Dangerous

by Jessie Keane

  89

  When they stepped out of the studio, it was to find one of Marcus’s heavies yanking a piece of paper off a telephone pole.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Marcus.

  The heavy said nothing, just handed it to him. Marcus unscrewed the paper and Clara peeped over his shoulder and went white. Clara Redmayne’s a copper’s nark, it shouted. Marcus put it in his pocket.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Clara.

  ‘Oh, come on. You can’t say you’re surprised. I’m not,’ he snapped, and they went over to the car.

  Clara felt exposed now, out on the street. She couldn’t forget the noise those bullets had made, thunking into Marcus’s car. The damage they’d caused to the metal. They could easily have hit her. And now things tied onto lamp posts; she was looking at everyone who walked past thinking Who put that up there? And then a woman passed by, gave her a sneering look, spat at her feet and walked straight on.

  ‘Jesus!’ Clara sprang back and collided with Marcus. Then she turned and started after the woman.

  ‘Hold on, Tiger,’ he said, grabbing her arm and hustling her into the back of the motor while his two pit bulls got in the front.

  ‘Have you heard of this bloke? This Yasta Frate?’ Clara asked Marcus as one of the heavies drove out into the traffic.

  ‘What?’ He gave her a pained look.

  ‘Yasta Frate. The man in the photos. Do you know him?’

  Marcus stared at her. ‘Clara. You’re in trouble here. People are spitting at you in the street. People are sticking your name up on lamp posts. Yesterday, someone took potshots at you. And you’re asking me who Yasta Frate is? For fuck’s sake, who cares? The girl’s dead, let her rest.’

  ‘You do know him, don’t you?’ said Clara.

  ‘Let it go.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘All right. I do. He’s small-time. Runs a couple of cellar clubs around the area. Lives in one of them, I heard.’

  ‘And he pays nonces like David Bennett to take photos of him shafting women and kids.’

  ‘You’re thinking he had something to do with her death?’ Marcus frowned. ‘Why would he kill her?’

  ‘Have you heard of snuff movies?’

  ‘You think there are other photos going around? Ones that show him killing this girl? That he’d get some sort of sick kick out of it? That he’d let incriminating stuff do the rounds? You’re mad.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t be “going around”. Maybe he keeps a private collection of stuff like that.’

  Marcus was staring at her.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Christ, what a mind you’ve got. What sort of dark fucking horrible things go on in there?’

  There had been horrible things. Things that haunted her still, although he would never know about that. That recurring dream of her dead mother, the cold blue lifeless child cradled in her arms. The night-time horrors, the fear of going back there, to that awful place, the terror of never truly escaping the slums.

  ‘These things do happen,’ she shrugged, staring right back at him. She couldn’t read him, not at all, and she could read most people. She stared into those almost-black eyes, as deep as pools of oil and just as expressionless.

  She shivered. Did he care that she was under threat? If anything happened to her, she was his wife and all that she had would pass directly to him. She remembered what he’d said on their wedding day, that he wished he could divorce her straight away. Would he truly be sorry if she died?

  She didn’t think he would.

  Not for a minute.

  And she could die, easily.

  Ever since that sniper thing, she had felt that she was being watched. That someone was keeping their eye on her, biding their time. And if the worst happened? Marcus would just carry on, take over her clubs. He had Paulette for recreational purposes. And probably – oh, and this made Clara’s guts heave – maybe he was keeping Paulette still, in her flat, in luxury; a convenient piece of arse on the side.

  90

  Jan was there at the Oak with a couple of the other girls, all getting set for the evening’s trade. She beamed like a beacon when she saw Clara walk into the bar with Marcus.

  ‘Hiya, Clar,’ she said, bouncing up, pleased as a puppy when its master comes home.

  ‘Don’t call me Clar,’ said Clara, and got out the photos.

  ‘What’s this? Oh these aren’t . . . ’ Jan’s smile vanished as she looked at them. ‘God, poor old Sal. What a way to go, eh?’

  ‘You know the man in these shots, don’t you?’

  Jan looked from the naked couple in one shot and then up at Clara. ‘Course I know him. That’s Yasta Frate. Sal used to be on the game in Notting Hill, Frate came over on the boat and moved in with her and ponced off her, took most of her earnings, the poor cow. Then she got out from there, got that other place – the one where we found her – and started working at the Oak. But he took over the flats and wound up as her landlord. He was mine, too. Still is.’

  ‘So they fell out, her and Frate?’ said Clara.

  ‘He couldn’t have been too pleased, she was his meal ticket way back and he’s the sort to bear a grudge. She took up with another bloke last year, a younger man. You know him. He was here at your wedding reception.’

  Clara looked startled. ‘I do? What d’you mean?’

  ‘Course you do. He was causing trouble, you remember? Smashed up the DJ’s deck and some of his records.’

  ‘But . . . that was my brother. Henry. You’re talking about Henry.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jan. ‘That’s the one.’

  Oh shit, thought Clara.

  91

  It was the middle of the day but Yasta Frate was asleep on the couch in the room behind the Gallipoli, safe and secure as a bug in a rug. These cellars, they’d come all through the war untouched. Like the Windmill, they were below ground and solid as could be. He always felt safe here.

  Safe to shoot up.

  Safe to do whatever.

  While the brothers partied in the basement club, he was back here counting the takings, doing whatever the fuck he liked. So, when there was a hammering and a banging on the door upstairs and it woke him up, he didn’t worry. He had boys up there, take care of anything.

  Annoying, though. Waking him up like that. He stretched and yawned and pulled his pony-skin coat closer over him. Big trouble with cellars, they were several degrees cooler than street level. Nice for keeping your wine in; not so good for anything else. He’d had a heavy night last night, and his head . . . well, it wasn’t the best, not today. All that banging about the place, he could do without it. Seriously.

  Then the door crashed open and he shot off the couch like a bullet.

  ‘Hey! What the fuck?’ he roared, and two huge men came at him, grabbed him and pinned him down on his knees on the floor, pulling his arms up behind his back until he was on the point of screaming in agony. He looked up. There was a black-haired white woman standing there, and a tall black-haired man.

  ‘You’re Yasta Frate,’ said the woman.

  ‘What is this, man?’ hollered Yasta.

  ‘You were Sal Dryden’s landlord. And more besides.’ Clara fished in her bag. She held the photo out to Yasta Frate, so that he could see it. ‘Much more, by the look of it.’

  ‘So?’ asked Frate, then he shrieked as more pressure was applied to his arms. ‘Man, wassup? Don’t break my limbs, for Chrissakes!’

  ‘Tell me about you and Sal,’ said Clara.

  Frate was looking at Marcus. ‘I know you. I know the pair of you, I seen you around here.’

  Marcus stepped in and punched Frate hard on the jaw. He let out a yell and shook his head wildly. ‘Fuck! What you do that for?’

  ‘Answer the question,’ said Marcus.

  ‘All right, OK! She was my whore once. Then she decided she wasn’t.’

  ‘Upset you?’ asked Clara.

  Frate hesitated. Marcus stepped forward.

&nbs
p; ‘Hold it! Yeah, it upset me, but what can you do? Anyway, I was glad to see the back of her. You want the truth? She cheek me, that girl. She cheek me bad.’

  ‘And now she’s dead.’ Clara stared hard into Yasta’s liquid brown eyes. Thought of all that he’d done to Sal, and felt nothing but disgust. ‘And you were her landlord.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You do that?’ asked Clara. ‘You kill her?’

  ‘No! God’s my witness, I didn’t.’

  ‘Making some of these sick prints? What, you do films too? Snuff ones?’

  Frate said nothing. Marcus stepped forward.

  ‘Whoa! Wait! All right.’ He was panting, his jaw starting to swell. ‘We did the photo stuff, but I didn’t kill her!’

  Clara stood there, staring down at him. If he was telling the truth . . . oh God, if he was, where did that take her?

  To somewhere I don’t want to go, she thought. To Henry, who cold-heartedly killed Frank’s dog to make Frank’s death like a Viking funeral. Henry who’d been with Sal last year. Henry who pinched money from her purse and left coins on the floor – and there’d been coins on the floor that day at Sal’s place when she found the body.

  She put the photos back in her bag. Turned to Marcus. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  The heavies released Yasta Frate and he pitched forward onto the floor. His jaw was on fire and his arms felt like they’d been wrenched right out of their sockets.

  ‘Bitch! Whore!’ he shouted after the woman.

  But Clara was already gone.

  92

  ‘It’s time we had a honeymoon,’ said Marcus later when they were up in the office.

  Clara looked at him. A moment ago he’d been going through the books with Gordon, the pair of them acting like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, gleefully crowing about this new and lucrative source of revenue – her clubs. Only they weren’t just hers any more. Now they were his, too.

  ‘What?’ Clara stared at him moodily. She had that scene stuck in her head, the two of them exulting in their good fortune, Marcus counting out notes and Gordon adding up lines of figures.

  He’s done well out of this marriage, she thought, and it hurt.

  All her life she’d married for security, for money – and now Marcus had done the same to her, hadn’t he. And the truth? It cut her like a knife.

  How must Frank have felt?

  And Toby?

  ‘A break, that’s all. Not a long honeymoon. The business will look after itself for a few days.’

  ‘What are you up to?’ asked Clara.

  His eyebrows raised. ‘Me? I’m not the one chasing around after someone that’ll never be found. And I’m not the one who’s being shot at in the street, or spat at, or having notices posted—’

  ‘All right, for God’s sake! So where are we going?’ she demanded. Fuck’s sake. He hadn’t even been near her since their disastrous wedding day, when he had practically raped her in a fury over what she’d done, and now he was spouting on about honeymoons like it was all a big romance and not a business move.

  ‘I’ve got a place down near Winchester. We can go this evening, be there by dark.’

  ‘That’s a bit sudden.’

  ‘Nah, gives you an hour or so to get packed after we’ve had some dinner here. Strictly casual.’

  ‘On a honeymoon?’

  ‘It’s nothing fancy,’ he said, and then he smiled at her the way a shark must smile before it chomps a seal into dead meat.

  Well, he hadn’t been exaggerating. It really was nothing fancy. In fact . . .

  ‘It’s a shit-hole!’ exclaimed Clara when they pulled up in the Hillman Super Minx Marcus had borrowed from Gordon. The E-type was in the garage, getting the panels replaced. Evening was coming in, the light fading fast. Soon it would be true spring, the clocks would go forward, it would get lighter.

  After about an hour on the road, they’d come up a dirt track, the suspension groaning and creaking under the strain of it, and now they’d stopped outside this place. It was an old farmhouse, probably Victorian, thought Clara, and there was a cracked cement yard to the side of it where she guessed the cows had once come in for milking. Half the chimney was missing and the roof, outlined against the cloud-streaked purple sky as the sun sank into the west, was bowing in the middle, which Clara knew from her days of speculation in the property market was a very bad sign.

  ‘What the hell is this place?’ she asked, getting out of the car and slamming the door. She walked around to Marcus’s side as he hauled their bags out of the boot. He tossed Clara’s to her and she let out an ‘oof’ of surprise as it smacked her in the midriff.

  ‘Bought it to do it up a couple of years ago,’ he said, as she went to the rusted metal gate and pushed it open. It jammed. She shoved it. It was still jammed.

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ she said as he kicked the gate open. It hung there, sagging tiredly from its ancient, rusted hinges. Clara surged through and Marcus grabbed her arm.

  ‘What?’ she snapped. How did he have the fucking nerve to bring her to a tip like this?

  ‘Don’t stray off the path,’ he said. ‘Molehills.’

  Clara couldn’t see any molehills. She could barely see the path, it was darkening so fast now. All she could make out was a ton of unkempt shrubbery and huge thickets of brambles; a couple of rogue daffodils gleamed yellow here and there, but really? The front garden was a wilderness. ‘Oh, perfect. I’m going to freeze my arse off and on top of that I’m likely to break my bloody neck the minute I go outside.’

  ‘Stay on the path and you won’t. Dunno what you’re moaning on about. It has all mod cons. Well, a bed, anyway.’

  ‘How much land does it have?’ Clara was shivering now, thinking of the slums. She couldn’t believe he’d had the nerve to bring her to a disgusting old dump like this.

  ‘Couple of acres.’

  Marcus unlocked the front door and nudged her into a cavernous dust-covered entrance hall with a big central staircase. Glancing left and right, she could see through one open door a dark kitchen with a range that must have come out of the ark, it looked so old. A farmer’s wife would have black-leaded it once, and kept orphan lambs alive in the bottom oven. Fuck’s sake! She looked to her right and there was another open door, leading into a sitting room with an old dusty threadbare couch and an empty brick fireplace.

  ‘This is a wreck,’ she said, flicking at a light switch. Nothing happened. No lights. No heat. No nothing.

  He closed the front door, locked it and threw the rusty bolt across.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ he said, turning on a torch to light the way. ‘Come on, let’s get to bed.’

  He grabbed her by the arm again to guide her toward the stairs. Clara walked into the newel post. ‘Careful,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you!’ said Clara, but he only laughed.

  93

  The first thing Marcus did when they got upstairs was put down his overnight bag; then he pulled up a floorboard beside the bed and took out a shotgun and a box of ammunition. The second thing he did was to pull the curtains and light a couple of candles. Yes, there was a bed. And it was freshly made up, by the look of it.

  ‘What the hell?’ asked Clara, dropping her own bag onto the floor in shock when she saw the gun.

  ‘Security,’ he said, and sat down on the bed. He loaded the gun and laid it on the floor. The spare ammo he placed beside it.

  ‘Is there anywhere I can clean my teeth? Have a wash? Anything?’

  He shook his head, his eyes watching her as she stood there in the candlelight. ‘There’s no running water. Not yet. There’s a well out in the yard and a pump, but that’s out of bounds overnight, all right? Stay in this room, and if you’ve got to use the toilet . . . ’

  ‘Yeah? What then?’

  ‘There’s a bucket on the landing. Think you kicked it on the way in.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘come here.’

  Clara frowned at him. ‘What for?�
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  ‘What do you think for?’

  Clara stared at him. He was a very handsome man, she thought, her husband. And very conniving, very calculating. He’d set this up, made the bed, sorted out candles, stored the gun away at the ready. He must have done all this earlier today, while she’d wondered where he was and – of course – no one had told her.

  Was that the plan then, get her out of the way down here? Shoot her with that damned gun, bury her dead body out in the wilds somewhere, everything sorted in one fell swoop? She knew he could do it. Troublesome copper’s-nark wife disposed of, so no shit sticking to him. He could just say she’d run off somewhere, God knew where, it was sad but there it was, a fact of life, she’d gone – and then he’d take over her clubs without her bothersome input and go back to his tart Paulette a richer man than he’d started out.

  ‘What?’ he asked, returning her stare.

  What the hell. If he was going to kill her, she saw no way of stopping him. She stepped around the bed, stood in front of him.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ she said lightly, but her heart was pounding with fright and anxiety.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling her down onto his knee. ‘Here you are.’ He pushed her hair aside, kissed her collarbone. ‘You’re shaking. Cold?’

  Terrified, she thought. And now she was remembering their wedding night, the amazing sensations he’d aroused in her, things she had never experienced before. She nodded.

  ‘Then let’s get you into bed,’ he said, and pulled the zip down on her mini dress and slipped his hand inside.

  Clara flinched as his skin touched hers. Then he was pushing the fabric down off her shoulders. Every inch of her flesh felt sensitized, every brush of his fingers over it causing a quiver deep in her gut.

  ‘Why not an earl, a viscount, something like that?’ said Marcus.

  ‘What?’ she queried vacantly. What was he talking about? His hands were everywhere, touching, caressing.

  Don’t stop, she thought.

  ‘You, Clara. Why settle for Frank or Toby or anyone like that? Why settle for me? Why not set your sights higher, if money’s all you want and clout is all you need? God knows you’re beautiful enough to get any man.’