Betrayed (29 page)

‘Fuck off, before I smash your head off the end of that bar.’ Jimmy spat the words without turning.

Silence.

‘You’re fucked, Jimmy!’ Rosie said. ‘The game’s a bogey.’

Deadly silence. Rosie adjusted her feet in readiness in case he lashed out. Sweat stung the back of her neck. Jimmy kept staring straight ahead, his face grey, nostrils flaring a little as he tried to control his breathing. So far, no sore face, Rosie thought. She took a short breath.

‘Cops found the bank card in Andy Brown’s wallet, the baker who had the shit beaten out of him for having an affair with McGregor’s wife.’ She paused for effect. ‘You knew that too, didn’t you?’ She was really chancing it now.

Rosie watched the muscle in his jaw tense and his Adam’s apple bobble as he swallowed. Any minute now. She hoped Adrian was nearby. Then it happened too fast – even for Adrian. Jimmy grabbed hold of her by the lapels of her blouse and swung her around, lifting her off her feet and slamming her hard against the wall opposite the bar. He
gripped the blouse so hard Rosie heard it rip somewhere at the seams and for a split second she thought he was going to headbutt her.

‘I should waste your fucking face, you bitch,’ Jimmy snarled. ‘Listen. I know who you are. And if you’ve got anything other than shit for brains you’ll walk out of here now and get a fucking plane out of this town. Because as of now you’re dead meat. You have no idea who you are messing with.’

‘Yes I do, Jimmy,’ Rosie managed to say. Then she couldn’t stop herself. ‘I know everything. You can smash my face, but you’ll still be fucked. It’s over. Eddie’s finished. And so are you, unless you find a way out.’

Rosie saw something like panic flicker across his eyes. Sweat broke out on his top lip. He pushed his tattooed forearm under her chin and she heard her head crack against the wall, making her dizzy for a second. Then suddenly, Jimmy buckled from a blow to his kidneys. Adrian. But Jimmy quickly swivelled around and landed an instinctive punch that burst Adrian’s lip. For a second there was a look of anger and indignation on Adrian’s face, then he unleashed a flurry of punches that knocked Jimmy three or four paces away, along the bar towards the toilet. Jimmy tried to fight back but he looked stunned, as he stumbled backwards through the swing bathroom door and disappeared, Adrian following, punching him all the way inside.

The barman came dashing from behind the counter and rushed to Rosie.

‘I get the
policia
,’ he said, his voice panicky. ‘
Por favor
. Sit here.’

‘No police, please. I’m okay.’ Rosie stayed standing, her hands trembling.

As she got her breath back, the bathroom door opened and Adrian came out, wiping blood from the side of his mouth.

‘Are you all right, Rosie?’

‘Yes. I’m okay. You?’ Adrian shrugged, surprised at the question. ‘Of course. Is nothing.’

‘Is he … What’s he doing?’

Adrian touched his burst lip with a paper towel.

‘He is washing his face. He is calmer now. He won’t attack you. Is okay.’

Rosie composed herself as the bathroom door slowly opened and Jimmy emerged, wiping blood from his lip, his eye already a little swollen. He squared his shoulders and came towards her.

‘Whoever you are, you’re as good as dead. You should know that,’ he said again, blood trickling from his lip as he stood facing her.

‘Jimmy,’ Rosie said. ‘Eddie McGregor raped your girlfriend. Wendy’s got courage – more balls than you – she ran away to save you from going after him. That’s the kind of girl she is.’

He said nothing, but the hardness had gone out of his eyes and he looked almost vulnerable. Rosie had stopped shaking and was on fire now, confident with Adrian at her back. She leaned towards him and whispered.

‘You know what? You go back to Eddie and your UVF thugs and your coke run. You’ll not see Wendy for the next twenty years because you’ll be banged up for a double murder. You’ve got no options left, unless you listen to me.’

‘Fuck off.’ He turned to walk away.

‘Wendy knows where I am, Jimmy. They know how to get me. This is your only way out,’ Rosie called after him.

He stopped in the doorway of the bar, and for a moment Rosie thought he was going to turn around. But he didn’t, and she watched as he crossed the road and disappeared from view.

She went into the toilet and splashed cold water on her face, examining the blotches on her neck and chest where Jimmy had grabbed her. There was the start of a bruise on her collarbone from the sheer force he’d used. Her linen shirt had a little tear at the shoulder. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking at her pale blue eyes in the mirror, letting it sink in that this time, her rush of blood to the head might have blown the entire operation. Shit. McGuire would go nuts. Reckless, he would call it, and she had to agree, though she could defend it by pointing out the times when her recklessness had broken massive stories
and gave him a front page he could brag about. She bit the inside of her jaw. She wouldn’t tell McGuire, not yet.

She left the cafe after reassuring the barman that there was no problem and pleading with him not to call the police. She and Adrian crossed the street and went back to the place where Javier and Garcia waited. Javier got to his feet when he saw her come in.

‘I can see by the look on your face it didn’t go well.’ He touched her chin and gently pulled her face to one side. ‘What the fuck? The
coño
got rough?’ He glared at Adrian.

Rosie took his hand away.

‘I’m okay. I bruise easily. It all happened so fast. He grabbed me a bit, that’s all, and shoved me against the wall. But Adrian was on him in a second.’ She touched Adrian’s arm. ‘Jimmy’s got a black eye and a burst lip to take back to Eddie.’

‘Shit!’ Javier said, turning to Garcia and speaking in Spanish.

‘
Hijo de puta
!’ Garcia replied, shaking his head. The sonof-a-bitch part Rosie understood, but she couldn’t make out what else Garcia was saying to Javier.

‘Juan is not happy,’ Javier said.

‘That makes two of us,’ Rosie said, deadpan. ‘And
I’ve
got a tear in my new shirt.’

‘This could cause all sorts of problems,’ Javier said.

‘I know, Javier. I’m well aware of that. I knew that before I even made the approach, but I thought it was worth doing.’
She shrugged and sat down, suddenly feeling a wave of emotion. Just a bit of reaction to the shock, she told herself. Don’t even think about bursting into tears in front of this cop. ‘Let’s have a coffee and put our heads together.’

She wished Javier wouldn’t look at her that way. He knew her well enough to see through the bravado, but right now she didn’t need his sympathy.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she said to him, helping herself.

He flicked the lighter and his fingers brushed intentionally against her jawline.

‘You okay, crazy woman?’

Rosie drew deeply on the cigarette and held the smoke before letting it out in a long, slow stream as she smiled at him with her eyes.

‘So,’ she said eventually. ‘Let’s work out our next move.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Jimmy was glad there was no one he knew hanging around the foyer when he arrived back at the hotel. He wanted to shower and change before he had to start explaining his black eye to people. He also needed some time to himself to digest what had happened in the last couple of hours. He had to calm down and start thinking straight, because right now he was wired to the moon.

He stood in the shower letting the cold water lash onto his bruised face, his body aching at the thought of Wendy’s touch. All he could see when he closed his eyes was the look on her face when he’d said he would stand by her if she went to the police about Eddie. Eventually, he came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, went across to the dressing table and pulled a cigarette out of the packet. He lit it and stood for a moment gazing at his reflection in the mirror, his toned body rippling with muscles under the tattoos he’d picked up over the years. His hand automatically went to the newest one emblazoned at
the side of his stomach just above his hipbone. Two hands brandishing daggers, an English rose and skull below, with the red hand of Ulster in the middle. Above it, framed in a ribbon like a family motto, the declaration,
There Will Be No Surrender
. It was his most recent, done by a former Loyalist prisoner in Belfast the morning after he celebrated taking the oath. It signalled his arrival, and as he drew deeply on his cigarette, he remembered how proud he’d been when he came home. His other tattoos were the badge of everything he cared about. On his forearm,
Rangers Forever
, with the club crest, and the letters
UVF
. And above them all on his bicep, a red heart with a knife through it, dripping blood with the word
Mother
. Christ! She’d have broken her heart the day he’d come back from Belfast after being sworn in. But she would have said nothing, just quietly worked and cooked and pretended it didn’t matter. She just didn’t understand, that was her problem.

Jimmy walked out to the balcony and sat down, smoking and staring out across the city as the church bells tolled. The afternoon heat rose in waves across the terracotta rooftops and beyond where the ancient buildings were barely visible in the haze. It was a beautiful city. He thought of Wendy and how he would have got such a kick just walking around this place with her on his arm, getting lost in the winding streets, stopping in bars and cafes, having a laugh at the buskers or the street performers, the two of them wrapped up in each other like the other couples he’d
watched. But that couldn’t happen. They would never have a life like that. His stomach sank at the realisation that it was over. He’d never see her again – he had to make that decision now and be done with it. If she hadn’t run away, if she’d stayed in Glasgow, maybe they could have worked it out. If she’d decided she couldn’t go to the police about Eddie raping her, he’d have spent the rest of his life trying to do everything to make her forget. But she ran away from him, and worse than that, when she needed someone, it was Liz she turned to and not him. He thought about that bitch reporter. She had some balls right enough, facing him down like that. She obviously didn’t know his reputation. For all of her smartarse bastardness he admired her guts. That stuff about the bank card. Where the hell did that come from? If the reporter was being straight, that meant the card could only have come from one person – Donna. He had seen Eddie put it in his pocket at the quarry. But what could he do now? He couldn’t risk telling Eddie this, or he’d have to tell him everything. And for all he knew, maybe Eddie was double-crossing them all. How did he know Eddie didn’t pass the card on to the cops himself? What if Eddie was setting him and Mitch up, sacrificing them to the cops? That’s what grasses did. Maybe he was on the take from the cops, had been for years, informing them and being allowed to operate. It was all entirely possible. He told himself he was just being paranoid.

And again, the image of Wendy’s face. What the reporter
had said about her having more courage than him had hit a raw nerve. Maybe that was true. Because the bottom line was that Wendy had run away from him because of what Eddie did to her, and to stop him from going for Eddie as she knew he would. The only person who was innocent in all of this was her. Just like his mother had been all those years ago when his father went to jail for the bombing. And for years after that, when the cops used to burst in and tear up the house in the middle of the night looking for weapons, his mum had said nothing, protected her man, even if she knew he was guilty. She protected Jimmy too when he was a frightened little boy. She’d put her arms around him as he’d buried his head in her skirt, crying as the cops ripped up his bedroom. She was braver than anyone, his mum. Like Wendy. But the problem was Wendy had talked to this fucking reporter, and the cops. She was dead meat now and there was fuck all he could do about it. Eventually it would come out that Wendy and Liz had grassed and they’d get bumped off. He felt sick to his stomach. He thought of his da and how he’d love to be able to say to him that he’d seen Wendy and what she had suggested. But it was stupid to even contemplate that. His father would be raging at the very idea that he’d met with someone who was about to grass them up. What if he’d been seen? What if some of the Rangers fans out for a walk saw him going into the flat? He touched his face, still hot and tender. He’d have to come up with a good explanation
for this. He flicked his fag end off the balcony and went back inside.

‘Fuck happened to you?’ Mitch looked up, grinning. ‘I’d like to see the other guy.’

Jimmy gave him a look and pulled up a chair at the cafe outside the hotel. Eddie watched him intently and raised his eyebrows.

‘So? What’s with the sore face?’ Eddie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Must have been somebody who doesn’t know you can’t take a pop at Jimmy Dunlop.’

Jimmy shifted in his seat and looked away.

‘Yeah. Well. He knows now.’

‘What happened? You get jumped?’ Eddie asked, looking straight at him. ‘Thought you were going to bed after we left you last night.’

Jimmy shrugged, trying to look blasé.

‘I was. But I met this wee bird from Liverpool in a bar on the way back to the hotel. She asked me to come up and meet her for a coffee today at her flat. She lives here.’

‘So did her man come in while you had her bent over the couch?’ Mitch sniggered.

Jimmy rolled his eyes. ‘Something like that.’ He shook his head. ‘She didn’t tell me she had a boyfriend.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Eddie said. ‘That’s why you’re better going to the whorehouses. You pay your money and leave with a
smile on your face – not a fucking black eye. And you don’t have to fight your way out.’

‘Aye. Well. You might have a point there. I’ll know the next time.’ Jimmy touched his face. ‘And so will the fucker who did this.’

‘So, did you not get your leg over?’ Mitch sneered.

‘Nah. I had to take my frustration out on the guy. And I’ve just had a very long, cold shower.’