‘Oh! Are you all right? We were told you’d been admitted to hospital. We were worried about you.’
‘I’m fine. Messages?’
‘Messages?’ The girl behind the desk looked puzzled.
‘Yeah, for me.’
‘No, but… you were checked out over an hour ago.’
‘What?’ Annie stared at her blankly.
The girl nodded, referred to her list, then looked up again.
‘He took your things…’
‘Who did?’
‘Yes, it’s right here – he checked you out, said you’d been called away on business, and he paid the bill for your stay. I’m so sorry, haven’t you seen him…?’
‘Who?’
‘Well… Mr Carter, of course. It was Mr Carter.’
Annie wandered out of the hotel and away down the street in a daze. Max is here. And he knows. Everyone knows. Then Jackie Tulliver ambled up.
‘There you are,’ he said, wafting alcohol fumes all over her. He wagged a finger at her. ‘You want to keep me informed, you don’t want to just go wandering off like that. Where you been?’ Jackie’s eyes went up and down her body. ‘And what the fuck? You been in a mud-wrestling contest? What’s all this?’
Annie ignored him; she kept walking.
‘Only, you know, for back-up purposes. It’s always useful, having someone keeping watch.’
Annie kept walking.
Jackie skipped along beside her, his dirty-denim-clad legs struggling to keep pace.
‘You don’t tell me what’s occurring, how am I to know? You been in a fight? You want to take it easy, let me take the strain-’
Annie stopped walking and spun round so suddenly that Jackie almost bowled into her. She grabbed the front of his moth-eaten denim jacket and shook him, hard. Then she stopped. It hurt like fuck, shaking him. And he wasn’t worth the effort, or the pain.
‘Listen,’ she spat out, eyes mad and cold with rage, ‘you fucking lowlife son of a bitch! Let you take the strain? Last time I needed your back-up, you were too busy trying to find an off-licence to give a fuck where I was and what was happening to me. When I was being hijacked by two thugs, where were you? Oh yeah – I saw you, on your way to the offy. So don’t give me any of your ruddy smarm, you little tosser – and don’t give me any of that bullshit about backup. You’re fucking useless, and you just proved it.’
‘Hey! No need to get abusive,’ said Jackie, dusting down the front of his jacket like she’d ruined the line or something.
‘You heard anything about Max being back in town?’ she demanded.
‘What? No.’
He was telling the truth, of course. Jackie Tulliver, who had once known everything that was happening on these streets, now knew nothing because no one included him. After all, what was the point? He really was useless.
‘I don’t know why you’re bein’ mean to me when all I’m doin’ is tryin’ to help you,’ he whined.
‘Shut. Up.’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s any call for that,’ he sulked.
‘What, for telling the truth?’ Annie glared at him. She rummaged in her coat pocket, found a fiver and flung it on to the pavement. ‘There’s what you’re after, right? Some cash to buy the next lot of booze. Well, there it is. Use it and stay the fuck out of my face.’
63
Jackie scuttled away, but not before he’d bent and snatched up the fiver from the ground. Annie watched him go, disgusted. He’d been one of Max’s best, and now look at him – not even the dignity left to argue the toss with her. Not even the dignity left to refuse the money, tell her where to stick it. If he’d done that, she might have thought there was some hope for him. But he hadn’t.
She walked on, with no idea where she was going to go or what she was going to do. Her broken rib and bruised body ached with every step. Her head ached too. People passed her on the pavements and the traffic roared through her throbbing brain like a nightmare. Once, a place of refuge would have been obvious: Dolly’s. But not now, not any more.
He knows.
The thought pinged into her brain and lodged there like a cold metal spike, before sinking to the pit of her stomach and stabbing her with icy dread.
Oh Christ, it’s true. He knows.
A two-stroke motorbike rushed past, the blank black helmet turning her way. Then bike and rider roared off, weaving in and out of the traffic up ahead. A white van pulled into the kerb and two men in navy boiler suits got out. Annie thought they were going to go into the audio shop she was passing in front of, and she went to step around them. They stepped in front of her. She stepped aside again. They blocked her way. Suddenly she thought of Ellie’s place, wrecked.
Six men in boiler suits, hadn’t someone told her that?
Yeah. They had.
Annie stopped walking. Oh Jesus, please, not again. She looked from one to the other of the men, total strangers to her.
‘Look…’ she said, dry-mouthed, thinking that she couldn’t take another beating, she just couldn’t.
‘Get in the front,’ said one of them.
‘Wait…’ said Annie.
He took her arm and pulled her out into the traffic, then when there was a gap in the flow he opened the passenger-side door and pushed her oh so gently but still very firmly inside the front of the van. He got in, and the driver did too, neatly pinning her between them. No knives in evidence this time, but these were hard men, people who wouldn’t think twice about using force if they had to.
‘Listen, I don’t know what this is about, but you’ve got the wrong person,’ she said quickly. ‘You don’t want to do this. Believe me. I have friends. Dangerous friends.’
They didn’t answer.
Annie gulped as the driver started the van and steered it out into the traffic. ‘Wait! It’s true, what I’m telling you. You’ll be sorry you did this.’
Neither one of them answered.
Annie fell silent, her heart hammering.
There was nothing else to say.
64
They drove her to the East End. As they wove through the streets she recognized the area and thought: No, it can’t be. Can it? But they carried on, and soon she knew the road, she knew the house, she recognized the little Victorian terrace.
Oh shit.
The house had a powder-blue door and a teensy front garden with a chequered pathway leading up to it. She’d walked up it in the past, maybe a thousand times. The driver parked the van, and the other one took her arm. With the same gentle firmness he’d employed before, he helped her down from the van, then he closed the door and took her round to the pavement. The driver opened the blue-painted wrought-iron gate, and together they escorted her up the pathway to the house.
The driver rang the bell.
Presently, the door opened and the squat bulk of Steve Taylor stood there. He looked at her, briefly took in her mud-stained state, then he looked at the two men and held the door wide. With nowhere else to go, Annie stepped into the entrance hall of Queenie Carter’s old domain. The house was empty – it had been empty for years – but for a big table and twelve chairs upstairs in the front bedroom, where Max and her and all the boys had once met up and discussed business.
Steve went on upstairs, and the driver nudged Annie that way too. She went up, feeling as if she was ascending the gallows.
He knows, he knows, repeated that panicky little voice in her brain.
Someone had done the unthinkable, broken the code of silence. But who, for God’s sake?
The driver and the other one came up too, hard on her heels so she had nowhere to run. When Steve reached the landing, he knocked on the first closed door he came to, and then pushed it open. He stood aside, so that Annie could enter first.