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Synopsis
Get ready to meet the toughest, deadliest, and most calculated players in Manchester's murky underworld...
HE'S GOT EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL.
You don't know Craig Malton. Hopefully you never will - until you need his help, help that the police can't give you. As well as running a respectable security firm for Manchester's elite clubs and bars, Malton moves in dangerous circles amongst the city's most cutthroat criminals. Nothing happens in his beloved city without his say so.
SHE'S GOING TO TURN IT ALL UPSIDE DOWN.
Keisha Bistacchi has never forgiven Malton for walking out on her all those years ago, and has been keeping a close eye ever since. When her husband is brutally kidnapped, she begs Malton to find him. But Keisha is no damsel in distress, she's as tough as the best of them, and with a violent gang war on the horizon, she'll do whatever it takes to get out alive.
WHO WILL BE THE ONE CALLING THE SHOTS?
An action-packed, knuckle-whitening first book in an explosive new gangland series - perfect for fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers.
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Release date: June 2, 2022
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 400
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
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Call the Shots
Sam Tobin
Sometimes Dutch courage isn’t enough. Sometimes you just need some good old-fashioned drugs. Drugs like the ones that had been promised to the man who was currently lurking across the street, keeping watch over a large Victorian mansion. It was two in the morning and parked up between street lights, under the shadow of a giant tree, he was as good as invisible.
He didn’t need to be able to see to handle the shotgun cradled in his lap. He held it tightly with a finger curved around the trigger, his other hand supporting the sawn-off barrels. It had been loaded in front of him before being handed over, along with explicit instructions as to what he was to do with it. On the seat beside him was a piece of paper. Written on it in large letters and underlined twice was the address of the house across the street.
The man knew who lived there. That was why he was finding it so hard to work up the courage to get out of the car and follow the orders he’d been given.
It was hard to imagine he could be scared of anyone. The gunman was a giant. Well over six feet tall, his body folded awkwardly into the driver’s seat, forcing him to stoop over the steering wheel to avoid bumping his head on the ceiling. At one time his enormous frame had been packed with dense muscle, but now his skin hung loose and sallow. It meant the tattoos that littered his body were all but indecipherable. Strange, creased-up markings that belonged to the man he once was.
Only the tattoo across his neck was still legible. In large, ornate letters it simply said ‘VICIOUS’.
If someone had been sat in the car with him they would have been struck by his stale smell. A deeply unclean stench of sweat, urine and neglect. But he was alone and over the past decade of his addiction, he’d long stopped worrying about trivial things like personal hygiene or the opinion of others.
He licked his lips. They were dry. He could feel the greasy sweat starting to run down his back. He remembered the bag he’d been shown before he left on his errand. A small plastic bag, plump with an off-white powder. Ten years of drug use told him that this wasn’t any old heroin. This was the good stuff. The stuff that you took when you were starting out. When you cared what was in it. Long before you found yourself cooking your drugs up with filthy canal water and shooting up in a bush beside the towpath.
The thought of that plump bag got him out of the car and on his feet. He pulled his hoodie up over his head, all the while imagining the gently sour smell of well-processed heroin. As he crossed the road and walked towards the driveway he could almost taste it.
For just a moment he stepped from the shadows and into the light. The sodium glare his own personal spotlight. He froze and took in his target. A grand double-fronted house with two large bay windows either side of an immaculately painted, sage green door. A well-kept front garden framed the building on either side with climbing plants and neatly tended shrubs. Money and taste. But most of all money.
Every house on this street was easily over a million. The casual wealth of Manchester’s upper middle class – all four-car driveways, immaculate pointing and a depth of privilege totally alien to the man stood in the street holding a loaded shotgun.
He could hear himself breathing. It was a low, hollow sound. As if the mere act of walking the two dozen steps to the front door would be the end of him. Whatever strength he had once possessed was long gone.
His coarse, echoing breaths became louder as he approached the house. His world narrowed to the handful of paces left between him and his target.
Raising the shotgun, he briefly thought how small and light it felt in his huge hands, before he aimed it at the front door and pulled the trigger.
1
Craig Malton hadn’t got much sleep in the last forty-eight hours. Not since someone had emptied a shotgun into his front door a couple of nights ago.
Malton had immediately recognised the sound. The distinctively dense ring of a shotgun blast. If he’d been alone in the house he’d have been downstairs, out the door and running towards the sound of gunfire. But he wasn’t alone.
Instead of giving chase he had forced himself to hang back. To reassure the woman whom he shared the house with that this was nothing out of the ordinary. He had kept his head as he stopped her from calling the police before he went outside to inspect the damage.
You wouldn’t know to look at it but Malton’s front door was made from three-inch-thick, reinforced steel plate. It could withstand a police battering ram, small arms fire and even a grenade. But thanks to the considerable sum of money Malton had spent getting it custom-made, it didn’t look at all out of place on the Victorian mansion sat on the rather nice street in Didsbury, South Manchester, which he called home.
Malton was a lot like that front door. Growing up in Moss Side, he had known the police to raid his house in the early hours. He’d ducked behind parked cars as rival gang members loosed off wild shots. Once he’d even had a grenade thrown through the window of his foster home. In all that time he’d never backed down. And now thanks to a decade of hard work and several hundred thousand pounds in the bank, he very nearly belonged somewhere as affluently genteel as Didsbury.
But all it took was one shotgun blast to blow away that expensively won façade, revealing to the world the ugly, brutal steel beneath.
Stood on his driveway that night he had fielded questions from terrified neighbours. Malton knew that people wanted to feel safe; they needed to be reassured. And so when he told them it was an attempted break-in they chose to believe him. When he said the damage to his front door must have been from a sledgehammer or some other blunt object they decided to go along with it. Malton’s answers were far more palatable than the truth – someone from Malton’s past had returned with a message delivered from the twin barrels of a shotgun.
Malton didn’t need his neighbours to believe him. He just needed them to want to believe.
The CCTV on his home had captured a tall, masked man firing at his front door. It wasn’t much but it was a start. For the past two nights Malton had been making enquiries. Knocking on doors and bashing heads. So far he was none the wiser as to the masked man’s identity, but until he got his answers there was still a business to run. His business: Malton Security.
From doormen to debt collection, Malton Security were experts in walking the fine line between lawful thuggery and illegal brutality. If you had a problem that could only be solved with the legally sanctioned threat of violence, Malton Security were more than happy to help.
Right now it was debt collection that saw him stood in the cluttered front room of a two-up, two-down in Hulme, Moss Side’s fractionally more respectable neighbour. There was no need for Malton to be doing a scruffy little job like this. A simple repo. But having drawn a blank hunting down the gunman, Malton felt the need to get back to basics. The day-to-day concerns of Malton Security. Concerns like the man stood in front of him holding a knife to the throat of his terrified girlfriend.
From the job paperwork, Malton knew the woman with the knife at her throat was Susannah Harper. He also knew she lived with her two sons. One sixteen years old, the other twelve. Looking at his watch, he saw it was 3.15. Home time. Malton didn’t have long. He didn’t really care who the man with the knife was. Malton was here to do a job and when Malton set his mind to something it got done.
‘You’re not taking my stuff!’ shouted the man with the knife, spit flying from his mouth.
Malton was standing close enough to smell the stale weed on his breath. He raised a giant hand for calm. He knew the effect his appearance had on people. Especially white people. Malton was mixed race. Short but heavyset. His head was shaved bald and he had a deep scar running from his right eye down his cheek. While the black community had their own opinion on whether or not Malton was one of their own, as far as white people were concerned he was as black as they come. There was no disguising it. Not even with the expensive wax jacket he wore beneath the hi-vis vest bearing the logo ‘Malton Security’. Not even with the custom dental work that had fixed the decades’ worth of violence. Not even with enough money to buy a detached house in Didsbury. Malton saw how his white neighbours looked at him. Even more so since two nights ago when the disturbance at two in the morning confirmed all their worst fears about the black man living next door.
‘He’s got a knife,’ said the other man in the room who was also wearing a company hi-vis vest, Dean Carter. Malton had almost forgotten he was there. Dean was a brand-new hire. Eighteen years old and fresh out of school. He was the exact opposite of Malton – pale white and visibly shaking. Standing at least half a foot taller than Malton, Dean had one of those unfortunate faces that refuses to grow into adulthood. Malton doubted he’d even started shaving.
This was Dean’s first day working for Malton Security. Malton liked to try new recruits out in a variety of positions. Getting a feel for what area of expertise would best suit them. Whether it be door work or security patrols, repo jobs or even some of the heavier, less reputable activities that Malton Security was often called on to provide.
From what Malton had seen so far, whatever Dean’s area of expertise was, it didn’t lie within Malton Security.
Malton took charge. ‘Your missus here owes over a grand. That means as a licensed bailiff I can collect any property I find on the premises. Unless of course you can prove it’s yours? Sorry, pal, I didn’t get your name?’ His voice was deep and oddly neutral but shot through with the unmistakable nasal peaks and glottal stops of a born-and-bred Mancunian.
‘You’re not getting anything. This is my stuff,’ shouted the man, pressing the blade harder against Susannah’s flesh.
Malton saw Susannah’s eyes flash up at the clock on the wall over the fireplace: 3.20. He could tell she was thinking the exact same thing he was.
‘I’m calling the police,’ said Dean, getting out his phone.
Malton snatched the phone out of Dean’s hand. ‘No one’s calling the police,’ he said. He turned and glared at the younger man. He was not making a great first impression.
‘I’ll cut her throat,’ hissed the man holding the knife.
‘Go on then,’ said Malton.
‘Kyle, please!’ cried Susannah.
‘Kyle?’ said Malton, giving the slightest hint of a smile. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You got a second name Kyle? One that I could check against receipts. You got receipts right?’
Malton could see the man slowly begin to realise that the situation was slipping away from him. But before either of them could make their next move they both heard the sound of someone coming in the front door. Malton saw Susannah’s eyes move from the clock on the wall to the living room door. A child’s voice came from the hallway, ‘What’s for tea, Mum?’
Susannah looked to Malton. Pleading. ‘Please don’t,’ she begged, as if it was Malton with a knife to her throat.
A young boy in a grubby school uniform walked into the room and froze. Malton guessed he must be the younger child. He was mixed race, same as Malton. Kyle was white. He wasn’t the boy’s father. Malton could use that.
The sight of his mother with a knife to her throat seemed not to faze the boy. He looked older than his twelve years. Getting to an age where he knew exactly what kind of man Kyle was but still too young to do anything about it. Malton turned to him.
‘What’s your name, son?’
The boy looked Malton up and down with an expression that Malton instantly recognised. A hardness. ‘Yaya,’ he said.
Malton turned to Dean. ‘Take Yaya into the kitchen and make his tea while I have a word with his mum and his . . . dad.’
‘He’s not my dad,’ said Yaya, glaring at the man.
Exactly the reaction Malton had hoped for. Yaya’s casual indifference to Kyle’s fate was far more effective than any threat Malton could make.
Dean took a last look at the scene before putting his arm around Yaya and hastily leading him out of the room. Malton closed the door behind them. Now that Dean had gone he could finally get on with the real work.
‘Don’t think cos the kid’s here I won’t do it,’ said Kyle. But now there was something different in his voice. A touch of fear creeping in.
Malton took in the front room. A large, new television. A couple of shabby sofas. A games console and a tablet. Garbage and old clothes thrown around. It was a mess. On the far wall a bookcase overflowed with everything except books. He decided on a course of action. Malton crossed to the bookcase and grabbed it with both hands.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Kyle.
With seemingly no effort at all, Malton pulled the bookcase down, showering its contents all over the floor with a loud crash. The bookcase landed on one of the sofas and lay blocking the door to the hallway. No way in. No way out.
Kyle took the knife away from Susannah’s throat and pointed it at Malton. Malton had been in more than enough fights to recognise a bully. The kind of man who was used to picking on someone smaller and weaker than himself. The kind of man who in those rare situations when he had no choice but to fight a bigger man would always put his trust in a weapon. Kyle was making Malton’s job easy.
Malton reached into his waxed jacket and pulled out a polished steel hatchet. The hatchet was a little smaller than a hammer and had a viciously sharp edge that glinted under the room lights. It looked deadly. Malton took a step towards Kyle.
‘I’m here to collect one thousand, one hundred and eighteen pounds.’ He looked around the room. ‘I estimate the value of everything in this room to be approximately two thousand pounds.’
‘I’ll kill her,’ Kyle repeated. Malton kept his eyes on Kyle as he raised the hatchet above his head.
Susannah got ready to die. If she wasn’t accidentally hit by the hatchet, Kyle would surely slit her throat as his final, malicious act. She closed her eyes and waited. Three . . . two . . . one . . . SMASH!
She opened her eyes to see Malton hacking the television to pieces. She and Kyle watched in horror and confusion as Malton rained down blow after devastating blow until the television was nothing but broken plastic and shattered electronics.
Malton straightened himself up. ‘Now I estimate the value of everything in this room to be one thousand two hundred pounds.’ He took another step forward.
Susannah felt a sudden warmth down the back of her legs. Kyle had pissed himself.
***
Twenty minutes later Malton sat on the pavement outside the house watching while Dean loaded the van. It was the lad’s first day on the job and from what Malton had seen it could well be his last. Yaya sat next to Malton on the kerb, fiddling with his laces, head down.
As far as Malton knew, he didn’t have kids. He intended to keep it that way. Kids made you weak. A weakness he’d not been above exploiting on occasion.
But sat on the kerb with Yaya, Malton felt something approaching a sense of duty towards the boy. He’d recognised that look in Yaya’s eyes. It was the look of a kid getting ready to do what he had to do to survive. A look Malton knew far too well.
He tried to think of something comforting to say to the boy. But the words eluded him. He was built for threats and innuendo. Coercion and manipulation. In his line of work there was rarely the call for sympathy.
‘You know back there, that was just grown-ups talking,’ said Malton, finally breaking the silence.
Yaya looked up at him and said nothing.
‘Where’s your dad?’
‘Dunno,’ said Yaya, doing his best to look like that didn’t bother him.
‘Does Kyle hurt your mum?’
‘What do you care? You’re not my dad.’
‘No. I’m not,’ said Malton. For just a moment he wondered what it would feel like if he was. The thought scared him.
‘When I’m bigger I’m going to protect her,’ said Yaya.
Malton was suddenly very aware of the weight of the hatchet, resting in the pocket of his waxed jacket.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Malton and, reaching into his jacket, he pulled out a business card and handed it to Yaya. ‘You got a phone?’
‘Of course I got a phone,’ he replied indignantly, taking the card.
‘Good lad. Kyle ever touches you or your mum, give that number a ring.’
‘And what?’
They both knew what. But the boy wanted Malton to say it and he felt it was the least he could do in the circumstances.
‘And I come round, break both his legs and put some fucking horrible dogs on him until what’s left can’t hurt anyone.’
Yaya smiled. ‘Is this your job?’ he said.
‘One of them.’
2
Claire Minshall squeezed her husband Marcus’s hand as tight as she dared. Not so tight that Marcus would know Claire was frightened. But tight enough to give her the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other as they walked away from the hospital.
It had been twenty minutes since the specialist had given her the diagnosis. Twenty minutes of the world no longer making sense. The sounds of cars passing on the road seemed like distant thunder. The smell of rain-wet pavement came to her, impossibly strong. She could feel the muscles in her throat tight and tense, holding back the tears.
Marcus could feel Claire gripping his hand tight and he was glad of it. He was the husband. He was the healthy one. He was the one who would talk at her funeral. Receive the condolences. Go on to raise their daughter and walk her down the aisle. He was the one who would live through this.
His wife was dying and yet all he dared to think about was the time when she would be gone. To even attempt to imagine what lay before that was too horrific. Months, maybe a year if they were ‘lucky’. Watching Claire slowly slip further and further away. Marcus wished it was him dying. To have the permission to give in to the awfulness of it all. But Marcus was the husband. He was the survivor. His job now was to be strong for their daughter.
They’d both dressed up for the appointment. An unspoken ceremony. Claire in a smart grey dress and the black heels she’d bought for a winter wedding the year before. Marcus in the suit he wore for going out. The one he’d paid a tailor to line with a Manchester United team shirt.
Claire wanted to let the doctors know that they were good people. People worth saving.
There were another couple of hours before their sixteen-year-old daughter Jessica would be back from school. Two hours before they had to break the news to her and end everything.
Marcus felt the silence. He felt Claire’s hand. He stopped and turned to face his wife, his expression like hers – hardly containing the grief. Seeing his pain mirrored back at him he heard himself laugh. This was ludicrous. The drama of it. This was television. A film. Other people’s lives. Not theirs. Claire was laughing now too, relieved to see Marcus felt the same fearful confusion. Marcus threw his arms around his wife and held her. They both knew that once they let go it was real. Within the year Claire would be dead from the tumour growing in her brain.
Claire could hear Marcus start to cry. They clutched each other in the middle of the pavement. All dressed up with nowhere to go.
‘I’m sorry . . . I’m so, so sorry,’ Marcus muttered. Claire could hear the terror in his voice. There and then she made her decision. She would die. That was out of her control. But she would die with her head held high. She would make it easy on her loved ones. Give them their grief but not force them to carry hers. She would do the only thing she could do now – endure.
Marcus felt Claire’s hand on his back. He hated himself. He had one job: to be strong. And here he was weeping like a child. He broke away from Claire and wiped his face on the back of his sleeve.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, half smiling.
In the distance someone was frantically hammering a car horn.
‘We’ll get through this together,’ promised Claire. ‘It’ll be OK. Jessica has her dad.’ The words opened her up. The tears she didn’t want to shed started to come. Marcus was every bit as handsome as when Claire met him all those years ago at university. Back when the future seemed like an endless open road. The square jaw, the little cleft in his chin. He looked almost comically macho. A cartoon tough guy she had thought at first, before she got to know the sweet, thoughtful man underneath.
As the emotion overwhelmed her, she didn’t hear someone screaming down the road.
‘I love you,’ were the last words out of Marcus’s mouth before he was launched from the pavement, flying up into the air. ‘Like a football’ is how Claire would describe it later to the police. Her dark purple overcoat billowed in the slipstream as a filthy, black car sped past her on the pavement, missing her by inches. She spun around in time to see the car slam back onto the road and keep on driving.
She turned back, her brain still trying to put the pieces together. Marcus wasn’t there. She felt rain on her face. She put her fingers up to touch it and they came back red. It was blood. All over her hands and her dress. Then she saw Marcus. Lying 20 metres down the road. Folded up under himself, one leg facing the wrong way, his arms splayed like a limp puppet. An ugly red smear leading up to where he finally came to rest.
Then Claire stopped enduring. She started to scream and didn’t stop.
3
The silence on the drive back to Malton Security had made Malton’s displeasure with Dean plain. Back at the office in Cheetham Hill, just north of the city centre, Malton left Dean to log Susannah Harper’s meagre possessions into storage while he headed home for the night.
Malton drove the long way back to South Manchester. Heading north from Malton Security before peeling off to the west and making his way slowly anticlockwise around the edge of Manchester as he headed for home.
He avoided the ring road, preferring to weave his way through backstreets. From the nostalgic grandeur of Bury with its sprawling market, through the suburbs of Prestwich full of parks and synagogues and on to the overgrown terraced streets of Salford, whose population had somehow managed to avoid the last one hundred years of British history and remain a near-all-white monoculture.
Ten years of running Malton Security had seen Malton intricately map the underbelly of Manchester. Nowhere was clean. Nowhere was too rich or too respectable or too religious that they didn’t, from time to time, have need of someone like him. Someone who knew the city like a guilty accomplice. Someone who was trusted and feared and indulged.
Officially Malton Security could provide you all the muscle you needed. But if you needed more than muscle to solve your problem, and you were willing to pay – Craig Malton was your man.
There was nowhere in the city that was off limits to Malton. A combination of money and charm and reputation had seen to that. And he’d used that access to do things that no one else could.
Especially not the Greater Manchester Police.
Malton had tracked down a missing half tonne of cocaine for a sprawling family of hauliers in Beswick. He’d located the motorbike gang who’d smashed up an exclusive club in Hale, convinced them to pay for the damage and never set foot in the city again. When the body of the daughter of the biggest slumlord in Manchester turned up face-down and naked in the Manchester Ship Canal the police had closed the investigation after a year with no leads. Within a week, Malton had tracked down the young plasterer who’d met her on a night out and then on a whim, raped her, murdered her and dumped her body in the canal. Malton had walked onto the building site where he was working, led him away and left him tied up in the basement of a skyscraper that was being built by the man whose daughter he’d killed.
This past decade Malton had done all those things and hundreds more. He’d been whoever he needed to be to get the job done. And in all that time he’d been sure to keep each job separate. Every nasty, dirty thing he did for money he filed away neatly. Careful to make sure that nothing could ever come back to him. Until it now finally had.
The one clue he had, the CCTV of the gunman, had yielded next to nothing. His face was covered but one thing that was unmistakable was his height. The man was at least a foot taller than Malton if not more. It wasn’t much to go on but right now it was all he had.
As he drove, his mind retraced his steps over those last ten years, starting with the people who had most to gain by coming after him and then working his way down the list.
Gratitude, fear and a desire to keep Malton onside had made getting answers relatively easy for him in the past. But none of the answers he’d got thus far had been the one answer he was after – who had emptied a shotgun into his front door?
He pulled into the driveway of his house in Didsbury. The bespoke, armoured front door had already been replaced at great cost. The CCTV upgraded in the vain hope that the gunman might return. But it wasn’t enough.
Malton knew, the longer this attack went unanswered the weaker he looked. He dealt with thugs and gangsters. Killers and hardmen. He moved in a world of extreme violence where predators could smell out weakness. A place where vulnerability got you killed. Or worse.
The Manchester underworld had thrown down a challenge and unless Malton answered it and found the gunman, he knew that next time it wouldn’t just be his front door in the firing line.
The clock was ticking.
4
Keisha Bistacchi scrolled through the flood of images appearing on her WhatsApp group. She’d met the women at the exclusive city centre gym she’d joined a little over six months ago. The girls were on a night out in town. From the photos Keisha could see they were having cocktails. She should have been there with them, swapping stories of dermal fillers and shopping trips. Instead she was in a deserted car park on the edge of the Peak District, bored and shivering in her car as she watched her husband Paul beating the shit out of his younger brother Johnny.
Paul Bistacchi looked exactly like what he was: an East Manchester nightmare. Hands large enough to crush a man’s windpipe. A face like a clenched fist and a bald head that, day or night, hot or cold, was permanently covered in a thin sheen of sweat.
The beams from Keisha’s headlights illuminated a narrow strip of the darkness in which she could clearly see Paul kicking Johnny round the small car park like a bloody football. Johnny’s whimpers of pain tailed off into the night air and Keisha could see steam rising off Paul’s bald head and merging with his frozen breath.
Unlike Paul, Johnny was gorgeous. Model gorgeous. He stumbled through life getting by on a combination of his good looks and the fear the Bistacchi name invoked. But neither of those were a defence when it came to his older brother Paul.
From where she sat watching, Keisha could see Johnny desperately covering his face while Paul’s blows hammered down on him. Vanity overriding every other survival instinct. Keisha liked Johnny. He was every bit as much of a scumbag as Paul but unlike Paul he had a sweetness with it. A sweetness that he did his best to cover up with swagger and bravado.
Keisha wasn’t the only one watching. Standing nearby was the boy they’d picked up on their way out to the middle of nowhere. One of Johnny’s friends. He looked terrified. Next to him was the black car Johnny had stolen.
Keisha turned off her phone and drummed her long, diamanté-studded nails on the steering wheel. She glanced at her reflection in the rear-view mirror: the sunglasses she wore – even at night – covering the top half of her face, the rest taken up with an elegant, wide nose and a mouth permanently on the verge of breaking into a dazzling smile. Thanks to her flawless brown skin she easily looked ten years younger than she was. Younger still with a full face of make-up. Not all that different to how she looked thirty years ago.
Three decades was a long time. Keisha had almost missed the anniversary when it had rolled round a couple of months ago. It was a date that only she knew. Something just for her. A date that meant nothing to the rest of the world but to Keisha marked the moment that something inside her had hardened, forever changed.
The next thirty years had made her the woman she was today. It saw her spread her wings and become an integral part of the Manchester underworld. A friend, a fixer, a confidante. Keisha made sure that there was nowhere she wasn’t welcome. No one who wouldn’t bring her into their confidence. Eventually she’d found her way to Paul Bistacchi and slowly worked her. . .
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