She left the room then, slamming the door noisily behind her. She knew how to make a dramatic exit, she was the world’s expert in them when the fancy took her. In fairness to her, these were very rare occurrences, but all the same, they were a warning as well. Ria was fiesty; she could cause a fight in an empty house when she wanted to. Every now and then she was known to put her foot down, and once she did that, there was no arguing with her. As Peter had often got his way over the years – without a whisper from her – when she did force the issue, he generally gave her whatever she wanted. But he was not about to humour her this time.

Daniel had gone too far: he had nearly ruined everything for them. It was solely Peter’s damage limitation that had kept not only his brother’s death from occurring, but also kept his own place as the head of the Bailey clan. It was only his fucking diplomatic skills – and he had really had to dig deep for them – along with his own obvious outrage at his brother’s actions that had stopped what could have been an international incident. He had put the word out that he would deal with Daniel himself, and that anyone else who felt the urge to chastise his brother would eventually have to answer to him personally. That wouldn’t be a good thing for anyone concerned; after all, whatever Daniel was, he was still Peter’s brother.

Sending Delroy to tell Daniel he wanted nothing more to do with him had been the hardest thing he had ever had to do. Delroy passed on Daniel’s response – in detail – but Peter knew that was just a front. Daniel would be more devastated by Peter’s anger and disappointment than anyone else’s.

Peter blamed a lot of this on the fact that his brother was on the old Persian rugs. Daniel taking drugs was a fucking anomaly in itself, as he had always hated them. Daniel was a drinker – he liked a few bevvies, end of. Now it seemed he was the fucking coke meister. He had only recently understood just how religiously Daniel had embraced the fucking snort. He had a line himself occasionally – they all did. It sobered you up, countermanded the drink, it allowed you to tear the arse out of the night. But for someone like his brother, a paranoid fuck at the best of times, it just exacerbated his natural inclinations, and his brother’s natural inclinations were always fucking violent.

He could hear Ria and his mother in the kitchen, and he wished he could, just once, wave a magic wand and strike the pair of them dumb.

Five minutes later, his mother and his wife were standing in front of him, demanding that he keep his promise.