The Graft

  Not that he had any intention of pointing that fact out in the near future, of course.

  ‘Fucking arsehole bandit! I mean, what the fuck is all that about?’

  A young redhead with slim legs and a suspiciously heavy chest came over and smiled at Stevie in a friendly way. Then, looking at Nick, she said in a broad Essex accent: ‘Got me wages?’

  He laughed. He liked her, she was a good kid. Eighteen but looking twelve without make-up, she had been stripping since she was a fifteen-year-old runaway. He nodded to the girl behind the bar and she passed him an envelope.

  ‘Here you are, love, see you next week.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes at him and he winked back at her but they both knew it was a game, he had no interest in her and she liked him all the more because of that. Men had been coming on to her since she had first gone into care as a rather pretty nine year old. She now knew better than women three times her age how to take care of herself.

  She smiled at Stevie once more because Nick had assured her he might be up for it. She liked the faces, they normally gave good sex and were always generous. He was looking at her as if he was up for a good time.

  Stevie was. He had been good for too long. His wife was a star and he appreciated her waiting for him, but she had the body of a forty year old and unfortunately for her he had dreamed for too many years about the bodies of twenty year olds. This little one was just his cup of tea, and far too good to knock back.

  Life was too short for monogamy, he had learned that much in nick. As he started chatting to the girl, Nick grinned. Twenty minutes later they were standing at the other end of the bar and Nick was as far from Stevie’s mind as his wife and kids were.

  The redhead was a good sort all right, she had done a sterling job of taking that miserable ponce off Nick’s hands. He knew Stevie had wanted to hurt Proctor, he had said as much, and Proctor had been hurt. Nick had done the main graft of the night, so what was Stevie worrying about? He had only given him a slap by their standards.

  Nick liked Stevie but he was an old woman in some respects. Still, a lump could do that to a body. They either came out able to hold the world on their shoulders and better for the experience, or else they came out like Stevie, frightened of their own shadow.

  But he had wanted Proctor sorted and he had been sorted, the same way that piece of thieving shit Lance Walker had been sorted.

  End of fucking story.

  Tyrell and Louis went back to Jude’s.

  Louis felt for his friend, knowing that the utter humiliation was killing him. Louis had heard rumours about Sonny, everyone had. He was a one-boy crime wave and at first it had been seen as amusing. When he had started nicking off his own, though, it had ceased to be funny. It was only Tyrell’s standing in the community that had stopped the boy being given a good slap.

  But Louis had never heard anything about him being a bender. He tried to imagine how he would feel in Tyrell’s shoes and couldn’t even get close. But then, he had always seen the boy differently from everyone else. It was what made him a good man. Tyrell had loved his son and Louis respected that.

  As they walked inside the flat Jude was standing in the hallway as if waiting for them. One eye was black and her neck was already bruising. She looked like she had been given a good hiding, which of course was the case.

  ‘You cunt.’

  Tyrell didn’t know who was more surprised at his words, Jude or himself. It was not a word he had ever used to her though he knew it was part of her everyday life like the squalor that surrounded her, the smell she gave off. She was barefoot and he could see the needle marks between her toes and the thread veins all over her ankles. He saw her through everyone else’s eyes and all the guilt he usually felt evaporated. In its place was a hatred that frightened him with its intensity.

  He saw the shiftiness in her blue eyes that he had never dared to acknowledge before because then he’d have had to deal with the knowledge of what she was really like. He had always given her the benefit of the doubt, but no longer.

  ‘I’ve been called worse than that, Tyrell.’

  He smirked at her and Jude felt the first real prickle of unease.

  ‘I bet you have.’

  He took a joint from his jacket pocket and lit it with shaking hands. The smell of skunk was heavy and sweet as it battled with the other odours in the flat.

  ‘So he was flogging his arse, was he?’

  She flicked her hair out of her eyes in a gesture of contempt.

  ‘ ’Course not. You know what they’re like round here, they talk shite.’

  But the fear was there, in the minute tremor in her voice, and Tyrell knew he had her on the ropes. All he had to do was deliver the final knock-out punch.

  So he did.

  ‘I believe Deborah, Jude.’

  She had been banking on his not wanting to believe any of it, but as they looked into each other’s eyes he finally knew the truth of it.

  Tyrell was a big man, a handsome man, his dreads gave him a dignity that was somehow lacking in the younger West Indian men. It wasn’t a fashion statement with Tyrell, it was who he was. He had a wide face, high cheekbones and slanting eyes. He had never appreciated just how good-looking he was, had never cared about anything like that.

  Jude shrugged him away dismissively and said in a flat bored voice that was somehow aimed at goading him, ‘Believe what you like. It’s too late now, ain’t it? He’s gone.’

  She spoke about Sonny as if he was a puppy that had run away, or a stranger who meant nothing, to her.

  Tyrell realised then that that was exactly what her son had been to her. He was purely a means to an end, and he had a sneaking feeling poor Sonny had realised it all along.

  Louis wasn’t prepared for the attack when it took place and neither was Jude. She disappeared under a hail of blows that would have killed any other woman. It took Louis a good five minutes to drag his friend off the now terrified Jude. All the stunts she had pulled on Tyrell over the years had never produced a reaction to match this one. If someone had told her he would raise his hand to her Jude would have laid her last fix in a bet stating otherwise.

  Never before had Louis seen anger like it. He knew it had been bottled up a long time. This man’s son had led a dog’s life and died prematurely. Now it was payback time for Jude because she had not tried to prevent it happening. In fact, had made sure something like that would happen eventually. Sonny never stood a chance of leading a decent life.

  He stared at the wreck of the woman before him and her bloody face and sagging countenance did nothing for him now. If someone had told him he would raise his hand to a woman he would have laughed in their face yet he knew that he could cheerfully break her neck now and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

  The hate was deep now, ingrained.

  ‘Where did my boy get that gun, Jude?’

  He was still panting from exertion as he spoke and Jude, broken and yet still standing, said nastily, ‘I don’t know.’

  Her voice set him off once more and when he attacked her again it took all Louis’s strength to drag his friend from the flat.

  As he pushed him into the car Louis wondered what the repercussions of this night would be.

  It wasn’t long before he found out.

  Maureen Proctor stood staring at the second pair of policemen to visit her today. She was unable to take in what they’d just told her.

  ’Are you sure it’s my Gary?’

  A PC nodded sadly.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘No, Mrs Proctor, but he is very poorly.’

  Poorly?

  The word was weird to her. It was one people had used in her mother’s day. Coming out of this young man’s mouth, it made her want to laugh.

  ’And he has been beaten up and burned, you say?’

  He nodded once more.

  ‘But why would someone do that to my old man? He is an irritating fucker but no one we know would go that far.’
/>
  ‘Would you like us to take you to the hospital?’

  She looked at him as if he had grown another head in front of her eyes.

  ‘Do I fuck! I’ll drive meself.’

  All the way to Billericay burns unit Maureen wondered who Gary had pissed off this time. She was also wondering who to tell first because chances were someone she knew would be aware of who was responsible for the attack. But it was the kilo of cocaine they’d found in his car that really threw her.

  Drugs were not Gary’s forte, or Nick’s, and they’d worked closely on everything. Gary might snort cocaine, he liked the high, but he wasn’t up to dealing it. The sentences were far too stiff. He stuck with his other businesses.

  Or maybe she didn’t know about this move? Maybe he had kept it quiet for the simple reason that he knew she hated drugs of any kind. As she negotiated her way through the traffic she marvelled at all the people she could see going about their lives without having to worry about knocks on the front door, about whether or not their husbands would still be home for Christmas or if they would be visiting them inside for a long time, pretending an affection that wasn’t there any more because affection needed human contact and that was impossible now.

  Maureen pushed the thoughts from her head. Gary was gravely ill in hospital, not on remand or waiting for bail.

  Beaten and burned, though. It sounded like nonce treatment . . . Was he up to something else she didn’t know about?

  Chances were he was, she acknowledged bitterly. But if he was then it was surely not with Nick by his side. Nick was known as a good family man. He was not even a womaniser. He talked the talk and he flirted, but that was as far as it went. Gary, on the other hand, was like a rutting pig. Had he dabbled with someone else’s bird? Or, more to the point, daughter?

  The thought frightened Maureen.

  She decided to talk to Nick Leary as soon as she could and see what he knew. But not on her mobile. She would ring from a payphone so she could be sure no one could trace anything. If this was over Gary’s usual business then she and the kids were home and dry money wise. She would be due some compensation from Nick and would want that sooner rather than later. If Gary died she would need a lump sum and access to his percentages.

  She had a lot to think about and Nick Leary, though fair, was not a man to cross. She only hoped Gary had remembered that.

  Tyrell sat with his boys and Sally in the lounge of his former home and watched as his sons chatted to one another.

  They were good kids. He was proud of them. They were kind, happy, and best of all respectful. He loved them and once he had loved being here with them. Now he felt like a visitor.

  It was funny but the room seemed smaller than he remembered and it had only been a week or so since he had lived here all the time. Now he felt as if the walls were coming in on him.

  As he watched them he thought of Sonny, and the way he had been living. How could he not have known about it? Why wasn’t he aware that something was so drastically wrong?

  But then, in Jude’s life there was always something going wrong, always something out of the ordinary happening. It was normality for Jude. All her life she had done things that most people would instinctively have seen as wrong. Sonny had grown up with her habit ruling his life. If Jude was stoned then the world was a good place to be. If she was wired then everyone paid the price. Someone knocking the door down at three in the morning for money . . . well, didn’t that happen to everyone?

  His eldest son had lived that kind of life, one where violence and the threat of violence were commonplace, and Tyrell had let him. But it was the knowledge that Sonny had actually sold himself to buy his mother drugs that was eating at him like acid. Thinking of what his Sonny had done with those men for money, Tyrell hated him for it even as he loved him.

  He had seen those boys around the stations in London, had felt sorry for them even as they disgusted him. Had shooed them away from him in case anyone thought he was trying to attract them. He had loathed them and their lifestyles and had patted himself on the back because he’d known it would never happen to any of his sons. They would never need to do anything like that, would they? He was there for them, wasn’t he?

  This new knowledge explained a lot of things to him now, things he had found suspect but had not felt able to question at the time. Like the way Sonny would disappear late at night without any explanation, and the two mobiles he always carried with him. One must have been for business, that was why he always took those calls in private. He must have had a regular clientele.

  When Tyrell had been told what had happened to his boy he had never dreamed anything could make him feel worse than that.

  But he had been wrong.

  Angela was alone once more. Tammy had left the house to go for lunch. Shortly after that she had gone to her own annexe and made herself a hot milk laced with brandy. She sipped it slowly, her TV tuned to ITV 2. She enjoyed Sally Jesse Raphael, she was an older, more sensible talk show host than the others. Angela particularly liked the strait-laced way she confronted her guests when she thought they were in the wrong.

  If only life was that easy.

  These people on TV put the world to rights in a few minutes. In the time it took Angela to make a cup of tea they had saved a marriage, exposed a love rat or informed some teenage trollop who the father of her child actually was.

  For her it was normally compulsive viewing, making her feel better than those people who used a visual medium to air their filthy washing in the public arena. She couldn’t understand the mentality herself. These messed-up people with their dirty lives got paid to make the programme interesting and confrontational. They’d face the baying audience with defiance as if to say, ‘Look at me and the fuck up I have made, not only of my life but my children’s and their families’.

  ‘How clever I am because now I am a topic of conversation for a load of jobless wonders who in their hearts should know better than to waste precious hours of their lives watching this crap.’

  Oh, she was hurting all right.

  She was hurting for a son who had been verbally abused all his young life, who had had to stand at the end of the bed and watch his father beat and then rape his mother.

  What did these people know of hurt and pain? What did these people know of humiliation, of degradation? What did they know of a young boy who had tried to save his sister from the same fate only to have the indignities heaped upon himself ?

  How could she ever tell her daughter-in-law about all that? How could she ever expect anyone to understand, especially Tammy who lived for sex and for what she believed it stood for.

  Sex wasn’t about love, not most of the time. It was about keeping people, cowing to people, making them do what you wanted. Sex was a weapon of choice for many men and she knew that from first-hand experience. Angela poured herself a large brandy and gulped it down. The fear was upon her again and even though she knew her husband was lying in a cold grave she still half expected him to come storming through the door at any second. She knew that, at times, Nick expected it too. Such was her husband’s anger it still impinged on their lives all these years later.

  Angela sighed, knowing that she was going off on a tangent because she didn’t know how to fix her own life or more to the point her son’s. Didn’t know what to do with the terrible knowledge she now had in her possession.

  Today, she had been snooping, as usual. She couldn’t help it. She had seen something she had never thought to see again in her lifetime. Proof of her son’s derangement.

  She would have to try to live with the knowledge, yet she wasn’t sure that she could cope with it and all that it entailed.

  There was a kink in Nick’s nature and she had helped to put the kink into place. She knew that better than anyone.

  So what was she going to do about it?

  There had been a time, not too long ago, when Nick and Tammy’s marriage ending would have been cause for celebration to her. She’d howle
d at the fates that had brought her son and his wife together.

  Not any more, though. She was finally seeing poor Tammy and the life she had to live with Nick through clear impartial eyes. And what she now knew terrified her.

  Bloody men and their constant craving for excitement . . . why would Tammy want to come home to a house that was empty of all natural affection and love? Angela set no store by all this sex talk. Everyone these days thought they should be having orgasms all over the place and still shagging until their pacemakers packed up with all the excitement. But in its place, which to her was every Saturday night after a few drinks whether you needed it or not, it kept a marriage solid.