FACELESS
Martina Cole
Copyright © 2001 Martina Cole
The right of Martina Cole to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher,
nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2008
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN : 978 0 7553 5068 1
Cover photograph © ilbusca; Woman © Jonathan Ring
This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Also by Martina Cole
Praise for Martina Cole
About the Book
Dedication
Introduction
BOOK ONE
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
BOOK TWO
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
Martina Cole is the acknowledged queen of crime drama with a long line of No. 1 bestselling and phenomenally successful novels to her name.
Several of Martina’s novels have been adapted for the screen; most recently The Take and The Runaway, which were shown on Sky One to remarkable reviews. In addition, Two Women and The Graft have been adapted for the stage; both were highly acclaimed when performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which also staged Dangerous Lady in 2012, celebrating twenty years since Martina’s debut novel was published.
Martina Cole is a phenomenon. She continues to smash sales records with each of her books, which have sold thirteen million copies in total. Her hard-hitting, uncompromising and haunting writing is in a genre all its own – no one writes like Martina.
By Martina Cole and available from Headline
Dangerous Lady
The Ladykiller
Goodnight Lady
The Jump
The Runaway
Two Women
Broken
Faceless
Maura’s Game
The Know
The Graft
The Take
Close
Faces
The Business
Hard Girls
The Family
The Faithless
The Life
Revenge
Praise for Martina Cole’s previous bestsellers:
‘Right from the start [Cole] has enjoyed unqualified approval for her distinctive and powerfully written fiction’ The Times
‘Intensely readable’ Guardian
‘Gritty novel from an author who knows intimately the world she writes about’ Daily Express
‘The slags and scum of Cole’s fictional underworld are becoming the stuff of legend . . . It’s vicious, nasty and utterly compelling’ Mirror
‘You won’t be able to put this one down’ Company
‘Set to be another winner’ Woman’s Weekly
‘Martina Cole again explores the shady criminal underworld, a setting she is fast making her own’ Sunday Express
‘Powerful, evocative and crackling with lowlife humour’ Maeve Haran
Faceless is an explosive novel of East End violence and corruption from one of the most original voices in fiction today.
Eleven years ago Marie Carter was convicted of killing her two best friends. And she’s paid the price. Now she is being released from prison. It’s time to go home. But life has moved on, and Marie has nowhere to go. Her parents have disowned her; her friends have abandoned her; even her kids don’t want to know. But some people out there are watching her, following her every move – they know that Marie Carter wants retribution.
For Bernie, the loveliest of women,
the kindest of friends.
So missed by all who loved you and knew you.
Forever in our hearts.
For Mark and all his family.
For Arline and Charlie, my friends in
Bronxville, New York.
Big thanks. See you at Bill’s, PJ’s, Covent Garden.
And a special thank you to Amanda Ridout at Headline,
She knows what for.
Introduction
People often ask me about the titles of my books. The idea for this new one came to me while I was researching. I was interviewing a very nice woman whom I had known for a good few years. She’d been a prostitute for most of her life and was always kind enough to keep me up to date on the pavement jargon and with anecdotes about her working life. Anyway, the two of us were talking over a bottle of wine when she said something I shall never forget.
She had been, in her day, ‘a well-paid brass’ as she put it herself. By then, though, she was older and on the slippery slope that age invariably brings to women who sell themselves for profit.
Laughing, she said, ‘We are faceless women, Tina, living faceless lives. Our punters are faceless. If I took a bloke on and he came back ten minutes later I wouldn’t even recognise him. If we met again in the supermarket we wouldn’t know one another.’
Well, she gave me the title of this book.
Since then her phone has been cut off and I can’t seem to track her down. I heard she’d died of AIDS. I hope she is happy wherever she is. She was a good laugh and a good mate.
You know who you are. If you read this, give me a call and let me know you are OK. This one’s for you and for all the laughs we have had over the years.
BOOK ONE
‘Mutual Forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise.’
William Blake (1757-1827)
Prologue
She heard the grille open and kept her eyes closed. She knew it would be Walker, a good PO as POs went, but she wasn’t in the mood for talk just yet.
She breathed in heavily, feeling the close, heavy scent of the cell, letting it wash over her one last time. After twelve years and ten months inside she was finally being released. She didn’t think of it as going home because she had no home. She had no friends, no family, nothing that other women took for granted. Her children were lost to her; her mother had given up on her. The few friends she’d had, and they were few, had all dropped away over the
years. But that was understandable. She was a convicted murderess. A double murderess. A woman who had killed two friends, no less, so it wasn’t surprising that the few others she’d had were wary of continuing the acquaintance.
Inside she had kept herself to herself and the other women had respected that. One good thing about a big lump of a sentence, people left you alone.
She smiled gently and the action changed her face completely. The permanent frown was gone, revealing smooth unwrinkled skin. Her high cheekbones, the envy of more than a few screws and prisoners over the years, gave her face a Nordic beauty. Full, curving lips made her face look enigmatic, interesting. Her cool blue eyes were softer than usual, with the look of the girl she had been twelve years earlier when she had walked into a prison cell, more aware than anyone realised that she was away for what should have been the best, most productive years of her life.
She had kissed her children goodbye, and in effect kissed her life goodbye. But it was her own doing, she knew that. The judge had called her a callous and disturbed individual. He had been right. From her teens on, her whole life had been lived through a drug- and alcohol-induced haze. From petty thief to prostitute in two easy steps, she thought, a faraway look in her eyes.
Her mother had been right. Her favourite saying had always been: ‘You will never amount to nothing.’
And her mother would know better than anyone. After all, it was a family trait.
The door rattled and she frowned, aware that she should have been up and dressed by now and ready to go. But she had been incarcerated for so long she wasn’t sure if she could cope with the outside world again. It had never been kind to her.
Her eyes travelled around her cell. It was like a refuge to her today. It felt safe and homely. It felt right.
She pushed the thought away, knowing it was a natural feeling. Telling herself over and over that once she walked out of the gates and was free, her life would start again.
She was counting on it.
The first thing she’d do, after twelve years without a glimpse of them, was see her kids.
She sat upright, looking around her with the eyes of a woman about to be freed. Eyes that could bore into people’s souls and see them as they really were. Eyes that were desperate for a glimpse of her children, greedily contemplating her first sight of them in all their glory. Not as distant memories that were hard to place because she had been out of it for so much of their young lives, but seeing the people they had become and hoping against hope that they didn’t hold it all against her. That they would understand she had had no control over what had happened to them. That she wasn’t really capable of motherhood then, any more than she was now.
Children were unlucky really. They were born without any say in things whatsoever. It was a lottery for them in some respects, what kind of mother they would acquire once out of the warmth of a snug and comfortable womb. A loving caring individual who would rush to fulfil their every whim? Or a selfish one who resented their intrusion into her otherwise orderly life? Children were a shock to the system for most women. The idea of a baby was wonderful; the reality of a toddler devastating. They drained you, made you realise you would never again be your own person. They kept you up half the night and ran around all the day. They needed feeding, training, time, effort, sweat and tears.
She had been fifteen when Tiffany had been born and seventeen when she had had Jason. Two different kids with radically different fathers. One black, one white. Her sister had joked she should go on Race Relations Board outings. But it had not been funny really.
She had been twenty-one, pretty in a make-up and tits kind of way, when she had beaten to death two other prostitutes in a squat in Kensington.
She closed her eyes at the unwanted image: waking up to the blood. Blood everywhere. On the walls, door, even the ceiling. She had been covered in their blood; it was in her eyes, her hair, her skin.
She felt the familiar rise of bile at the image and the crashing of her heart as it pumped her own blood through her body at a rate that made her feel light-headed. It was a reminder, every time her heart beat like this, just what she had robbed her friends of. And they had been friends, that was the strangest thing of all.
Why had she done it?
Why could she never remember what it had been over?
Why the fuck had she pumped herself so full of narcotics she’d successfully blotted out whole days of her life, never to be recalled?
All she could remember was drugs and drink and man after man. How had she lived that life for so long? After twelve years clean, more or less, she saw the world through different eyes. Saw the world as a straight person saw it. Didn’t need to blot it out any more. Didn’t need to get so out of it she could vomit and not know anything about it until she awoke to the familiar sour smell.
But she also knew she was institutionalised, living in an artificial environment. No bills to pay, and warmth, food and drink provided for her at regular intervals. She had not turned off a light switch in over twelve years. Had been bedded down by seven-thirty most nights, and escaped into books through the absence of television as a stimulus.
She turned towards the door, hearing the screw’s approach.
‘Come on, girl, up and out of it. Have you forgotten what day this is?’
She didn’t answer, but made an effort to look busy. She was already packed, in fact, had been for a week. What she owned was so minimal she could put it all into a carrier bag. In over twelve years she had had not one visitor, not one letter.
She washed her face in cold water, then dressed quickly, silently. She sat on the bed with her small bag and waited for the breakfast she wouldn’t even eat, though the bitter coffee would be welcome.
One half of her could not wait to get out of the door, get a new life, join society this time as a productive member. The other half was frightened witless at the thought of being out in the real world, talking and interacting with real people. People who knew nothing about her or, worse, people who did.
She put her face in her hands and sighed. Her Bible was on the bed beside her and she picked it up, whispering over and over, ‘God forgive me, God forgive me, God forgive me.’
And in her mind’s eye she saw Caroline and Bethany again, lying mangled and dead as she finally realised what she had done to them.
Caroline her friend; Bethany her best friend.
She had reduced them to bloody pulp with a baseball bat and a torque wrench. But why? That was the question she asked herself a hundred times a day.
Why?
For nearly thirteen years, she had not been able to find an answer.
She finally walked out of Cookham Wood Prison into a light rain. She stood for a few moments, savouring the feeling of the moisture on her face. It was cold, the kind of misty rain that soaked through clothes and skin, the kind of rain other people hated, but for her it was proof she was alive and well.
She trudged to the bus stop, aware that her clothes left a lot to be desired, in her pocket the address of a halfway house. She fingered the money beside it. It felt dirty and used, crumpled as it lay in her palm.
It felt like her.
Two young girls walked past her, their clothes and hairstyles looking completely alien. They stared at her rudely and she ignored them, remembering a time when she would have faced up to them. Would have frightened them with her language and her aggression. Instead she walked on, oblivious to their stares and muttered comments.
She breathed in the misty air, sucked it deep into her chest. Enjoyed the feeling of being outside yet alone. Wanted the comfort of the anonymous room she would occupy tonight. She wanted desperately to be alone, properly alone again. Wanted the opportunity to think in peace.
Instead she found herself on a train. She didn’t want to think about where she was going. It would hurt too much.
She drank in the scenes that rushed by as she stared out of the window. A woman sat opposite her with a young boy. He was handsome, w
ell-behaved. She couldn’t help staring into his face as if she could read his mind with her eyes alone.
What were her own children doing at this minute? Did anyone keep in contact with them? She had signed the papers for them to go into long-term care and that had been that. The social workers would tell her nothing except that her kids were well cared for. Told her to forget about them, get her head down and do her time.
Well, she had done all that and the pain of parting from them was as real today as it had been all those years ago. Why did you have to lose something before you could fully appreciate it?
She stepped down from the train and jumped into a cab. The familiar streets made her nervous. She strained to see a face she recognised, a shop she might have frequented. Most of the pubs were gone. It was all different. This upset her more than she’d thought possible.
She paid the cab and walked up the narrow path to her childhood home, feeling sick with apprehension. She forced herself to knock on the door, watching through the glass as a woman bowled up the hallway, her bleached blonde hair like a magnet to the visitor’s eyes.
The door opened and her mother stood there speechless, the smile of welcome dying on her face.
They stared at one another for long seconds.
‘Hello, Mum . . .’
The other woman held up her arm as if warding off evil, hatred plain upon her face.
‘Fuck off, Marie - and don’t you ever come here again. We don’t want you, we never did. You’re trouble. Nothing but bloody trouble.’
The door was slammed shut in her face.
She wavered on the doorstep and seemed to sink down. She was sitting on the step, her tears mingling with the rain which was heavier now. A roll of thunder above her head made her shiver with fright, but she sat there and cried as she hadn’t cried in years: deep sobs, wrenched from her bowels. The sound was as lonely as it was heart-breaking. As loud as it was terrifying. But the door didn’t open again.