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Lefty was nodding frantically.
‘Or else I’m going to cut your freakin’ balls right off, you got me?’ Deano said. ‘And then I’m gonna stuff ’em down your stupid throat.’
Alfie was his, and some fucker had dared to snatch him away. When Deano caught up with this arsehole – and he would – he promised himself that this cunt and anyone associated with him was going to suffer. His family, his friends, anyone.
‘Now get your useless arse outta my house, you tosser,’ he told Lefty.
Lefty crawled to his feet and, limping, left the room. Everything hurt. And what hurt even worse was the panicky knowledge that he didn’t have a clue where to start looking for the boy. Not a fucking clue.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_657e87b7-0f5c-596f-9fb6-621f257bfa67)
‘Shall I tell you what I’d do, Lefty?’
Gordon was built like a tank and he was sitting, over-spilling his cheap plastic seat, in a café in the Mile End Road with his colleague Lefty Umbabwe. Lefty looked like death; his dark skin was greyish with strain, his head stapled up like Frankenstein’s monster. He’d come in limping, and Gordon had said, hey, wassup? Trying not to laugh, and failing. He’d never seen such a mess as Lefty in his entire life.
‘What would you do?’ asked Lefty, drinking tea and wishing it was whisky. His bollocks ached. His head ached. His mind whirled with desperation. He needed another whiff from his butane can, but he couldn’t do that here in the café; he’d get them both chucked out. ‘Come on man. Really. I’d like some help here.’
Lefty had poured out the whole tale of woe to Gordon. How he’d lost track of Deano’s boy, during the honeymoon period. Deano wasn’t sick of the sight of the kid yet, which was what always happened in the end with Deano and his grand amours.
What always happened was this: Deano’s people picked the kids off the streets, because the streets of London were paved with gold, everyone knew that, and they all headed here. The stupid kids thought they were going to make their fortune, join a band, become a star; it was all going to happen for them in London town.
Sadly, it didn’t work like that. It worked like this: the kids found themselves cold and hungry on the streets and, if they were lucky, they went back home with their tails between their legs. If they were unlucky, they fell prey to loitering paedos like Deano, who drugged them up and used them for their own amusement for a few weeks; then, when the nonces grew weary of their charms, they farmed the kids out at a handsome profit to their fancy bender friends.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d throw myself in the bleeding river,’ said Gordon, and burst into peals of laughter.
Lefty stared at Gordon. ‘Hey, you think this is funny?’ He jumped to his feet. It hurt. He winced. Gordon caught the wince and that made him laugh even more.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Gordon, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘But Christ, Lefty, what a fucking to-do. What the hell happened? You’ve played babysitter lots of times before, why’d you balls it up now?’
Lefty slumped back into his seat. ‘I got the dose wrong. Thought the boy was well under, but he gave me the slip. Ran out of the club, legged it. It was night-time, black as your frigging hat too. I had a bad time tracking the little cunt down, then this bastard butts in – and before I knew it he whacks me and then Alfie’s gone.’
‘Well, my friend, now it’s official: you’re in the shit.’ Gordon worked for Deano too, as a bouncer on the door of Deano’s fetish club Shakers. He knew Deano from way back. Knew what a twisted git he was, and he knew Deano would make Lefty pay hard for this.
‘I know that.’ Lefty stared at Gordon, who was tucking into a big fry-up.
‘You should have used your loaf in the first place, checked the dose, and you wouldn’t be in this bind.’
‘Yeah. I know.’
‘Fact is, Lefty, you’re lucky you can find your dick to take a piss these days, the amount of stuff you keep sniffing. Something like this was just bound to happen.’
Gordon was right and Lefty knew it. Lefty couldn’t face food. He still felt dizzy and a bit nauseous from that blow to the head. And he needed his fix. Deano had given him this week to find the boy, or else his arse was well and truly cooked and he didn’t have a clue where to even start.
‘Yeah, so come on. Where would you start looking?’ he pleaded.
Gordon speared a sausage, bit off a hunk and chewed thoughtfully, his eyes resting all the while on Lefty.
‘Right,’ he said at last, swigging down a mouthful of tea, ‘here’s what I’d do. Go back to where you found him at around the same time of day. Start asking the cabbies, the night-bus drivers. Nearest tube station, talk to station staff, any buskers, anyone. You got a picture of this boy Alfie?’
Lefty shook his head.
‘No matter. Just describe him. Take one of the girls with you, though: don’t do it alone.’
‘Why?’
‘People see a big black bastard asking around about a cute white boy, they might get antsy. Take Mona, she’s got a sweet face. You know?’
Mona was one of the fetish-club dancers. It was true, Mona had a kind face. And a gorgeous arse.
Gordon was mopping up skeins of sticky yolk with his bread and Lefty had to look away.
‘Get her to tell everyone she’s the kid’s mother, shed a few tears, my lost boy, my tragic life, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill.’
‘Yeah.’ Lefty felt slightly better now. It was good advice, and he was going to take it.
‘Another idea,’ said Gordon, talking fast now, waving the dripping bread about in Lefty’s direction. ‘Am I on fire or what? The ideas are comin’ thick and fast. Go to the nearest YMCA, get Mona to do the business: her little boy Alfie ran away from home, is he there? And the tears, don’t forget the tears, man. They pay dividends.’
Lefty was nodding. ‘My man, you are a scholar and a gentleman,’ he congratulated Gordon.
‘Hope it helps.’ Gordon shrugged modestly. ‘Besides all that, I’ll pass the word around, get all the mates to keep ’em peeled. I really hope you find him, Lefty, because if you don’t, seriously, I would take my first piece of advice if I were you. Just throw your arse in the river. Because Deano’s going to do that – and much worse – to you, and then you know what? He’s gonna post you home to your mama in a plastic bag.’
Gracie (#ulink_085490b9-c776-5ff4-aa0d-2376302c895c)
DECEMBER
Chapter 10 (#ulink_71c761f6-93aa-532a-8b8e-cd4876bfbcd0)
19 December
Gracie didn’t sleep well the night after the police visit. She had blackout blinds at her bedroom windows and an eye mask to keep out any hint of residual light because working so late she often slept in until gone noon. She was usually an eight-hour girl – anything less and she woke up grouchy and stayed that way for the better part of the day – but things were playing on her mind, despite her best efforts to ignore them. Like her family, for instance. The family she had distanced herself from long ago, and barely gave a thought to any more.
When her parents split, she’d been sixteen years old. George and Harry had been twelve and eleven respectively. As kids they had endured years of furious rows and recriminations, their father cold and withdrawn, their mother shouting and screaming. There was talk of affairs, and it became obvious who’d done the cheating – their mother.
How the hell could she have done that to Dad. To all of them?
Dad had been managing a casino in the West End at the time, working all hours, and Mum had cited that as the reason she had strayed. Gracie had been numb at first, and then coldly enraged at her mother. Of all the trampy, despic able things to do. Dad had worked hard to give them a comfortable home, a decent life, and this was how she repaid him.
Gracie remembered the pain of it all, even now, and how judgemental she had been, as only a teenage girl with her hormones in turmoil could be. Her relationship with her mother had never been an easy one. Gracie was cool, and Suze was a bundle of out-of-control emotions. She made no secret of the fact that she preferred ‘her boys’, and found logical, strong-willed Gracie hard to manage or understand – but after the affair thing blew up in all their faces, Gracie had detested her.
So when Dad decided to go and work in Manchester, Gracie had winged the last school term and abandoned her exams. She knew she wanted to work in the casino business, so what was the point of more school? She’d been blessed with a prodigious natural talent for maths, so she could weigh up odds in an instant, and add up a row of figures at lightning speed. She knew exactly what she wanted in life; she didn’t need any careers adviser to tell her. Coldly, dis passionately, she had announced to her mother that she intended to go with him.
George and Harry had of course sided with Mum, and had been angry, hurt and resentful that Dad and Gracie were choosing to leave them. And although Dad tried to keep in touch with his boys, asked if he could visit them, Suze had said a flat, spiteful no. Gracie knew that he’d sent them presents and cards and letters, but he never heard a thing back from them, not a word. She knew how much it had hurt Dad. She knew too that he could have tried for proper controlled access through the courts, but the split had been so devastating that he had quickly lost heart.
So, time passed.
Contact was lost.
Ancient messes – ones she preferred not to think about now.
But the phone call from the girl – what was her name, Sandy? – had brought it all back, unnerved her, made her go on the defensive. She’d shut down on her emotions, snapped at Brynn. She felt bad that she had lashed out at the one person who had always been solidly supportive of her, helping her through the hideous time after Dad’s death. Brynn had always schooled her in the business, never running out of patience when she was slow to pick up anything. She promised herself that she would apologize to him as soon as she got in to work.
Gracie showered and dressed and ate breakfast in the bright, well-fitted kitchen with its view out over the Manchester ship canal. Yet even the view failed to charm her today. Her flat was in a converted corn mill, its old antecedents clearly visible in its bare, minimalistic brick walls and high ceilings. She’d bought it with a huge mortgage, and had loved it from day one.
Yesterday’s post mocked her from the kitchen table, where she’d left the letters in the small hours of this morning. Divorce papers. So, finally, it had come down to this. Lorcan wanted rid of her, wanted to make it all legal and above board.
Probably – and she felt another little stab of unease, a little niggle of something suspiciously like genuine pain – probably he had found someone else. After all, he was a good-looking man. And there he was, in her mind. Lorcan Connolly. Black, close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes that skewered you where you stood, a mouth like a gin trap. Six feet four inches of Alpha male who looked like he could get physical – in the bedroom or out of it – without any trouble at all.
Stop it, she told herself. You made your choice. You walked away.
Ancient messes.
She wasn’t going to think about them now. She pushed them to the back of her mind and took the lift down to the secure underground car park.
Gracie loved her car. It was a smooth, powerful beast, the silver Mercedes SLK-Class roadster, and she steered it effortlessly through the traffic, watching out for manic cyclists and distracted Christmas-shopping pedestrians with iPods stuck in their ears, meandering across roads strewn with multicoloured Christmas light displays with barely a glance at the traffic. She cut all thoughts of trouble out of her brain and hummed along with ‘Addicted to Love’ on her bass-heavy sound system, safe in her luxurious cocoon. Warm, too. Heated seats. Outside it was frosty-cold, with a pink-tinted sky up ahead. They were forecasting snow and Gracie thought that for once they’d got it right. The sky looked odd.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, she thought. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.
A white Christmas. How romantic.
Oh yeah? This from a woman who just got divorce papers?
Shit. Why did she have to keep thinking about that?
She heard a siren long before she saw the fire engine in the rear-view mirror; cars behind her were edging in to the kerb to let it pass. She did the same, nosing the Mercedes in as far as she could. The huge red Dennis, lights flashing, siren blaring, eased past the long line of cars, then whipped through the red light up ahead.
Going the same way as Gracie.
The lights changed, traffic started moving again. The sun was a golden ball hanging low in the crystal-blue sky to her left.
Gracie’s gut tightened.
Hold on. Ahead was where the sky was lit up so peculiarly. Not to the left. That wasn’t the sun that was . . . a pretty big fire. There was a plume of black smoke spiralling up, and now another fire engine was coming through, everyone easing out of the way, Gracie too; and that ominous pink light was still there in the sky. Someone had a real mother-fucker of a fire going on somewhere.
Gracie got closer and closer to her destination, and now she could see the front of Doyles casino. Her heart leapt into her throat and her hands clenched on the steering wheel. She stared in disbelief. The engines were there, firemen were unravelling hoses, shouting at each other. People were running, yelling; others just stood and stared. And the frontage . . . my God, the frontage was on fire.
Later on, Gracie had no memory of actually stopping the car. All she knew was that she was unsnapping her seat belt and throwing herself out of her seat, then running hell-for-leather across the road to where the firemen were milling around, and the only thought in her head was oh my God, where’s Brynn?
Brynn lived in the flat over the casino, alone. She half staggered up the middle of the road, cars honking as they swerved and came to a halt, a policeman there, waving cars back. Gracie just stood there; she could feel the heat from here, could hear the hungry crackling of the flames. The glitzy ‘Doyles’ sign was gone. A gust of wintery air blew a choking veil of spark-spattered smoke back into the road and her breath caught on a wheezing cough.
The policeman turned and looked at her. ‘Move back, miss, will you? Right back.’
‘I own the place,’ she gasped out. ‘Where’s Brynn? The manager? Is he still in there?’
Jesus, not Brynn, she thought in anguish.
‘I don’t know. Just move back, it’s not safe.’
But Gracie charged forward, hearing the policeman let out a shout behind her.
‘Brynn?’ she yelled at the top of her voice. ‘Brynn, for God’s sake! Are you out here?’
He had to be out here.
The heat was blistering, scorching her skin where she stood, even though she was yards away from it. It was terrifying, the height and spread of the flames. The gouts of water from the hoses seemed to be having no effect at all. She looked at the firemen, and called over to the nearest one.
‘Is the manager out?’ She had to shout to make herself heard above the noise of the flames.
The fireman glanced at her absently, then carried on with what he was doing.
The policeman had followed her. He tapped her shoulder.
‘Miss! Come on now! Out of here!’
‘Fuck off!’ said Gracie, her eyes everywhere, frantic. She could see the front of the upper floor – Brynn’s flat – was well and truly alight. She looked around, her eyes crazy with fear for Brynn, spotted the fireman with the white helmet – the chief, wasn’t that right? She ran over to him, ignoring the policeman who was dogging her footsteps, and, just as she was going to grab the man, roar at him to get Brynn out, for the love of God, he was going to die in there . . . just at that moment she saw him.
Brynn was sitting, slumped over, wrapped in one of those ridiculous silver space-type blankets, at the back of one of the fire engines. There was an oxygen mask clamped over his nose and mouth. His thin face was grimy with soot, and he looked rough, but he was there.
‘Brynn!’ Gracie hollered, and he looked up at her.
The white-helmeted fire officer was standing close by. ‘We’ve got an ambulance coming,’ he told her as she dashed up. ‘Best get him to hospital. Check him over.’
Gracie knelt down beside Brynn and put a hand on his knee. She stared up at him anxiously. ‘You all right?’ she asked.
Brynn nodded. He looked exhausted, hunched there in grubby pyjamas. There was madness all around them, men bellowing orders, the flames roaring, people – for fuck’s sake! – taking pictures of the blaze on their mobiles. The policeman had abandoned Gracie and gone to harangue them instead.
‘What the hell happened?’ she asked Brynn.
Brynn moved the mask away from his face.
‘I came down . . .’ He paused, and coughed hard. ‘. . . I heard something at the front of the building about an hour ago. Woke me up. I came down, and got the shock of my life. The outer door was well alight. It didn’t set off the sprinklers straight away, it wasn’t close enough to the lobby for that.’ He stopped speaking again, coughed, drew in a whooping breath. ‘I got the fire extinguisher out and sprayed it from inside, but it was too fierce, I had . . . had to leave it. Came out the back way.’ He stuck the mask back over his face, shaking his head.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gracie, patting his knee. His pj’s smelled smoky. Running chillingly through her brain was the thought that if he had not heard that noise at the front door, he would now be upstairs in his flat, asleep and drifting into death as rolling black smoke stole the air from his lungs.
The casino alarms were bellowing, and through the smoke-haze and the orange glow of the flames Gracie could see that the sprinklers were working now inside the building, drenching the lobby, the slots, the tables, everything. She stood up and looked at the wrecked building and felt a spasm of real pain. There was going to be a lot of damage. It was going to take a long time before they could resume business. Thank Christ for insurance.
‘What could have set it off?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Any idea?’
‘Not the bloody foggiest,’ said Brynn. ‘Electrical fault’s my best guess. Something blew. They’ll look into it.’ He coughed again, long and hard.
There was an ambulance nudging its way towards them now down the packed street, siren wailing.
Gracie stood up and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Think that’s our lift,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to come too,’ said Brynn, getting to his feet and standing there swaying like someone caught out in a gale. ‘They’ll want to talk to you here.’
‘Of course I’ll come too,’ said Gracie. ‘I’ll leave my details with the chief fire officer, and he can pass it to anyone else who wants it. And . . . Brynn . . .?’
He swayed and Gracie found herself putting an arm around his thin shoulders, half supporting his slight weight against her.
