I clapped my hand over my mouth but I knew they would have heard the cry.
As I heard the door to the dressing rooms slam open, I locked the door.
‘Daisy? Is that you?’
Tears sprang to my eyes. I couldn’t reply. If I didn’t say anything they might leave. If I pretended I wasn’t there, maybe that would make it true.
One of them tried the door. The handle clicked and caught.
‘Daisy? If you come out we won’t hurt you.’
‘Bullshit!’
There was a blast that made my head ring as one of them tried to shoot a bullet through the door, but it held firm. I covered my ears, then remembered the gun in my hand and pointed it upwards, firing a shot at the ceiling.
They went quiet.
‘Yeah, I’ve got a fucking gun!’ I was glad they weren’t able to see I was crying. ‘I’ll fucking kill both of you if you try to come in here!’
I felt for my phone in my coat pocket – Missed Call from Edie – and dialled 999, putting it on speakerphone.
‘And I called the police!’ I yelled.
The handle jerked again and I shrank away.
‘Daisy, open the fucking door!’
Then, much quieter, from Eli this time, ‘Daisy… open the door.’
My skin crawled. I felt like I could choke on this fear.
I heard Eli say, ‘Look, Edie called the police too. We need to go.’
They paused.
I couldn’t breathe.
Could I shoot Ronnie? I thought.
Definitely. Fucking definitely.
I didn’t hear anything more from either of them. I put the phone to my ear and managed to whisper the club’s address to emergency services, who kept asking for my name over and over again, but otherwise I just waited.
I watched the minutes go by on my phone, ten… fifteen minutes, and then I moved.
I only moved because I could smell smoke.
The fire alarm started blaring again.
The gun was becoming heavy. I unlocked the door, hesitated for a second and then bolted out of the dressing rooms – black smoke billowing across the ceiling – to the back door. It was locked. I tried it again but there was no give. They’d locked me in.
I ran back to the club floor and the smoke was overpowering. I lowered myself until I was hunched over, but the whole place was ablaze. I didn’t stand a fucking chance of getting to the main entrance.
Shutting my eyes, opening them, trying not to shut them again, I felt my way over to the bar and climbed over the top of it. I hit the floor on the other side and gulped some air before getting to my feet.
My eyes were streaming. I was still gripping the gun.
Using the bar as a guide, pressing my hip against it, I managed to get near the stage.
It was so fucking hot. I could see the flames from the booths dancing behind my scrunched up eyelids.
I left the bar and pressed my shoulder to the wall on my right, sinking closer and closer to the ground, and managed to find the stairwell. It was still dense, but the air was clear enough in here for me to start heaving for breath.
When I tried to kick open the fire exit it wouldn’t budge, as if it had been jammed from outside.
‘No!’ I kicked it harder, rubbing my stinging eyes. ‘Fuck!’
I knew they had left too easily. Now they had sealed me into the burning building and I had given them the time to do it.
Kicking the door for a final time, I gave up and ran up the stairs. The handle had been shot off Edie’s office door. I knew they weren’t still here, but I held the gun out anyway, supporting it with my other hand, how Nic had always shown me.
I edged into the doorway, blinking sweat out of eyes.
‘Edie?’
Pointless.
She was dead, partially hidden by her desk.
I leant against the doorframe. The alarm was doing my head in. I was glad I couldn’t see all of her; just her legs. A chair had been overturned. A picture of Ronnie’s kids was on the floor, smashed. Bullet holes in the far wall.
It seemed cruel to leave her, but there was no other option.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’
I ran to the end of the corridor and barged out of the other fire escape. It was open. They had forgotten the upstairs exit.
Outside, the misty rain was soothing.
I made my way down the spiral stairs into the alleyway out the back. I could hear sirens, though fuck-load of use they’d be now.
I leant against the wall of the building next door, watching the main road but not venturing out until I saw…
‘Nic!’
It looked like him.
It was him.
‘Nic, over here!’
Blue and red lights across his face. He stopped in the middle of the road, which was being cordoned off, and searched for my voice. When he found me with his eyes, he jogged over.
‘Daisy, stay there!’
He was wearing a suit, as he always did when he was playing the role of police officer. He did this by contacting whichever legit officer he was paying-off, who then vouched for him at any crime scene he needed access to.
My first thought was that he looked tired, shaken, handsome. My second was that it was absolutely fucking irrelevant.
I said, ‘She’s dead. She tried to call me but she’s dead. They killed her, she’s dead.’
‘I know. She called me. She was barricaded in her office.’
He noticed the gun in my hand and took it from me, glancing about before tucking it into the back of his jeans. Then he took me firmly by the arm and led me across the road, away from the Underground, underneath the barriers blocking the street off and around the nearest corner.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘It was Ronnie.’
‘I know.’
‘And Eli. They shot her, I heard it. She’s dead, she’s fucking dead.’ I was finding it hard to focus. ‘I hid and they chased me but then they tried to lock me in… Ronnie’s gone insane, he’s fucking lost it, he—’
‘When they question you, Daisy, you can’t mention that you had a gun or you might be a suspect, OK?’
But Edie was dead. It was all I could think. She was dead and it was so soon after I’d last spoken to her. It didn’t seem possible.
‘Daisy, you can’t mention you had a gun or you might be a suspect.’
I didn’t quite hear him the first time and he had to repeat himself, giving me a little shake.
‘Yes, yeah, I’ve got it. I didn’t have a gun.’
‘Are you OK?’ he asked again.
‘I’m fine, I think.’ I looked down at myself. ‘I think.’
My throat hurt and I was drenched in sweat. But there was no lasting damage.
‘Have you called Noel?’ I asked. ‘He doesn’t know!’
‘I called him just after Edie called me, he’s on his way.’
‘You didn’t see Ronnie or Eli when you arrived?’
He shook his head. ‘Long gone. They must have chucked some petrol around or something. The place has really gone up.’
I couldn’t un-see those dead legs in the office. I thought I was going to throw up and I pressed my palms to my forehead.
‘It’s OK, they’re not going to hurt you,’ Nic said.
I glared at him. I wasn’t going to say it but I finally did.
‘I hate you. I fucking hate you.’
‘Yeah. I get that.’
And he let go of my shoulders.
Nic had told me once, during a particularly candid discussion of his job, that you always discovered who a person really was when they were about to die. I wondered what sort of person Edie had been.
Statistically, we were more likely to be killed by men than anything else, I thought.
I wondered whether that had crossed her mind.
It didn’t take long for Noel to arrive, and the first thing he asked Nic was, ‘Can I see it?’
‘W
hat?’
‘Can I see my club?’
Like it was on the mortuary table.
Nic, in an uncharacteristic show of sincerity, grasped Noel’s shoulder. ‘Not right now. But give me a while and just sit tight. It’s safer for you to stay behind the cordons. I’ll call you over when we’re... well, they’re... ready for you to make some statements. But you need to tell me everything you know about where Ronnie might be now, or Eli.’
‘Ron…’ Noel said. ‘Fuck. Have the police sent anyone to his house?’
‘Not yet, as he’s not an official suspect. He won’t be there anyway. Can you think of anywhere else he’d go?’
‘No, I… No, I’ve got no fucking clue.’ Noel fixed his eyes on me and said, almost accusingly, ‘Did you know about this when you left?’
On the spot, I stammered, ‘I only came back to close down, I didn’t know until I got here. I didn’t know.’
Noel didn’t say anything. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him, coming to terms with this kind of loss; of his best friend and his livelihood in one night. I would have reached out to him but I was too conscious of Nic looking between us.
His gaze moved from me to Noel, and then back to me. I wondered if he could somehow tell that something had happened. But no emotional reaction had crossed his face.
He said, again, ‘You’re safest here, for the time being.’
For the time being.
‘Thanks, Nic,’ Noel said, staring in the direction of the Underground, just out of our sight behind the other buildings. ‘Let me know when I can see it.’
‘Just hang tight.’
Nic ducked below the cordon and walked off.
There was nothing either of us could say, so I took Noel’s hand and squeezed a little, because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I looked up at the buildings shielding the cremation of our home, as the strobing of the sirens wordlessly struck us over and over again.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Ronnie
I took him out to Serpentine Lake in the early hours of the morning, where this fictitious pick-up was taking place. We could sit by the water and smoke some weed, I’d said, selling Eamonn the idea; hang out properly and talk, brother to brother. I felt bad for what I’d said earlier.
That’s what I said.
And I kept thinking about a line from Aliens for some reason, on a loop.
I got a bad feeling about this drop.
Eamonn didn’t have a bad feeling about this drop, even after being shaken awake by myself and Eli, both wild-eyed and smelling of gasoline. But then Eamonn so rarely had a bad feeling about anything. Life was just a big sign saying Free hugs! to him; an unmanned lemonade stand, a pie left to cool by an open window.
‘You all right, bro? You’re quiet.’
‘Yeah, disco.’
I got a bad feeling about this drop.
We both left the car and walked towards the water, across grass. I was wearing trainers for the first time in my life. The air was clear and the ground was dry. Even the water was silent. I could see people dotted around, here and there, but it was a Monday night; by far the best evening to attempt to leave the house without bumping into anyone.
Even in the smallest ways, it seemed like Eli had planned this perfectly.
Eamonn was carrying a briefcase with nothing in it because, in his naive way, that’s what he thought being a gangster entailed. I knew he wouldn’t question it.
‘You know, I was beginning to think you’d given up on me, man,’ he said. ‘Even tonight, earlier. You looked at me like a real piece of shit. Made me feel real low.’
We walked, side by side.
‘I can’t pretend the thought hadn’t occurred to me,’ I said, certain I could still smell the scent of Edie’s death clinging to my nostrils. ‘But I couldn’t do that. It’d make me too much like Dad.’
‘I was even talking to Daisy the other morning about a room-share.’
‘The two of you would probably get along, so long as you didn’t try it on with her.’
‘Yeah, I bet she’d kick the shit outta me.’
The lake came into view.
It must have been a while since Eamonn had seen a vast expanse of water up close. Flying over the ocean didn’t really count.
He bounded to the water’s edge, grasped the railings and inhaled. ‘Sweet.’
‘It’s quiet here,’ I said.
‘Who’s this guy we’re meeting?’
‘Katz,’ I said, because it was the first name that came to mind. ‘He’s this Russian guy we occasionally do business with. I’ve been running a lot of stock through him recently.’
It was as if I was just making up words.
I leant against the railings next to him and Eamonn was nodding along like he understood everything I was saying.
‘In jail we were encouraged to be religious,’ he mused, eyes half shut and enjoying the bitter breeze. ‘I meant to tell you, coz I thought you’d find it interesting what with your Catholic stuff. It was kinda the only way we were allowed to do anything. The more religious you were the more you were allowed to talk to people, read, work, do stuff. If you didn’t buy into this idea of God it was like there was something wrong with you. I think some guys even got years off their sentences because being into Christianity counted as “good behaviour”. Isn’t that weird?’
‘I find it weirder that you’re not,’ I said, my entire body tingling.
‘Na, I think it was you that put me off it.’ He grinned at me. ‘For real. Some of the stuff you said growing up… You were already so fucking scared of everything.’
‘You thought I was scared?’
‘Yeah. That’s why you ran away and got married and had kids and went to church all the time. You did all that safe stuff.’
‘I guess I did.’
‘But then I went to jail and… fucked everything up.’ He hung over the railings, searching for his reflection. ‘Maybe it’s better to be scared.’
‘It makes you more careful.’
‘Maybe.’
I took a few paces back, mimicking someone who might have been taking in the scenery. In my mind, I couldn’t get enough of the expression on Edie’s face as she’d known she was going to die. It filled me with purpose, with conviction.
I was doing the right thing.
‘Eh, so when’s this guy arriving?’ Eamonn asked.
I shot him through the back of the head, caught his weight as he fell and tipped him over the railings. The silencer hissed, there was a dull thwack when he hit the surface of the lake, but other than that there was no sound.
Deaths like these were the most convincing argument for atheism. If we did have a soul, it shouldn’t be able to leave the world that quietly, leaving the body behind for garbage. Especially not Eamonn’s soul, which had never been able to enter or exit a room without causing a commotion.
For about fifteen minutes I waited there, for hell or the afterlife or the ferryman to spit Eamonn back out, bending my ears with a stream of reproach and complaints. But wherever he’d gone, I realized, he was staying there. No argument was forthcoming.
Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
Damned as we were, shouldn’t we try and save the few souls we could?
I had no interest in a better place, anyway. Not now. It wasn’t for people like me and Eli.
With heavy footfalls, I turned and walked back to the car, putting the gun inside my coat.
I opened the boot, took out my bag and shut it.
There was a flash of headlights and I walked towards them.
I circled the other car, slung my bag into the back, and got into the passenger seat beside Eli.
I expected him to say something, a knee-jerk expression of condolence perhaps, but there was nothing. He had seen this arrangement coming for months. I wondered if
somehow we’d telepathically decided on it in the moments we’d sat in silence, looking in different directions while sitting in the wasteland off Interstate 15, fantasizing that all the things tethering us to society didn’t exist.
He’d sat down on the ground.
I’d repressed a laugh.
And that had been the moment we’d decided.
It was only in hindsight that I was able to recognize it.
Eli started the engine.
I rubbed my eyes and face, and started fiddling with the radio.
‘Driver picks the music,’ Eli said, reversing out of the space.
For a moment the crackle of the static through his speakers sounded like the clapping of an audience, scattered rapturous applause. The voices from the stations were a singular dissenting protest trying to fight their way through and be heard. Then they were cut off entirely, when Eli slid a new CD into the player.
Headlights shone onto the foliage, grass and trees, then the streetlights hit us and we were bathed in gold.
END
We hope you enjoyed this book.
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About Hanna Jameson
About the Underground Series
An Invitation from the Publisher
About Hanna Jemeson
HANNA JAMESON’s debut novel, Something You Are, was written when she was just seventeen. It was nominated for a CWA Dagger Award. Her second novel, Girl Seven, was published in 2015. Jameson’s influences are Tarantino, David Peace and Nick Cave. She has lived in Australia and travelled the USA, Japan and Europe with bands such as Manic Street Preachers and Kasabian.
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About the Underground Series
The Underground series is set in the bleak ganglands of southeast London. An upmarket club, The Underground, forms the centre of this amoral, violent, and moneyed world: this is where drug smugglers and corrupt officials discuss business over cocktails and cocaine; where hit men devise honey traps with the gorgeous girls who work the poles...
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