Scarlet Women

‘Mrs Carter, can you see me?’

Annie turned her head just a little, and looked upward, towards the shattered left-hand side window. She couldn’t see a face. What she could see was a hand. There was a gold wedding band on it. And there was a faint flickering blue light.

Police car, she thought.

She’d never been glad to see the Bill before, but shit was she glad to see them now.

‘A hand,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I can see a hand.’

‘Can you reach it? Grab hold?’ he asked. He sounded very calm.

Shuddering, Annie unravelled her aching limbs just a little.

Straining through a gap of just inches, she stretched her hand towards his.

But in doing that, she became aware of how firmly her legs were held, how securely her ankle was clamped into the dead body of the car.

So securely that her foot was numb.

She felt a scream building at the back of her throat, felt a claustrophobic spasm grab her and gnaw at her guts.

‘I can’t move,’ she burst out.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, still very calm. ‘You’re going to be fine. Can you reach my hand? Try to reach my hand.’

Annie strained harder. With an enormous effort she reached out and managed to touch the hand. It fastened firmly on to her fingers. The hand was warm. Hers were icy with shock. Jesus, she was so glad he was there.

‘That’s good.’ His voice was soothing, like he was trying to talk a jumper down from a tall building.

She wanted to ask him if they’d got the Delaney twins, but she knew better than anyone else that it wouldn’t be the Bill who dealt out justice, not around here—it would be herself. She’d make those bastards suffer for this.

‘Can you squeeze my hand?’ he asked.

She tried to move closer to the hand that had wrapped itself securely around hers. She couldn’t. ‘My foot,’ she said, and now her teeth were chattering. Yeah, that’s shock, she thought detachedly. ‘I can’t move my foot,’ she told him.

‘We’ll need cutting gear,’ he said to someone else, and there were more voices, radio messages being sent. To Annie he said: ‘Try to relax, Mrs Carter. Help’s on the way. Just hold on now, and try to stay calm.’

Stay calm. So easy to say.

‘How did you know where to find me?’ she asked unsteadily.

‘I didn’t. We had a lead on the disappearance of Peter Delacourt, and we ended up here. Call it fate that we got to you in time.’

Fate.

It was pure fate that she hadn’t died. And it was fate that decreed she was going to hunt down those Delaney bastards and finish the job.

Chapter 50

The Delaneys were over so far as Hunter was concerned. He’d got so much evidence against them that the whole firm would be going down for years.

‘We’ve closed all the ports and airports,’ he told her later in the day, when she had been checked out at the hospital and Tony had been found groggy but unscathed in one of the breaker’s yard other outbuildings.

They had both been given a clean bill of health, and told they ought to stay in overnight. Both had refused, despite the fact that they had sore heads, Annie’s ankle was bruised, and her face bore several scratches from all the flying glass.

‘We’ll get them,’ Hunter assured her. ‘They’ll be behind bars soon.’

Annie didn’t believe it. It was too easy to slip in and out of the country, if you really wanted to and had the means to do it. For now, anyway, their rule was over. Deaf Derek, the treacherous bastard, had fled. The cops had nearly caught Charlie Foster, but only nearly. He’d given them the slip. Fuck it: they’d all got away with it.

She felt robbed. Behind bars was too good for those bastards, anyway. They’d tried to kill her, they’d nearly taken Layla’s mother from her; banging them up would almost be like letting them off. All right, her contacts could get to them even on the inside, but she wanted revenge. She wanted to see them suffer, right in front of her eyes. She wanted it done.

Still shaken by her ordeal, she was grateful to the cops who dropped her back at the club, and drove Tony back to his flat. They were lucky to be alive. She knew that. Death had been this close. She sat in the flat, her newly refurbished club beneath her, and thought: I could be dead right now. She thought of opening night on Saturday, a big celebration, and she might never have seen it thanks to those fucking Delaneys. They had to be caught. Had to be put down, like the crazed animals they were.

She looked around the small sitting room of her flat, at the mounds of beautiful red roses Constantine had sent her. Suddenly the scent of them was suffocating. They could have been decorating her grave, if things had gone as Redmond and Orla had planned.

Anger stung her at the thought of that. Of what they could have inflicted on her, and Tony, and Layla. Of what Redmond had inflicted on Mira. She thought of Orla’s denial over Aretha. Oh, she so wanted it to be Orla who she could pin that on. It would fit, it would be truly neat, she wanted that so much it hurt. But Orla’s words had rung true. That was the awkward thing, the damning thing. She felt strongly that Orla had been telling the truth.

Fuck it.

So Chris was still in the frame for his wife’s murder. Nothing had changed. Val Delacourt and Teresa Walker were down to that twisted little git Cyrus. Gareth Fuller and Pete Delacourt were down to Redmond. But still Aretha could not rest easy because still they didn’t have a clue who had killed her.

A tall red haired woman, Sir William had said.

The phone rang. Annie snatched it up.

‘When are we going to do dinner and talk?’ said Constantine.

She sat down on the couch with a thump.

Dinner!

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ he said.

‘There’s something I want to talk to you about, too,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow night? Eight? I’ll send the car.’

‘It can’t wait until tomorrow night,’ she said shakily, and told him all about what had happened at the Delaneys’ yard.

He was silent, taking it all in. Redmond Delaney had gone against her and in doing that he had gone against Constantine too. ‘So what are you going to do now?’ he asked her.

She felt peeved at him. He’d said nothing. She had expected outrage, a fierce surge of protectiveness towards her. What she hadn’t expected was that he should be so fucking calm about it all.

‘What, like you care? Ain’t you even mad that you wouldn’t have gone on getting your sex on tap, if I’d got done?’ she demanded, feeling so irritated at his lack of response that she could have screamed.

‘What?’

‘And while we’re on the subject, it would be really fucking convenient for you, wouldn’t it? Me in the penthouse in Manhattan, all neatly tucked away. No family rucks over that, I suppose. Course you’d have to keep me on the Pill—Christ, what would they think if you had a kid