Jessie Keane - Ruthless

‘I don’t want trouble.’

Sounds like you got it anyway, thought Dolly.

‘Tell him,’ ordered Dolly.

‘I don’t-’

‘Layla!’ Dolly’s voice was sharp. ‘Wake up and smell the bloody coffee. You are who you are. Which means you got to be careful. So tell him. OK?’

Layla sighed. ‘OK.’

‘Tell him.’

‘OK, I will.’ She wouldn’t.

‘Be careful.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘’Night then, honey.’

‘’Night.’

‘You know what, Rufus? You can be such a fucking fool sometimes.’

‘I thought…’ Rufus was floundering under this onslaught. She was pacing back and forth in front of him, spitting with rage. News of his failed attempt to snatch Layla Carter had not gone down well.

‘I told you I’d see to this. That I would be in charge here, that I would decide what was to happen, when it was to happen.’

‘But-’

‘You’ve tipped them off! How could you be so bloody stupid?’

‘I haven’t tipped them off,’ he objected. He felt wounded, through and through. His eye was smarting, he was aching all over from where he’d struck the pavement. The girl had run rings round him and now his Orla was giving out about it, like he was a moron.

Rufus the DOOFUS .

But he’d been trying to help, that was all.

She stopped her pacing and, breathing hard, came to a halt in front of his chair.

‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said, her eyes wild with anger and determination. ‘ I’m going to do it.’

‘I’ll come with-’

‘No . You won’t come with me. I go in alone. And I do it, OK? I do it.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

Annie Carter awoke in darkness. Pitch-black, all-enveloping. She was completely disorientated for a split second, before she got her bearings. She was in the master suite in the Holland Park house in London. And she was – of course – alone.

Into her brain came tumbling a multitude of alone-related thoughts, Alberto, Layla, Max.

She flinched.

Max .

Eight years, and it could still cut like a knife, how he’d hurt her. She threw back the covers, sat up, shutting off that train of thought. No good going there, none at all.

Something had awakened her. She pressed the button on top of the alarm clock and the dim light illuminated the dial. Two twenty-five a.m. She sat there and groaned. She’d only got home a couple of hours ago; jetlagged and exhausted, she was desperate for sleep but her brain was in overdrive, turning over problems instead of letting her relax.

Alberto .

She put her head in her hands, thinking about everything he’d told her as they’d stood together at the graveside. Was he going to vanish from her life one day soon, never to be seen again?

Give my love to Layla, he’d said when she left him.

Dammit, Annie couldn’t even give Layla her love, let alone his. She’d flown home and there’d been no hugs, no kisses from her daughter. There never had been. Only Max got those, she guessed. It was only a guess – while Layla visited Max several times a year in Barbados, and he came to London occasionally to meet up with their daughter, Annie hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him since the divorce.

She knew Layla blamed her. It had hurt Layla terribly, being parted from Max, but Annie had got custody and so it was a done deal. And now there was this great yawning gulf between mother and daughter. Annie seemed incapable of reaching across it, to touch Layla as she wished she could, to see her daughter smile at her with unguarded love instead of sullen wariness, to be vulnerable and sweet as she had been when she was a little girl.

At the moment, Layla was in the adjoining room, asleep. Or so Annie had assumed. But maybe it was Layla who’d woken her up. Maybe she couldn’t sleep either. Annie felt a surge of maternal pride as she thought of how hard Layla worked, how conscientious she was. Who’d have thought a kid of hers would end up a trainee accountant? Wherever Layla had got that weird gift for figures, it certainly wasn’t from her.

From Max, must be, thought Annie.

Again she felt that stab of pain. No, she wasn’t going to think about him. She was over that. She had even dated other men since the divorce. Well, two. Just two. Disasters, both of them, and best forgotten. Her mind spun away from that and back to Layla. Her terribly strait-laced and difficult-to-know daughter, who poured all her energy into her job. Maybe Layla couldn’t sleep because something work-related was bothering her? Not that she would ever confide in her mother. Her father? Yes. Her mother, forget it.

Annie thumped the pillows and lay down. Her relationship with her own mother had been unhappy. Maybe there was a pattern there? Connie Bailey had been a single mum. Her husband had taken off for pastures new, leaving her with two young daughters – Annie and her older sister Ruthie – and bills to pay. And the drink.

Oh God yes, the drink.

People were always saying, The best years of your life, growing up, aren’t they? Happy childhood years .

Annie’s childhood had been far from happy. Her mother had detested her, preferring gentle, quiet, well-behaved Ruthie.

Maybe I reminded her of Dad, thought Annie.

It was too late to ask her mum about any of that. Mum was gone.

Her memories of her mother were not fond. They were of Connie lying on the sofa, drunk out of her skull, and the rent man or the milkman or the baker or some fucker banging on the front door demanding to be paid.

Her and Ruthie would be cowering behind the sofa pretending they were out. There was always fear, a constant endless nagging fear, that one day they would come home and Connie would finally have downed one drink too many and seen herself off to that great ever-open bar in the sky.

Annie sighed heavily. No wonder she’d no taste or tolerance for alcohol. She had hoped for better from her relationship with Layla. But – oh, and this was hard to admit, even to herself – they didn’t get on. Unable to break down the wall Layla had put up between them, Annie had lashed out in frustration, saying hurtful things – things that she didn’t mean and wished she could take back.

You’re always working, don’t you know how to have fun?

That colour doesn’t suit you .

Can’t you do something with your hair?

Annie turned on to her side, berating herself.

Stupid .

She knew that her criticism would only make Layla withdraw further behind that big, invisible, fucking wall.

Clunk .

She stiffened, every sense alert.

There! Somebody was definitely moving about downstairs.

Probably it was Layla. But Layla was such a deep sleeper, usually. Even as a child, she would lay immobile all night, her bed as neat in the morning as it had been the night before. And Rosa, their ancient housekeeper, was never downstairs at night; she had her own little self-contained apartment at the side of the house.

What if it’s neither of them? What if someone’s broken in? suggested a tiny voice in her brain.

Her heartbeat was deafening. She wanted to put the light on, to drive back the darkness. But that might alert whoever was downstairs if they glanced up and saw the strip of light under her door. No lights then. Instead, she reached for the bedside drawer.

Max’s side .

Banishing the thought, she slid open the drawer, groped inside, felt the cold hard outline of the Smith & Wesson revolver there. It was loaded. It was an old, old gun, but effective. Scary to see, scary to shoot too. It kicked like a mule. But she wasn’t going to be firing it, she just wanted to frighten the shit out of any intruder and send them running for the hills.