Lawless (3 page)

On the surface, Michael had been a businessman, giving generously to charities, stumping up for the Aberfan disaster, raising donations for the Hackney Road Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children. But underneath the façade? He was a crook, the feared leader of one of the big organized gangs who ‘ran’ the streets of London, like the Krays had, and the Richardsons, the Regans, the Nashes and the Carters . . . Some of those gangs were off the scene now, and there were new developments: the Maltese were muscling in, the Mafia was cruising around, looking tasty, and then there was Tito Danieri’s lot, his
camorristi
, who should have been sweating it out in Naples but were here instead, causing trouble. Ruby wanted no part of that world.

Ruby and Michael had been in their forties when they met, too old to be called boyfriend and girlfriend. But they’d been passionate, committed lovers and she felt she’d buried a part of herself when she’d lost him. Slowly, though, she was coming back to some semblance of normality, telling herself to get on with it, that life had to go on regardless how much it hurt.

In the aftermath of Mike’s murder she’d ceased to care about the business – Darkes department stores, the chain she had built up from a single corner shop originally run by her dad – but now she was forcing herself to take up the reins again. As it had done so often in the past, work provided solace, kept her sane. Helped her to cope with her loss, just as it had when her twins were taken from her at birth.

She was lucky, she had to keep telling herself that. Against all odds, thirty years after she was separated from them, Daisy and Kit had come back into her life. Daisy, who’d been brought up by her biological father and his wife, had found it easier to forgive than Kit, who’d never known what it was to have a family. Even after he’d learned how she was forced to give him up, he couldn’t stop blaming her for abandoning him. While everyone else had rallied round after Michael’s death, Kit had kept his distance. That hurt her terribly.

Daisy, however, had been wonderful, as had Rob, Kit’s second-in-command, and all her staff. There had been notes of sympathy from her workers at all the stores, and even from Michael’s contacts and business associates, people she barely knew. Flowers from a man called Thomas Knox, and a note expressing his deepest sympathy. Then, a little later, a letter sent to her office, offering her help if she should ever need it, asking her to call him, asking if he could call her . . .

Ruby had quickly decided that she never would. She suspected that Knox, like Michael, operated on the precariously narrow line between big business and criminal activities, skirting between legit and not-so-kosher deals. Bad enough that Kit was following that same perilous path; all she wanted now was to escape that shadowy underworld. It was dark and it was dangerous. Look at what had happened to Michael. Wasn’t that proof enough?

‘Do you know a Thomas Knox?’ she’d asked Rob one day. She could always talk to Rob, far more easily than she could talk to Kit. Rob was solid as a rock; he’d been her minder last year, when she’d had need of one. He’d saved her life.

‘Knox? Sure. Hard man, a real face. He was at Michael’s funeral – didn’t you see him? Big guy. Fortyish. Blondish sort of hair. Why?’

‘No reason,’ said Ruby.

She was sure she
had
seen Knox there, watching her with hard blue eyes.

She kept the flowers – they were beautiful – but she binned the note, and the letter.

As she picked up the phone, Ruby’s mind had already made the assumption that it would be something to do with her plan to roll out coffee shops across the Darkes chain. Shifting to professional mode, she forced herself to confront her reflection in the mirror above the telephone table. Lately, she had avoided mirrors. Now she looked and there she was: Ruby Darke, still battling away, still coping. She saw a woman of a certain age and mixed race, dark haired with café au lait skin. She was model-thin (maybe too thin, since Michael had gone and food had lost its appeal) and elegant. She was dressed in black, and pearls. Her features were delicate, and her straight, thick black hair was swept back into a neat chignon. She looked confident and wealthy. But her eyes, darkest brown with speckles of copper-gold, told the true story. The expression in them was anxious and miserable, full of sadness.

‘Is that Ruby?’ It was a female voice, accented – French or Italian? – with a hint of uncertainty.

‘It is.’ A little frown of puzzlement wrinkled Ruby’s brow. ‘Who is this?’

‘I am Bella Danieri. Tito’s mother.’

Ruby’s false business smile dropped away. Italian, then. She’d heard the news about Tito, and how he’d died. Everyone had.

‘I want you to come to his Requiem Mass,’ said Bella. ‘If you would.’

‘Well I . . .’

‘Please. I want you to come.’ And Bella started reeling off the time, the place, the date.

Ruby paused, hearing but not wanting to, wondering how she could get out of this. She hadn’t even
known
Tito, not really. He’d been an associate of Michael’s, so she’d brushed up against him once or twice. She hadn’t liked him. One look into those soulless eyes had told her all she needed or wanted to know about Tito Danieri. She had formed the strong impression that Michael had done his utmost to keep her out of Tito’s way. So no, she didn’t want to attend his funeral.

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Please, you must.’ Bella’s voice trembled. She stopped speaking. Then she seemed to gather her strength to go on. ‘Please come. I have to talk to you. Or I tell you, blood will flow.’

And there it was. The witch’s curse.

Blood will flow.

And God help them all, because it did.

5

There was something awesome about Bianca Danieri, with her straight fall of silvery white-blonde hair, her lily-pale skin and her turquoise-blue eyes.
And
she knew it. Exploited it, in fact. To emphasize the whiteness of her hair and skin, she
always
wore white. The woman in white, pale as the proverbial ghost; that was Bianca. Even her name meant ‘white’. She could nail a room in one second flat, turn the attention of everyone in it directly to her.

Bianca was twenty-five years old and for the first time ever her brothers had trusted her enough – or Mama Bella had nagged them sufficiently – to run one of the just-about-to-launch new Danieri family discos. This one was in Southampton at the Back of the Walls, where the ancient city fortifications still stood. Not a prime site in London’s West End like the ones the family already owned, oh no – not like Tito’s, or Fellows or Goldie’s; of course not. Bianca had to prove herself in the wasteland of the sticks first. Well, so what? Prove herself she would.

The disco was to be called Dante’s – Bianca’s own choice, she liked the idea of replicating an inferno in here – and the red, black and gold paint was still tacky and stinking the place out. The kitchens had been fitted over the past week, the black carpets (which wouldn’t show the inevitable stains) were being laid today, then the furnishings were coming in. The sparks were in now, fiddling with the strobes. It was all hands to the pump.

‘Hey, Cora, you listening?’ said Bianca. ‘Drayman’s delivering at eleven, you sort him out, OK?’

Cora, a tall redhead who’d been running bars since before Bianca was born, nodded.

‘And Tanya . . . where the hell’s Tanya?’

While Cora was in charge of bar staff, Tanya was here to manage the waiters and waitresses, or rather ‘hosts’ and ‘hostesses’. They would be working front-of-house, dressed in fetching little devil costumes, and red horns. Red wings had been discussed as an option, but Bianca had dismissed that idea. ‘Take up too much room,’ she said. ‘You turn around, knock a punter’s drink flying. Nah. Silly idea.’

‘Tanya had a hot date last night, I heard,’ said Claire, a tiny brunette already puffing on her twentieth cigarette of the day.

‘I told her to get in early.’

Cora and Claire exchanged looks. They both knew that Tanya had been moonlighting at Nero’s, a club in Portsmouth where the girls were all tricked out in dinky little togas. They also knew that if Bianca found out about this, she would grab Tanya by the throat and give her seven kinds of shit before kicking her smartly out the door. You didn’t mess with Bianca.

‘She’ll be in soon,’ said Cora loyally.

‘She’d better be.’ Bianca might look like a cool blonde angel, but she wasn’t up for being taken for a mug, not now, not ever. She’d been adopted into a fierce immigrant family, and had absorbed their ways; she wouldn’t take any shit. And it mattered so much to her that this went right.
So
much.

She was special and she knew it. Bella was always telling her so.

‘We
chose
you out of all the little girls we could have brought home from the orphanage,’ Bella would say.

Bianca had no memory of the orphanage. All she
did
remember was a blonde woman, smiling. One of the nuns or matrons or whatever they were called, no doubt. And Tito, cuddling her in the family kitchen, saying she was his little sister, his precious one – with Vittore looking on, uninterested, and Fabio looking furious. Oh – and a bead of blood, dripping from a blade of grass. Weird. She must have fallen over when she was small, cut herself perhaps. Something like that.

‘Speak of the devil!’ said Claire, as Tanya came in the door, looking washed out.

‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘What the fuck time d’you call this?’ asked Bianca.

Tanya looked truculently up at the clock on the wall, brand new and still without its batteries, both hands stuck at the vertical.

‘Twelve,’ she said.

There was a brief, freezing silence.

‘Don’t even
think
about being bloody funny,’ said Bianca. ‘Carpet fitters are coming in today, and
they’re
late too, so get on the sodding phone and hurry them up,
capisce
? And you keep an eye on them when they get here, I don’t want to see any joins in awkward places, I want this to look the business.’

‘And what will you be doing?’ asked Tanya. It wasn’t her job to balls around looking at
carpets.
She was supposed to be in charge of the waiting staff, wasn’t she?

Bianca looked at her. ‘You got a hangover?’

‘A bit.’

‘Then I’ll make allowances. Not that it’s anything to do with you, but I’ll be interviewing doormen, if that’s all right with you, Tanya?’

Tanya shrugged.
Sure.

‘OK, get on with it then, the lot of you. I’ll be up in the office.’

Bianca went upstairs. Cora and Claire looked at Tanya.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You don’t half push your luck,’ said Claire. ‘She ain’t in the mood for fun and games.’

‘She never flaming is,’ said Cora.

‘She’s on edge with all the decorating and stuff going on. She wants the place to look right. Tito’s trusted her with it, and she wants to impress him.’ They all knew how Bianca worshipped her eldest brother, Tito. Claire took a long pull at her cigarette, then stubbed it out in a black ashtray on the bar. ‘Let’s get on then, shall we . . . ?’

Half an hour later, the carpet fitters arrived. And half an hour after that, Vittore Danieri showed up.

‘Bianca here?’ he asked the three women, who were pausing by the bar for a fag and a coffee.

Vittore had an authoritative way about him, like Bianca; he was big, blockish like Tito, robust and tough-looking and ugly with a hooked nose, receding black hair and bulging dark brown eyes. There was a stillness, a hardness about him – and he looked somehow
polished
like Tito too, in the way that rich guys did.

‘Why hasn’t he got a neck?’ they’d joked between themselves when they first set eyes on him. Vittore’s head was set low on his shoulders and it poked aggressively forward; he
didn’t
seem to have a neck, it was true, but then he didn’t seem to have a sense of humour either, so they maintained a show of respect in his presence.

‘Bianca’s upstairs,’ said Tanya, her eyes catching his.

She thought of it as
turning on the headlights.
She turned them on now, gave him full beam, eyelashes fluttering,
You want some of this?
She knew he was married, but she didn’t give a toss about that. Of course, she would prefer to have Tito, but Vittore would do. The family was loaded, and all the brothers – even that vain little tit Fabio who’d come down here once trying to chuck his weight about – had an aura of power that appealed to her.

‘Right,’ said Vittore, and passed by all three of them without a second glance.

‘Shit,’ said Tanya, shaking her head. ‘Am I losing it, or what?’

‘Girl, you never had it to lose,’ laughed Cora.

‘Yeah, funny,’ said Tanya, and Claire gave a smirk.

‘Come on,’ sighed Claire. ‘Work to do . . .’

Bianca wasn’t particularly surprised to see Vittore show up unannounced. She was thrilled that Tito had entrusted her with the start-up of Dante’s, after she had spent several years learning the business up in London; but she was under no illusions. He was expecting her to fail, to need bailing out at any moment.

She was used to this. With three older brothers, she was always the one standing on the sidelines, the one nobody consulted or enquired after, because she was a
girl
and in their eyes that made her something less than a man, someone less likely to get things properly done. She had kicked against it for most of her life, but it was
there
, always staring her in the face: the testosterone wall.

She might have been used to it, but that didn’t mean she liked it, or accepted it. In fact, it enraged her. She knew she was capable, sensible,
tough
enough to run this place. When she put herself forward for it, her brothers been taken by surprise; it was obvious that they wanted to say no, but Mama had backed her. They all knew Mama was the boss, so Tito had said OK, why not? All the time expecting Bianca to make a bollocks of it.