‘That’s two days ago. Have you eaten since?’ Sheila asked, pondering the shadows that the basement bar’s mood-lighting cast along the gaunt furrows either side of his mouth.
He grinned at her. Narrowed his eyes. Wagging his finger, as if he’d just sussed some sister-in-lawly subterfuge. ‘I see what you’re doing. You’re checking up on me, aren’t you?’ He pulled his sleeve gently out of reach, ramming his hands into the pockets of his jeans. ‘It’s nice of you but—’
‘Come round for dinner with me and Conks tonight. I’ll make a curry.’ Sheila knew what an overgrown boy like Frank needed. Mothering. Perhaps she could find him a woman through her speed-dating venture.
‘Aw, She. I’m busy actually. I’ve got this—’
‘Now. Tables and chairs,’ Sheila said, assuming that the dinner was a done deal and turning her attention to the layout of the bar area. ‘Me and Gloria went to another speed-dating night, run as a franchise by some big company that covers the north. They had the same set-up. A number on each table. You ring the bell. The men move round after three minutes to sit with a new woman. So the seating’s really important.’
Scratching at his ear, Frank frowned. ‘Sheila, I hope you don’t think I’m a cheeky sod, but you’re the head of the O’Briens, now. You’re the boss-lady. What the hell are you doing, messing around with lonely hearts crap?’
Sheila moved over to the bar where she had left her laptop in its bag. Beckoned Frank to follow her. She could barely contain her excitement as it effervesced like Cristal champagne inside her. Several months ago, Paddy would have popped those bubbles for her with a verbal put-down or a physical slap.
‘This is my latest entrepreneurial vision, Frank. And you’re helping me do it. Come and look.’
Opening the laptop on the bar, she brought up a brightly coloured website. Photo after photo of beaming, attractive, wholesome-looking couples holding hands, kissing, embracing … ‘Online dating.’
Slack-jawed, Frank stared at the web page’s masthead. True Love Dates.
‘It’s a play on words,’ Sheila said. ‘True Love Dates instead of True Love Waits. Get it?’
Frank nodded, clearly not getting it at all.
‘It’s me and Gloria’s new venture. We’re gonna do speed-dating to draw people in, and I’ve just had this website designed. There’s millions of subscribers to some of the bigger online-dating sites. We get their credit card details and bam! You slap on an admin charge and you’re making a fortune from sod all. Algorithms do the work. And once I’ve got a stack of subscribers, I’m going to do a big phishing scam that can’t be traced. I’ve got this speccy computer geek from UMIST reckons he can cream millions off the top, straight into an offshore account.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘It’s the darknet, or some shit, Frank,’ she said, savouring the thrill of her racing pulse and the endorphins that momentarily almost snuffed out the stress of Ellis James and the tax and annoying CCTV cameras that saw everything. ‘This is the future. It’s so good, because it’s almost legal!’ She tapped her nail extensions on the gleaming reinforced glass bar for emphasis. ‘And sophisticated. The set-up costs are sod all. And me and Gloria get to spread a little love into the bargain. We’ve already got fifty sign-ups for tomorrow night’s speed-dating and a couple of thousand on this dating website.’
‘Doesn’t sound like much,’ Frank said, leaning over the bar to pour himself half a lager from the tap. His T-shirt riding up to reveal an emaciated, concave stomach.
Sheila looked away abruptly, stroking the web page that glowed lovingly out at her from the laptop’s screen. ‘Give it a couple of months and it will,’ she said, somewhat irritated that her enthusiasm wasn’t as contagious as she’d hoped. Remembering the way Paddy had ridiculed her idea to start up a cleaning agency all those years ago. Bastard. But now he was dead, and the cleaning agency, staffed by women they’d rescued from scumbag traffickers, had a turnover of a couple of million a year and was growing month on month. Income she could spend, however circuitously it made its way to her current account … unlike Paddy’s dirty cash that sat in rubble sacks beneath the tiled floor of her guest en-suite. ‘I know what I’m doing, you know. Same as you knew what you were doing when you bought this place, Frank.’
‘I’ve had nothing but aggro since I bought this club,’ Frank said, opening an old-fashioned pill box and dropping a small tablet into his drink. ‘My son was murdered on my dance floor, and then, that twat, the Fish Man killed a load of kids. Our Jack’s dead. My reputation’s hanging by a thread. Some savvy businessman I am.’
‘But that was all down to Paddy,’ Sheila said, rubbing Frank’s bony shoulder as a gesture of solidarity, though he shrugged away from her touch. ‘And he’s gone. You’ve done well to get this place open again. Sod that bullying arsehole. He’s just a memory. To hell with the past, Frank. You own one of the country’s biggest super-clubs and you do it well. All the outrage in the papers from worried middle-class parents made kids who were desperate for a walk on the wild side wanna come back! M1 House is edgy and cool. You’re cool! Have faith in yourself, chuck.’
Sighing heavily, the crow’s feet around Frank’s eyes seemed to deepen. The shadows on his face seemed to lengthen. The Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, sticking out of his scrawny neck as though a malign spirit had taken up residence in his throat and was trying to punch its way out.
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Just when I got the Boddlingtons off my back, and I’m getting back on my feet with the club, there’s been a few new faces around. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.’
Sheila snapped the lid of the laptop shut. ‘New faces? How do you mean?’ She studied Frank’s face for signs of drug-fuelled paranoia and hippy bullshit.
‘You got new lads working for you? Dealing in here?’
‘A couple of temporary workers, doing a bit of this and that. We’re struggling to find the staff since Paddy got stabbed. A couple of the lads got caught in the crossfire when the Boddlingtons did over the cannabis farm. Quite a few have just lost their nerve and said they were going straight. I can’t exactly stop them. Or blame them.’
‘Paddy would have had them killed before he’d let them go,’ Frank said, running a thin finger around and around the rim of his half-pint glass.
‘I’m not Paddy,’ Sheila said, pressing her lips together tightly. Stifling an outburst. ‘And that’s precisely why I’m trying to build up me and Gloria’s cleaning business and do these new start-ups. White-collar crime, Frank. It’s less risky. It’s more forward-thinking. It’s how the rich get richer. All that gun-toting bad-boy crap is Paddy’s legacy. I’ve got a functioning brain and a beating heart, Frank. I can’t fill my days, sitting on my backside, sewing a fine seam like some merry widow. My Amy and Dahlia have grown up and flown the nest. One at uni. One a lawyer in the City. I need something more than nail bars and chardonnay and I don’t want my daughters having their inheritance seized by the coppers and dying of shame if I go down. Now, who were these new faces? You got any security footage of them?’
Taking her laptop bag with her, Sheila followed Frank up the winding staircase to the echoing vastness of the main club. Here, the house music that the DJ played reverberated off the empty, gleaming dance floor – sanded down and refinished not once, but twice, to remove the life’s blood of those who had fallen at the hand of that slippery eel of a Fish Man, the Boddlington gang enforcer, Asaf Smolensky. Glancing at the DJ booth, she expected to see her nephew standing there, all muscles and bronzed-Adonis-handsome, with his cans pressed to his ear. Young Jack, Manchester’s golden boy, waving at his Aunty Sheila. In his stead, there was just some young, trendy-looking black guy she didn’t recognise – up from London no doubt – and the chubby, middle-aged