Dirty Game

by Jessie Keane

  Annie got the message. She turned and said, ‘Donny, fuck off will you? Go and wait for me by the lych gate.’

  Donny hesitated. His eyes flicked to the cringing Celia once again.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Annie snapped. ‘And listen up. You never saw a thing, Donny. Not a fucking thing. Okay? Or I tell Max you made a pass at me. Don’t think I won’t, I’m telling you I will. Do you believe me?’

  Donny said nothing. He nodded.

  ‘He’d have your arse on a spit if I said the word,’ said Annie. ‘So keep it buttoned – or else.’

  Donny stalked off and stood by the gate with a face like thunder.

  ‘Christ, that told him,’ said Dolly with a trembling voice.

  Annie looked at Dolly. Her colour was coming back now, but she still looked shaken. Annie knew what she was thinking. Who did this? And if they could do such a hideous thing to Celia, where did that leave any of Celia’s girls – and Celia’s niece?

  ‘You won’t tell him you saw me, will you?’ asked Celia. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. I know that. But she was my sister-in-law, the poor bitch, it was the least I could do. I didn’t think anyone would see me if I kept my distance. You won’t tell him, will you?’

  ‘I won’t tell him,’ said Annie. They both knew they were talking about Max. ‘Is he responsible for this?’ She nodded at Celia’s right arm.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ said Celia.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. Max don’t have to do his own dirty work, unless he really wants to.’

  ‘They made me write the note at the kitchen table.’

  ‘Max’s boys,’ said Annie. Oh God no, she thought. Please no.

  ‘Of course she means Max’s bloody boys,’ said Dolly. ‘Who the hell else would she mean? I knew there was something bloody fishy going on.’

  ‘Then they blindfolded me. I thought I was a goner, straight up.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Annie. She felt more than sick now – disgusted. Disbelieving.

  ‘They took me somewhere. A meat market.’ Connie drew a shuddering breath. ‘There was a bloke there … he cut off my hand.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Dolly.

  ‘You won’t tell him you saw me, will you?’

  Fuck it, would Celia never stop saying that? ‘I won’t tell him.’

  ‘You’re all right, Celia,’ said Dolly, patting her shoulder. ‘We won’t breathe a word.’

  ‘He told me to keep away. I shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘You’re safe,’ said Annie. ‘Safe as houses.’ Not even she believed that.

  ‘Do you know what he said when he did it? The chap who cut off my hand?’

  Annie and Dolly shook their heads. Dolly looked as if she was about to be sick again now. Annie felt as if someone had hit her with a brick. She was stunned by what had happened to Celia, staggered by the implications of this act of brutality.

  ‘He said it was a little message,’ Celia sobbed. ‘From Max Carter.’

  37

  By three o’clock on the day they buried her mother, Annie had moved all of her stuff and herself out of the Park Street apartment and back into the Limehouse place.

  She left a note on the hall table of the apartment and her keys with an unhappy Donny.

  ‘Remember. You saw nothing.’

  Donny nodded.

  There was nothing else she could do. She didn’t want to even look at Max, far less crawl into bed with the bastard. All she could think about was Celia’s panic-stricken face as she hailed another taxi and vanished out of their lives once again.

  Celia had been too spooked to conduct a conversation. Annie asked if her dad ever got in touch with Celia, trying to keep her there for a moment or two longer. But Celia said a flat no. The last she’d heard of Annie’s dad, he was a milkman in Manitoba. He had his own life, and she was bloody lucky to still have hers, so she had to go. She wished them good luck. She didn’t even comment on how different Dolly looked, she was too eager to get away, back to safety. Annie could understand that. She watched her beloved aunt shoot away in the taxi and just knew that she’d never see her again. Because of Max.

  ‘What will you do?’ Dolly asked Annie.

  But Annie could only shake her head. She felt too devastated to speak.

  ‘Listen,’ said Dolly. ‘You don’t have to stay with him. You know that. Your room’s still standing empty. You could come and stay with us. If you want to.’

  And so that was what she did. In a state of stunned disbelief she walked out of the apartment and out of Max’s life. Donny dropped her back at Limehouse. He still looked unhappy. But then, so did she.

  ‘I’ll have to tell him where I took you,’ said Donny.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s going to be seriously pissed off.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘When you see him, tell him it had nothing to do with me, will you?’

  Annie’s eyes met Donny’s in the driver’s mirror. He looked fearful. Everyone around Max looked fearful sooner or later, she was coming to realize that.

  ‘I won’t see him,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Donny’s laugh was hollow. ‘Trust me – you’ll see him.’

  Max came to find her next morning. Chris let him into the front parlour and shouted for Annie. Sweet Jesus, how was she supposed to cope with this? Annie wondered. She composed herself with an effort and came downstairs.

  She felt a mess. She hadn’t slept. Darren and Ellie and Aretha had spent all last evening tiptoeing around her, not asking the questions they were dying to. It was obvious that Dolly had told them to button it. Annie was grateful for that. She had gone to bed early, wanting to be alone, and lay awake for most of the night, thinking about Max. Thinking of Celia too, screaming with fear and agony as they hacked her hand off in cold blood, just because Eddie Carter died on her premises. Thinking of the times she had shared with Max in the apartment, falling into bed together laughing and then becoming serious as they made love.

  She was unable to reconcile the two images – the wonderful lover and the heartless bastard who had mutilated her aunt. Now he was here. She went into the front room and closed the door behind her and looked at him. It hurt to look at him, like a thousand stab wounds.

  Max looked right back at her. Then he said: ‘No one walks out on me.’

  Annie swallowed. ‘I just did.’

  Max threw a scrap of paper on to the floor.

  ‘And what the fuck does this mean?’ he asked with venom. ‘“I’m sorry but it’s over”! What sort of fucking note is that?’

  ‘What sort of fucking note do you want, Max?’ she shot back.

  Max lifted a finger. ‘I don’t want any lip, Annie. I want an answer, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve told you. It’s over.’ Fuck, he looked furious. Annie thought of Celia’s hand, dropping on to a sawdust-covered floor like a piece of dead meat. She tried to keep her voice steady, but her heart seemed to be lodged in her throat.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said again.

  Max was silent for a long time. Then he walked across to where she stood and leaned in close.

  ‘Is this about Kieron fucking Delaney?’ he asked.

  Annie stared in surprise. ‘What?’

  Max grabbed her chin. ‘Is it?’

  ‘No it fucking isn’t!’

  ‘What then? What’s happened over the past day or so to make you change? I saw you at the apartment before your mum’s funeral, you were fine. I saw you waiting outside the church in the car with that blonde tart and Donny at the wheel. I didn’t see you inside the church. When we came out, the car was gone and you with it. So what happened?’

  Annie couldn’t breathe. He was too close. She kept seeing that image. The hand, dropping away, Celia screaming with pain. She was going to faint, or vomit, she didn’t know which.

  She had even thought of confronting him with it, telling him about Celia and what had happened to her, saying ‘Look you bastard, I know you did it.’


  But she knew he would only deny it like he’d done before, and she didn’t feel strong enough to argue the toss with him now. She was too tired, too sickened. This time he wasn’t going to get the chance to win her round. He could rot for all she cared, he was dead to her now.

  ‘Donny must have told you what happened,’ said Annie. Oh Christ – and what if he had? What if Donny had ignored her warning and spilled the beans, told Max that Celia was there at the church?

  ‘He said he dropped you back at the flat and that you seemed a bit upset. That you’d changed your mind about attending the funeral. You told him to go home, that you wouldn’t want to go out again. What did you do, wait until the coast was clear and then nip off to see that Delaney piss-artist instead?’

  ‘For God’s sake, no!’ Fuck, she couldn’t let him even start to think that Kieron was at the root of all this. She had thought all this through, she knew what she had to say now. ‘Max – I saw you with Ruthie at the funeral. And I suddenly saw that what I was doing was wrong. Wicked. She’s my sister. I can’t go on betraying her.’

  Which was partly true. Who the hell had she been kidding, thinking she could go on with this behind Ruthie’s back? She couldn’t do it any more, wouldn’t do it any more. And then seeing that Celia had been cut for something that wasn’t her fault – well, that was knowledge she could never live with, not when Max had ordered it done.

  He drew in closer still.

  ‘Like it or not, you’re mine,’ he said.

  Annie steeled herself. ‘I told you before, Max. I don’t belong to anyone. Only to myself.’

  He released her chin with a flick of his fingers. He was nodding. ‘It’s that fucker Delaney.’

  ‘No. It’s Ruthie. I can’t go on doing this to Ruthie.’

  Max turned away. ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ said Annie, heart racing.

  ‘We were good together.’

  Now Annie knew she’d been kidding herself. She looked into his eyes and saw only deception and cruelty there. Max Carter wasn’t the romantic hero she’d always believed him to be. Max Carter was a vicious, low-life thug, he always had been and he always would be. He would kill any fucker who crossed him, she knew that much. So would he really draw the line at wreaking vengeance for a crime against his family?

  Annie stiffened her spine.

  ‘We might have been good together once,’ she said coldly. ‘But that’s over. It couldn’t go on. I see that now.’

  Suddenly he turned back to her, grabbed her, kissed her hard.

  Annie held herself rigid. He was hurting her. Punishing her. She tasted blood on her lip. She kept still, forced herself not to respond to him the way she always responded.

  ‘You’re mine,’ he said again against her mouth.

  ‘No,’ said Annie.

  ‘This is only over when I say so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  The following morning, the nude portrait of her that Kieron had painted was thrown on to the pavement in front of the parlour. A car roared away. Chris came out and cautiously picked up the painting. The canvas was slashed right through.

  38

  Annie was sitting at the kitchen table next morning when Darren walked in. She was staring at the ruined canvas, propped against the wall in tatters. Darren looked at it, then at her.

  ‘Well, girl, he’s properly pissed off with you,’ he said.

  Annie nodded. ‘There’s tea in the pot.’

  Darren poured and sat down beside her. ‘Been up long?’

  ‘Hours – couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Dolly wouldn’t say what had gone on. She said we ought not to talk about it to you.’

  ‘Dolly’s right, there’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Look at the painting, Darren, don’t you think that says everything?’

  Good old Dolly. She knew how to keep quiet, thank God. She might have a mouth on her like the Blackwall tunnel, but she knew when discretion was needed. Jesus, it was needed now. No one could know about Celia. Hadn’t the poor cow suffered enough? God knew what Max would do to her if he found out she’d come back, Annie knew all too well what he was capable of.

  Still, Annie could scarcely believe that he’d trashed the painting. Slit it wide open with a knife, by the look at it. She thought of Celia’s missing hand. Of Kieron. Max seemed convinced this had something to do with Kieron.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she moaned, and put her head in her hands.

  ‘It’ll all work out,’ said Darren, patting her shoulder.

  ‘Yeah?’ Annie dropped her hands and glared at him. ‘How, exactly? It’s a total bloody mess, and I’ve got no one to blame but myself.’

  ‘You sorry you left him?’

  Annie thought of lying in bed with Max. All right, he was a man. Mum – God rest her, the poor cow – had told both her daughters over and over that men were bastards, that all they needed was a hole to stick it in and they were happy. But it had been different with Max and her. There had been passion, yes, but there had also been laughter, and Annie believed that she had got closer to Max Carter over the last month or so than anyone else had in a long while.

  Maybe she had just been kidding herself, because just look – he’d done this. He was behaving like any other thwarted male, raging about the place destroying things and threatening revenge.

  ‘I’m not sorry I left him,’ said Annie dully. ‘There was nothing else I could do.’

  ‘Then you’ve got to pick yourself up and move your life on again,’ said Darren.

  That easy. Annie sat there and felt like a puppet with its strings cut.

  She stood up. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ she said.

  Darren watched her go. Christ, this wasn’t the Annie Bailey he knew.

  Annie had managed to sleep for an hour or so when Aretha knocked on her bedroom door. Annie lifted her head from the pillow and squinted up at her.

  ‘Fuck, girl, you look rough,’ said Aretha.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Annie.

  ‘You got Mr Big on the phone. Wants to talk to you.’

  Annie shot upright. ‘Max?’

  ‘Redmond Delaney.’

  Annie hauled herself out of bed, wrapped herself in the expensive turquoise silk dressing gown Max had bought her, and crawled downstairs. Chris was there in the corner. He nodded at her and went back to his paper. Dolly and Darren and Ellie were in the kitchen, chatting. Everything was as if she’d never left.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Miss Bailey,’ said Redmond’s cool, calm voice. ‘Are you well?’

  Annie drew in a quivering breath. ‘Fine.’

  ‘I heard you’d come back,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you going to stay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want to stay?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘Only there could be difficulties. Miss Farrell’s in charge now, she’s doing well.’

  Annie had to think for a moment. Who the fuck was Miss Farrell? Of course. Dolly. Dolly had settled into her job as Madam and Redmond didn’t want her treading on Dolly’s toes.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘You sound very tired.’

  It was simply an observation, but Annie’s eyes filled with unexpected tears.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘I heard about Kieron’s painting,’ said Redmond.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault. Take care.’ And the line went dead.

  Annie wandered through to the kitchen. Conversation stopped. Then Dolly piped up: ‘What did he say?’ There was an edge of unease in her voice.

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘You look like shit, Annie Bailey,’ said Dolly a touch unkindly.

  While she looked great. Annie thought that Dolly had never in her life looked so good. So polished, so elegant. How the tables are turned, she thou
ght, how the mighty have fallen. Dolly looked like the cover of a magazine, and she, Annie Bailey, formerly queen of this establishment, looked – yes, Dolly was right – like shit.

  ‘You poor thing. Sit down and have some tea and toast,’ said Ellie, a little too sweetly.

  Annie sat and exchanged a look with Darren. Ellie was hedging her bets. Annie was back, and she might kick Dolly out of pole position as lady boss. It might pay to suck up. Ellie could get a degree in sucking up, she was that good at it.

  The painting was gone, Annie noticed. Someone had put it away, out of sight. Stuffed it in a cupboard or something. Not that she cared. They could burn the bloody thing for her. It represented another time, a time she’d rather be allowed to forget.

  ‘He didn’t say anything about this place, did he?’ asked Dolly.

  Annie looked at her and Dolly looked away. Annie knew what she was thinking – that Annie intended to take over the reins of command here again, and maybe Redmond was going to put Annie back in charge over Dolly’s head.

  ‘He didn’t say much,’ said Annie.

  Dolly’s eyes moved back and locked with hers for a moment.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, and stood up. She clapped her hands. ‘Come on then, troops. Let’s get this place tidy, the punters will be arriving soon.’

  Of course, thought Annie. Friday. Party day. Ellie put her tea and toast in front of her and she was left alone at the table. She took a bite, but couldn’t eat the rest. She drank some tea. Then she went out into the hall and back up the stairs. Fuck it, this was no use, she couldn’t go on like this.

  She took a bath, washed her hair, got dressed. There was music coming from the front room, and people were laughing and talking. Maybe this was just what she needed.

  She went back downstairs. Chris was at his station. Ellie was servicing an elderly gentleman on a chair just inside the front-room door, jumping up and down on the poor chap fit to break his brittle old bones, but he seemed to be enjoying it. Two whores she didn’t know were rolling about on the sofa with three men who looked like barristers or High Court judges. Probably Aretha was at work upstairs in her room, strapping another poor twisted soul into the Punishment Chair. And Darren didn’t much care for an audience while he performed, so he was probably upstairs too with some outwardly respectable gentleman who preferred to take it up the arse. Dolly was doling out drinks as Brian mixed and served, and passing around canapés. She looked up when Annie entered the room and her smile tightened.