do, how best to deal with this mess, how to make her feel a little less terrible than she did at this moment. She removed the plate.
‘Elbows off!’ she said.
Otis, their black Labrador-something cross, followed her across the tiled floor, ever hopeful. She set the plate down in front of her son, grabbed the remote and muted the sound.
‘Meatballs and pasta?’ Tyler said, screwing up his face.
‘One of your favourites, isn’t it?’ She put down a bowl of salad beside him.
‘I had this for lunch today at school.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘They make it better than you.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘You told me always to be truthful.’
‘I thought I also told you to be tactful.’
He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ Then he prodded a meatball suspiciously. ‘So, how’m I going to get to school tomorrow?’
‘You could walk.’
‘Oh great, thanks a lot.’ Then he perked up. ‘Hey, I could bike!’
The idea sent a chill through her. ‘No way. You are so not biking to school. OK? I’ll sort out a taxi.’
Otis stared up at Tyler expectantly.
‘Otis!’ she warned. ‘No begging!’
Then she sat down next to her son. ‘Look, I’ve had a shit day, OK?’
‘Not as shit as that cyclist, right?’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
Tyler suddenly stood up and ran towards the door, yelling, ‘I bet he didn’t have a drunk for a mother.’ He slammed the door behind him.
Carly stared at the door. She half rose from the chair, then sat back down. Moments later she heard the furious pounding of drums upstairs. Otis barked at her, two
‘Sorry, Otis, not feeling great, OK? I’ll take you for a walk later.’
The smell of the meatballs was making her feel sick. Even sicker than she already felt. She got up, walked over to the door and opened it, ready to shout up the stairs at Tyler, but then thought better of it. She sat back down at the table and lit a cigarette, blankly lip-reading the
The phone rang. Sarah Ellis. Married to a solicitor, Justin, Sarah was not just her closest friend, she was the most sensible person Carly knew. And at this moment, on the day her world had turned into a nightmare – the worst since the day she’d been told that her husband was dead – she badly needed
‘How are you, Gorgeous?’
‘Not feeling very gorgeous,’ Carly replied grimly.
‘You were on television – we just saw you on the local news. The accident. The police are looking for a white van. Did they tell you?’
‘They didn’t tell me much.’
‘We’re on our way over with a bottle of champagne to cheer you up,’ Sarah said. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’
‘Thanks, I could do with the company – but the last thing I need is a bloody drink.’
23
Cleo was asleep in the hospital bed. The sleeve of her blue hospital gown had slipped up over her elbow and Grace, who had been sitting beside her for the past hour, stared at her face, then at the downy fair hairs of her slender arm, thinking how lovely she looked when she was asleep. Then his eyes fell on the grey plastic tag around her wrist and another coil of fear rose inside him.
Wires taped to her abdomen were feeding a constant flow of information into a computer at the end of the bed, but he did not know what the stuff on the screen meant. All he could hope was that everything was OK. In the weak, stark light and flickering glow of the television she looked so pale and vulnerable, he thought.
He was scared. Sick with fear for her.
He listened to her steady breathing. Then the mournful sound of a siren cut the air as an ambulance approached somewhere below. Cleo was so strong and healthy. She looked after herself, ate the right stuff, worked out and kept fit. Sure, before she had become pregnant she liked a drink in the evening, but the moment she knew she was expecting, she had reduced it right down to just the occasional glass, and during the past few weeks she’d dutifully cut even that out completely.
One of the things he so loved about her was her positive attitude, the way she always saw the good side of people, looked for the best aspects of any situation. He believed she would be a wonderful mother. The possibility that they might lose their baby struck him harder each time he thought about it.
Even worse was the unthinkable idea that, as the consultant had warned, Cleo might die.
On his lap lay a document listing all the files needed for the prosecution case against the snuff-movie creep Carl Venner. For the past hour he’d been trying to concentrate on it – he had to read through it tonight, to check nothing had been omitted, before a meeting with Emily Curtis, a financial investigator, in the morning, to finalize the confiscation documentation – but his mind was all over the place. He reminded himself that he must ask Emily about her dog, Bobby. Besotted with him, she was always talking about Bobby and showing Grace pictures of him.
It was 9.10 p.m. A new crime show was on television, with the volume turned right down. Like most police officers, Grace rarely watched cop shows because the inaccuracies he invariably found drove him to distraction, and he’d given up on the first episode of this one last week, after just fifteen minutes, when the central character, supposedly an experienced detective, trampled all over a murder scene in his ordinary clothes.
His mind returned to the fatal accident this morning. He’d heard summaries of the first accounts from eyewitnesses. The cyclist was on the wrong side of the road, but that was not unusual – idiots did often ride on the wrong side. If it was a planned hit, then the cyclist had given the van the perfect opportunity. But how would the van have known that he was going to be on the wrong side of the road? That theory didn’t fit together at all and he wasn’t happy with it, even though the van had gone through a red light.
But the New York crime family connection bothered him, for reasons he could not define. He just had a really bad feeling about that.
Plenty of people said that the Italian Mafia, as portrayed in movies like
Yes, it was a different organization from in its heyday. During Prohibition, the crime families of the US Mafia grew from strength to strength. By the mid-1930s, with command structures modelled on Roman legions, their influence touched almost everyone in America in some way. Many major unions were under their control. They were involved with the garment industry, the construction industry, all rolling stock, the New York docks, cigarettes, gambling, nightclubs, prostitution, extortion through protection rackets of thousands of businesses and premises, and loan-sharking.
Today the traditional established crime families were less visible, but no less wealthy, despite some competition from the growing so-called Russian Mafia. A major portion of their income now came from narcotics, once a taboo area for them, fake designer goods and pirated films, while large inroads had been made into online piracy.
Before leaving the office this evening he had Googled
