Ruthless Girl: An absolutely gripping, gritty crime thriller

by Emma Tallon

  Ruthless Girl

  An absolutely gripping, gritty crime thriller

  Emma Tallon

  Books by Emma Tallon

  Ruthless Girl

  Fearless Girl

  Reckless Girl

  Fierce Girl

  Boss Girl

  Dangerous Girl

  Runaway Girl

  Available in Audio

  Dangerous Girl (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Epilogue

  Hear More from Emma

  Books by Emma Tallon

  A Letter from Emma

  Fearless Girl

  Reckless Girl

  Fierce Girl

  Boss Girl

  Dangerous Girl

  Runaway Girl

  Acknowledgements

  *

  For my beautiful children, Christian and Charlotte. That I have been gifted with you makes me so thankful each and every day. This book, like everything else I do, is for you.

  I love you always.

  Prologue

  Her heart rate increased with excitement and her breath caught in her throat. She was so close now. He was just inside that door, totally unaware of what was about to happen. With steady fingers she reached into her pocket and pulled out the gun.

  She took the last few steps to the door and smiled. It was slightly ajar, which was perfect. There would be no need to alert him to her presence by rattling the handle. She exhaled slowly, savouring the moment, revelling in the feeling of power, then gently pushed it open.

  It swung silently open and she pulled the silencer out of another one of her pockets. With deft, experienced hands, she screwed it onto the end of the gun and lifted it ready to shoot. She licked her bottom lip, her eyes wide and alert like that of a predator. The bookcase came into view, then the filing cabinets and finally the end of the desk, bathed in the weak, warm glow of light from a desk lamp. Finally, as the door swung wider, he came into view.

  Her eyes narrowed as she stared at him across the room. She had been so quiet and he was clearly so engrossed in whatever he was doing that he hadn’t yet turned around. He sat hunched over the desk, peering over a load of papers with his back to her and the door.

  For a moment she considered getting his attention. It would be the icing on the cake to see his face as she ended his life. Seeing the helplessness play out as he realised he was cornered would warm her for years to come. But sense won out and instead she just lifted her arm, aiming the gun at the back of his head. Her breathing slowed and years of training took over. This was nothing but a hunt. And today he was her prey.

  He froze, and as he began to turn, alerted too late to the presence behind him, she pulled the trigger.

  The muted clap of the gun going off bounced through the room and faded away as the bullet found its mark. As he slumped forward a heavy silence fell across the room. It was all over. He was dead.

  The great Freddie Tyler was gone.

  One

  Two weeks earlier

  Anna Davis took one stiletto-heeled step back and rested her hands on her slender hips as she cast her eye critically over the back wall of the premises for their latest venture. She nodded slowly. The guys she’d hired had done a good job of resurfacing it. It looked perfect, not even a hint of the bullet holes which had pockmarked it just a few days before.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked the man next to her, as he wiped the last of the plaster off his hands onto his work trousers.

  ‘You’ve done a great job,’ she replied, with a look of appreciation.

  ‘It was certainly a mess before we started,’ he said with a small laugh.

  Glancing sidewise at the beautiful and slightly intimidating woman who’d hired him, he wondered again at her calm and collected attitude towards the state the place had been in. It had given him the shivers when he’d first walked in. There had been patches of blood on the floor, glass and broken furniture strewn around and bullets lodged in the walls almost everywhere you looked. No one quite knew exactly what had happened, but there were rumours going around and they all seemed to loosely match up.

  ‘Rumour has it there was a bunch of Russians in here before you took the place,’ he continued. Anna nodded distractedly as she checked the wall for any imperfections. ‘Some say they had a disagreement between themselves, but I don’t think that’s what really happened here.’

  ‘No?’ she asked, turning to face him. ‘And what do you think happened then, Mr Butler?’

  Lowering his voice, Steve Butler leaned in a little closer. ‘Well,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘my cousin was having drinks a few doors down from here that night, and they were just out having a fag when they heard the shots. Well, they thought they might have been something else at the time. You hear all sorts round here, don’t ya? But sure enough, they was shots,’ he confirmed, his expression serious. ‘My cousin said he saw a load of men in balaclavas coming out after and getting in a van. Swears blind he recognised one of them and it was a guy who works for none other than the Tyler brothers, the bigwigs who own this area.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, his eyes gleaming with the juiciness of his gossip. ‘He reckons they was there to get the Russians out of Soho. It was a turf war,’ he summarised with a smug nod.

  Anna’s expression grew cold and her dark blue eyes flashed dangerously, causing Steve to blink in confusion.

  ‘If that were the case, Mr Butler,’ she said, her measured tone deadly, ‘I would be a little more careful about who you voice that opinion to. I don’t imagine the Tylers would take too kindly to those who added that sort of thing to the rumour mill.’

  ‘Yeah, but…’ Steve floundered a little as he started to catch on to Anna’s swiftly cooling demeanour. He had found her a little intimidating to begin with, a woman with such natural power about
her, but now something in her hard stare was causing his heartbeat to quicken. He laughed slightly, trying to lighten the mood. ‘I mean, it’s not like it could be that really, when you think about it. I mean, it’s not like the Tylers have taken over here. Whatever happened paved the way for you ladies to step in with your restaurant.’

  There was a long silence as Anna stared at him, her cold gaze level. He shifted his weight awkwardly and was trying to think of something to say to fill the silence when she suddenly smiled, the action not quite reaching her eyes.

  ‘Pop me over the invoice when you’re ready and I’ll have it paid this Friday.’ Anna turned back towards the wall. ‘And good job. It’s as though it never happened.’ Without another word she walked back through the bar area towards the office.

  Watching her go, Steve shivered involuntarily. He had no idea what just happened, but he sure as hell wouldn’t be mentioning the Tylers again. Whatever her connection was to them – and he was starting to think there was one – Anna Davis was a formidable woman in her own right. He stared at the clean, blank wall he had just finished. Russian or not, he wouldn’t want to be the man who stood in her way. Not for all the money in the world.

  Two

  Freddie ended the call with a grim expression and slipped the phone back into his inner jacket pocket. Smartly dressed in their infamous tailored Savile Row suits as always, he and his brother Paul stood out like sore thumbs in the tired, rundown neighbourhood they’d just pulled up in. Flicking his cigarette butt out of the window, Paul killed the engine.

  ‘This definitely it?’ he asked in his deep, craggy voice.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Freddie answered, staring up at the dingy high-rise block of flats across the road. ‘First storey, number five. Some sort of safe house Aleksei set up for his men. There’s at least three of them in there, keeping their heads down, Billy confirmed. Could be more, but that’s all he’s seen.’

  It had been nearly a month since they had raided Aleksei’s strip club in order to gain the ground back that the Russian had so disrespectfully stolen from them whilst they’d been away. But for some strange reason, Aleksei had not been there that night as expected, and even more bizarrely he hadn’t been seen or heard from since. The Tylers had been ready for him, had hunted high and low, ready to finish what they’d started, but their searches had been in vain. For once they were well and truly stumped. Aleksei – the Russian mobster who’d attempted to overtake part of Soho – had disappeared off the face of the Earth and his men had scattered. Most had gone home, some had stayed and gone underground, none seemed to have much of a plan as to what to do next. Freddie had never seen anything like it. Their men had been tracking as many of them as they could over the last few weeks and had watched to see if Aleksei made contact, but he hadn’t, so now it was time for them to go in themselves and find out what these men knew.

  Leaving the car, the pair walked up to the building and in through the badly fitting double doors to the stairwell beyond. Paul wrinkled his nose at the stench of piss and the suspicious stains worn into the cracked plastic flooring. They both pulled leather gloves from their pockets and put them on as they mounted the stairs in silence. The only sound around them as they made their way up was the buzz of a TV behind the door of one of the flats and the roar of a plane taking off above them. This part of Stanwell was a dreary place, an estate right next to Heathrow airport where the dreg ends of society seemed to gather in force, making it about as appealing to visit as a nuclear test site.

  Reaching the front door of number five Paul glanced at Freddie, his eyebrow raised in question. ‘Want to do the honours?’ he asked.

  ‘It would be my pleasure,’ Freddie answered. Pulling his foot back he booted the flimsy wooden door in with one hard kick.

  As the wood splintered the brothers pushed through into the hallway beyond and swiftly gathered their bearings. The open door in front of them led into an open-plan lounge and kitchen where three startled men quickly jumped to their feet from where they had been chilling in the mismatched furniture around the room. Two were still in their underwear, hair tousled from sleep, and the other had been about to light a cigarette which promptly dropped out of his mouth onto the dirty carpet below. He went to reach around to the back of his belt but the brothers were way ahead of him, pointing the loaded guns from their inner pockets.

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ Paul warned, marching forward and placing the cold end of the barrel against his temple. The man immediately raised his hands up high. The other two followed suit, unarmed as they were. Paul reached into the first man’s waistband and threw the gun back towards Freddie.

  ‘Right then,’ Freddie bellowed, waving his gun between the other two as if deciding who to focus it on. ‘Where the fuck is Aleksei?’

  Three

  Seamus leaned over the ropes at the edge of the ring and watched the lads who were currently sparring. ‘Footwork, Tim,’ he called out. ‘You’re supposed to be as light as a bird, not jumping around like a bloody drunken bear.’ Tim corrected his footwork and immediately the sparring match became a lot more even. ‘Good lad. Fists up, Al, unless you fancy sporting a flat nose on your date tonight.’ Al raised his arms.

  Nodding in approval at a particularly skilful shot, Seamus felt a pang of longing to get into the ring surge through his chest. His need to be up there doing what he did best was beyond physical. But it was the one thing he couldn’t do right now, not with his hand being bust. The reminder of this current weakness brought the constant dull ache he felt in the slowly healing bones to the forefront of his mind and he gently flexed his hand. A few weeks before, two of Aleksei’s men had pushed a stack of heavy crates down on top of him in a bid to hospitalise him and antagonise the Tylers. It had partially worked. Seamus had jumped back at the last moment and it had only bust his hand, saving him the trip to hospital as he’d been swiftly patched up behind closed doors – however it had still greatly antagonised the Tylers.

  It was no longer strapped up, for which he was grateful. His bosses had lied to the boxing league board about why he’d had to pull out of all his arranged matches so suddenly, claiming a death in the family back in Ireland. He’d had no choice but to keep a low profile for the first few weeks whilst it had been wrapped up in tight bandages. If anyone from the boxing world had seen, news would have spread like wildfire. He’d have been forced through a medical assessment and kept out of the game until he was deemed officially fit. His opponents would have found out and used his weakness against him and it would have damaged the position he had worked so hard for. By keeping it quiet, Seamus could work on getting back to the point when he felt ready to get back in the ring and not be denied.

  There was still a long way to go. The bandages had only just come off and so he had returned to training his boys in the ring in the gym, but it would be a few months before he would be able to get back up there himself. He could tell his boys were curious as to why he wasn’t training or entering matches himself. There had been whispered conversations and curious glances, but none of them had had the balls to ask him outright. He doubted they ever would. They all knew who he was. Seamus was a prize-winning boxer, top of his game and one of the legendary Tyler firm. The youths that came to the gym to learn how to let off steam without violence knew better than to show any disrespect to one of the Tylers’ men and were not stupid enough to get on the wrong side of someone who could put them on their arses with one strategic blow. So, Seamus was shown the respect he deserved and suffered no struggle in avoiding the questions everyone was dying to ask.

  Suppressing a sigh, Seamus stretched his hand out and pulled it in, careful to do his physio exercises under the small towel he held in his other hand so that no one could see. Feeling, rather than hearing the presence of someone walk up to stand beside him, Seamus glanced sideways. It was Sammy, another of Freddie’s men, one of the more senior-ranking individuals in the inner circle – the man who’d taken Seamus under his wing when he’d
first joined the firm several years before. Pulling himself off the ropes, he greeted his friend with a smile.

  ‘Come, let’s talk in me office,’ he suggested, the melodic lilt of his Irish accent still as clear as ever. ‘We can catch up properly.’

  Sammy nodded and followed him through, his broad shoulders swinging from side to side in his beige suit. The men in the gym nodded their respect as they passed and Sammy returned the gesture. He often worked out there himself, priding himself on keeping his muscular physique on top form.

  Closing the door behind them as they entered the office, Seamus pulled out a chair and waited for Sammy to sit down before he took his own seat. ‘You been on the sun bed?’ he asked, with a small frown.