Jessie Keane - Ruthless

Taking the hint, Ellie heaved a sigh and left them to it. Sometimes, she found it hard to believe that soft-hearted Layla really was Annie Carter’s daughter – she was nothing like her.

‘It’s so awful,’ Layla was sobbing.

‘We’ll fix it,’ said Max. ‘Whatever it is.’

‘How?’ she wailed.

‘Where can we talk?’ asked Max, rubbing her back reassuringly.

‘Oh… in here,’ said Layla, and led him into her bedroom. Max followed her in and closed the door, leaned against it. Layla sat down on the bed.

‘Tell me all about it,’ he said.

Layla told him, leaving out nothing. The man pursuing her in the park. The intruder her mother believed to be Orla Delaney. The car bomb.

‘Mum could have been killed, you know. She was so brave and I was just… useless. She could be dead now,’ she said, dropping her head into her hands.

Her mind stalled, unable to comprehend such an outrage. All right, she couldn’t relate to her, but Mum had been a constant, solid presence in her life, and to think of her gone for ever – that was too terrible to contemplate.

‘Layla…’ Max came to the bed and sat down beside her. He gave her shoulder a tiny shake. ‘She wasn’t hurt. The main thing is, you’re both OK. And you’re safe here.’

‘Yeah.’ She might well be safe here, but… stupid as it might sound, what she felt right now was hurt. Rejected. Her mother had sent her away yet again. ‘I’ll lose my job if I don’t go in tomorrow,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘They’re laying people off, and if I don’t show up-’

‘Fuck the job,’ said Max. ‘Stay here. Just until we know what’s happening.’

‘What is happening?’ asked Layla in despair.

‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ said Max.

DI Sandra Duggan was doing the door-to-door on shops and offices up and down the street where Annie Carter’s car had been done. She was getting nowhere in a hurry. Nobody knew a damned thing. Nobody had seen a damned thing. They looked at her, saw FUZZ writ large all over her, then she flashed the badge and they thought, I don’t need this trouble. So far everyone she’d spoken to might as well have been deaf, dumb and blind for all they’d told her.

She was tired. Her feet were aching. She was sick of looking at these people and seeing only lies and evasion staring back at her. Then she went into the charity shop and the girl behind the counter – who was tricked out in kohl eye make-up, sucking on a lollipop from a bristling potful of lollipops beside the till – said yes, she’d seen something.

Sandra nearly wept with gratitude.

‘What did you see?’

‘Who,’ said the girl. ‘ Who did I see.’

‘Who then?’

‘I saw Frankie.’

‘Frankie?’

‘Frankie Day,’ smiled the girl. On her own at lunchtime, thank the Lord. No one with half a brain in here to shut her up.

Sandra wrote it down. Frankie Day.

‘So you know him, do you? This Frankie Day?’

‘Everyone knows Frankie,’ said the girl, shifting the lollipop deftly to the other cheek with her tongue.

‘I don’t.’

The girl laughed as if this was extremely funny.

‘But everyone knows him. He’s always up and down this road, all the time.’

‘Doing what?’ asked Sandra.

The girl laughed and tossed the lollipop with her tongue again.

‘Doing what?’ Sandra persisted.

The girl winked. ‘Doing the… you know.’

‘No, I don’t. What?’

The girl made a gesture with her hand, swivelling the wrist.

‘Trying the car doors,’ she said with a sharp sigh and a roll of the eyes, as if Sandra was thick and should have known. ‘He passed by the front of the shop. Then I heard the bang. It blew out some of the windows, but this one -’ she nodded to the big plate-glass job at the front of the shop – ‘ this one was OK. It moved in the frame, though. You know what I mean? And I went to the door to go out and see what had happened, but Martha – she’s the manager – she screamed at me not to touch it, because the whole thing was out of its frame, just hanging there. If I’d opened the door, it could have fallen out and cut me.’

‘And you didn’t see Frankie again, after that?’ asked Sandra.

‘He hasn’t been back.’ The girl frowned. ‘I don’t know why.’

Think I do, thought Sandra. ‘Can you describe Frankie for me?’

The girl described Frankie, and Sandra made notes. ‘Can you remember anything else?’

‘A dark-haired woman dressed in black left the car that blew up,’ said the girl, her forehead knotted with concentration.

Annie Carter.

‘And then a big tall man, thick-set, with lots of this bright red hair, he went to the car and got in. I think he popped the lock. He sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. And when he’d left it, Frankie rolled by.’

‘And when the car blew up, you were standing here?’

‘No, I was over there. By the baby clothes.’

‘And you could see the car?’

‘Yeah. I saw the red-haired man sitting in the driver’s seat of the car after the woman with the long dark hair left it. He had the door open. Next thing I knew, he was gone, the car door was shut and that’s when I saw Frankie try the handle. Then I was walking back to the till, and boom! Up it went.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Tracey Esler.’

Sandra made a note of that and put her book away. ‘Thanks, Tracey. You’ve been a great help.’

Tracey beamed and held out the pot of lollies. ‘Have a lollipop,’ she said.

‘Oh, fuck, it’s you,’ said Kath the next day when she found Annie standing on her doorstep.

She turned without a word and led the way up the hall. Annie closed the front door behind her and followed her cousin’s great wallowing arse into the kitchen. Once there, Kath, who was wearing a deeply unflattering navy shell suit and greyish-white T-shirt, collapsed on a chair by the table as if the effort of opening her own front door had exhausted her. She picked up a smouldering fag from an ashtray.

Annie looked around the kitchen. Nothing ever changed here. The place was the same tip it had always been, dirty washing piled on the floor instead of in the laundry basket, unwashed cups and plates littering the draining board and filling the grubby sink. The table awash with debris from meals, toast-crumbs, a paper blazoned with the headline PIPER ALPHA TRAGEDY, dog-eared magazines and chunks of half-eaten pizza.

‘Hi,’ said the eighteen-year-old girl leaning against the sink. She was fair-haired, hazel-eyed and showing a big toothy overbite, dressed in skinny hipster jeans and a pink T-shirt.

‘Hiya, Molly,’ said Annie.

Her eyes drifted to the young man standing beside his sister. Jimmy Junior was twenty-one, and while his sister was plain and a bit goofy-looking like her mother, Junior favoured his father. He had close-cropped dirty-blond hair and a face any sane woman would fall for. His eyes were a stunning clear blue, vivid as Sri Lankan sapphires.

Annie’d always liked Junior, she’d put him forward for the bar job at the Shalimar. I have a weakness for good looks, she thought, and knew it to be true. But it was more than that with Junior. He was her blood. Added to that, he was a hard worker, and he had charm.

‘Hi, Junior,’ Annie greeted him.

He nodded.

‘What is it this time?’ asked Kath.

Annie turned to her cousin. Once briefly pretty in her youth, Kath had settled into her mid-forties as if she belonged there, with a disastrous poodle perm on her yellow-grey hair. Her face was red and her breath was wheezy. Annie knew Kath hated her and she also suspected that Kath bore a grudge against her over the disappearance of Jimmy Senior.