Jail Bird

‘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, asif 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?’

58

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 theempty 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?’