She stared into her tea.

‘I don’t want to touch the money. I have everything I need.’ She got up and went to wipe the work surface where she’d made the tea.

Mann could see that the time had come for him to drop it, otherwise she was going to clam up completely. He held up his hands in a surrender gesture.

‘Okay, sorry. Let’s drop it. Please come and sit with me. This must be the only kitchen in the whole of this expensive block of flats in which the owners sit and drink tea. Better make sure no one catches us or you’ll be chucked out of the wealthy widows’ club.’

‘Ha…’ she laughed. ‘If such a thing exists, I don’t think they would ever ask me to join, do you?’

‘No, you’re right—you’d have them donating all their money to the poor and making baskets to sell.’

A ginger cat appeared and wound itself around Mann’s legs. Molly’s face lit up when she saw it.

‘Hello, Ginger—just woken up, have you?’

‘I didn’t think you’d agree to take on David White’s cat…Never thought I’d see you with a pet; I always thought you hated them.’

‘Nonsense, it was your father who hated animals, not me. I always had animals when I was a girl, back on the farm. I grew up with them.’ She leaned her hands against the rim of the sink and stared out through the kitchen windows at the wooded hills that rose in a bank of emerald green opposite. ‘My life was very different then.’

‘I can imagine little Molly Mathews running around with straw stuck in her hair and mud on her knees.’

She turned from the window and smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes.

‘That was such a long time ago, it feels like another life. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for years until recently. Now something comes back to me almost daily—vividly—I’m not sure I like it.’ She sighed and turned back from the window, buffing the taps with a cloth as she did so. ‘Anyway, son, tell me…How is it with you? Did you get the rest you needed?’ She came and put her arm around his shoulder and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

‘I did a lot of thinking. As the saying goes, Mum—you can run but you can’t hide.’

She sat opposite him and leaned forward to hold his hands in hers.

‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself. You have been through such a lot these last few months.’

‘It’s nothing to what others have endured, Mum, and I feel responsible for some of that.’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Johnny. No one could have known that Helen would be killed.’

‘But I let her go, Mum; I have to live with that.’

‘You let her go because you didn’t think she was the one for you. You didn’t know she would be killed.’

‘If Helen had never met me she’d be alive today.’

‘Chan was the one to blame, not you. None of us could ever have imagined he would turn out like that. All those years we knew him as a child, we never realised how envious, how vindictive and downright evil he was.’

‘Father saw it in him. He hated him.’

‘Your father saw something in him: a ruthlessness, a mercenary heart. He knew the triads well and he knew that Chan had been enlisted.’ Molly gave an involuntary sigh and picked up Ginger the cat and held him close to her. ‘You have to be a bit kind to yourself. You have to let it go now. Time will heal, son.’

Mann looked at his mother and searched her eyes.

‘I will never let it go, Mum. In my own way I got justice for Helen, and I will get it for father. I will find out who killed him and I will make them pay.’

‘Your father made enemies. It killed him. We can’t keep raking up the past.’

‘And I cannot forget it…the sight of my father being executed will never leave me. I can see it so clearly. It is branded on my mind’s eye, on my subconscious, in vivid detail. There is no forgetting for me until I get it explained. I want to find out why his death was ordered and I want to get the man who ordered it.’

Molly was staring at him, horrified. Mann felt instant remorse. He had not meant to worry her. He reassured her with a smile and stroked Ginger, who purred in her arms.

‘I never knew that about Dad—that he hated animals.’

She looked at him and met his eyes with her piercing grey stare.

‘There was a lot you never knew about your father.’

9

‘What is that fucking awful smell?’

The Teacher sat back in his chair and waited for an answer. Reese sniggered.

The Colonel paused, beer bottle to his mouth. ‘What smell?’ He lifted his chin and sniffed the air from right to left.

‘The all-prevailing smell of shit in this place.’

Reese giggled nervously. ‘You get used to it, bro.’

‘Don’t you smell it, Colonel, or is your nose buggered from all that speed you shove up it?’

Reese and Brandon looked anxious. It wasn’t often they saw their boss at the butt of someone else’s jibes. He wasn’t the best at taking a joke. But then, he didn’t usually have to suck up to anyone. His word was the law in Angeles. He owned five of the big clubs there: Hot Lips, Lolita’s, Lipstick, The Honey Pot and Bibidolls. They were the best clubs in Angeles with the youngest, prettiest girls—handpicked by him. He also owned several bars and hotels. The Bordello was one of them, the Tequila Station another. The Colonel set his beer carefully down and looked at the Teacher. He smiled.

‘I thought the same when I first got here. I thought “what a shit-hole”. Now I think “what a gold mine”. The smell of shit and the smell of money have become one and the same for me.’

‘Just as well, because this place is an open sewer.’ The Teacher looked about him in disgust. ‘Literally…’ He was referring to the foul running water that ran the length of the street and followed a course beside the cracked and uneven pavement.

The Teacher gave up the conversation and sat back and drank from his beer bottle. There was too much noise to talk. Opposite the Bordello the mosquito drivers with their noisy motorbikes with sidecars, were trying to impress the girls who stood outside Bibidolls in their bikinis. They were competing to see who could rev their machine the loudest—the night was young and they were bored. They belched fumes and beeped at one another whilst the girls giggled at them—although both sides knew it would not end in a coupling. The boys didn’t make enough money and the girls didn’t give it away for free. The girls’ sole aim in life was to marry a foreigner and get off the Fields. They were Guest Relations Officers, GROs. Their job was to entertain the tourists on Fields Avenue. Besides their yellow plastic bikinis they wore permits that hung long around their tanned necks and settled just below their pert cleavages—permits that had their photos and stated they were legally permitted to work in the clubs and that they were eighteen and over. Most of them weren’t; their documents were forged. The girls swished back their hair and pushed their chests forward as they bantered with the whorists as they passed by.

Upstairs in the Bordello there were no GROs. This point on Fields Avenue was the boundary. Here marked the beginning of the descent into unlicensed bars and twenty-four-hour hostess clubs where the girls didn’t wear badges. They often didn’t wear bikinis. They were kept locked in a back room. They were children.

The Colonel flashed the group of mosquito drivers a look that silenced them instantly and they moved hastily away.

‘What about the police? Have you fixed it? Blanco hates fuck-ups.’

The Colonel drank from his beer at the same time as he kept his eyes fixed on the Teacher. He was letting him know that whilst he would take

some

, he would not take a lot of dissent, especially not in front of his men.

He set his bottle down. ‘Blanco doesn’t need to worry. Over the years I have cultivated a good working relationship with the police. Some I have had to trick by providing them with a girl for the night and then informing them that they have slept with a minor. Others, I have had to give a small share of my profits to. Most of the time it has just taken hard currency.’