Malice (Rina Walker Book 3)

by Hugh Fraser

  ‘Fucking finish it!’ shouts Jack, from the table.

  Danny picks up both guns, puts a chair in front of me, lifts Sammy onto it and slaps him back and forth across the face until he wakes.

  ‘Let’s try that again shall we? Unless you want to go out first,’ he snarls, putting a gun in Sammy’s hand and jabbing the barrel of the other one into his back.

  The door crashes open behind me. Danny gets a bullet in the head, then two in the chest and hits the floor. Sammy drops the gun and bolts out of the back door as someone strides past me and shoots Jack twice as he struggles to stand up. When he slumps forward onto the table, the shooter turns, lowers the gun and Dawn is looking at me and smiling.

  She takes a butcher’s knife off the draining board, slices through my bonds and then frees Lizzie.

  ‘Come on, quickly,’ she says, going across the hall and out onto the patio.

  I take a look at the dead brothers, check there’s no pulse, then I take Lizzie’s hand and we run after Dawn.

  She’s put a chair up against the garden wall and she’s sitting astride the top of it. Lizzie steps onto the chair, Dawn hauls her up and over and then does the same for me. She drops down beside us, runs to a car a short way up the hill and gets into the driver’s seat. I sit beside her and Lizzie goes in the back. She slips the handbrake and the car rolls silently down the slope. There are lights coming on in the first house we pass and I look back and see a door opening. When we get towards the bottom of the hill, Dawn starts the engine and drives fast towards the main road to Denia.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I ask.

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve been following your career,’ says Dawn.

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘When Johnny Brindle was killed, I knew you must have done it so I did a bit of asking around while you were in Holloway. Right Liz?’

  I look at Lizzie and I’m surprised when she nods. ‘You knew about this?’ I ask.

  ‘She owes you her life and she wanted to watch your back, that’s all.’

  ‘And you told her I was going after them?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Well I’ll be…’

  ‘If it had gone off without any trouble you’d never have known I was here,’ says Dawn.

  ‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’ I ask.

  ‘One of my brothers is a bit handy.’

  I can’t quite take in what I’m hearing. These two have got together to try and protect me and Dawn’s risked her life to save me from getting shot.

  ‘Well… thanks,’ I say.

  Dawn puts her hand on mine and I’m reminded of doing the same thing with her, when I was driving her away from Brindle’s aunt’s house in Birmingham.

  ‘When I saw the way you straightened the Teales and got me away from them, I wondered if I could be as strong as that,’ she says.

  ‘I think you’ve proved your point,’ says Lizzie.

  ‘And they killed my baby,’ says Dawn.

  We get to the outskirts of Denia and onto the coast road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘Barcelona airport,’ says Dawn.

  ‘Not Valencia?’

  ‘I thought they might give you an Oscar if they saw you again.’

  I laugh out loud. ‘You knew about that?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘What?’ asks Lizzie.

  ‘I had to do a bit of acting to get thrown off the plane earlier.’

  ‘I was wondering how you got back.’

  ‘You have got your passport?’ asks Dawn.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, checking it’s still in my back pocket.

  ‘I haven’t got mine,’ says Lizzie.

  ‘It’s in your suitcase, in the boot,’ says Dawn, reaching under her seat and pulling out a bottle of whisky.

  ‘To the woman who thinks of everything,’ I say, unscrewing the cap.

  31

  We get to Barcelona airport at sunrise and buy tickets to London. The next flight leaves at midday. The check-in desk isn’t open yet, so we have breakfast and sit in the lounge. Dawn and Lizzie are soon asleep and I look at them both opposite me and thank my lucky stars they’re still alive. When I think what Dawn’s done for me and how Lizzie helped her, I feel so moved and grateful that tears start welling up and I have to get hold of myself. I take a few deep breaths, go and get myself a coffee from the café and sit opposite my two sleeping beauties. I suddenly remember that I put Rebecca in Lizzie’s suitcase, so I get it out and find my place.

  After the humiliation of the fancy dress ball, our girl is having a row with Mrs Danvers, and the old cow is telling her how perfect Rebecca was, what a waste of space she is, and that Maxim will never love her. She takes her to a window ledge and tells her she might as well jump and our girl is so desperate that she almost does. Then Rebecca’s body is found in the sea and Maxim reveals that it wasn’t suicide at all, that he killed her because she was a selfish bitch and when she wasn’t being the perfect hostess at Manderley she was in London, mixing with a dodgy crowd and shagging everything that moved, including Jack Favell. Maxim finally had it out with Rebecca in the boathouse and when she told him she was pregnant with Favell’s baby, he shot her.

  I’m just turning the page to find out what happened next, when the flight’s called. I wake Dawn and Lizzie and we check in, go through passport control and along the walkway to the departure lounge, where we get chatted up by a couple of tweedy types who’ve been on a golfing holiday. When Lizzie tells them that she plays off scratch they look a bit miffed and move away. I ask her what she meant and she says she’s no idea but a punter she used to have said it a lot.

  We get on the plane, and almost as soon as we’re in the air, the girls are asleep again. I’m back to my book and reading how the magistrate gives a verdict of suicide for Rebecca’s death and Maxim’s relieved he’s got away with it, until Jack Favell says he knows Maxim killed her and tries to blackmail him. Favell tells the magistrate that he and Rebecca were lovers, that she was having his baby and that Maxim found out and topped her in a jealous rage. It’s looking like Maxim’s for it, which is a shame because him and our girl are now really close and in love again. Then Mrs Danvers finds Rebecca’s diary and they see that she went to a doctor in London on the day she died. They all go and see the doctor, including the magistrate, and Maxim is convinced the doctor will confirm she was pregnant and he will be found guilty, but when they get there the doctor tells them that Rebecca was about to die of cancer and couldn’t have children anyway.

  Favell’s shamed, Maxim’s exonerated and he and our girl drive happily back to Manderley to start a new life together, only to find that the great house is on fire and burning to the ground.

  I’m a bit shocked by the ending, but then I suppose Maxim’s worth a few bob and they can just go back to Monte Carlo or somewhere and have a good time, so I suppose it’s a happy ending.

  I close the book just as the seatbelt sign comes on and people start stubbing out their fags and clicking their belts shut. I take Lizzie’s hand and give it a squeeze to wake her. She sighs, turns towards me, snuggles up and gives me a long kiss. I’m loving it and hoping it’ll go on forever, but then she opens her eyes, remembers where we are and sits back in her seat. One of the golfers is watching us from across the aisle. Lizzie gives him a wave and he turns away, looking a bit queasy.

  The plane lands and we go through passport control, pick up Lizzie’s case off the carousel, go through customs and come out into the main hall. Dawn and I change our pesetas for pounds, shillings and pence and we make for the exit. When we get to the cab rank I ask Dawn where she’s going. She hesitates as if she’s not sure and I ask her if she wants to come and stay with me. She thinks for a minute, then she thanks me and says she wants to go to her own place in Highgate. The three of us share a cab to Maida Vale and when we get there, Dawn and I swap phone numbers, have a tearful farewell and Lizzie and I wave her off from the pavement.
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br />   ‘What a girl, eh?’ says Lizzie.

  ‘I’ll say. I still can’t believe it.’

  We go in through the glass door, say hello to Keith and take the lift. We stop at Lizzie’s door, arrange to go out later to a club to shake some of the Spanish dust off.

  She says she’ll pick me up about eight and I go into mine. There’s no mail on the mat so I pick up the phone and dial Bert’s number. I’m just about to hang up when he answers.

  ‘It’s done,’ I say.

  ‘Both?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s quick.’

  ‘I want paying.’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  I put the phone down, go into Georgie’s room and put Rebecca back on the bookshelf. I look at all the books she’s got and I think about her coming home to this flat in a week and how difficult it’s been to keep her away from all the slippery stuff that I’m involved in. I’m glad that she’s growing away from her background and getting well educated and mixing with a different type of person, but at the same time she’s the only family I’ve got and I don’t want to lose her. As soon as I’ve got my dad’s money, I’m going to find a place well away from it all, that she can call home and where we can get settled.

  The phone rings and I go into the hall. It’s Bert Davis.

  ‘Outside yours in half an hour and bring your passport.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just bring it.’

  The line goes dead. I have a quick bath and wash my hair, put on a black Dior trouser suit and some make-up. Not that I need to impress Bert Davis, but I just feel like getting smart again. The phone rings and it’s Keith telling me the car’s there. I go down, get in the car and we drive down Edgware Road.

  ‘Aren’t we going to George’s?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘To the money.’

  ‘OK.’

  He drives along Marylebone Road, turns right at Kings Cross into Grays Inn Road and stops outside Lloyds Bank. I follow him inside and he tells me to wait by the door while he talks to a man in a pinstripe suit, sitting behind a desk. Bert calls me over and while he fills in a form, the man asks me for identification. I show him my passport and he writes the details down and clips them to the form that Bert’s now completed, puts them in a drawer and gives Bert a key. He gets up from the desk and we follow him across the banking hall, down some stairs and through an armoured door, into a room with safety deposit boxes lining the walls. He tells us to press the button when we’ve finished and closes the door behind him. Bert takes out a key, opens a box on the second tier, pulls out a canvas holdall and unzips it. ‘Two hundred large, less the two we bunged your witness and what you’ve had in expenses.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He lifts the bag out and gives it to me. I open it up, have a look at more money than I’ve ever seen in my life and say a silent thank you to my dad. Bert locks the box and presses the bell. I zip up the bag and the man in the pinstripe opens the door and escorts us up the stairs. When we get to the door, I tell Bert I don’t want a lift home and he leaves. I go to the desk where the man in the pinstripe sits and tell him I want to open a safety deposit box. He looks at the bag by my feet, asks for my passport again and brings out the paperwork. Once it’s done, he gives me a code that I have to quote when I want the key and takes me back down to the strong room. I open the bag, take out a bundle of fivers, put them in my pocket, then I stow the bag in my box and lock the door.

  I pick up a cab on Grays Inn Road and get him to drop me at Savills estate agents, by Marble Arch. I go in and have a look at some of the big houses in the country section, pick out a few likely ones quite near London and get the brochures from one of the assistants. I put them under my arm and get another cab home.

  I take the brochures into the lounge, pour myself a whisky and sit on the sofa. I’m leafing through them when there’s a knock on the door. I go and open it to Lizzie. She asks me if I want to go and have a meal before the club. I say I do and ask her to come and have a drink first. We go into the lounge and I pour her a whisky.

  ‘What are these?’ she asks, looking at the brochures.

  I tell her about my fears of losing Georgie and how I want to be able to offer her a good home and a better life. She looks at a couple of brochures and drops them back on the coffee table.

  ‘And what are you going to do with yourself in a nice Cotswold village?’

  ‘I’ll be with Georgie.’

  ‘No you won’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s growing up and making a life for herself. She’ll be away at university and going on trips in the holidays, and when she’s got her degree she’ll be working in London, or somewhere else, maybe abroad, and you’ll hardly ever see her.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Now and again maybe. What are you going to do in the meantime? Join the Women’s Institute? Invite the county set round for drinks? Join the local hunt?’

  ‘I could do the garden.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh. You can’t keep a pot plant alive for five minutes.’

  What she’s saying is making sense. Georgie will live her own life, as she should do. She won’t need me like she has until now and I can see that I’ve got to accept that.

  ‘You’ve kept Georgie safe and given her the chances to make something of herself and she’s taken them. You need to stand back and let her go her own way now.’

  I make a pile of the brochures and put them on the floor.

  ‘You’re a London girl born and bred and you’d go mad living out there,’ she says.

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And I’m fucked if I’m schlepping out to Hertfordshire every time I want a cuddle.’

  I laugh and dump the brochures in the waste paper basket.

  ‘So let’s go out and have a good time!’ she says, as she jumps up, downs her drink, takes my hand and whisks me out of the door.

  Lizzie takes me to a new club called Annabel’s that opened a few days ago, underneath the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square. By the time we’ve eaten a delicious meal, had a few brandies and danced ourselves dizzy, among a great crowd of London’s finest, I’m more than convinced that I don’t want to live in the country.

  • • •

  I’m walking past the Kings Road Cinema a few months later, on my way to Bazaar for some new threads, when I notice a familiar face on a poster. I take a closer look and see that it’s Kim Daley. The film’s called “The Hard Way”. Kim’s standing in a dark London street, turning to look back at the camera, and I realise that it’s the one that I was in with her. I look at the showing times and see that the matinee starts in ten minutes, so I buy a ticket and go in. After the newsreel and the Pearl and Dean adverts, the film starts and it all comes back to me as the story unfolds. Kim’s really great in it and by the end I’m really rooting for her and egging her on to toast Challoner. The actor playing him is a really evil bastard and I can sense the relief among the audience when she kills him and feeds him to the pigs.

  On the way out, I look at the reviews on the wall in the foyer and read that the film’s a big success. It’s been nominated for some awards, including one for Kim and I’m really pleased for her.

  The girl doing my part looked a lot like me, but I didn’t think much of her acting.

  The End

  Hugh Fraser is best known for playing Captain Hastings in Agatha Christie’s ‘Poirot’ and the Duke of Wellington in ‘Sharpe’. His films include Patriot Games, 101 Dalmatians, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Clint Eastwood’s Firefox. In the theatre he has appeared in Teeth’n’Smiles at the Royal Court and Wyndhams and in several roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  He has also narrated many of Agatha Christie’s novels as audio books.

  You can follow Hugh on Twitter @realhughfraser

  HARM

  Book 1 in the Rina Walker series

  ISB
N: 978-1-910692-73-8 • £8.99

  Acapulco 1974: Rina Walker is on assignment.

  Just another quick, clean kill. She wakes to discover her employer's severed head on her bedside table, and a man with an AK-47 coming through the door of her hotel room. She needs all her skills to neutralise her attacker and escape. After a car chase, she is captured by a Mexican drug boss who exploits her radiant beauty and ruthless expertise to eliminate an inconvenient member of the government. Notting Hill 1956: Fifteen-year-old Rina is scavenging and stealing to support her siblings and her alcoholic mother. When a local gangster attacks her younger sister, Rina wreaks violent revenge and murders him. Innocence betrayed, Rina faces the brutality of the post-war London underworld - a world that teaches her the skills she needs to kill...

  THREAT

  Book 2 in the Rina Walker series

  ISBN: 978-1-911129-75-2 • £8.99

  London 1961. In the dying days of the Macmillan government, George Preston is in control of crime in West London and Rina Walker is his favoured contract killer. When Rina is hired by Soho vice king Tony Farina to investigate the disappearance of girls from his clubs she discovers that they are being supplied to a member of the English aristocracy for the gratification of his macabre sexual tastes. Rina's pursuit of the missing girls and her efforts to save the innocent from slaughter become increasingly perilous as she grapples with interwoven layers of corruption and betrayal and makes her way, via the louche nightclubs of Berlin, towards a final confrontation with depravity.

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