The Graft

  He pulled on the brandy once more and said cockily to his wife, ‘But I did get away with it, didn’t I?’ He was deadly serious. ‘What are you going to do now then, Tams? Grass me up?’ He grinned again. ‘I don’t think so. I know you better than you know yourself.’

  He picked up the phone from the table and held it out to her. ‘Here you are, Tams, ring the filth, go on. Bring it on, girl! Go for it. But remember, if I go down, I take you both with me, because you would be finished around here. Remember that. All your so-called mates would be in their element, seeing you brought so low. I ain’t just a murderer, I am a fucking nonce, girl. You would be a fucking laughing stock.’ He knew in his heart that she would not do it. Tammy didn’t have finer feelings or any kind of principles. All she knew was how to look after number one and she was an expert at that. She had had to be.

  Nick was ranting now. ‘He was like you, Tammy, my Sonny Boy. A fucking leech! Always wanting me, but I hadn’t wanted him since he was a kid. I used him like I used you. He got me what I wanted and I paid him for that but, like you, Tams, I shoved a mercy fuck his way and kept him sweet. He actually thought we would play happy families, see, and I let him think it, like I did with you, and I wiped him off the face of the earth and that is what I will do to you if you push me, see?’

  Nick looked sinister now, his face twisted angrily with aggression and defiance. ‘I was protecting you, Tammy. You, the kids, me mother. I was protecting you all from him and his fucking hanging on all the time.’

  The two women realised that he actually believed what he was saying. He was now trying to justify what he had done and his wife and his mother exchanged glances as he stood between them looking for all the world like an innocent man.

  ‘What about the little kids then, son? How do you justify them?’ Angela pulled him round to face her and she slapped him with all her might across the cheek. ‘What have I bred? Listening to you just then it would have been so easy to forgive you like I’ve always forgiven you. But now I know you are nothing. You are scum, son. And Tammy doesn’t need to phone the police, because I will. I will do it and gladly.’

  The cocaine had made him aggressive and, smiling at her, he said gently but viciously, ‘I was more worried about you finding out, Mum. Do you know that?’

  He flicked his head towards his wife as he said louder, ‘Now her, I couldn’t really give a fuck about. But you? Well, I was always a mummy’s boy, wasn’t I? You saw to that, didn’t you? But Tammy was only ever a means to an end, and like the fucking albatrosses you both are, I have had the pair of you hanging round my neck for the best part of my life. Is it any wonder I like the uncomplicated, innocent world of children?’

  Tammy felt the brandy rising up from her stomach and she ran to the sink and retched until her tummy was empty. But the sickness was still there.

  Angela’s voice was loud as she said, ‘You used us all, that was why you wanted me here in the first place, isn’t it? You knew Tammy didn’t want me here yet you insisted. Telling me you had bought the house for me—’

  ‘It got you here, didn’t it?’ He was laughing once more. ‘I have fuck all on my conscience where you are concerned, Mother.’

  Nick looked at his wife. ‘Or you, for that matter. I gave you the world on a plate and you know I did.’

  ‘What about the little kids? Aren’t they on your conscience then?’ Tammy’s words were low and bitter. ‘The little kids you’ve destroyed because you are a fucking weirdo. What about Sonny Hatcher? Is he on your conscience?’

  He shook his head sadly.

  ‘I loved Sonny, as a matter of fact. He was everything I had ever wanted in a lover.’

  Tammy laughed then. ‘Till he grew up and you murdered him.’

  Nick started to walk around the kitchen once more as he spoke. ‘Gary Proctor was filling his head with shit behind my back, Sonny was always after me for more and more money and I had had enough of it. I had what I wanted in a rat house in London and I tell you both now I ain’t ashamed of my preferences. That is what you can’t seem to get on board. I like what I do, I get enjoyment out of it. I love my life!’

  ‘You need help, son, and the police will make sure you get it.’

  He shook his head as if she had said the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  ‘Fuck off, Mother, and take that sick cunt with you.’

  ‘Your father always said you were bad, rotten to the core and he was right, wasn’t he?’

  Nick’s eyes were stretched to their utmost now.

  ‘Back to him, are we? Ask poor fucking Hester how she feels about him, Mum. Ask her about her feelings for once. Like you, she can’t bear the thought of anyone finding out the truth of it all.’

  It was strange but even in her heartbreak she knew he genuinely loved his sister.

  He was pouring himself a brandy then as he said, ‘I liked my life, Tams. Whatever you might think I kept this shit away from you. I bankrolled the lot, Sonny included. I let you do what you liked, Tams.’

  ‘We were just a blind no more and no less, Nick.’

  It was the truth and he couldn’t deny it. He knew his life was over now. The life he knew anyway.

  ‘Sonny was going to blow us all wide open, and so he had to be sorted. With Gary, I set him up. He thought he was going to rob me and get money from the insurance company, see. It was so easy. Murder is much easier than people think, you know.’

  He was talking matter of factly now. ‘No one is who you think they are, Tams, me mother is proof of that, ain’t you?’ He was looking into her eyes now. ‘It was better for all of us if Sonny was gone, see. I regretted it, but it was better for everyone. I swear to you both that I didn’t really want to do it, but what else could I do?’

  Tammy looked around the beautiful home she had never really appreciated, saw poor Angela’s face, saw the disgust on it and knew it was mirrored on her own.

  ‘You are nothing but a child molester.’ Angela said it quietly and with conviction. ‘You are your father’s son all right.’

  ’Am I?’

  He smiled once more at her, snorting through his nose with his laughter.

  ‘Well, you always wanted him more than you wanted us, so don’t try and come the old fucking soldier with me! You would still shag him when he wanted you to and his mates as well.’

  He turned to Tammy as he said loudly, ‘She was worse than you in her younger days, old holy Joe, she’d fuck him and his mates, it was like our whole lives were about sex and sexual innuendo and she was as bad as him because she let him do it to us.’

  He grinned once more and his gaze was almost malevolent. ‘Remember, Mum, remember the Friday nights?’

  ‘Stop it! Stop it will you, Nick!’

  There was something in Angela’s shrill and frightened voice that Tammy picked up on. Shaking her head at what was being said to her she instinctively knew that he was telling the truth.

  Realising she believed him, he deflated in seconds. Then he said to her sadly, ’Ask her about how she would comfort me. Go on, Tams, ask her. Ask old holy Joe there what she would do to me.’

  He turned and stared at his mother then. ‘You remember, don’t you, Mum?’

  Tammy felt sick once more as she watched them.

  ‘If I am a pervert what does that make you, Mum, eh? Answer me that.’

  Had she known all this on some deeper level? Deep in her heart. She remembered him at the christening of his son, James, taking the pats on the back and the ribald comments. Even though he knew most people were asking the same question he was. Who the hell was the real father? Tammy, by then, had been round the turf of Essex more times than Frankie Dettori.

  Yet he had swallowed it so that no one would ever find out that he liked young boys. Kids. He was also telling her that his mother had abused him as well.

  What the fuck was happening here?

  ‘Give me that phone, Tammy. If you won’t ring the police, I will.’

  Nick’s head shot up and
he looked her in the face.

  ‘You wouldn’t?’

  His voice was low.

  She laughed then, an utterly sad and broken laugh.

  ‘Try me, Nick, see what I am really capable of.’

  He pushed the phone away from her.

  ‘Don’t do this, Mum. You need to think about what you’re doing, this is just a knee-jerk reaction, nothing more.’

  She tried to grab the phone from him but he had picked it up and was now standing, holding it behind his back.

  ‘I do not need to think about anything, I know what has to be done and I am going to see that you pay for everything you’ve ever done!’

  ‘But I am your son, you should be helping me, Mum, protecting me like I’ve protected you.’

  She shook her head then, walking towards him, she said quietly, ‘Not any more, Nick, you’re on your own. Now give me the phone.’

  He was backing away from her towards the granite island that housed the summer cooker and the chopping board. When his back was against it, he said in a low, babyish voice, ‘Please, Mum, don’t make me do this . . . please!’

  ‘Look at yourself, a fine thing for a mother to have to look at, eh? Me son, the queer boy.’

  Nick closed his eyes in distress at the vitriolic words.

  ‘Come away from him, Angela, come away now.’ Tammy’s voice was loud in the room but the man and the woman ignored her. This was a private battle and they both knew it. One of them had to give.

  ‘I want that phone and if you don’t give it to me I will walk out to the hallway and phone the police from there.’

  She shook her head at him in derision.

  ‘Because, son, no matter what you say or what you do, I am going to tell them what you are.’

  It was said with finality and as she turned away from him he took the large boning knife from the expensive beech block that housed it and stabbed her in the back with it. Then, with Tammy’s screams ringing in his ears, he walked from the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Billy Clarke walked into a scene of pandemonium. He looked around the scruffy flat and was in turn disgusted and fascinated by what he was seeing. It was like something from a television play, something you knew went on but never believed you would see for yourself.

  Now, though, they were all seeing it and real life was a bastard when it was so in your face. A classless society? Well, there was no class of any kind in this fucking drum, that much was for sure. His wife, though, would have known all about this kind of life. Caroline was interested in other people, especially the ones no one cared about.

  The underclass, she called them.

  She was a diamond like that, had educated him in many ways and he loved her for it. And she was absolutely right in what she had said to him: no one seemed to care about these kids, least of all the man who professed to be looking after them.

  Terry was grilling the Lexus owner. For some reason the man really seemed to annoy him and Billy could see why. He looked like one of their associates, looked like any normal grafter, and he had obviously done a bit of bird. You could see that by his tattoos and his general demeanour.

  Billy walked from the room, leaving his brother to it.

  In one of the bedrooms he saw a young girl of about fifteen. She wasn’t even pretty, God love her, not that that should have made any difference, of course, but in all honesty it did to him. He understood about chasing youth and beauty, they were what most men desired. If it wasn’t most films would never be made, all those lovely girls flashing their threepenny bits all over the show. Somehow a young bird always spelled renewed youth to the man screwing her. Luckily most men were happy just looking at pictures of them in the paper or dreaming about them when they rogered the old woman.

  These people, though, to them it was a form of control. His wife knew all about that, too. She had explained to him once that rape was not really a sex crime. It was using sex to subdue or destroy someone.

  It was the weapon of choice, if you liked. The worst thing that could happen to anyone. Billy finally realised that he was staring at the poor girl and probably frightening her. He told her to get dressed but she just stared back at him and he saw she was stoned out of her box.

  He walked back into the front room and said to Terry in anger ‘The cream of fucking society in here, eh?’

  His brother shook his head in disgust.

  ‘Look at this cunt. He is masquerading as a fucking person, a grafter like us. He works for Liam O’Halloran. Wait till I tell him this sorry little tale.’

  O’Halloran, another local lunatic, would be honour bound to bounce his man round the pavement when he found out about this.

  ‘Imagine getting your rocks off with this lot, Bill. It’s like a fucking nightmare, ain’t it?’

  Terry clumped O’Halloran’s man without any ceremony in the face. Not knowing how to react to a situation like this, they were all caught between anger and shock.

  Louis stayed quiet, just watching his friend through the dirty window as he laid into the man on the balcony outside.

  Watching and waiting in case Tyrell needed his help in any way.

  Billy loved his brother Louis. He wasn’t cut out for all this really, he was like Tyrell in that way, they were both too nice. You had to have a deep-seated anger at the world to succeed in their business, or in Terry’s case just be a bonafide loony tunes. But Louis was a grafter, in his own way he got things done. Billy remembered him and Tyrell as kids, one so blond and the other so dark. They had loved each other like brothers. When Tyrell’s boy had died, Louis had taken his friend’s grief as his own. Billy respected that. You needed family, but a good friend was as important at times. You could tell them things you could not tell your own flesh and blood.

  He heard a smacking sound and saw Terry had lashed out once more. The man with the Lexus was openly terrified and Billy glanced at him without a flicker of remorse. He knew Terry wanted to hurt this scum and as far as he was concerned his brother could go for it.

  A young boy with longish red hair and mascara was sitting on the sofa watching it all.

  ‘What you looking at?’ snarled Terry.

  The boy turned away quickly, his fear almost tangible.

  ‘What’s your name then?’

  He looked at Terry and stammered, ‘F-Frankie . . . Frankie Watts.’

  He had a girlish voice, quiet and put on. Billy imagined he had practised it over a period of time to get it just right.

  It cut no ice with him.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  He looked all of twelve, with his skinny body and baby face.

  Terry looked at his brother again and held his arms up as if to say, See what I mean?

  ‘This place is mental, Bill, I can’t take it all on board.’

  Billy nodded, knowing exactly how he felt. This was too far out for them, too fucking weird.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, this place is giving me the fucking creeps.’

  Billy had had enough now. He walked out on to the balcony; he needed to hurry Tyrell up. He honestly didn’t know how much more of this he could take. It made him want to go home and check on his own kids, make sure they were OK.

  The cold hit him but he liked the clean feel of it in his lungs. After that flat it was almost like ambrosia.

  ’All right, Tyrell?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You getting anything useful?’

  Billy was lighting a cigarette, something he only did when stressed. Tyrell held his hand out for the smoke and Billy gave it to him gladly.

  ‘This is sick, Billy, you won’t believe any it, I tell you.’ Tyrell looked down at the man cowering on the floor. Freezing and bloody, he was finally broken. ‘Tell him! Tell him what you told me.’ Tyrell kicked him none too gently in the ribs as he spoke.

  The man looked up at him and Billy could see his broken teeth. From the way his arm hung crooked and bleeding he knew Winters had f
elt the full force of the chair leg more than once during the course of their conversation.

  Billy was impressed with old Tyrell. Had thought when it finally came to it he might have shit out. And who could blame him? Who wanted to know the truth about their own kid when it was as ugly as this? He had expected to take over from here, to mete out the punishment for Tyrell, and would have done it gladly. The man needed to know that whoever had taken his boy down was wiped off the face of the earth.

  Winters was stuttering in fear. He knew who Billy was and was terrified all over again.