Stay Dead (29 page)

‘Thank you for this,’ said Annie. The woman wasn’t about to offer her any refreshments, and she was starting to read this bloodless little creature now; she couldn’t
expect any warmth from her, not even a tiny bit.

Sarah shrugged. ‘Say what you’ve got to say,’ she said.

‘Had you seen Dolly recently?’ said Annie quickly, in case Sarah changed her mind and asked her to go.

‘No. We didn’t keep in touch.’

‘How about Nigel? Your brother?’

The thin mouth got even thinner. ‘Nigel wouldn’t lower himself. He knew what Dolly was.’

‘So your dad died in an accident on the railway,’ said Annie.

Sarah went pale but said nothing.

‘The driver of the engine that hit him, was he named?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘But did your family know who he was?’

‘I know nothing about any of this,’ said Sarah.

‘What about Dick, or Sandy?’

‘Dick’s abroad. New Zealand. I told you. And Sandy’s an invalid.’

‘In what way?’ Annie half-expected Sarah to tell her to mind her own business.

But Sarah said: ‘He was never strong. Had some strokes. He’s not much better than a vegetable.’

‘I’m sorry. What home’s he in?’

‘I don’t want you bothering him.’

‘I won’t bother him. Can you give me the name of the home?’

For a minute it looked as if Sarah was going to say no. Then she said: ‘Sunnybrook. It’s up Watford way.’ She gave Annie the name of the road. ‘But I don’t want you
upsetting him. He’s not right. Don’t tell him about Dolly. He’s got troubles enough, without that.’

‘I won’t,’ said Annie. ‘Nigel said Dolly left home at thirteen. Did she not tell you she was going? She was the oldest, that right? And then there was Nigel, then you?
Then Dick and Sandy?’

‘That’s right. Dolly didn’t tell anyone she was going. She was wild, Dolly. Bad to the bone, Dad always said. After she left us.’

‘He didn’t like her?’ It took a real effort on Annie’s part not to say that he had a damned nerve saying anything about Dolly, when he was such a low-life arsehole.

Sarah shrugged. ‘For a while she was his favourite. Then she went, and
I
was.’

The prim mouth lifted at the corners. This was a little victory to the woman, Annie could see that.

‘So you don’t know who the driver was, when your dad had the shunting accident? That must have been awful for the driver, that responsibility. Killing someone like that. You sure you
don’t know his name?’

‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘I told you. I don’t.’

‘Didn’t
you
like Dolly?’ asked Annie.

‘She was all right. Until she went to the bad.’ The lips tightened again, assuming an irritating Puritanical look. ‘We’re a good Catholic family, always have been. For
her to do things like that,
disgusting
things . . . well, we could never forgive anything like that. Excuse me a moment,’ said Sarah, and stood up and left the room.

Annie heard her go up the stairs, heard the landing boards creak, heard a door shut. She sat there and waited, looking around at this plain little kitchen and thinking how well it suited the
woman who lived here. Sarah was married – so where was the husband? There were no photos on display. Maybe in the sitting room . . . ?

There was movement upstairs and then Sarah came back down and into the kitchen again. She sat down and stared at Annie.

‘How did Nigel find out what Dolly did for a living?’ asked Annie.

Sarah looked blank.

‘If you never kept in touch, how did he find out?’

‘Oh! Nigel found out through an acquaintance. I won’t call him a friend. This man went to places like that,
disgusting
places, and he said he’d seen Dolly
there.’

‘Did Nigel tell your dad that?’

‘Dad was already gone when Nigel found out about her.’

But this was your sister
, thought Annie.

She thought of her own sister, Ruthie, who had forgiven her everything, anything, even when she had been beyond all hope of redemption. Ruthie even now would welcome her with open arms, but
Annie had no plans to contact her. Better to keep her distance, keep Ruthie safe.

Suddenly there was the sound of a key turning in the lock at the front door. It opened and closed, and then thin repressive little Nigel came into the kitchen. Sarah looked at the floor. Nigel
stared straight at Annie.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in his reedy voice.

‘I’m here to see Sarah,’ said Annie. ‘Just for a chat. And to offer my condolences.’

‘You say you’re Dolly’s friend? What were you, another one of those
tarts
she liked to mix with
?
I don’t like you coming here. You’ve just come to
fish about in things that don’t concern you.’

‘Dolly’s death concerns me,’ Annie replied. ‘I heard your dad was a bit of a bastard, that right? Mistreated Dolly?’

Nigel looked like his head was going to explode and blow clean off his narrow sloping shoulders. His face went brick-red and his whole body tensed.

‘Get out!’ he shouted.

Annie stood up, dwarfing Nigel by a foot.

‘Good of you both to turn up for the funeral though,’ she said. ‘Even if she
was
a tart.’

Nigel puffed himself up like a toad. ‘We went to the funeral out of respect for the dead, but I’m telling you right now – a woman like that? She was no sister of
mine.’

Tony drove her back to Holland Park. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. In years past the silence between them had been companionable, but today it was charged with stifled
aggression. Yet she supposed she was safe with Tony; Max had told him to behave, and he would. She hoped.

She couldn’t even be sure of Max, not now. He’d believed what he’d been told about her, and he seemed to believe it still. At any moment he could turn on her, and if he did,
she was finished. She’d suspected he was having an affair, but she’d been miles off. In fact he’d been tracking Gina Barolli down, and Gina had broken the Mafia code, betrayed her
brother.
Why?
Annie wondered, and then she thought of Constantine as he was these days, and thought that she might know the answer to that.

Tony pulled up outside the house, got out of the driving seat, opened her door. Looked the other way while she got out.

‘Tone?’ Annie said when he was about to get back behind the wheel without even saying goodbye.

He paused. Cocked an eyebrow, waited.

‘Our tame coppers – you said you were going to talk to them. Anything? I got Jackie on it too, by the way. And he’s turned up nothing.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. They ain’t heard a thing.’

‘Right. Tone . . . ?’

‘What now?’

‘None of it’s true. I’ve told Max and now I’m telling you.
None
of it.’

His expression didn’t change. He didn’t believe her.

Annie let out a sigh. ‘Come tomorrow at one, OK?’

Tony nodded, got back behind the wheel, and drove away.

Annie deliberately didn’t set the alarm that night. If he was going to come, if they were ever to get past this, then bring it on: she’d risk his rage, she’d
take that chance. But Max didn’t show.

To cheer herself up she spent the next day indulging in some retail therapy. It was Saturday and she could have used some company after this grim week. She could have met up with Ellie, if only
Ellie hadn’t decided that she was too dangerous to talk to. So she kicked her heels up and down Bond Street and then went home alone with a silent Tony at the wheel and sat in solitary
confinement into the evening before deliberately not setting the alarm again and then going to bed.

He won’t come
, she thought miserably.
He’s done with me. All right, so he’s keeping me safe – for now – for old times’ sake, but he won’t come
again. He’s had enough.

And then, at about one in the morning, she woke up, switched on the bedside light, and he was there.

‘You didn’t set the alarm again,’ said Max, rising from the chair in the corner of the room and coming over to the bed.

‘Didn’t I?’ asked Annie, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning.

‘Careless.’

‘Yeah. Wasn’t it.’

‘So get the fuck on with it. Go on with what you were saying,’ he said.

Annie frowned. ‘What was I saying?’

‘Don’t play dumb. You were going to tell me, Scheherazade, about your first visit to that shit Constantine.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘Yeah, that.’ He sat down on the side of the king-sized bed and stared at her, sitting there all rumpled from sleep with her hair all over the place and the thousand-thread-count
sheets pulled up to her chin. ‘So come on. Let’s see how good a storyteller you
really
are. What happened then?’

‘Max, I’m tired.’

‘Tough. Tell me what happened next, and by Christ you’d better make it good.’

Annie drew in a breath. It made her rib ache like a bastard, and she pulled the sheet higher – no way did she want him glimpsing the strapping and the bruises around her
middle and thinking she was going for the sympathy vote, playing the poor-little-wounded-wifey card.

‘All right. I’ll tell you. Alberto took me up to the Scottish Highlands that first time. It was January 1989. Five years ago. He chartered a private flight out of the heliport.
Sometimes we flew straight to the castle . . .’

‘A
castle
,’ said Max. ‘That bastard never did stint himself, did he.’

Annie went on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Sometimes I stayed in a house outside Edinburgh. We had to be careful. We were always watching, making sure no one joined up the
dots.’

Max’s eyes were intent on her face. ‘Yeah, me included, right? What was it like, this castle?’

‘The locals called it the Mouth of Hades. It’s an actual castle. It’s got a big tower – battlements, don’t they call them? Yeah, battlements. There’s a
courtyard in the centre, and a helipad. Big steep stone sides to the place. On one side, there’s nothing beneath it but sea. Two hundred feet down, a sheer drop to the water. It looks
grim.’

‘Go on then. You got there, then what?’

‘The housekeeper met us, Mrs McAllister. Took me up to this room in the tower, through all these old stone passageways with tapestries and suits of armour. And then in the evening . .
.’

Annie stopped talking, her eyes on Max’s face.

‘Go the fuck on. What then? You met up with
him
and fucked his brains out? Yes?’

Annie shook her head. ‘God’s sake, Max, will you listen? Mrs McAllister took me into this dining hall. Alberto had made himself scarce. And yeah, that’s when I saw Constantine.
That’s when I knew he was alive.’

Max said nothing. He just sat there, arms folded, face set in angry lines.

‘Five years ago! And you know what? He was pretty much unchanged. Or at least he seemed to be.’ Annie could see Constantine in her mind’s eye. Back then he had still been the
Silver Fox, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped. There was still the mane of startling white hair, those piercing blue eyes. A few more wrinkles around the eyes. No silver-grey Savile Row suit, though:
now he wore slacks, and an open-necked shirt.

‘You still fancied him,’ said Max.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Bullshit.’

Annie shook her head. ‘All the way there, I’d been wondering how I would feel when I saw him again. And in that instant, I knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘That it was all gone.’ Annie passed a tired hand over her face. The sheet slipped a bit, and she grabbed it quickly, pulled it back up to her chin. ‘Everything I’d ever
felt for him, it was as if it had never been. There was simply nothing left. Nothing at all. He thought we could just pick up where we’d left off. But I lost it, shouted at him that it was
all finished, done, all in the past.’

Max puffed out his cheeks like an angry bull and stared at her. ‘Oh, come on. You really think I’m going to swallow
that
?’

‘It’s the truth, Max. I didn’t feel anything for him . . . except pity.’

‘Pity?’

‘He’d escaped the threat of a hit back in the seventies. He’d given the Feds the slip. But really, do you think he was free, stuck up there in his Highland castle? He
wasn’t. He might just as well have been banged up in Fulsom Prison in the States, because he was in prison anyway. He barely went out of the door. And when he did, he was scared to fucking
death that someone was going to spot him, recognize him, dob him in.’

‘He changed his name then?’

‘He calls himself David Sangster these days.’

Max stood up, started his nervy pacing around the room again. ‘Does he, by God. And you had a nice little chat, did you, the two of you?’

Ignoring the sarcasm in his voice, Annie said: ‘Oh, we did. I told him in no uncertain terms that it was over, that it had been over for years. He’d bailed out, left me. And I had
moved on, I’d survived, what else could I do? And I told him I was leaving, coming home, first thing in the morning.’

‘Yeah?’ Max paused, hands in trouser pockets, and looked at her. ‘And what did he say to that?’

‘He said I wasn’t going anywhere.’ Annie took a gulping breath. ‘He said that, if I left, he would give the order to have you killed.’

Max was silent for a long time, staring at her face.

‘You
what
?’ he said at last.

‘The man was lonely. Desperate. I think . . . I think he realized what he’d tossed away, all those years ago, and when he saw I wasn’t going to play ball, he lashed out. He
threatened you.’

Max was nodding, grim-faced. ‘Oh, that’s clever,’ he said.

‘Clever?’ she echoed faintly.

‘Yeah, it is. So you did it? You spread your legs for that git because you
had
to, right? To save me. How long did it take you to think
that
one up?’

Annie stared at him in outrage. ‘You
shit
,’ she snapped. ‘What, you think I’m playing you? That I’ve cooked up his threat to you so I could just say,
“Oh, I had to sleep with him, I couldn’t help it”?’

‘Got it in one,’ he snapped right back.