Utter blackness descended. Annie froze in her chair. Something brushed by her leg, there was a scrabble of movement, and then someone grabbed her arm. She let out a shriek.
‘It’s me,’ said Max, and then Steve was in the room and the wavering light of the torch was blinding Annie. Steve cast the beam around. ‘That other geezer shot past me out the back door,’ he said.
So – no Mitchell.
Steve cast the torch’s beam around the room.
And no Redmond, either. He was gone.
‘That bastard makes my skin crawl,’ said Max as he started the car and drove them back to Holland Park.
‘Me too,’ said Annie. She wasn’t convinced that Redmond had told them the complete truth about what had happened to Sam Farrell. Redmond was a game player. You couldn’t trust a word that came out of his mouth.
Steve had searched everywhere in the house and the grounds, but Jackie wasn’t there. So where the hell was he? And what had made him scream that way? Annie shivered to think of it, what could have happened to him. All right, he was a walking disaster, drunk and disgusting most of the time, but he’d been making an effort to shape up over this last week or so, and he’d been on her side when no one else seemed to be.
She thought of Redmond, sitting there like butter wouldn’t melt. But she knew that bastard of old, just like Max did. That cool polished exterior hid a squirming worm-fest of nastiness that could be unleashed at a moment’s notice. Priest, pervert or crook, Redmond’s basic personality never changed. He was disturbed, and disturbing, and there was history between them. Bad history. Annie could never forget that it had been Constantine who had tried to kill both Redmond and his twin sister Orla back in the seventies. And it had been Annie’s own daughter, Layla, who had finally put a stop to Orla’s sad, twisted life.
‘Are you going to come in?’ asked Annie when Max pulled up outside her house.
‘What, to hear more tall tales?’ Max sighed.
Annie looked at him in exasperation. Before Jackie’s phone call, Max had been about to make love to her. She knew it. Now he was cold again.
‘We can talk,’ she said. ‘Can’t we?’
Truthfully, she didn’t want to be alone, not after this evening, not after hearing that godawful scream and staring into Redmond’s expressionless eyes.
He shrugged. ‘If you want,’ he said, and got out of the car.
Annie got out too, shutting the door after her, crossing the pavement, starting up the steps. There was something, a bundle of rags, something like that, near the door, lit by the carriage light over it.
‘What the f—’ she started, coming to a halt as her feet met a puddle of dark oil.
They had found Jackie.