Baker's Gonna Bake

Chapter 41

Cora heard it too, the gunshot, because she was standing right outside the door to the warehouse that her father had just walked into.

She found it strange how the sound of a shot fired and its simultaneous reverberating echo sounded like the beat of her very own heart in that moment and it took her a breath to rationalise the scenario in her mind for what it was.
Someone had more than likely just been killed, and when the two people in there were definitely the two most important males in her life she should really have felt sheer panic.
But she was numb, so, so numb.
After reading that letter she was hollow, and cold and dumbfounded and she couldn't bring herself to peer around the crack of the door to see which of the two men had more than likely been annihilated,  because whichever way the tides had turned the ship had indeed sailed.
That person was dead, because the body hit the ground and it didn't get up, it had sunk like a ship and delivering herself of the news about which body it was, would only hurt her visual senses more, so she listened instead, an ear against the door jamb, a hand clasped in a soft pocket, around the cold hard steel of a trigger as she waited to see which man had been taken down.

More than half an hour ago she had been sat clutching a letter of revelation whilst sinking every liquor bottle she could lay her hands on in Alfie's drinks cabinet, which was a revelation in itself.
Tipsy and tearful she had thrown the glass tumbler at the wall when she had finished reading and watched as the remnants of wasted liquid flowed at a far more steadier pace than that of her tears.

The man she thought she had known so well, was nothing but a dark silhouette of a stranger in her memories now, the words contained on the paper transforming everything she had ever experienced, saw or felt at his hands. The normality of the man changing into stone cold abnormality, a monster or a beast revealed in its entirety and she couldn't quite grasp how she didn't notice it before, but knowing deep down that love was of course, blind.

Rising from her place in Alfie's chair, Her vision swam before her very eyes and she somehow managed to adorn her coat and bonnet, fix up her lipstick without the use of a mirror and leave the office on steady but threateningly weary feet.
She hailed a carriage to Barbury house and as she approached in the dimness of dusk, saw another one leaving at the same time. It held her father, she could see his bowler hat and grey hair at the nape of his neck and so she beckoned for the driver to continue on past her original destination.

"Drive on please, that is my father in front. If you could follow him, I need to travel to where he is going also." She nodded.

The man stalled the engine slightly, looking back at her with a frown.

"Don't worry sir, I have the coin" she said rattling her purse. At the sound of the clatter of what he believed to be more than ten bob and the obvious grandeur of her dress and address, he did as she said and followed the cab in front of him.

She had taken Alfie's weapon from the top drawer of his desk and placed it deep inside the pocket of her dresscoat. She wasn't sure why. The thing would likely explode in her pocket if she wasn't careful and she was so below the level of normal sober sense, that careful was a foreign language by now, so it was probably a very bad idea.
As the carriage slowed down she watched as her father left his transportation and walked to a man beside the courthouse entrance who pointed towards a door down a side alley. They did not see her approach as they were so consumed in their task but she was close enough that she heard the ramblings of mixed words that included "he's in there" and "Jew" and "cunt".

She paid the cab driver his fare with good advance change, and stayed put whilst she watched her father enter the building with his faithful servant in tow. She didn't want to make herself known and she hadn't quite decided what she was here for yet. The feeling that Alfie was on the other side of that stone cold wall made her breathless like she had just plunged into icy depths of ocean and couldn't get to the surface.