Never Go Back

by Jessie Keane

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

THE CARTER WOMEN DON'T FOLLOW THE RULES: THEY MAKE THEM.

The brilliant new gangland thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of DIAMOND.

Gangster Max Carter and his ex-wife Annie Carter are leading separate lives in separate countries: past hurts and broken promises cannot be resolved. But then a summons to Majorca and a tragic death makes Max question all that has happened to him over many years.

He had two brothers - both are now dead. His closest friend has been found hanging from a London bridge. As the police wrestle with a seemingly unsolvable case, Max is forced to revisit his painful past to find answers to a mystery that seems to make no sense at all. Who is targeting his family and why?

Annie Carter is at a crossroads in life. She has a luxurious lifestyle but no one to share it with, and Max clearly thinks she is in danger too. Her daughter, Layla, has left her mafia lover Alberto Barolli and is back in London, stumbling into the police investigation and making waves. You should never go back, so the old saying goes. But then, the Carter women don't follow the rules, they make them.

And when the truth of what's been happening is finally revealed, will the Carter family stand together - or will it finish them for good?

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: February 2, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

It started with a kiss . . .

Well, not exactly. More a look of passionate hunger, when I dreamed up an imaginary hot-headed 1960’s East End of London girl (Annie Bailey) who had a massive crush on local up-and-coming gangster Max Carter. Straight away, I understood Annie’s feelings when Max ended up engaged to her goody-two-shoes sister Ruthie, I understood how badly Annie behaved and how cataclysmic that ‘crush’ became when she was perched between one rival gang (Max’s) and another (the Delaneys).

Reader, I couldn’t get the thing down on paper fast enough! I rattled it off in no time, forgot to number the pages, shivered in my shoes at my own audacity while I stood in the Post Office queue and sent it off to six agents.

I waited.

I shivered a bit more, because I was living in a council flat and couldn’t afford to run the heating. I’d typed the whole of Dirty Game while wearing an overcoat and using a monitor lent to me by a kind neighbour because I couldn’t afford to buy a new one when my own packed up. I was told by well-meaning people that I should Get A Proper Job. Seriously! When I knew I was holding this story, this fabulous story of conflict and hate and desire, in my hands and that someone had to put it into print.

Well, someone did. Also, someone paid me a six-figure sum for Dirty Game plus two more Annie books – Black Widow and Scarlet Women.

So, my writing career began.

The truth was, I’d always wanted to be a writer. As a child I’d scribbled down stories, or told stories in needlework class, or put on puppet shows I’d scripted. All through my teenage years I’d written westerns and adventures and sci-fi pieces. All through my twenties I’d written romantic comedies. I’d even tried to get a few of those published, only to fall at the last hurdle. One exasperated agent said to me when I’d pestered him once too often: ‘Why don’t you write straight crime? Why fiddle around trying to be funny?’

So, straight crime it was. And finally, miraculously, I found my writing voice and Annie Bailey sauntered into my head and stopped there. Seven books about her followed, and three about another very gutsy heroine Ruby Darke, and seven stand-alone novels too. Then my editor pointed out to me that it’s 15 years since that very first Annie book Dirty Game was published. She’s right! I wish I knew where all that time’s gone, but I have to say, it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve bought a house, slogged over the keyboard, sold a house, slogged a bit more, bought another house, moved, slogged on . . . you get the picture. Mostly, it’s been the perfect life for a homebody introvert who likes to just plod along at her own pace. I’ve been blessed with great helpers and fantastic fans. So thank you, one and all. Now I’ve got to get back to the keyboard,I sense another book coming . . .

Love

Jessie x

1

Queenie Carter and her sister had always despised one another.

‘She’s such a moaner,’ Queenie said about Nora.

‘She’s a bit of a tart,’ Nora sniffed, disapproving of Queenie’s liking for Bill Haley when he got up on stage with that ridiculous kiss-curl of his and belted out ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’.

Nora had married early, and her husband, a dock worker called Ted Dawkins, had very tidily dropped dead one night after exiting the docks, falling gracefully into the gutter not six months after their wedding. He left Nora a young widow, with a small sum that she took down to Brighton, to set up a bed and breakfast establishment and make a bit of money off the tourists.

Queenie was warm-hearted, bold, loud and loving – the polar opposite of her plain, prudish older sister. Queenie fell recklessly in love and married an East End boy, a Carter who, much to her eventual disappointment, did not drop dead but lived on – and on – lazy, feckless, useless son of a bitch that he was.

She named them all herself, her three boys, her beloved sons, because her ale-soaked liability of a husband was neither use nor ornament – and by the time he made his mind up about anything, she’d already made the decision and acted upon it. He lounged day after day in his chair, complaining about the government, drinking beer and doing a fabulous impression of fuck-all. Marriage was a huge disappointment to Queenie. She grew bitter and resentful and she quickly lost interest in the once-handsome man she’d wed back in her optimistic girlhood, when she’d still had hopes and dreams to cling to. Bit by bit, all her passion for the man drained away in the face of his apathy. But she had to have some focus, so as the years went by, all her attention was lavished upon her sons.

Queenie’s boys were her pride and joy. They were great boys, lovely boys, and she’d chew the head off anyone who said different. Her husband had at least managed three good things in his life – he’d given her delicate baby Edward, and Jonjo the rough-and-tumble middle son. And – best of all – there was the eldest, Max, the handsome one, the brightest too. Max was her favourite really, but you mustn’t show favouritism. She knew that, so she did her best to hide it. Two years between each of them, and although Queenie was skint for a great part of the time – the war was not long over and there was still rationing – she made sure her boys wanted for little. She often went hungry herself to achieve that.

Boys were always into mischief. They weren’t like girls. She’d wanted a girl of course – what mother did not? – but that hadn’t happened. So she had to content herself with her three boys, and yes, they were often getting into trouble – Max especially. First with him it was a flat refusal to be told what to do at school. Then he’d be skiving off, leading his little brothers on wild chases, and the school inspector would be round and they’d have to turn the radio off and all be quiet and hide until the fucker went away.

‘You little . . .’ Dad would say, hoisting himself out of his chair long enough to raise a threatening hand to his eldest.

‘You leave him alone!’ Queenie would snap as Max darted out of reach behind her, too quick to be caught by his slothful father.

So, Max was the leader, the young prince, the heir apparent. Lumpish, slow-thinking Jonjo trailed after him, and Edward – Eddie – tried to keep up, but couldn’t. Max was slight as a boy, not tall, not thick-set, but he had a commanding way about him. Jonjo was bigger, bulkier, but lacked Max’s brain. You could imagine Jonjo running to fat in his middle years; his sheer size meant that he found it easy to intimidate smaller, weaker boys – like Eddie, who was almost girlish in his fragility. Jonjo often mocked him for it.

‘We can’t all be the same,’ Queenie often said, pulling Eddie in for a cuddle. ‘Jonjo, go out and play with Max and stop pushing our Eddie in the nettles while you’re out there, all right? Or you’ll see the back of my hand and no bloody supper.’

For a long while, the three boys thought their mum might even be one of those peculiar vegetarian types, because they had meat to eat, but she never touched it. It was only later on, as they grew older, that they realised she was simply giving the best of the food to them and doing without herself.

So, they grew. Max left school early on and joined one of the East End gyms for the boxing.

‘He’s so bloody scrawny, he’ll get knocked to fuck,’ said his dad, laughing, relishing the idea of the pushy little sod getting a pasting.

But Max didn’t. He became stronger and he fought dirty. Queensbury rules? He laughed at the very idea. Slowly, the weedy boy with the thousand-yard stare grew muscular. And his dad gave up trying to take a swipe at him. Maybe Max wouldn’t strike back at his own father, but his dad wasn’t prepared to chance it. Sensing his wife’s preference for her eldest son, Max’s dad was often tempted to give the bolshie nipper a smack. But he suspected he might one of these fine days get knocked flat on his arse if he did, not only by Max himself but by Queenie too, who could be a right dragon when the mood was on her.

Jonjo joined the gym too, encouraged by Max’s example. Not little Eddie, though – it was all a bit too physical, too rough, for him.

Then one day Max came home and found Queenie weeping in the front room.

‘What is it, Mum?’ he asked.

Dad was gone. He’d packed a bag that morning and fucked off. Queenie wouldn’t miss him – Max knew that – but Dad had earned a bit on the Corona lorries sometimes and now they didn’t have even that small wage coming in. Queenie quickly got another job cleaning. That made three jobs she had on the go, so she could at least still put food on the table for her lads. But she was never there when they needed her. Jonjo and Eddie were dragging themselves up, more or less. And as the man of the house now, the head of the household, Max was making up his own rules as he went along.

The Carters were barely scratching a living, hiding from the rent man, buying stuff on tick and then struggling to pay for it. Max hated that. He hated his father for running out on them and making a bad situation even worse than it already was. He was determined that this wasn’t going to last. One way or another, he was going to break out of this downbeat endless struggle that made up their lives. He was going to be rich.

2

All through his growing up and into adulthood, Max felt the weight of the world upon his shoulders. He worried constantly about Mum. She wasn’t strong. He looked at her pale, tired face and drooping shoulders and felt under intense pressure, felt that he should, he must, do something to change their situation. He was forever thinking up new and inventive ways of bringing in cash, because he could see quite clearly that Queenie was just about working herself to death. She was in and out of the house at all hours with her cleaning jobs. He knew she was struggling and he was determined to help out.

Max knew that he didn’t have the application to turn pro as a boxer. He was altogether too bright and too wary of managers and promoters, too concerned about ending up punch-drunk and addled like so many did in that business. Jonjo might have given it a shot, if only he’d had the merest bit of self-discipline, which he did not. Boxing or crime – those were the only ways out of penury on the dirt-poor streets of the post-war East End, so Max decided that crime it was going to have to be.

Max and his old gang from schooldays still hung around together, loitering around the dance halls, getting into trouble. Steve Taylor had been working as a self-employed window cleaner. He even had his own round, he was sorted, but Max’s siren call was loud and it was lucrative, so Steve chucked that in and joined Max’s firm as a breaker. Tone Barton’s father earned good money around Bermondsey on the docks, and for a while it looked like Tone might follow his dad into that, because it paid well enough. Dock worker’s houses had fitted carpets, TVs and the latest radiograms – and every so often a crate of goods got damaged by being dropped onto the concrete unloading bay – usually deliberately – and so there was always a surfeit of marketable stuff to sell.

But Tone didn’t fancy that work and he could see the way things were going around London, dock work thinning out by the day. He liked – because of his dad’s comfy lifestyle – the luxury of having money on the hip. But more than that, he liked cars. He dreamed of being Stirling Moss one day. Fat chance, but he could dream. So when Max asked Tone if he wanted to join up as driver for the firm, and offered him a cut of any profits for the privilege, Tone jumped at it.

Sometimes the firm stole wages from shops and factories, using skeleton keys an old lag down The Grapes had sold to Max. The keys worked a treat, usually – hardly any of the businesses had alarms fitted.

‘Piece of piss,’ said Tone, parking a van he’d appropriated outside a hardware store.

Steve hopped out and went and tried a skeleton key in the shop lock. It didn’t work. Glancing left and right, he got out his matches and let the black smoke run over the key. Then he put it back in the lock, waggled it, drew it back out. Now he could see from the smoke’s outline where the thing was jamming. He went back to the van where Max and Jonjo were waiting, with Tone at the wheel.

‘No good?’ asked Max.

‘Don’t fit. Can’t get it in,’ said Steve.

‘Ought to stick some hair round it, you’d find the opening quick enough then,’ said Jonjo with a grin.

Max took the key and applied the file. ‘That should do it,’ he said, and handed it back to Steve.

Steve jumped down out of the van and went back to the shop door. This time, it worked. He nodded back at the van. Max and Jonjo piled out but Tone stayed put, with the motor running.

The three of them went inside the hardware shop. They moved around among the piles of screws, hammers, paint pots and saws, noting what was worth taking and intending to set off any hidden alarms. Then they went back outside, locked up and sat in the van again. Tone moved it down the road a safe distance, just on the remote possibility that the place was connected to the local nick. When the police failed to show up within half an hour, Max knew the coast was clear, and the place was theirs for the taking. That place – and many, many others.

An even easier game was the protection rackets, and Max got into that very early, setting up fights in clubs all around the city and then coming in with his tasty mates after the event with offers of coverage, for a price. Mostly the owners jumped at the chance, not realising they’d been set up, so Max started earning better. Apart from getting established in the protection business, he was also getting to be an expert thief.

He looted Dorothy Perkins one day, nabbing a fistful of fivers from inside the cashier’s box and legging it out to the door to where his mate Tone was waiting behind the wheel of an old Armstrong Siddeley car. That worked out fine, but Max didn’t like the risk and he didn’t attempt it again. You could only do so many sudden little jobs like that, then sooner or later the Bill were going to be aware and then they’d grab you and there’d be a three-person cell in Wandsworth with your name on it. And there was no way Max was ever going to prison.

3

‘Gawd! She looks like him, don’t she?’

While the teenage Max Carter was busy out on the rob, Auntie Maureen, Connie Bailey’s sister, was leaning over Annie Bailey’s cradle and looking disapproving.

Annie was a dark-haired, red-faced little scrap, newly born, who bawled the place down night and day. Annie heard the same thing said about her when she was five years old, and ten, and fifteen. Somehow, she had committed the crime of the century by the simple act of arriving on earth looking like her own father.

Connie, Annie’s mother, had another daughter too. Ruthie was two years older than Annie, and a sweeter, more obedient child altogether. Ruthie played quietly with her toys, Ruthie studied at school, Ruthie toed the line. Ruthie was pale, mousy-haired, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Annie was Technicolor while Ruthie was black and white. The more cuffs around the ear Annie got for being disobedient, the more she misbehaved. She didn’t care. Dad called her his little princess and she was happy. So what if Mum hated her?

But then Dad left.

‘You are just like your father!’ Connie would rage at her youngest daughter.

After Dad’s departure, Annie learned to keep well out of Connie’s way.

‘She don’t mean it,’ Ruthie would whisper to her in the night. ‘Not really.’

But Annie thought that Connie did mean it. When she wasn’t drinking and cursing her husband for having it away on his toes, she was taking a swipe at Annie over just about anything, because – Annie could never be allowed to forget – she looked like her father, and that, in the Bailey household, was unforgivable.

‘She’s the dead spit of him, that girl,’ Auntie Maureen would hiss. ‘Ain’t she? Got that look in her eye like she don’t give a damn for nothing.’

Annie grew up and became used to the fact that even the sight of her seemed to aggravate her mother.

‘Maybe ease up on the drink,’ Maureen said to Connie.

Drunk or sober, Connie would always take one look at Annie, see her missing husband staring back at her, and hit the roof.

So Annie grew a hard shell around her heart.

She’d loved her dad and he’d abandoned her. Maybe all the men in her future life would be nothing but a search for that missing father figure, the beloved Daddy who’d run out on her. She hated her mother and was despised in return. So what? She would cope. She grew into a beauty, eclipsing poor little goody-two-shoes Ruthie. And she grew up hard. She had to.

4

For Max, there was always anxiety over Queenie. He didn’t like his mum working so hard, and he was earning good now, coining it. He told her that she needn’t bother anymore.

‘I’m a working woman, darlin’,’ she told him. ‘I like to keep busy.’

Then one of her friends who worked down The Grapes was off sick, and the landlord said she’d suggested Queenie for a stand-in. So now – as well as the cleaning stuff during the day – she’d got this new evening job too, as a barmaid. For that, she had to dress up – ‘make herself look shipshape’, she said, laughing about it, trying to make light of it, while Max gritted his teeth and got into ever more dodgy stuff, more lucrative stuff, so that he could say to her, ‘You can stop all this, Mum. We’ve got enough to keep us going now. Fuck the cleaning and fuck the bar work too.’

But Queenie wouldn’t have it. She was a strong-willed woman and she relished a measure of independence. God knew, married to their father, she’d had little enough of that. Now, she was enjoying life. Loving it.

Despite Max’s best efforts, there still never seemed to be quite enough cash coming in. Maybe someday soon, there would be. But not yet. So he carried on trying everything he could to alter the family situation, and Queenie carried on cleaning and going out to her job down The Grapes, first just evenings and then lunchtimes too. She’d be all dolled up, her hair in a fancy chignon, her tea dress tight around her waist, hugging her curves. She looked damned good for a woman with grown-up kids, and she knew it. She had a swagger about her and a mouth like the Mersey tunnel. Sometimes the Bill came round with questions about things ‘her’ boys had been up to, but she always saw them off with shrieks and yells of outrage.

‘My boys are good boys!’ she’d roar. ‘They work hard and all they get off you lot is ruddy persecution!’

Queenie frightened the younger lawmen to bits. They always slunk away, defeated by the sheer scale of her verbal assaults. The older ones knew better. They chased Jonjo all the way back home one day, and out the backyard and through the gate. Queenie faced them down with a yard brush and a scowl of temper and saw them off.

‘No wonder her husband ran for the hills,’ the Bill muttered among themselves. ‘Poor bastard, I’d run too from that loud-mouthed bitch.’

Not able to afford stockings, instead she painted lines up the backs of her legs with gravy browning, as she had done in the war, before slipping on her one good pair of high-heeled shoes, snatching up her handbag and going out the door to the barmaid job she seemed – much to Max’s annoyance – to love.

She’d never dressed like that when Dad was here.

‘You’re overdoing it, I reckon,’ said Max, uneasy. He didn’t like her working in The Grapes. He didn’t like the punters down the pub eyeing up his mother, flirting with her, the lairy bastards. It cheapened her. She flirted right back at them, and Max started to wonder what the hell she was up to, acting the tart like that.

‘Don’t be silly, son. Got to get earning, ain’t we?’ She’d smile, dabbing on red lippy and blusher before leaving Eddie and Jonjo in his care, who invariably started fighting. Half the time there was a battle on Max’s hands, just keeping Jonjo off Eddie’s back. Then one day Jonjo found Eddie mucking about with Queenie’s make-up, dabbing on lippy like he’d seen their mum do.

‘You bent little fucker!’ roared Jonjo and started laying into Eddie.

Max heard the commotion from downstairs and ran up, two at a time. He pulled Jonjo off, pushed him away.

‘Leave him be,’ Max ordered. ‘He’s not hurting you, is he?’

Jonjo was panting, his face contorted with rage. He pointed at Eddie and Eddie flinched back. One of Jonjo’s punches had smeared Queenie’s lipstick all over Eddie’s face. He looked both comical and pathetic, like a clown. ‘It’s fucking disgusting. He ain’t a girl.’

‘Leave it. I mean it.’

Max had more important things on his mind. He went in The Grapes and saw the men chatting his mother up and it made him want to puke. This was his mother. But she was doing it for the money, and she was obstinate. She’d never give the job up, and so he had to shift himself, bring in more and more loot – and then perhaps she’d stop and maybe just be content even with a couple of little cleaning jobs. Or stop altogether, just let him support her? That was what he wanted, ideally. It irritated him that her mate who’d been off sick didn’t come back to the job at The Grapes, which meant that Queenie, to her obvious delight, stayed on.

Max started shifting dodgy motors around the manor and sold as much stolen gear as he could lay his hands on, like the big load of nicked police shoes that he offloaded in Smithfield meat market. He had a lorry load of fashion goods that had been bound for West End shops that his gang sold off all around the manor, and a load of furniture that had come up from Southampton docks. He grafted longer hours than anybody, thieving and selling, sometimes buying cheap and selling dear, covering the clubs, making whatever he could however he could, to build up a pot of money so that Mum could see sense, that she should stop the pub work and the cleaning stuff too, and relax a bit more.

Soon – much to his relief – he was able to tell Queenie he had enough to keep the Carters; she didn’t have to graft like she did. They argued about it and Queenie relented. She gave up her cleaning jobs, but said she enjoyed the bar work – and there was no way she was stopping doing that, not to please him, not to please anybody.

‘Now let’s not fall out over this,’ Queenie said to her eldest son.

‘We won’t,’ said Max.

‘Yes we bloody will. Unless you fucking well drop it, my lad.’

‘All right, all right! I won’t mention it again,’ said Max, who could smell trouble long before it ever materialised. How did it reflect on him and on the business he was steadily building up, his mother being a barmaid? It irked him, tormented him.

‘You swear?’ said Queenie.

‘I swear it. All right?’

‘Good!’

Then one day what Max had feared would happen actually did. Queenie brought home one of the punters, Clive Jensen. He was a flashy salesman from up north who – to Max’s intense annoyance – made her giggle and flirt like he had never seen her do with Dad.

Max and his brothers had been used to seeing Queenie with her mouth turned down, wearing drab unflattering gear, cursing Dad as the useless waster sat there in his armchair, reading the Racing Post and smoking roll-ups. But this was a new Queenie – pouting, laughing, enticing her new beau.

‘It’s fucking sickening to see,’ said Jonjo.

Max agreed. He was seriously pissed off. He had been working his arse off to allow Mum to stop with all this, to concentrate instead on being a steady, reliable housewife, a mother to her adult sons, one of whom had a strong and fast-growing reputation in the area to think about. Clive took to lounging around the Carter house, staying for his tea, getting in Max’s face, smirking at him. But if Max poked Clive on the jaw – as he longed to do – he could see that Queenie was only going to come roaring to the bastard’s defence. So he left it, hoping – praying – that it would fizzle out.

And eventually it did, and Max was thankful. Not that Queenie was. Suddenly, Clive was gone – and Queenie was moping about the place, drinking too much gin, crying in the night when she thought they couldn’t hear her; but they could. Without Max’s prompting and much to his astonishment, she then gave up the job at The Grapes and sat about looking dismal. Gone were the flattering clothes, the giggly demeanour. Now she wore big shape-covering items that did nothing to flatter her. She tied her hair back in a rough bun and forgot about make-up. This was worse than the Queenie of old, the bored and put-upon wife she’d been when Dad was here.

Max jollied her along, took her out to dinner at the swanky places he could now afford. But nothing seemed to snap Queenie out of her mood. She was depressed. She drank far too much. She fell asleep on the sofa. The mum they’d always known had disappeared, and it was a worry for them all – but mostly for Max.

5

Queenie knew she’d been a fool. Having been used to a married life full of nothing but dull misery, she could admit – only to herself, mind – that she had gone a little wild when all that was over. Suddenly, free of matrimonial tedium, she felt like a woman again and it was wonderful; men paid her attention. Most particularly one man: Clive. The only man – ever – who could make a purring pussycat out of the snarling tigress she knew herself to be. He’d shown up in The Grapes, suited and booted, handsome, merry-eyed, a commercial traveller with a seductive line in patter. Clive really could charm the birds from the trees; to her own surprise, he charmed Queenie.

Like one of those old snake oil sellers in the western movies, he laid out his wares – encyclopaedias, silk stockings, ornaments, brushes – and the housewives flocked around, interested, blushing at his words as he teased them, lured them into spending their husbands’ hard-earned money, which many of them could ill afford, on his goods. Queenie knew that Max didn’t like Clive hanging around, but for God’s sake! Didn’t she deserve a little bit of pleasure, after all the dross she’d been through in her life?

Clive might have had a way with all the ladies, but to Queenie’s surprise he seemed to single her out for his special attention. He treated her nicely, and she wasn’t used to that. She found herself smiling more. Whistling on her way in to do her shift. She wasn’t in love – she was getting a bit too long in the tooth for that stuff – but there was a powerful physical pull from Clive, like magnetism. When Queenie listened to Al Martino crooning out ‘Here in My Heart’ on the pub radio, she always thought of Clive.

They kissed a few times, out in the tiny beer garden at the back of the pub, the kisses becoming increasingly desperate. If people came out there, they had to spring apart, they had to be discreet. She was still a married woman even if her husband had cleared off. She was still the mother of Max Carter who was a rising star in the East End and she had to consider that, be careful never to cause Max embarrassment.

‘You know I want you, don’t you,’ Clive whispered in her ear. ‘I want you so much.’

‘Yes, but we have to be careful,’ Queenie told him. She didn’t feel she wanted to be careful, but she had to be.

‘Please,’ he moaned against her throat, causing ripples of sensation to shimmer up her spine. ‘Please, honey, we must.’

And then one night she weakened and – to her shame – he coaxed her out into the alley behind the pub. Suddenly he was kissing her, over and over, rendering her weak, blissful, uncaring. His hands were all over her and she wanted that; she wanted it so much that when he pulled down her underwear and freed his manhood from his trousers she could only raise the thinnest of objections.

‘Clive, no . . .’ she groaned, but it was too late, he was frantic and so was she; she felt him searching, groping, finding her and then heard his gasp of triumph as he pushed himself eagerly into her waiting flesh. She was ready for him, more than ready. He did it to her right there in the dark, holding her up against the wall, arousin. . .