Redmond Delaney was always interested in Annie Carter. He’d had Mitchell watch her when she came back to England, and she did that quite frequently. She was a pet project of his; he liked to think of her as a butterfly trapped under glass so that he could watch her at his leisure.
Redmond was very curious about her trips north of the border. What was so fascinating to her up there? And he wondered – given that she’d been married to the Mafia bastard at one point – if she had known about Constantine Barolli’s plan to kill both him and his sister back in the seventies.
He was irritated that Gary Tooley hadn’t come up with the goods yet on this next big secret. Him and Mitchell had gone to the Blue Parrot to get the information and pay the five thousand (Redmond wasn’t sure if he was going to pay Gary or cut him yet; the cunt had seriously annoyed him), but guess what? Gary was suddenly out of town. This made Redmond think that Gary was just tweaking his tail, upping the ante.
That prick.
‘He’s back again,’ said Mitchell.
‘What?’ Redmond was sitting in his living room, and Mitchell was standing at the window, nudging aside the closed curtains. It was night-time.
‘The dirty little creep in the crappy car. Annie Carter’s follower,’ said Mitchell. He glanced at Redmond. ‘Now your follower too, it seems. He’s parked up outside, watching the house again.’
Redmond stood up, went over to the window and looked out. There was a car there. Inside, dimly, a match flared as Jackie Tulliver lit a cigar.
Redmond ground his teeth in annoyance. The Tooley business was irritating enough, and now this. His years spent as an East End Face had made him anxious about people tailing him, tracking him, following him. He was the last Delaney standing and there was a reason for that; he was the toughest, the smartest, the fastest to react. Much as he admired Annie Carter, he was not so keen on this lapdog scruffy cunt of hers watching his house.
He’d done a little watching of his own, though; he knew Annie was back in her Holland Park house, and Mitchell had seen her talking in the street with the man out there in the car.
‘Jackie Tulliver,’ Redmond told Mitchell. He’d recognized him from years back as a Carter boy. ‘He’s working for her.’
That night, Redmond lashed himself with the whip again, because he was having thoughts, impure thoughts. Nothing new there. Really, they’d done him a favour, kicking him out of the priesthood, he just wasn’t suited to it. He thought of all those lovely parishioners and got quite excited, quite agitated. And then he whipped himself harder, and got angry at the thought of those Carter people, Tooley and Tulliver, arsing him about. And mixed up in it, as usual, was Annie Carter, fabulous and unflinching as she strode about creating mayhem.
Panting, naked to the waist, he put the whip back in its box and went to his bedroom window and looked out. And there he was, that little fecker Jackie Tulliver, sitting in his car smoking oversized cigars and having the brass neck to be watching him, Redmond Delaney.
Redmond wasn’t happy.
He wasn’t happy at all.
He snatched up his shirt and dragged it on, glorying in the stinging pain as the cuts on his back stuck to the fine material. He wasn’t having this. He was going out there, right now.