Blood Sister: A thrilling and gritty crime drama (32 page)

‘What do you mean the dinner money hasn’t been paid?’ Jen asked, amazed at the school office management. It didn’t help that she stood opposite a poster announcing it was National School Meals Week. The manager, Mrs Lamont, was one of those women who always rubbed Jen up the wrong way. Fake la-di-da accent, twin sets and pearl clothing, and a way of looking down her nose that suggested that Jen shouldn’t be sharing the same planet as her.

That awkward feeling came over Jen. She felt like she was a girl in a navy blue uniform, back in school. She’d got through her school days, but she’d always felt like she didn’t fit in there. She’d never done a bunk or given any backchat, like Tiffany had, but she’d just felt like a lump in class, getting by but not understanding half the stuff the teachers went on about. Not that the teachers seemed to care whether she understood or not, just as long as she kept nodding. Of course, that didn’t mean she didn’t take her responsibilities for her kids’ education seriously. Jen attended parents’ evenings, bought the girls the right P.E. kit for school, came to workshops held especially for parents; if the school asked her to do something, she did it.

‘The school must’ve made a mistake.’ Jen’s arms were folded elastic tight against her chest.

Mrs Lamont shook her head. ’All the dinner money is collected during registration on a Monday morning. All of our teachers make sure that each child’s money is put in the money box with the appropriate paperwork.’

The metal boxes stood side by side in a neat line on a low filing cabinet behind the office manager. Each had the names of the classes printed on them. Courtney was in Emerald class and Little Bea was in Diamond.

‘Yeah, but what if the teachers have made a mistake and got muddled up with the names of the kids?’

The other woman stretched her neck in indignation. ‘I can assure you, Mrs Taylor, that our teachers do not make mistakes.’ She leaned over and checked her computer. ‘The school would never let a child go hungry, so your daughters are fed at lunchtime, but we have to make sure that proper procedures are followed. We’ve already written to you twice about the arrears.’

Jen hated that word ‘arrears’; it made it sound like she owed the council a wagon-load of rent. ‘You what? Two letters before I got this one?’ She waved the letter in her hand. ‘I haven’t ever received any letters before this one. Now come on, if you’d been sending them they would’ve been posted through my letterbox. Mind you, the post can always be a bit hit and miss where I live.’

Last year, the Post Office had put the brakes on mail being delivered to the estate after the postman was attacked by a gang of youths armed to the teeth with knives and pitbulls who snatched his mailbag looking for cash and giros. But that was all sorted now.

‘I notice from our records that you live on the Essex Lane Estate.’

Jen swallowed. It was never a good sign when someone mentioned The Devil. Everyone tried to forget that it existed, much less talked about it, including its residents.

‘Yeah, what about it?’ Jen said defensively.

Mrs Lamont didn’t answer her but instead gave her a letter. The first line put Jen’s back up, straight away:
‘If you are in need of financial assistance, the school recommends . . .’

Jen almost threw the letter in this condescending woman’s face. Instead she raised her chin. ‘Oh I get it, everyone who lives on The Devil’s . . . The Essex Lane are lazy good-for-nothings. We’re either on the dole or on the make, working and fiddling the social at the same time. Well, let me tell you, I have never been a member of the JSA crew.’ Seeing the look of confusion on the woman’s face, Jen added, ‘That’s Job Seekers Allowance to people like you. I’ve got a perfectly good job, thank you very much. The wages might be crap, but I’m working.’

‘Then I suggest you pay your children’s dinner money.’

Jen left the school steaming. She screwed up the letter and pitched it into the gutter where it belonged. If the girls weren’t giving the school the money and were too scared to tell her what was happening, that was not good. Anyway she had pretty much figured out what was happening to her girls. And she was going to put a stop to it.

Forty-Three

Tiffany lit up and then passed the spliff to Nicky. ‘Remember what I said. You need to inhale deeply,’ she told him.

They sat in Tiff’s motor around the corner from Nicky’s house in a lane dark enough that no one could see what they were doing. They had come back from one of their ‘evenings out’. Tiffany had told Mizz Dee that she was taking her son up West to see
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Dee had liked that and started chuckling when she found out that the movie’s other title was
The
Curse of the Black Pearl
. Only Tiffany hadn’t taken him to Leicester Square but to the garage under the arches in Bethnal Green where she still did a bit of part-time work at the weekend. Dee was now employing her through the week to see to her son’s needs, because she was really pleased with the progress Tiffany was making with him.

If there was one thing Tiffany had sussed out quickly, it was that the boy was bored out of his box. She remembered what that had felt like, wasting her teen years down the cemetery. His mum smothered him with anything she saw he wanted, but what the kid really wanted was a slice of real life. So Tiff took him to the garage to get a feel of the ole East End.

Now it was time for him to step up to the next stage of his education, Tiffany Miller style.

‘What you waiting for?’ she asked as Nicky stared, fascinated by the spliff he held in his hand. ‘It ain’t going to bite your nose off.’

Nicky slowly placed it at his lips, pulled in and exhaled on a splutter and cough. ‘That’s flippin’ disgusting,’ he let out, wiping his mouth.

‘It’s always like that to start with. You’ll soon get used to it.’

So the kid took another tote and this time he didn’t cough but started to frantically spit. ‘Uh, it tastes like shit. All my mates said it should taste kind of mellow.’

‘Well, your friends weren’t smoking the real deal. They probably got some of that cheap rubbish dealers palm off to gullible kids.’

Tiffany sat back as Nicky kept puffing away at his smoke. Suddenly his cheeks blew out like a squirrel with nuts and he quickly opened the door and puked on the ground outside. Tiffany smiled. She hadn’t given him weed but Rizlas rolled up with parsley. He wanted to experience smoking some herb so she’d given him some – the cooking variety. Now every time he thought about defying his parents by smoking some leaf he’d think about throwing up; well, that was her reasoning. That’s what so many parents didn’t get: you want your kid to stop doing naughties, no point ranting and raving at them. Instead, introduce him to a slice of life your way.

A heavy breathing Nicky leaned back in the car, his face very pale indeed. He looked at her. ‘That weren’t weed, was it?’

‘What do you—?’

‘Come off it, Tiff, I’ve had a joint before. All those fancy boys at school are into it.’

Tiffany squinted at him. ‘You been pulling my plonker?’

He grinned, despite still looking green. ‘Thought you might have some hot shit gear I haven’t done before. What was that stuff?’

Tiffany grinned. ‘Parsley.’ Then she became dead serious. ‘I just want to make sure you don’t go down that bad road. When I was your age, me and my mates would smoke dandelion down the cemetery because we didn’t have the readies to buy the proper stuff. And just as well, because I think if I’d had a regular stream of real ganja, I don’t know where I’d be now.’ She stopped thinking about what had happened to Stacey.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ Nicky said shyly, the green on his face replaced by blushing red.

‘Nicky thanking me?’ Tiffany said with mock amazement, ‘Quick someone, get me a camera so we can preserve Nicky saying ta to me, for all eternity.’

He grinned. ‘For showing me where my dad was probably born – that’s what I wanted to thank you for.’

‘I didn’t know that John hailed from Bethnal—’

‘Not
my
dad, my
other
dad – Chris.’

The blood drained away from Tiffany’s face. ‘I didn’t know that your real dad was called Chris.’

Nicky started talking but Tiffany didn’t hear a word he said. Oh bloody hell. Her mind was dragged back ten years to the plan that she and Dee had put together where she had to stitch up a geezer called Chris and keep John’s name well and truly out of the frame. She didn’t need to ask if it was the same Chris; hadn’t Dee told her, on the quiet, that Nicky’s father had been John’s right-hand man? But the other woman had never told her his name.

‘I’m so sorry, Nicky.’

He gazed at her confused. ‘It ain’t your fault about my dad.’

Maybe it is, Tiffany thought, guilt eating her up. But she kept her thoughts to herself.

‘Someone’s bullying the girls, Mum,’ Jen told Babs as she headed for the bottle of light blue Bombay Sapphire gin on the drinks cabinet. She’d left it a couple of weeks before coming to her mum to tackle how to stop the problem with the dinner money. What her daughters didn’t know was that she’d paid the dinner money in full until the end of the month, but she’d still given the girls their dinner money on the last two Mondays. Courtney should have been bringing the money Jen gave her back home, because the school would have told her that the money was already paid. But instead her daughter came home every Monday saying she’d paid the dinner money. Whoever was pinching her kids’ money was still at it.

Jen and the girls were frequent visitors to her mum’s. Even though she had her own flat in another block on the estate, this place still felt like her real home. Every couple of weeks she’d bring the girls and they’d stay for the whole weekend. Babs adored her grandkids and they adored her in turn.

‘Bullying my girls?’ Babs said indignantly. ‘You give me the names and I’ll sort the toerags out.’

Babs Miller hadn’t changed much in the last ten years, but two things worried Jen about her mum. She knocked it back like a fish and seemed even more obsessive about keeping her home neat and tidy. Even now she held a cloth midway through a polish routine for dust Jen could never see.

Jen took herself and her drink and sat heavily on the sofa. ‘But I don’t know who they are, Mum.’

Babs joined her on the sofa, placing her duster across her knees. ‘So how do you know they’re being bullied?’

Jen ran her mum through the dinner money saga. ‘It’s the only explanation,’ Jen concluded. ‘Some bastard brat must be waiting for them before they get to school and ripping them off.’

‘I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’ve always said Jen that you’re too protective of those girls. It’s a rough world out there and they’ve got to learn when to stand their ground.’

Jen bit her lip. ‘But once you start teaching them to use their fists that’s how they might deal with life every time they find themselves in a tight spot.’ Jen couldn’t help thinking of Nuts and the way he brutally used his fists on her every time they got into a bit of verbal. No way did she want to encourage her kids to go around decking other people. ‘I don’t want them to be like the other young ’uns around here, thinking the only way to go through life is to punch their way through it.’

Jen didn’t even realise she did it, but she smoothed her hand across her side where Nuts had punched her a couple of weeks back.

Babs took note of her daughter’s hand and worry lines creased her forehead and around her mouth. ‘You hurt yourself, love?’

Jen instantly dropped her hand, but wouldn’t meet her mum’s gaze. ‘It’s nothing. I think I hurt myself when I knocked into a table or something.’

Babs leaned over and stretched her hands towards her eldest child. ‘Let me be the judge of whether it’s nothing.’ She touched Jen’s top. ‘Let me have a look—’

Jen stormed to her feet, but couldn’t stop the tears forming in the bottom of her eyes. ‘I said it’s nothing, Mum. Now please, leave it out.’

Stone-faced, Babs got to her feet, the duster dropping onto the carpet. And in her mum voice, that Jen hadn’t heard for years, ordered, ‘Jennifer Miller, you stay right where you are.’

Jen pulled in a strong breath as her mum lifted her top. She looked away as her mum gasped at the fading blue-black-yellow bruise. She was too ashamed to look at her mother. Babs tenderly touched her fingertips to the bruise. The tears began to fall at the care her mum was showing her.

‘It ain’t . . .’ she gulped as the tears came stronger, ‘what you think, Mum.’

‘And what do I think, baby?’ The last time her mum had called her ‘baby’ was when she was ten and scraped the side of her face when she’d fallen off her bike. Babs had gently cleaned her face and whispered soothing words in her ear.

Babs pulled herself straight and looked her daughter in the eye. ‘I tell you what I think. I think that bastard of a husband of yours is using you as a punch bag. And don’t lie to me because my mate Terri had enough of these in the early part of her marriage – until her brothers made her old man see the error of his ways. How long, Jen?’

‘When I started carrying Courtney.’ The tears and emotions overwhelmed Jen and she collapsed in her mother’s arms and started sobbing as if her heart was breaking. Babs soothed and caressed her, like she was that ten-year-old again. Eventually she got her tears under control and allowed her mum to steer her back to the sofa. But Babs didn’t sit down, instead she said, ‘Let’s make you a nice cuppa.’

When Babs left the room Jen slumped back against the sofa. She was consumed by relief. It was like a large stone had been lifted from her chest. All the years when she’d had to hold back the pain, and wear long sleeves to cover the bruises and swelling on her arms, were now in the past. Just knowing that her mum was now in the picture made her feel strangely safe. But the safe feeling disappeared a minute later when she saw her mum headed for the door.

Jen jumped up and rushed into the passage. ‘Mum? Mum, what you doing?’