Jessie Keane: Ruthless

‘I’ll get some design people in, put some ideas together,’ she said.

‘Yeah, fine. You’re the boss.’

Oh am I? For a second there, I thought you were.

Sonny went back into the club. Annie hailed a cab, and returned to her apartment.

Layla had been shopping in Bloomingdales on 59th and Lexington. She came out of the store laden with bags, and into the gusty air. People poured along the busy sidewalks, yellow taxis moved in droves through the multi-laned street. The sheer activity in New York had come as a shock to her: she hadn’t visited since she was a child.

She was on her way to meet her mother at the apartment overlooking Central Park, and looking forward to it in a way that she never would have guessed at a year ago. Annie had become her friend as well as her mum now. Since that business with Orla Delaney and Rufus Malone, Layla had come to treasure her.

She was, she supposed, fairly happy. Mum was keeping busy, but then Mum usually did. And she… well, she shopped. She hadn’t thought about finding another job, not yet, she was just keeping Mum company, looking at possible venues for the new club.

She was happy enough.

As long as she didn’t think about him.

Then she didn’t feel happy at all.

So she shopped, and lunched and… she caught a glimpse of herself in one of Bloomingdales’ exquisitely dressed shop windows, and paused. She was elegantly groomed now – as Precious had taught her to be. She was wearing a black cashmere coat with a thick faux-fur collar. Black leather boots. Her hair was loose, glossy: her Gucci shades were big and dark.

I am turning into my mother, she thought. And once that would have appalled her; now she just felt proud. She turned away from her reflection, moved into the milling crowds, and a man came out of nowhere and bumped hard up against her.

Her bags went flying. She let out an ‘Oh!’ of shock and staggered back. She had a quick impression of a middle-aged man, grey-haired, instantly forgettable. He scrambled around, picking her bags up.

‘Sorry, lady,’ he said, and thrust them into her hands.

‘Wh-’ she started, but he was gone, vanishing into the crowds.

She looked down. He’d put something else into her hand too: a piece of paper. Frowning, she stared at it. Then she closed her fist over it, stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, and flagged down a cab.

Annie went pale when Layla showed her the small square of paper.

‘It was weird, Mum. This guy bumped into me outside Bloomingdales, knocked my bags everywhere, then he gave them back to me and he gave me this, too. Next thing I knew, he’d disappeared.’ She squinted over her mother’s shoulder as Annie sat at the table. ‘It looks funny. Letters, numbers, I don’t know what the hell it is.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Annie.

‘Do you know what it means?’ Layla dragged out a chair, sat down, peered at her mum’s face in concern.

Annie looked at Layla. ‘I know what it means. I know what it is.’

‘OK, what is it? Come on.’

‘It’s a pizzino. Caesar’s code.’ And she hadn’t seen it in a lot of years. Not since Constantine.

Who would use the same code that Constantine had always used? She stared at it, started to shake her head.

‘Get me a pencil and paper,’ she said. ‘Hurry up.’

Layla did so. They sat at the table and as she scribbled on the paper, her pen moving faster and faster, Annie talked.

‘This code is over two thousand years old. It was used by Julius Caesar. Each letter of the alphabet becomes a number, and you add three. So A is one, plus three, which equals four, B is two, plus three, that’s five, and so on. Constantine reversed it for numbers.’

Layla watched, fascinated, as Annie jotted stuff on to the paper.

When she’d finished, Annie sat back and stared at it.

‘Oh. Dear. God,’ she said. ‘These are map co-ordinates.’

‘What?’ Layla demanded.

Annie looked at her daughter and suddenly she started to laugh.

‘Honey – It’s a grid reference. Alberto’s telling you where he is.’

Whoever said it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive was obviously barking mad. Layla felt as though she had been travelling for about a year, first shuffling in airport queues, then on a five-hour flight, then another airport, another flight, then a water taxi, then a sea plane. Now a dust-covered cab with a smiling man in a loud shirt at the wheel was bumping her along an unmade-up road. She was so exhausted she could barely keep her eyes open.

‘Do you know how many islands there are in the Caribbean?’ Annie had asked her excitedly before she left New York. ‘There are thousands. Saba and St Eustatius, the Virgins, then there’s Andros and North Bimini in the Bahamas, and-’

‘And your point is…’ interrupted Layla impatiently.

‘My point is, a person could lose themselves there and never be found. You could stash your money in Belize or Panama, get yourself a luxury yacht, live on it, cruise around. Get lost for ever .’

Layla had been looking at the maps, she knew Annie was right.

I would kill for a shower, she thought. She felt grubby, sweaty. It was so hot, there was no air-conditioning in the taxi. She peered outside, blinking with gritty eyes, and saw an azure sky, a stretch of white beach zip past, people strolling, no hurry, no problems, palm trees bent nearly double by the breeze, and the sea. She stared at it, a vast shimmering turquoise expanse that she longed to dive into to cool down.

The taxi came bumping to a halt. She fumbled for her purse, paid the driver. Clambered from the car while he went round the back and got her case out of the boot. The warm breeze tossed her hair into her eyes. She dragged it back, looked around her. There was nothing here.

‘Hey!’ she said to the driver. ‘Where…?’

But he was already back behind the wheel, slamming his door closed, gunning the engine, driving away in a cloud of dust. That was when she saw the huge black-haired man standing near a rickety pontoon, wearing shorts and a green polo-shirt. He saw her, and came lumbering over to pick up her case.

‘Miss,’ he greeted her.

Layla felt like she wanted to kiss him. ‘Sandor! Hi.’

‘This way,’ he said, and she stepped out on to the pontoon over the swirling sun-speckled clear waters, tiny bright fish dancing inches below her feet, Sandor following on behind. The taxi roared away.

Layla looked ahead, shielding her eyes from the hot glare of the sun. There was a forty-foot schooner moored out in the deeper waters of the bay. And there was a man stepping out of a small rowing boat at the end of the pontoon. He was wearing cut-off denim shorts, nothing else. His blond hair was bleached almost white by the sun and the wind, and his tall muscular frame was tanned and fit. He gazed along the pontoon, saw her standing there. His laser-blue eyes met hers, and Alberto started to smile.

Layla smiled too, her heart beating very fast. It was him. It really was.

She began to walk towards the man she’d loved all her life.

Then she broke into a run.

Not fifty miles from where his daughter was being reunited with Alberto, Max Carter lay in blissful ignorance in the sun on his Bajan terrace, wearing black Speedos. He loved lying in the sun. It refuelled him, made him stronger, and he was soaking it up, making the most of it, because he’d decided that he was going back to grey blustery England soon, see that crazy bitch Annie again, why not? Put her out of her misery.

He missed her.

That was what he’d been trying so hard to blank from his mind these last eight years, with the heat and the women and the easy-living style of the Caribbean. The fact that he missed his ex-wife. And… he could see now that he’d been a fool. He’d allowed his jealousy and his deep insecurity where she was concerned to run riot. Maybe he would tell her that, but he didn’t think so. Keep her on her toes.