‘How did Nigel find out what Dolly did for a living?’ asked Annie.
Sarah looked blank.
‘If you never kept in touch, how did he find out?’
‘Oh! Nigel found out through an acquaintance. I won’t call him a friend. This man went to places like that, disgusting places, and he said he’d seen Dolly there.’
‘Did Nigel tell your dad that?’
‘Dad was already gone when Nigel found out about her.’
But this was your sister, thought Annie.
She thought of her own sister, Ruthie, who had forgiven her everything, anything, even when she had been beyond all hope of redemption. Ruthie even now would welcome her with open arms, but Annie had no plans to contact her. Better to keep her distance, keep Ruthie safe.
Suddenly there was the sound of a key turning in the lock at the front door. It opened and closed, and then thin repressive little Nigel came into the kitchen. Sarah looked at the floor. Nigel stared straight at Annie.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in his reedy voice.
‘I’m here to see Sarah,’ said Annie. ‘Just for a chat. And to offer my condolences.’
‘You say you’re Dolly’s friend? What were you, another one of those tarts she liked to mix with? I don’t like you coming here. You’ve just come to fish about in things that don’t concern you.’
‘Dolly’s death concerns me,’ Annie replied. ‘I heard your dad was a bit of a bastard, that right? Mistreated Dolly?’
Nigel looked like his head was going to explode and blow clean off his narrow sloping shoulders. His face went brick-red and his whole body tensed.
‘Get out!’ he shouted.
Annie stood up, dwarfing Nigel by a foot.
‘Good of you both to turn up for the funeral though,’ she said. ‘Even if she was a tart.’
Nigel puffed himself up like a toad. ‘We went to the funeral out of respect for the dead, but I’m telling you right now – a woman like that? She was no sister of mine.’
80
Tony drove her back to Holland Park. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. In years past the silence between them had been companionable, but today it was charged with stifled aggression. Yet she supposed she was safe with Tony; Max had told him to behave, and he would. She hoped.
She couldn’t even be sure of Max, not now. He’d believed what he’d been told about her, and he seemed to believe it still. At any moment he could turn on her, and if he did, she was finished. She’d suspected he was having an affair, but she’d been miles off. In fact he’d been tracking Gina Barolli down, and Gina had broken the Mafia code, betrayed her brother. Why? Annie wondered, and then she thought of Constantine as he was these days, and thought that she might know the answer to that.
Tony pulled up outside the house, got out of the driving seat, opened her door. Looked the other way while she got out.
‘Tone?’ Annie said when he was about to get back behind the wheel without even saying goodbye.
He paused. Cocked an eyebrow, waited.
‘Our tame coppers – you said you were going to talk to them. Anything? I got Jackie on it too, by the way. And he’s turned up nothing.’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. They ain’t heard a thing.’
‘Right. Tone…?’
‘What now?’
‘None of it’s true. I’ve told Max and now I’m telling you. None of it.’
His expression didn’t change. He didn’t believe her.
Annie let out a sigh. ‘Come tomorrow at one, OK?’
Tony nodded, got back behind the wheel, and drove away.
Annie deliberately didn’t set the alarm that night. If he was going to come, if they were ever to get past this, then bring it on: she’d risk his rage, she’d take that chance. But Max didn’t show.
To cheer herself up she spent the next day indulging in some retail therapy. It was Saturday and she could have used some company after this grim week. She could have met up with Ellie, if only Ellie hadn’t decided that she was too dangerous to talk to. So she kicked her heels up and down Bond Street and then went home alone with a silent Tony at the wheel and sat in solitary confinement into the evening before deliberately not setting the alarm again and then going to bed.
He won’t come, she thought miserably. He’s done with me. All right, so he’s keeping me safe – for now – for old times’ sake, but he won’t come again. He’s had enough.
And then, at about one in the morning, she woke up, switched on the bedside light, and he was there.
‘You didn’t set the alarm again,’ said Max, rising from the chair in the corner of the room and coming over to the bed.
‘Didn’t I?’ asked Annie, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning.
‘Careless.’
‘Yeah. Wasn’t it.’
‘So get the fuck on with it. Go on with what you were saying,’ he said.
Annie frowned. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Don’t play dumb. You were going to tell me, Scheherazade, about your first visit to that shit Constantine.’
‘Oh. That.’
‘Yeah, that.’ He sat down on the side of the king-sized bed and stared at her, sitting there all rumpled from sleep with her hair all over the place and the thousand-thread-count sheets pulled up to her chin. ‘So come on. Let’s see how good a storyteller you really are. What happened then?’
‘Max, I’m tired.’
‘Tough. Tell me what happened next, and by Christ you’d better make it good.’
81
Annie drew in a breath. It made her rib ache like a bastard, and she pulled the sheet higher – no way did she want him glimpsing the strapping and the bruises around her middle and thinking she was going for the sympathy vote, playing the poor-little-wounded-wifey card.
‘All right. I’ll tell you. Alberto took me up to the Scottish Highlands that first time. It was January 1989. Five years ago. He chartered a private flight out of the heliport. Sometimes we flew straight to the castle…’
‘A castle,’ said Max. ‘That bastard never did stint himself, did he.’
Annie went on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Sometimes I stayed in a house outside Edinburgh. We had to be careful. We were always watching, making sure no one joined up the dots.’
Max’s eyes were intent on her face. ‘Yeah, me included, right? What was it like, this castle?’
‘The locals called it the Mouth of Hades. It’s an actual castle. It’s got a big tower – battlements, don’t they call them? Yeah, battlements. There’s a courtyard in the centre, and a helipad. Big steep stone sides to the place. On one side, there’s nothing beneath it but sea. Two hundred feet down, a sheer drop to the water. It looks grim.’
‘Go on then. You got there, then what?’
‘The housekeeper met us, Mrs McAllister. Took me up to this room in the tower, through all these old stone passageways with tapestries and suits of armour. And then in the evening…’
Annie stopped talking, her eyes on Max’s face.
‘Go the fuck on. What then? You met up with him and fucked his brains out? Yes?’
Annie shook her head. ‘God’s sake, Max, will you listen? Mrs McAllister took me into this dining hall. Alberto had made himself scarce. And yeah, that’s when I saw Constantine. That’s when I knew he was alive.’
Max said nothing. He just sat there, arms folded, face set in angry lines.
‘Five years ago! And you know what? He was pretty much unchanged. Or at least he seemed to be.’ Annie could see Constantine in her mind’s eye. Back then he had still been the Silver Fox, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped. There was still the mane of startling white hair, those piercing blue eyes. A few more wrinkles around the eyes. No silver-grey Savile Row suit, though: now he wore slacks, and an open-necked shirt.