Dirty Game

The band were taking their bows. The compere was talking loudly into the microphone, but the words were just garbled noise to the people grouped in the small room upstairs.

‘I’m not ashamed of it,’ said Kieron.

‘Well you should be,’ said Orla, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. ‘You know what it did to Dad.’

‘It needed doing. I can’t be like you, laying flowers and lighting candles for the bastard who caused you both such grief. I had to do something about it.’

So Max hadn’t killed Tory Delaney. Annie’s eyes met his and she read the question there.

‘So if this is the time for confessions, what about Max’s family?’ she asked, turning her gaze to Redmond and Orla. ‘What about Queenie? What about poor Eddie? Jesus, Max had reason enough to hate you all, don’t you think, when he believed you were behind their deaths?’

‘Jesus, trust you to come galloping to his defence,’ said Kieron angrily.

‘I’m not defending anyone. I just want to hear the truth, that’s all.’

Why didn’t the fool just shut up? Annie didn’t even glance at Kieron’s face, she was sick of his mouthing off. She’d spent all this time sitting on the fence that divided the boundaries of the Carter and Delaney manors. It hadn’t been a comfortable experience. Now there was a chance of finishing their feud once and for all, and Kieron was still putting his oar in.

‘It was Pat,’ said Redmond to Max. ‘Pat set a couple of local boys up to do Queenie at your home in Surrey. Make it like an armed robbery, shoot her… but her heart gave out before they could do it. I’m sorry. He bragged about it to me. Laughed about how he went down there and wore a fake moustache and a bowler hat in a pub one night and paid two locals to do it.’

Max nodded, his eyes icy. ‘I traced them. The Bowes boys.’

Redmond nodded too. He didn’t have to ask what had happened to the Bowes boys.

‘That was always Pat’s style, targeting the weak. Tory’s too. And then there was this business with your young brother.’

A muscle in Max’s jaw was flexing. His eyes were slits. Christ, he was going to hurt someone over this. Annie knew it.

‘Pat was a bigot,’ said Orla. ‘Of the nastiest kind. He hated blacks and he hated Protestants and he hated homosexuals. He had a great capacity for hate and very little for love, our Padraig. He knew your brother was attracted only to boys, and he loathed him for that and for the fact that he was a Carter. He killed him. He told us. On Delaney turf, in a parlour that paid protection to our family too. It’s a sort of justice, I feel, that Pat himself died in the place where Eddie was attacked. Pat had no sense. He was a creature of impulse, and some of those impulses were murderous.’

‘Max, we can stop all this now,’ said Annie. ‘Call a halt to it before anyone else gets hurt.’

Max’s fist came crashing down on the desk. Annie jumped.

‘Annie, go downstairs and wait for me there,’ he said.

Before Annie could open her mouth Kieron surged forward and planted both hands on the desk and leaned across to glare into Max’s face.

‘She isn’t yours to order about like a piece of dirt,’ he shouted.

‘Get out of my fucking face,’ said Max flatly.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Kieron roared.

Annie looked up at Kieron as if he’d gone mad. Christ, he looked mad. Max had been thinking of her safety, she knew that. If it had sounded like an order, it was because he was used to giving orders. He meant no harm by it.

‘All this acting like she’s your own personal property, I’m sick of it!’ Kieron gabbled on. ‘Gatecrashing my exhibition, to which she had come as my guest, and whisking her off God knew where. Now how the fuck do you suppose that made me look, eh? You don’t know? Well I’ll tell you! You made me look like a fucking idiot, and I don’t like it!’

‘Kieron, calm down,’ said Orla.

Annie had never seen him so steamed up. This was the real Kieron, she knew that now. Not a gentle artist at all, but the spoiled son of a mad family, determined that everything should go his way. It had made him a killer of his own kin. It had made him dangerous in the extreme.

Kieron turned from the desk. Redmond grabbed at his arm, but he spun away, shrugging himself free. Feeling a sudden frisson of fear, Annie got to her feet. Orla rose too. The small room was packed with bodies, it was too warm in here, too tightly enclosed. And then, without warning, there was a gun in Kieron’s hand and he was pointing it at Max’s chest.

* * *

Annie suddenly saw what a fool she had been in the past. She had been fearful for Kieron’s safety because of Max. Now she knew she’d got it wrong.

‘Well, we’ve all had our confession time, haven’t we?’ Kieron sneered. ‘All the little secrets have come out and we all feel better for it, don’t we? And now there’s only one piece of rubbish still in need of clearing away.’

He took aim. Max stood frozen. Orla screamed Kieron’s name, but he was deaf, triumphant at last to be destroying his enemy, his rival for Annie.

How deep blood runs, Annie thought in horror. Ruthie and Mum, drinking themselves steadily to death. Kieron and his violent family. He’d grown up mired in shady deals and strong-arm stuff, with intimidation and incest and a mob of boys willing to do anything the Delaneys told them to. He was no gentle artist. A predilection for mayhem had seeped into him, like arsenic into a victim’s skin.

Kieron cocked the gun, ready to fire.

The audience downstairs roared as the compere announced the next act. Redmond lunged towards Kieron. Not fast enough. Max was standing there.

Christ, why doesn’t he move? thought Annie, frantic and terrified.

She saw Kieron’s finger tighten on the trigger as if in slow motion. Without a thought in her head she flung herself around the desk. Orla’s screams rang in her ears. Annie threw herself at Max, thrusting him aside.

The bullet smashed into her, knocking her into the chair which fell beneath her as she crashed into the wall. Such an impact. A loud explosion, deafening. Then smoke and the stench of cordite and a fierce, all-encompassing pain.

She couldn’t breathe. She fell, seeing smears of blood – her blood – spattering over the wall behind Max’s desk.

The world began to float around her. She lay on her back, something digging into her hip, Max’s face leaning over her. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear. Everything was peaceful and warm and the pain was slipping away from her, going to another place.

I love you, she tried to tell him. I’ve loved you for ever.

But she couldn’t speak and now it was strange but everything looked blurry, too. The world was going.

Dig deep and stand alone, she thought vaguely.

She was alone again.

But that was fine.

Peaceful.

She was gone.

59

Uncle Ted answered the door in a dirty vest and red braces that evening to find a uniformed copper standing on the doorstep. Beside him was a smaller man in a plain beige mac. He was middle-aged and had the narrow eyes and thuggish demeanour of a small-time crook.

Ted drew back a little, fearing the worst. All right, he’d bought a few cartons of fags off a docker mate and had sold them around the East End, but so what? Hardly a nicking offence, was it? Everyone was at it. Why pick on