‘You know what, Rufus? You can be such a fucking fool sometimes.’
‘I thought…’ Rufus was floundering under this onslaught. She was pacing back and forth in front of him, spitting with rage. News of his failed attempt to snatch Layla Carter had not gone down well.
‘I told you I’d see to this. That I would be in charge here, that I would decide what was to happen, when it was to happen.’
‘But-’
‘You’ve tipped them off! How could you be so bloody stupid?’
‘I haven’t tipped them off,’ he objected. He felt wounded, through and through. His eye was smarting, he was aching all over from where he’d struck the pavement. The girl had run rings round him and now his Orla was giving out about it, like he was a moron.
Rufus the DOOFUS.
But he’d been trying to help, that was all.
She stopped her pacing and, breathing hard, came to a halt in front of his chair.
‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said, her eyes wild with anger and determination. ‘I’m going to do it.’
‘I’ll come with-’
‘No. You won’t come with me. I go in alone. And I do it, OK? I do it.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
Annie Carter awoke in darkness. Pitch-black, all-enveloping. She was completely disorientated for a split second, before she got her bearings. She was in the master suite in the Holland Park house in London. And she was – of course – alone.
Into her brain came tumbling a multitude of alone-related thoughts, Alberto, Layla, Max.
She flinched.
Max.
Eight years, and it could still cut like a knife, how he’d hurt her. She threw back the covers, sat up, shutting off that train of thought. No good going there, none at all.
Something had awakened her. She pressed the button on top of the alarm clock and the dim light illuminated the dial. Two twenty-five a.m. She sat there and groaned. She’d only got home a couple of hours ago; jetlagged and exhausted, she was desperate for sleep but her brain was in overdrive, turning over problems instead of letting her relax.
Alberto.
She put her head in her hands, thinking about everything he’d told her as they’d stood together at the graveside. Was he going to vanish from her life one day soon, never to be seen again?
Give my love to Layla, he’d said when she left him.
Dammit, Annie couldn’t even give Layla her love, let alone his. She’d flown home and there’d been no hugs, no kisses from her daughter. There never had been. Only Max got those, she guessed. It was only a guess – while Layla visited Max several times a year in Barbados, and he came to London occasionally to meet up with their daughter, Annie hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him since the divorce.