They drove her to the East End. As they wove through the streets she recognized the area and thought: No, it can’t be. Can it? But they carried on, and soon she knew the road, she knew the house, she recognized the little Victorian terrace.
Oh shit.
The house had a powder-blue door and a teensy front garden with a chequered pathway leading up to it. She’d walked up it in the past, maybe a thousand times. The driver parked the van, and the other one took her arm. With the same gentle firmness he’d employed before, he helped her down from the van, then he closed the door and took her round to the pavement. The driver opened the blue-painted wrought-iron gate, and together they escorted her up the pathway to the house.
The driver rang the bell.
Presently, the door opened and the squat bulk of Steve Taylor stood there. He looked at her, briefly took in her mud-stained state, then he looked at the two men and held the door wide. With nowhere else to go, Annie stepped into the entrance hall of Queenie Carter’s old domain. The house was empty – it had been empty for years – but for a big table and twelve chairs upstairs in the front bedroom, where Max and her and all the boys had once met up and discussed business.
Steve went on upstairs, and the driver nudged Annie that way too. She went up, feeling as if she was ascending the gallows.
He knows, he knows, repeated that panicky little voice in her brain.
Someone had done the unthinkable, broken the code of silence. But who, for God’s sake?
The driver and the other one came up too, hard on her heels so she had nowhere to run. When Steve reached the landing, he knocked on the first closed door he came to, and then pushed it open. He stood aside, so that Annie could enter first.
Oh Jesus . . .
Annie braced herself and stepped inside the room. There was the table, just as she remembered, and the chairs. Gary was seated in one of them, Tony in another. Another man stood at the window, his back to the room.
‘Blimey. Looks like a fucking courtroom in here,’ said Annie. She glanced around at them all, a bright smile masking the awful fear that was gripping her guts. She felt almost unable to move, she was so frozen with apprehension.
‘So who’s on trial?’ she quipped.
The man at the window turned and stared at her. Black hair, deep tan, dark navy-blue eyes and a piratical hook of a nose. Her husband.
Ah shit, she thought.
‘Looks like you are,’ said Max Carter.