Ruthless (22 page)

50

‘Oh, fuck, it’s you,’ said Kath the next day when she found Annie standing on her doorstep.

She turned without a word and led the way up the hall. Annie closed the front door behind her and followed her cousin’s great wallowing arse into the kitchen. Once there, Kath, who was wearing a deeply unflattering navy shell suit and greyish-white T-shirt, collapsed on a chair by the table as if the effort of opening her own front door had exhausted her. She picked up a smouldering fag from an ashtray.

Annie looked around the kitchen. Nothing ever changed here. The place was the same tip it had always been, dirty washing piled on the floor instead of in the laundry basket, unwashed cups and plates littering the draining board and filling the grubby sink. The table awash with debris from meals, toast-crumbs, a paper blazoned with the headline PIPER ALPHA TRAGEDY, dog-eared magazines and chunks of half-eaten pizza.

‘Hi,’ said the eighteen-year-old girl leaning against the sink. She was fair-haired, hazel-eyed and showing a big toothy overbite, dressed in skinny hipster jeans and a pink T-shirt.

‘Hiya, Molly,’ said Annie.

Her eyes drifted to the young man standing beside his sister. Jimmy Junior was twenty-one, and while his sister was plain and a bit goofy-looking like her mother, Junior favoured his father. He had close-cropped dirty-blond hair and a face any sane woman would fall for. His eyes were a stunning clear blue, vivid as Sri Lankan sapphires.

Annie’d always liked Junior, she’d put him forward for the bar job at the Shalimar.
I have a weakness for good looks,
she thought, and knew it to be true. But it was more than that with Junior. He was her blood. Added to that, he was a hard worker, and he had charm.

‘Hi, Junior,’ Annie greeted him.

He nodded.

‘What is it this time?’ asked Kath.

Annie turned to her cousin. Once briefly pretty in her youth, Kath had settled into her mid-forties as if she belonged there, with a disastrous poodle perm on her yellow-grey hair. Her face was red and her breath was wheezy. Annie knew Kath hated her and she also suspected that Kath bore a grudge against her over the disappearance of Jimmy Senior.

‘There’s been some stuff going down, I just wanted to tell you,’ said Annie.

‘What stuff?’ asked Jimmy Junior.

Annie looked at him. She wondered what Kath had told the kids about their father. Had she told them he’d once been Max Carter’s number one man, trusted and revered? Or had she told them the real, painful truth?

Annie pulled out a chair. She didn’t dust it off, although it took an effort of will to resist the temptation. She sat down, took a breath. And told her cousin and her cousin’s children about the intruder – leaving out the shooting and who she believed the victim to be – and the bomb, and the man who had tried to attack Layla.

‘Holy
crap
,’ said Molly when Annie finished speaking.

‘I think you should all clear out for a while,’ finished Annie.

‘So
that’s
why Layla’s at the club with all that muscle hanging around,’ said Junior.

Annie didn’t reply to that.

‘I don’t run,’ he said defiantly. ‘Not from nobody.’

Annie looked to Kath, then Molly. ‘I’m here to let you know, that’s all.
I
think you’d be well advised to disappear, take a holiday, tell no one where you’re going. Because they’ve had a serious pop at me, and at Layla too. There’s no telling where they intend to stop. And you’re family.’

‘And if we don’t?’ asked Molly.

Junior crossed his arms over his well-muscled middle. ‘Fuck ’em. Let ’em come.’

Annie stood up. ‘Look – I’m telling you, you should go. Talk to Steve, there’s a safe house waiting.’

‘And if we don’t?’ asked Junior.

‘If you
don’t
. . . well, keep your eyes open. Whoever they are, they’re not messing about.’

Tony drove her back to Holland Park. She hadn’t been indoors ten minutes when the doorbell rang. She poked her head out of the study door, expecting to see Rosa letting someone in. Instead she saw Bri doing the honours.

Instantly she recognized black-haired Sandor, big as a bear as he lumbered inside. He was scanning the interior, checking everything was clear. Then Alberto Barolli stepped into the hall, two more men coming in behind him, covering his back.

Annie leaned against the door frame and grinned with delight. ‘Shit!’ she said. ‘The eagle really
has
landed.’

‘Hiya, Stepmom,’ said Alberto, striding across to give her a hug. ‘You OK here? I came as soon as I could.’

‘I’m fine. There’s been some trouble, though.’

Alberto glanced around. ‘Layla here?’

‘No, I thought she’d be safer elsewhere.’ She told him about Ellie’s place.

‘I’d like to see her, I’ll go today.’

‘She’d like that.’ Annie said it automatically, though she doubted her own words. Layla had been awkward around Alberto all through her teenage years. Attending school in England, she had managed to duck out of any significant contact with him. Teenage girls were funny.

When
she
had been a teenager . . . Annie thought back and almost cringed with the shame of it. God, she had been
obsessed
with Max. She’d hung around wherever she’d thought he’d show up. She’d literally thrown herself at him. Annie was convinced that Layla’d had a similarly massive crush on Alberto. And she wondered whether her daughter nursed an infatuation for her glamorous and dangerous ‘stepbrother’ even now.

‘Look, I’m going to get washed up, then we’ll talk, OK?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Annie, and she watched him go up the stairs to his usual room, watched the heavies disperse – and felt comforted.

51

Almost despite herself, Layla was beginning to get quite comfy at the club. Already Precious – or ‘the Glamazon’ as Layla secretly thought of her – had taken to coming into her room and sitting on the bed with her, just chatting. They had a connection: they’d ‘clicked’ straight away.

She was quickly learning a new respect for the girls who worked here. They weren’t stupid, as she’d previously suspected. They weren’t slappers, either. Circumstances, she found, had pushed them into this line of work. And the pay, as Precious so rightly said, was tops.

‘We get all our friends – only the pretty ones, management doesn’t like dogs in the club – to come in,’ Precious told her. ‘For that, we get ten pounds per girl. They add to the club vibe.’

‘Let me get this straight.’ Layla was outraged at this. ‘You’re saying that, if a girl’s ugly, she’s turned away?’

‘Got it in one.’

‘But that’s . . .’

‘Business,’ said Precious. ‘All our nice-looking mates get free drinks, too.’

Layla squinted at Precious. ‘But aren’t you sort of
prostituting
these girls? Your mates?’

‘In what way? They’re having a great night out, all expenses paid. And they encourage the male punters to buy drinks for us, and for them too, at a hefty mark-up. Everyone’s happy.’

‘And the men sit around ogling them – and you – like prime cuts of beef.’ Layla shuddered.

‘It’s nature,’ smiled Precious. ‘The laws of attraction.’

Layla raised a doubtful eyebrow.

‘And then there’s the podium work,’ Precious went on.

Layla was fascinated, despite herself. It was another world!

‘See, we get a basic wage, but the podium pays an extra seventy pounds per dance. And it’s a hundred pounds per private dance in the VIP rooms. I pull down just under a thousand a week, on average.’

‘
How
much?’ Layla didn’t earn that in a month. ‘And does anyone ever – you know – proposition you, in the club?’

‘Constantly,’ said Precious. ‘Goes with the job.’ There were voices out in the hall. ‘Look, the other girls are in, it’s time you met them, don’t you think? Come on. Let me introduce you.’

Precious led the way out into the hall and along to the dressing room. There were two women in there. They glanced up as Precious came in with Layla.

‘This is China,’ she said. ‘China, meet Layla Carter. Her dad owns the club.’

China couldn’t speak much English. She was tiny and exquisite, with hair like a bolt of black silk, big dark slanted eyes and peachy olive skin.

‘She’s from the Philippines,’ explained Precious. ‘Every penny she earns here, she sends home to her husband and her little girl. She used to be a cleaner, but the pay was lousy.’

Layla thought about that – the reality of being parted from all that was familiar, having to clean other people’s toilets to scrape a living, then the hell of realizing it wasn’t enough, would
never
be enough to feed your loved ones on the other side of the world, and having to do this – table dance for strangers – instead.

‘And this is Destiny,’ said Precious.

‘Hi,’ said Layla, and Destiny smiled. She had sad eyes and seemed quiet, Layla thought.

Destiny looked older than the others, maybe in her mid-thirties, but she was still ravishing. White-blonde and deeply tanned, she looked more Scandinavian than true-blue Brit.

‘They seem nice,’ said Layla when Precious came back to her room later.

Layla was ashamed of it now, but she had prejudged Precious. Prejudged
all
the dancers. She’d thought they must be dense to do a job like this one. But that wasn’t the case. Talking to Precious soon convinced her that there was a pin-sharp brain working away inside that beautiful head.

‘They
are
nice,’ said Precious with a sigh. ‘I feel sorry for China, though. She’ll never get out of this game. She’ll always have to be funding her family.’

‘What about you?’ asked Layla, curious.

‘Me?’ Precious’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, I won’t be in it for much longer. Let me show you something.’

Precious ran off out of the room and returned minutes later clutching a textbook and a large wad of paperwork.

‘What’s this?’ asked Layla, turning the textbook around so that she could read the title.

‘
Clinical Psychology
?’ she read in surprise.

‘I’m studying for my finals, and supporting myself with the dancing,’ said Precious. ‘I’ve covered bereavement counselling, now I’m doing stress management.’

‘My God,’ said Layla, laughing. ‘You’re full of surprises.’

‘I’m doing couple counselling next.’ Precious pulled a face. ‘Maybe Destiny could benefit.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘D’you think she does this for fun?’ Precious got up and gently closed the door. She lowered her voice. ‘She’s got three kids to support. She was stinking rich once, you know. Her husband was a banker, but he lost his job.’

‘That’s tough,’ said Layla. A lot of City jobs had gone down the drain since Black Monday, the previous October. It had hit the market like a tornado, and the fallout had dragged on and on. Fearing for her own job, she could well understand the trauma Destiny’s husband had gone through.

‘It gets tougher,’ said Precious. ‘He was full of it at first. Men are, aren’t they. Their loss, he said. Firms were crying out for his sort of expertise. He’d farm himself out to small companies, give them guidance for shares or a fee.’

‘Sounds a good plan.’

‘Yeah, but meanwhile they’re living off their savings, and he
insists
on carrying on as if he’s still pulling in a fortune in basic plus a hundred grand in bonuses.’

‘Ah.’ Through her accountancy work, Layla had come across this sort of thing all too often. A previously wealthy, powerful man’s inability to accept a lesser reality. It usually led one way: to the bankruptcy court.

‘It seems even he started to wake up in the end. He said they’d sell the house. And the live-in housekeeper-nanny would have to go. And the gym memberships. Destiny agreed to it all. But when she said she’d get a job, he flew into a rage, so she dropped it. He’d handle it, he told her. He’d always managed their money, did she think he was incapable of looking after his family or something? Only the house didn’t fetch nearly as much as they’d expected, and his business didn’t go well, and the rental on their new flat was forever being hiked up by the landlord. But whenever Destiny voiced her concerns, her old man would go into a strop, so in the end she just kept quiet.’

‘Didn’t he take any financial advice?’ asked Layla.

‘Oh, are you kidding? He thought he was Paul Getty, he could turn shit into gold. What would
he
want advice for? After a while the moods dipped even further and he started to sink into depression, lying on the couch all day staring at the TV. Then Destiny got a call from the landlord telling her he hadn’t been paid in months.’

‘Jesus!’

‘So Destiny pulled the kids out of their private schools and put them into local comprehensive. Hubby went crazy, of course. But by this time Destiny’d had a gutful. She said she was going to get a job. She’d been a secretary when they first met – she was his second wife, the trophy wife, the beautiful younger one – and she said she could do that job again. He freaked and accused her of only wanting to get into an office so that she could embark on an affair. Still, she started applying, going for interviews, only she couldn’t land a secretarial job, and the bills were mounting, so she ended up here.’

‘And does he
know
. . .?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Precious heaved a heartfelt sigh. ‘She’s covering the bills, but playing it down as much as she can, telling him she’s waitressing. Because the pay’s so good, she’s been salting a bit of fuck-you money away on the side.’

‘Huh?’

‘Fuck-you money. Haven’t you heard that expression?’

‘No.’

‘It’s for when she decides enough is enough, and she bails.’

‘Will she bail?’

‘Hard to say. She still loves him, but if she’s got any sense, she’ll get out of it. Her life’s a nightmare, the poor cow. He barely even talks to her these days, and she’s starting to suspect he’s being unfaithful. Well, he cheated on his first wife, why wouldn’t he do it to his second?’ Precious shook her head. ‘Me, I’m never getting married. Not ever. I like to steer my own ship. I don’t need some gormless, arrogant git to start grabbing the controls.’