Dirty Game

needed her. Maybe I’m just weak, thought Ruthie. Weak like Mum was.

She shivered when she thought that she could so easily have gone the same way as Connie, down that slippery slope to death by drinking. She went over to the tray on the sideboard and picked up the bottle of vodka. Deliberately she carried it through to the kitchen and tipped the contents down the sink. She put the bottle in the rubbish bin then gave a dismissive brush of the hands.

Picking up her bag, she took the keys down from their hook and went out of the back door and over to Queenie’s annexe. She let herself inside, then went along the quiet hallway to the cosy little sitting room. It was still kept immaculately clean, dusted, cared-for. She looked up at the portrait over the fireplace, at the gimlet-eyed Queenie glaring down at her.

‘Well, you old bag,’ said Ruthie. ‘I’m going. You never wanted me here in the first place, did you?’

Ruthie smiled. Queenie couldn’t answer her. The mean thin line of the lips and the imperious stare said it all. This wasn’t a woman who would welcome a rival for any of her sons’ affections.

‘Do you know what I thought I’d do?’ Ruthie asked the dead woman in the portrait.

Ruthie rummaged in her bag and came up with a cheap cigarette lighter. It had been Connie’s, and she had kept it out of sentimentality. It reminded her of her mum, who had been a disgusting old lush but who had nevertheless given life to her. She flicked it with her thumb and a flame ignited. Ruthie stared at it, then at Queenie, up there like royalty. Named as a Queen and regarded as one by all the boys and by everyone on Max and Jonjo Carter’s manor. Ruthie thought of Annie – a worthy successor if ever there was one. The thought tickled her and she smiled. Annie would be more than a match for Queenie, dead or alive. Annie and Max. Maybe some things were just meant to be.

‘I thought I’d do this place,’ said Ruthie. ‘Then the main house. Then your London house. Burn the whole lot to the ground.’

Only silence answered her.

Ruthie smiled at the portrait’s glassy blue eyes for a moment longer, then flicked the lighter shut.

‘But you know what?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t worth it. What would I be proving? That I care enough to bother? Strangely enough, I don’t. Not any more.’

Ruthie tucked the lighter back in her bag. ‘I’m free as a bird,’ she told Queenie.

She had freedom from a loveless marriage, freedom from a drunken mother, freedom from all care. She had it within her grasp now.

‘I can go anywhere and do anything I like. And you know what, Queenie Carter? I think I will.’

With that she turned and left the room, walked along the hallway, left the annexe.

Rest in peace, thought Ruthie as she relocked the outside door. You old bag.

66

Max had taken a suite in a posh but discreet hotel up West to keep Annie out of the way of the Press after the trial. No way was Max going to doss down overnight in the Limehouse brothel – on Delaney territory – and the Press would have a field day if he did, they both knew that. He thought the Palermo’s little flat might contain too many bad memories for Annie. They could have gone to his mum’s old place, but it was cheerless, less a home than a meeting-place these days.

So, instead of slopping out as she had expected, Annie found herself on the morning after the trial bathing in luxury, then breakfasting not on horrible prison food but on delicious kedgeree and vintage champagne. Max went out to do some business at lunchtime, and Annie made some calls, thanked her lucky stars and then had a surprise visitor.

‘Redmond told me you were here, so I thought I’d stop by. You know, you’re a lucky woman. I seriously thought you were dead that night at the Palermo,’ said Orla, breezing into the suite and settling herself on a small, ornate sofa.

‘So did I.’ Annie wasn’t surprised Redmond had known where she was. She knew that the mobs kept careful tabs on each other. For sure Max knew where Redmond was, too, at any given moment.

‘And I seriously thought you were going down yesterday.’

‘Me too.’

Orla smiled. ‘So what are your plans?’

‘I’m going straight,’ said Annie, frowning. All right, she’d been lucky this time – thanks to Max. But she was not going to push her luck and risk ending up in the dock again if she could help it. ‘Got to keep my nose clean. I’ve had enough of being a Madam anyway. I got into it by accident, but I’m getting out of it by design.’

‘Shame,’ said Orla. ‘You’re a good businesswoman.’

‘Well, if that’s true,’ reasoned Annie, ‘then I can make a go of something else, can’t I. Something legit.’

‘I came to say sorry,’ said Orla, her smile fading fast. ‘About Kieron. I never thought he had it in him. First he shoots Tory dead, then he tries to shoot Max Carter.’

‘And how is Kieron?’ asked Annie coldly. Not that she gave a fuck. But if Orla could make an effort to be civil, then so could she.

‘It’s big of you to ask that, since he damn near killed you. He’s abroad, I think. Painting, probably.’

Kieron had spoken to Annie weeks ago about the Spanish light. He would be there, she thought. Lying low. But he would be back. She felt sure of that.

‘I don’t think he’s right in the head,’ said Annie. Even the thought of Kieron Delaney gave her the jitters now.

Orla smiled. It was the most chilling smile Annie had ever seen.

‘We’re all disturbed. My father’s senile, my mother lives in a fantasy world where her “boys and her girl” can do no wrong. We’re career criminals, for the love of God. But she’s always seen only the good in us. Refuses to see the bad.’

‘Pat was bad,’ said Annie, seeing in her mind’s eye that horrible night when he’d died.

‘So he was. And not much missed.’

‘And Tory too.’ Annie shook her head in wonder at all that Orla had suffered, and at the hands of her own family too. ‘You’ve really had the shit kicked out of you. But you’re not disturbed. Damaged, perhaps.’

‘Damaged,’ considered Orla. ‘Now that’s probably the right word for it, I’d say. Do you know, I was wetting the bed until I was eighteen. Terrified of the night, I was. When I reached puberty and couldn’t share a room with Redmond any more, the terror got worse. I had to have a light on all night. But I was still scared. I peed myself nightly, I was so scared. Even though by then there was a bolt on my door because I couldn’t sleep in a room alone without one.’

Annie looked at Orla and felt her heart might break.

Damaged, she thought. Yeah, that’s the right word.

‘Kieron saw things happening,’ said Annie. ‘Maybe that excuses what he did, to some extent. To see that must have affected him too.’

‘Still, he had no right to treat you like some sort of star prize,’ said Orla. ‘What gets into men, that they think they own a woman, have rights over her?’

‘Well, no one has rights over you,’ pointed out Annie.

‘No,’ said Orla. ‘And I’m glad of that.’

Annie paused.

‘No boyfriends then?’ she asked. ‘No husband? No children?’

Orla shook her head. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t see that happening for me. I’ll concern myself with business, I think. I want nothing of all that.’

‘I never had a brother,’ said Annie, her mind still on children, because she was late. And she was never late. She felt sort of different too. Her tits were sore and swollen. Her stomach too. There could be no doubt about it, no doubt at all.