Deadly Obsession (7 page)

‘
W
ell
, there's a face I thought I'd never fucking see round here again. What the frig do you want?'

The blunt, joyless churlish welcome wasn't entirely unexpected by Amy. Considering the last time she'd seen Tommy Hearn had been at the reading of Riley's will, she had not exactly envisaged being greeted with open arms and the offer of a cosy catch-up. Not that she had ever really planned to see Tommy again to be honest ... not until that letter and her need to track down the truth behind it. Being with Riley again was all she could think about and if that meant having to share airspace with Tommy then so be it.

‘I need to talk, can I come in?' said Amy matter-of-factly.

‘Be my guest.' His intonation was not exactly inviting.

Tommy ushered Amy into his office at the Dirty Cash Casino, as the Kitty Kat club was now known. Amy had made a calculated guess that she'd find him there now that his work with Riley at the plastics factory no longer existed. On lonely nights at the flat in London she'd often found herself idly looking at the internet and out of curiosity she'd once googled Tommy Hearn. The ‘success story' of Manchester's latest casino had popped up on a website about northern businesses. Unable to stop herself from reading it she'd immediately felt the hair on the back of her neck standing to irate attention at the man who had so easily filled her dancing shoes and stolen her life.

As she walked into the space that had once been hers, had once pulsated with music and been the scene of so much happiness and jubilance, at least before
that
night, she again had the same feeling of contempt wash over her. Every corner held a memory. Instead of the raging buoyant beat of the music, the space now resonated with the soundtrack of endless
kerchings
from the rows of slot machines spaced sentinel-like from wall to wall. Amy had nothing against gambling, far from it, but somehow the scene disgusted her. A hatred of it that stemmed from the loss of what had gone before.

‘Welcome to The Dirty Cash Casino, it's your first visit I guess. Looking good, eh?' There was ridicule in Tommy's words, a bragging that pricked at Amy's skin. Added to the almost cataclysmic pounding of her heart within her rib cage, the atmosphere in the room made Amy feel deeply uncomfortable. But she needed to be strong. To conquer her fear.

She sat herself at his desk as Tommy eased into his chair opposite her and lit a fat, stubby cigar. No cigarette ban would ever stop him. He was king of this empire and he made the rules. He ran his hand through his thick mane of black, slicked-back, wavy hair as he reclined back into his chair, blowing smoke into the air. His demeanour was one of pure arrogance. The fat cat who had not just tasted the cream, but made his enemies choke on it.

‘I guessed you'd be here ... where else would you be?' she sniped. ‘Dirty Cash? It's dirty all right … the cash that funded this place was my cash and you know it, Tommy. This was my club. You left me with nothing. How can you live with yourself?' A tear started to form at the corner of Amy's eye as she spoke. It annoyed her. This was not how she was supposed to be. She planned to be forceful, take no shit … tears were not an option. After everything she had gone through she was not going to give this man the satisfaction of seeing her blub like she was watching some emotion-drenched Jennifer Aniston rom-com.

‘Come for a handout, have you? Times are hard? I'd heard on the grapevine that you're not exactly doing so well. You're down in London now, aren't you? Streets not paved with gold, eh? There's nothing here for you, Amy …' Tommy left a slight pause before adding ‘... not anymore.'

Amy needed to be strong. Trying to ignore the ever-increasing volume of her own heartbeat, she spoke. ‘I need answers, Tommy, not money. You were a friend to me and Riley. Or at least I thought you were. You came to our wedding. You were there when my parents died. You've been part of my life with Riley for as long as I can remember, so what happened? How can you sit here, somewhere that was once mine and know that you're making a living in the place where my husband ... your friend, died? I don't understand ... I never had you down as such a callous bastard.'

Tommy stared at Amy, his gaze like that of a feline ready to apply a fatal blow to a passing nuisance of a rodent. ‘You never did understand, love. You were never the sharpest tool in the box from the moment Riley met you, were you? I never really understood what he saw in you, but I suppose you must make up for your lack of brains in other departments.' His eyes narrowed and his glance descended down Amy's body as he spoke, his meaning evident.

Amy had never been Tommy's biggest fan but even for him this was nastiness on a scale she'd never experienced before.

‘Screw you, Tommy!'

Amy was on the verge of standing up and leaving but she hadn't come all this way to quit so soon. She was stronger than that, despite what Tommy may think. It was her strength that had managed to help her survive the last six months. She needed answers and she needed to find her husband. If Tommy had anything to do with Riley's ‘death' then she had to fathom a way to find out about it. For a moment her mind clouded, the thought of being with Riley once more distorting her vision. For them to potentially be together she needed to calm her rage and focus. Not let her armour be penetrated.

‘Riley was a good man, a wonderful husband. He was honest and decent. He didn't deserve to die. You came to his funeral. You liked him ... you were sad he'd died ... weren't you?' Amy could hear the uncertainty in her own voice. So much now seemed in doubt.

‘I had my reasons for being there. That's all.' He blew another thick plume of smoke into the air from his cigar and stubbed it out into an already-full ashtray on the office desk. A few stray flakes of ash dropped over the edge. ‘Now, I assume you're not here to just take a trip down Memory Lane and reminisce happy days, so what the fuck do you really want, Amy? I've got a business to run. In fact I've got quite a few. Selling that factory was a nice little earner for me. It was about time Riley came up trumps.'

‘What do you mean, “came up trumps”? You worked with Riley at that factory. You talked plastics with him all the time. Dinner parties with you and Jemima were always a
delight
.' Amy smothered the word with irony. ‘You and him would disappear off to discuss work and I'd be left with dull-as-ditchwater Jemima.' Amy saw no point in mincing her words given the attitude Tommy was dishing out to her.

Tommy leapt from his chair in anger. His frame, wide and foreboding, seemed to fill the room as he stared down threateningly at Amy. A curl of hair escaped downwards across his forehead as he spoke. It looked out of place on the normally immaculate Tommy. ‘You stupid girl, you truly believe your husband was merely a boss for some bleeding plastics factory? You brain must be as fucking hollow as the pipes Riley was supposedly selling. You never went to the factory, did you?'

The comment floored Amy. It was true, she hadn't. ‘Er ... no, why would I? It was Riley's work, I had no need to ... never wanted to.'

‘Because if you had, you'd have seen that the whole thing was just a façade. A front. A cover. A sham. Your husband was no more a plastics salesman than you are a bloody
University Challenge
contestant. He was a fucking criminal with ideas above his station and a spending habit that sped way out of control. He'd have been dead long ago if I hadn't helped him out on countless occasions.'

Confusion gripped Amy. It was then that the first tear started to fall. Inhaling deeply, Amy wiped it away, determined not to crumble. She thought of Laura and how she would have coped with the situation she was in. She'd have been ballsy, strong, known what to say and how to react. Amy owed it to her to be the same.

‘Criminal? No, not my Riley. Not a chance. That factory was a family business. He cared about it. He took it over from his dad.'

‘Don't you get it? There never was a business. That factory was the HQ for all of Riley's underhand activity. You might think that Riley was whiter-than-white but tell that to some of the people he'd bumped off along the way. Your late hubby was one of the most feared underground gangland criminals in Manchester and much further afield too. As was his dad, Cazwell Hart, before him. Except his father was a true gent who earned his reputation and wasn't idiotic enough to blow shitloads of cash and get into debt up to his eyeballs.'

Gangland criminals? What Tommy was saying was alien to her. That was something she'd seen watching Tom Hardy playing the notorious Krays in
Legend
, in a violence-soaked Tarantino flick late at night when she'd been unable to sleep, or read about in one of her explosive novels. It was somebody else's life, not hers. The lack of understanding floored her. She was silent.

There was nothing Amy could say. It was true that she had never involved herself in Riley's business. Never paid any major interest or really asked any deeply probing questions. She was not the questioning type, she'd always been told that. She'd enjoyed the riches of designer clothes, exotic holidays and expensive jewellery but had never asked where the money came from. She always thought she'd known. But the thought of Riley being a criminal ... a murderer ... no, not the man she knew. He couldn't have been. Not the man who had made love to her countless times in such a tender and gentle fashion, sometimes in the very office where her world was now unravelling like a ball of wool in the clutches of a mischievous kitten. Amy could only helplessly listen as Tommy continued with his verbal shower of destruction.

‘That's where I came in, Amy. Always happy to bail Riley out when he bit off more than he could chew. The overheads on the “factory”, the cost of this place when it was The Kitty Kat, the monies owed to others. Riley was a headstrong bloke who didn't know when to stop. That's why people went to him when they needed a job doing. He was fearless. But he was reckless too. He'd happily push some poor bastard into the Manchester Ship Canal wearing concrete boots for being a grass or shoot some lowlife scum between the eyes in a Parisian back alley but ask him to balance his books and he was a waste of bloody space. Your late hubby was a bad egg and I was his human cash point. And it turned out he was a pretty good investment as it happens ... or at least now he's dead.'

‘So you think he is dead ...?' Amy had spoken before she'd had time to think. The barrage of information ramming into her brain was pulverising her already destroyed senses. Her mind shot back to those evenings when Riley was busy 'at work', that night she'd been left alone in Paris, glances from shifty strangers in chi-chi bars he'd taken her to on nights out, excuses he had made to disappear from a romantic restaurant dinner table to ‘take an important call'. There were countless occasions and now they all seemed to stack in line with Tommy's ruinous accusations.

Tommy's reasons for wanting Riley out of the picture were clear – pure and simple monetary gain. Amy wasn't sure that letting him even consider the possibility that she thought Riley could still be alive was a wise move. The man had just admitted to being a huge and heartless piece of Manchester's crime scene, so violence was obviously part of his DNA. If he was behind Riley's demise and was now considering the possibility of having failed in his quest to bump him off then he was evidently capable of sparking into brutality at any second. And as she was sitting across the desk from him, it was Amy who was the closest to potential harm. The thought froze inside her.

‘Of course he's fucking dead. What kind of stupid fucking notion is that? He had his face shot off and you sat there, crying into your handbag, at his funeral. Your husband wasn't a liked man. There were a lot of people around here who breathed a sigh of relief when he met his maker. He's dead. What the fuck makes you think otherwise?'

Tommy sounded convinced but he could be bluffing. Amy wasn't sure. This was a Tommy she'd never seen before, more brutal than she'd ever realised. Unable to formulate what to say, her mind a riot of emotion, she remained silent. It seemed the best option.

‘Riley made countless enemies over the years. He was ruthless when it came to making people pay if they double-crossed him and he was able to charge a hefty price tag for snuffing someone out. His problem was spending too much cash on needless shit ... like this place before I got my hands on it. If he was still alive, doubtless he'd still be spunking heaps of cash into all sorts of useless ventures to try and make some dough. And doubtless I would still be bankrolling him. No, he's six feet under, definitely. The police gave up on the case for good reason, they didn't want to ruffle too many criminal feathers.'

Amy's bottom lip trembled as she spoke. She was beginning to realise why Riley had been so apologetic to her in his letter. What had he said? ‘I have to say sorry. A million times over. Sorry for the misery you've suffered, sorry for the confusion I'm about to cause, sorry for the heartache.'

Yes, this was heartache all right. She'd headed back to Manchester from London thinking that her husband had been a good man to her in life, a true son to his father, someone who had just had his beautifully bright flame extinguished too soon. But now she was being told different. Tommy had spelt it out to her. Riley was a criminal, a hit man, someone who took lives like a beast would lick the last drop of water from the bottom of a trough – with an insatiable thirst and with no thought for those who were to follow. Including Amy. She'd been lied to all her life with Riley. About his dad, about his business, about his relationship with Tommy ...

She could feel her heart snapping in two. ‘So, you were Riley's loan shark? The man who bled him dry and constantly made sure you had your pound of flesh to chew on. I thought you were his friend ...' Her voice was branded with despair, the fight within her not so much ebbing out of her bones but now seemingly free flowing.