Blood Sister: A thrilling and gritty crime drama (51 page)
Read Blood Sister: A thrilling and gritty crime drama Online
Authors: Dreda Say Mitchell
‘Hello Denise – no, she’s out I’m afraid.’ Denise Brooks was her Babs’ best mate and Rosie liked her. She was a sweet girl, unlike many of the young ones around here who were growing into loud-mouthed replicas of their parents. The only problem with Denise was her unfortunate ‘lights on but no one at home’ expression.
Rosie could see that Ma Jackson was eagerly hoping that this new arrival would shed some light on the incident at the doctor’s and was disappointed when Denise looked surprised and said, ‘Oh? That’s a shame; she said she’d be in. I thought we were going to the pictures later to see the ‘Steptoe and son’ film. Can you tell her I called?’
Rosie nodded and the girl turned and walked back in the direction she’d come.
Ma Jackson put the needle back on her stuck record. ‘So, Babs alright then? You know me, if there’s a problem and I can help in any way . . .’
Rosie pushed the front door open. ‘I think you must have got the wrong end of the stick. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Of course, dear.’
Rosie closed the front door behind her. Her husband did shift work and was dozing in his armchair in the sitting room. With a mixture of alarm and anger, she prodded him and asked, ‘Have you seen Babs today? Did she say she was going down Doctor McDaid’s?’
Her husband shrugged his shoulders. ‘No, I haven’t. What’s she doing that for anyway? She’s not ill, is she?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
Her husband closed his eyes and turned his head away. Rosie walked around the house pretending to do a few things before marching back into the front room and shouting, ‘Where the hell is Babs anyway?’
Even before she pushed open the door of the Bad Moon pub, gut instinct told Babs her fella wasn’t there. There were only a few punters inside, a stocky barman and a busty, hard-faced landlady wiping down the surfaces. As soon as she reached the bar, the landlady stopped polishing and asked, ‘What can I get you, love?’ But she didn’t seem very pleased with her new customer. The Bad Moon was a bloke’s pub and Nev always took her somewhere else.
‘Has Nev been in today?’ Babs knew her voice sounded desperate, but she couldn’t hold her emotions back.
‘Nev? Don’t know any Nevs.’
‘Yeah, you know – Neville.’
‘Oh, him.’ The landlady looked at her with sympathy. Babs’ stomach rolled. ‘No, I haven’t seen him around for a while.’
Babs’ desperation grew as the other woman got back on with her cleaning. While there was some hope she’d kept things under control, but this was her first port of call and already hope was draining away.
‘What do you mean you haven’t seen him?’
The landlady looked back up, her eyes as tough as stone. ‘What I say – I ain’t seen him. It’s not a very complicated sentence, is it?’
Babs clenched her fists. ‘You’re a liar. He’s always in here. I know.’
The other woman put her dishcloth down and placed her palms on the bar. Her fingers twitched ever so slightly, showcasing knuckles that said she knew a thing or two about the hard knocks of life. ‘Look, love, I’m not taking any lip from a slip of a girl like you. He’s not here and we haven’t seen him for a while. Now – do you want to order a drink or what? Otherwise I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
Babs looked around at the patrons nervously. They were looking back at her in the same way as Doctor McDaid’s patients earlier.
She left.
So she never saw the barman shift up to the landlady and ask, ‘Who was that?’
‘Some dopey bird looking for Neville,’ she answered, pulling out a Virginia Slim and lighting up.
And Babs never saw the barman burst into laughter. ‘Silly bitch. Her and half the other scrubbers in the East End.’
Once she hit Commercial Road again, Babs caught a bus to Limehouse. When she’d first met Nev, he’d had a pad there. In fact, it was there that they’d first had sex, later on the same night she’d met him. She’d gone up to the Reno nightclub in Stoke Newington with her friend Denise as they’d heard they had a classier clientele than the usual wide boys, spivs and pretend bank robbers they met on a night out in the East End. At first, it seemed what they’d heard wasn’t true, but that was before she met Nev. He hadn’t seemed that interested but when she turned him down for a dance, he suddenly became very interested indeed. Nev wasn’t the kind of bloke who took refusals lightly. He spent the rest of the night pursuing her and chatting her up. Once he had his big strong arms wrapped around her for a slow dance in the small hours, she didn’t remember making any more decisions. She followed him in a dreamlike state to a cab and then to his flat and then to his bedroom.
She’d had other guys, of course, but he was different. He was tall, he was strong and he was cool. He didn’t show off or play act because he didn’t need to. The hard boys in the Reno all got out of the way for him. The manager and the bouncers all knew him by name. So she knew no geezers were going to lean out of a car window and shout, ‘Oi darlin, show us your tits!’ while Nev was around. Not if they wanted to keep a matching pair of ears. He was polite, he was protective and he had good manners. And as guys like that were at a premium down her neck of the woods she wasn’t going to let him go without a fight.
So the morning after the Reno, after she’d waited patiently for him to arrange to see her again, she got angry when she was finally forced to ask, ‘Are we going out together then or what?’ – and he didn’t seem to understand the question. She got even angrier when he said nothing in reply. So she’d yelled, ‘I’m not a fucking tart, Neville’ so loudly that the neighbours must have heard.
He’d gifted her with his one hundred watt smile. ‘Yeah – sure we’re going out.’
Afterwards, she apologised to him for getting the nark. It was obvious to her later that he was just upset she’d even asked the question in the first place. And that was the first excuse she’d made for her new boyfriend.
As she looked out of the bus window at the estate in Limehouse, she realised in the pit of her guts that she’d been making excuses for him ever since.
She’d never seen the estate he lived on in daylight before. It was one of those old style thirties estates, on its last legs, looking dirty and dingy. She walked up to the fourth floor where the flat was. At first Nev had claimed it was his place but later he’d admitted that he was looking after it for a friend who was on remand for something that he totally and absolutely hadn’t done. Of course, she believed him. She knew Nev wasn’t at the flat anymore but kept her fingers crossed that he had left a forwarding address.
Whoever was occupying the flat now had a poster in the kitchen window that said, ‘Demand the Impossible!’ so she guessed they were squatters. The same poster had been in the window of a squat on the street where she lived with her mum and dad. That was before the Rozzers had come round and dragged the squatters out by their long, greasy hair, giving them a good kicking on the street before they’d been chucked in the back of a Black Maria.
The lock on the flat in front of her had been kicked off and replaced with cardboard. It was a squat alright.
Babs tapped on the door. It was opened slightly by a young man with long, straggly blonde hair nearly down past his nipples. He wore flared jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m Neville’s fiancé. He used to live here. Have you got a forwarding address?’ Babs realised how stupid she sounded, standing at the door to this flat, on this estate, asking for a forwarding address for her ‘fiancé’.
‘Never heard of him . . .’ The door slammed shut. But a few moments later it opened again, more widely this time. ‘Neville, you say? Wait there a minute.’ The freak disappeared before returning with a handful of mail. He passed it to Babs without a word and the door shut again.
As she slowly made her way downstairs like a mourner at a funeral, she quickly scanned the front of each envelope – all addressed to Neville but with various surnames. It was bad enough finding out her boyfriend maybe wasn’t who he said he was, but she was in for another shocker when she tore open each letter and looked inside. They were final demands, summonses and threatening letters about unpaid loans and overdrafts. Nev had always told her he was ‘in business’. That he had various ‘irons in the fire’. That he was looking at ‘investment options’. Now it was clear why he was so well dressed and could afford such expensive things. He wasn’t actually paying for anything but living on the never-never.
Then there were the postcards. She’d cried no tears since her visit to Doctor McDaid hours earlier. Now they erupted again. But this time they were acid ones that stung her face.
‘Hi Nev! Found a great spot for some nudey sunbathing! Can’t wait to get back and show you my new all over tan. And I mean all over! Loads of love! Tania!!!’
Another one from Petra in West Berlin.
‘Baby! Course finish next week. I’m in London from Monday. I call. Petra XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ps but please don’t call me Nazi anymore, yes?’
She checked the postmarks on the cards. They’d both been written after she’d met Nev at the Reno club.
All those nights the little bastard was ‘busy’ or doing ‘business’. Or ‘seeing his family’. Of course he never asked her to meet his family. It seemed that Nev had taken the same view as Doctor McDaid all along – she was a whore. What a proper fucking moron she’d been. And worse, what a fucking moron he must have thought she was.
When she got down to the courtyard below, she scattered the envelopes and letters in the gutter. She took the postcards, tore them into tiny pieces, spat on them and threw them on the ground before grinding them with her heel in fury.
She was done weeping and wailing. Her back straightened and steel set in her spine. She raised her head, more determined to find Nev than ever. She was Barbara Wilson. And no one was going to make a divvy out of her.
As she walked on, she remembered something. One evening when she’d been in the flat upstairs, there was a knock at the door. After a brief chat on the doorstep, Nev had said he was popping out for ten minutes to discuss business with the caller. While he was out, the phone in the flat rang. She was absolutely forbidden to pick up Nev’s phone and was sometimes ordered out of the room when he answered it. But as he wasn’t there, she’d picked it up. The voice was smooth and Cockney. ‘Alright, darlin? Can you pop Neville on the blower?’
‘He’s just stepped out.’
‘No problem. Can you ask him to call the Go Go Girls Modelling Agency in Soho? We’ve got some work for him. He’s got the number, sweetheart, but I’ll give it to you anyway …’
‘OK. Can I tell him who called?’
The man seemed amused. ‘Me? I’m the proprietor, love. My name’s Stanley Miller.’
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