‘We have a younger brother, Sandy.’
Then why isn’t he here too? wondered Annie. It was like drawing teeth, trying to get a word out of them. ‘Couldn’t he come?’
‘He’s in a home,’ said Sarah. ‘And Dick’s in New Zealand.’
‘And your parents…?’ asked Annie, thinking of the father – that bastard.
‘Mum passed last year. Dad died years ago. An accident on the railway.’
‘He worked on the railways? I never knew that.’
‘Oh yes. Started out in the signal boxes but then he went on to be a wheeltapper, and a shunter.’
That meant precisely nothing to Annie. ‘Shunter? What’s that?’
‘They connect the engines to the carriages. Dad’s accident was about five years after Dolly left home,’ said Nigel accusingly, as if Dolly being there could have prevented it.
‘What happened?’ asked Annie.
They looked at her in dual disapproval. They didn’t like giving out personal information, or any damned information at all, she could see that; but fuck it and fuck them, she wanted to know.
‘He was crushed,’ said Nigel. ‘By one of the engines. It was a terrible accident. People don’t realize how dangerous it can be, working on the railways. Accidents happen all the time.’
Or more likely it was an act of God, thought Annie, thinking of the dirty old goat mauling Dolly about.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she lied. People were still passing by, staring at her. Hunter was right. She had to be careful.
Nigel and Sarah both nodded morosely, and stood there looking at the grave.
‘Now Dolly’s with Dad,’ said Nigel after a pause. ‘In heaven. If she repented of her sins before she died.’
A shiver went through Sarah, so intense that Annie stared, wondering if the woman was going to collapse, fall right into the open grave and land, thunk, on her sister’s coffin.
‘Yeah,’ she said, thinking that Dolly was bound for heaven for sure.
But the father…?
That old bastard was cooking over a low light in hell, with Satan turning the spit. And a fucking good job, too.
76
They told Annie there would be a wake – cake and sandwiches and cups of tea, nothing fancy – back at Sarah’s place, and she would be welcome to come if she wanted. She didn’t think she wanted to spend one more second in this joyless pair’s company, but she took the address anyway.
Then she went back along the gravel walkway toward the lychgate. A large crowd of mourners had gathered there. She looked around for Ellie, but she seemed to have gone. She felt a shudder, thinking of Dolly lying in the cold earth, alone. Soon the gravediggers would come and fill in the hole and that would be it; Dolly would be gone forever.
Feeling apprehensive after that little tussle with the group near the grave, she walked on, head held high, but at the back of her mind was the kicking she’d got off Gary’s thugs, the unrelenting soreness of her broken rib, and she thought, I don’t want any more of that. She had thought Max and his boys had it in for her, for sure; but the fact that the bad news about her had already reached the wider population was chilling. She made a mental note to dig out her can of Mace when she got home. It wasn’t much, but it was something, at least.
Maybe she wouldn’t have the chance to get home and do that, though. The mob by the gate turned and watched her coming, their eyes unfriendly.
Christ, I could be in real trouble here.
Her footsteps slowed and finally she stopped walking. Then there was movement closer to her, all around her, and she turned, startled. She had been so focused on a possible threat at the lychgate that she’d missed another. Tony had appeared on one side of her, and Steve came up in front of her. Her head whipped round and she started to turn further, but there was Chris, grim-faced, right behind her. No Gary. There was that to be thankful for, she supposed.
Oh fuck…
Her heart lodging in her throat, she spun back round to the front and there was Max, standing right beside her like a brick wall and looking at her blank-faced.
She was closed in.
She was trapped.
Please no, not again, please, please…
‘Just keep walking,’ said Max.
What else could she do? She had four big men surrounding her and an angry mob waiting for her at the gate. Her stomach clenched with terror, she did as he said. No good making a break for it, they’d catch her easily. And frightened though she was, she wasn’t about to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing that.
She kept her head up, and somehow got her trembling legs to move forward. As she moved, so did the four men surrounding her. As one body, they walked to the lychgate, and the now silent, watchful crowd parted in silence to let them pass.
The four of them walked her right to the car, a black Jag. It gave her a pang, just to see it. This had once been her car, the car Tony had chauffeured her about in, but it had passed to Dolly. Now Dolly wouldn’t use it any more. Tony got behind the wheel. Once, back in the day, Tony had been the jockey, the wheelman on heists pulled by the Carter gang; he could do things with a car that would make your eyes water. Turn the damned thing on a sixpence. Chris slid into the front passenger seat. Steve got in the back, and Annie was pushed in after him; then Max got in. And it was then it hit Annie, the truth; that her husband had just rescued her, put a steel wall around her to get her out of the church grounds and away.
‘Max-’ she said, turning toward him.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said.
‘Max-’
‘I said, shut up.’
And having said that, he turned away from her and stared out of the window, jaw set.
Tony gunned the engine and drove them back to Holland Park.
She shut up. Tony drove on, through the steadily hardening rain. When the car pulled up outside her house in Holland Park and Max dragged her out, she thought maybe he’d go and leave her there. But he didn’t get back in. He slammed the door shut, and the other three men shot off in the Jag.
‘Come the fuck on then,’ he said, and grabbed her arm and hauled her up to the steps to the big imposing navy-blue doors of home.
77
Once inside, Annie went on unsteady legs across the hall and into the drawing room. She peeled off her coat and dropped it on to the carpet, then slumped down on a Knole sofa and put her head in her hands.
‘Shit,’ she said with feeling.
Max was pacing about again. Suddenly, he stopped in front of her.
‘Oh, you think those at the church were scary? You ain’t seen fuck-all yet. What in the name of…’
His words trailed away and he started his restless pacing again. Not a good sign, she knew that. Then he was back in front of her. ‘You low-life cow. I don’t know why I bothered to do that. I must be off my fucking head. You’ve been cheating on me with that flash Yankee bastard-’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Max’s eyes were blazing. ‘You admitted you’ve been seeing him. What, you been playing tiddlywinks or something? Or chess like in that film? Or have you been doing what we all know you’ve been doing? That is, dancing the horizontal tango with that American prick.’
Annie sat there, head bowed. ‘You said you wanted a divorce,’ she said slowly.
‘What?’
‘A divorce. That’s what you said. So what the fuck? What’s the use of all this? You want a divorce, you got one. Simple as that.’