Rob stood in the centre of the lounge, looking around him in wonder.
‘How the fuck would I know? Look at this shit.’
Daisy moved inside, feeling a bit bolder now she knew some lunatic wasn’t lurking in a corner somewhere. She looked around, at the sofas, the cushions, the…
‘Why slash the sofas open?’ she asked him.
‘Hm? Oh. They did the mattress too.’
‘Yes, but why?’
‘I dunno, Daise,’ said Rob irritably. ‘It’s been a bloody long week. And now this…’
‘They must have been looking for something,’ said Daisy.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you think so? I wonder what’s missing.’
‘Daise – I don’t know. I never did a fucking inventory of the place.’
Daisy surveyed the wreckage. ‘What were they looking for?’ she wondered aloud.
‘Fuck knows. Maybe nothing. Maybe they just smashed up the place for the hell of it.’
Rob was tired, and he was thinking that possibly they’d done a stupid thing, taking Bianca. Vittore had been beyond fury when he’d phoned him and let him know the score. His best friend was laid up in a hospital bed hovering somewhere between life and death. He’d had enough. He walked to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ said Daisy.
‘Home,’ he said. ‘I need to sleep.’
‘No, I want to look in the office downstairs.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s-’
‘What?’
‘Daise, enough.’
‘No! The office.’
‘God, you’re a stroppy cow, has anyone ever told you that?’ said Rob, thinking that he’d have to get the locks repaired and the boys in, tidy the damned place up; it was just one bloody thing after another lately.
He followed Daisy downstairs and into the restaurant where the staff were getting ready for the evening’s trade. Daisy and Rob wove their way through the bar, through the restaurant, and over to the office.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Rob.
Daisy peered past his shoulder. The door was slightly ajar. And the lock looked…
‘It’s been broken into,’ she said.
‘Oh, first prize! Give the lady a coconut,’ said Rob, and pushed the door open. He flicked on the light. ‘Damn, will you look at this? How the hell did this happen and no one see or hear?’
Daisy came in behind Rob and eased the door closed behind them. All the filing cabinets had been emptied and overturned. There were papers all over the place, the desk had been flipped onto its back, Michael’s chair – Kit’s chair – had been thrown aside, the seat slashed open, the stuffing pulled out.
Rob went over to the desk.
Daisy stared all around her.
‘Somebody’s definitely looking for something,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but what?’
‘I wonder if they found it?’
‘Daise…’
‘Maybe they didn’t.’
‘Hm.’
‘Maybe you and Kit have already taken it away. Perhaps what someone wants is the stuff that Michael was carrying around with him.’
On the way out, they stopped at the bar and questioned Terry, the head barman.
‘You seen anyone hanging about the office?’ asked Rob.
‘No, why?’
‘It’s been broken into. Turned upside-down. The flat upstairs, too.’
‘Get out of it! Really? Well, I was on last night and I didn’t notice anything. Mind you, that lock’s a pissy little thing, one good shove and it’d give. Keely!’ He called over to a brunette who was busy polishing glasses. ‘You see anyone hanging around the office yesterday or today? Someone’s been in there.’
Keely shook her head: no.
‘Bridge was on too,’ said Terry. ‘Bridge!’ he called, and a blonde girl appeared from the back, eyebrows raised in enquiry. ‘Bridge, you see anyone around the office last night or today? They’re saying someone’s been in there, and the flat upstairs.’
‘No, I haven’t. Sorry.’ Bridget turned away, then she stopped and looked back at them. ‘Wait on, I saw a bloke with a beard loitering near the side entrance yesterday evening. But he was that skinny, I wouldn’t have thought he could break the lock. Didn’t look like he had an ounce of strength in him.’
At that moment, Ashok appeared in the restaurant doorway. He saw Rob and came straight over.
‘We had some trouble at the hospital,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to risk telling you over the phone, so I’ve been driving all over-’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Another one tried to get to Kit.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Daisy.
‘It sorted?’ asked Rob.
Ashok grinned. ‘Bloke had a nasty accident, decided to end it all.’
89
When he took the call at the club, Vittore couldn’t believe it. This was not a day for good news. ‘Pizza-face’ Donato had fallen to his death from a hospital window and then Miller’s right-hand man had the brass neck to tell him that he should call his dogs off, because they had Bianca.
A bluff?
He phoned Dante’s in Southampton and asked Cora, was Bianca there?
She wasn’t. Days ago, she’d said she was going up to London, and no one at the club had seen or heard from her since.
First, he had to tell Mama. She wailed and screamed like a madwoman.
‘What will they do to her?’ she sobbed. ‘My baby!’
‘They’ll do nothing, Mama,’ said Vittore. ‘She has to be kept safe, or else what do they have left?’
But Bella went on with her hysterical breast-beating.
Fabio came into the kitchen, alerted by all the noise. ‘What’s going on?’
Vittore filled him in.
‘We can’t allow this,’ said Fabio, clenching his fists.
‘It’s done,’ said Vittore, watching his younger brother with cynical eyes. Like he cared about Bianca. Not that Vittore did either, not really, only insofar as her behaviour reflected upon him and the Danieri name. She was becoming a liability. He couldn’t have her telling the world she was in love with that bastard Kit Miller. He couldn’t have Miller scoring points over them. No way. And it wasn’t as if Bianca was truly blood, he reminded himself.
‘What do you mean? We stand by? Do nothing?’
‘Yeah, we do nothing. For the time being. What else can we do? Now shut up and get out of my way.’
Fabio glared at his older brother. Who was he, telling him what to do? He had his own business now, he didn’t have to answer to Vittore any more. He had even tupped the mama’s boy’s wife. And still Vittore thought he could tell him what to do?
Fuck him.
But then he remembered that bricked-up cellar door, and Maria, gone God knew where, and that smell. And suddenly the fear was back, crawling up his spine as he looked at Vittore.
He’s going to get me, thought Fabio.
And then he had another thought.
Unless I get him first.
90
Someone was calling his name, right by his ear.
The voice was so close that it startled him. All the sounds before had been distant, ethereal, ghost-echoes of his own thoughts. But this was a definite, firm, Kit.
It was grey, light-grey now, and he could hear things beeping, monitors or something, and it was like being talked up from hypnosis or some such bollocks; he was coming up and he would wake when someone went click with their fingers.
Three…
Coming awake, coming back to the land of the living…
Two…
… stretching, feeling that he’d had enough of that other world with its blackness and its chilling winds…
One.
His eyes flickered open. Owwww. Bright in here. Lights all over the place, and someone leaning over him, a blonde pigtail tickling his collarbone, his heartbeat accelerating, what the fuck…? A kind face, young, pretty and that blonde was straight out of a bottle…