THE DOMINO BOYS (a psychological thriller) (16 page)

‘You’ve got a bloody nerve, Ginetta,’ snarled Craddick. ‘Sending someone to my home to take a crack at me. You think that scares me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Ginetta, who was obviously smiling at the other end of the line. ‘A crack at you, you say? My, how audacious. Who was it? I’d like to offer them a job.’

‘Don’t fool with me, Ginetta. I could have been killed.’

Ginetta’s tone hardened. ‘This is what it’s like playing in that part of the pool where the big boys play, Mr Craddick. If you don’t like water splashed in your face then it’s time to move to the shallow end. Your father was very adept at swimming in the deep end, but perhaps you are not yet ready to ditch the water wings. And it’s
Mr
Ginetta.’

Craddick sucked in a breath. ‘OK, we’ll meet.’

‘You have the money?’

‘Sure I do. But it’s going to take a little time to get one hundred thousand together.’

‘Time is one commodity you don’t have, Mr Craddick. You’ve got the rest of today and tomorrow morning. I shall call you again tomorrow afternoon. Have the money ready and be prepared to meet me at a moment’s notice. I’ll tell you where. Offer ends tomorrow afternoon. If you don’t come up trumps then I keep the notes. And if this is too fast for you, Mr Craddick, I suggest you swim back to the shallow end. Oh, and a little reminder; it’s not your home, is it? Someone told me your father didn’t leave it to you in his will. I think that makes you a squatter, Mr Craddick.’

The line went dead before Craddick could protest. ‘Bastard!’ he said.

He stuffed the phone into his pocket, biting his lower lip. That amount of money would clear him out, but he had no choice. The million pounds in duff notes would fetch far more and give him the cash boost he needed to kick-start his operations. But Ginetta would pay for this, in time. There was no way he was going to take any of this lying down.

‘Roche,’ he said, ‘I need to get together one hundred thousand before tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Can you do that?’ he asked.

He shook his head. ‘Too tight. My money’s spread out all over the place.’

‘I still have a few of your father’s contacts who could stump up the cash. They’d want interest, of course.’

‘Sort it.’

‘They’re not the kind of guys you want to let down, Mr Craddick. Late repayment doesn’t go down too well with them. I once knew this guy who defaulted on a mere three hundred and they cut off his ear and sent it to his missus to bake in a pie.’

‘I don’t need to know the sordid details. They’ll get their money back as soon as I can get my funds together. Can you do it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then quit jabbering and get onto it.’

Camellia Lucas paused in the large entrance hall, and looked back to the door. Alfie Parker came up to her.

‘What a thing to happen, eh, Miss Lucas?’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Better stay indoors. Safer here, it seems.’

She stared at him, nodded. ‘You say you saw someone, in the tree…’

‘Yes. Are you OK? You don’t look too good.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. He nodded his goodbye and she watched him go back upstairs to his carpet cleaning. She waited till he’d disappeared from sight before leaning a hand against the wall and bowing her head. She felt as if she might throw up at any moment.

Gathering her thoughts, she followed Alfie upstairs, stepped into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Her breathing was erratic, and she fought to control the shaking in her hand as she bent down and reached under her bed.

But it touched nothing and she crouched down low, lifting the duvet and looking beneath.

It had gone!

That’s impossible, she thought. It had to be there!

In a panic she stood up, searching fervently about her.

‘Are you looking for this?’

Alfie Parker had stepped silently in from the en-suite bathroom, was standing in the doorway holding up a scarf-wrapped bundle. He slowly unrolled it and took out a handgun.

‘What are you doing in here?’ she cried. ‘Get out of my bedroom!’

He came further into the room. ‘What’s going on, Camellia?’

‘Give me that back and get out of here before I call someone!’

‘Go ahead. They’d be really interested to hear that you have a gun and tried to kill your fiancé.’

‘I don’t know what you mean…’

‘Oh come on, Camellia, I saw you! I was up in one of the bedrooms about to clean one of Donnie’s stinking carpets when I heard the shots. I leaned out of the window to see what was going on and I saw you. You were at that window,’ he said, pointing, ‘a smoking gun in your hand. This very gun, in fact.’

Her eyes began to mist, her lips trembling, and then she sank to the bed and began to sob. ‘Why’d you tell them you saw someone in the trees?’ she said shakily.

‘I have my reasons,’ said Alfie, sitting down beside her. ‘So, are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

*  *  *  *

‘You’ve got to tell me,’ he insisted.

She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

Alfie Parker held the gun out. ‘Then I’ll go to the police with this,’ he said. ‘Tell them what you tried to do.’

‘Leave me alone! It’s my business!’ The tears had stopped, and her face was now a porcelain mask of hard resolve.

‘Camellia, my friend was out there; you could have killed him. That makes it my business.’

‘What do you care? Just leave me alone to do what I have to do.’

‘Leave you alone to kill Donnie Craddick? I don’t think so.’

‘Leave me the gun,’ she said, looking at him. ‘Pretend you didn’t see what you saw.’

‘And be an accessory to murder?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to do it.’

‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘Why throw away your young life because of someone like Donnie Craddick? You’ve got so much going for you.’

‘Is that why you lied to Donnie?’ she asked.

He angled his head, wrapped the gun back up in the scarf. ‘Partly. But I mean what I say; you’ve got your entire life ahead of you. Why waste that on someone like Donnie? I don’t understand it. You don’t seem like the type of woman to fall for a lowlife like him. And now you try to bump him off, and in a rather ham-fisted way, I add. What the hell is going on in that screwed up head of yours?’

There was only the faintest tremor to her bottom lip. He could see she was steeling herself, stiffening her shoulders.

‘I don’t have a life. He took it away from me.’

Alfie waited. Her lips were clamped shut. ‘Took it away?’

‘Marcus and me, we were going to get married…’

‘Marcus?’

‘Someone I knew before I met Donnie. Marcus was a journalist with one of the nationals. He was bright, funny, intelligent. One thing led to another, eventually he proposed, I said yes. My mother and father were very pleased. He came from a good family, you see. Family bloodline mattered to them, a rather old-fashioned notion these days, but as long as they were happy for me I didn’t care. Then Donnie entered our lives.

‘I didn’t think much of it at first. Donnie and Marcus were old university friends – Marcus had many friends, he was that kind of man. I didn’t think much of Donnie from the outset. Sure, he’s got the looks, even shared the intelligence, manners and cultural background that on the surface would make Marcus an ideal friend. But Marcus was always uneasy around him. There was something deep in Donnie’s eyes I could never quite figure, and something about their relationship that said Marcus was none too pleased he’d crawled out of the woodwork to re-establish contact. Marcus being Marcus, though, would always clam up if I ever broached the subject of Donnie Craddick. Thing is, Donnie didn’t go away. He hung around and would turn up unexpectedly. He attached himself to us and it was difficult to throw him off. One day I got Donnie alone, tried to tell him politely that he wasn’t welcome in our lives.

‘He looked genuinely upset, but Donnie is good at dredging up emotions when he needs them. He said he was sorry he’d caused any upset and would leave them alone. But as he was about to leave he said he knew something that I ought to know; something potentially embarrassing if it ever got out. He was trying to protect us both, he said. It involved Marcus getting drunk one night at a party when they were in university – it wouldn’t take much because Marcus rarely drank – and how Marcus found himself in the morning in bed with a man. I was horrified, and Donnie knew it. Why say those kinds of things, I asked? Because you need to know, he said. It might be something that could affect your marriage in the future. I told him it was all a lie, but he told me to ask Marcus.

‘That’s when I realised why it had been so difficult for Marcus to ditch the man, why he put up with his constant presence; he was worried Donnie would say something to me. So I told Donnie that I didn’t care what had happened in the past. Marcus had been drunk. We loved each other. That wouldn’t matter to us.

‘I could see that Donnie was fuming inside, thinking I was bluffing. That’s when I told him I knew Marcus, and that the likeliest reason was that he’d had his drink spiked, that nothing had really happened. He’d been set up. I asked Donnie if he was behind that.

‘He was stumped for a minute, but his face took on a look of apology, and he was aghast that I would even suggest such a thing. They were friends. He was trying to protect us, he said, and he promised to leave us in peace. I foolishly thought that was that. Marcus was murdered a fortnight later.

‘Marcus said he was onto a story about the trafficking of young women, a ring operating from central London but with connections in many towns in the UK. Marcus was digging around, making some people uncomfortable. He got a couple of death threats if he didn’t stop snooping, which the police didn’t take too seriously. Then one evening Donnie invited Marcus out to dinner, to say a final goodbye as he was leaving London and might not see him again. It was as they left the restaurant that they were both bundled at gunpoint into a car, driven round to a backstreet in the East End. Marcus was shot in the head, at point-blank range. Donnie was shot in the leg when he tried to intervene.’

‘Donnie tried to save him?’ said Alfie disbelievingly.

‘That’s what he told the police. He was in hospital some time, and at one point infection set in and the doctors thought he’d lose his leg. I was distraught at losing Marcus. I had nothing to go on for. Then I went to see Donnie in hospital, and I began to see him in a different light. He was so supportive of me. He became a friend. Strange, I know, but maybe it’s because he’d been the last person to be with Marcus; maybe I wanted to see something of Marcus in him. Whatever the reasons, all the misgivings I had about Donnie seemed to vanish. He wasn’t the man I’d painted him to be. As time progressed we started dating. Then he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

‘Perhaps that was a foolish thing to do; perhaps I was still in a daze over losing Marcus. But Donnie was delighted. Mother and father, understandably, were not, and resisted it, but it had the opposite effect and made me want to marry him all the more, to prove a point, I guess. I don’t know. A few weeks after proposing to me I was told by someone that Marcus had been murdered by Donnie Craddick; he had been the one to pull the trigger.’

‘Christ…’ said Alfie. ‘Who told you?’

‘Steve Roche.’

‘Donnie’s right-hand man?’

‘Roche is after building his own little empire. He wants Donnie out of the way. He said Donnie had bragged about it to him. I guess by telling me about Donnie’s involvement with the murder Roche thought I’d go to the police and shop him, have Craddick removed. I told him I didn’t believe him. Roche went on to tell me that I was a fool for trusting Donnie, that Donnie was only after securing a strong financial base, not having much money of his own – he still is – and that by marrying me he was marrying into money. Marcus wasn’t murdered by someone from a trafficking gang; it was Donnie who’d arranged the entire thing. Not only that, Donnie had asked to take a gun from their assailants and shoot Marcus, because, he said later, he wanted to know what it felt like to kill a man. Then he handed the gun back, had them shoot him in the leg. They almost messed that up, because he nearly lost his leg, but it helped cement his cover story. And I fell for it too.’

Alfie released a breath. ‘The man’s a monster, Camellia. And he surrounds himself with monsters. Roche is a dangerous man to mess with – he won’t let you live knowing that you might blab to Donnie about what he said to you.’

‘I know that. But Roche is afraid of Donnie. He won’t do anything to me until Donnie’s out of the way.’

‘You should have gone to the police. Why are you still here?’

‘Because I’m going to kill Donnie for taking my life away from me. I have nothing to live for without Marcus. After I’ve killed Donnie I don’t care what happens to me. Roche can kill me for all I care. He’d be doing me a favour.’

‘So you’ve been biding your time, is that it? Waiting to get your chance.’

She nodded gravely. ‘I was hoping we’d be going out to the Yorkshire Dales, like he promised. There, in some lonely spot ort other, on our own, I was planning to shoot him through the head, just like he did with Marcus.’

‘So why’d you attempt to jump the gun, pardon the pun, and kill him today?’

‘He made me so mad earlier that I couldn’t help it. I know all he wants is access to my father’s money, to get it through me. That’s the only reason he killed Marcus, so that he’d have a fast-track to me. Now he wants to move the wedding on so he can get at the money sooner. A wedding I never intended going through with. I was so angry I just snapped, got the gun and tried to kill him. I didn’t think or care what happened to me afterwards. I just wanted him dead. Right there, right now.’

‘Your aim stinks,’ he said.

She closed her eyes. ‘I know. I’ve never used a gun before.’ She took in a deep breath that rattled in her throat. ‘What am I going to do?’ she asked plaintively.

Alfie Parker’s brows furrowed. ‘You’ve got to leave him at once.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can.’

‘I have to take care of him.’

‘No you don’t. He’ll get his dues, don’t you worry.’

She gave a brittle laugh. ‘So says the man who cleans his carpets. Well I can’t wait for ever, Alfie, thanks for your words of wisdom. It’ll take more than words to bring Donnie down.’

‘Words are powerful things, Camellia,’ he said.

‘Look, I really appreciate you covering for me out there, but I won’t rest until Donnie pays for everything he’s done.’

Alfie weighed the gun in his hand. ‘I agree, but this is not the way,’ he said.

‘So we write a nasty piece in the paper about him, eh? Is that your answer? You’re so naïve, Alfie. Nice but naïve.’

Alfie Parker smiled broadly. ‘There are more ways than one of sticking a pig, as my dad used to say.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Pack a suitcase and go home.’

‘I owe it to Marcus…’

‘And what about your parents? What do you think you being hauled up before the judge as a murderer will do to them? You’ve got to think of them, as well as yourself.’

‘He has to die. He killed me when he killed Marcus.’

‘Sorry to say this, but you haven’t got a choice, lady. Either you go home or I swear I will go to the police to prevent you from doing this again. Think about it; you’ll end up going to court, the evidence against Donnie is circumstantial, Roche will deny he told you anything, the police will think you’re clutching at straws because of your grief at losing Marcus, and Donnie goes free and carries on doing what he’s doing. You have to understand that I’m only saying this to protect you.’

‘Then Donnie’s won,’ she said bitterly. ‘He’ll get away with everything.’

‘This isn’t a game, Camellia. Donnie has to be taken care of in a different way, to make sure he goes down once and for all. A way that doesn’t bring you down with him.’

‘And who’s going to do that?’ she scoffed. ‘Are you going to douse him in cleaning fluid?’ Then she immediately regretted saying it. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

‘I understand, you’re upset. I’m not asking you to forget what’s happened, what Craddick has done to you. I’m asking you to do me this as a favour. If not for me then for your parents.’

She took in a breath, thought deep and hard. Nodded. ‘Seems I don’t have a choice. Donnie’s a pig,’ she spat. ‘Someone should stick him like one, too.’

‘But that someone’s not going to be you,’ he said insistently. ‘Now, I’ve got to get rid of this gun…’ He rose to his feet.

‘Alfie…’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘For making me see sense.’

He smiled. ‘Think nothing of it. All part of a carpet cleaner’s day.’

*  *  *  *