Kit looked at Ruby, at Daisy. He knew Daisy had a soft spot for Rob. He didn’t think Rob felt the same, and that was sort of a relief. As Daisy’s brother, he felt protective of her, and he wasn’t entirely sure yet how he would feel if something should develop between his number one man and his own sister.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I need him. Ruby…’ He couldn’t bring himself to call her ‘Mum’…’There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you know where Michael was going, what he had planned to do, on the day he died?’
He didn’t expect her to say yes, but she did.
‘He was planning to call in on Joe,’ said Ruby, wishing so much that he’d hug her, kiss her cheek, show some sort of feeling for her and not just for Daisy. But he wouldn’t. She knew that.
Kit frowned. ‘Your brother Joe?’
Ruby nodded.
‘He didn’t say what for?’
‘No. He didn’t.’
42
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ screamed Maria.
‘Hey, hold it down, will ya?’ said Fabio, laughing and thrusting and trying to get a hand over her mouth all at the same time.
Oh, this was better than any scenario he could have dreamed up, and he had dreamed up a lot. Over the years, the images he cooked up in his own head had been his only comfort. He knew Mama’d never wanted him. Time and again he’d heard her say how sure she was that he had been a girl, carrying all the way round, not at the front. He was sick to death of hearing her say that.
‘But instead there he was, this scrawny little thing with a big dick,’ Bella would say, shaking her head as if the bottom had dropped out of her world when Fabio popped out of her cooze. ‘A boy, not a girl.’
Time and again. He was so sick of being the disappointment, the non-girl. Embarrassingly, Mama had dressed him as a girl at first. Vittore and Tito had never failed to see the funny side of that, fucking bastards. He’d been done up in pink booties and a hat, even the nursery was pink, painted in readiness for the expected female.
‘Oh God, oh, Fabio…’ moaned Maria loudly, thrashing around on the bed beneath him.
Jesus, he should have known she’d be a screamer. Couldn’t the noisy mare pipe down? They were in a cheap hotel way off the beaten track, but he didn’t want to disturb the other guests, he didn’t want to call any sort of attention to them. That would be stupid. And he wasn’t stupid, no matter what the rest of the family might have to say about it.
When Mama’d sent him to school, she hadn’t cut his hair, so it hung down past his shoulders like a girl’s. Oh, how Vittore and Tito – and all his classmates – laughed. In desperation he himself had hacked the long strands off with a knife he stole out of art class. A wallop from Mama for doing that, but at least she seemed to get the message. He was not a girl. Thereafter, she kept his hair short.
Then who should arrive on the scene but Bianca. Before her, he’d been the stand-in, the stunt double, his mother – Jesus, she was demented – using him as a sort of dummy, a replacement for what he should have been at birth. Once Bianca came, things got worse. Instead of this weird attention, he got no attention at all. He was sent out to play, forgotten; what small place he had was taken up. There was no more room in the boat, and he was tossed out, shoved into the water to take his chances or drown.
He hated Bianca, but knew she had to be tolerated. The odd punch or two he managed to land on the little principessa was reported straight back to Mama, and Astorre had taken his belt to his youngest son at her insistence. Fabio hated Vittore, because Mama adored him so much. And he hated Tito too, swaggering about the place, impressing everyone with his bulky good looks and his largesse.
He hated them all.
But now he was having his revenge. He and his boys were shifting the Jamaican’s gear around the family clubs, around Vito’s, Fellows and Goldie’s, but they were not giving Vittore so much as a taste. Not a hint. Fabio was making his own wedge right under Vittore’s nose, but discreetly, carefully.
And this! Oh, this was the best thing of all.
He looked down at her, naked, sweaty, dishevelled. Maria was quite a handful. And it was pretty obvious that Vittore had not only been knocking her around but also letting her down in the bedroom department. Which was a crying shame. In Fabio’s opinion, a woman like this needed a good seeing-to on a regular basis. And he was just the man to do it.
‘Ah!’ yelled Maria as she came, her excitement pushing him over the edge too. They locked together in an ecstatic clinch, then Fabio drew back and flopped onto the disarranged, cheap and rather scratchy sheets of the bed.
Gasping in a breath, he looked around the room and lit a cigarette. It was a pest-hole, this hotel. The wallpaper was peeling, there was a brown damp stain on the ceiling over by the window. The sheets were clean, though not the fine thousand-thread Egyptian cotton he was used to. But at least the place was off the Danieri patch and rented rooms by the hour. What more could he want?
To rub Vittore’s nose in this, he thought, glancing back at Maria, who was now snuggling up against him with puppyish zeal.
But he couldn’t. Vittore would kill him if he knew. So this revenge had to be a private one, gloated over in secret.
‘Do you love me, Fabio?’ she was asking him now.
‘Yeah. I do,’ he lied. Well, he loved the fact that he was screwing Vittore’s wife. He loved that, for sure.
‘And you’ll talk to Vittore, like you promised?’ she asked, kissing his shoulder.
‘Of course,’ he lied again.
43
‘Well, say it,’ said Kit.
‘What?’ asked Rob.
‘That it’s my fault, what happened to Simon,’ said Kit.
It was late on Sunday night and Kit and Rob were in the little office behind the restaurant. Kit slumped down in the chair behind the desk that Michael Ward had once occupied. He could still smell the faint aroma of expensive cigars and Dunhill cigarettes in here: the ceiling was stained brown from all the years of nicotine. It was like Michael’s ghost was in attendance, too.
Rob pulled up a chair and sat there and looked at his mate, his boss. He said nothing.
Kit went on: ‘I turned up drunk at Tito’s funeral. I provoked Vittore. And now we’re in the shit because of it.’
Rob cleared his throat. ‘Look, you were a mess. You were in mourning for Michael. Shit, I thought you were never going to pull out of it. And maybe you haven’t, even now. These things take time.’
Kit eyed Rob speculatively.
‘I behaved like a complete arsehole,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘God’s sakes, you didn’t go to fucking pieces.’
‘Yeah, but I got a big family. Sisters, brothers, a mum – and a dad. He’s an awkward, cantankerous old son of a bitch, but he’s been there for me all my life. It’ll break my heart when he goes. You never had any of that, did you? Michael was like a dad to you. The two of you were that close. And when you lost him – and especially losing him that way… well, it’s understandable you’d go to pieces. Anybody would.’
Kit heaved a sigh. He wanted to go over to Vittore’s place and torch it. Fulminating rage swept through him as he thought of Daisy, that they’d had the front to try to scare her that way. He leaned on the desk, pushed his hands through his hair, looked steadily at Rob.
‘So what did you get from our boys down the cop shop?’ he asked.