Jessie Keane - Black Widow

Everything was her fault.

For Dolly’s sake she nibbled at the cake, although she really felt like throwing up, like screaming, like crying her fucking eyes out. The happy chatter was going on all around her, and there she was in the middle of it all, feeling that she was in a dark and terrible place, lonely and afraid.

Her friends were concerned, but they couldn’t help. There was no prospect of help coming from any quarter. It could only have come from herself, when she did something that seemed to her to be a betrayal of all that she had once held dear. But now that ship had sailed.

She tuned into the conversation, if only to distract herself from the horror story she was living in right now, and was immediately plunged back into it.

‘Told Chris about Billy,’ said Dolly.

‘Oh.’ Annie gulped. The thought of Billy lying in a bloodied heap was still so raw in her mind.

‘Some sick bastards around,’ said Chris solemnly.

Annie and Dolly exchanged a look. It wasn’t the only horrendous thing that had happened here. Annie thought of the death of Max’s brother, and the night when Pat Delaney had come at her, intending murder.

‘The funeral’s Monday,’ said Dolly, her eyes still on Annie’s face. ‘I’m going, if you want to come along…?’

She didn’t want to go. The very last thing in the world Annie wanted was to stand at Billy’s graveside. But she knew she must pay her respects; say that final, awful goodbye.

Monday! Five days then until Friday, five days during which Layla’s fate would be decided once and for all.

Oh shit , she thought.

‘Yeah. I’ll come,’ she said.

Dolly nodded her approval and raised her cup of tea. ‘Let’s give a toast to Billy Black,’ she said.

Everyone raised theirs too. ‘To Billy,’ they mumbled, and drank.

And then, thank God, Dolly dropped that subject and started talking to Chris about what a good doorman he’d been, and that he ought to go back to it.

‘You really think he should do that?’ Aretha asked hopefully. She hated Chris working the graveyard shift night in, night out.

‘Not a chance,’ said Chris. ‘I’d rather get back in the ring than be a doorman again.’

Chris had relished his time in the boxing ring, but you had to know when enough was enough or you’d end up punchy, fucked-up for life. Annie looked at him. He was no oil painting, even though he’d quit the ring a long time ago. Chris was bald, with a matching set of cauliflower ears and a nose to make a plastic surgeon weep. But it was his manner that appealed. He was hard but fair with men, kind and considerate with women. A regular gentleman. No wonder Aretha had married him before someone else snapped him up. No wonder Ellie still looked at him that way.

‘It’s easy money,’ said Ross, their current doorman, who had come to stand in the open kitchen doorway. He didn’t even look at Annie, and since Redmond’s visit had not addressed a single civil word to her.

Fuck him , she thought.

‘Being a doorman’s a piece of piss,’ Ross said to Chris.

Dolly looked at Ross. ‘Oh yeah? Am I paying you too much?’

Ross grinned. ‘You know what I mean, Doll. Not much trouble. Easy money.’

Ellie was diving into the cake, shooting furtive glances at Chris.

Still got the hots for him , thought Annie. Poor cow.

Annie glanced at Aretha-stunning, black, not a spare pound on her. Stiff competition. Ellie was well outgunned.

The doorbell rang and Ross went back into the hall, closing the kitchen door behind him.

‘Yeah, but you liked it here, didn’t you?’ said Darren to Chris. ‘We’ve always had a good bunch of girls here.’ He gave a coy smile and suddenly Darren was like he used to be, not the sickly-looking individual he had become. ‘And boys of course.’

Chris nodded. ‘It was good. But security work’s easier.’

‘Yeah, but permanent nights.’ Aretha pulled a face. ‘Girl gets lonely.’

‘Yeah, but good pay. No hassle.’

This sounded like a conversation the two of them had had many times before. Chris was happy in his job; Aretha was feeling bored and neglected and that was why she had come back to work at Dolly’s. Not that Chris seemed to mind too much. He knew the woman he was getting; he was clearly under no illusions about his exotic-looking wife.

‘Think I told you,’ said Dolly to Annie, ‘Chris does nights at the trading estate at Heathrow.’

Did you? Annie couldn’t remember. Her brain was befuddled by all the shit being heaped on her day by day.

‘What, looking after stuff before it’s shipped abroad?’ asked Annie, trying to take an interest.

‘Yeah, that’s it. We get big consignments in. Huge amounts of stuff.’

‘And real good stuff too,’ Aretha looked across at Annie with eyes alight with simple girlish greed. ‘Gold sometimes. Real bars of gold. What they called? Ingots. Ingots of gold.’

There was a chorus of wows and sighs from around the table.

Chris was smiling and shaking his head. ‘That’s rare,’ he said, looking fondly across at Aretha. ‘They store it sometimes at Heathrow and then transport it to Gatwick; it’s usually headed for banks and businesses in Hong Kong. But mostly we just get the dosh coming through.’

‘Yeah, but it’s dosh by the bucketload,’ said Aretha excitedly. ‘More money than you can count, I heard.’

‘Yeah, you heard,’ said Chris, smiling across at her.

Suddenly Annie felt as though she’d been punched in the chest. Her breathing had shut down. She looked at Chris. She worked some spittle into her mouth and managed to get the words out.

‘How much are we talking here? A few thousand? Half a mill?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Couple of million’s the usual amount. Sometimes more.’

Sometimes more.

But she only needed half a million pounds. She thought of Constantine Barolli. She had nearly sold her soul to him, in order to get her hands on the cash to rescue Layla. But now maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe Chris had just given her the get-out clause she needed. A couple of million pounds, sitting in a depot at Heathrow Airport.

‘And that sort of amount’s there now? Right now?’ she asked.

Chris looked at her. Nodded.

‘We could take it,’ she said suddenly, surprising herself.

Everyone looked at her.

‘Oh sure,’ said Chris, thinking she was joking.

He turned away and chatted to Dolly, but his eyes kept whipping back to Annie’s, as if to say: Did you mean that? Are you crazy?

Annie meant it all right.

She was a desperate woman.

Her eyes told him so.

It was impossible, of course. When she thought about it later, when she got Chris on his own and got the full details, when she really thought it through and tried to make sense of it, she knew it was madness. Talking about hitting a secure depot and running off with the cash-what a joke. She couldn’t risk a jail term. She’d stood in the dock once before and only Max pulling strings had got her out of a very sticky situation that time.

This time there was no Max to tug her arse out of the mire at the last minute.

This time, she would go down for sure.

If she got caught.

But maybe she wouldn’t.

On the other hand-maybe she would.

The idea of the heist kept plaguing her, even though she knew it was crazy. She had the boys, Max’s boys: they’d been out on the rob and on the heavy game-their term for armed robbery-many times before, and Max with them. They were handy men, hard men, and they would know how to tackle a job like this; they would know where to get experts in to assist, what the snags would be, what could go wrong.