Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

There was that familiar crack of skulls. Just like Bobby…

Layla winced, but she couldn’t let that distract her now. Her mind strangely cool and calm, Layla stepped in, ignored. The fourth bodyguard had stayed at his post, but Layla was shielded from his view by his own principal, and everyone’s attention was on the fight. Carefully, she reached under her skirt and yanked the Makarov free, unaware of the brief burn as the tape ripped from her thigh.

The safety was already off, the hammer back. The Army surplus guy down in Miramar had thrown in a little instruction as well. Gave him more of a chance to stand up real close behind her as he demonstrated how to hold the unfamiliar gun, how to aim and fire.

She brought the nine up the way he’d shown her, both hands clasped round the pistol grip, starting to take up the pressure on the trigger, she bent her knees and crouched a little, so the recoil wouldn’t send the barrel rising, just in case she had to take a second shot. But, this close, she knew she wouldn’t need one, even if she got the chance.

One thing Layla hadn’t been ready for was the noise. The report was monstrously loud in the high-ceilinged ballroom. And though she thought she’d been prepared, she staggered back and to the side. And the pain. The pain was a gigantic fist around her heart, squeezing until she couldn’t breathe.

She looked up, vision starting to shimmer, and saw Venable was still standing, shocked but apparently unharmed. How had she missed? The bodyguard had come out of his lethargy to throw himself on top of his employer, but there was still an open window. There was still time…

Layla tried to lift the gun but her arms were leaden. Something hit her, hard, in the centre of her voluptuous chest, but she didn’t see what it was, or who threw it. She frowned, took a step back and her legs folded, and suddenly she was staring up at the chandeliers on the ceiling and she had to hold on to the polished wooden dance floor beneath her hands to stay there. Her vision was starting to blacken at the edges, like burning paper, the sound blurring down.

The last thing she saw was the slim woman she’d taken for a secretary, leaning over her with a wisp of smoke rising from the muzzle of the nine millimeter she was holding.

Then the bright lights, and the glitter, all faded to black.

The woman Layla had mistaken for a secretary placed two fingers against the pulse point in the waitress’s throat and felt nothing. She knew better than to touch the body more than she had to now, even to close the dead woman’s eyes.

Cindy , the name tag read, even under the trickle of the blood. She doubted that would match the woman’s driver’s licence.

She rose, sliding the SIG semi-automatic back into the concealed-carry rig on her belt. Two of Venable’s meaty goons wrestled the woman’s accomplice, bellowing, out of the room. She turned to her employer.

“I don’t think you were the target, Mr Dyer, but I couldn’t take the chance,” she said calmly. She jerked her head towards the bodyguards. “If this lot had been halfway capable, I wouldn’t have had to get involved. As it was…”

Dyer nodded. He still had his arms wrapped round his wife, who was sobbing, and his eyes were sad and tired.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

The woman shrugged. “It’s my job,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?” It was Venable himself who spoke, elbowing his way out from the protective shield that his remaining bodyguards had belatedly thrown around him.

“This is Charlie Fox,” Dyer answered for her, the faintest smile in his voice. “She’s my personal protection. A little more subtle than your own choice. She’s good, isn’t she?”

Venable stared at him blankly, then at the dead woman, lying crumpled on the polished planks. At the unfired gun that had fallen from her hand.

“You saved my life,” he murmured, his face pale.

Charlie stared back at him. “Yes,” she said, sounding almost regretful. “Whether it was worth saving is quite another point. What had you done to her that she was prepared to kill you for it?”

Venable seemed not to hear. He couldn’t take his eyes off Layla’s body. Something about her was familiar, but he just couldn’t remember her face.

“I don’t know – nothing,” he said, cleared his throat of its hoarseness and tried again. “She’s a nobody. Just a waitress.” He took another look, just to be sure. “Just a woman.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dyer said, and his eyes were on Charlie Fox. “From where I’m standing, she’s a hell of a woman, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why should an innocent and respectable lady of good family and in her late middle years, never touched by a breath of scandal, be haunted by a mysterious stranger whose name is entirely unknown to her?”

The woman in the railway carriage nodded. “You have expressed the problem in a nutshell.”

Her companion tugged at his beard. “It is a tantalizing puzzle, I grant you, my dear Mrs Gaskell.”

As the train rattled round a bend, she said, “I only hope that I have not called you up to Cheshire on a wild goose chase.”

He gave a little bow. “Your summons was so intriguingly phrased, how could any man fail to hasten to your side?”

“Of course,” she said, “I am profoundly grateful to you for having agreed to spare me a little of your precious time. I realize that there are many calls upon it.”

More than you know, dear lady. Charles Dickens suppressed a sigh. It had been his intention to evaporate – as he liked to describe it – from London to spend a few pleasant days with Ellen Ternan. However, as no doubt she had calculated, Mrs Gaskell’s telegram had fascinated him. Within an hour of its receipt, he was on the train heading north to Manchester. He had an additional motive for racing to her side, being determined to seize an opportunity to improve relations between them. Once they had been on first class terms, but ever since their wrangles over the serialization of North and South, she had displayed a stubbornness unbecoming (if not, sadly, uncommon) in any woman, let alone the wife of a provincial clergyman.

He smiled. “Do you remember why I used to call you Scheherezade?”

She blushed. Not, he was sure, because her memory had failed, but rather from that becoming modesty that had entranced him in the early days of their acquaintance.

“You must recall my saying I was sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one. Besides, your message was so teasing that no man with an ounce of curiosity in his blood could possibly resist.”

She permitted herself a smile. “You have not lost your gift for flattery, my dear Mr Dickens.”

“Charles, please.” He gave an impish grin. “Scheherezade.”

As if to cover her embarrassment, she looked out of the window at the fields and copses flying by. “We have reached Mobberley. Soon we shall be arriving.”

He clapped his hands. “I eagerly await my first sight of Cranford! Tell me, meanwhile, more about your friend Mrs Pettigrew.”

“Ah, dear Clarissa. It is difficult for me to think of her by the Major’s name. To me, she will always be Clarissa Woodward or, at a pinch, Mrs Clarissa Drinkwater.”

“You have met her second husband, Major Pettigrew?”

“Only once, at the wedding.”

“You do not care for the Major or his habit of bragging about his service in India?”

“I did not say that.”

“And I did not ask if it were true,” he said briskly. “I asserted it as a fact, inferred from your manner whenever you have mentioned the fellow’s name.”