by PJ Adams
Contents
RUTHLESS
Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books
Credits and copyright information
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RUTHLESS
A Bailey Boys novel
PJ Adams
1
Love changes everything. Even for a monster like me.
I was slow to fully understand that, though, hidden behind my blinkers.
I had my life. The secluded, un-noteworthy life in which I’d successfully lost myself these past few months.
I had the house I was renovating, perched on top of a line of chalk and sandstone cliffs on the Norfolk coast, facing north with only a couple of thousand miles of water between me and the North Pole.
I had a modest car, an old Range Rover that coped easily with the rough track that led from my house to the coast road.
I had a newly fitted, top of the range country kitchen where one day I would teach myself to cook something that involved a little more than piercing the plastic lid and waiting for the microwave to do its magic. If there was one thing I missed it was the variety of cuisines available in my old East End haunts, the restaurant owners who would pull out all the stops when one of the Bailey Boys stopped by for a meal.
Up in the attic room I had my 1912 Blüthner boudoir grand piano set before the north-facing picture windows, my one real indulgence.
I had left so much behind when I moved away from London.
My life in this North Norfolk retreat was a quiet one, populated by these few things and punctuated by long walks along those cliffs, or along the shingle beach at their foot, where fossilized sharks’ teeth and ammonites lay scattered among great drifts of razor shells.
Another of the few things I had, because of those same events that had cost me all that I loved, was a price on my head.
One day my enemies would come for me. There could be no doubt about that. A man like me can never escape the past.
And on the day when they came, I would be waiting.
I might even ask them why it had taken so long.
I was ready. I knew what I deserved.
I would offer no resistance, and no one would grieve.
Few would even notice, and those who did would probably ask the same question: why had it taken so long?
§
But love.
I had never anticipated that.
Love.
A different kind of monster.
Can you ever anticipate something like that, though? Plan for it?
I don’t know.
I do not fall. I do not trust. I’ve stood by and watched as my two younger brothers have done so, first Dean and then Lee.
Both of them fell, and both let it change them – for the better I’m sure, but still they changed.
I keep an eye on them, even now; even though we do not talk any more, I have contacts.
I may have betrayed my brothers, but I still care.
But love. Not the family kind of love, but the head-over-heels bullshit. I don’t do it. I never have.
You can’t let people close to you in my line of business. You can’t trust them, because trust is, quite literally, a matter of life and death, for you and all around you.
I’m not a completely cold son of a bitch. Don’t think that of me.
I like women. I admire them and I enjoy their company. I’ve always taken care of the women in my life. I’ve been told I’m a proper gentleman. Respect. That’s what it comes down to. A bastard like me could easily abuse his position, but I almost never have. Despite what others might say, I’ve always liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.
But love... I could never afford to love.
Until... her.
The first time I saw her I did the usual, the man thing. Taking it all in with a single assessing glance. The straw-blonde hair, straight and pulled back into a practical ponytail. The slight figure, a nice curve to the waist where the hips spread – her figure slight but strong, the natural, wiry strength of someone who worked hard, rather than worked out. The fullness of her breasts, the way she moved; the eyes, the kind of gray that glinted blue and you never knew if that was pigment or reflected sky.
That first assessment. I don’t know what it was that broke through my barriers. Not a superficial thing, not model looks or glamour, but... something. A spark. Something that made you look again after that initial man-glance, made you wonder what it was that had snagged your attention.
I liked what I saw. Of course I did. I wanted to screw her. I even ran through one or two scenarios in my mind that might lead to that outcome.
That day, the first time I met Miglë Petrauskė, I fancied the girl that I saw before me.
It was only later that I fell in love with the woman I discovered. And maybe that was my downfall, because she made me care again.
§
She held a hand out, politely, for me to shake. “I am Miglë Petrauskė,” she said, as I did that thing, the glance that took her all in and in a split-second had me thinking I’d like to get into her pants. “But people here call me Maggie.”
“Maggie.” I took her hand, tiny and cool in mine, squeezed, held on for a moment too long, and maybe that’s when I realized there was some kind of spark, something extra.
“Tomasz. He tell me you need a cleaner, yes?”
I stepped back from the doorway, waved a hand to indicate the interior of the place, and said, “What do you think?”
“I think you need Tomasz to finish first,” she said, as she stepped in from the stiff September wind that was whipping in off the North Sea.
Tomasz was my builder, one of the few people I’d allowed into my new home. I’d had him and his team checked out carefully before I’d even allowed that. Poles, no connections to any of the Russian mobsters I’d managed to antagonize recently. Clean records, hard workers, and now Tomasz had put Maggie my way, as he’d said he would.
But when he’d told me he knew someone and would send her round, I hadn’t expected someone like Maggie, with her delicate good looks and a brisk manner that strayed into unwholesome perkiness. God knows I was in no place for perky just then.
The house was a mess. Bare floorboards, electric sockets hanging off the walls, naked windows.
“You any good with a paintbrush?” I asked her. I don’t do small talk or light-hearted quips, either.
I stepped back from her, only now reflecting on the fact that I’d just let a complete stranger into my home, on only the recommendation of a builder I’d known for a few weeks.
My gaze was unsettling her, and she glanced at the door, still open to the wildness of the day.
Damn it, Maggie, why didn’t you just walk away then, while you could? Why did you straighten up, meet my look – the look that had broken so many before you – and let me fall?
I’ll always blame you for that.
“I paint, yes,” she said. “Electrics, too.” And with that she went over to examine a light switch that was hanging loose, waiting to be properly fitted to the newly plastered wall.
2
He played the piano. That surprised Maggie more than anything. Up there in that long attic room, with the picture windows that afforded a view out over the slate-gray sea, he would sit at his concert-style piano and play. Classical music, with big, dramatic chords. Sometimes something American, jazzy. Mostly music that Maggie did not recognize.
On her third day at Owen Bailey’s Norfolk retreat, she stoo
d on the narrow staircase that led up to the attic, a mug of tea she had made for him in her hands, and now she hesitated.
She had decided that this was the time to talk to him, to test him.
To confess that she was not entirely who he believed her to be. That she was not a distant Polish relative of Tomasz the builder. That she had, in truth, only met him the week before and had paid him to make the introduction.
But she paused.
Owen was playing something different to the usual dramatic pieces he favored. Fast, in waltz time, with intricate trills and flourishes, far more upbeat than his usual fare. She recognized it from somewhere – probably a movie soundtrack or TV.
She waited until he had finished, then knocked and went in. “I make you tea,” she told him, and placed the mug on a nearby table.
He looked distracted, as if still lost in the music.
It took him a few seconds to focus and then smile, as if it was an expression he had to remind himself to use. Maybe he did. She had never been around someone so wrapped up in themselves. His life here mainly consisted of hiding away in this attic room, or going for long walks along the cliffs, where he would stand too close to the edge and look down. You might think that one day he must jump, if the cliffs were higher and not just crumbling muddy slopes that tumbled down to the beach.
“Your fellow countryman,” he said, and Maggie paused, looking at him to see if he would go on.
He was a tall man, his hair dark and cropped short, a salt and pepper beard lining a gaunt jaw, and dark eyes that fixed you to the spot when they locked onto you.
It was the eyes that convinced her that he might just be the man she sought. They were gangster eyes. They could easily be the eyes of a man who had once been one of the most ruthless crimelords London had seen, according to the stories she had heard.
“Chopin. A Pole, like you.”
Now would be the moment.
I am not a Pole. I am not who you believe.
“He wrote it for his friend’s dog.”
“A dog?” The moment was past.
Owen nodded. “He watched it chasing its tail, round and round in circles, and decided to try to capture that in music. Valse du petit chien – the little dog waltz. Most pianists like to play it as fast as possible, a show-off piece.”
“As you did.”
He played a short burst, fast and ebullient. Then paused and said, “But usually I slow it right down, and switch it to minor.”
He played the same few phrases again, much more slowly, and suddenly the piece took on a heavy sadness, almost overpowering.
Maggie had never been in the same room when he played before, and was not prepared for the intensity.
Now, she backed away to the door, Owen watching her all the way.
Those dark eyes had taken on a harsher aspect now, as if he realized he had briefly opened up to her.
“You need to know I’m a bastard,” he said. “A vicious bastard who drives away anyone who gets too close.”
She put a hand to the doorframe, steadying herself.
“Are you warning me?” she said.
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m warning me.”
§
He scared her, although she struggled to admit that to herself. You should never admit to your fears; that only gives them power over you.
But that look in his eyes...
It wasn’t that she feared for herself physically, that she felt uncomfortable being in the house around him.
It was the atmosphere, the sense that he was a man around whom things happened. He did not stand at the top of those cliffs hoping that one day he would find one high enough; he was waiting for the earth to swallow him up, and maybe one day it would.
Leaving at the end of a day of painting and fixing and cleaning, she felt the weight lift from her shoulders.
Today, especially. The day she had taken him tea and he had tried to scare her with his words, his warnings that he was a bad man.
She knew that.
Oh, she knew that!
Why else was she here?
Owen Bailey, the oldest of the three Bailey Boys. A man responsible for many deaths. A man with a price on his head, put there by the Russian and Ukrainian gangsters who now filled the vacuum he had left on the streets of London.
3
I liked to work alone on the place. Teaching myself new skills that others would no doubt consider basic: patching and restoring old woodwork where it hadn’t been replaced altogether; preparing surfaces; painting primer, undercoat, top coat.
Until now I’d always relied on others for this kind of thing. I was the thinker and planner, the organizer, the one who tidied away loose ends or, if I was doing my job right, making sure there were none in the first place. I knew where all the bodies were but I was rarely the one who put them there, if you know what I mean.
I had only rarely worked with my hands.
While Tomasz and his boys had been renovating the place I’d left them to it. Since I’d dismissed them, the work mostly done now, it had all been down to me and Maggie. I’d taken her on as a cleaner, but there were few things around the place she couldn’t turn a hand to, and her range of skills was slightly intimidating – even to me, a man who would never admit to feeling intimidated.
And so we developed a kind of tag-team dialogue between the two of us. In the day, while she was there, I would retreat to my attic room, or go for a long walk. Then in the evening, I would pick up where she had left off, adding an undercoat to her primer, or continuing to hang paper where she had stopped halfway along a wall.
We never arranged this, not even leaving notes of what needed doing, and for all I knew she was pissed off every morning when she came in and found her flawless paintwork finished with a patchy coat, or her immaculately hung wallpaper next to mine with gaps and wrinkles.
I’m being unfair to myself, I know. My skills progressed rapidly at that time, as we applied the finishing touches to a house in which I had no expectation of living long.
I didn’t see it then as a way of talking with her without words, of connecting her activities to mine. Even now I’d tell you to stop being poncey if you said that’s what I was doing.
I was just finishing my house. No more. It occupied my mind on those dark Norfolk nights, and the steady, if slow, progress gave my life some kind of shape.
One night I was sitting on the exposed wood of a staircase, bright arc-lights illuminating the passageway like a crime scene as I twisted awkwardly to put the final coat of satinwood on the skirting board, when I felt the buzz of my cellphone, deep in one of the pockets of my overalls.
It must have been in my head, the idea of the dialogue between Maggie’s day and my evening, because although she had never called me – didn’t even have my number – my first thought was that it must be her.
I checked the screen. Reuben Glover.
I almost put it back in my pocket, surprised at my reaction, my disappointment – the new understanding that it wasn’t only the work on the house that gave shape to my days.
It made me uncomfortable that Maggie’s presence had become a part of my life. Something beyond appreciation for her work and the way she filled a pair of jeans. I would never have dropped my guard like that in the old days.
Reuben was part of the old days.
It was weeks since I’d last spoken to him. Months.
“Hey, Reuben. How’s it hanging?”
My greeting seemed forced. I’d had to pause to think how we used to talk, the banter that had been so natural as we’d grown up together on the streets of the East End. I stood up, squared my shoulders. “So... what’s up?”
“Just checking you’re still alive, know what I mean?”
I didn’t like this. The awkwardness. The way I felt the need to read between the lines. The knowledge that while Reuben was joking, making light of it all, there was also that layer of concern underlying it all. Even if the bastard hadn’t spoken
to me for perhaps three months.
It had been messy. Ugly.
Back in the spring: a long-overdue confrontation with a Russian gang that was trying to muscle in on our territory. I’d made mistakes, made a clumsy attempt to negotiate peace and betrayed my two younger brothers, and in making amends I’d shot one of the Russians’ top men, a bastard we’d nicknamed ‘Putin’.
And Reuben Glover, the closest thing to a fourth Bailey Boy there could be, had stepped in to clear up the mess. I owed him for that, and we both knew it.
“How’s things down there?” Earlier this year, I’d walked away from it all, but Reuben had stayed in the thick of it.
“Oh, you know,” said Reuben. I could picture him sitting there in the corner of some shady East End pub – I could hear the background noise, it wasn’t much of a leap – pausing while he moistened his thin lips with the tip of his tongue. Dean had once said it made him think of snakes, and ever since I’d been unable to shake the image.
“I’m out of it,” I reminded him. “The only time I ever hear what’s going on is when someone like you calls me in the middle of the fucking night to talk about old times, know what I mean?”
He laughed. Reuben was one of the few people with the confidence to judge when I was taking the piss and when the hint of tightness in my voice betrayed menace. He usually even got it right, too.
“Oh, you know,” he said again. “The Russians run the manor now. Salko and Davydov. You left a void they were only too ready to step into.”
“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”
“Maybe. But... well, these bastards don’t have the same class, know what I’m saying?”
It was my turn to laugh. Say what you like, but there’s nothing like an old school London gangster. Don’t get me wrong: my father’s generation, the Krays and the Richardsons, they were vicious, ruthless, conscienceless bastards, and me and my brothers kept up that tradition, but, well, we had standards. A code. People respected us. We kept people in line, and I don’t think it’s going too far to say that we were seen by many as pillars of the community.