ɪᴛᴀʟɪᴀɴ ꜱɪʀᴇɴ

sesto capitolo

The betting shop was closed. At this hour it should have been open, the door propped wide and the pavement outside crowded with men clutching folded slips, voices rising and tangling in argument while coins clattered across the counter. The place was usually alive by now, thick with smoke and temper and the restless promise of money changing hands.

Instead, the shutters were half-drawn and the front door locked, daylight pressing uselessly against the glass as though it, too, had been turned away. Inside, there were no punters, no bookmakers calling odds, no sharp bursts of laughter from men chasing luck. There was only the family. The silence did not belong in a room like this. It sat wrong between the tables, sank into the worn floorboards, and clung to the smoke gathering beneath the ceiling beams. Even the air felt different tighter somehow, stretched thin and humming with the weight of waiting.

Polly Gray stood near the door, a cigarette burning low between her fingers, forgotten until the ash bent under its own weight and dropped quietly to the floorboards. Her eyes never settled. They moved restlessly across the room, over the men of her family, over the long table where ledgers and papers lay untouched. Again and again, her gaze returned to the same place the empty chair at the head of the table, the space that belonged to Tommy. And every few seconds she glanced toward the frosted glass of the door, listening for the sound of an engine, for tyres scraping over cobblestones, for any sign that her nephew's car had turned the corner or that he was walking up the street toward the house.

Arthur sat back at the table with a glass of whiskey in his hand, broad frame filling the chair as though he meant to anchor the room by sheer presence alone. That morning he had carried the crate over himself, setting it down in the middle of the shop like a declaration. It was what remained of the Garrison. Whatever hadn't been smashed or stolen he had locked away in his office, out of reach of greedy hands and thirsty men. He then had poured a drink for everyone without asking. And now the glasses stood half-full around the table, catching the thin strips of daylight that slipped through the shutters. The liquid glowed faintly in the gloom. No one raised a toast. No one tried to joke or soften the air. They drank quietly, each lost in their own thoughts, waiting for Tommy to walk through the door. They all understood this wasn't for celebration. It was a family meeting. One of the important ones.

The eldest of the brothers lifted his glass again and took another swallow, not for pleasure but to steady himself. His knee kept bouncing under the table, a small, restless movement he couldn't quite control. The stress, he told himself. Just nerves. The whiskey burned on the way down and settled heavy in his chest, but it did nothing to quiet the noise in his head. He wasn't worried about the hospital. Polly had seen Tommy with her own eyes. If she said he was standing, then he was standing. What truly troubled him was London. And Alfie Solomons. Whatever had been said in that bakery, behind glass walls and locked doors, would decide what came next. Not just for Tommy, but for all of them. For Birmingham. And for the Shelby name itself.

Curly and their uncle Charlie kept to the walls, caps pulled low, hands tucked into their coats, shoulders set stiff as if they were standing guard rather than waiting. They said little, only shifting their weight now and then, eyes drifting toward the door and back again.

Finn hovered far too close to Arthur, trying to make himself look taller, older, like he belonged at the table with the men. He squared his shoulders, lifted his chin, and even shifted his stance to mirror Arthur's, copying the way he sat, the way he held his glass, the way he leaned back as if nothing in the world could unsettle him. But every few seconds his eyes betrayed him, snapping toward the door at the slightest sound. No matter how carefully he mimicked his brother's posture, the boy in him still showed.

Esme, John's wife, sat halfway up the staircase, a book resting open across her lap. From a distance she might have looked calm, almost removed from the tension in the room below. But her eyes had been fixed on the same line for minutes, unfocused, her thoughts clearly somewhere else. She wasn't reading. She was listening to the silence in the shop, to its weight, to the way it stretched tight around the family like wire pulled too far.