They told Annie there would be a wake – cake and sandwiches and cups of tea, nothing fancy – back at Sarah’s place, and she would be welcome to come if she wanted. She didn’t think she wanted to spend one more second in this joyless pair’s company, but she took the address anyway.
Then she went back along the gravel walkway toward the lychgate. A large crowd of mourners had gathered there. She looked around for Ellie, but she seemed to have gone. She felt a shudder, thinking of Dolly lying in the cold earth, alone. Soon the gravediggers would come and fill in the hole and that would be it; Dolly would be gone forever.
Feeling apprehensive after that little tussle with the group near the grave, she walked on, head held high, but at the back of her mind was the kicking she’d got off Gary’s thugs, the unrelenting soreness of her broken rib, and she thought, I don’t want any more of that. She had thought Max and his boys had it in for her, for sure; but the fact that the bad news about her had already reached the wider population was chilling. She made a mental note to dig out her can of Mace when she got home. It wasn’t much, but it was something, at least.
Maybe she wouldn’t have the chance to get home and do that, though. The mob by the gate turned and watched her coming, their eyes unfriendly.
Christ, I could be in real trouble here.
Her footsteps slowed and finally she stopped walking. Then there was movement closer to her, all around her, and she turned, startled. She had been so focused on a possible threat at the lychgate that she’d missed another. Tony had appeared on one side of her, and Steve came up in front of her. Her head whipped round and she started to turn further, but there was Chris, grim-faced, right behind her. No Gary. There was that to be thankful for, she supposed.
Oh fuck . . .
Her heart lodging in her throat, she spun back round to the front and there was Max, standing right beside her like a brick wall and looking at her blank-faced.
She was closed in.
She was trapped.
Please no, not again, please, please . . .
‘Just keep walking,’ said Max.
What else could she do? She had four big men surrounding her and an angry mob waiting for her at the gate. Her stomach clenched with terror, she did as he said. No good making a break for it, they’d catch her easily. And frightened though she was, she wasn’t about to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing that.
She kept her head up, and somehow got her trembling legs to move forward. As she moved, so did the four men surrounding her. As one body, they walked to the lychgate, and the now silent, watchful crowd parted in silence to let them pass.
The four of them walked her right to the car, a black Jag. It gave her a pang, just to see it. This had once been her car, the car Tony had chauffeured her about in, but it had passed to Dolly. Now Dolly wouldn’t use it any more. Tony got behind the wheel. Once, back in the day, Tony had been the jockey, the wheelman on heists pulled by the Carter gang; he could do things with a car that would make your eyes water. Turn the damned thing on a sixpence. Chris slid into the front passenger seat. Steve got in the back, and Annie was pushed in after him; then Max got in. And it was then it hit Annie, the truth; that her husband had just rescued her, put a steel wall around her to get her out of the church grounds and away.
‘Max—’ she said, turning toward him.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said.
‘Max—’
‘I said, shut up.’
And having said that, he turned away from her and stared out of the window, jaw set.
Tony gunned the engine and drove them back to Holland Park.
She shut up. Tony drove on, through the steadily hardening rain. When the car pulled up outside her house in Holland Park and Max dragged her out, she thought maybe he’d go and leave her there. But he didn’t get back in. He slammed the door shut, and the other three men shot off in the Jag.
‘Come the fuck on then,’ he said, and grabbed her arm and hauled her up to the steps to the big imposing navy-blue doors of home.