’

Lily told her about Alice Blunt’s apparent suicide, and Bev who was in intensive care having inhaled more smoke than ten thousand test beagles, and Suki who hadn’t survived the fire at all, the poor cow. ‘You knew about Julia, I suppose?’

‘Her getting marked like that? Yeah, I knew.’ Adrienne sounded worried now. As well she might. ‘That was bloody nasty, that.’

‘Adrienne, are you
sure
you’ve never shown anyone else that list? Apart from Jack – ’ who was now either dead or dying, and she couldn’t face telling Adrienne that – ‘and me?’

Adrienne was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. ‘No. Look, I told you. I was telling the truth. Of course I haven’t. Why would I?’

‘No, you’re right, why would you?’ Lily frowned. ‘But it looks as if someone’s getting to the women on it. Wouldn’t you say that’s what it looks like?’

‘Yeah,’ said Adrienne, and now her voice reflected her fears. ‘Yeah. I would.’

‘So take care, Adrienne. That’s all I’m saying. This is just a heads-up. Watch out, okay?’

‘You started all this trouble,’ said Adrienne suddenly.

‘Hey –
you
kept the list,’ flung back Lily, stung.

‘I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you, Lily King,
or
your cheating rat of a husband,’ said Adrienne, and the line went dead.

Lily sighed and dialled again.

The phone was snatched up on the first ring.

‘Hello?’ demanded a female voice, very aggressively.

‘Reba? Reba Stuart?’ asked Lily, picturing the brassy madam in her mind, leathery skin and hair bleached to fuck. Mean, baleful eyes glaring out at the world.

‘Who wants her?’

‘This is Lily King.’

‘You
bitch,
’ snarled Reba.

‘What?’

‘Oh, don’t come the fucking innocent with me. You want to gloat now, I suppose. Ain’t that it?’

Lily looked at the phone.
‘What?’
she echoed faintly.

‘Oh yeah.’ Reba sounded seriously pissed off. ‘This is you. I
know
this is you, you rotten little mare. You can deny it all you like, but I know what I know.’

‘Hey, Reba – why don’t you tell
me
what you know? Because I’m in the dark here.’

‘We’ve been raided. We’ve been shut down. I’m looking at a stretch inside. But then you
know
all this. You grassed me up to the cops. Didn’t you?’

She’d only phoned Reba to warn her to watch herself. But something had obviously already kicked off.

‘Reba—’ she started.

‘No! I don’t want to hear another damned thing from you.’

‘Take care, Reba,’ said Lily quickly, before the madam could hang up on her.

‘You
what?
’

‘I
said
you’ve got to take care. There’s a list of Leo’s mistresses. And I think someone’s picking them off.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone. ‘You
serious?’
said Reba, more quietly.

‘That’s what I phoned for, to warn you.’

‘What the f…’ breathed Reba.

Lily told her then. Laid it all out about Alice, Bev, Suki – and Julia.

‘Jesus,’ said Reba.

‘And if you’ve been raided, it had nothing to do with me. I’ve never grassed up anyone, Reba. You can believe it or not believe it, but it’s the truth.’

‘All right. Suppose I
do
believe you about that – which I fucking don’t. But this other thing. What the hell…?’

‘Believe that too, Reba. Keep safe, okay?’

‘All right. I will,’ said Reba, and hung up.