Playing Around (39 page)

Sarah tasted the bile rising in her throat, and Angie was finding it hard to control her breathing, it was as though she was swimming under water and couldn’t catch her breath.

‘The others won’t be as nice as me, Angela. And if the big boys get involved at this stage, maybe they won’t turn a blind eye to all your nan’s little enterprises either. I could protect you. And her.’

‘Leave Nan out of this.’

Sarah gripped her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Mr Jameson, do you swear that if Angela tells you everything she knows that she won’t get into trouble?’

Jameson smiled like a lizard. He had them. ‘Mrs Pearson, your granddaughter is a little girl who got involved with a grown man. An evil man. I’m not treating her as any sort of a suspect.’

‘But if she acts as a witness …’

‘I have plenty of witnesses to all sorts of things, Mrs Pearson. I just need Angela as a source of information, confirmation if you like, to tie up one or two ends that I can’t quite match.’

‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’

‘Mrs Pearson, I’m by myself here. If it comes to it, you can just deny everything I say. That I was even here. After all, who’d think a nice little girl like your granddaughter would have got herself involved with the likes of David Fuller?’ Jameson was telling the truth.
Well
, partly. He wasn’t going to bother with charging Angie with anything, because he wasn’t sure if he had anything to charge her with. Involving her in any serious way would need time and effort, and if he failed, it would distract his superiors from what would be his great success: nailing Fuller.

And he rather liked the idea of having Sarah Pearson and Doris Barker – two women with some interesting contacts – in his debt.

For now, anyway.

‘Angie, what do you think, babe?’

She couldn’t look at her nan. ‘All right, Mr Jameson. What do you want to know?’

David was sitting on a tea chest, the only seat, in a prefabricated office building in a scrap yard on the Beckton Marshes. He was speaking on the phone, which, apart from a pad of scrap paper and a stub of pencil, was the only nod to office equipment in the place.

‘This is important, Bob. I want you to make sure that when Jeff clears out all the other gaffs, the snooker clubs and that, that he clears out the desks and bureaux in all the flats as well. Got it? Even the legit-looking stuff.’

‘Sure, Dave.’ Bobby, who was listening to David with one ear, and to Maureen’s wails and complaints as she continued to pack with the other, couldn’t bring himself to say that he had already spoken to Jeff and that Bill and George had apparently done the job for him. He didn’t want to mention it because Jeff had been a bit concerned – just as Bobby was a bit confused as to who had told them to do it – and he’d thought it best not to worry Dave with all that now. Not with all this Mikey and Sonia business on his mind.

He would have liked to have asked Dave about him
and
Maureen going to Cyprus, but Mr Burman had said not to, that he was keeping Dave up to speed on all of that. It was all making Bobby’s head go round, keeping straight what he had to say and not say to people.

‘Right, thanks, Bob. Now I’m gonna be amongst the missing for a few weeks, but I’ll be in touch. OK?’

He put down the phone before Bobby had the chance to reply, and immediately rang Peter Burman.

‘Peter. Hello. It’s me, David. David Fuller.’ He had a light laugh in his voice, but a lead weight in his gut. ‘I’ve been thinking about that business you were interested in. In Marbella. If you still fancy going ahead with it, I thought I could go over there. Check things out.’

There wasn’t an immediate response from the other end, just some mumbling as though Burman had put his hand over the receiver while he was talking to someone else.

‘Are you still there, Peter?’

‘Excuse me, David, I had someone talking to me here in the office. So, you’re interested in going to Spain, you say? Are you in trouble?’

‘No. No. Nothing like that. Just need to get away for a bit, that’s all. Bit of woman trouble. You know.’ He tapped his passport nervously on his knee, the passport with his photograph in it, but in the name of Stephen Joseph Townsend. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’ll make some phone calls. Then I’ll get back to you. Are you at Greek Street?’

‘No. I’m on a private number. Hold on.’ He rubbed the centre of the grease-covered dial with his finger, trying, and failing, to make out the faded numbers. ‘Look, how about if I ring you back? Say in an hour?’

‘Make it two.’

Two hours to kill.

David stood out in the scrap yard in the warm evening air. It was half past eight and getting dark. The nights were beginning to draw in. He hated the thought of autumn coming, knowing that winter was not far behind. That time of year had never suited him. Not since he’d been a kid and he’d dreaded going home from school, knowing the house would be cold, empty and in darkness.

Still, why worry about that now? He’d be in Spain in a few days. Sunning himself on the costa. But before he cleared off abroad, he had a job to do.

He opened the back of the Jaguar and took out a petrol can. It was a shame, but he had no choice, the motor had enough forensic in the boot to put him away for life.

He shook the petrol can, spraying the fuel over the gleaming dark green paintwork, saving a drop to pour over an old piece of rag. Then he stood back and struck a match ready to ignite it before he threw it on to the bonnet of his precious car.

‘Fuller!’

Startled, David looked up to see three uniformed coppers clambering over the high wire fence. ‘If you don’t want a good kicking, drop that match.’

‘Don’t say that, you’ll scare me!’ David touched the flame to the rag and then flicked the petrol-soaked cloth at the car as if he were shaking out a duster after a bit of light housework.

As David was being led away from the yard in handcuffs, his ribs aching from the rather half-hearted beating the young coppers had given him, Burman was sitting in his office, contemplating the depressing sight of the worn-out prostitute standing in front of his desk. She was almost dribbling with anticipation as she
awaited
her reward for the second-rate shop-soiled information she had been so eager to pass on to him.

Why were people so stupid?

Burman jerked his head towards the door, and began trimming a cigar ready to smoke. ‘Get rid of her,’ he said.

Without a word, the two men hauled the now terrified Christina kicking and screaming from the room.

Burman stuck the fat Romeo y Julietta between his lips and thought about David Fuller.

It had been a foolish mistake, no, more of a weakness, to let a parvenu such as Fuller anywhere near his business. The
naïveté
of the man was breathtaking. He had never even suspected that Bill and George, two of his supposedly most loyal workers, had gladly gone on to his, Burman’s, payroll as soon as he had approached them.

It was something Burman always made sure of, that he had insiders in other people’s business. For security reasons.

Good security pleased him. Just as much as amateurs annoyed him. But not nearly as much as dumb, loud-mouthed prostitutes, who thought he would pay for their pathetic gossip, infuriated him.

‘I DON’T FEEL
right being here, Doris. Look at that lot.’

Sarah Pearson, feeling uncomfortable, but looking elegant in her broad-brimmed straw hat and beautifully cut, lavender two-piece – especially acquired from Selfridges by one of Doris’s more talented girls – nodded to the other side of the ancient, flower-filled Sussex church. There sat Jill Walker’s family and friends, in colourful clusters on the ornately carved pews, decked out like an illustration in an etiquette book, demonstrating how the middle classes should dress for a late-summer country wedding.

‘If it hadn’t been for missing out on seeing my Angie all done up, I would never have dreamed of us coming here.’ Sarah tugged at her skirt. ‘Never.’

‘Just enjoy it, Sal.’ Doris was craning her neck to get a good look at everyone and everything, taking it all in. ‘This is the only time the likes of you and me are gonna get to a do like this.’ She took her lace-trimmed hankie from the sleeve of her lemon duster coat, and held it to her mouth as a shield for what she was about to say, despite the organ music echoing around the hammer-beam roof providing more than enough privacy for even the most intimate of conversations.

‘Here,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Look behind.’

Sarah twisted round and saw her daughter, Violet, done up to the nines, walking up the aisle on the arm of a handsome, smiling man.

‘Blimey, Sarah, look at her, will you? Bold as brass.
How
the hell did she get an invite?’

Sarah sighed resignedly. ‘Soon as she heard Angie was going to be a bridesmaid, she launched her campaign. Chance to come to a classy do like this, she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And you know what she’s like when she wants something, Doris. The Murrays never stood a chance of refusing. Angie was so embarrassed when Violet told Tilly Murray that Angie wouldn’t come if her mum wasn’t there.’

‘Tilly wouldn’t have fallen for that old flannel.’

‘No, but you know how much she hates any awkwardness. Especially in front of her new in-laws. And when Martin – and his young lady, of course – insisted on having Angie as bridesmaid, to match Jackie, I suppose, they had no choice. You know Violet, she’d have caused murders if she hadn’t got her own way. She’d have mucked it up somehow or other.’

Doris shook her head in wonder at Sarah, such a good woman, having a daughter like Violet. ‘Yeah, but all that said, and much as I begrudge the words even coming out of my mouth, Sal, you’ve got to hand it to her. She really looks the part. Like that Jean Shrimpton.’

‘Being so good-looking was part of that girl’s downfall.’

Doris and Sarah watched as Violet glided effortlessly into a pew near the back, smiling graciously at the man, who stood politely until she was comfortably seated.

‘You’d never have her down as an Eastender though, would you? It’s like she was born to it.’

‘Always was a good actress.’ Sarah turned and faced the altar again.

Doris did the same. Still hiding her words behind the cover of her hankie, she said, ‘Did Angie ever find out that she tried to get rid of her?’

‘No, and she never will if I’ve got anything to do with
it
. When that dirty old sod along the landing got done for doing abortions for the local toms, Angie was so shocked when she found out. I could hardly tell her that her own mother had gone to the very same bloke when she was carrying her sixteen years earlier, now could I?’

‘Just thank gawd he got it wrong that one time, eh?’

‘He didn’t get it wrong, Doris. She just never had enough money to pay him. So he turned her away. If I hadn’t been down Leysdown with you in your chalet, she’d have tapped it off me and …’ She sighed. ‘Well, things would all have turned out very different.’

‘I never knew that, Sal.’

‘No. Well, it’s all in the past now.’

Doris shoved her hankie back up her sleeve and looked at her watch. ‘Here, look at the time. Nearly a quarter past two. What do you think’s causing the hold-up?’

The cause of the delay was simple: the bridegroom, Martin Murray, was round the back of the church vomiting spectacularly into the yew hedge.

‘I can’t handle this,’ he moaned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tilly, his mum, was being no help at all, having collapsed into hysterical weeping against a monument of a broken pillar that marked the passing of an eighteenth-century vicar; and Stan, his dad, would only comment that he knew too much education would only lead to some things. So Jackie and Angie had been brought round by Jill’s brother, Guy, to try and talk some sense into the reluctant groom.

They were now standing on either side of him, a matching pair of increasingly cross, cream and lilac, fairy-tale bridesmaids.

‘
What
can’t you handle?’ demanded Jackie, shaking
him
by the arms and making the flowers in her hair bob furiously. ‘A lovely church? A fantastic sunny day? Stone-rich in-laws? A brilliant job waiting for you after you’ve finished college? A bloody rent-free home? A gorgeous sodding bride? Who, I think you should know, is being driven around the buggering village for the fifth bleeding time, and is probably getting fit to come in here and deck you. And I wouldn’t blame her. In fact, I might bloody well do it for her, if you don’t pull yourself together.’

‘Listen to that child’s language,’ wailed Tilly. ‘And in front of all these strangers. The shame of it. I’m going to pass out. I just know I am.’

‘Go and see to your mum, Jack.’ Angie picked up Martin’s top hat from the grass and led him over to a moss-covered, stone bench.

‘Sit down, Martin,’ she instructed him wearily. ‘You are really getting on my nerves.’

He slumped down, his head falling to his chest. ‘Don’t you start on me as well, Squirt.’

‘Stop feeling so sorry for yourself, will you? This is real life. Not some game you can stop playing just because you don’t think it’s fair, or you don’t like the rules, or because you’ve got bored with it all. Get a flaming grip on yourself.’

‘Why should you care what I do?’

‘Because Jill’s having a baby, that’s why. Your baby. Your flesh and blood.’

‘She’ll be all right. What does she need me for?’ He glared at Jill’s brother, who was standing smoking and chatting, surprisingly amiably, with a very solemn-looking Stan Murray.

‘Her precious family can give her everything she needs.’

‘And what about the baby?’

‘That won’t want for anything either. Believe me.’

‘How about a father?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Look, Martin, I’d have given anything to have had a dad like the other kids in the street. I used to lay in bed thinking what he’d be like. Inventing little stories about where we would go out for the day during the summer holidays. Down to Walton-on-the-Naze and Jaywick and that. Like you and Jackie did with your dad. Like every kid should be entitled to. You don’t want your baby winding up like me, do you, making up lies at school about what we did and where we went?’