The Make

‘Russian roulette,’ breathed Deano, looking into Harry’s eyes.

Harry stared right back at him. The evil bastard was getting off on this, he could see it. He loved to hurt people.

‘Here we go then, Harry. Let’s see what the game nets us, shall we?’

Oh shut up and shoot me.

Deano squeezed the trigger. Harry shut his eyes, screwed them up tight. There was a dull, solid click. Despite himself, Harry flinched.

Deano drew back, smiling broadly, stroking a spade-like hand through his neat little goatee beard. ‘Lucky that time, Harry. Very lucky.’ And then the smile dropped from his face and he rammed the black muzzle back against Harry’s flesh, grinding it hard into his cheekbone. And he fired the gun again.

Click!

Deano started to laugh.

Harry let out his breath. He felt the warm trickle of blood on his face where the gun had cut in. Well, he was still alive. Three bullets down, three to go. One of those would kill him, for sure.

‘The game’s getting exciting now, Harry,’ said Deano, drawing back with a smile and a shake of his massive head. He placed the gun carefully on the freezer lid again. He looked at Harry almost tenderly. ‘Wonder when your luck’s going to run out?’

Think it already has, thought Harry, as Deano fiddled in his tool box and came up with the pliers once again.

Chapter 66

Lorcan was going clean off his head. He was trying to think as Gracie would think, trying to work out what had been going on in her febrile little brain while he’d been out. All right, he’d been out for longer than he’d expected. Had she started to worry, thinking something had happened to him? Had she got a call from the hospital – maybe George had taken a turn for the worse? Had she got restless – this was always a possibility with the Gracie he’d known – and gone over to Auntie Vera’s to see her mother for something?

For what?

Gracie and her mother had never got on. He didn’t think Gracie would actively seek out her mother’s company, except in an emergency – but he could be wrong. So, the hospital then. He called them, bypassed all the usual tedious questions about whether he was a relative or not.

‘I’m his brother-in-law,’ he explained to a distracted-sounding nurse. ‘I’m trying to reach his sister, my wife. Gracie. There’s been a family emergency. Tall, red-haired woman. Is she there with him?’

The nurse went off to check. Come on Gracie, be there, thought Lorcan.

It seemed to take forever, but at last the nurse came back. No woman matching that description was visiting intensive care at that time, she said.

‘Yeah, but Gracie could have popped out to go to the loo or grab a coffee. Is anyone else there visiting George Doyle?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

Lorcan hung up, and phoned Suze’s mobile.

‘Is Gracie there with you?’ he asked when she picked up.

‘No she’s not,’ said Suze. ‘I thought she was with you.’

‘Any idea where she’d be? I left her right here at the casino, now she’s gone.’

‘Listen, I gave up trying to understand Gracie years ago,’ said Suze with a sniff.

‘You’ve no idea where Gracie could have gone?’

‘Nope. None at all.’

Great.

Which left him with two thoughts, neither of them very comforting. Had Drax grabbed her? He’d tried it once before. Or someone had, anyway. Had he been so long delayed that she’d thought something had happened to him? Did she think that Drax had him? Was she even now on the way over to Drax’s club to see if he was there? Or had she gone back to the boys’ flat for something?

‘Fuck it,’ said Lorcan, and picked up his coat and hurried out the door.

Chapter 67

Gracie had no idea what to do next. She was shivering with cold and sweating with nerves at one and the same time as she crept closer to the huge bulk of the house, which seemed to crouch in blackness against a star- studded sky.

There were lights on downstairs – no doubt these were the lights she had seen from the lane where she and Paul had come to grief. Stepping warily, Gracie moved closer until she could see in one of the windows. The window was decorated with a leaded lattice and she could see that the glass was so old that in some of the diamond- patterned sections it had bulged out, giving a curiously distorted effect as she peered inside.

She found herself looking into a sitting room, replete with low dark beams, red-themed cosy couches, and an old brick inglenook fireplace in which a big fire was roaring away. Alfie was sitting on one of the couches, his head thrown back, his eyes closed.

Gracie froze. What, was he asleep? Drugged?

Alfie wouldn’t be relaxed enough to sleep if Drax had grabbed him. She had seen how much Alfie hated Drax when he’d talked about him at the hospital. If he was in Drax’s clutches, Alfie would be in a state of fear. He had to be drugged.

She moved on. It was no use trying to alert Alfie that she was there. Drax could be right there in the room, just out of her field of vision, and she would be alerting him too. Her bowels felt almost liquid with terror as she thought of coming face to face with Drax. And where was Lorcan? Was he here too, held prisoner somewhere? It was a big house and the entire upper storey was in darkness.

This is impossible, she thought.

She walked on, cautiously, padding through the snow, thinking that at any moment a security light was going to come on, that in some way Drax was going to be alerted to her presence. The snow muffled her footfalls but she couldn’t see where she was treading. Flowerbeds, solid obstacles, all were shrouded in a concealing blanket of white. She could so easily trip and fall, twist her ankle, and then where would she be? Up shit creek, that’s where.

The snow was continuing to fall steadily, deadening sound. She felt totally alone here outside the house; she could see no lights anywhere in the surrounding countryside. She rounded the corner of the house, skimming a hand lightly along its walls to steady herself in the blue-tinted semi-darkness of the snow-filled night.

Now she was around the back of the house, and she could see light spilling out from another window up ahead. She slowed, all her senses alert to danger. Maybe Drax was in this room, having left Alfie at the front of the building.

She drew closer and saw that there was a half-stable door near the window – and the door was standing ajar. She swallowed hard and wondered if she was actually going to throw up, she felt so sick with apprehension. Her legs didn’t seem to want to move any more. Or at least not in this direction. Everything in her was saying, Don’t do this. Run.

But Drax had Alfie. He might have Lorcan too. And Harry.

She drew closer and risked a peep in at the window.

It was a kitchen. An honest, homely, practically laid-out farmhouse kitchen, with a big refectory table in the middle of the floor, more beams on the ceiling, an Aga, and an old-fashioned butler’s sink just below the window through which she was looking.