Rob and Kit looked at each other. His what?
Joe was nodding his head.
‘You heard me right. Michael and his wife Sheila had a son: Gabriel.’
48
Betsy was back, bearing a tray with two steaming mugs of coffee and a plate of biscuits. She beamed at Kit and Rob, then gave a look of blank dislike to her husband.
‘There!’ she said, placing the coffees on a low table in front of them. ‘Help yourself to the biscuits. Can I get you anything else…?’
‘Bets,’ said Joe.
‘Yes?’ She turned to him and there was that chameleon thing again, the fake charm dropping away to reveal the ugly heartfelt contempt.
‘Fuck off, for Christ’s sake,’ said Joe, and took another deep drag on his oxygen.
Betsy went red in the face.
‘We got things to discuss,’ said Joe. ‘So go in the kitchen and look at your fuckin’ brochures, will you? Work out how you’re going to spend the next few thousand I’ve sweated blood over, yeah?’
Betsy turned on her heel, lips clenched. Rob stood up, quickly touched her arm.
‘You got a loo I can use, Mrs Darke?’
‘Sure,’ she said, and they went off into the main body of the house.
‘This is some place,’ they heard Rob say, and Betsy chattering in reply.
Joe turned his attention to Kit.
‘She’s cost me a fortune ever since the day I married her.’ He inhaled deeply from the mask, the moisture from his struggling breath misting the transparent plastic. ‘Now she’s having the kitchen refitted because she don’t like the colour of the units. She’s had the fucking fishpond moved four times. Every six months, regular as clockwork, we got decorators indoors doing something or other. It’s a pain in the fuckin’ arse.’
‘Joe… you said Michael had a son,’ said Kit.
Joe was nodding.
‘What’s the deal here then, Joe?’ Kit asked his uncle.
His uncle.
He’d never even met the man before. But this was his kin.
Some kin. Everyone said his late uncle Charlie was the one who’d cast him into a succession of care homes. He had only to think about it and he was back there. The bleak monotony of those places, the Christmases pasting together home-made garlands to hang around the stark hallways, the mealtimes when boiled cabbage was forced down his reluctant throat, the meagre accommodation, the cold, the rarely washed bedclothes, nights spent top-and-tailing because there weren’t enough beds to go round – a kid at one end of the bed, a kid at the other, someone’s cheesy feet stuck right under your nose all night. A fucking nightmare.
Charlie had been responsible for that. But surely Joe had known, too?
‘Gabe and me go back a long way,’ said Joe. His voice was growing hoarser, as if conversation exhausted him. ‘He was one of my boys, back in the day. He fell out with his mum and dad as a teenager, dunno why. Michael washed his hands of him. Being a bad lad was all he knew, so he came to my lads and said did I have something for him? As it happens, I did. But Gabe, poor Gabe…’ Joe heaved a sigh. ‘Gabe’s trouble, see, is money burns a hole in his pocket the minute he’s got it. I think he’s into drugs, probably got hooked on that crap inside. That can happen. He thinks the world owes him a living. It don’t.’
Kit was silent, taking it in as Rob rejoined them and sat down. Whatever this Gabe had done as a teenager, it must have been pretty damned bad to make his parents disown him.
‘He came out of the Scrubs about a week before Michael died,’ said Joe.
‘What was he in for?’ asked Rob, who’d overheard the last bit of this.
‘GBH.’
Kit gave his uncle a wry smile. ‘Got a bit of a temper, has he? And he phoned you.’ Had he phoned Michael too? Tried to make contact again, to repair the fractured relationship with his father? Michael hadn’t said a thing about any of this.
‘He wanted to know if I’d take him back on.’
‘And you said…?’ Kit prompted. He wasn’t sure how he felt about all this; displaced, angry, disappointed. Michael hadn’t confided in him, and he should have.
Joe let out a loud hmph of disgust. ‘I said sod off out of it. I made it clear he’d done working for me. The boys didn’t like him, he was a jittery little fucker, off his head half the time. You know what I think? I think something happened to Gabe, something bad way back in his past. Anyway, I didn’t want him around. I was glad to be rid of him. He wasn’t happy about it, but fuck him.’
‘You got an address for him?’ asked Rob.
Joe shook his head, raised one quivering hand to his brow. He looked tired, thought Rob. Tired to death.
‘I didn’t ask for one. The boy’s trouble. And he’s money-hungry, he can never get enough of the stuff. You know the sort, they’re always scammin’ some poor bastard and thinking up stupid schemes, always grubbing around in the dirt for cash – but they never seem to have a pot to piss in?’ Joe’s eyes wandered to the open door into the house. Betsy’s radio was loudly playing Showaddywaddy’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ in the kitchen she was about to have remodelled, at Joe’s expense. ‘So I’m glad you called. I wanted to warn you he’s out. That’s the reason I asked Michael to come over, to tell him.’
‘And Michael never made it.’
‘No. He never did.’
Rob took a swig of coffee. He wondered how Kit felt about this. Kit had been Michael’s blue-eyed boy for a long time; but Gabe was his actual son. Gabe was Michael’s blood.
Joe managed a weak smile. ‘And there you are, as I said – sitting on top of the gold mine.’
Kit gave Joe a level stare. He had worked diligently for Michael for years to earn the right to be his number one. And Michael’s monetary decisions had been his alone; there had been no coercion on Kit’s part.
‘What are you saying?’ he asked Joe.
‘I’m saying Gabe’s a greedy little tick and he’s going to want it. All of it. The restaurants, the clubs, the flats, the dosh – everything. He’ll want it all.’
Kit took a sip of the coffee, then said: ‘It was Michael’s wish that I should carry on where he left off. He knew I could do it. He trusted me to do it.’
He thought then of his dangerous flirtation with the booze. He’d been dry for a couple of weeks now, and one of the reasons he’d managed that was because he’d been sure that Michael would be disgusted with such weakness.
‘What would this Gabe character do with it all?’ he asked Joe.
Joe let out a guffaw of grating laughter which faded into a painful cough. ‘He’d piss the whole lot up against the fuckin’ wall,’ he said, eyes watering. ‘Spend it on alcohol, cigarettes and loose women. And the rest he’d just bloody squander.’
Kit had to smile. Poor bastard. He was up shit creek, but he still had a sense of humour.
‘You really got no address for him? Not even a number?’
Joe shook his head.
‘You think he’s going to come calling over Michael’s money?’ asked Kit.
‘Gabe?’ Joe gave a dry smile and took another pull at the oxygen. ‘Oh yeah. He’ll come.’
49
Tito wasn’t going to rush this. He was like a cheetah, stalking fleet-footed gazelle; he had to be sure of his choice before he broke cover. He took his work seriously. Papa Astorre had spoken to Mama Bella and now Astorre told him what she wanted.
‘A little blonde girl,’ said Astorre. ‘Not a baby. Maybe two, three years old? Young enough to forget, not old enough to remember the details.’
‘People are going to talk,’ warned Tito. ‘Suddenly you have a child? A girl who doesn’t even look like one of us?’