‘Yeah. Him. What’s his name?’

‘Graves. Bruno Graves. One of twins. The other one’s Baxter, and even more vicious they say. They been hanging around the gangs all their lives as breakers for hire and now Frank’s taken Bruno on as his personal minder. Word is Bruno got in a knife fight and some bugger tried to scalp him. His loving brother Baxter, apparently. Bruno’s got a scar right across here.’ Colin slashed a finger across his hairline. ‘Ugly son of a bitch to start with, and that didn’t improve matters.’

‘And?’

‘We’ve seen Frank around town. I pulled him in and questioned him not two days since. Didn’t get a damned thing out of him, of course. Had the slickest brief with him you ever did see. But what I noticed was that Graves wasn’t hanging around him like a bad smell, like he usually does. I asked Frank about it. He said Graves is taking a holiday down the Costas, but I checked that out, and according to everyone’s say-so, Graves hasn’t left the country. He’s still here. Somewhere.’

‘Maybe Bruno’s off doing a specific job for Frank,’ said Donny.

‘Yeah. Maybe hunting down his ex-mistress Dora O’Brien and shutting her up for good.’

‘You think?’

‘Could be.’

Donny was pleased about that. He’d lost her, but maybe Bruno would track her down.

54

The thing was, getting scarred at an early age did things to a man’s head. Inside. Bruno Graves was seventeen when he got into a fight over a woman and ended up on the wrong end of a knife attack. Sure, he’d walked away from it, despite the fact that the fella who’d attacked him – his own brother, Baxter – had been sitting on his chest, stabbing first his upper arms and then trying to cut his hair loose from his head, like in the old cowboy films starring Gary Cooper and Alan Ladd, the ones they used to like to watch together when they were growing up.

‘Like the Apaches did to the settlers,’ his brother had always told him, with a grin.

Baxter hadn’t been grinning when he sat on Bruno’s chest and tried to scalp him. He’d been deadly serious, then, and Bruno had somehow got out from under. He’d limped out of the family home bleeding, and he’d never gone back. Slept rough, under hedges. Thought he was going to die. But he hadn’t. Now he didn’t know where his mum and dad were, or even if they were still alive. As for his bruv, that arsehole Baxter was still around, doing bits and pieces for Frank, but Baxter could fry in hell for all he cared.

Bruno’s upper arms gave him trouble for a long time after that assault over the girl. He’d suffered cut muscles, ripped tendons. Such things took a long while to heal. He’d staggered into the hospital a few days after he’d fled from home. He was still bleeding, still hardly able to see through the blood seeping down his face from the half-scalping. And they’d stitched him up. Not particularly well, but the job was done, and Bruno – who had never been all that in the looks department anyway – caught sight of his reflection in a shop window around two months after the event and thought: well, that’s that then.