Although Vincent knew he was getting sound advice, he still couldn’t let his wants go. He liked the life of a criminal; he liked the kudos and, most of all, he liked the money. He was determined to get some serious poke if it was the last thing he ever did in this life.
When he left, Bertie Warner sighed in annoyance. He had seen them all come and go – real hitters who, if they had a bit of patience, could have gone right to the top of their game. Impatience, Bertie had learned, was the scourge of the villain; it was the downside of easy money. So many of these young lads blew their wages in a week and were soon looking for another earn; if they saved a bit for the rainy days they would be quids in. He watched them in the pubs and clubs – big diamond Rolexes and eighty-grand motors and they were still signing on, for fuck’s sake! The naïvety of these young men was laughable. He blamed the education system – they taught them how to add up, but not how to invest their money and save the bastard, or at least some of it, anyway.
Bertie lived well, but not as well as he could, and that was because he knew the Old Bill loved nothing more than someone who lived it large with no real means of employment. A local Face driving a prestige car, with all the rent paid, while still on fucking Jobseeker’s Allowance did tend to raise the red flag. But these young lads wouldn’t listen, none of them.
Well, he had said his piece – it was up to Vincent O’Casey now. But he hoped the lad used his noodle. He really had a knack for the driving and, if he could just wait a while, he would be set like the proverbial jelly.
Bertie decided to have a talk with young Derek and see what he thought about the situation. If the boy got a tug, he didn’t want it coming down on them. The trouble was, the mood Vincent was in, he was liable to go outside for his work if they didn’t give it to him. Vincent was like all this generation, they wanted everything in five minutes, but they needed to learn that it took a long time and a lot of effort to bring off any decent job. Planning was the key, planning for every and any eventuality. That, unfortunately, was the bottom line. Haste meant mistakes, and a mistake on this lad’s part could get him a big lump inside, and another kid meeting their father only once a month.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two
James was squatting in Hoxton with three others – two girls in their late teens, and a man in his forties called Dougie McManus. As he looked at the three of them sprawled out on the floor, he wondered at how he had got himself in this mess.
Dougie was a hustler, a panhandler, and not a very good one. With his long straggly hair and beard, he resembled Christ in a good light. But he also looked like a junkie, and people either threw a few pence at him or told him to fuck off. But he could score anything from anyone.
The girls were relatively new, and would not last more than a week at most. They were runaways, drifters, and Dougie was already freaking them out; they were not interested in his sexual advances, and were already sick of his high stories. James had noticed that all junkies talked about was the last high, or a spectacular high from the past. Dougie’s tales always involved a stash he had bought once, or stolen from someone, or found the Holy Grail of skag, always the best high ever.
Normally, James just tuned him out, but now he was getting angry, because the money he had hidden in the squat had miraculously disappeared, and Dougie and the girls were stoned out of their tiny – emphasis on the tiny – minds. So, putting two and two together, he made the usual four.
He looked down on their sleeping forms and thought about how he’d ended up in this place. He had left his bedsit because he had wanted to. He believed that the woman in the next house could read his mind through the walls and he could feel her interfering with his thoughts day and night. She was very old, and she had a foreign accent, but he knew that was all just an act. She was working for his mother and reporting back to her.
He had been very clever. He had got dressed one day, and walked out of his bedsit without anything, as if he was just going to the shops, and he had never gone back. That’s when he had shaken off the authorities – they were all a part of the conspiracy anyway, giving him tablets to stop him knowing the truth. He was a lot of things but a moron wasn’t one of them.
Ha! He had shown them all, and he would carry on showing them all. Now here he was in a den of thieves, living with actual thieves. What was it his father had always said? Never steal off your own – and yet that was exactly what this lot had done. As bad as they had tried to make him out, he had never stolen unless he was at rock bottom. He prided himself on that.
Now these pieces of scum had robbed him. He could smell the sourness of the girls’ bodies and wrinkled his nose in distaste. One of the girls, Alicia, was quite nice. She was very posh and had gone to an expensive school, but her parents had washed their hands of her, and who could blame them? She was a thief, and thieves never prosper.
He sat down on the hearth of the old-fashioned fireplace; it was filthy, overflowing with cigarette butts, roaches, and the usual detritus of a junkie’s lair. Needles, wraps, and sooty tinfoil burned and wrinkled, McDonald’s wrappers, and sugar-laden drinks bottles. He looked at Dougie’s narrow face, thin beyond belief, and his filthy beard full of food and grease. He wondered if they were really asleep – perhaps they were pretending, hoping he would go away so they could get their stash out behind his back. The stash he had paid for, that they had bought with his stolen money!
He stood up and went into the kitchen. Holding open the heavy door was a rusty old iron. It had once been a lovely piece of metalwork, burnished black, and it had probably ironed ladies’ lawn handkerchiefs, or their knickerbockers; he smiled at the thought.
Picking it up, he walked back into the room and, raising the iron above his head, he brought it down with all the force he could muster on to Dougie’s face.
Dougie, so full of heroin he couldn’t feel a thing, was knocked out cold by the first blow. Ten blows later his face was gone and, placing the iron carefully on to the floor by the body, James Tailor methodically searched the man’s clothes for anything of value – he wouldn’t miss it now, after all – before leaving the flat. He had to get away. Far away.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three
‘But it’s my scan, you said you’d come with me.’
At the other end of the line, Vincent could hear the disappointment in Gabby’s voice.
‘Look, babe, I can’t do anything about it now.’ He sighed. ‘I have to go to this meet, it’s important, OK?’ A few minutes later he put the phone down, and turned back to his two comrades. ‘So are you in then?’
They both nodded. Geoff Gold was clearly thrilled, but his brother Micky was not as easily pleased.
‘Hang on a minute, who told you all about this place?’
Vincent smiled; he had expected this question before now and, in hindsight, he would realise that it should have bothered him. He tapped his nose. ‘Never you mind. It’s enough that I trust the bloke. The fewer people who know our business the better, don’t you think?’
The two men nodded, but he could see that Micky Gold was not that impressed, which annoyed him. The Golds were from Canning Town and they were a pair of blond Adonises. Both were tall, had thick wavy blond hair and dark blue eyes framed by long black lashes. Derek Greene said they attracted too much attention to be villains of any real note – women took too much notice of them for a start – but they would not be put off by that. Their father had been some Scandinavian seaman and their mother was a good-looking local girl who had often moonlighted as a brass in the various pubs of East London during the sixties and seventies. They loved their old mum and would do anything for her. She, in turn, supplied them with food, did their washing, and lied to everyone for them, from girlfriends to judges. They had a good little rep, but had never done the big one.
‘Look, Micky, if you don’t want in just fucking tell me and I’ll stop wasting me breath.’
Geoff looked at his younger brother and said hastily, ‘Shut the fuck up! This
is all kosher, and I want in.’
Micky shrugged but he was still chary and it showed.
Vincent wasn’t bothered. If nothing else, this job would appeal to their greedy natures; after all, that’s what had made him so interested. He poured the Scotch out and they sat down in his office at the garage he was beginning to make such a success of. Then he took them through the robbery that was being planned for a bank in Borough Green, Kent. By the time he had finished outlining the proposition, both were smiling widely, as he had known they would be.
‘This, my friends, is what is known as a piece of piss.’
The Gold brothers were only too happy to drink to that.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Four
Cynthia Callahan was looking at the two policemen in complete shock.
‘He what!’
The elder of the two men took her gently by the arm and walked her through to her kitchen where he helped her into a chair at the scrubbed pine table. The younger man put the kettle on, knowing this was a cup of tea and a chat scenario; the poor woman looked mortified.
‘I’m sorry to be the harbinger of such distressing news, but we feel we have to warn you. Your son has murdered a man called Dougie McManus, and we believe he may come here at some point. In the squat where he was living we found exercise books that were your son’s, in which he detailed how he was going to harm you. Burn you out, in fact. So we need you to be on your guard.’
Cynthia nodded, but her mind was whirling. ‘He’s killed someone. He has finally killed someone.’
The policeman looked at his young counterpart to see how he was getting on with the pot of tea.
‘I’m afraid that’s true, Mrs Tailor—’
She interrupted him. ‘I’m Callahan – Miss Callahan. I reverted to my maiden name after my husband’s death.’
He made a note of that in his little book. ‘Now, has he approached you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, but I think he’s been stalking me for a while. My daughter warned me about him the other day, funnily enough. You know he has severe mental problems?’
The policeman said he did.
‘He was diagnosed schizophrenic at a very young age, after his father committed suicide. It’s very sad. I need to know, have you any idea where he could be?’
‘Well, Miss Callahan, I was going to ask you that very same thing.’
She shook her head again. ‘I avoid him like the plague, to be honest. He’s a very difficult person to deal with. He believes he is being watched by government forces. If you talk to his doctors they will explain it to you.’
He nodded – he had spoken to the doctors already.
‘My daughter might know something, but I doubt it – same with my parents. He’s not someone you encourage into your life, if you get my drift. Very violent, and very easily riled up. He cut a neighbour’s cat’s throat when he was just coming up to nine.’
The policemen were surprised to note that, as she described her son’s problems, there was no real emotion there at all for him.
‘My daughter seemed to think he was on drugs. She said he looked like he was on something when she saw him just down the road from my house. She stopped the car and spoke with him. I had her little daughter staying with me at the time so naturally she was worried in case he came here in front of the child . . .’
He waited until the teas were placed before them all, before saying gently, ‘We believe he is on heroin – a lot of the mentally disturbed take that drug on the streets. We also found a crack pipe, and evidence that he’d used it, at the murder scene. Is there anyone you can think of that he might go to? Any friends?’
She shook her head. ‘No, nobody. He’s a loner, a strange boy. I wish I could help you more.’
Five minutes later they were ushered out of the front door and, seeing the number of locks she had on it, they realised that she had been preparing for her son coming for her long before they had arrived on the scene.
‘You keep yourself safe now, Miss Callahan, and, if he comes near you, ring the police immediately. All the forces are looking for him, so try not to worry.’
Cynthia closed the door and locked it, every bolt and chain, then she went around the house making sure everywhere was secure.
In the kitchen she poured herself a large vodka and tonic and then, smiling slightly, she wondered if he would have the guts to turn up here. Burn her out! She’d like to see the little fucker try.
Picking up the phone she rang her daughter. If he went near her grandchild, she’d skin him alive. The only good bit of all this aggravation was that they’d have to lock him up again and, hopefully, this time, they would throw away the bastard key.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Five
‘Look, Gabby, all men are the same, they get you pregnant but they have no real interest in the actual pregnancy – it’s only the baby they are interested in, and even that wanes after a while.’
Gabby sighed. Did her mother really think she was helping? The worst thing of all was she had a feeling that what she was saying was true. She was heavily pregnant and Vincent was never in the house for any length of time. The garage was doing well, and that pleased her; they were beginning to save some money, and they were moving to a new council house before the baby was born. But he was out from early morning till late at night.
Cynthia looked at her daughter and felt the urge to shake her. What was it with this girl? She couldn’t see what was under her nose – she had bagged herself a blagger, and blaggers were not known for their homing instincts. She should think herself lucky she had a man out grafting for her – not that she was that enamoured of her daughter’s ‘partner’ as they called them nowadays. He looked down his nose at her, and did not bother to hide his indifference. Dislike she could cope with because it meant she’d made an impact at least. Indifference, on the other hand, meant she had not had any effect on the idiot in any way. He ignored her completely, which really pissed her off, and the fact that her daughter didn’t even defend her to him really annoyed her as well.
‘Any news on Nutty?’
Gabby rolled her eyes and said huffily, ‘Will you stop referring to James like that? They haven’t found him yet. God knows where he is by now.’
Cynthia snorted then. ‘Fucking Broadmoor is where he should be, locked away for good.’
‘He’s your son, Mum!’
Cynthia snorted again. ‘Stop fucking saying that, he’s nothing to do with me! Anyway, he’s over eighteen – he’s his own person now, responsible for his own actions.’
Gabby didn’t answer; it always amazed her that her mother could just push the blame away from herself without a second’s thought. She rubbed her belly – she was feeling awful today.
Seeing her daughter’s discomfort Cynthia said, ‘Get your stuff, Cherie, you’re coming home with Nanny.’ She held a finger up to her daughter in protest. ‘Not a word, you need your rest. Now, I’ve put a lasagne in the fridge, and I’ve got your ironing. So stop panicking and put your feet up.’
Gabby felt a rush of gratitude to this woman who she alternately loved and hated. Since Cynthia had seen how ill she had been with this baby she had been a diamond. She even talked about the baby as if she was looking forward to it, which Gabby thought she secretly was. Cynthia was buying little bits for it, and she had got out Cherie’s old cot, so she must be expecting the child to stay there on occasion.
For the first time in years, Gabby felt a modicum of contentment in her mother’s company as they chatted and laughed. It was as if the heavier she got with this baby the better her mum liked her. Her nana Mary thought she was mad, but they didn’t see this side of Cynthia – so few people ever did. There was no doubt about it – as her mother got older, she was becoming more like a mother should be. OK, not where James was concerned maybe, but then he’d always been difficult, to say the least. Gabby hoped none of her kids inherited his mental illness, that would be too cruel. Whereas her mother had never been a lovi
ng mother exactly, Gabby was – she loved her family with all her heart.
She had tried to tell her nana and granddad about how her mum was behaving these days, but they both dismissed it out of hand, saying she was after something, just as she had been before. Gabby understood that they didn’t trust Cynthia, but even if she was after Cherie, now that Vincent was back he would never let anything happen to them.
Having him there made her so happy – she just wished he was home more. She knew that it had taken lot of work to get the garage off the ground, and he wanted to make a success of it. It was all for them so she shouldn’t really moan too much.
Cherie had her little bag packed, and was impatient to go with her nanny Cynthia now. She had brought all her drawing books with her; she loved drawing, and her nanny Cynthia had got her an easel which she loved painting on. She had a white smock just like the real painters in a book her nanny showed her.
Cynthia really thought the child had a talent, and she was determined to see her make the best of it. She could be the next Tracey Emin, that was Cynthia’s belief. She knew with certainty that this little girl had a brilliant future ahead of her, and she would move the heavens to see she got the chances Cynthia felt had been denied to her. She saw herself in little Cherie, saw her as she would have been with different parents, with people who could have given her a proper start in life. Cynthia blamed her parents for the way her whole life had turned out, and her son’s life as well. She believed with all her heart that her mother had had more say in James Junior’s upbringing than she did and, consequently, the blame for his condition lay at her mother’s door.
It never occurred to her that dumping her children at will, not loving either of them, and placing impossible demands on them might have had something to do with her son’s illness and her daughter’s desperate craving for love. In fact, Cynthia was proud of her Gabriella; she was doing all right, and so long as she let her have Cherie she would remain in her good books.