Loved by Mr. Night

Chapter 17

Aria crossed the car park to the taxi rank and headed for the city, asking for the driver to drop her in Hyndland road close to where her flat was. Aria had brought the flat three years ago, working on the basis that West end was not the kind of the place you ran into low lives who were employed by Jackson’s prodigy, Timothy Devlin. The foot soldiers lived in the high rise flats or the run down Council housing schemes like Drumchapel or Maryhill, where they were handy for their smackhead customers queuing at the door morning noon and night.

Their dens were fitted out with slick tvs, stereos and all modern devices, their wardrobes bulging out with designer clothes--- all of it bagged from the shoplifters and the fraudsters. And they lived outside side by side with decent, ordinary families who busted a gut to try and keep their families out of the clutches of the drug dealers, gangsters and loan sharks who had most of the neighbourhood in the end of a debt cycle which could never be repaid.

The lieutenants, slightly higher up in the food chain would be holed up in some other shiny new town centre of developments, either in merchant city or in the downtown overlooking the river which had been bought by their bosses using the drug money and had been rented to them at almost next to nothing on paper but several hundred a month. They were the guys who did anything that they were told, from drugs, organized shootings, kidnappings, assaults, beatings and slashings for unpaid drug debts. They would be used to travel up and down in Manchester, Liverpool or London, making drops or picking up drugs in bulk. The chances of seeing any of this bunch at Dudley drive with its neat tenetment of flats side by side in uniform anonymity was minimal. You seldom saw your neighbous and nobody asked you questions. That was perfect for Aria.

She walked briskly down the street in the second floor flat. It felt good to enter the broad hallway and go into the living room, with its old wooden floors and its big yet solid bay window. This was the closest thing that she ever had to a home since she was a kid. But there were no real signs of herself in it. Except for a print of two small sun burned children somewhere in Ireland. She had brought it with her from some junk store years ago because it reminded her of her time with Aubrey and her mother.

She went into the kitchen and then opened the tap water and then let it run for a while then took out a glass from the cupboard and drank I, enjoying the taste of the pure Scottish water she had missed when she was living abroad. She filled the kettle and switched it on, and then went down to the hallway and into her bedroom. She sat on the king size bed and opened the wardrobe doors, running her hand over a dozen of blouses, tops, jackets on the hangers. Seven or eight pairs of shoes. This was just about all that she had.

A wave of loneliness washed over her. Pick it up, she told herself. No more of that s**t. She closed the wardrobe doors.

Aria flopped on the big sofa with her feet up on the coffee table and opened her laptop. She signed in with one of her email addresses and her mail pinged in with two unread messages. Even before opening the mail she knew who it will be from. And she cursed herself for giving her mail id to Tim Devlin. He would have been bombarding her with messages on her regular email address—the one she used for business in Spain and that one most people had for her. But she should have kept the private one for herself. It was careless. She opened the mail and read it:

Rose—where the f**k are you? You are not answering your phone, or your normal email. Everyone is looking for you in Spain, but you are obviously not there. Are you? This does not look good for me. I am losing patience. I know you are out there. So don’t make me come looking for you.

Tim

It had been sent on eight o clock in the morning, probably not long after Tim Devlin got word of his surprise barbecue. Aria knew that Tim would be calling on her mobile within hours of her driving away from Jackson’s villa, but she had tossed both her phones in the sea near Marbella before driving north. She hadn’t checked her emails—she didn’t need to. She knew that everyone was trying to reach her.

She sat back, staring at the high ceiling, suddenly transfixed by a spider spreading its web further across the cornicing so that the whole side of the ceiling would end up as one big web, where it could lie in wait, knowing that once its prey got all tangled up, there was no way out. It wasn’t much different from the web that she had cut herself out of.

The difference for her was that she had walked into it six years ago with her eyes wide open, knowing that once she was in, then there might be no way out.

She pictured Tim’s face, probably all fired up with barely contained anger, telling the assholes that he surrounded himself with that everything was under control now that he was in charge. She had seen what a chillingly evil bastard he could be if he wanted to.

She had seen him shoot one of his men in the chest for trying to pull a stroke with a delivery of coke from London. It was brutal and ruthless, and he would insisted Aria remain in the room while he dealt with what he called a bit of business with one of the lads who had f****d up. It was the first time that she had seen anyone get executed, and she had to hold on to scrap of her strength not to faint from the shock as the blood bubbled out of the guys chest when he shot him.

The last thing she could show was weakness. Tim was Jackson’s prodigy. When they had left the office that night he had taken her to dinner, and he had talked as though nothing had happened. Afterwards they went to his flat, where he made love to her for the first time. That was shock in itself.

The s*x had been tender and caring----no sign of the cold blooded killer that he had been two hours ago. Aria had been expecting a hungry, wild encounter, bordering on brutal. And part of her—the dangerous reckless brutal side she had, which she knew that it would never allow her to be a normal person--- had been looking forward to it. Instead she had kissed every part of her, gently asked her permission before he entered her and afterwards held her for a long time while she stroked her back until she fell asleep.

A complete psychopath, Aria had realized as she lay awake, the rest of the night. She realized that then her biggest mistake was to have gone anywhere outside of the business relationship she had with him. On the occasions that they had met over the last three years on the Costa Del Sol, she took care of Jackson’s money- Laundered it through businesses , investments, construction companies, as well as charities in UK and abroad.

Aria looked up at the ceiling again. The spider had now spread its little empire right across to the other side. Her mind flashed back to the dead body of the girl that she had seen in the morgue and the man that was in coma that she had visited last night. The entrepreneur who was supposed to be dead but was not. She needed to submit her piece on it today but she still could not discard the ravaged features of the girl from her mind.

And the conversation that Adriel had with her mother.

She had said that they allowed only one child in Chinese Republic and now it was too late for her to start again. How could someone ravage a family like that? She knew how it could be done. The pain in her chest welled up as she could feel that she knew how it was done. After all those bastards had done the same thing with her.

Aria knew that some how she needed to find out who was doing this and how had he been doing this without getting caught. She was adamant that this man needed to be caught. Now it was safe for her to go to the scene of the crime and take stock of what had happened and then she had to see what had happened in this scene.

And then she needed to see the body as well…