sight. They would come soon, staff and management pouring out of the club to see what was going on. The noise would have alerted them. But there was a moment.
Just a moment.
‘You,’ gasped Tory, and his killer smiled.
One more shot was fired between Tory’s eyebrows. Pink jelly spattered, brain and bone. Then at last Tory was still, staring sightlessly at the balmy evening sky.
No time to gloat.
The killer was already walking away, slipping the gun back into its oiled bag and then into a larger polythene container –
The killer walked away in darkness and strode out the mile back to the car, then got in, pleased with a job well done, and placed the gun in a concealed compartment under the passenger seat, removed the thick leather gloves and drove home.
Later that same night Max Carter sat in his Surrey kitchen and cleaned and oiled his gun. While he was doing it, his kid brother Eddie came in and sat down at the kitchen table.
‘Busy night?’ asked Eddie.
‘Fair,’ said Max, carrying on with his work.
Max looked at Eddie. Eddie was queer as a fish, but he was a good kid and trustworthy. He liked to wear all those floral shirts and cords, and his mid-brown hair was over his collar, like that new group The Beatles wore theirs. Mum would have thrown a fit to see it.
But she was gone. The bleakness filled Max again at the thought of that.
‘Where’s Jonjo?’ he asked Eddie.
Eddie made a face. ‘Out with a new blonde.’
That cheered Max up a bit. Jonjo was good entertainment value, that was a fact. Jonjo and his fucking blondes. When Marilyn Monroe offed herself last year, Max almost thought that Jonjo would off himself too. Marilyn, to Jonjo, had been the ultimate.
Max couldn’t see it himself. He preferred dark-eyed brunettes. And Eddie preferred pretty young blokes, but so long as he didn’t frighten the horses, so what?
Eddie was looking at the gun in his brother’s hand.
‘You did it then,’ he said flatly.
Max paused and looked at Eddie square in the eye. Max’s eyes were suddenly a chilly blue, like arctic ice. ‘I did nothing.’
Eddie swallowed nervously. His lips quivered. ‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered.
Max replaced the gun in its oiled cloth and held it out to Eddie.
‘Take it out and bury it,’ he told him. ‘I don’t want to know where.’
Eddie did as he was told. Max went into the lounge and put Mozart on the radiogram. He sat down with a brandy, feeling like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
3
‘And where the fuck have you been?’ Connie Bailey demanded of her daughter as Annie let herself in the front door of her mother’s little terraced council house.
It was nearly dawn and one of Max’s boys had just dropped her off at the end of the road. Annie silently cursed her mother’s erratic sleeping habits. Connie was always trotting about in the night, making cups of tea and smoking fags, and that was in the quiet times. Now it was the day of the wedding, and with all the excitement Annie doubted that her mother had slept a wink.
Connie was perched on the bottom stair with a mug of tea and a cigarette. Annie looked at her with stark dislike and hoped it wasn’t true that daughters turned into their mothers.
Connie was dirt-poor skinny, with a smoker’s lined and yellowish skin. Her dry, dyed blonde hair was up in the sponge rollers she always wore at night, and her candlewick dressing gown, once peach-coloured, had faded to dirty beige.
Oh God, Annie thought, I could do without this. She was still smarting from the fact that Max had barely bothered to say goodbye to her. Annie wondered if he’d had Ruthie yet, but she doubted it. Ruthie was the Virgin Princess, the sort that men took home to meet their mums. Ruthie had been presented to Queenie Carter over tea at Christmas and, when she had met with Queenie’s approval, the marriage had been given the go-ahead.
Annie had never even met Queenie, although she had seen her about now and again with Max and his brothers. She’d never meet the imperious old woman now. She’d croaked back in the spring, heart attack or something.
There had been a lavish funeral on a rainy April day, a huge fleet of black Daimlers gliding through the East End behind the hearse. The pink carnations on either side of Queenie’s coffin had spelt out MUM. The streets had been lined with silent, respectful watchers.
All the men had removed their hats.
Some of the women had cried.
The Carter family were held in high regard around this manor, and that day was the proof.
‘I stopped at Kath’s,’ said Annie, closing the door behind her.
‘You’re a bloody liar,’ said Connie flatly, snorting smoke from her pinched little nose. ‘I spoke to Maureen two hours ago and she said that Kath was home by eleven and she didn’t have you with her. You’ve been up to no good.’
Annie let out an angry breath. ‘I’m twenty, Mum, not ten. What I do is my business.’
‘Not while you live under my roof,’ snapped Connie. ‘You’ve been out mucking around with some bloke or other.’
Annie stared at her mother. She ached to wipe that smug look off Connie’s face by telling her that the
It would be quite a laugh, standing behind them both at the altar in her role as bridesmaid, looking at Max’s broad, expensively suited shoulders and knowing that her scratch marks were still on them.
‘What’s going on?’
They both looked up. Ruthie was standing at the top of the stairs yawning as she shrugged into her red dressing gown. Her mousy hair was rumpled around her plain, placid face.
Ruthie wasn’t bad-looking, really.
There was a serenity about her.
But she didn’t have Annie’s incendiary beauty, and she didn’t have that flirtatious spark that made men lose their heads and sometimes their hearts. Connie always said that Ruthie was her good little girl. She also said that Annie was trouble just like her father, always had been, always would be.
Annie had been hurt by that when she was little. For a while she had tried to be good like Ruthie, to prove her mother wrong, but then Dad had left so it was clear that the good-behaviour policy had got her nowhere. Bad behaviour won her a lot more attention. All right, it was a clout around the ear or bed without supper, but it was attention nevertheless, and she had to claw a little back from perfect Ruthie now and again, or go mad.
‘Nothing’s going on, sweetheart,’ said Connie, and Annie’s lip curled because even Connie’s voice was different when she spoke to Ruthie. It was soft and gentle and soothing. When Connie spoke to Annie, her voice was harsh with dislike. ‘Just Annie out on the tiles, hooking her pearly about for any lad that wants it.’
Now that was unfair. Sure, she went down the pub with her mates and up West sometimes when she was flush, and she flirted and danced and teased, but she’d never come across for a man until last night, and she wanted to tell her mother that but she couldn’t. Pride wouldn’t let her.
‘Oh Annie,’ said Ruthie. ‘I don’t want you looking all washed-out for the big day.’
