Prologue
Why didn’t Jimmy Lazenby just focus on the stripper, like any normal guy would do?
Why did he let his attention drift, his eyes skipping around the room until he saw them? His brother Glenn, sitting at that booth with Mel Conner, the woman Jimmy had once, long ago, briefly loved.
The stripper.
He focused on her again, if only to gather his thoughts. She hung one-handed from a pole on a small stage to one side of the long, low room, looking back over her shoulder at Jimmy as he paused in the club’s entrance. Her free arm trailed gracefully out toward the half-empty room, an almost ballet-like grace to the curves and line of that arm and her body, the string of her thong cutting her bare ass in two like cheesewire on a soft brie.
She had a tattoo of angel wings across her shoulder blades, and blue eyes that fixed on him with some kind of desperation. Dancing here can’t exactly have been the most sought-after gig in town.
Jimmy had been in seedier places than this – way seedier – but there was something about this girl, and the others working the room for private dances, that made his heart sink.
He was distracting himself, he knew that. Pausing. Hesitating in that brief moment when he could have turned and walked away from this dive. Walked away from this town forever, as he had done once before.
Then Glenn spotted him, and something in the way he straightened and rolled his shoulders made Mel look first at him and then follow his stare, find Jimmy, and if his heart had sunk moments before, now it plummeted.
Mel. Those eyes, the look in them – betraying something like the same emotions, the same feelings of Sweet god, not him.
Jimmy looked away. The stripper was still studying him, perhaps sensing that something was going on, that he wasn’t the usual customer.
He gave a little shrug.
He should have stuck with the stripper. Taken her for a private dance and whatever else she had on offer in one of those curtained-off booths at the rear of the club. Anything would have been simpler than looking up, meeting Glenn’s stare again, nodding and heading across the room to join them.
§
In the ten years since Jimmy had last seen him, Glenn’s features had rounded out, and he had a long scar over one eye that Jimmy didn’t remember from before. His dark hair was slicked back, his jaw peppered with stubble, and his eyes narrowed as he watched his kid brother approach across the club’s sticky wooden floor.
As he approached Jimmy noticed how one arm trailed across the back of the U-shaped leatherette bench he shared with Mel. Proprietorial.
Mel. Blonde hair cut in choppy spikes, a tiny black nose stud, a wary look. She’d been beautiful ten years ago, but now she sucked the air out of Jimmy’s lungs. She was everything the girl back then had promised to become, half of the future they were supposed to share.
He had to look away.
Glenn nodded at the seat opposite, as if his brother had been waiting for permission to sit.
Jimmy remained standing.
“Surprised you came back,” Glenn said, finally, his voice – always surprisingly soft – barely audible above the thump and grind of the dancer’s music.
“It’d be rude not to, really, wouldn’t it?” Jimmy said. “Now the old bastard’s dead and all.”
The old bastard. Their father. Another of the reasons Jimmy had left this town with no intention of ever coming back. He hadn’t planned to return even when he heard the news, was only here now because he had to be.
Glenn’s eyes briefly narrowed even more, then a grin split his face and he tipped his head back, laughing. “You cheeky fucker, Jimmy. You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”
Glenn spoke with more of a London accent now, while Jimmy spoke with a carefully cultivated anonymity. Glenn liked to stand out, just as much as his brother tried to blend in. Each to his own.
Jimmy glanced at Mel, saw her studying him. She was hard to read – always had been. He hadn’t expected her to be here. Was she with Glenn, or was her being here just coincidence?
Jimmy knew not to believe in coincidence, though: there must be a reason for her being here, just as there was a reason he hadn’t been told, because if he’d known she would be here he’d never have come home.
Mel.
The old, old story. Boy meets girl. Boy fucks up and breaks girl’s heart – and his own. Boy runs away and pretends he doesn’t care, and eventually teaches himself how to stop... feeling.
“You’re staring, Jimbo. Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?” Glenn might have changed his accent, but he hadn’t lost the bullying sneer. Jimmy met his look and realized he didn’t care. He really didn’t care anymore.
He hadn’t understood until this moment how far he’d moved on. All this, it really was long behind him. Another life, another person.
“Are we burying him or burning him?” he asked.
“Cremation,” said Glenn. “Harder for you to dance on the grave, then.” He laughed again. There was no humor in that laugh.
Jimmy glanced at Mel again. Testing himself, perhaps, trying to see if there was even the faintest spark remaining.
Nothing.
He sat, and Glenn signaled to someone for drinks. Three glasses of whisky were brought over, almost immediately. So like his older brother not to ask what anyone wanted, just to order. He was showing off, Jimmy knew, making sure he understood how everyone in this dive was ready to jump at the slightest hint of a command from him. It was all his now, after all.
Jimmy knew he was supposed to be impressed.
“Your father?” said Mel, glancing between the two of them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t ask, did you?” said Glenn.
So maybe the two of them weren’t a thing, after all.
Jimmy met her look, shrugged, and she gave a slight nod. It felt strange to be communicating so easily again – a gesture, a look, conveying so much understanding – and it felt briefly as if no time had passed.
He turned his look away, watching the dancer with the eye-watering thong.
“Friday,” said Glenn. “If you’re free?”
The funeral. Jimmy nodded, still watching the girl. She looked bored now, Jimmy’s arrival only a brief point of interest for her. Her attention had shifted to a fiftyish guy in a suit, who sat at a table idly thumbing the screen of his cellphone with one of the other girls clinging to his arm.
Jimmy already knew the funeral was Friday, just as he knew Glenn had the majority stake in this club. He knew what car his brother drove and where he liked to eat, knew he had an office at the rear of the old family pub he liked to use as a base when he was back in their home town.
He knew a lot about his big brother.
It’s what he did.
But Mel... She was a wildcard.
He didn’t like surprises.
“Don’t worry,” said Glenn. “I’ve taken care of everything. You just have to turn up. If you want to, that is.”
“I came back,” Jimmy said, simply.
Glenn nodded, and for a time they said nothing more. Not so much an easy silence, as a Where the fuck do we begin? one.
“See him?” said Glenn finally, leaning closer to Mel, his arm still trailing along the back of the bench. He nodded in what he probably thought was a subtle way toward the suited guy, still thumbing his phone. “Local detective inspector.”
“Watching this place?” Jimmy asked. “Watching you?” In his first glance around the club he’d noticed the guy, thought he had a look of the Old Bill about him, almost as world-weary as the dancer.
“You’d think, right? But no. Had him checked out when he started coming here, didn’t I? Turns out our detective inspector’s just here to inspect the girls, if you know what I mean.”
Mel laughed, but she was faking it, wanting Glenn to think she was impressed.
“Get all sorts in here,” Glenn went on. He always had liked the attention. “Football players. Showbiz types. The lot. We get one guy, he has a fleet of yachts on the Med. He can have whatever he wants, and what does he want most? A bit of rough like this. Always the way, isn’t it? Even someone like that only really wants what he shouldn’t have, doesn’t he?”
“Is that what you do? You get it for them, just like Dad used to do?”
And so it came back to their father. Underworld fixer, the man in the middle who could provide anything for anyone and always got away with it.
“Jealous?”
Jimmy looked away. Let him think that. Let him believe whatever he liked if it stopped him digging into why his brother was really here.
The dancer finished, still wearing her thong. A girl had to have standards, even here, Jimmy supposed. Stepping off the stage, she went to join the detective and the other girl departed, following some unwritten code between the dancers.
Jimmy should have stuck with the stripper. It would have been so much less complicated.
§
“How was it?” Jimmy asked, surprised that he wanted to know.
Glenn understood immediately, and said, “Messy. Lung cancer, spread to lymph, liver, brain. Only three or four months ago he was right as rain, same old bastard he ever was, and then... Coughing his insides out. Literally.” A shrug, an arching of eyebrows – an oddly dismissive expression for something so awful. It wasn’t often you saw Glenn betraying his feelings, even if it was by a gesture of dismissal.
“He was, wasn’t he?” Jimmy said. He didn’t need to add: A bastard.
“He was. But I stood by him, didn’t I, while you just walked away.”
Jimmy looked around the dimly lit club. This place was only a tiny part of the network their father had built up, he knew. He could have been part of it all, had his share. The old man’s legacy. He could have been a bastard, just like him. Just like Glenn.
He risked a look at Mel, and regretted it. He’d walked away from all of this, her included, and now, every time he looked at her, he couldn’t help seeing what might have been.
She’d hated what he was back then. Hated that he was a Lazenby, a part of all this. He wanted to tell her he’d spent the last ten years trying to make up for it all, trying to be one of the good guys. He shut down on those feelings, then. He didn’t do that shit. He didn’t let anyone in. Not anymore.
A new dancer had stepped onto the stage, a black girl with silky, blue-black hair that was clearly a wig. With long fingers she teased at a gauzy top that hung open from her shoulders and did little to conceal her figure, while her other hand curled around the pole so she could swing to one side. The detective inspector was watching her, even as the previous dancer sat with him, one hand on his arm. Was he like the guy Glenn had mentioned, one of these men who was only interested in what he didn’t yet have?
Mel was still watching him, still impossible to read.
And then it all fell into place. Mel, Glenn, the missing girl, Harriet Rayner.
Mel knew Harriet’s family, almost certainly knew the girl herself. He hadn’t made the connection until now – he’d had no reason to, because he hadn’t expected to find Mel here.
But now he saw that Mel was here for the same reason Jimmy was. Somehow she’d found out his brother was one of the last people to have been seen with Harriet before she went missing, and she was here to dig.
The only difference was, Jimmy knew what he was doing, while Mel was an amateur.
She didn’t understand what she was getting into.
Didn’t know just what kind of bastard Glenn Lazenby was.
And what kind of danger she was putting herself in just by being here.
§
The whisky burned in his throat. He’d only ever been a whisky drinker to blend in, like now. Generally, he tried not to drink. Losing control only ever exposes you. He’d learned that lesson a long time ago.
They talked a little more. Glenn told his brother who would be at the funeral, relatives Jimmy hadn’t seen for years, a few names he recognized as acquaintances of the old man – he wasn’t sure Trevor Lazenby had ever had anyone close enough to qualify as a friend. So many people Jimmy had never expected to see again.
When Mel made excuses, Jimmy watched Glenn’s eyes tracking her across the club to the restroom, eyes fixed on the way she filled those dove-gray jeans and the way she moved.
Then Glenn turned with a lecherous smile, knowing it would wind his brother up.
“You fucked up there, didn’t you, bro’? Could have had all that.”
And Jimmy could have told him. Told him it wasn’t him, it was everything around him. That the more she had found out about the family, the more she saw how impossible it was. How back then she’d seen the world as black or white, moral absolutes rather than points on a spectrum, and Jimmy hadn’t yet worked out which way his murky shade of gray would go. He probably still hadn’t, even now: his life was all about doing the right thing, but not always the right way, after all. Did that make him a good person, or just another shade of his old man?
He shrugged. He’d fucked up. He’d lost her, hadn’t stood up for himself and defended his particular shade of gray.
“Whatever,” he said.
“Yeah,” said his brother. “Whatever.”
Jimmy had forgotten how much that sneering tone wound him up. The look on Glenn’s face.
He stood, went over to the bar and asked for tap water.
He wasn’t usually so unfocused. He’d underestimated the impact of being back here, of seeing Glenn again, perhaps even of coming to fully understand that the old man was gone.
And he hadn’t expected Mel.
A short time later she emerged from a dark doorway. She hadn’t seen him at the bar yet, and stood hesitating, as if trying to decide whether to come back to the table or simply to walk away. Right then Jimmy willed her to take the latter option. Walk out of there. Get away from Glenn, away from him.
There were all kinds of reasons she shouldn’t be here right now.
She spotted Jimmy, met his eye, threaded her way through the tables, the scattering of punters. Some of them watched her rather than the dancer – all that naked flesh on display and eyes were drawn to Mel, the way she moved, the toss of the blonde hair and the swing of that ass.
She’d always had that about her.
She paused before Jimmy, eyes fixed on his. A challenging look. A searching one, too. Maybe she was having as much trouble reading him, as he was her.
He wanted to tell her.
He wanted to tell her he understood what she was doing here, why she was sucking up to Glenn and why she was laughing at his jokes and pretending to be impressed. That he understood she was digging, and that she thought she was being clever and getting away with it, even when she was being way too obvious.
He wanted to tell her he was here because of her – for now he understood that as well as being sent here to look into the disappearance of Harriet Rayner, he was also here to look out for Mel and stop her from putting herself at risk. He wanted to tell her who he was, who he had become. What he’d become.
And yes, he’d admit that he wanted to see the look in her eye, wanted to impress her, just as Glenn clearly wanted to impress her.
Above all, he wanted to tell her she was in danger. Every second she was here, every question she asked, she was digging herself deeper into something she didn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend.
He wanted to tell her all that, but he couldn’t, because when you’re an officer in Section Eight, a branch of the security services so secret not many people even know it exists, a unit that operates on the murky fringes of the law to do whatever is necessary to get the right result... when you’re someone like that, someone like Jimmy Lazenby, you can’t tell people, can’t even hint, not even when you desperately want to impress the girl you won and loved and almost immediately lost again and who now, when you meet her look, snatches the air from your lungs.
He looked away. He didn’t do this shit. He didn’t let people get to him.
He was too professional to let that happen.
“You have to get out of here,” he told her. “No matter how bad you think this is, it’s worse, and you’re not equipped to handle it. Leave now. Stand up, slap me across the face just like I know you want to, and storm out. I’ll tell Glenn I pissed you off and in the meantime you’ll have a chance to get away. Run, Mel. Leave this to me. My people. Get out of here.”
She understood. She knew he wouldn’t say something like that lightly. She must know he was trying to protect her.
Her eyes narrowed, and he saw a tensing in the tendons at either side of her neck, a tightening of the shoulders.
She was fast. No backswing, her arm straightened, her hand flat, the palm stinging against his cheek with a sound like whiplash.
Then she turned and walked back to the booth where Glenn sat laughing.
Jimmy couldn’t do anything, was powerless.
He couldn’t just drag her out of there – that first glance around the club when he’d arrived had picked out two bouncers and at least three other guys almost certainly in Glenn’s employ. His brother owned this place and the people in it. Jimmy wouldn’t stand a chance.
And so, just then, all he could do was finish his water, stand, and walk away, hoping desperately this wouldn’t be the last time he set eyes on Mel Conner, the girl he’d loved, the girl he’d lost, the girl who had changed him forever.