Lawless (45 page)

Fabio swiped the mustard-coloured cushions off the Habitat sofa and onto the floor. He was still laughing, he couldn’t stop laughing. It was over, it was all over at last. Everything was his now. He went to the drinks tray and poured himself a triple whisky, then moved into the centre of the room and shouted it out loud.

‘
All hail King Fabio!
’

And then he raised his glass in a toast to himself, the survivor, the least likely to succeed. And look, just
look
at what had happened: he’d done it, walked past two graves to do it. Three, counting poor stupid Maria. Just look at the huge favour Miller had done him tonight; he ought to go over there and
kiss
that fucker.

‘To me!’ he roared out happily, and he drank the whisky down in one gigantic hit.

113

‘You think Fabio’s going to come up against us again?’ Rob asked Kit as they sat in Kit’s living room.

Rob didn’t like loose ends. Vittore was done for, but there was still Fabio. And Gabe. Rob couldn’t help wondering whether he’d been right in thinking the guy was such a loser that the worst punishment would be to let him live. He only hoped he wouldn’t have cause to regret the decision to let him go.

‘Why should Fabio bother?’ asked Kit. He had the sling off now, his left arm was getting stronger. ‘Bianca says he always hated Vittore and despised her, what should he care if she’s out of the family fold and Vittore’s dead as toast?’

‘Never did like that little tit,’ said Rob.

‘Let it go,’ said Kit.

There’d been pieces in the paper about gangland violence, shots heard late at night and a businessman called Vittore Danieri and some of his employees had vanished, seemingly without trace.

‘How’s your mum doing?’ asked Rob.

Kit glanced at his watch. ‘I’m just off to see her. Come if you want.’

Rob shook his head.

‘Daisy’s with her,’ said Kit.

‘Dunno.’ Over these past weeks Rob had felt himself getting on far too well with Daisy. Maybe it was time to step back from that. She was a posh bolshy cow, there was no doubt about that. She’d always want to be in charge.

‘Ah, come on.’

‘What are you two deliberating about?’ asked Bianca, coming in from the hall and sitting down next to Kit.

Rob watched them, thinking what a striking couple they made. Bianca so pale, Kit dark like his mum. Kit kissed her cheek, grabbed her hand and held on.

‘Rob’s scared of Daisy,’ he told her, sending a smile up at his number one man.

‘Scared? In what way?’ Bianca looked puzzled. There were big dark shadows under her eyes and a strained thinness to her lips. Rob thought that the news about the Danieris, the stark facts about her real family, the knowledge that it was Kit who had finished Tito – all that had eaten into her and was hurting her still.

‘Scared in the way that he finds her fucking irresistible,’ said Kit.

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Rob.

‘You didn’t have to.’ Kit looked at Bianca. ‘You going to be OK here on your own for an hour or so?’

He worried about her. She’d had some terrible shocks and upsets, and while she seemed to have taken it all with her customary nerve, he wondered what the true impact of it all was going to be. Somewhere out there, maybe she still had real family, people who had been missing her for years. And he suspected that she still felt something for Bella Danieri, who was now mourning her favourite son. Bianca must be in turmoil.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she told him. ‘You two go, I’m going to have a snooze.’

114

When they got out to Ruby’s place, it was to find an excited Daisy waving the Roy Orbison LP around and asking when the twins and Jody could come back, everything was all right now, wasn’t it?

Rob wasn’t sure about that. And he was winded by seeing Daisy again. Every time, the shock of her physical impact on him damned near took his breath away, but still he resisted it. What else could he do? It would be a bloody disaster, he knew it.

Kit was smirking at him. The bastard knew Rob had the hots for his sister. ‘Soon,’ he told Daisy.

‘And we nearly forgot about this,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we?’

‘What, the handwriting?’

‘Of course the handwriting. Kit, you know about this, don’t you?’

Kit nodded. ‘I do.’

They went into the sitting room where Ruby was shuffling through a box of magazines and cards. She looked up, saw Kit and Rob there with Daisy, smiled and stood up.

This time it wasn’t her who opened her arms hopefully. This time was different. Kit came straight over to her and hugged her, hard. It hurt his shoulder a bit, but he didn’t care.

‘You OK?’ he asked, thinking that he could have lost her, never got the chance to make it up. This woman – his mother – had talked him back to life. She had proved her devotion, when he hadn’t even truly been there to see it.

‘Absolutely fine,’ said Ruby, hugging him and trying not to cry. He’d come for her, rescued her. Her son. Her beloved boy.

‘Good. What’s all this then?’ Kit cleared his throat and indicated the box. He saw birthday greetings, Christmas wishes, Valentines . . .

‘We thought maybe Mum night recognize the writing on the LP sleeve,’ said Daisy.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby. ‘I don’t think so. I’m going through my old cards to see if I could match it up to anything.’

‘You and Michael did share contacts for quite a while,’ said Kit.

‘Yes, we did.’ Ruby sat down again, picked up a handful of the cards. ‘Stupid to keep them all really. Just clutter. Old things, old memories. Look at this . . .’

She pulled out a dog-eared copy of
London Life.
The date on its tattered cover was May 1941 and there were three women depicted there, dressed in lingerie and gas masks.

‘They’re Windmill Theatre showgirls,’ she said. ‘The one in the centre’s Vi – my friend who’s now Lady Albermarle. She was
so
glamorous. She was everything I ever wanted to be.’

Ruby put the magazine aside and thumbed through the cards.

‘I really don’t think I’m going to find anything here,’ she said. She’d been looking for nearly an hour now, comparing the writing on the record sleeve to the jottings in the box. Privately she thought it was a waste of time, but she was doing it to please Daisy, who seemed to be chewing at this thing like a dog with a bone, determined to solve the riddle of Michael’s death.

Ruby was becoming more philosophical now. She didn’t think the mystery would ever be resolved, that they would eventually be forced to let it go, let him rest. It was silly to—

‘Oh,’ she said suddenly.

‘What?’ asked Kit.

Ruby’s eyes were moving between the record sleeve and a Christmas card. There was a fat red robin on the front of it, and
Season’s Greetings
printed in glittery script.

‘Look,’ she said, and put the card in his hands.

Daisy hurried over with the LP sleeve. They stood there and stared at it. Ruby looked up at Kit, her eyes anxious.

‘You know that my brother Charlie was killed in a hit-and-run not long after he got out of jail? After he’d done time for the mail-van robbery?’

Kit nodded.

‘Thomas Knox told me Michael was behind the hit-and-run. And that would fit. Charlie was trying to intimidate me, and Michael didn’t like it.’

‘You think this matches?’ Kit was peering closely at the two sets of handwriting.

‘It’s close. Don’t you think?’

It
was
close.

And it fitted, too.

Ruby knew that Betsy had always loved Charlie best; Joe was second choice. And if somehow she had found out that Michael was behind Charlie’s death, couldn’t she have targeted him? Seduced him, perhaps, and lured him to the place where he was killed?

I’m Still in Love with You.

Ruby shuddered. Yes, it could be Betsy. But it could also be Joe. Charlie was his brother, after all. Perhaps Joe and Betsy had colluded over this, arranged Michael’s downfall between them.

‘You’ll just talk to them, won’t you?’ she asked anxiously. ‘He’s . . .’

Dying.

‘. . . He’s very ill.’

Kit and Rob exchanged a look. ‘We’ll go easy,’ said Kit.

After they’d left, Ruby sat there on her own and thought about what an individual thing handwriting was. Graphologists could tell a person’s entire personality, just by the way they slanted letters and added loops. She sorted through a few more cards, thinking that she ought to toss this old stuff out. Look to the future, forget the past. She’d even put Thomas’s card in here, the one he’d sent her after Michael’s death. She thought she’d thrown that away . . .

Suddenly she saw it, and jumped as if someone had shot her. She dropped the box of cards and they fell to the floor. She bent down and with shaking fingers picked up the one that had caught her eye. She stared at it.

Couldn’t believe it.

But there it was.

115

Rob dropped Kit back at his house because Kit was worried about leaving Bianca on her own for too long. Rob thought he was right to worry, she was a highly strung girl and she’d had some very hard knocks.

‘We can take care of this,’ he assured his boss. In the back of his own mind, he still suspected Gabe at work in this, somewhere. ‘Let us go in first, suss out what’s been going on. Maybe Ruby’s mistaken. Maybe the writing’s similar but not quite the same. Who knows?’

Because Kit was concerned about Bianca, he agreed to Rob’s plan. He stood on the kerb for a moment, watching the car pull away, wondering how Rob and Daisy would get on in Chigwell. When he went indoors, he found that Bianca was gone.

‘Joe and Betsy Darke – they’re your uncle and aunt,’ said Rob on the way out to Chigwell.

‘Yes, but I’ve never been acquainted with them.’

‘Your uncle’s not well,’ said Rob.

‘I know.’ Daisy shot a look at him. ‘It seems Ruby and Betsy fell out a long time ago. And Joe took his wife’s side, as you would. So there was an estrangement there, and it’s never been resolved. Not my fault, or Kit’s. Nothing to do with us.’

‘Your aunt Betsy’s a man-eater, Daise. Kit and me, we had a laugh about it after we came out here, but now I’m thinking it’s not very funny. Your uncle knew what a loose tart she was, he saw her swanning half-naked around the house, chatting up the builders, and he resented it, poor old bastard. We guessed she’d be knocking off someone, but Michael? I thought he had better taste.’

Daisy was silent. She had a horrible image in her mind, of Michael in an alleyway, dead, his head shot away. Uncle Joe might be ill, too weak to do the job himself, but he still had plenty of criminal connections. If Betsy
had
been having an affair with Michael, then it would have been a simple matter for Joe to hire in help to kill his rival and – bonus – the man who had offed his brother Charlie. Or for Betsy to pull in a few favours and organize it in revenge for Charlie’s death.

‘Well, here we are.’

Rob pulled in beside the gateway of the Chigwell house. It looked quiet in there today, the house sitting serenely in its lush two acres, the gates shut, no builders, nothing. He got out and pressed the intercom. Waited.

He glanced back at Daisy in the car. Shrugged.

He pressed again. He could hear a dog barking in the distance, and wondered if it was Prince. Maybe Betsy was out, maybe she’d left Joe in the conservatory dozing, and the dog on guard. But peering up there, he could see her car was on the drive. You didn’t just ‘pop to the neighbours’ round here. This was a classy enclave, people kept themselves to themselves.

Rob moved away from the intercom and started walking along beside the five-foot wall that skirted the property. He heard Daisy get out of the car behind him, and slam the door.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘You think Joe’s told Betsy he rubbed Michael out? Poor git’s on his way to the pearly gates, confession’s good for the soul. Maybe she’s realized we’ve finally made the connection with the pair of them, or suspects we have, and is keeping a low profile?’ he wondered aloud.

‘We need to be careful here,’ said Daisy.

‘Meaning?’

‘This could be either one of them. Joe or Betsy. If she was pursuing Michael, giving him gifts like the LP—’

‘And the ring.’

‘And that, yes. Maybe Michael was on his way to meet her when he died. Maybe that call from Joe was some sort of confrontation. Or a trap.’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out.’

Rob was approaching an accessible section of the wall. He glanced left and right, saw all was quiet, and heaved himself up and over.

116

‘This is crazy,’ said Daisy as they walked across the closely cut lawn to the house.

She’d scrambled over the wall after Rob, despite his moaning that she ought to keep the fuck out of this, wait in the car
.

So here they were, approaching the house, and the barking was getting louder.

‘What if the police are watching the place? What if the alarm’s on?’ she asked him, panting as she tried to keep up with the length of his stride.

‘Easy. These people are your relatives. You were concerned when they didn’t answer the intercom, you decided to come in. And the alarm? I checked it all out last time I was here. You only got to say what a nice place this is to Betsy and she gives you
all
the details. They don’t bother setting the alarm, and it’s a piss-poor single system anyway.’

‘What?’ asked Daisy.

‘Christ, Daise, there are some big gaps in your education. It means you only have to cut the phone lines to the house and it’s out of action. Plus, there are no movement sensors, either inside the house or out here.’

‘You’re so clever,’ mocked Daisy.

‘You get clever in this game, Daise, or you get dead.’

‘That’s a very big dog barking in there,’ said Daisy.

‘I know, I’ve seen it.’

They were at the front door now. Rob rang the doorbell. He leaned on the button for about a minute. Stood back. There was no answer. No movement. Only Prince, barking frantically.