Roger Jon Ellory - A quiet vendetta

R. J. ELLORY

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Orion
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

Copyright R. J. Ellory Publications Ltd 2005

The moral right of R.J. Ellory to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Extract from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book II, by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems 1939-1962, Volume II 1944 William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Limited.

All the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 4091 2430 6

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martins Lane
London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

www.orionbooks.co.uk

R.J. Ellory is the bestselling author of numerous novels. A Quiet Belief in Angels, a Richard & Judy Book Club selection in 2008, was shortlisted for the Barry Award, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers Prize and was winner of the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide. R.J. Ellory currently lives in England.

www.rjellory.com

Praise for R. J. Ellory

A QUIET VENDETTA

With exquisite pace and perfect timing, R. J. Ellory has given us a piercing assessment of the nature of love, loyalty and obsessive revenge, not to mention a deep understanding of la cosa nostra Guardian

A sprawling masterpiece covering 50 years of the American dream gone sour... [A] striking novel that brings to mind the best of James Ellroy Good Book Guide

CANDLEMOTH

An ambitious first novel... incisive, often beautiful writing The Times

You know youre on to something from the opening line... compelling, insightful, moving and extremely powerful Sydney Morning Herald

GHOSTHEART

This compelling novel, with its shock dnouement, is both beautifully written and skilfully crafted and confirms Ellory as one of crime fictions new stars Sunday Telegraph

Genuinely heartbreaking... an extremely vivid, moving picture of the human condition, Ghostheart is a superb tale of tragedy and revenge Big Issue

CITY OF LIES

Ellory writes taut, muscular prose that at its best is almost poetic... City of Lies is a tense and pacy thriller taking the reader into a world of secrets, betrayal and revenge

Yorkshire Post

A gripping thriller with many twists and turns

Womans Weekly

A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS

A Quiet Belief in Angels is a beautiful and haunting book. This is a tour de force from R. J. Ellory Michael Connelly

This is compelling, unputdownable thriller writing of the very highest order Guardian

Once again R. J. Ellory shows off his special talents... it confirms his place in the top flight of crime writing

Sunday Telegraph

By R. J. Ellory

Candlemoth
Ghostheart
A Quiet Vendetta
City of Lies
A Quiet Belief in Angels

To all those at Orion: Malcolm Edwards, Peter Roche, Jane Wood, Gaby Young, Juliet Ewers, Helen Richardson, Dallas Manderson, Debbie Holmes, Kelly Falconer, Kate Mills, Sara OKeeffe, Genevieve Pegg, Susan Lamb, Susan Howe, Jo Carpenter, Andrew Taylor, Ian Diment, Mark Streatfeild, Michael Goff, Anthony Keates, Mark Stay, Jenny Page, Katherine West and Frances Wollen. As well to Mark Rusher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson; and to Robyn Karney, my own Thelma Schoonmaker the embodiment of patience and care.

To Jon Wood, editor and consigliere.

To my agent and friend, Euan Thorneycroft.

To Ali Karim at Shots Magazine and Steve Warne at CHC Books.

To Dave Griffiths at Creative Rights Digital Registry; the crew of BBC Radio WM; Maris Ross at Publishing News; The UK Crime Writers Association; Daniel, David and Thallia at Goldsboro Books; Richard Reynolds at Heffers in Cambridge and Paul Blezard at One Word Radio.

To Sgt Steve Miller, Metro-Dade Crime Laboratory Bureau, Miami, FLA, for staying after-hours to answer questions about body parts and the frailty of human beings.

To my brother, Guy.

To my wife of sixteen years, my son of eight.

I owe you all.

This is a work of fiction.

Irrespective of the fact that it is set against historical events and amidst people whose names you will recognize, it is nevertheless a work of fiction. Where actual events have been modified, or perhaps a sequence changed, this was done only to facilitate the telling of the story.

Many of the people herein are long-since dead, and perhaps the world is a better place for it, but they populated my life for some weeks, and in their own way gave generously of themselves. Some of them were funny, some of them disturbing, others just downright crazy. Regardless they came and went, they made their mark, and I acknowledge them for their contribution.

It has been said that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and perhaps in collating and binding these parts together I have made errors. For this I assume complete responsibility, but also plead an element of mitigating circumstance: I was in bad company at the time.

The Author

Approaching death,

as we think, the death of love,

no distinction,

any more suffices to differentiate

the particulars

of place and condition

with which we have been long

familiar.

All appears

as if seen

wavering through water.

From Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book II
William Carlos Williams

Through mean streets, through smoky alleyways where the pungent smell of raw liquor hangs like the ghost of some long-gone summer; on past these battered frontages where plaster chips and twists of dirty paint in Mardi Gras colors lean out like broken teeth and fall leaves; passing the dregs of humanity who gather here and there amongst brown-papered bottles and steel-drum fires, serving to tap the vein of meager human prosperity where it spills, through good humor or diesel wine, onto the sidewalks of this district...

Chalmette, here within the boundaries of New Orleans.

The sound of this place: the jangled switching of interference, the hurried voices, the lilting piano, the radios, the street-walking, hip-dipping youths playing mesmeric rap.

If you listen, you can hear from porch or stoop the quarreling voices, innocence already bruised, challenged, insulted.

The clustered tenements and apartment blocks, pressed between streets and sidewalks like some secondary consideration, the unwanted reprise of an earlier discarded theme, and running like a strung-together, slipshod archipelago, hopping a block at a time out through Arabi, over the Chef Menteur Highway to Lake Pontchartrain where people seem to stop merely because the earth does.