Marie was the worst nightmare of every mother living: a daughter who was nothing more than a whore. She had caused everything bad that had ever happened to them. From the loss of Marshall, Louise’s heart, her son, the reason she got up in the morning, to her own near death by fire. Yet fire was supposed to be cleansing. Louise remembered reading that after plagues and epidemic illnesses everything was burned. If she was ever capable she would burn her daughter herself and watch as she writhed in agony, she vowed. Only then could she feel she had been avenged for all the trouble Marie had brought on them.
Her breathing was bad again and she fought to calm herself. She must concentrate on getting better.
The door opened and she was surprised to see her husband standing before her. Kevin looked dishevelled, his whole demeanour strange. He needed a wash, a shave and a change of clothes. He looked like a tramp. What must the nurses think, seeing him like that? She was so angry with him for showing her up, but that was him all over. Without her he was capable of nothing. Her spiteful thoughts were clearly reflected in her eyes and he knew exactly what was going through her mind.
‘What do you want?’
Her voice still sounded muffled. She couldn’t talk properly because of the scarring to her face.
He smiled at her and drawled out his words because he knew it would annoy her.
‘You look terrible, Lou. Really fucking rough, girl.’ She shook her head in annoyance.
Kevin widened his eyes as if he was surprised he had offended her.
‘Oh, have I upset you, Lou? Sorry. I was only doing what you normally do – plain speaking, remember? Please or offend, that was your motto. Especially when you were slaughtering someone’s reputation. Or more often their kids’ lives.’
Her eyes were black pools of hatred as she looked at him. She didn’t need him to tell her what she looked like, she was well aware of it. She had insisted on seeing herself as soon as she was able, and she didn’t care. It meant nothing what was on the outside, it was the inside that mattered and she was good inside. She was clean, which was more than her husband or daughter could claim.
‘Get out of here.’
He laughed. ‘You amaze me, Lou. Even like you are, you still think you’re the dog’s knob, don’t you? Get out of here!’
He mimicked her voice and she closed her eyes against the onslaught she knew was to follow.
‘Well, I come to give you glad tidings as they used to say in biblical days. I have avenged your burning up. I killed that fat cunt’s husband today. Petey, who I feel drew an even shorter straw than I did, is no more. He has ceased to be, as they say on Monty Python. He has crawled up the curtain to meet his maker. He is an ex-arsonist.’
She was finally convinced that he had lost it. Once and for all he had gone over the edge.
‘Kevin . . .’
He laughed again.
‘Kevin! “Oh, Kevin, my husband.” How often did I hear that when we were first married, eh? But not for long. Once Marshall was born I was redundant, weren’t I? You had what you wanted, your glorious son. Well, he wasn’t the boy you thought he was – he was a weak-kneed little fucker and I hated him almost as much as I hated you.’
‘Stop it, Kevin. He’s dead . . .’
He watched her distress and felt a small spark of pity for her.
‘Oh, you noticed, did you? Would you have noticed if I had died, by any chance?’ He slapped his forehead and bellowed, ‘’Course you would. When the wages didn’t come in you would have wondered where I’d gone, wouldn’t you, Lou? Only I didn’t shoot meself, did I, like Marshall did? I shot someone else.’
He was laughing again.
Three nurses entered the room and looked at the man before them fearfully. One was very pretty with ginger hair and wide-spaced green eyes. Kevin smiled at her in a friendly way.
‘Hello, girls, come to see the freak?’
Then he took the gun from the carrier bag and held it so it was pointed at his wife. Louise was terrified. She was dribbling with fear and unable to wipe her mouth. It was an Essex shotgun. Lazily he unscrewed the long barrel, then threw the piece to the corner of the room. It made a hollow sound as it hit the pale green wall. He held the gun underneath his chin.
‘Husband and son topped themselves. How will you live this disgrace down, eh, Lou? Driving us both to suicide.’
Before he could pull the trigger, however, a burly porter grabbed him from behind. The report from the gun was heard all over the hospital, and the hole in the ceiling was there for months.
The police took Kevin away and charged him with murder. He was whistling and smiling all the way to the station.
Lucy listened to her mother’s ranting afterwards and tried to stem the tears. She knew her father had murdered Petey and wondered what on earth had possessed him. They were now left at the mercy of the Black family and she was terrified of further revenge attacks. It seemed to her that as soon as Marie had been released all hell had broken out.
She grasped her mother’s hand and the two of them stared at one another in shock.
‘I bet she’s laughing up her sleeve at us. She’s evil, Mum. You were right, she’s nothing but pure evil.’
Louise nodded her head in frustration.
‘Mickey’s mum is going to go mad when she hears this latest. He already hardly talks to me any more. I feel like Marie’s done all this deliberately, and there was me starting to feel sorry for her!’
The two women sat together, bitterness overflowing from them both. For the first time in ages they were united and as usual it was over Marie who, no matter what she did or didn’t do, was hated by them both for the same reason.
Marie watched Mikey sleep by moonlight. He slept like a baby, deeply and with small snuffling noises. She wondered what men would think if they knew how women watched them at their most vulnerable. Men asleep were like children. They thrashed about, farted, spread themselves across the bed claiming their space. Their faces relaxed and the real man was revealed, weak chin, saggy jowls . . . things that were not immediately obvious when they were strutting around being men. Thinning hair and pot bellies were hard to disguise asleep. Her eyes roamed all over him and she felt a strange affection for him. Sexually he’d been like a teenager, all over her, grabbing, wanting it all at once. His big hands were gentle in their way, but he was not the great lover he thought he was. That came from years of shagging women who just wanted something from him, who were with him because he was Mikey Devlin, who sucked his cock and groaned at all the right times because they knew it was what he wanted to hear.
Marie could spot women like that a mile away. Their only claim to fame was who they fucked, and they made sure people knew who that was. They held on to their man like a badge of honour. ‘Look at me, people, I’m shagging a bank robber, murderer, burglar, whatever.’ They didn’t know what real love was, or real life come to that. Which was why Mikey was so drawn to her. She actually had more creds than him and that had been the attraction in the first place. Now he liked her because he had talked to her and she had listened to him, and she liked him back. This surprised her but it made this job so much easier. Mikey was her ticket to Patrick Connor; she was Patrick’s nemesis, though he didn’t know that yet.
But, she reasoned, the fact that she liked Mikey made it all much easier. She had shuddered and groaned for England and he had believed he had satisfied a woman who had not had sex for thirteen years. He was over the moon with his own performance and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that George Clooney himself couldn’t have got a reaction from her. She had no sexual feelings left any more. She had used them up years ago and now sex was nothing to her. She had enjoyed the cuddle afterwards. Enjoyed feeling his heart beating against her chest. Even enjoyed his awkward compliments, such as the fact that she was apparently ‘in beautiful condition’. She smiled at the thought of his awkward words.
He was used to babes with fake tans and fake personalities. Women who had no real intelligen
ce except knowing how to garner money from him and maybe a holiday if they were lucky. Whose conversation was spattered with other hard men’s names and gossip about their contemporaries. Who didn’t read books or watch television unless it was a soap or a documentary on plastic surgery, the ultimate goal in their hollow lives. On one level Mikey was aware of all this and that was where his dissatisfaction stemmed from.
She kissed him gently and he snuggled into her. She pulled him into her arms and held him like a child and he responded like one, searching for a nipple and putting his hand in the crack of her behind. As he gently caressed her in his sleep she found herself beginning to become aroused. She moved against his hand and her movement woke him. She had her eyes closed and let the feeling wash over her. The fact that she was feeling anything was making her head reel. It had been so very long since the idea of sex had even entered her mind.
He pushed her on to her back and slipped his fingers inside her. He watched, fascinated, as she came in one long shuddering movement. She soaked him and she soaked the bed and when it was over he pulled her towards him and held her as she tried to control her breathing.
She felt free, really free for the first time in years. It was as if a dam had been emptied and taken away all her pent-up emotion with it. She was crying. Then he rested her back on the pillows and whispered softly in her ear, ‘You can definitely sleep on the damp patch after that!’
They laughed together, holding one another close.
‘I can’t sleep on the damp patch anyway. I have to go, I’m late for my curfew as it is.’
Mikey felt deflated. He had forgotten about that.
‘It’s only eleven o’clock, Marie . . .’
‘Let me ring and explain why I’m late and then I have to go, mate. Sorry.’
He stood up, annoyed she could tell. But it would just make him want her more.
‘Tomorrow me and you eat fast and then get straight in the kip, right?’
She laughed at his boyish eagerness.
‘We’ll see, Mikey. We’ll see.’
Chapter Seventeen
‘Come on, Verbie, it’s only until the girl gets back on her feet.’
Verbena stared at the man she loved above all else and wondered how he could have the gall to ask her to take on Tiffany’s child.
Ossie felt angry deep inside. When his wife was like this he actively disliked her. She could be a snob, and though he joked about it to her, she knew that it annoyed him.
‘I don’t know, Ossie. She’s trouble.’
Verbena knew she was annoying her husband and she didn’t care.
‘Who’s to say Tiffany will ever take the child back? She’s too much like her mother for my liking.’
Ossie rolled his eyes to the ceiling and Verbena felt tears near the surface of her own.
‘Look, Ossie, I’m the one who’ll have to take care of the child, not you. You’ll go off to work as usual and leave me here with her.’
‘I’ll stay home and help, Mum.’
Neither of them had realised that Jason was listening. Ossie turned and grinned at his son.
‘She asked me to help and she is my sister. Whatever she’s done she is my blood. Same with Anastasia. I feel I have to help if I can. Tiff would do it for me, I know she would.’
Verbena put her hand over her mouth as if she was going to be sick.
‘And as for my mother, if Tiff is like her then so am I. We come from the same stock, remember.’
He walked from the room and Ossie shook his head sadly at his wife.
‘We have to do this, Verbena, the boy needs to help his family.’
‘I’m his family . . . We are his family.’
Ossie shook his head again, his handsome face troubled.
‘Supposing we could have had kids of our own and had a daughter who’d turned out like Tiffany – would you turn your back on her?’
Verbena lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply. ‘We would never have had a child who turned out like that.’
Ossie laughed nastily.
‘No? What about John and Mary Thompson then? Their son is a heroin addict who has been in rehab more times than I can count and has actually robbed them. But they don’t give up on him and he was their birth child. No one can guarantee what a child will turn out like, Verbena. Remember that. That boy had everything a child could want, including an expensive private education, but he still turned out a thief, a liar and a drug addict.
‘And what about the Rawlings – the mother is addicted to painkillers, has been for years. Laura Rawlings is an addict, for all her high talk and expensive education. Verbena, it happens. No one wants it to but at least Tiffany is trying to make things better.’
His wife just looked at him. Her eyes were pain-filled and her mouth was trembling ominously.
‘I spoke to a solicitor. He said the boy has every right to ask for his sister’s child. No one else is available. No one else wants the poor little mite.’
Jason had been standing outside the door and came inside once more, his face set as it had been when he was a little boy determined to get his own way.
‘Please, Mum. Do this for me? She’s a lovely little girl.’
His expression was implacable and Verbena knew if she didn’t do what he wanted she would lose a part of him for ever. He was asking her for something so big she knew instinctively that if she let him down now it would seriously affect their relationship.
‘I promised my sister I would try and help and I intend to keep that promise, whatever.’
Ossie was proud of his son, saw the man he would become and felt grateful that Jason was a part of his life.
Verbena tried to smile but it was more of a grimace.
‘Looks like my mind has been made up for me, doesn’t it?’
Jason hugged her close and his touch was worth everything to her. She would do whatever she had to do to make her son happy.
Ossie hugged them both, his big arms encompassing them, and Verbena prayed that she could take to the child. Because she was the one who would be with her all the time and both the men in the house had forgotten that fact.
Patrick sat outside Sadie Beasley’s house with his music blaring. Her mother looked out from behind the net curtain and cursed under her breath.
Sadie was a pretty girl with long dark hair and deep brown eyes. She had olive skin, the legacy of an Italian grandmother, a high-breasted body with slim legs and a tiny waist. Her mother was frightened for her. She was only sixteen years old and already she was a handful.
Sadie came into the room.
‘I’m going out.’
Mabel Beasley shook her head.
‘No, you bleeding well ain’t. Not with that black bastard anyway!’
Sadie laughed without a care in the world.
‘Get a life, Mother, for crying out loud. What you going to do, stop me?’
She was ridiculing her mother and they both knew it.
‘I mean it, girl . . .’
Sadie walked from the room and Mabel felt the frustration of a mother who had completely lost control of her child. Tears of rage and fear filled her eyes as she watched her lovely daughter get into the car of the local hard man and drug dealer, Patrick Connor. He would ruin her without a second’s thought, without remorse, but Sadie was too stupid to see that.
If only her husband was still around, he would have stopped Sadie going out. But he was up north somewhere with his bird, a girl hardly ten years older than the daughter he had walked out on without a backward glance. The daughter he had once professed to love more than anything in the world.
Was it any wonder the girl was running the streets with Patrick Connor? He offered her everything that life had so far denied her and she was too young and starry-eyed even to suspect that some day soon she’d have to start paying him back.
Alan Jarvis saw Marie pull up in Mikey’s Merc and felt his heart sink down to his boots. Mikey must have picked her up from the hostel and that smacked
of some kind of ongoing arrangement between them. Mikey lived out in that big mausoleum in Essex so he’d have had to get up early to go and pick her up from the halfway house.
Seeing them together made Alan angry. What did Mikey Devlin have that he didn’t? He had asked himself this question over and over in the last few days. He didn’t care that Marie had the rep she had: prostitute, thief, drug addict, murderess. The list was endless, yet he would give anything to have her look at him just once as a potential lover. But it wasn’t going to happen, and he could not for the life of him understand why he cared so much. He thought about her all the time and obviously Mikey did the same. Devlin had once remarked that he wouldn’t get out of bed for less than ten kilos. Now he was getting out of bed to give a bird a lift to work.
That told Alan all he needed to know and he was gutted. Devlin was too heavy for him, far too heavy. Anyone else and he might have tried to interfere.
Marie must be off her head if she thought she could handle Mikey Devlin, the biggest nutter this side of the water. He was worried for her on top of everything else. Devlin exacted a price for everything he did to help someone and it was usually far higher than the person he’d dealt with had anticipated.
‘Listen, Marie, I promise I will find out what I can. He’ll be charged then held on remand. I can’t see him getting bail, especially not at Magistrates’ Court. The ponces are renowned for not having the guts to give it. We’ll see how it goes at Crown. If push comes to shove we’ll request judge in chambers, but don’t get your hopes up, OK?’
She nodded. ‘I can’t believe Dad did that. Killing Petey of all people! He was just a prat. It was Karen who was behind the fire, not her husband.’
Mikey personally couldn’t give a toss, but he knew better than to say that.
‘Petey had it coming to him. I think your father done a good thing. I’d have done the same if someone crisped up any of my family. You can’t let people get away with that! They’d start to think they could do what the fuck they liked. When you deal with a nutter, you have to be a bigger nutter. It’s how the world works. Our world anyway.