The Take

  She hated Freddie Jackson, and the boy had just been another stick to beat her with. If she had only had another child, she could have got away with her deceit, got Freddie off her back. But it had never happened, not even a threat of one.

  Every time she allowed Jimmy to take her, she prayed that this time he would give her a proper child, a child of their own.

  But inside herself, she felt that would never happen.

  ‘Did you have a nice time at Nana’s, mate?’

  Jimmy Junior nodded. ‘Freddie came and was nice to me.’

  Jimmy could hear the relief and surprise in his voice, and he hugged the boy to him, feeling, as he always did when near to him, the sheer strength of his love for his child.

  The boy’s blue eyes had incredibly long lashes and his little nose was a perfect blob on his handsome little face. His thick dark hair was so like his, wavy and black, and the smell of his small, chubby body was distinct and wholly his own.

  ‘Are you happy, my little soldier?’

  The boy looked up at him with complete trust and said happily, ‘Yes, I love you, Dad.’

  ‘And I love you, son. Now, off to sleep, eh?’

  He watched as he cuddled up to his teddy bear and closed his eyes, and knew it was not natural that this child had never once tried to get into bed with his mother and father.

  Jimmy looked around the perfect bedroom. It was a real boy’s room. Trains were hand-painted on the walls, and pennants were pinned up to show all the places he had visited in his little life. All his other toys were hidden away in the large toy store, as Maggie insisted on calling it, and the few toys lying around were jigsaws of Thomas the Tank Engine and colouring books and pencils that were all neatly put away in their cases.

  This was not how a three year old’s bedroom should look. Jimmy didn’t know how he knew that, but he was convinced he was right. The jigsaws and colouring books signified solitude to him, and he knew that this child was alone far too much for his own good.

  Kissing his little son’s forehead, he walked quietly from the room.

  Freddie was at the delectable Charmaine’s house, and he was happily drinking a beer and watching a video while she made him something to eat.

  At least her flat was clean, he would give her a few points for that much anyway, and the kid seemed a nice little thing from the photos that were all over the place. She was at her grandmother’s house. Well, there was a novelty on this estate. He would bet not one child under the age of twelve had ever stayed in with their mothers on a Friday night in their life.

  Char, as she liked to be called, came back into the small lounge and gave him a cheese sandwich and another beer. She was a nice little thing, well house-trained and with a cracking little arse on her.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were Kimberley’s dad.’

  Now this was a new concept to him. Surely she wasn’t his daughter’s mate!

  ‘How do you know her, then?’

  Charmaine laughed at his tone, and said with a smile, ‘I just know her from around the estate, that’s all. She pops in sometimes to see my mum for a cuppa, you know.’

  Freddie nodded, not sure where this conversation was taking them. ‘I see, now why don’t you get your kit off while I eat this sandwich, eh?’

  Charmaine nearly fainted, and he was surprised that she was so shy. He would have laid money on her being a right little raver.

  ‘Leave it out!’ She was genuinely embarrassed, and this endeared her to him for some reason.

  ‘Well, sweetheart, you saw me wife tonight. I ain’t come round here to read the fucking Bible with you, have I?’

  She laughed, and then she said seriously, ‘Do you fancy a joint?’

  She opened a small tin, and he watched her in delight as she rolled a perfect little joint and then sparked it up and drew the smoke into her lungs like a true professional.

  She passed it to him and he drew on it deeply.

  ‘This is a nice bit of scran, where did you score it?’

  She was sipping her own beer now, and he saw that she was very ladylike and dainty.

  ‘I get it off Taffy Robin.’

  He laughed then, a big booming laugh that made the girl jump in fright. ‘Off fucking who?’

  She started giggling as she repeated, ‘Taffy Robin, you know, the Welsh bloke who lives in the flats over by the mini park. He always has a good stash on him, anything you want he’s usually got it. Ask your Kimberley, she should know.’

  He was alert now and sobering up faster than a high-court judge on a drink-driving charge. ‘You what? How would my Kimberley know about him?’

  Charmaine heard the subtle change in his voice and realised she had said the wrong thing. ‘I don’t know, Freddie, I thought she knew him, that’s all. I was probably wrong, eh?’

  She was trying to recover and she was doing a sterling job, but he knew a lying cunt when he saw one. His dad used to say, ‘How do you know when a woman’s lying? Her lips move,’ and he was right about that.

  He sat up and, putting down his plate, he said nicely, and with his most charming smile, ‘Oh, no you don’t, Char. You know something that I don’t, see. Now, you can either tell me the truth, and I mean the truth, and me and you can remain friends or you can go to the nearest casualty department via the end of my boot. The choice, my little love, is yours.’

  Charmaine was nervous. The dope she had smoked had just hit and she was not enjoying it at all. In fact, she was starting to sweat, she could feel it all over her body and she knew it was through fear.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Freddie, I only know she goes round there sometimes—’

  She was on her back with him holding her by the throat within seconds, and the force with which she hit the floor winded her. The pain was acute and she was suddenly reminded of just how dangerous this man might actually be.

  She looked into those blue eyes that earlier had seemed so sexy and inviting, and now all she saw was anger and threats.

  ‘I am warning you, Charmaine. You had better tell me what my daughter was doing in a Welsh fucking dealer’s house, and you better tell me what she was scoring. Because if you lie and I find out you fucking lied to me twice, I will break your fucking neck. Now tell me what it was.’

  The girl’s eyes were bulging and he was so angry it was a few seconds before he realised that she literally couldn’t answer him. He released his grip a little, and then he bellowed over her coughing and spluttering. ‘Fucking answer me, you cunt!’

  In minutes her life had gone from happy and carefree, with maybe even the promise of a romance, to violence and terror. She was shaking with fear and shock and she said through her tears, ‘It’s the brown, she’s on the brown.’

  The words took a few seconds to penetrate and when they did he could not for the life of him form in his mind the correct term for brown.

  Then he heard the word heroin in his head like a screaming klaxon and he knew then, without a shadow of a doubt that it was true, it was all true.

  And he slapped the girl on the ground around the face and head a few times, before he gravitated to punches and kicks. He was so angry he could kill someone, and he knew exactly who that was going to be.

  Maggie lay awake and listened to Jimmy gently snoring. She liked to feel him beside her in the dark, and she liked to hear him breathing as he slept because it made her feel safe.

  He had not touched her when he had got into bed, and she was disappointed because she had psyched herself up for it. And she wanted a child of their own, felt that this alone could cleanse her, make things right again.

  As she lay there, he turned over and she felt his hand touch her thigh and she jumped as she always did when touched without any warning. Her stomach turned over and she felt the now-familiar sickness as she once again felt Freddie’s hands, and smelled his breath and his body odour. She knew that as long as he lived those stenches would stay in her mind, and she would be able to smell them as acutely as she had
then.

  The phone started ringing and she answered it gingerly, nervous in case it was Freddie. He rang sometimes in the night and asked for Jimmy, though she knew it was part of his campaign against her. But instead of Freddie’s voice she heard a practically incoherent Jackie screaming and crying down the line.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Robin Williams, a name he saw as a curse thanks to a certain movie star and now a singer from a boy band whose sexuality was questioned, was carefully burning up some skag. A couple of young friends, young female friends, were happily going like lambs to his slaughterhouse as he showed them how to bubble it on the silver paper. Then he was going to explain the intricate mystery of how to load a syringe.

  He was in his late thirties, but he looked younger. His hair had a ginger tinge and was long and straggly, as was his little goatee beard. He was tattooed everywhere, and these home-made drawings consisted mainly of skulls and other death-related objects. He only listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or his idol Ozzy Osbourne, and his life revolved around his habit and/or the maintaining of his habit.

  Like most heroin addicts, any kind of real life had been put on hold the day he had become addicted. He had no real friends, no real social life and no idea of conversation outside of the best high he had experienced or the death of people who were only friends now because they had overdosed and died and could not contradict anything that he said about them.

  It was a lonely, depressing and seriously dangerous way of life. But to these two young people, who he saw as earners for himself in the future and nothing else, it seemed an exciting and fun-filled existence.

  Robin, or Taffy Robin as he was known, had three children he never saw, a string of women he had destroyed and left, and a debt that was, in their world, the equivalent of a Third World country’s which he could not pay back. Hence the new recruits.

  He was also into crack when the fancy took him, and he smoked dope to mellow himself out. He sold his methadone but kept up the scripts, or prescriptions to give them their correct term for it, because that was his magic ticket to the dole office. He knew every scam going and he had never worked a day in his life.

  He was an addict, and that meant that every agency the Labour Government funded was there expressly to help people like him. He had never had it so good, life had simply got better and better.

  His addiction had helped keep him out of prison, had helped him get housed time and time again when the going had got a little too tough, and it had made sure he got his drugs whenever he needed them because he was, after all, big roll of drums, addicted.

  Roll on Tony and his wonderful nanny state.

  As he drew the brown into the syringe, his front door came off the hinges and his front-room door, which as usual was wide open because of the smell, brought into view his worst nightmare.

  He had dealt with more than his fair share of irate fathers in his time, but this was not the usual angry dad. They were normally flabby, beer-drinking men who gave him a small dig that left him with a black eye, and gave them the prestige of their wives and friends.

  This man was what he had been dreading all his life, this man was a lunatic and it was there in his eyes, in his demeanour and also in the crowbar he was holding with both hands and which Taffy knew was going to come down on to his skull in the very near future.

  Like all addicts he tried to quickly put down the brown, to save it, so it wasn’t wasted, because to him it was more important than his own life.

  The two girls looked at the huge man with fear-filled eyes and when he bellowed, ‘Out, you pair of useless junkie cunts!’ they did not need to be told twice.

  The two girls grabbed their belongings and made a run for the now-gaping hole that had once been the front door.

  Freddie pointed at them with the crowbar to stop them leaving so quickly, and he said in a conversational tone, ‘You phone the filth or anyone and I will come after you, understand? ’

  They stood stock still and nodded. He was talking like their dad, like a regular person and they nodded in unison again so hard they hurt their necks.

  ‘Well, fuck off, then!’

  They were running out the door now, and on the stairs they encountered neighbours who were all interested to see what was going down.

  Taffy Robin was a thorn in their side. He had people in and out at all hours of the night and day, and they had to be careful of being robbed, because an addict would not go too far from his source to steal unless he had to. These people had come home from the shops to see their TV or a video recorder gone, just enough to get the thief a few quid until the next time. Get the thief a ten-pound bag.

  The flats had gone downhill since they had been built just after the Second World War, and that meant that insurance was unheard of. No company would take on the responsibility. If something was stolen, it was gone, and that was that. It had to be replaced by the individual who had lost it. The police rarely came out if called for theft or burglary, and if by any miraculous chance they did bother to come, they told the victims what they had already sussed out for themselves. It was junkies. So, other than making a cup of tea for someone Taffy’s neighbours instinctively saw as an enemy anyway, and everyone knew the filth could drink tea for England, they had to sort things out for themselves.

  Now, it seemed that this was finally coming to pass.

  An elderly man in pyjamas and a baseball cap shouted through the door, ‘Fucking do him, Freddie, he’s a cancer. Fucking do him, boy.’

  Freddie did not need to be told twice.

  The crowbar was brought down with all the force he could muster over and over again. When Taffy stopped moving, Freddie started on the front room and he trashed it, windows, TV and anything else that got in his way.

  The whole thing took twenty minutes, and he walked from the flat a conquering hero.

  ‘Who did this to your daughter, Mrs Jackson?’

  The WPC was a kind girl with nicely cut blond hair and almond-shaped green eyes. Maggie looked her over with a professional eye and decided she could take five years off and make her look like a movie star.

  Jackie was not talking, and Maggie sighed as she said seriously, ‘She was attacked in the street, mugged. It was her mother’s birthday party tonight, and she stayed at the pub. When she couldn’t get a cab, she walked. It’s only ten minutes away, you know. And from what we can gather she was jumped from behind.’

  ‘But she managed to get home?’

  Jackie and Maggie nodded.

  ‘With a broken leg?’

  Jackie shrugged then. ‘We found her out the front. What can I say? Maybe someone helped her, we don’t know. That’s your job ain’t it, at least it was last time I read a crime novel.’

  ‘What about you, Mrs Jackson, how did you get the bloody nose?’

  Maggie and Jackie could see what her questions were leading to now, and Jackie said with deliberate and calculated disrespect, ‘Fuck off, sweetheart. We can see where you are going with this shit.’

  Maggie winked at Jackie and she walked the WPC from the little family room. ‘Look, love, my sister is an alcoholic, as I am sure you probably know. You spend enough time around there sorting out her different tantrums with the neighbours. She always has cuts and bruises, drunks tend to fall over a lot.’

  She yawned delicately before continuing, but it was an insulting yawn, a bored yawn and the WPC knew without a shadow of a doubt that the person boring this well-turned-out and well-spoken woman was herself.

  ‘Now you listen, and you listen good. That girl’s father is Freddie Jackson, and you had better hope you find the culprit before he does. But don’t you ever dare to insinuate anything like that about my sister again, not unless you want to deal with her and hers. All right?’

  The girl nodded. She knew when she was beaten. This family was a law unto itself, which was, she realised, why she had been assigned to them. She saw that now with crystal clarity. No one else wanted the aggravation, or indeed wanted to g
et involved at all!

  The Jacksons would sort this out and the local police would let them. It was how their worlds worked.

  She heard later that night in the canteen that some bloke called Mr Thomas Halpin, who was part of the Serious Crime Squad, had apparently already warned the station to back off. It was not the first time that had happened and she was sure it would not be the last.

  So she would do the same as everyone else. She had tried her best, done her job, and if she was honest she hoped that Freddie Jackson did take the fucker out. If there was a nutter on the streets and Jackson cleaned him up, it would save them all a job.

  She wanted to be a plain clothes one day, and if that meant letting the Jacksons have a get-out-of-jail-free card, then so be it.

  Ozzy was ill and he was feeling the pain in his chest acutely. He sat up in his cell and clutched his arm. It was like a big cold weight was crushing his chest. Like a block of ice had been dropped on him from a great height.

  He was sweating heavily, and his breathing was getting shallower and shallower.

  He wondered if he should ring the bell, get a screw in. But he had to lie down first, he had to try to lessen this pain a bit.

  Finally he fell asleep, and the pain eased.

  Jackie and Maggie came home from the hospital at six thirty in the morning. The girls had stayed behind, and were told the same story, that she had been attacked by a stranger. Though none of them believed it they would keep up the pretence, especially Kimberley, who was already remembering details of her mystery attacker.

  Maggie put on the kettle in the kitchen while Jackie took a bottle of vodka out of the fridge. She mixed it in a large water glass which already contained lukewarm white wine and gulped it down. Maggie watched as she poured out another drink with trembling hands, and her heart broke once more at the sorry excuse of a woman her sister had become.

  ‘You have to make him go, Jack, you can’t let him get away with that.’