Ruthless Girl: An absolutely gripping, gritty crime thriller

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Ruthless Girl: An absolutely gripping, gritty crime thriller Page 27

by Emma Tallon


  She picked up the box of macarons she had purchased earlier in the day from her favourite French patisserie, Ladurée, and made her way down the stairs and out onto the busy Soho street. Raising her face to the sun, she enjoyed its warmth for a moment before marching forward with determination. She was only going around the corner, to Club Anya, but each step towards it felt like an uphill struggle.

  She clutched the box and hoped that her peace offering might do the trick. Anna hadn’t exactly warmed to her, but she had been around her a lot more lately, due to all the unforeseen issues that had arisen. Josephine was hoping that perhaps she was beginning to thaw a little. After all, their shattered friendship aside, Josephine did work for Anna. She ran the whorehouse and lived there too. Surely Anna couldn’t keep up the iciness forever. She knew that they weren’t about to bounce back to being close pals again, it was too soon, and Anna had made her feelings perfectly clear on that front. But she hoped that perhaps if she kept persevering, they could at least get to a more civil and comfortable level with each other again. Because the tension between them was almost unbearable.

  Reaching the side door to the club, Josephine used her keys to get in. It was still too early for the doors to be open to the general public. She walked through to the bar and greeted Carl with a nervous smile.

  ‘Hello, Josephine,’ he said in a warm tone. ‘I haven’t seen you in here for ages, how you keeping?’

  ‘Hi, Carl, I’m OK, thanks. You?’

  ‘Oh, I’m dandy. Love the scarf, very nice shade on you,’ he replied.

  ‘Why thank you.’ Josephine preened and gave him a wink before continuing on to the office.

  She paused at the office door and exhaled slowly, trying to muster up the courage to enter. ‘Oh, come on, you silly fool,’ she muttered to herself. She lifted her hand and knocked, then pushed forward into the room before she could change her mind.

  Anna sat at her desk. She was frowning at a piece of paper, running her finger down rows of data and holding up a bunch of other papers in her other hand. They hung, suspended in the air, as if they were awaiting their turn on the gallows of Anna’s disapproval. Josephine knew how they felt.

  Anna looked up and briefly raised her eyebrows in surprise before focusing back on the task at hand. ‘What do you need, Josephine?’ she asked in a clipped tone. Her red lips pursed together firmly, a clear sign that she was not a fan of her visitor.

  ‘I, er…’ Josephine stepped towards the desk. Anna was dressed in black. Not an uncommon colour for her, but Josephine knew that today it was on purpose. She doubted there would be much brightness to Anna’s wardrobe for a while. At least until after the funeral. ‘I wanted to offer you my condolences. I heard about Sammy,’ she said, tentatively. ‘That he… that he died.’

  Anna’s finger paused on the page, her dark red nail pressing down into the paper for a moment. ‘Yes. Well.’ She swallowed. ‘You heard correctly.’

  She tried to refocus on the list in front of her but found suddenly that she couldn’t. She had been trying to stay strong for everyone around her – Freddie, Paul, Ethan. But she had felt Sammy’s death too. They all had. They were a family and each of them had had a special bond with Sammy in their own way. Having him gone so suddenly felt as if someone had removed a limb. Nothing worked quite so smoothly. Nothing felt quite right anymore. It was going to take a long time to get used to and they would never fully heal from it, the way they had never fully healed from losing Thea, Freddie’s sister. But that was something Josephine couldn’t possibly understand.

  Anna felt her heart harden once more against her once so-called friend. She had taken Josephine in at a point in her life where the other woman had wanted to end it all. She had given her purpose, a home, a family to be part of and who accepted her for who she was. But Josephine had betrayed them. She had carried on behind all of their backs with the one person who had been out to destroy them, destroy everything they had worked for. So how could she stand there now and feign sorrow for the death of a member of that family? Anna felt the anger swell up inside and she tried to swallow it down.

  ‘Was there something else?’ she snapped.

  Josephine blinked, taken aback by the sudden aggression. ‘Um…’ She looked down at the box in her hand, the pale green ribbon around it tied neatly into a bow. She placed it down on the edge of the desk. ‘I bought you these. I thought that perhaps a sweet treat might make you feel a little better.’ She tried giving Anna a hesitant smile.

  Anna stared at the box in disbelief. ‘Someone we all loved dearly just died,’ she said slowly, ‘and you think some cupcakes will make it all feel better?’ she asked.

  ‘Macarons,’ Josephine corrected, her cheeks colouring. ‘And no, ’course not. I just thought—’

  ‘You just thought,’ Anna butted in, ‘that you could walk in here with some macarons and a smile and all would be OK with the world, right?’ She stood up, her agitation reaching boiling point. ‘What world do you live in, Josephine?’ she demanded, anger flashing across her face. ‘What fantasy world do you think this is – that macarons could take away the sting of someone dying? I mean,’ she barked a humourless laugh, ‘that just brings a whole new meaning to the term “sugar-coating”, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Josephine mumbled, dismayed that her attempt at peace had gone so terribly wrong.

  ‘Well, you have, Josephine,’ Anna responded, her tone harsh. ‘You upset me with these stupid macarons, you upset me by turning up here at a time when I really don’t need the added stress, and you upset me with your total betrayal of this family after all I’ve done for you.’ She glared at Josephine for a few long moments and then closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, her shoulders slumping defeatedly. ‘I just need you to go, Josephine. I can’t do this right now.’

  Josephine’s eyes filled with tears and she bit her lip in an attempt to stop it wobbling. ‘I’m sorry, Anna,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned and fled, before Anna could say anything more.

  Anna sighed heavily, immediately feeling guilty. She shouldn’t have taken it out on Josephine. The woman was trying really hard to make things right and get back onto a normal footing and Anna knew that she should be trying too, however burned she felt by it all. Whether she liked it or not, it had happened. But the past was the past and she knew that, like Josephine, she should be focusing on trying to rebuild the present so that the future had a fighting chance.

  With a groan she moved around the desk and opened the door, dashing into the bar area. ‘Josephine?’ she called.

  ‘She’s gone. Ran out crying,’ Carl said from his position behind the bar. He placed the cocktail jug he’d just polished down and picked up the next one. ‘What did you do to her?’ he chastised jokingly. ‘Poor girl…’

  Anna bit back the retort that Josephine was anything but a poor girl and instead took a seat at the bar. ‘Nothing,’ she replied, brushing it off. ‘She just caught the back end of my bad mood.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll have a glass of wine.’

  Carl poured one out and handed it to her in silence. He waited until she had taken a few sips. ‘When will the funeral be? Do you know yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Anna replied with a glum sigh. ‘But I’ll let you know as soon as I hear. We’ll obviously shut the club for the night, whatever day it is.’

  Carl nodded and continued his methodical polishing of the glassware. Anna pulled her phone out of her dress pocket and checked the screen with a frown. It was still blank. She checked the signal but there were four bars, so it wasn’t that messages weren’t coming through. She had been texting and calling Tanya all day and hadn’t heard anything back from her. She typed out another text.

  Tan, can you PLEASE get back to me? I’m swamped, could really do with you here!

  ‘Hey, did Tanya come in at all yesterday?’ she asked Carl.

  He shook his head. ‘No, I haven’t seen her for a couple of
days.’

  Anna tutted in irritation. ‘Me neither and I really need to talk to her. This is not the time to disappear off the radar.’

  ‘Well, I think she’s just, you know…’ Carl pulled a face. ‘Grieving.’

  Anna’s frown deepened. ‘We’re all grieving, Carl,’ she replied. ‘We all miss Sammy. But that doesn’t mean everything else stops. We have businesses to run, things to do.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Yeah, but, it’s Sammy,’ he reiterated with a meaningful look.

  Anna stared back at him with a blank expression. ‘I’m aware of that,’ she said. ‘And like I said, we all miss him. But we still need to carry on with life. The world doesn’t stop, much as we would like it to at times like this. And I don’t think that’s why she’s disappeared. She’s so resilient. Even when Thea died, that hit us just as hard, but she held her head up and got on with things.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘And I mean, I know that she’s known Sammy a long time, but they barely hung out. She wasn’t as close to him as she was to Thea. They were friends, sure, but it’s not like he was her boyfriend or anything.’

  Carl stopped what he was doing and his usually neutral expression fell into a frown as he stared at her.

  Anna caught the stare and blinked. ‘What?’ she asked, self-consciously.

  ‘You don’t know?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘Don’t know what?’

  Carl’s eyebrows shot up and he exhaled slowly, blowing out his cheeks. ‘Wow. OK. I thought you knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ Anna urged, worried now. She stood up, her wine forgotten. ‘Carl, you need to tell me what’s going on, right now.’

  Half an hour later Anna rushed out of the lift on Tanya’s floor of their building and pulled out her keys from her purse. Without bothering to knock, she unlocked the door and let herself in. The flat was in darkness, all the curtains closed and a slightly stale smell in the air, indicating that fresh air had not been invited inside for a while.

  Princess, Tanya’s fluffy white cat, pranced over and wound itself around Anna’s ankles. She bent down and stroked the feline, who began to purr warmly. ‘Hey, where’s your mum, Princess?’ Anna asked quietly. ‘Where’s she hiding?’

  Standing up straight she leaned into the lounge and glanced up towards the open-plan kitchen. Tanya wasn’t in there, but the usually tidy side was covered in glasses and a nearly empty bottle of cherry vodka stood beside the sink. Anna pursed her lips and moved through the hallway towards the bedroom. She walked in and squinted in the darkness, allowing her eyes to adjust. As they did, she saw Tanya – or rather, the shape of Tanya – buried underneath her thick quilt in the middle of the bed. Another half-empty bottle of vodka sat beside her and one hand poked out from beneath the covers, holding on to the glass she was drinking from.

  Without a word Anna kicked off her shoes and climbed into the bed beside her, gently taking the glass and placing it on the side before pulling Tanya into her arms for a hug. She looked down at her friend and her eyes immediately filled with tears of sorrow. Tanya’s wild red curls that usually bounced and shone were flat, knotted and unkempt. Her face was pale and drawn and her eyes were puffy and red, a dullness where there had once been life and sparkle.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tanya,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry that he’s gone and that I told you the way I did.’ She closed her eyes, cringing at how callous she must have seemed. ‘I didn’t know.’ She lowered her head to Tanya’s and stroked her friend’s hair.

  When Carl had told her she could have kicked herself for not seeing it sooner. She had been so wrapped up in all their troubles that she hadn’t taken the time to notice all the things that were going on right in front of her. She was Tanya’s best friend. Even though Tanya hadn’t told her, she should have picked up on it. Looking back, Tanya had had an extra glow to her recently, despite their worries. She’d sneaked off at times and had often been vague about the things she’d been up to when Anna had enquired about her evenings. There had been all the signs of a budding romance, but they had all gone over Anna’s head. She felt terrible. What sort of best friend was the last to notice something like that?

  Silent tears poured down Tanya’s face. ‘We were going to be happy together,’ she said in a pained voice, barely more than a whisper. ‘We’d finally figured it out.’ She squeezed her eyes shut as the pain once more broke through the fuzzy layer the alcohol had wrapped her in.

  ‘I know,’ Anna said, holding her tighter. ‘I’m so sorry, Tanya. I’m so, so sorry.’ She shuffled deeper into the bed, trying to find a comfortable position. Because she wasn’t going anywhere. She may have been a neglectful friend of late, but she was here now. No matter what life threw at them – and life had certainly thrown them some bad times – they had always pulled each other through. And this was no exception. Anna was going to get her through this. Because whether they wanted it to or not, life went on – and this was just what she and Tanya did. They weathered the worst times together, no matter what.

  Sixty-One

  Sarah stared up at the tall, imposing gates that led to Sophia’s property, her hands jammed down in the pockets of her thin leather jacket. The security was impressive, she had to give them that. Probably installed by Aleksei when he bought the place. When you were a Russian mobster taking over enemy territory you couldn’t be too careful, she supposed.

  Before she had reached forward to press the buzzer, a whirring noise started up and the gates opened, allowing her entry. She pulled a face and walked forward down the wide gravel drive and up to the front door. It opened as she reached it and Ali gestured for her to come inside.

  As the door closed behind her, Sarah took in her surroundings with appreciation. Whatever else she was, Sophia was certainly a talented decorator. With soft hues and elegant furniture running throughout, it was a stark reminder of Sarah’s lack of talent in this department. Her small flat was filled with a mismatch of whatever had taken her fancy over the years. All sorts of colours and styles haphazardly thrown together. She had often thought that the chaos of it all lent it a homely charm, but as she compared it in her mind to the home she was in now, she realised that this was no more than wishful thinking.

  They entered a lounge area which could have been plucked straight from the pages of a magazine and Sarah spotted Sophia lounging on a sofa, her attention on the pages of the book she was reading.

  ‘So, Miss Riley, are you here as an officer of the law, or as the Tylers’ paid pet?’

  Sarah ground her teeth and held her neutral expression with difficulty, as the caustic comment hit its mark.

  When Sarah didn’t answer, Sophia put down her book and looked her up and down. She took in Sarah’s casual jeans and jacket and the lack of any type of sidekick and made a sound somewhere between a huff and a snigger.

  ‘Paid pet is it then, today. And what brings you to my home, Miss Riley?’

  Sarah forced a smile, although it did not reach her eyes. ‘This is a courtesy call. I just thought I should let you know that Aleksei’s body won’t be officially identified.’

  ‘Oh?’ Sophia raised one perfect eyebrow in interest.

  ‘I’ve had it buried to protect your new business partners from any unnecessary scrutiny.’

  ‘How good of you to let me know.’ Sophia’s words dripped with sarcasm.

  Sarah gave her a small frown of confusion. ‘Surely you’re pleased that they are protected? I mean, they are helping you prop up your only source of income now.’

  There was a short silence and Sophia gave her a tight smile. ‘Of course. But don’t forget, Aleksei was still my husband, so I can’t really celebrate the news that he will just forever disappear without being shown any of the usual honours that death brings someone of his standing.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sarah replied gravely.

  ‘It is my sons that I’m thinking of,’ Sophia continued. ‘It is they who have missed out.’

  ‘Indeed. And may I just say,’ Sarah stepped closer towa
rds her, ‘that I commend you for doing such a great job with them in the face of this all. It must be incredibly hard for you, raising them alone.’

  Sophia narrowed her eyes. What was Sarah playing at? They were not on terms to share compliments and sympathy – they were not on civil terms at all.

  ‘Honestly,’ Sarah continued, extending her hand. ‘I have a lot of respect for people who have no choice but to go it alone and you’re doing a better job than most. I’d like to shake your hand.’

  Sophia raised her eyebrows. The praise was unexpected and very odd, but then perhaps it was an English thing. She found English people often shared far too much with each other and always seemed to offer opinions and advice in business that wasn’t theirs to mind. She held out her hand, deciding to meet Sarah’s halfway. Perhaps she should lay off the insults for a while. She despised the scruffy Amazonian woman, but perhaps she would come in useful down the line as an ally, once she had succeeded in doing away with the Tyler brothers.

  Sarah grasped Sophia’s hand and shook it vigorously, deliberately causing the other woman’s sleeve to rise up her arm. There it sat, on her slender wrist. The gold chain bracelet from the video footage. She had been right. Sophia was the shooter.

  ‘What a beautiful bracelet,’ she commented. ‘Though it doesn’t seem your style, somehow.’ She tilted her head to one side in question, looking from the bracelet up to Sophia’s face.

  Sophia retracted her hand and pulled her sleeve back down. ‘It was Aleksei’s,’ she said, her dark eyes suddenly wary. ‘I bought him it as a wedding present.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ Sarah nodded her understanding and looked away, her mind racing.

  Sophia seethed inside, realising that the whole conversation about her children had been nothing but a trick to get close enough to see the bracelet. ‘Was that everything, Miss Riley?’

 

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