by Roberta Kray
Morgan, however, must have anticipated his intention. A grin crept on to his round sweating face. ‘Hey, Cavelli, aren’t you going to say goodbye to your little pal before you leave?’
He gestured behind him and the massive bulk of Leroy appeared from a cell three doors down. His thick forearm was tight around Isaac’s throat, squeezing on his windpipe.
‘Fuck,’ Cavelli murmured.
Isaac’s skinny arms hung down limply and his eyes were bulging. There was a spreading blue bruise along the length of a cheekbone. His nose looked broken and his lower lip, split along its length, was bloody and swollen.
Cavelli stared up at Leroy. ‘This has got nothing to do with him. Let him go. It’s me you want, right?’
But Morgan was the one who replied. ‘Not that easy,’ he said.
Cavelli ignored him and continued to address Leroy. ‘What’s the matter? You such a woman you need a fucking kid for protection?’
Isaac made a grunting noise that roughly translated probably meant that this was not the best moment to start casting aspersions on the big man’s masculinity.
‘Mr Bryant sends his regards,’ Morgan said. He moved his hands to his hips, looked Cavelli up and down, and laughed. ‘He wanted to be here himself only he’s kind of busy.’
‘Yeah, busy getting you to do his dirty work for him.’
‘Oh, no. This isn’t work, shitface – this is pleasure.’
While Morgan was gloating, Cavelli was trying to work out how he could possibly get to Isaac. It wasn’t looking good. Even if he managed to take Leroy out – and that would involve a minor miracle – he would still have the other seven to contend with. But then he guessed that was the point. As soon as he went for it, they’d be all over him, taking turns to shove his face in the concrete. And if he didn’t go to them, then …
‘Make your choice,’ Morgan said.
Cavelli gazed along the landing. Not a bloody screw in sight of course although whether that was down to chance or design – men like Bryant had their ways – he didn’t have time to ponder on. He heard a scuffling sound to his right and turned to glance in the direction of the other pack. His heart turned over. Jesus! Two of them were dragging Terry Weston out of his cell. He was kicking and struggling but was too small to put up any useful resistance. He had a gag in his mouth and those wide grey eyes were filled with terror. They pushed him to his knees and held him down.
It was only then that Cavelli fully understood the pure evil of Bryant’s revenge. He could only save one of them. He had a choice – Isaac or Terry. Either way, he was going to get his own head kicked in but one of them was going to die.
Jesus Christ.
Morgan laughed again. ‘Make your choice, shitface.’
Isaac or Terry.
Cavelli stared back at his cell mate, the blood in his veins slowly turning to ice. Leroy tightened his stranglehold. Isaac grunted, gazing at him pleadingly, his lips moving as if in silent prayer. And then he quickly looked over at Terry again. He was weeping like a little boy, the tears running down his face, snot pouring from his nose. He thought of Evie and of all the ways she had tried to protect him. How could he make a fucking choice like this, how could he even begin to—
Cavelli launched himself across the space. The roar that came from his mouth was primitive, more animal than human, a sound that rose up from his soul. Instinct had taken over from reason. He was barely within reach of the group when Leroy pushed Isaac aside, throwing him against the railings. Morgan reached back and a weapon was placed into his hand. Cavelli felt the crunch, the agonizing pain as the length of wood, as solid as a baseball bat, swept his right leg from under him.
‘That’s for Hales,’ Morgan yelled.
Cavelli writhed on the floor. Someone kicked him hard in the ribs. And then again. A boot smashed into his groin. He tried to curl into a ball but the blows kept coming, to his face, his chest, the base of his spine. He tried to crawl but his arms were kicked away. It could not be long now before …
Then, abruptly, like a door being slammed everything stopped. For a moment he thought it was over. Relief streamed through his body. He lay listening to his own groaning breath, to the murmur of voices around him. Then slowly, one by one, the voices fell quiet and an eerie silence descended.
Leroy leaned over, grabbed him by the hair and wrenched up his head. He clamped his palm across his mouth. ‘Watch!’ he demanded. It was the only word he had ever spoken to Cavelli. It was a word he would hear in his nightmares, over and over, from that day forth.
Along the landing, Terry was still on his knees. He was staring straight at him, his liquid eyes as wide as saucers.
‘And this is for Bryant,’ Morgan whispered in his ear.
He must have given a signal because the man holding Terry put his left hand under his chin and jerked back his head. The blade was a glint in the light. It was there, hovering, just for a second – and then it sliced through his throat as cleanly as a razor.
Epilogue
The rain battered against the window, a fast brutal downpour that shook and rattled the panes. A miniature lake of water was pooling on the sill. As another fork of lightning split the thunder-dark sky, Eve put down the letter and frowned.
It was six months now since she’d left Norwich, over seven since she’d driven up the path to Hillgrove and seen the fleet of cop cars and the ambulances gathered ominously on the forecourt. Had she realized at that moment? Had a part of her known even before she entered the building that Terry was already dead?
What she had felt when they told her, when they had sat her down and were talking in those soft anxious tones, could not be described by a single word. Perhaps it could not be described by words at all. She had displayed all the natural responses, shock, horror, grief – and they had all been genuine – but hidden inside had been another emotion that she could not afford to show. It was so dark, so grossly shameful, that she could barely acknowledge it to herself. Buried deep within her soul was a small sprouting seed of relief. Now she would never have to ask him the question she was dreading – and would never have to hear him tell that terrible lie.
Sergeant Shepherd had been one of the cops who had interviewed her. The other was an inspector called David Locke. By then she had had no choice other than to hand over the picture and to tell them most of what she knew.
This new version of the story – one that contained no mention of Jack or her conversation with Lesley and described Martin Cavelli only as an old friend she had called upon to help defend her brother – she had made up on the spot. It wasn’t too hard; omission was less risky than the treacherous quicksand of detail.
‘All I know,’ she said, ‘is that something awful happened to Andrea Banks at that villa, something that my father and Terry were forced to keep quiet about.’
Even then, even when Terry was lying cold in the morgue, when it no longer mattered any more, she had continued to protect him. Or was it her father she was trying to defend? The truth would come out eventually but she could not bear to be the one to speak it.
Eddie Shepherd placed the two pints on the table, sat down and glowered at the empty ashtray. It was over six months since he’d given up smoking and he was still reaching for his fags at least twenty times a day. That bloody Weston case had almost been the death of him: three weeks in hospital and enough drugs pumped into his veins to raise the envy of every Norwich junkie.
‘Let it go,’ Locke said. ‘You want to give yourself another heart attack? What’s the point?’
Eddie sighed into his pint. The point was that when he shut his eyes at night, he couldn’t sleep; he went over the evidence over and over again, still trying to put the pieces together. Had Eve Weston been telling the truth? Only some of it, he suspected. And she was still sticking to her story. ‘I don’t like loose ends and I don’t believe her about that picture. She knows more than she’s saying.’
‘But it makes sense that he’d keep it as protection. If they were wi
tnesses to a murder, it’s the one thing that would keep them safe. So what are you thinking – that he was using it to blackmail Silk?’
‘It’s possible,’ he said. Although recalling the state of Alex Weston’s flat it wasn’t likely. And if Sonia Marshall was to be believed, he’d hardly been living the high life.
‘Or maybe the daughter was the one trying to put the squeeze on Silk. He decides he’s had enough, that he’s going to hit her where it hurts and—’ Locke made a fast cutting gesture to his throat.
Eddie wasn’t sure about that either. He lifted his gaze to stare out of the window. The grey of the sky, the lashing rain and intermittent claps of thunder matched the darkness of his mood. ‘We haven’t even got a body.’
Locke snorted. ‘Bodies are the one thing we haven’t been short of.’
‘But not Andrea’s. If she was murdered at the villa, she must have been buried somewhere else. They turned that whole place over, inside and out – not a shred of evidence. Without the body, we’ll never find out who killed her.’
‘Well, whoever he was, the odds are he’s past prosecution.’
Which was true. Of the five men at the villa, only one was still breathing. Alex and Terry Weston, Peter Marshall and Joe Silk were all dead. Yes, even the infamous Joe Silk had gone to meet his maker. He’d been found in the office of one of his clubs with a neat gunshot to the temple. A gangland execution perhaps – or a gift from someone closer to home. Had Keeler Chase decided to eliminate the last possible witness to his crime or had he simply done a bunk when he found out Silk was dead?
Eddie sipped his pint and frowned. The one person he never mentioned in these frequent and frustrating discussions was the bizarre resignation of Jack Raynor. ‘Family problems’ was the reason cited. Bullshit! He remembered Raynor’s response to Peter Marshall’s drowned corpse, his defensiveness over Eve Weston, his interest in Martin Cavelli. They were all loose threads that if pulled on hard enough might eventually … but he didn’t want to go there. He had never liked the man but some dogs were best left sleeping.
Eve leaned her head against the window and felt the vibrations of the rain. Whenever she thought about that afternoon, it was always with a lingering sense of guilt. If she had gone straight to the cops when she found out about Andrea Banks, if she had seen Terry instead of Cavelli on that Thursday visit, if she had only found the time to speak to her father …
But what ifs didn’t change anything. She understood now why he had taken that silent midnight stroll into the river. He had been too exhausted to go on, too tired of hiding such a dreadful secret. And yet, even at the end, he had still not been able to make a definitive decision. He was a father and Terry, whatever he had done, would always be his son. He could not be the one to condemn him to a life behind bars. So he had simply left the notes, hidden the photograph, and left the rest up to fate.
Simply? No, that didn’t come close. There had been nothing simple about it. He must have struggled with a thousand angry demons. He must have thought about it, lived with it, for every waking minute of what had almost been two years. Someone else’s daughter, someone else’s misery and pain …
She wondered what Terry had said to him that night. Had he cried and pleaded, sworn it was an accident, begged for his help? She would never know. Perhaps her father would have acted differently if he had been aware of the previous assault but Lesley – more concerned with her own reputation than with the very real danger her son presented – had chosen to take matters into her own hands. Vince had been despatched with strict instructions and a wallet full of cash. Terry’s first victim was a prostitute, an addict and probably a realist too; she had accepted their money rather than go to court.
How Joe Silk had found out about it was another matter altogether and he wasn’t around to ask any more. Still, she supposed that if you dug deep enough you could always find some dirt. Was she glad that he was dead? More relieved perhaps than glad. She recalled him sitting in the café, slowly shaking his head. Evie, my dear. How has it come to this?
It was a question that continued to haunt her – along with so many others. What had made Terry like he was? Were monsters born or created? And if it was the latter, then had she played a part in what he had become? She wanted to grieve properly for him – he was her brother after all – but she could only shed tears for the child she had once loved; the grown man was a stranger to her.
She shivered, pulled away from the window and lit a cigarette. Perhaps coming back to London had not been such a great idea. Henry was right; she needed a fresh start, somewhere new, somewhere different.
‘You have to look to the future,’ he’d insisted the last time that she saw him.
That had been six weeks ago.
They had walked along the Embankment with their heads bowed low and a cold November wind whistling round their ears. Their meetings, since his recovery, had been infrequent. She knew she should not really see him at all – their friendship had already caused too much damage – but he remained the only constant in her life. Henry was her anchor. He was her safety and security; he prevented her from drifting. Eventually, soon, she would have to let go but she was not quite ready yet.
‘You have to stop feeling guilty for the things you had no control over.’
‘But I did have control over getting you involved.’
‘I made my own choices. Neither of us knew what was going to happen.’
She turned and leaned her elbows on the wall, staring out over the dark expanse of river. ‘Doesn’t it bother you that he’s out there somewhere?’ Keeler Chase still came to her at night, an uninvited visitor to her dreams. She saw him standing in an archway, watching and waiting, his blank eyes slowly brightening. ‘Don’t you want him to pay for what he did?’
But Henry only gazed into the water and sighed.
It was an ambiguous sort of sigh, not the kind that could easily be interpreted. She doubted if anyone could fully recover from such a violent encounter but it had produced one positive result. It had brought him closer to Celia. Extreme events provoke extreme emotions and ever since the shooting, ever since his life had hung so tenuously in the balance, they had managed not just to put their differences behind them but to rescue and revive their marriage. She felt a faint twinge inside her chest. Was it jealousy? Not exactly; she wanted him to be happy. It was more a pang of envy. She couldn’t help wondering if she would ever experience even a fraction of that enduring kind of love.
‘So does Celia believe you now – does she understand that you were never unfaithful?’
He had looked at her kindly, his eyes soft behind the lenses of his glasses. ‘Oh Eve, there’s more than one way to betray someone.’
And she couldn’t argue with that.
With their shoulders hunched, they had walked silently on. The traffic roared by beside them. For a while they were separate, lost to their own inner thoughts. It was only as they were approaching Waterloo Bridge that he had taken his hands from his pocket and linked his arm through hers.
‘How’s Sonia?’ he said.
And for the first time she smiled. ‘Still milking it for all it’s worth. Eddie Shepherd’s convinced she knows more than she’s telling. He won’t leave her alone. He thinks that if he buys her enough meals and plies her with enough booze she’ll eventually give in.’
He laughed. ‘He’ll have a long wait.’
‘And an expensive one.’
They stopped again to gaze out over the river. Huddling against the cold, they leaned in against each other. She felt the warmth of him, the security. How could she ever let him go? But then again how could she not? She half-closed her eyes. Her breath caught in her throat. She leaned a little closer and absorbed the feeling, the safety and the sweetness, and stored it up for some future lonely day when she would need it again.
‘And how’s Patrick?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she murmured. ‘He’s fine. He’s okay.’
‘You don’t think that y
ou two might—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’ Which wasn’t to say that it hadn’t crossed her mind; there was always comfort in familiarity. Only last week he’d rung again and asked her out. Just for a drink, where’s the harm in it? And she’d been tempted but she knew that one drink would lead to another and then another and that in turn might lead to … ‘No,’ she said again. ‘No going back, right?’
‘The voyage out,’ he said.
She nodded.
Eve glanced down at her watch. She had to be at work in less than an hour. The job wasn’t the best in the world, serving cocktails to lecherous overpaid city slickers, but the tips were good. After Christmas, when she had enough money, she would go away – to Paris, to Rome, to anywhere her cash would take her.
She had to find a way to move on, to stop looking back. In a moment of weakness, brought on by too much wine, she had even tried to ring Jack. She had done that stupid drunken thing of sitting on the floor, curled up against the sofa, with the phone pressed to her ear. She had punched in his number, bitten down on her knuckles and waited … only to hear that flat relentless souldestroying tone. His phone was disconnected. He was gone, out of touch, out of reach, out of her life.
She picked up the letter again and stared at it. Well, it wasn’t really a letter. In fact it was barely a note; Martin Cavelli was a man of few words. Evie, Come and see me. And enclosed was a visiting order, not for Hillgrove but for an open prison in Surrey. So it couldn’t be that long before he was due to be released.
What did he want?
She had written to him at the hospital, shortly after Terry’s funeral, but he had never replied. No big surprise. A faltering apology was small reward for a broken leg, five cracked ribs and whatever else her hellish pact had inflicted on him.
Would she go? No, she couldn’t see the point. There was nothing left to say.
But then again, her curiosity usually got the better of her – and at least she might finally get rid of those boxes …