The widows, p.1
The Widows, page 1
Anna Smith was a frontline journalist for more than twenty years and is a former chief reporter for the Daily Record. She has covered wars across the world as well as major investigations and news stories from Dunblane to Kosovo to 9/11. Many of Anna’s novels are set in different locations, such as Spain, Bosnia and Romania, as well as Glasgow and London. She divides her time between Scotland and Ireland and is a regular visitor to Spain.
Also by Anna Smith
THE ROSIE GILMOUR SERIES
The Dead Won’t Sleep
To Tell the Truth
Screams in the Dark
Betrayed
A Cold Killing
Rough Cut
Kill Me Twice
Death Trap
The Hit
THE KERRY CASEY SERIES
Blood Feud
Fight Back
End Game
Trapped
THE BILLIE CARLSON SERIES
Until I Find You
If I Should Die
Last Seen
In the Shadows
The Widows
Anna Smith
First published in Great Britain in 2026 by Quercus
Part of John Murray Group
Copyright © 2026 Anna Smith
The moral right of Anna Smith to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Jacket design: © www.blacksheep-uk.com
Photography: © Depositphotos
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organisations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978 1 52944 323 3
ebook ISBN 978 1 52944 324 0
Ebook by CC Book Production
Quercus
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
John Murray Group
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8 Castlecourt Centre, Dublin 15, D15 XTP3, Ireland (email: info@hbgi.ie)
For Max.
May all your tomorrows be blessed.
Dream big. Be brave. Be kind.
CONTENTS
About the Author
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Acknowledgements
Follow Anna Smith here
PROLOGUE
‘So what now?’
Cissy turned to Bella as they stood on the steps, taking in the damp air of the thin, grey February morning. Behind them, the vast sliding steel doors of the women’s prison drew to a close, like the curtains at the end of a stage show where nobody wanted an encore. The women looked at each other as the doors locked with a heavy clunk.
‘I suppose a spa day is out of the question,’ Bella said, deadpan, pulling some crumpled notes out of her coat pocket and glancing at them. ‘I’ve got fifteen quid.’
Cissy snorted.
‘That’s ten more than me. Let’s settle for a full English breakfast, then a shower at whatever shithouse hostel they’ve booked us into.’ She turned to her friend and took a step down the stairs. ‘Come on, I heard there’s a greasy spoon down the road on the corner. Let’s just get the fuck away from here.’
It had been three years. Three long years banged up inside – half of the six years they’d been sentenced to – for a crime they didn’t commit. Not that they’d been whiter than white in the years before they landed in jail. As the wives of hardened criminals, they’d lived in some luxury. But there’s no such thing as a free ride. Bella Malone, Cissy Callaghan and their best friend, Ruby Kelly, did what they were told. They may have looked powerful in their fancy cars and kitted out in designer chic, but they were never in charge of anything, especially not themselves. And when it came to the crunch, they’d been used all along.
How could this have happened? And where were the men they’d loved and lived with, the big-time Charlies who’d given them the good life on the Costa del Sol? It wasn’t long before the penny dropped. Cissy and Bella had nobody. They were forgotten, abandoned and on their own. Ruby was gone. Now they would have to start again.
CHAPTER ONE
Three years earlier Costa del Sol
Ruby was charming the pants off big Jimmy Digby and she knew it. She was good at this shit – playing the part, making someone feel like they were the only person in the room. That’s why she was always brought in by her man when the big boys came over to the Costa del Sol for a pow-wow. They were all there, some of them sat around the long table after a lavish lunch in the cliffside restaurant, and one or two scattered around the private room, or out on the terrace, chatting and soaking up the rays of the late afternoon sun. This was the life these guys had dreamed of when they were raggedy-arse teenagers nicking cars or bullying people who were late with their loan shark payments. This was their pay-off for all the shit they’d shovelled, and the time they’d served inside when things didn’t go down as they should have. Now they seldom, if ever, even got their hands dirty. If someone had to be made to disappear, they hired a gun to do it. These days, they relished the benefits of a life of crime, and let’s face it, nobody ever complained, or if they did, they never did it out loud, at least not in this company.
Ruby was listening to this prick with the twenty-grand smile telling her how rough it had been back in the day in the council flats, but how they were now top dogs and untouchable. She nodded admiringly in all the right places, her dark eyes holding his, seeming to hang on his every word. But she kept stealing little glances out to the far end of the terrace where Cissy was being pinned to the smoked-glass balustrade by her fat bastard of a boyfriend, Terence. She could see her friend’s fear even from this distance, sense the terror that Cissy felt that things might get out of hand, as they often did. If Terence had done too much coke, then anything could happen, and he didn’t give a shit who was there to witness it.
Ruby pushed back her chair as she suddenly got to her feet, telling the man who was boring her rigid that she had to dash to the loo, but would be back in a jiffy. She patted his forearm fleetingly as though she cared. Then she gave a quick glance around the room, where everyone was either guffawing about an old story or deep in conversation. She slipped away quietly and went out to the terrace. Ruby was one of the few people who could handle the bullying thug that was Terence Sullivan. She’d proved it more than once before. She’d known him long before Cissy got involved with him, and somehow Ruby had the ability to calm him in a crisis and talk him out of some of the craziness that drove him, especially when he was coked up. And if that all failed, then she would dig her nails hard into his shoulder and fix him with her black eyes, telling him that if he didn’t stop what he was doing right now, she would put a bullet in his throat when he was sleeping. That would stop him in his tracks, because he knew that she could and would. Ruby’s reputation had been well known long before she had ever teamed up with Tommy Mallon, the hardman from Dublin who ran the show for the Irish hoodlums from Marbella to Murcia and all places in between.
‘Everything all right here, sweet cheeks?’ Ruby said as she slapped her hand a little too hard on Terence’s back.
He turned around quickly, his eyes still blazing, but her look was enough. He let go of Cissy’s arm, and Ruby glanced in disgust at the red welt where he’d been gripping her. Cissy smiled weakly at Ruby, who blinked in acknowledgement.
‘What’s happening, guys?’ Ruby said. ‘You’re missing all the chat in there. Come back in. The lads are asking for you, Terence.’ She took hold of Terence’s arm and her eyes softened as she looked at him. ‘Tell them that story of the night you robbed Johnny Franklin of his takings from the casino.’
He shot her a maniacal, coked-up grin.
‘Yeah, that was some laugh,’ he said as she ushered him towards the open terrace doors. ‘We split that bastard like a kipper, we did.’
As they went into the room, Ruby looked over her shoulder to see Cissy fighting back tears as she tried to compose herself, the Costa sun still high in the deep blue sky in this land of plenty.
Back in the room, Ruby glided past to where Bella was knocking back a glass of soda, her arm draped around Billy Dalton, who she’d been shacked up with these past three years, and finally married eight months ago. Ruby couldn’t for the life of her see what Bella saw in the stocky little bastard with the thinning hair, but if pressed, she guessed it might be something to do with his two-million-pound villa, plus the string of estate agents and restaurants Dalton had along the Costa del Sol, as well as the nightclubs in Manchester. He’d inherited it all from his father, a major player who died four years ago. Bella was nobody’s fool. She was a smart, sassy, slender beauty, who could take down a foul-mouthed thug with a sharp one-liner. When she wasn’t relaxing by the poolside of their lavish villa, her role was to oversee the money-laundering estate agents to make sure nobody was dipping into the tills, and keep the business ship-shape, because really, Billy was too thick to do it.
Ruby sat back down next to Jimmy Digby, just as Tommy Mallon pulled up a chair beside them. He casually ran a hand through Ruby’s hair and glanced at Digby in what Ruby knew was a ‘she’s mine’ gesture so that Digby would know the score – just in case he was taken in by Ruby’s charm offensive. Digby locked eyes with his old mate for a second and Ruby clocked the coldness in him, compared to the genial guy he’d been while she’d been chatting to him. Both Digby and Mallon – respected and feared as ‘The Irish’ – were two of the big dogs in this exclusive little gathering, and everyone knew it. They’d grown up on the wrong side of Dublin along with Terence. Digby ran his empire in Manchester and beyond, and both he and Mallon worked well with each other, especially when it came to pooling huge cash payments to buy coke in bulk from Amsterdam and Columbia.
Mallon and Digby had their hands on everything that was coming in and where it was going. They were as tight as they came. But if you were in this outfit, the golden rule was, no matter how much you wanted to, you never, ever touched another man’s woman. That would be the ultimate betrayal. Ruby turned to Mallon and smiled because she knew that’s what he would expect.
‘So, what’s going on over there, Tommy?’ she asked, gesturing her head to the three other men sitting on easy chairs in the corner. ‘You all looked like you were deep in discussion.’
Mallon looked at Digby and they both raised eyebrows as though they had some secret agreement.
‘Just a bit of business that has to be dealt with today, darlin’,’ Mallon said. ‘That’s all.’
‘All sorted then, Tommy?’ Digby asked.
‘Yep. It’ll be done today,’ Mallon said. ‘The boys are all organised and ready. They’ll be on it once we get out of here.’
Ruby took a sip of her white wine, then put the glass down on the table. She’d had enough. As much as she enjoyed a lunch and a couple of drinks in the sunshine, the constant drinking that was a feature of the ex-pats’ lives over here had never been up her street. She was fiercely controlled in her fitness regime and got up every morning for a run and a swim while Mallon was still spark out. Not that she didn’t know how to drink. She’d been there and done that when she was young, but there was too much at stake these days to be making wrong decisions or judgements when your head was clouded with alcohol. She got up and excused herself, poured a tumbler of icy water and headed back out to the balcony, where Cissy stood.
‘Hey, you,’ Ruby said breezily. ‘You all right, mate?’
Cissy turned to her, sniffing and wiping the tear from her cheek.
‘Yeah, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Just . . . well, you know . . . sometimes Terence can be such a piece of shit.’
‘I know,’ Ruby said, patting her shoulder. ‘You’re going to have to make a decision one of these days, Cissy. You can’t live like that, with the constant threat of him.’
Cissy looked at her, then back out to sea, and puffed out a sigh.
‘What am I supposed to do, Ruby?’ she said. ‘There’s no way he’ll just let me walk away. He’d do me in before he’d ever let me leave him.’ She shook her head. ‘I should never have married him. I know that now, but I’ll just have to get on with it. Anyway, where would I go? I haven’t got a light, and I can’t go back where I lived and start over. I keep thinking he’ll change.’
Ruby didn’t want to say any more. Terence wasn’t going to change. Back in Dublin, he’d slashed his way to the top alongside Mallon and Digby, but the difference between them and him was that he relished the violence. The fact that he was rich now and moving in all the right circles to keep up his shitty empire wasn’t going to change him from the vicious little psycho he’d always been. He’ll kill her one of these days, Ruby thought, but she kept that to herself for now.
‘Anyway,’ Ruby said, standing alongside her, leaning on the railing so they both faced the sea. ‘I think there’s something going on in there.’ She jerked her head back towards the room, where everyone else looked like they were getting ready to leave, and lowered her voice. ‘I think two of those boys are going for a long swim tonight.’
Cissy turned to her.
‘Seriously? Who? What boys?’
‘Don’t look now,’ Ruby said. ‘But those two younger boys at the table with four of the London mob. I haven’t seen them before, so don’t know much about them. Handsome buggers, though, all gelled hair and smart gear. Twins, apparently. But word is they passed information on to some Serbian guy down here about who’s doing what in the big scheme of things. Looks like they’ve talked a bit too much.’
‘Christ! Rough justice. Stupid boys.’ She glanced behind her.
‘Yeah,’ Ruby said. ‘But the word is out, and I think their number is up.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I heard Tommy on the phone. He called them Jedward.’ Ruby chuckled.
‘Jedward?’ Cissy asked.
‘Yeah. Like those Irish twins who were on The X Factor.’
Cissy nodded, smiling.
‘Oh, I remember now. They’ll not be singing much longer then, if you’re right.’
‘Nope.’
Both of them stood in silence for a while, looking out at the sun twinkling on the sea and the picture-postcard beauty of this paradise. It was a million miles from where the pair of them had grown up in a rough Glasgow housing scheme, where the toughest survived and those who couldn’t hack it got as far away as they could as soon as they were able. Ruby and Cissy were on the run by the time they turned sixteen. They left the children’s home for school one day and never returned, making a pact as they slept under the bridge in London that night that they would never desert each other.
‘Look.’ Ruby nudged Cissy. ‘Down there in the street.’
They both watched as the young twins, laughing and joking, got into the back of the Mercedes with the blacked-out windows, then a big guy with a mop of blond curly hair got in the back beside them. Ruby knew him as Jake Dawson, a hitman from Cork, who was brought in to clean things up.
‘Is that Jake Dawson in the back?’ Cissy asked.
‘Yep,’ Ruby replied.
‘That’s as bad as it gets for the boys then,’ Cissy said.
Ruby nodded but said nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
Ruby turned her head to face the open patio doors as Tommy Mallon rolled off her and lay on the bed, his breath beginning to slow. It had been good sex. It always was – Tommy knew his way around every part of her body, and what she liked. For a man who could ruthlessly cut down an enemy in a heartbeat, he was tender and loving when they were together, never rushing the sex and murmuring how much he loved her as they lost themselves in the passion. He was like two different people. Ruby knew the man he was when she married him nearly three years ago, and she would never change him. But she loved him, and when they were together like this it was just about as good as it got.
