Last Part of Chapter OneGrant asked her what had happened with Jake as they were closing the club a little after two in the morning. Stacey had agreed to wait outside with Bradley, and Ruby knew that she’d been third wheel for most of the night and made excuses to help Grant in order to give them some time alone. Now though she thought being gooseberry would have been preferable to Grant’s awkward questions. She admitted to drinking too much and taking it out on Jake when he told her off. She told Grant she’d made some hurtful comments and that she intended to apologise.
“What did you say to him, I didn’t see him again after you took him off into the office to… tell him off?” Grant asked, while he counted up the night’s takings muttering figures every now and then and jotting things down in the book of takings.
“I said some things about his brother. Unforgivable things… even considering what he did, I shouldn’t have said that.” Ruby had been mulling over how much like her father she was becoming, now that she’d been left on her own. She knew that she hadn’t liked what she’d turned into in the office with Jake. She’d scared herself.
“So what exactly do you think Jake did?” Grant asked, treading carefully so as not to put himself in the firing line once more.
“He shot Danny. I saw him take the gun, I heard the gun shots from the house and he didn’t deny it when he drove me back to Stacey’s. That’s why he has been so screwed up. He murdered his own brother.”
“What if I were to tell you that it was… self-defence?” Grant asked awkwardly skirting the truth. Ruby looked confused, but as though she were addressing new questions for the first time in almost a month of anger and grief.
“I saw Danny smack Jake with a baseball bat, but he wouldn’t have killed him.” Ruby reasoned without a lot of self-belief, which Grant was very quick to pick up on.
“Are you sure about that? Danny was really gone in the head, you must have been aware of that, Ruby. You were living with the guy after all.” Grant explained.
Ruby fell silent. Too much of what Grant was saying rang true to her and conflicted with the facts she’d assured herself of. Not for the first time in recent weeks, she wished her mother or sister were still alive. They would have given her some solid advice. Thoughts like these usually spun her off on another reel of anger towards Jake; mainly from the lost sibling association alone, and not because she blamed Jake for everything bad in her life. Now though she saw how Jake may have understood what she was going through more than she’d previously thought. If this didn’t shake the foundations of her mind enough, what Grant was about to say would certainly cause the fault lines to crack.
“It was Danny who killed Dennis last year. Your father took the blame, but then he was to blame. Danny should have been in some institution, his mind the way it was. Your Dad used him, first to take out Dennis and leave Sharon to look forward to raising her longed for child alone and then to play games with me and Phil. You know Danny was about to kill me, don’t you? He had a gun at my head and was ready to kill me and my brother. Jake did what he had to.”
Ruby couldn’t speak, her head was reeling from all these new suggestions and the feelings they were causing her to be swallowed up by. After asking if she was okay and receiving a faint smile and a bewildered look, Grant went to the office to put the takings in the safe and Ruby went outside to interrupt Stacey and Bradley making out. She needed to go to bed, lock the door and go to bed; even if she doubted whether she’d get any real rest until she found out what had really happened in Essex. However the cold air meant that fate had a different plan. While Stacey and Bradley tore themselves apart, all the alcohol Ruby had consumed caught up with her and she made the assessment that rushing to the club toilets would be a better idea than jostling for the bathroom at the Slater’s when she was really desperate. She told the lovebirds to go on ahead, that Grant was inside and he could walk her back across the square if necessary.
Ruby wasn’t aware of how much time had passed while she sat in the toilets and pondered why Danny was dead. She hadn’t known that Jake was defending the Mitchells, because she’d seen the Moon brothers fighting only a few minutes before, she’d assumed Jake was like the rest of them. Now fearing she might have been wrong all the time, she didn’t know how she was going to face Jake again. Eventually she realised that sleep would be the best way to help her make a rational choice on how to deal with the situation and she finally left the ladies toilets. Unfortunately when Grant had seen that Stacey was no longer outside, he locked up and went back over to the Vic for a much needed rest, leaving Ruby stuck inside the club for the night.
As she left the public toilets at Scarlet she heard a noise and quickly called out to see if it was Grant. When she received no reply, she rushed to the office for help or to check the security tape herself for what might have caused the clattering noise. When she found the office empty and discovered that most of the lights had been turned off she panicked. The noise seemed to be coming from the toilets behind the bar, so she quietly made her way up the stairs to leave and call Grant to deal with it. It was then that she discovered the door was locked and with no keys of her own, she realised she was trapped.
After ten minutes of rooting through her bag for a mobile she realised she’d left it at home, as was always the case when you actually needed the things, and began to sneak down towards the office to call Grant or even Jake if she had to. It was then that she heard the loud smash of a bottle and what sounded like someone falling over in the men’s toilets. Perhaps it was just a drunk, maybe even Gary or Deano; they had been putting it away some during the night. She didn’t have to be afraid of them. She called the Vic and got no reply after a few rings and decided to try Jake. It might be awkward, but she knew he’d help her and it meant that she didn’t wake the entire Mitchell clan by constantly dialling their number for ages. She planned what to say, but it was irrelevant when there was no answer at 41 either. She called Grant’s mobile, it was engaged, and then she tried Jake’s and plucked up the courage to leave a message when it wasn’t answered.
“Jake, it’s Ruby. I’m sorry I was angry with you… I’m locked in the club. Can you come and let me out, please? I think I heard something and… I shouldn’t have talked to you so harshly before… I just don’t know how to deal with everything. Please come over if you get this… Jake… I’m scared. Please help me.”
Jake had been drinking ever since Ruby had verbally abused him for stopping her doing the same thing, along with every other sin he’d ever committed. He’d gone to be on his own, but some sense of responsibility had stopped him leaving the club altogether and running away like he wanted to. Instead he sat in the toilets while Grant locked up and drank a litre of vodka to try and silence his guilty conscience. It didn’t work and by the time he’d drained the last drop at what may have been somewhere around two, he flung the empty bottle at the wall and collapsed in the disabled cubicle loudly knocking the door closed before passing out unconscious.
Picking up a bottle from behind the bar, Ruby walked towards the toilets hoping it was just Deano and that her biggest trauma would be living with his jokes over the next few days about how she’d faced up to him with a grim-face and a litre bottle of gin. Adrenaline was rushing through her blood stream as she prepared to hit any intruder with the heavy bottle.
“Who is it? Deano, Gary, if that’s you come out of there. It’s time to go home and throw up in your own toilets.”
There was no reply so Ruby pushed the door open and tried to find a light switch. Not being familiar with the workings of the club yet, particularly the gents’ toilets, she didn’t know the light switch was in the hall outside the toilets themselves. She slowly walked along the row of cubicles, her heart beating madly in her chest.
“Please whoever you are, it’s time to come out of there and go home. I’m going to have to call the police if you don’t!”
She tried to sound threatening, but her voice trembled and she felt herself prickling with goosebumps. She held on tighter to the bottle and fearing for her life, she pushed open the second to last cubicle door. This time she was too consumed with panicked thoughts to say anything, she was walking further and further into the darkness and nightmare images of what may be about to happen swamped her thoughts. Faintly she heard a beeping noise and a tiny voice which felt like her conscience whispering suggestions or concerns around her petrified mind. Fear roared in her ears like the sound of the tide coming in and she suddenly woke herself from her terrifying reverie by yelling at the intruder.
Jake who had come round hearing the cubicle door clatter on its loose hinges beside him, blinked to try and figure out where the hell he was. Surrounded in bits of broken glass and feeling sick and like he’d been kicked in the head, he felt for something familiar. Realising he was in the toilet at Scarlet he tried to get up and dropped his mobile on the floor. It was then that he noticed the message on his phone that said he’d missed Ruby’s call. He fumbled at the buttons and pressed the wrong code causing it to beep a few times before he heard her frightened voice. He could barely stand as he struggled to get up and find her. His mind was too fogged with alcohol to realise that he was the intruder she was scared of. All he could think of was protecting her and in the back of his mind was the pleasure that she had finally trusted him. He staggered out of the cubicle and heard Ruby yelling about police at the top of her voice, and then everything went black for a very long time.
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