Lawless (9 page)

She took up her position on the till and fixed a smile on her face, teeth gritted, as the doors of Darkes opened and the customers streamed in.

18

‘Hi! Rob!’

Daisy got back home shortly after six, and there was Rob out on the front drive, washing down the Mercedes in the fading half-light with his shirt sleeves rolled up. She thought he looked sexy as hell. His toffee-blond hair was flopping into his eyes. Her heart did a roll, just seeing him there. He glanced up, didn’t smile.

‘Oh. Hiya, Daise.’

‘Busy?’

‘Yeah.’

He carried on soaping the car. Daisy watched him working, imagining those strong, strong hands on her body. He was so
reliable
, Rob. You felt like you could count on him for anything. She’d had a pig of a day, but seeing him was the perfect salve to her wounded feelings. Her co-workers hated her. She was the boss’s daughter, slumming it – that was how they saw her. They were determined not to give her a chance. But at least Rob didn’t have any of those stupid preconceptions.

‘How’s it going at the store?’ he asked, seeing that she was still standing there, watching him.

‘Fine. Great!’ she lied.

‘Good,’ said Rob.

‘Rob . . .’ Daisy stepped closer, and snagged her instep on the hose, twisting her ankle and lurching sideways. Rob reached out, caught her arm, steadied her.

‘Careful,’ he said.

‘Ow,’ said Daisy. That
hurt.
God, why wasn’t she any good at all this femme fatale business, like chic Auntie Vi? But no. She lumbered around the place, tripping over hoses and making a fool of herself.

‘All right?’ he asked, still holding her arm while she hopped on one leg.

‘Yeah. Fine,’ said Daisy, wincing.

‘Sure?’ Now he was smiling. Laughing at her. She was
sick
of being laughed at.

‘Fine,’ said Daisy, yanking her arm free and straightening herself up with all the dignity she could muster. ‘See you,’ she said, and limped off indoors.

Rob watched her go, and sighed. He knew where she was going with this, and – OK – he
had
wanted to go there too, quite badly. He thought she was the sexiest woman he’d seen in a long while, and he wanted to fuck her bandy. But he’d had time to think it through, and now he reckoned it would be a stupid move. She was too bloody
posh
, for a start. And too bossy. Plus, she had a shedload of baggage. She’d done that rich-girl-goes-crazy thing in her younger years, driven everyone nuts. Was she over all that shit yet? Who knew?

On top of that she had babies. Twins, for God’s sake. Double the trouble. Plus there was that crazy little fat fucker of an ex-husband – not that he could give a shit about Simon Collins, but still, it was an unwanted complication. And she was the boss’s sister, and Kit was almost off his head at the moment, there was trouble building up there with him and the Danieri mob. It was all a little too close for comfort. If he got together with Daisy and then they fell out, how would that sit with Kit, and with their mother Ruby?

Rob got back to polishing the car.

No. Best to steer well clear of the complications. Find a nice single girl down the pub, no kids, no hassle, no crazy lunatic exes or unwanted connections, and let off steam with her instead.

It was all Daisy could do to stay awake, but she forced herself to get up out of the cosy armchair in the twins’ room and make her way downstairs to join her mother. The previous evening she’d been so exhausted she’d gone to bed as soon as she finished bathing the twins with Jody and tucked them in for the night. She didn’t want to make a habit of being in bed by seven thirty.

She sat down on the sofa beside Ruby, kicked off her shoes and gingerly rubbed at her ankle. It was still sore, but she wasn’t limping any more. No permanent damage. Not enough to cry off work tomorrow, which was a pity.
Fucking
store work.

‘You OK?’ asked Ruby.

Daisy looked up at her mother, wondering whether to come clean, but the strain on Ruby’s face stopped her in her tracks. ‘I’m fine, but what about you? You look as if you’re worried sick.’

Ruby sighed. ‘I can’t stop thinking about what happened at the funeral yesterday . . .’ She told Daisy about Kit showing up, and Bella’s words to her.

‘God, that sounds serious,’ said Daisy. It certainly put all
her
petty concerns into perspective.

‘It’s that all right. But if Bella can rein in Vittore and Fabio, Kit might yet get away with it.’

‘Do you think she can?’

‘Let’s hope.’

19

Kit woke up alone and in pain. No luscious blonde Alison today, kicking off because he called her by someone else’s name. Now, he couldn’t remember whose name he’d called her by.
Same meat, different gravy.
It didn’t matter, anyway.

The pain was a familiar morning companion. His head felt like someone had taken it off his shoulders and kicked it all around a football field, then booted it right out of the ground for an encore.

The drink.

He knew he had to stop that. He’d come home from his mother’s late yesterday afternoon after the funeral –
was that wise, taunting the Danieris as they buried Tito?
– and then he’d got drunk again. Roaring, shit-faced drunk. He must have fallen across the bed fully dressed, and now he was awake, and he felt like death warmed over and served up as freshly minted.

He opened his eyes and it was light, it was morning, and oh God he didn’t want another day, another
fucking
day without Michael, without Gilda. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and his brain started banging away inside his skull.

‘Shit,’ he groaned. There was a three-quarter-empty bottle of Bell’s on the bedside table. He reached for it.

Hair of the dog, right? Make it all better. Maybe a prairie oyster later, settle my stomach, feels like it’s doing backflips in there, what the hell . . . ?

Her
face rose up in front of him, sea-green eyes laughing into his, the faint fairy jangle of gold that had followed her everywhere like her perfume, which was sweet strawberries and hay meadows. Not that he’d ever
smelled
a hay meadow, but if he had he just knew it would smell the same as her skin.

Gilda.

He’d truly loved her, and now she was gone.

He screwed up his eyes, wrenched out the cork, put the bottle to his lips and drank. Then he set it aside, tossed the cork fuck knew where, and lay back, eyes closed, feeling the whisky burn a hot tingling track all the way down to his toes.

Now he could see another face. Granite-jawed, set with a strong mouth and dark grey eyes that matched the thick thatch of hair. Those eyes were looking at him with disapproval.

Michael? Boss . . .

Kit felt his eyes fill with tears that spilled over. It was the drink. He was turning into a pitiful, booze-soaked alkie, maudlin and seeing faces of dead loved ones and blubbing like a fucking
baby.
Michael was looking disgusted with him. Well, he was disgusted with
himself.
He knew it was getting to be a major problem, the way he felt the pain and then automatically reached for the bottle to take it away.

He was scared of the pain.
Physical
pain he could handle. He was a gladiator, right? That was how he saw himself: tough as you like, nothing touched him. Rip his arm off, he’d come at you with the other one. But
this –
this soul-eating sense of loss, of something precious that was never, ever going to be replaced – this was too much.

So maybe he was, in fact, a fucking
coward.

And what use was he, falling-down, rat-arsed drunk? He had . . .

Oh shit he had something important to do. What the hell was it?

Yeah, he had to . . . find out who murdered Michael, who
really
did it, because Tito and his brothers didn’t. Was that true, though?
Could
it be?

Oh, and incidentally, just a minor detail, Kit, but didn’t you
kill
Tito because you believed he did Michael?

‘Fuck,’ he muttered.

He hauled himself back into a sitting position. Looked again at the bottle and felt an uncomfortable stab of self-loathing. He was like a sodding baby with that bottle, a baby on its mother’s teat.
Gimme comfort, take the pain away, don’t let me think, don’t let me feel, it hurts.

He had no regrets about taking out Tito: Tito had been a bastard through and through, and he was now frying in hell, Kit was convinced of that. But what Ruby told him tormented him. That there could be someone still out there, laughing in secret because they’d done it, got away with it, they’d taken Michael Ward’s life and never been made to pay the price.

Kit swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Everything in the room spun. Bile surged into his throat.

Somehow, he kept it down. Managed to stand up, too.

Up and at ’em, soldier!
he told himself, and then he looked at the whisky bottle again, and he could
taste
it, it was good and it was as cosily enfolding as a warm blanket on a cold night, the booze, the blessed booze.

He picked up the bottle. No cork – where was the cork? Ah, no matter.

Raised it to his lips.
Smelled
it, rich alcohol, so soothing, taking the pain away.

But . . . he paused.

Maybe he had to
feel
that pain to be able to do this, find whoever had robbed Michael of his life. Maybe. He took a couple of steps over to the bathroom door, opened it, with the whisky bottle still in his hand. Then he went over to the sink, fully intending to pour all the remaining golden happy-juice down the plughole.

Instead, he left the bottle in the sink –
careful now, don’t be a cunt and spill it! –
and looked at himself in the mirror. Café au lait skin looking a little grey, a little
bleached
, black hair, a handsome, well-sculpted face and blue, blue eyes with big dark shadows underneath them. His face. The face of Kit Miller. Only not. The stranger in the mirror was a nameless, unwanted boy, and ‘Kit Miller’ was actually a construct of some long-ago care worker in a children’s home. His
mother
was Ruby Darke. His
father
was Cornelius Bray, who had also fathered Daisy – and neither of his parents had ever wanted him. He’d been cast aside, left to rot.

‘So who the hell
are
you, pal?’ he asked his reflection.

And his reflection answered: ‘Michael’s right hand. His number one man.’

Except, he wasn’t
that
any more. Because Michael was gone. Now, everything that had been Michael’s was Kit’s – the restaurants, the boozers, the clubs, the wedge from the streets, the fortune Michael made on the Albert Docks development. Kit hadn’t totted it all up, but he guessed he was now a sodding millionaire, and that was funny, because once upon a time money was the one thing he’d wanted. He’d been destitute as a child, not a pot to piss in, reliant on charity in children’s homes. Now, he had it all. And he didn’t want it.

What he wanted was a home life, a
real
life, a family maybe.

Gilda . . .

He wanted her back. And he wanted Michael back too.

Ah, impossible dreams.

He looked at the bottle.

My little friend.

He picked it up, took a swig.

Hold it down to a dull roar, right?

There was still some left in the bottle. He placed it carefully back in the sink, went towards the shower. He’d clean up, and then there was that nice liquid treat waiting there, a little something in reserve, right?

Right.

And then . . . maybe he’d try and start to think. Or maybe . . . maybe he’d decide not to face any of it. Maybe he’d take a razor blade, skip the shower, have a nice deep hot bath instead, you didn’t feel it in a bath. Maybe that would be a plan: finish the drinking, finish with the whole stinking sorry mess that his life was these days, just open his wrists and lie there until it was over.

He thought of Vittore Danieri – those hate-filled eyes beneath that widow’s peak of receding dark hair, the guy looked like fucking
Dracula
or something – Vittore hissing at him ‘
I’ll rip the heart out of you
. . .’

Vittore had marked him, like Cain. Vittore had made a promise, a solemn oath that one day, one day soon, he was going to hurt him, maybe hurt Daisy or Ruby too. But maybe, Kit thought with a grim little smile, maybe he’d jump the gun, how about that? Take himself out of this whole shitty scene before Vittore took the matter out of his hands and did it for him.

He looked at the bath for long, long moments.

Then he leaned in and started the shower running.

OK, maybe not today. Maybe tomorrow.

20

‘Please, Vittore, don’t,’ said Maria.

Ah, that was music to his ears. People begging, pleading, he loved it. What Vittore Danieri liked best about being the boss was seeing the abject fear in people’s – even his wife’s – eyes when he talked to them. He
loved
that. Relished it. He’d waited a damned long time for it, too, and would have had to wait a damned sight longer, if Tito hadn’t come to such an unfortunate end.

In Vittore’s eyes, Tito hadn’t been right for the boss’s job anyway. Like their father Astorre, Tito had been too easily distracted by bedding dirty
puttas
both male and female, and forging dubious connections to MPs and to the nobility, neither of which held any interest for Vittore.

What Vittore loved above all else was control,
power.

As the middle son, he’d felt the lack of it for most of his life. Tito had been their father’s chosen one, his first born. Astorre Danieri had doted on his eldest boy: Tito could do no wrong in his eyes. Fabio was the one who
hadn’t
been the girl Mama craved.