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  Being as coy as only Sarah was she grinned thinly ‘Maybe’.

  ‘Hmm, I bet that maybe wears a suit everyday and sucks at golf.’

  She just laughed before telling me to tell him she was going to call him in an hour or so.

  Meeting Joey out back of Tesco’s at around 11 a.m. was a good idea. It wasn’t mayhem yet. We got booze, Doritos and dips, a couple a steaks, tons of junk food and some games to play on the Playstation. We were all set as we raced to the checkout with our packed trolley.

  When we arrived at Joeys we got our game faces on quick. Metallica was blasting out, we had the food out, got the games on and commenced battle on the Playstation. I picked the Porsche, Tommy picked the Ferrari, 1st level. Wicked!

  ‘Hey, mate, I forgot to tell you, Sarah’s calling soon. Seems you’ve made an impression there, mate. Fuck, I crashed.’

  ‘I’m trying. I just don’t want to fuck up. We were supposed to be taking it slow but, I have to say, she’s like fucking lightning every time I see her. I can’t explain it. She gets me bro. Shit I crashed as well. You got manual gears on.’

  ‘Ha-ha, I think someone’s in love. Man, listen to you, no auto gears mate, it’s easier.’

  ‘Hey, you wanna talk, Mr. Marriage, ha-ha, see ya. I’m first now.’

  ‘Ain’t no denying from me, please believe it, Joey. Gonna be the best husband I can be and father too, if I can. I’m catching up, turd.’

  ‘Good for you, mate. I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Listen to us, Joey, we are growing up. Weird or what? Fucking Ferraris.’

  ‘Hmm, come on then. Enough of this lovey stuff, we’re on the next level. I rule.’

  Chapter Forty

  I walked into the kitchen when she rang to let Tommy carry on cursing at the Playstation. He was losing badly.

  ‘Hey, babe, you ok? Having a laugh then. What you all up to?’

  She sounded a little drunk. ‘Yeah, we are singing Christmas songs, drinking, trying on wedding clothes. Hey, you wanna see Emma, she looks amazing.’

  ‘Christmas songs, hun. It’s three weeks away. I’m sure you look amazing too, by the way.’

  ‘Sweet talker. Keep going.’

  ‘Ok, I’ll play,’ I said as I loved doing this. I was a proper Mr. Softy. ‘You are like … hmm …. Ok, tell you what, I’ll say sing the words, you tell me the song. I’m going to have to sort of whisper and sing, though, because Tommy will take the piss otherwise. We did this the other day, remember?’

  ‘Done,’ she laughed. ‘I always kick your arse at this. What genre?’

  ‘80’s, of course’, hate the nineties crap and this noughty’s stuff is just dire. And you know I aren’t singing Christmas songs. Right then …hmm …. oh yeah, I heard this the other day .…’

  ‘Come on then,’ she laughed impatiently.

  ‘Can you hear me calling out your name? You know that I’m falling and I don’t know what to say. I’ll speak a little louder, I’ll even shout. You know that I’m proud and I can’t get the words out. You got it yet?’

  ‘Hmm, haven’t yet, honey. You better keep going.’

  She was still laughing.

  ‘Ok , ok, errrm, oh yeah, I got it…something’s happening, happening to me. my friends say I’m acting peculiar. Come on baby, you better make a start, you better make it soon before you break my heart … Come on you must have it now.’

  To my horror I heard the sound of a load of crazy women scream out in drunken song ‘Oooh aaaaarrh, I wanna be with you everywhere.’

  ‘Speakerphone, baby,’ laughed Sarah uncontrollably. Busted! I have to admit it was funny though.

  ‘Oh hun, you’re in for it.’

  ‘You promise?’ she teased.

  ‘Hmm, so what do the girls think of my velvet voice? Can’t believe you exposed my liking of Fleetwood Mac, hun. They are going to think I’m old. Grew up on it, though, so what can you say?’

  ‘Erm, that you’re old.’

  She loved to tease me, but I loved it.

  ‘Hey, by the way, hun, did Tommy try and ring earlier because the phone rang but it went dead went. It was crackly but someone asked for Emma.’

  ‘Don’t think so. He’s been here. I’ll ask him in a bit. He’s in game mode right now. Right, will pick you up at, what, about midnight?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s great, Joey-babes. See you soon. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too, Sarah.’

  As I hit the living room again I could hear Tommy’s cursing. ‘Fucking control pads fucked mate. Me car is crap. Might as well be Fred Flinstoning it.’

  ‘Ha-ha, it’s because you are missing fingers, Tommy, plus the fact you are crap mate, and I rule. Accept it.’

  ‘Yeah, ruler of the rectums maybe.’

  ‘Ha-ha, come on now, you know you’re the one who had Elton John’s Greatest hits stashed away.’

  ‘Hey, I was 16 and nobody knew he was singing about dudes then, Joey.’

  I teased him by singing Elton John songs ‘Hey Nikita is it cold?’

  ‘Oh you fucker,’ Tommy laughed as he jumped at me. We wrestled around the living room like when we were kids. After a marathon of two minutes play-fighting, and knocking over the food and some beer, we called it quits.

  ‘Right mate, steaks?’ asked Tommy, gasping for breath.

  ‘Yep, do mine medium please, mate.’

  ‘Will do,’ he answered as he went to the kitchen.

  ‘Oh yeah, I forgot. Did you ring your lass earlier? Sarah said someone rang and asked for her but it went crackly and the phone went dead. I know how cheap your phone is so....’

  Racing into the room Tommy looked liked he’d seen a ghost. ‘Fuck me, crackly? Fuck, fuck, get the fucking car mate. Now! I’ll ring Emma.’

  I raced to the car, not exactly knowing what Tommy meant. He jumped into the passenger seat with his phone in one hand and a mean looking shotgun in the other. ‘Answer, Emma, answer!’ he screamed. I sped off down the street. ‘What is it, mate? Tell me? What’s wrong?’

  Looking at me, in a way I had never seen before - it was fright – he shook as he said it. ‘It’s fucking Trigg, Joey, it’s Trigg. Oh fuck, Emma, shit, shit.’

  There was no need to say any more. My foot hit the metal, hard.

  ‘What did you bring that thing with you for?’ I asked. The last thing we wanted was gunfire around the girls.

  ‘Because if they’ve hurt her, they die…tonight.’

  Taking a deep breath I just hoped to God they were ok. What could I say?

  Chapter Forty One

  It was too late by the time Tommy and Joey got to the house.

  I was feeling more than merry when our lights went out. I didn’t know anything about power or electric but I knew the electric meter was outside. I didn’t know if it was a case of us running out of credit or just a power cut. Either way, I wasn’t going outside to check, especially because I had my comfy clothes on. In other words, I looked a tramp.

  Sarah volunteered. She was drunk and ran out in my wedding dress. She loved it so much I told her to try it. She did and she was beautiful. I even thought she looked better than me in it.

  After having a snoop, Sarah shouted down the hallway that she was going to her car for a torch. The girls and I sat there in the dark for a few moments. We had lit a few candles and we sat there waiting for the lights to come on, when one of the girls, Emily, noticed something outside.

  ‘What’s that light outside. Emma? It’s weird.’

  I walked over to my window along with the girls and it seemed a light was moving fast in a circular motion outside, near my garden.

  ‘I don’t know, hun,’ I said as I tried to make out what it was. Then I made it out. You ever looked at something for a few seconds before you can make it out? It was like that.

  I screamed as I saw Sarah in my wedding dress lying on the street outside my house. The torch she had been holding was round, and was rolling down the street still lit.

  We all
ran out to help her. Even a few neighbours came out. We called an ambulance. She was still alive. I thought she had just slipped on the ice or something, but blood was seeping out of the dress from her stomach and chest. I couldn’t believe it - she had been shot. All the girls were screaming and crying and I think the whole street was awake.

  It was all like it was happening but it wasn’t. I remember Emily shouting down the phone at the police saying ‘Fucking get here. Sarah’s been shot, she’s been shot’.

  Holding Sarah in my arms, I told her to stay with me.

  ‘It’s ok, honey, it’s ok.’ I wept but tried to keep it together at least until the ambulance got there. Sarah was semi-conscious. She was trying to talk but I told her not to. I told her to relax. She asked for Joey, and my tears were now in full flow. And then she said ‘I’m sorry I got blood on your dress’. After that I was inconsolable.

  I shouted for one of the girls to ring Tommy or Joey. I needed Tommy here, and Sarah needed Joey here.

  As we laid there waiting for the ambulance and the police, a car sounded near, but there was no siren. Screeching like it was in a street race, Joey’s car skidded around the corner and crashed into the next-door neighbour’s wheelie bins.

  Chapter Forty Two

  Once I got out of the car, I dropped the shotgun as I raced to the front lawn of our house. I had seen the wedding dress as we drove up and thought she was dead. I had screamed ‘no’ as Joey drove up and tried to get out as we were still moving, which made Joey crash in to next door’s bins.

  It sounds awful of me to say but when I realised it was Sarah, I was relieved. I was still shocked and in pain but that initial sense of, well just absolute devastation which had gripped me for all of a few seconds, had passed. I was hurt, and I was still as shaken, but from my own selfish point of view I was just so glad Emma was ok.

  I knelt down and held Emma. She was crying and screaming and I held her in my arms as she wept.

  It was chaos. There were neighbours everywhere and Emma’s friends were all holding each other, weeping and screaming.

  Oh God, poor Sarah.

  Once Joey noticed it was her, his face turned to stone. He had a look of inner pain that, even with all my days of torture, I don’t think I could fully comprehend. Falling to his knees, he shuffled to her and held her. She was still alive, just alive. I could see him whispering into her ear but I couldn’t hear what he was saying as he cried and tried to cover the holes in her chest with his hands. The blood looked black in the dark night. The only red I could see was the deep red all over the dress and all over Joey as he held her, trying to stop the bleeding.

  The ambulance took Sarah away so quickly once it got there. The paramedics worked so fast as they got her in the ambulance.

  Before Joey got in the ambulance with her, he got up and I looked him in the eyes. I could have said so many things, so many things. But there were no words, and in that situation, that scene of tragedy, Joey and I shared a look, if only for a few seconds, and all that was needed was silence.

  I took Emma inside the house as the police turned up and joined us inside. Emma’s friends stayed with us and told the police what they had seen, or not seen, as it was in this case.

  The police combed the area talking to the neighbours as two plain clothes detectives questioned me, Emma and her friends. I told the police everything I knew, about Trigg, Samson, X Company, but in my heart I knew this would have to be settled by other means. Street means. Gangster Law.

  In gangster law, the usual sentence if you fucked with a man’s family was death. It was that simple. Sarah was family.

  I was relieved to hear Emily whisper that she had hidden the shotgun I had dropped as I had got out of the car. A good job too because they would have arrested my arse on sight if they’d have found it.

  Thoughts of a murderous rampage with my shotgun were already going round in my brain. There was no way Trigg or Samson would see Christmas, no fucking way.

  It seemed like forever as we waited for news of Sarah.

  We waited…

  Everyone fell silent as the phone eventually rang. I could hear the night’s wind howling against the window, the old clock on top of my TV ticking, the annoying clicking of our radiators as they warmed up the room. I answered the phone as all in the room waited with baited breath. It was a policewoman on the other end of the line.

  I hung up.

  Pausing for a moment I could feel everyone focusing on me. I just focused my eyes on Emma as she sat there on the chair next to me with teary eyes.

  ‘Tommy?’ she said as she could barely get even one word out.

  As I said before, words can’t be used, all you need is silence. Crouching down to Emma’s knees, I just looked her in the eyes and shook my head as I clenched my mouth shut and held her tight. She screamed her heart out.

  Chapter Forty Three

  When it snows you always expect it to be cold. But on that morning of Sarah’s funeral it was the coldest I have been in my life. I could see my own breath as I looked up at the roof of the church.

  It had only been a week since her death but the police still hadn’t got anything. Both Trigg and Samson had been hunted by the police but had not yet been found.

  We had obviously called off the wedding. I was surprised Emma was still with me because at first all I could do was blame myself. I felt largely responsible for bringing all this into their lives. But nobody would blame me. I don’t know if I needed some blame at first, or what, but my initial feelings were that, if anyone, it should have been me, not Sarah.

  Sarah… innocent Sarah.

  Trying to be there for both Joey and Sarah was hard. I kinda had to suppress my own feelings of grief to be strong for them.

  Joey and I had sat and had talked over the last week and, as you can expect, he wasn’t in a good place at all during that time. He wouldn’t blame me either.

  ‘It’s all them,’ he had told me. Joey wouldn’t hear a word of my apologies as he said I had nothing to apologise for. It was the same with Sarah’s family. I at least thought they would blame me because I told them everything. But still they wouldn’t blame me. Even though they all said it wasn’t my fault, no matter how I tried, I still had the dark figure of guilt holding me in a bear hug, getting tighter and tighter until at times I couldn’t breathe and it felt like my chest would cave in.

  Gripping our hands tight, Emma and I sat through the awful motions of watching a family lose a loved one.

  It was awful, truly awful.

  After the priest was finished talking, some of Sarah’s family said some words, at which point even I was just falling apart from the inside.

  But it was Joey’s words which hurt the most for me. He stood there at the front of the church in front of us all, shaking, holding back his anger, holding back his grief for a moment.

  He had briefly gone over to Sarah’s father before getting up and whispered something in his ear, and Sarah’s father had nodded.

  Reaching into his suit jacket pocket, Joey pulled out a piece of paper and composed himself before he spoke.

  ‘Please bear with me. I have a few words to say. Now I was only with Sarah for a few months or so, but I have to say, those months were magical, as she was magical. That is how I will remember her. I knew her years before we got together. She was the wife I should have had, the girl who had the answers. I remember years ago that I always thought she was out of my league, this blonde-haired beauty with eyes that could melt the hardest of hearts, a laugh that was so infectious that even if what she was saying wasn’t funny, you’d laugh. That’s the thing with Sarah, she was always laughing. Now I have a few words I have borrowed, although I have altered them to my own.’

  God, it was so hard seeing him suffer, standing there with his soul just naked to everyone. I gripped Emma’s hand too because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Joey continued in the freezing churches silence.

  Sarah isn’t here

  Her
e in this coffin

  Sarah’s in heaven now

  Where she’s smiling and laughing

  Now she isn’t here, I can no longer sleep

  I just think of you baby, and I can’t help but weep

  You were the 1,000 winds that blow

  The glint on the snow

  The sun on the grain

  The gentle autumn rain

  When I woke next to you in the morning hush

  You were the swift uplifting rush

  But now I look at the stars in the empty night

  And no longer do they give out light

  I love you Sarah, I…

  I shot up to my feet and helped Joey as he wept and couldn’t finish the words. I took the paper he had been reading from and then both Sarah’s mother and father got up and hugged Joey. They all cried together.

  Both I and Emma broke our hearts along with everybody else. I felt we should go after an hour or so at Sarah’s family home. I had gone outside for a quick smoke with Joey before we left.

  He was quiet, just sucking in the smoke from the cigarette hard.

  Sat in the silence I wanted to say something but my brain was frazzled.

  Joey talked first.

  ‘You have to promise me something, Tommy.’

  ‘Anything, bro, anything.’

  ‘No killing. I mean it. I’ve seen that look in your eyes. You have had it all week. Promise me’

  ‘I can’t promise that, Joey.’

  ‘You have to. I can’t lose you too, Tommy. I need you now. Emma needs you too. We both do, now more then ever. Let the police handle it.’

  ‘So what? Trigg gets a pass? Is that it? Joey, I can do this. I won’t get caught, I swear. Only when they die will they not be a threat. I can’t risk them coming for Emma or you, and what about when my child is born? How can I live with the thought they could be out there. That’s what they do, they hurt the ones you love. You know as well as I do that that bullet was meant for Emma. They just saw the dress. They will know by know it wasn’t Emma. You think a guy like Trigg will just go away? Come on, brother, you know it doesn’t work that way.’