“Have you been making sure you always have a body bag in your boot?” she asked.
“You fucking what? Is someone dead?”
She resisted barking at him. “That’s usually what we use body bags for.”
His ragged breathing drifted down the line. “Um, yeah, I do. I always have two in there. You never know when you’re going to kill someone, do you.” He chuckled.
Cassie didn’t find him amusing. “I need you at the Jade. I’ll tell you what’s happened when you arrive. Park round the back.”
“Shite. What’s going on?”
“Jason… Just do as you’re fucking told, will you?”
Angry at him stepping over the mark, again, she cut the call, shoved her phone away, and moved to the hob. When she’d arrived, a pot of something had been boiling, the water milky. She turned the gas off and looked beneath the steel worktable for a colander. Rice poured into it in the large sink, she gazed at the bloated, puffy white grains, thinking of something Dad had said.
“From space, we’re all like grains of rice, insignificant, tiny specks on a green-and-blue planet. But on that planet, up close, we mean something, we’re important, and if we try hard enough, we’re fucking important.” He’d smiled. “You, my precious little bird, will be fucking important, and no one is allowed to stop you.”
Tears burned. She hated showing emotion, but at least she was alone while doing it. The rice was fucked, overcooked, but that was the least of Li Jun’s worries. She used a paper towel to dab her eyes so her liner didn’t run and cringed at the sound of Yenay wailing followed by Tai’s soft voice of comfort. Their family had been ripped apart, and for the sake of appearances, they’d have to hide their grief from the public.
Cassie knew how that went. She hadn’t mourned openly for her father, instead crying in her old bedroom at the family home while staying with Mam, the usually unconquerable Francis, who sobbed on the other side of the wall and once told Dad’s ghost she wished she could join him but couldn’t bear to leave Cassie.
Maybe she’s waiting until she knows I can cope without her, then she’ll…
No. Cassie needed Mam. Not just for her guidance—Francis Grafton knew how to run the estate just as well as Dad had and was a valuable source of information—but for an anchor in her world, someone who’d keep her from going too far. Although that was debateable, seeing as Mam had encouraged her to make a homemade weapon, a whip with barbed wire around the leather thong. Mam had come alive at the idea of Cassie using it to show the Barrington lot she meant business.
Mam’s as warped as Dad.
And I’m as warped as them.
A tap from the front of the takeaway had her jumping, and to cover the slip in composure, she turned to stare through the cutout in the wall behind the main counter. Jason stood outside, glancing left and right as if checking for anyone watching, and Cassie almost screamed in frustration.
What was he doing out there?
She rushed through the swing door, annoyance lending her speed, out through the gap in the counter, and opened the shop. “I told you to go round the fucking back. Get in, for God’s sake.”
He walked inside, frowning, hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, casual as eff. “I parked round the back, like you said.”
“And I meant stay round there. Christ.” She cursed herself for not being more specific, locked up, and led the way to the kitchen, gesturing for him to join her in the corner farthest from the back door so that poor family outside wouldn’t overhear her.
“Jiang’s had a machete to the throat,” she whispered. “Whoever it was wanted the drugs.”
Jason’s eyebrows rose, and his mouth pursed. “Who was it? I’ll fucking kill them.”
Cassie’s nerves prickled. He wasn’t calling the shots, she was. “No, we’ll get them, together, like we did with Nathan Abbott.”
Jason’s eyes all but gleamed. “Too right. So, you didn’t answer me. Who was it?”
“No one knows. I haven’t had a proper chat with Li Jun yet to get the full story. One bloke, and he had a mask on, probably a balaclava.”
Jason pinched the bridge of his nose and found the tiled floor interesting, tapping his foot. “Did they get the drugs?”
“Thankfully, no.”
A tic flared beside Jason’s left eye, and he raised his head to look at her. “Good. That’s good.” He cleared his throat. “So this must have been a warning. Someone’s after taking over the drug patch.”
“It could be that twat, the one Richie Prince worked for.”
She thought about Richie, a man Jason had killed in the squat, a house out in the sticks they used to threaten people, kill people. Dad hadn’t wanted Jason to shoot Richie, just said to give him another ‘warning’ for selling on the Barrington without permission, so that was a bone of contention with Cassie that Jason had defied orders, something he tried to do often. But it was done now, Richie taken to Marlene then fed to the pigs, and his mother, Doreen, now worked for Cassie, spying on the two women, Karen Scholes and Sharon Barnett, who wrote and distributed The Barrington Life, a weekly flyer that kept everyone on the estate up to date with what was going on.
Karen and Sharon were up to something, but Cassie didn’t know what. Suspicions and gut feelings weren’t solid proof. Doreen had agreed to keep ‘helping out’ on The Life to see if she could pick up any info. She needed a distraction from her possible guilt at kicking Richie out once she’d sussed he was selling drugs behind Dad’s back, then his death. While
