Lawless

by Jessie Keane

  ‘Maybe it’s time I had a chat with Vittore,’ he said.

  Ruby’s eyes opened wide at that. ‘No! Kit, don’t go near him. Promise me you won’t. This is exactly what Bella was afraid of, that things would escalate. If you go and see him, it can only make matters worse.’

  Kit didn’t agree, but he didn’t say so. Daisy could have been badly hurt. And her kids could have been killed, and their nanny, along with their father. All because of him. Tension gripped him as he thought of what could have happened, while he was elsewhere having a bloody good time.

  ‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘What we’re going to do is this: Reg and the boys will stay here with you, OK?’

  ‘Won’t Rob stay too?’ asked Ruby.

  Kit looked at Ruby, at Daisy. He knew Daisy had a soft spot for Rob. He didn’t think Rob felt the same, and that was sort of a relief. As Daisy’s brother, he felt protective of her, and he wasn’t entirely sure yet how he would feel if something should develop between his number one man and his own sister.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I need him. Ruby . . .’ He couldn’t bring himself to call her ‘Mum’ . . .’There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you know where Michael was going, what he had planned to do, on the day he died?’

  He didn’t expect her to say yes, but she did.

  ‘He was planning to call in on Joe,’ said Ruby, wishing so much that he’d hug her, kiss her cheek, show some sort of feeling for her and not just for Daisy. But he wouldn’t. She knew that.

  Kit frowned. ‘Your brother Joe?’

  Ruby nodded.

  ‘He didn’t say what for?’

  ‘No. He didn’t.’

  42

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ screamed Maria.

  ‘Hey, hold it down, will ya?’ said Fabio, laughing and thrusting and trying to get a hand over her mouth all at the same time.

  Oh, this was better than any scenario he could have dreamed up, and he had dreamed up a lot. Over the years, the images he cooked up in his own head had been his only comfort. He knew Mama’d never wanted him. Time and again he’d heard her say how sure she was that he had been a girl, carrying all the way round, not at the front. He was sick to death of hearing her say that.

  ‘But instead there he was, this scrawny little thing with a big dick,’ Bella would say, shaking her head as if the bottom had dropped out of her world when Fabio popped out of her cooze. ‘A boy, not a girl.’

  Time and again. He was so sick of being the disappointment, the non-girl. Embarrassingly, Mama had dressed him as a girl at first. Vittore and Tito had never failed to see the funny side of that, fucking bastards. He’d been done up in pink booties and a hat, even the nursery was pink, painted in readiness for the expected female.

  ‘Oh God, oh, Fabio . . .’ moaned Maria loudly, thrashing around on the bed beneath him.

  Jesus, he should have known she’d be a screamer. Couldn’t the noisy mare pipe down? They were in a cheap hotel way off the beaten track, but he didn’t want to disturb the other guests, he didn’t want to call any sort of attention to them. That would be stupid. And he wasn’t stupid, no matter what the rest of the family might have to say about it.

  When Mama’d sent him to school, she hadn’t cut his hair, so it hung down past his shoulders like a girl’s. Oh, how Vittore and Tito – and all his classmates – laughed. In desperation he himself had hacked the long strands off with a knife he stole out of art class. A wallop from Mama for doing that, but at least she seemed to get the message. He was not a girl. Thereafter, she kept his hair short.

  Then who should arrive on the scene but Bianca. Before her, he’d been the stand-in, the stunt double, his mother – Jesus, she was demented – using him as a sort of dummy, a replacement for what he should have been at birth. Once Bianca came, things got worse. Instead of this weird attention, he got no attention at all. He was sent out to play, forgotten; what small place he had was taken up. There was no more room in the boat, and he was tossed out, shoved into the water to take his chances or drown.

  He hated Bianca, but knew she had to be tolerated. The odd punch or two he managed to land on the little principessa was reported straight back to Mama, and Astorre had taken his belt to his youngest son at her insistence. Fabio hated Vittore, because Mama adored him so much. And he hated Tito too, swaggering about the place, impressing everyone with his bulky good looks and his largesse.

  He hated them all.

  But now he was having his revenge. He and his boys were shifting the Jamaican’s gear around the family clubs, around Vito’s, Fellows and Goldie’s, but they were not giving Vittore so much as a taste. Not a hint. Fabio was making his own wedge right under Vittore’s nose, but discreetly, carefully.

  And this! Oh, this was the best thing of all.

  He looked down at her, naked, sweaty, dishevelled. Maria was quite a handful. And it was pretty obvious that Vittore had not only been knocking her around but also letting her down in the bedroom department. Which was a crying shame. In Fabio’s opinion, a woman like this needed a good seeing-to on a regular basis. And he was just the man to do it.

  ‘Ah!’ yelled Maria as she came, her excitement pushing him over the edge too. They locked together in an ecstatic clinch, then Fabio drew back and flopped onto the disarranged, cheap and rather scratchy sheets of the bed.

  Gasping in a breath, he looked around the room and lit a cigarette. It was a pest-hole, this hotel. The wallpaper was peeling, there was a brown damp stain on the ceiling over by the window. The sheets were clean, though not the fine thousand-thread Egyptian cotton he was used to. But at least the place was off the Danieri patch and rented rooms by the hour. What more could he want?

  To rub Vittore’s nose in this, he thought, glancing back at Maria, who was now snuggling up against him with puppyish zeal.

  But he couldn’t. Vittore would kill him if he knew. So this revenge had to be a private one, gloated over in secret.

  ‘Do you love me, Fabio?’ she was asking him now.

  ‘Yeah. I do,’ he lied. Well, he loved the fact that he was screwing Vittore’s wife. He loved that, for sure.

  ‘And you’ll talk to Vittore, like you promised?’ she asked, kissing his shoulder.

  ‘Of course,’ he lied again.

  43

  ‘Well, say it,’ said Kit.

  ‘What?’ asked Rob.

  ‘That it’s my fault, what happened to Simon,’ said Kit.

  It was late on Sunday night and Kit and Rob were in the little office behind the restaurant. Kit slumped down in the chair behind the desk that Michael Ward had once occupied. He could still smell the faint aroma of expensive cigars and Dunhill cigarettes in here: the ceiling was stained brown from all the years of nicotine. It was like Michael’s ghost was in attendance, too.

  Rob pulled up a chair and sat there and looked at his mate, his boss. He said nothing.

  Kit went on: ‘I turned up drunk at Tito’s funeral. I provoked Vittore. And now we’re in the shit because of it.’

  Rob cleared his throat. ‘Look, you were a mess. You were in mourning for Michael. Shit, I thought you were never going to pull out of it. And maybe you haven’t, even now. These things take time.’

  Kit eyed Rob speculatively.

  ‘I behaved like a complete arsehole,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘God’s sakes, you didn’t go to fucking pieces.’

  ‘Yeah, but I got a big family. Sisters, brothers, a mum – and a dad. He’s an awkward, cantankerous old son of a bitch, but he’s been there for me all my life. It’ll break my heart when he goes. You never had any of that, did you? Michael was like a dad to you. The two of you were that close. And when you lost him – and especially losing him that way . . . well, it’s understandable you’d go to pieces. Anybody would.’

  Kit heaved a sigh. He wanted to go over to Vittore’s place and torch it. Fulminating rage swept through him as he thought of Daisy, that they’d had the front to try to scare her that way. He leaned on the d
esk, pushed his hands through his hair, looked steadily at Rob.

  ‘So what did you get from our boys down the cop shop?’ he asked.

  Rob placed a buff-coloured folder on the desk. Kit reached for it, but Rob kept his hand on it, holding it closed.

  ‘There’s things in there you really don’t want to see. Morgue shots. Stuff like that,’ he warned.

  Kit looked Rob dead in the eye. He could see Rob’s anxiety for him, he knew Rob was afraid that the contents of the folder would send him tumbling down the slippery slope again, hitting the bottle, that he wasn’t up to seeing just what had been done to Michael.

  ‘Yeah, I do.’ I need to, he thought. I need to know everything.

  Rob released the folder, and Kit pulled it towards him.

  ‘They saying anything that could help?’ asked Kit.

  ‘Nothing except it’s been shoved to one side. Other stuff’s more important.’ Rob leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and stared up at the dirty ceiling. ‘Ruby reckoned Michael was having talks with her brother, didn’t she? Joe Darke phoned her that night, when Michael didn’t show up at his place.’

  ‘Which is . . . ?’

  ‘Over Chigwell way. You’re his nephew, don’t you know this stuff? He’s got a big fancy house out there, couple of acres with it.’

  ‘Ruby go out there much?’ asked Kit. He didn’t know Joe at all.

  Rob shook his head. ‘They’re not close. His old lady Betsy hates Ruby, although I heard they were mates once upon a time.’

  ‘Wonder what they fell out over?’

  ‘No idea. But that’s all we’ve got right now. Michael went to Tito’s club one day, and the day after that he should have gone to Joe’s. But he never made it.’

  Kit looked at the folder. ‘Let’s go on home and get some kip,’ he said, picking it up and getting to his feet. ‘First thing tomorrow, you and me are going to pay Ruby’s brother a visit.’

  After Rob dropped him off at his house, Kit took the folder into the kitchen and started spreading the contents across the table. He drew out the morgue reports and the photographs of the corpse. He caught his breath as the horrific black-and-white shots swam into view. Forced himself to look at the images of Michael, shot in the back of the head, his skull half-disintegrated. His right eye was gone, his fucking soul was gone, no life there whatsoever, all of it snatched from him by some bastard with a bloody great gun.

  Kit surged to his feet. He ran to the sink and vomited.

  Ah Jesus!

  He heaved until he felt like he was bringing his entire stomach up. Finally, panting, he washed out the sink, swooshed water around his mouth, snatched up a towel and dried himself. Then he tossed the towel aside and sat down at the table and looked again.

  Michael, dead. No longer handsome, suave; no longer flashing that devil-may-care grin.

  This isn’t Michael, he told himself. This is a shell, empty of life.

  Kit breathed deeply, and felt his heart racing in his chest, felt that sudden biting urge to go to the drinks cabinet, get something, glug it down.

  But he’d chucked all the booze away, hadn’t he?

  Off-licence . . .

  No. He could do this. He had to do this, and he couldn’t do it if he was sodden with drink.

  He pulled the folder towards him. Ballistics reports. A big-calibre gun firing soft-nosed bullets of lead that spread on impact, did maximum damage. They were called dum-dums and during the drive home, Rob, who had a keen interest in munitions, had told him that the name came from the Dum Dum Arsenal near Calcutta in India, where the first expanding bullets were developed back in the 1890s by Captain Bertie-Clay of the British Army. Kit had sensed that the history lesson was Rob’s way of trying to deal with the whole thing objectively, to try to focus on details instead of giving into the red mist that would take hold if you stopped thinking about the history of the bullet and thought about what it had been used for. The fact remained, whoever fired it hadn’t wanted to take any chances. They had wanted to be sure that Michael Ward was dead.

  But who did that finger on the trigger belong to?

  44

  Bianca sat and looked at the phone as if her will alone could make it ring.

  It didn’t.

  Why hasn’t he phoned me?

  A little threadworm of fear uncurled in her stomach and a tiny voice in her brain whispered,

  Because he’s like all the others, he didn’t mean any of it. Because, you fool, you were just a convenient lay and he said he loved you to get your legs open.

  ‘Staring at it ain’t going to make it ring,’ said Cora, coming into the stockroom and tutting as she saw Bianca standing there.

  Bianca instantly started making like normal. Like she didn’t want to kill him or kiss him – she didn’t know which. ‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’

  Cora gave a smile and a sigh of impatience. ‘Yes you do. You’re waiting for that Tony fella to call you, and so far he hasn’t. Give the man a chance. And incidentally, we’re getting low on the bitter lemon.’

  ‘Put it on the list for the wholesalers.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Cora, and snatched up a box of ready-salted crisps. Then she paused. ‘Don’t you have a number to reach him on?’

  Bianca gave her a sour look. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ snapped Bianca. But she knew what it meant, she didn’t need Cora or anyone else to draw her pictures. He hadn’t given her a number to reach him on because he’d had a fine old time with her and that was it: end of the road.

  ‘No offence. It seems odd that he didn’t give you a number, that’s all,’ shrugged Cora.

  ‘Well, he didn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t ask?’

  ‘Yes, I did. He said not to bother, he’d call me.’

  ‘Right. What was his name again?’

  ‘Tony. Tony Mobley.’

  Cora hefted the box higher and gave a cheering smile to her boss.

  ‘He’ll call,’ she reassured her. ‘You wait and see.’

  Then Bianca was alone in the stockroom again. Wearily, she sank down on a stool and thought I have been such a fucking idiot.

  She had thought it was love, real love: something different, something special. It lanced her like a dagger, through and through, to think she’d been so callously duped.

  Her eyes went again to the phone.

  Ring, she thought. Come on. For me!

  But he didn’t call, not that day, or the next, or the one after that.

  It was true, then. Mama was right. You couldn’t trust any man.

  They were all bastards.

  45

  Naples, 1947

  Astorre still had old contacts in the port where he had once run contraband, and through these contacts he arranged passage for him and his family on a cargo vessel bound for England. The crossing was awful, through the Bay of Biscay all of them were sick, but soon they were in the English Channel and then they were sailing up the peaceful slate-grey Thames towards London’s docks.

  As the family stepped down onto dry land, swaying and feeling wrung out, dispossessed, the rain fell and the cold seeped into their bones. Three years earlier, Bella’s sister and her husband and daughter Serafina had made this same trip – and her sister’s husband had died not long after, having developed pneumonia. Bella could see why, breathing this damp dreadful air.

  ‘Madre de Dios,’ muttered Bella, looking fearfully around her as she held baby Fabio to her breast.

  ‘It will be fine,’ said Astorre.

  It didn’t take the Danieris long to realize that England, like their homeland, had suffered during this hideous war. Bomb sites were everywhere in the capital; children roamed the streets, begged, slept in gutters. Astorre had a little money, barely enough to get them board and lodgings in a stinking rat-hole of a tenement building.

  Once installed in the place, Astorre took Tito out with him onto the streets to look around,
to familiarize himself with London. The chill here was unbelievable, the damp and the fog seemed to permeate their very bones after the dry radiant Neapolitan sun. But they were tough and they were desperate.

  Soon they sussed out that there was a pocket of Italian immigrants living in Clerkenwell – so many that it was called ‘Little Italy’ by the English. That was where Astorre wanted to be, among his own kind. Already, he missed the old country, but he knew that he would never go back. There were others who possessed the same deadly patience he had displayed; no matter how many years passed, it would never be safe for him or his family back in Napoli.

  What he needed right now was more cash.

  And that, at least, was a problem it would be easy to solve.

  Astorre and Tito spied out and targeted a few clubs in London – ‘up West’, as the Londoners called the more salubrious part of their city. These particular clubs were owned by one man, a self-made heavy plant millionaire called Fred Cheeseman. Cheeseman’s doormen were old lions, losing their teeth, unable to stand against bulky Astorre and his thuggish cub.

  ‘All right. You can take over security on my doors,’ Cheeseman told the Danieris. ‘But I still run the bar and the business.’

  Trying to talk tough, like he actually had a choice in the matter. As he spoke, Tito was standing at his father’s shoulder, slapping a cosh rhythmically into the palm of his hand; big bulging-eyed Astorre was blocking out the light. Cheeseman, a short bald man, was terrified.

  Cheeseman doled them out a contract, and hoped that would be the end of it – the fool. Within six months he’d caved in to extreme pressure and handed the clubs over. Astorre had even been so good as to pay him – a knock-down price, of course, a small salve to his wounded pride – and Cheeseman departed with his kneecaps intact.

  ‘You got to take what you want in this life,’ Astorre told his boys. And he did.

  Soon they had money enough for their own home in London’s ‘Little Italy’. They became established and well respected in the area, running the clubs as fronts to launder the money they acquired by other means. The family worshipped together every Sunday – Mama Bella insisted – at St Peter’s church, and they attended all the big Catholic festivals; particularly, Bella loved to see the Procession della Madonna del Carmine passing through the packed streets in the summer. Still, she missed Napoli, and the old Italian songs filled the house as she remembered the old country with a nostalgic tear. But this was home now; it had to be. All that was missing, for Bella, was the daughter she longed for.