Scarlet Women

Annie started to turn. She saw Charlie coming up fast, too fast.

The cosh caught her right behind the ear. Pain crashed through her brain. And then—blackness.

Chapter 49

Consciousness returned to Annie in fits and starts. Her head hurt; there was a sore spot behind her right ear. She opened her eyes to semi-darkness and a dim, familiar interior.

She was in the car. Her car. Charlie’d hit her hard. Her mind was spinning. Her car, that was right. Had to get a grip, start thinking straight. The black Mark X Jaguar. Her beautiful car.

She was lying across the back seat, which smelled of leather and cologne; familiar smells, comforting smells. But she didn’t feel comforted. Alarm bells were ringing in her addled brain; her guts were screwed up with unfocused anxiety.

Tony.

Where the fuck was Tony?

He was usually up there behind the wheel—big, suited shoulders, bald head, gold crucifixes glinting in his ears. Weaving through the London traffic with his usual casual grace and asking where she wanted to go now, then saying, ‘Sure Boss, okay.’ But he wasn’t there. She was in the car alone.

Her heart stalled. She was beginning to remember what had happened. They’d coshed Tony as well as herself.

How long have I been out of it? she wondered, sitting up stiffly, wincing as her head started to thump sickeningly in protest at even the slightest movement.

It was all coming back to her. The Delaneys. She’d been talking to them. And Charlie…oh Jesus, the shed. Pete Delacourt’s corpse under the tarp. Charlie in the shed and then, worse, far worse, Redmond. She was up shit creek, and she knew it. On Delaney turf, on Delaney streets. She had no chance.

Charlie had knocked her out cold. She remembered that now. The sudden pain, the swift descent into blackness. Tony was fuck-knew-where. Now they were going to take the wheel and drive her off in her own damned car to some remote place, where they would blow her brains out, what little brains she had, because who but a fool would push their luck so far as to cross Redmond Delaney the way she had?

She thought of Layla, her little girl, her little star. She knew she had to get the fuck out of here, because she was all that Layla had; she couldn’t afford to get herself wasted. She was reaching for the door when the noise started—a high mechanical whine, deafening in its intensity. She clutched at the seat. Her heart kicked against her chest in alarm.

What the fuck…?

Suddenly the car lurched to the right, flinging her back against the right-hand door. She watched with horror as the left-hand door started to buckle inward. There was a ferocious shriek of tortured metal, louder than a thousand banshees at full moon. With a sound like a gunshot, the glass of the door shattered, showering her with fragments. She ducked down, covering her head momentarily with an upraised arm, then staring in terror as the left-hand door just kept coming at her, buckling inward, metal tearing, ripping, screaming.

And then the door behind her was coming in too. The noise was mind-numbing, beyond pain, beyond anything she had ever experienced before. The second window imploded, and again she was smothered in pieces of glass, felt her cheeks sting with the impact of it, felt warm blood start to ooze from cuts on her face.

‘Jesus!’ she screamed, knowing exactly where she was now, and knowing what was going to happen to her.

She was in the car crusher in the Delaney’s breaker’s yard.

Then the roof crashed in upon her, folding inward not like metal but like soft cardboard. The car lifted with a violent heave and she fell sideways, ending up on the floor, nearly gibbering with fear. She was going to die, she knew that now.

Just make it fast, she thought desperately. Please make it fast.

She was curled up into a ball, eyes clamped shut, waiting for the car to become her coffin. In anguish she thought again of Layla, felt a hot spasm of guilt and grief because Layla was going to be devastated all over again. Bad enough to lose her father. Now she was going to lose her mother too. And there was not a bloody thing Annie could do about it.

The noise was awful, mind-numbing. It seemed to reverberate all around her head, killing sensible thought, destroying reason. She was screaming, crying, she knew she was, but she couldn’t hear her own animal sounds of terror, she could only think, I’m going to die, I’m going to die.

How long would it take?

Would she feel her limbs being pulverized, would she feel her legs, her arms, being twisted and snapped like twigs beneath the huge crusher’s relentless pressure? Would her pelvis disintegrate, would her ribs crack, pushed inward to pierce her lungs, her heart? Yes, all of that. She had all that to come. All that inhuman pain.

Help me, she thought in a paroxysm of fear.

Everything was moving around her, drawing inward. She felt the front seats encroaching on her small space, felt them push inward, inward, so that the space became smaller still, and now her foot was trapped beneath Tony’s seat, she couldn’t move it, couldn’t get it out and it was getting tighter and tighter, just the merest pain now, but it was clamped tight in there as if in a vice, she couldn’t get free.

Then, suddenly, the machine stopped. Suddenly, she heard herself screaming. She was screaming like a soul trapped in a fiery hell. But the machine had stopped.

But it’s going to start again, she thought in hysterical fear. Any second now. They’re playing with me, that’s all.

Suddenly she couldn’t get her breath to scream. She gulped down air, sobbing weakly, gripped by a gut- churning panic. It was going to start again. She knew it. She could hear the metal tomb the car had become still popping and wheezing all around her. She opened her eyes and saw that she was jammed into the tiniest of spaces, the roof crammed up against the top of the front seats, the floor impacted beneath her, the car’s sides encasing her with mere inches to spare.

She drew in a shuddering breath and yelled: ‘Help! For God’s sake someone help me!’

And then she heard voices, coming closer.

Oh shit, they were coming to gloat. Coming to see her lose it before they started the damned thing up again and finished her off.

Annie bit her lip and stifled more screams. Fuck them. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. For long moments she listened to her own unsteady breathing and her galloping heartbeat, and kept as quiet as she possibly could.

‘Mrs Carter?’ said a male voice nearby. ‘Can you hear me?’

Redmond.

But no. It wasn’t an Irish voice. It was…she thought she knew, but her brain was so skewed with fright that she couldn’t think straight.

‘Mrs Carter,’ repeated the voice. ‘Can you hear me?’

Now her frozen brain started to fire up again. Now she thought, yes, I know it. Don’t I?

She thought she was probably in shock. She had to think about it, very carefully. Trying to think of anything above the almost overwhelming fear of that thing starting up again was difficult, almost impossible. But she was thinking, trawling her brain, and now it came up with a name.

‘Hunter?’ she gasped out.

‘Mrs Carter?’ He’d heard her.

Annie said nothing. No, it was going to start up again. She knew it. She was going to die.