Geezer Girls, page 39
‘What the hell?’ That was when he knew who it must be. The only person who would send him vodka would be the Russian. But why? What the heck did this have to do with anything?
He ran his eyes over the bottle.
Smirnoff vodka.
He kept running his eyes over the label. Backwards. Forwards. Forwards. Backwards. As his eyes ran backwards over it for the third time the blood drained away from his face.
‘No fucking way,’ he muttered in absolute disbelief.
His breath caught in the back of his throat as he read each letter of Smirnoff Vodka one by one, starting from the end: a-k-d-o-v f-f-o-n-r-i-m-s.
‘Akdov Ffonrims. Fonrims Akdov. Smirnoff vodka,’ he said aloud.
‘Frankie?’
He ignored Bell for the second time as the penny finally dropped with a shattering echo in his mind. He realised that there was no Fonrims Akdov. The name was just Smirnoff Vodka spelt backwards. If there was no Fonrims Akdov there was no Russian gangster.
In a stunned voice Frankie looked at Bell and said, ‘He don’t exist.’
‘What’s going on?’
Frankie’s mind whipped back to the information he’d read about the mobster when he was on the boat. ‘Have you heard of a place in Russia called Mugistan?’
Bell frowned at him. ‘I don’t claim to know the map of Russia inside out, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of such a place. Stan means land, so Afghanistan means the land of the Afghan. So Mugistan would mean the land of the mug.’
The land of the mug? That was when it hit Frankie – that he’d been played for a total mug.
Suddenly the door opened. A court official stood on the threshold. ‘They’re ready for you.’
Dazed, Frankie got up and moved in a trance, realising that he’d been set up. And there were only four people who could’ve done it.
forty-five
Ollie took her seat at the back of the court. Her job was simple – report the verdict back to the others.
‘OK?’
The question made her glance sideways at Gio, who sat beside her. Misty thought it would be best if she took a bit of muscle along for the ride. They hadn’t told Gio what was going on, but he’d grinned like he’d finally made it to heaven when he realised he was having Ollie all to himself. Ollie gave him a tentative, shy smile at the same time as Frankie and his lawyer stepped inside the room.
As soon as the judge opened her mouth Frankie knew that those four bitches had well and truly stitched him up. The courtroom was packed, with a few journalists and other spectators, all eagerly waiting to see if he would fry. But Frankie wasn’t aware of them – all he heard was the voice of the judge. A voice that in no way resembled the one that Jackie had spoken to on the phone.
Shit.
He swore some more in his head. How the heck had the girls managed to set him up?
As the judge started the proceedings, flinging out legal and Latin words he didn’t even understand, his mind scrambled back through the last two weeks.
He’d had the women carefully followed, watched their every move. Them getting the van, going to the school, finding a place to stash the kid, finally nabbing the kid . . . His thoughts screamed to a halt. Nabbing the kid. His mind ran over the scene he’d witnessed outside the club in Richmond.
Anna and Roxy following the boys, entering the club, walking the boys down a dark side street. The van screeching to a stop outside the mouth of the street. The back doors being flung open. The boys being dragged inside . . .
His mind screamed to a halt again.
Suddenly he knew exactly how they’d done it. The van’s doors had been flung open alright, but one of the doors had obscured his view. Bollocks, he’d assumed that when the doors had slammed shut the boys were inside. Now he knew without a doubt that whoever the legs had belonged to that were visible under the van’s doors, they hadn’t been the boys’. Deception, wasn’t that what the girls spelt out in the card they’d sent to him?
Shit.
So who were the boys he’d met on the boat? He didn’t know, but what he did know was that one of them hadn’t been the judge’s son. And if that boy wasn’t Danny, then the other boy couldn’t have been his mate. Which meant there was definitely no Russian mobster. Distraction, wasn’t that the other word the girls had flung in his face in the card? And they had distracted him alright, using the mythical Russian gangster as a way to keep him running around like a blue-arsed fly.
Shit.
So if Fonrims Akdov didn’t exist, who’d killed Finlay and Jason? Who’d shot up the room on the fourth floor of St Nicholas? The girls couldn’t have done it. Could they? No way would they have that type of fighting power and knowledge. He thought of the ways that Finlay and Jason had met their nasty ends. Who else but the girls would’ve known that Jason had hung Roxy out the window and Finlay had poured petrol over Ollie in his music shop? Would know about St Nicholas?
Deception and distraction. They’d used both to kipper him like a newborn kid. And who’d taught them the art and craft of both? he thought bitterly. Himself.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Frankie.’
He heard the whisper and realised that Bell was talking to him. He tilted his sweating head towards her. She raised her eyes towards the judge. He did the same. The look in the judge’s eyes told him she was ready to pronounce her verdict.
‘Boys, are you ready?’ Jackie called out.
She nervously paced inside the main cabin of Miss Josephine. She knew the verdict on Frankie would be in soon.
‘Come on, boys. We want to be back at the club by the time the verdict gets in.’
‘We’re ready,’ a voice called from behind the kitchen door.
The door opened. Out walked two males. The actors, Whacky and Mojo.
Guilty.
The word battered the inside of Frankie’s head as he angrily made his way through the court foyer with a grim-faced Bell Dream at his side. Plus the judge had also ruled that there was sufficient evidence to suggest Frankie made his dough from criminal activities, which gave the green light for the authorities to try to seize his assets. Only one place he was going now – to hunt down those four bitches and slaughter them one by one. He didn’t care what plans he’d made for Daisy, Jackie Jarvis was gonna be a goner.
‘We’re gonna appeal, right?’ he asked furiously as he walked past the three men he’d noticed earlier. As soon as they saw him they rose as if out of respect.
‘Yes. But in the meantime they’re still going to start proceedings to try to seize your assets. They want your wallet. They want the small change from your trousers and anything you might have lost down the back of the sofa.’
He reached the exit. Punched open one of the glass doors. A spark of light hit him in the eye as a camera flashed. A battery of reporters and journalists waited on the steps below. To him they look like birds waiting to pick at his carcass. If he was going down it weren’t like no weeping dickhead. He set a glittering smile on his face. Started to descend. That was when he saw Ollie’s face smiling at him through the crowd. By the time he was done with her she wouldn’t have a face left, much less be able to smile. Her and her mates would soon learn the cost of making a public pussy out of him. He twisted his body in her direction. Took a rushed step forward. But she didn’t move. Just watched him, smiling. As he took another step, hands grabbed his arms. Stunned, he twisted his head to find two of the three suited men from inside holding him, while the third stood to one side so the snappers could catch Frankie’s face.
‘Frankie Sullivan, I’m arresting you on charges of conspiracy to kidnap . . .’
The crowd below surged forward, cameras manically flashing.
Ollie and Gio walked away from the chaos of the crowd. As they moved briskly towards Gio’s car Ollie pulled out her mobile.
‘He’s a finished man. We’re on our way back now.’
Ollie took a deep breath as she took her place in the passenger seat. She tilted her head to the side to look at Gio as he switched on the radio. He looked back at her as the news report came on. Suddenly she grinned and punched her arms into the air.
‘Yessss!’ she shouted.
She reached over and hugged a startled Gio. His arms tightened around her. She pulled herself slightly back. Glanced up into his face. He looked down at her. Her heart did an unsteady jump. Suddenly her arms locked around the back of his neck as she pulled him down to kiss her. They tumbled backwards into her seat as their hands went into a frenzy over each other. As Ollie unbuttoned Gio’s shirt the newscaster reported a new item:
‘The bodies of two men were discovered in separate locations earlier on today. Sources close to both inquiries are saying that they may be associates of Frankie Sullivan . . .’
‘Cheers, everyone,’ Misty said.
She raised her champagne glass, which was filled with Smirnoff vodka, in a celebration. ‘Never thought I’d say this, Roxy, but your long-established partnership with this remarkable drink was a lifesaver.’
The other people in the main room of the Shim-Sham-Shimmy Club raised their glasses. Jackie. Anna. Roxy.
And, of course, the actors, Whacky and Mojo.
‘After what he did to us and our mums, did Frankie really think we were gonna roll over and kidnap somebody?’ Anna said, stinging disbelief in her words. ‘No way were we gonna put another fifteen-year-old kid through what we had been through. The only reason we’re sitting here nice and tight and free is ’cos of Jackie’s brilliant planning.’ She raised her glass towards Jackie. The others nodded in agreement.
‘You only ever told me and Whacky about our parts on a strict need-to-know basis,’ Mojo said. ‘So now we wanna know how you planned such a cool set-up?’
‘You know what Frankie Sullivan said to me years ago?’ Jackie asked. No one spoke, so she carried on. ‘That life’s all about distraction and deception. That’s how we got Frankie, we played him at his own game every step of the way. It didn’t take us long to figure out that that tit Finlay was on our tail twenty-four-seven. So our first deception was getting Finlay to believe we were getting ready to snatch the kid. So we did all the things they were expecting us to do – got a van, found an isolated place to keep the kid, made contact with the boy in the school. Then all we had to do was make Frankie think he saw us kidnap the boy.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Whacky asked.
Jackie grinned. ‘We figured out that Frankie would most probably be watching our every move and was probably parked in a spot where he could see us. So all we had to do was convince Frankie that we’d snatched the kid. So we drove the van across the street and opened the doors so that Frankie couldn’t actually see what was going on. The only thing he could see were legs under the van’s door. And of course those legs belonged to Anna and Roxy. When the van door slammed the only people inside were Anna and Roxy . . .’
‘But where did the boys go?’ Whacky asked.
Anna took up the story. ‘When we got Daniel and his mate in the street I told them that I was part of a special patrol set up by the government investigating underage kids in clubs. I told them that if they didn’t go back to school ASAP I was taking them into custody. I said if they didn’t believe me I had a van coming to get them. Just then the van swings into the street. The boys scarpered, but the reason Frankie never saw them come out of the street was because they went the other way.’
Jackie grinned at Whacky and Mojo. ‘And that’s where you two out-of-work actors came in because the next big deception was convincing Frankie we had the boys.’
Whacky started speaking with a large grin on his face. ‘I must admit that when we came looking for work we never guessed in a trillion years it would be anything like this.’
Jackie’s face became serious, her voice full of emotion. ‘I can’t thank you enough, boys.’
Whacky kept grinning. ‘Don’t get all soppy on us. If it weren’t for you we’d most probably be following in our family tradition of doing a ten-stretch for a blag in the Scrubs. You helped us change our lives, Jackie, so we owed you one.’
‘I still can’t believe it.’ Jackie shook her head as she toyed with the stem of her glass.
‘There we are sitting in my gaff while Roxy talks us through the info she found on the Net about how to kidnap someone when you two come knocking at the door with Ryan. As soon as you two came into the kitchen my brain started going like the clappers. All of a sudden I start thinking, what if Whacky or Mojo pretend to be the kid? Didn’t think you would do it, Whacky, but you were blindin’.’
‘All I needed was some make-up, and once I was blindfolded and the tape was on my mouth you couldn’t even see my face properly. I could’ve been mistaken for Prince Harry.’
‘And my part,’ Mojo said. ‘Fantastic part to play, but how did the idea for the Russian gangster and his son come about?’
The grin was back on Jackie’s face. ‘When I was sitting with Danny and his mates teaching them rhyming slang, they started telling me about their family lives. One of them was real quiet. The others got all shifty. I knew what that meant, his dad was a businessman alright, but was well dodgy. And that’s when I started thinking, what if Danny had a mate whose dad was a Russian kill-’em-all gangster? What if when we pretended to nab the boy we also had to nab his mate? What if this mate starts making a right load of noise about his killing machine of a dad flying into town the next day looking for him? Chuck a Russian gangster into the mix and all hell starts breaking loose in Frankie’s life and we set up our biggest distraction. All we had to do was find a name for our gun-totin’ gangster.’
‘Smirnoff vodka, what a touch, Jackie,’ Mojo said.
‘That weren’t down to me, that was our wonderful computer expert, Roxy over there, just like the Internet was.’
Roxy blushed as everyone looked her way. ‘The only way that Frankie was going to believe that this so called Fonrims Akdov existed was to get information on the Web, which wasn’t hard to do. So I created two pages, leaving one on the computer screen and the other on the toolbar. When he went over to the computer we were all sweating like mad, fingers crossed, praying that he wouldn’t insist on checking the real Net.’
‘Mind you, I thought everything was tits up,’ Jackie said, ‘when he put Mojo on that chair with that noose around his neck. Crikey, I nearly wet myself.’
Mojo rubbed his throat. ‘Thought I was done for as well.’
‘I tell you this much, I was ready to chuck the towel in. Just watching you swing in the air nearly give me heart failure.’ She looked Mojo squarely in the eye. ‘How did you have the guts to let him do it? You could’ve been brown bread.’
‘There was no way I was letting some bloke who treats women the way he treated you lot get away with it. I ain’t saying I weren’t scared because I was shitting it. But you know what, I realised he was shitting himself as well. He weren’t gonna do me.’
‘Go on Anna.’ Roxy giggled. ‘Do your imitation of the judge again, it cracks me up.’
Anna swung her hair back over her shoulders, stuck her nose in the air, pressed her hand over her heart and in her best dramatic mock-posh accent said, ‘Not my Danny. Please don’t kill him. If you do, who am I going to leave the family silver to?’ They all laughed. ‘Doing the accent was the easy bit,’ Anna started once the laughter had died down. ‘Trying to figure out a way of getting out of Miss Josephine’s main cabin and outside so that I could be on the other end of Jackie’s call was much harder.’
‘So how did you do it?’ Whacky asked.
‘Well.’ The word was long and drawn out as Anna looked at Roxy. ‘Nothing a man hates more than seeing a woman cry. Frankie knew that Roxy is a bit of a waterworks merchant, so all we did was get Roxy to crack up in front of him. Roxy was bloody great. You should’ve seen their faces. They had to get her to shut up and short of whacking her they had no choice but to let me help calm her down. Once I was outta the room, bingo, my mobile’s in my hand. Mind you.’ Anna looked straight at Jackie. ‘I nearly bloody well got caught out when you called that second time. I was in the club, music thumping in the background. I nearly blew it when I started by saying “You what?” ’
‘You should’ve seen my face when Frankie said that it sounded like the judge was in a disco. I thought the game was up.’
Whacky looked at Misty curiously. ‘But how did you sort it so he gets arrested for attempted kidnapping?’
Misty looked at the women with a mischievous smile. All of a sudden, in unison, they began to sing:
Daisy, Daisy.
Give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy,
All for the death of you . . .’
The two actors looked at them as if they’d lost their minds. The women and Misty cracked up and started laughing.
When the laughter died down Misty explained, ‘Let’s just say that I took Frankie’s motor for a spin and left him a few surprises. And I’ll bet you ten bob the Bill are giving him a roasting about it right now.’
forty-six
‘We have evidence to show that you were going to kidnap Judge Gray-Hammond’s son,’ the detective inspector confidently stated.
Frankie was down the nick with his brief, being given the third degree by the Bill.
‘What evidence?’ Frankie shot back.
‘My client will not be making any statements until I’ve had the opportunity to speak alone with him.’
Frankie eyeballed the officer. ‘They ain’t got dick on me . . .’
‘Mr Sullivan . . .’ Bell tensely interrupted.
Frankie ignored her. ‘The bastards have been out to get me from day one. It ain’t enough that they’re taking the livelihood way from an innocent man, now they’ve got to try and frame me for another crime as well.’ He confidently leaned towards the other man. ‘Go on,’ he challenged. ‘Show me this so-called evidence.’
