Black Widow. Jessie Keane

slapped the other woman, hard. Then she grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

      ‘What happened?’ she shouted. ‘Is Layla indoors? Is Layla all right?’

      Now Jeanette was crying and shuddering.

      Christ, thought Annie. She stumbled to her feet and half fell off the terrace and through the door into the sudden cool and semi-darkness of the finca’s hallway. The telephone on the hall table tinkled as she passed by. She stopped, looked at it. What the fuck? It had never made that sound before. Maybe the blast had damaged the wiring in some way. She picked it up, heard only a normal dial tone. She quickly put it back down again and hurried on. Supporting herself against the walls, she dragged herself to Layla’s bedroom, blinking to try to see with eyes that were incredibly sore.

      Layla’s swimsuit was laid out on her bed beside her teddies and dolls. But the room was in chaos. The stool at the dressing table was thrown on the floor, and a chair had been knocked over, and the dressing table itself was askew, as if it had been pushed.

      But the thing was way too heavy for Layla to have moved it.

       Where was Layla?

      Swallowing bile and a growing panic, Annie lurched into the bathroom, into the master bedroom, into the spare bedroom, the kitchen, then the sitting room.

      ‘Layla!’ she yelled, but there was no answer. She ran outside to the back of the finca where Layla loved to play; she had a swing there, suspended from one of the palms.

      ‘Layla!’ she yelled again, but there was only silence.

      Maybe this was a nightmare. Please God let it be a nightmare. At any moment Layla would come and jump on the bed and she would wake up and Max would groan beside her and roll over and go back to sleep.

      ‘Layla!’

      Nothing. No answer. No sound.

      Annie stumbled back outside to the terrace and stepped on something soft. There was a tiny crunch of bones. She looked down. A dead sparrow. Not a mark on it, but it was dead. The blast, she thought. The Shockwaves had killed it. There had been an explosion. Or had it been merely stunned? Had she just killed the poor damned thing with her weight? Nausea rose again. Her eyes went to the pool house and found nothing there but smouldering wreckage.

      Her eyes drifted on.

      ‘Max?’

      Her eyes locked on to the body in the pool. A man’s body, the skin brown from hours spent in the sun, face-down, floating on the surface. Dark hair on the arms, dark hair on the head—and blood billowing all around it like a crimson halo.

      Annie felt the breath leave her body in one horrified, disbelieving rush.

      ‘Max!’ she screamed, and dived straight into the pool.

      Afterwards, Annie couldn’t even remember swimming across the pool. One moment she was on the side looking at Max’s lifeless body, then she was there beside him.

       ‘Max!’

      The nightmare was relentless. She rolled him over and he was weightless, lifeless in the water. Max, oh God Max no please don’t be dead, please Max…

      It was Jonjo.

      The breath left Annie in a whoosh and she sank and came up spluttering and choking on chlorine and Jonjo’s blood. Jonjo’s pale blue eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the sky, and between them was an impossibly neat hole, leaking a steady flow of red into the blue water. She flinched away from the body in horror. Glanced at Jeanette, who had seen that it was Jonjo too and was now starting to shriek again.

       Where was Max?

      Annie felt panic grip her, robbing her of reason. Jonjo was dead. The explosion. Layla, where was Layla? And Max. Where the fuck was Max?

      Something deadly serious had happened here. A deliberate hit. Max and Jonjo Carter had influential friends but they had bad enemies too. People whose toes they had trod on over turf in London. People who might want to take revenge. Maybe she and Max had been out here lotus-eating for so long that they had dropped their guard. She had to do something. Fuck, she wished Jeanette would shut up.

      She looked all around the perimeter of the finca and stared up at the rock face looming behind the building. Max could have taken cover up there, if this was a hit. And if this was a hit, they—whoever ‘they’ might be—could be up there right now, watching, maybe taking aim.

      Annie swam swiftly to the side of the pool and hauled herself out. She grabbed Jeanette and yanked her to a standing position.

      ‘Just shut up,’ she ordered, and shook the blonde again, hard. ‘Shut up. Come inside, come on, you silly cow.’

      Annie grabbed Jeanette’s arm and hauled her indoors. She slammed the door shut and locked it. She went to the back door and quickly locked that too, while Jeanette stood nearly nude, shivering and crying in the hallway. Annie closed all the windows and shutters. Then she bundled Jeanette into the master bedroom, locked the door behind them and shoved her in the direction of the wardrobe.

      ‘Put some clothes on,’ said Annie. ‘Move, Jeanette. Come on.’

      Jeanette was still weeping and wailing. She was just standing there looking at the clothes.

      Annie ran over to her. Her heart was pounding, her head was spinning, she wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t going to be sick again. She wanted to scream too. Layla. Max. Where the fuck were they?

      ‘What did you see out there, Jeanette?’ she demanded urgently.

      Jeanette just stared at her. Shock, thought Annie. She’s in shock.

      ‘Come on. Talk,’ she said more gently. If she was ever to get any sense out of the poor bitch, she’d better ease up.

      ‘Men, there were men,’ cried Jeanette.

      ‘Go on.’ Annie felt herself grow still as she braced herself as if for a fatal impact.

      She wanted to hear, but she didn’t. Dreaded the details, but she had to know. Christ, she was shivering too now. She wanted to roar and scream at Jeanette, demand every detail; she wanted to know. But know what? How terrible would it be, to know what had taken place out there on the terrace? How terrible, to know what had happened to the man she loved so much, to the daughter who was a living, breathing part of her and of him?

      ‘Maybe four of them—I don’t know.’ A sob burst from Jeanette. Snot and tears ran down her face in rivers. ‘It all happened so fast; it was so confusing. They had masks on. They dragged Jonjo off the bed and shot him and threw him in the pool. They put a cloth over your face. I thought they were going to kill me.’

      ‘Max?’ asked Annie, thinking: I’ll never survive this, I couldn’t live if he was dead…

      ‘They grabbed him.’

      ‘And?’

      ‘They grabbed Layla too.’

       Layla.

      Annie turned away from Jeanette. Moving like a zombie, she went to the left-hand side of the bed, the side that Max always slept on, and opened the drawer in the bedside cabinet. The first thing she saw was Max’s ring. He always took it off when he was in the pool. It was bright yellow gold, with engraved Egyptian cartouches on either side of a square slab of lapis lazuli. She took it out, turned it over. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

       Max.

      She took a breath, blinked, got focused again. She slipped the ring on to her thumb, for comfort, for reassurance; then got back to business. There was a small bunch of keys, and she pocketed them. She pulled out a cloth-wrapped parcel with shaking hands and removed an oilcloth-covered item from within it. Pulled off the oilcloth and sat down hard on the bed as her head spun suddenly and the room