Tony drove her back to Holland Park. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. In years past the silence between them had been companionable, but today it was charged with stifled aggression. Yet she supposed she was safe with Tony; Max had told him to behave, and he would. She hoped.
She couldn’t even be sure of Max, not now. He’d believed what he’d been told about her, and he seemed to believe it still. At any moment he could turn on her, and if he did, she was finished. She’d suspected he was having an affair, but she’d been miles off. In fact he’d been tracking Gina Barolli down, and Gina had broken the Mafia code, betrayed her brother. Why? Annie wondered, and then she thought of Constantine as he was these days, and thought that she might know the answer to that.
Tony pulled up outside the house, got out of the driving seat, opened her door. Looked the other way while she got out.
‘Tone?’ Annie said when he was about to get back behind the wheel without even saying goodbye.
He paused. Cocked an eyebrow, waited.
‘Our tame coppers – you said you were going to talk to them. Anything? I got Jackie on it too, by the way. And he’s turned up nothing.’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. They ain’t heard a thing.’
‘Right. Tone . . . ?’
‘What now?’
‘None of it’s true. I’ve told Max and now I’m telling you. None of it.’
His expression didn’t change. He didn’t believe her.
Annie let out a sigh. ‘Come tomorrow at one, OK?’
Tony nodded, got back behind the wheel, and drove away.
Annie deliberately didn’t set the alarm that night. If he was going to come, if they were ever to get past this, then bring it on: she’d risk his rage, she’d take that chance. But Max didn’t show.
To cheer herself up she spent the next day indulging in some retail therapy. It was Saturday and she could have used some company after this grim week. She could have met up with Ellie, if only Ellie hadn’t decided that she was too dangerous to talk to. So she kicked her heels up and down Bond Street and then went home alone with a silent Tony at the wheel and sat in solitary confinement into the evening before deliberately not setting the alarm again and then going to bed.
He won’t come, she thought miserably. He’s done with me. All right, so he’s keeping me safe – for now – for old times’ sake, but he won’t come again. He’s had enough.
And then, at about one in the morning, she woke up, switched on the bedside light, and he was there.
‘You didn’t set the alarm again,’ said Max, rising from the chair in the corner of the room and coming over to the bed.
‘Didn’t I?’ asked Annie, pushing the hair out of her eyes and yawning.
‘Careless.’
‘Yeah. Wasn’t it.’
‘So get the fuck on with it. Go on with what you were saying,’ he said.
Annie frowned. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Don’t play dumb. You were going to tell me, Scheherazade, about your first visit to that shit Constantine.’
‘Oh. That.’
‘Yeah, that.’ He sat down on the side of the king-sized bed and stared at her, sitting there all rumpled from sleep with her hair all over the place and the thousand-thread-count sheets pulled up to her chin. ‘So come on. Let’s see how good a storyteller you really are. What happened then?’
‘Max, I’m tired.’
‘Tough. Tell me what happened next, and by Christ you’d better make it good.’