Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

Mrs Dyer had made a big show of inspecting the arrangements, though. She’d walked through the kitchen earlier that day, nodding serenely, just so her husband could toast her publicly tonight for her part in overseeing the organization of the event, and she could look all modest about it and it not quite be a lie.

She’d had the secretary with her then, a slim woman with cool eyes who’d frozen Steve off the first time he’d tried laying a proprietary hand on her shoulder. Layla and the rest of the girls hid their smiles behind bland faces when she’d done that. Even so, Steve took it out on Tammy – had her on her back in the storeroom almost before they were out the door.

The secretary was here tonight, Layla saw. Fussing around her employer, but it was Mr Dyer whose shoulder she stayed close to. Too close, Layla decided, for their relationship to be merely professional. An affair perhaps? She wouldn’t put it past any man to lose his sense and his pants when it came to an attractive woman. Still, she didn’t think the secretary looked the type. Maybe he liked ‘em cool. Maybe she was hoping he’d leave his wife.

At the moment, the secretary’s eyes were on their guest. Venable had been free with his hosts’ champagne all evening and his appetites were not concerned only with the food. Layla watched the way his body language grew predatory when he was introduced to the gauche teenage daughter of one of the guests, and she stepped in with her tray, ignoring the ominous looming of the bodyguards.

“Sir, can I interest you in a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar or Kobe beef and ginger?”

Venable’s greed got the better of him and he let go of the girl’s hand, which he’d been grasping far too long. She snatched it back, red-faced, and fled. The secretary gave Layla a knowing, grateful smile.

Layla moved away quickly afterwards, a frown on her face, cursing inwardly and knowing he was watching her. She was here for a purpose. One that was too important to allow stupid mistakes like that to risk bringing her unwanted attention. And after she’d tried so hard to blend in.

To calm herself, to negate those shivers of doubt, she thought of Bobby again. They’d moved in together, found a little apartment. Not much, but the first place Layla had lived in years that didn’t need the wheels taken off before you could call it home.

He’d been always gentle with Layla, but then one night he’d hit a guy who was hassling the girls too hard, hurt him real bad, and the management had to let Bobby go. Word got out and he couldn’t get another job. Layla had walked out, too, but she went through a dry spell as far as work was concerned, and now there were two of them to feed and care for.

Eventually, she was forced to go lower than she’d had to go before, taking her clothes off to bad music in a cheap dive that didn’t even bother to have a guy like Bobby to protect the girls. As long as the customers put their money down before they left, the management didn’t care.

Layla soon discovered that some of the girls took to supplementing their income by inviting the occasional guy out into the alley at the back of the club. When the landlord came by twice in the same week threatening to evict her and Bobby, she’d swallowed her pride. By the end of that first night, that wasn’t all she’d had to swallow.

Even Bobby, slow though he might be, soon realized what she was doing. How could he not question where the extra money was coming from when he’d been in the business long enough to know how much the girls made in tips – and what they had to do to earn them? At first, when she’d explained it to him, Layla thought he was cool with it. Until the next night when she was out in the alley between sets, her back hard up against the rough stucco wall with some guy from out of town huffing sweat and beer into her unremarkable face.

One minute she was standing with her eyes tight shut, wondering how much longer the guy was going to last, and the next he was yanked away and she heard that dreadful crack of skulls.

Bobby hadn’t meant to kill him, she was sure of that. He just didn’t know his own strength, was all. Then it was his turn to panic and tremble, but Layla stayed ice cool. They wrapped the body in plastic and put it into the trunk of a borrowed car before driving it down to the Everglades. Bobby carried it out to a pool where the ‘gators gathered, and left it there for them to hide. Layla even went back a week later, just to check, but there was nothing left to find.

They stripped the guy before they dumped him, and struck lucky. He had a decent watch and a bulging wallet. It was a month before Layla had to put out against the stucco in the alley again.

How were they supposed to know he was connected to Venable? That the watch Bobby had pawned would lead Venable’s bone-breakers straight to them?

A month after the killing, Venable’s boys picked Bobby and Layla up from the bar and drove them out to some place by the docks. Bobby swore that Layla wasn’t in on it, that they should leave her alone, let her go. Swore blind that it was so. And eventually, they blinded him, just to make sure.

Layla thought she’d never get the sound of Bobby’s screaming out of her head as they’d tortured him into a confession of sorts. But even when they’d snapped his spine, left him broken and bleeding on that filthy concrete floor, Bobby had not said a word against Layla. And she, to her eternal shame, had been too terrified to confess her part in it all, as though that would make mockery of everything he’d gone through.

So, they’d left her. She was a waitress, a dancer, a hooker. A no-account nobody. Not worth the effort of a beating. Not worth the cost of a bullet.

Helpless as a baby, damaged beyond repair, Bobby went into some institution just north of Tampa and Layla took the bus up to see him every week for the first couple of months. But, gradually, getting on that bus got harder to do. It broke her heart to see him like that, to force the cheerful note into her voice.

Eventually, the bus left the terminal one morning and Layla wasn’t on it.

She’d cried for days. When she’d gotten word that Bobby had snuck a knife out of the dining hall, waited until it was quiet then slit his wrists under the blankets and quietly bled out into his mattress during the night, there had been no more tears left to fall.

Layla’s heart hardened to a shell. She’d let Bobby down while he was alive, but she could seek justice for him after he was dead. She heard things. That was one of the beauties of being invisible. People talked while she served them drinks, like she wasn’t there. Once Layla had longed to be noticeable, to be accepted. Now she made it her business simply to listen.

Of course, she knew she couldn’t go after Venable alone, so Layla had found another bruiser with no qualms about burying the bodies. And, once he’d had a taste of that spectacular body, he was hers.

Thad was younger than Bobby, sharper, neater, and when it came to killing he had the strike and the morals of a rattlesnake. Layla knew he’d do anything for her, right up until the time she tried to move on, and then he was likely to do anything to her instead.

Well, after tonight, she wouldn’t care.

She slipped out of the ballroom but instead of turning into the kitchen, this time she took the extra few strides to the French windows at the end of the corridor, furtively opened them a crack, then closed them again carefully so they didn’t latch.

By the time Layla returned to the ballroom, the canapés were not all she was holding. She’d detoured via the little cloakroom the girls had been given to change and store their bags. What she’d collected from hers she was holding flat in her right hand, hidden by the tray. A Beretta nine millimeter, hot most likely. As long as it worked, Layla didn’t care.