The Ladykiller (34 page)

‘Oh, Mum . . . Gran . . . I’m so glad you’re here!’

Evelyn pushed Kate gently out of the way and hugged her granddaughter. Lizzy began to cry.

‘Now, now, whist now. Everything’s going to be all right.’

Kate sat on the bed and watched them.

‘They want me to go to a mental hospital, Mum.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

Lizzy shook her head. ‘I don’t know. They seem to think that I’m a bit touched . . .’

Evelyn broke in, ‘Now don’t call it that. All you need is a bit of a rest, time to sort out your thoughts.’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, though!’

Lizzy was on the verge of hysteria. Kate grasped her daughter’s hand.

‘Well, they’ll find that out in Warley. A sui—. . . what you did, is a very frightening thing, Liz. You must try and find out why you did it.’

‘I know why I did it! It was because of Nan reading the diary, that’s all.’

‘Why did you take the drugs?’

‘Oh, everyone takes drugs nowadays. I’m not an addict, Mum. I don’t take heroin or anything like that.’

‘But from what I read in the diary you take them often, every day. Amphetamines, cannabis, Ecstasy. What I can’t understand is how this all went on under my nose.’

Lizzy lay back in the bed. ‘Sometimes, Mum, when I was stoned, I would come and chat to you when you got in. You never even guessed because the amphetamines just make you chatty. They make you high, happy.’

‘And you’re not happy without them?’

Lizzy stared down at the bandages on her wrists.

‘Not very often.’

‘But why?’ Kate’s voice rose and the girl in the next bed stared at them all.

‘I just don’t know, Mum. I don’t know. I think about death all the time.’

Kate stared at the white-tiled floor. How could a sixteen-year-old girl think about death? Her life was just starting.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He hasn’t even tried to find out how I am, has he?’ Her voice was flat.

‘He’ll be in touch, Lizzy, he thinks the world of you.’

‘Yeah, of course he does.’ Her voice was bitter and Kate and Evelyn exchanged worried glances.

Life had a funny way of catching up with you, thought Kate. Just when you thought you had it all figured out, it threw you a curve like this.

Doctor Plumfield was right about one thing. Lizzy should go to Warley Hospital.

She needed help, professional help, and Kate was honest enough to admit that it couldn’t come from her or her mother.

Patrick was standing outside a house in Barking. Three of his best men were with him. It was twenty to twelve and he had arrived ten minutes earlier. This was one of the jobs that he hated. They were to evict a couple and their three children from a rented house. Patrick had been called in when the man had threatened his team with a baseball bat. In normal circumstances the men would just have forced their way in and relieved him of the weapon. But the police had been called so everything had to be done by the book. The man was watching them from a bedroom window, the bat visible.

A young PC went to the letter box and began shouting through it.

‘Come on, Mr Travers, this is silly. If you come down here we can talk about it.’

He stepped away from the letter box and looked up towards the window. Mr Travers, a plasterer, who had lost his house when he had been made bankrupt, opened the window slowly. He poked out a grizzled head.

‘Fuck off, the lot of you. I paid that bastard and he knows I paid him.’

The constable tried again. He lifted the letter box.

‘The man you rented the house from has never paid the mortgage. It is the building society who’s evicting you, Mr Travers, not your landlord. If you’ll just come down we’ll try and get this sorted out.’

He looked through the letter box. He could see a woman holding a young baby standing at the end of the hall. She looked haggard. Her clothes were crumpled and she had no shoes on. He noticed that her feet were filthy. She shook her head at him in a gesture of bewilderment.

‘We paid him the other day. We paid him four hundred quid, a month’s rent. We’ve been here for six months. We ain’t got nowhere to go.’

Two little girls, twins, walked from one of the downstairs rooms and went to her. The constable sighed heavily. He shut the letter box and went back to the little crowd on the pavement.

‘Poor bastards. This is happening more and more. Someone buys a house, gets a mortgage and then rents it out to poor gits like them. They take the four hundred a month or whatever for as long as they can, then when the place gets repossessed they’ve had it on their toes. Nowhere to be seen. Some of these blokes have eight or nine houses on the go. They make a fortune.’

Patrick nodded. Mortgage scams were as old as the hills. He hated these jobs.

‘Let me have a go.’

The constable shrugged. ‘I’m getting on to Social Services. They might find them a bed and breakfast or something.’

Patrick nodded and went up to the front door.

He bellowed through the letter box: ‘My name’s Patrick Kelly and I have been asked to repossess this property. I am a court bailiff. Now, Mr Travers, you have your wife and children in there with you, and they are probably frightened out of their lives. Come down and we’ll try and get something sorted.’

Ben Travers stood in the bedroom. He knew who Patrick Kelly was, everyone knew who Patrick Kelly was. He was a legend in his own lifetime.

Travers looked around the squalid room. Their so-called furnished accommodation had consisted of two old beds that had come from a second-hand shop, a broken-down settee, and a gas cooker that had probably been used all through the war. He looked around the room and felt the frustration and anger building up inside him. He had come to this, with a wife and three kids to support.

Every penny he’d saved had gone to getting the key money for this house, over a thousand pounds, and then the four hundred a month rent. They’d had to get away from Louise’s mother! They had lived with her for three months before they got this place, and it had been three months too long as far as he was concerned. Two years earlier he’d had a privatised council house in East Ham, a nice little business and his family. Now it had come to this, the repomen at the door for the second time. He caressed the baseball bat, then holding it down by his side slowly walked down the uncarpeted stairs.

His wife was crying quietly and he looked at her sadly.

‘I’m sorry, Lou.’

‘Just let them in, Ben, let’s get this over with.’

He nodded and went to the front door. As he opened it Patrick Kelly walked inside. He shut the front door on all the onlookers.

‘Mr Travers? I am really very sorry about this, but the eviction notice has been granted. I know that the bloke who tucked you up will get off with it scot free. By the way, do you have a name for him at all? Maybe I could find him and recoup some of your money?’

Ben Travers nodded.

‘It’s Micky Danby. I trusted the ponce. He was only round last week to collect the month’s rent. He never told us nothing. We signed a year’s lease on this place but it ain’t worth the paper it’s written on. What the fuck we gonna do now?’

Patrick opened his coat and took out his wallet. He pulled out three fifty-pound notes.

‘Take this to tide you over. Get a B & B or something. This is my card. Leave a message with my secretary about where you are and I’ll see about recouping some of your losses. Micky Danby is a prat and I owe him a few scores meself.’

The man took the money. ‘Thanks, Mr Kelly. I’ll pay you back one day.’ His voice was shaky.

‘Give me the baseball bat and we’ll get this over with.’ Patrick inclined his head to the woman watching him. ‘How about a nice cuppa, love, while we get this sorted out?’

The woman nodded, glad of something to do.

Patrick opened the front door and smiled at everyone. ‘Everything’s OK, officers, you can go now.’

‘Fair enough. I’ve radioed in for the Social Services, they’ll find them some alternative accommodation. See you, Mr Kelly.’

The PC got in his car and drove off. Patrick followed Ben Travers into his front room. It was nearly bare except for an old portable TV and a sixties-style PVC settee. He sat on it with the two little girls and gave them a big smile. He’d wait until the Social came, see what the score was. He looked at Ben Travers. He looked a big strong man.

‘Working?’

‘Only on the lump, here and there. The building game’s fucked at the moment. They’re laying down the footings for houses and then just leaving them. It’s a bloody joke.’

Patrick nodded.

‘Ever thought of doing this job?’

Ben Travers frowned. ‘What, being a bailiff you mean?’

‘Yeah, why not? It’s good steady work.’

‘Never thought about it.’

‘Well, see one of my blokes and they’ll tell you what you’ll need. I’d take you on. I’m always after decent blokes with a bit of savvy.’

‘I’ll do that, Mr Kelly, I’ll do that.’

Patrick smiled at the woman as she brought in the tea.

‘Thanks, love.’ He gestured around the room.

‘Not worth four hundred sovs a month this.’

The woman grimaced. ‘The fucking Ritz it ain’t. If I could get my hands on that Micky Danby now, I’d break his sodding neck.’

Patrick looked at Ben Travers.

‘Do you think she might want a job and all?’ Ben Travers burst out laughing. It was a laugh he didn’t think he had in him.

Patrick sipped his tea.

Since Mandy had died, he’d gone soft, he admitted that. Knowing grief as he did, he wanted to spare as many people as possible the experience. Except the Grantley Ripper. That was one man he wanted people to grieve for. When that bastard was dead, maybe he would start living a proper life, a life that he hoped would include Kate Burrows.

Kate was beginning to mean a lot to him. He thought about her constantly. The day she had come to his house to talk about her daughter’s problem he had felt much closer to her. He knew that she was a DI and a bloody good one, by all accounts. He knew that they came from two different worlds, but still nothing would deter him.

When she’d said she was worried about her superiors, he’d felt like telling her that he had her superiors right where he wanted them, but he couldn’t. Kate would not stand for anything like that, she was too straight. That’s what he liked about her. From the first night he had met her, when she had stood up to him in his own house, he had been attracted to her. She was one of the few people who had no fear of him, even her Chief Constable would be shocked if he heard the way she argued with him sometimes.

Kate was a woman in every sense of the word, and she was a woman who would not give herself to a man lightly. When they had gone to bed together on New Year’s Eve it had been like a revelation to him. Never before, not even with Renée, had he felt such a force of love in him. She confided afterwards that it was the first sexual contact she’d had in over five years. She had only ever had one man before in her life. To Patrick that statement had put her above everyone. She was clean and decent and he wanted her on any terms.

He wondered how her daughter was. How Kate was coping with the day.

He found himself thinking about her all the time.

Despite all his heartbreak, it was a pleasant feeling.

Kate and Evelyn took Lizzy to Warley themselves. They had stopped off at home and packed a case for her and then they had stayed to help her settle in. The funny thing was that Lizzy seemed glad to be going. At least everyone there seemed very nice, they had welcomed Lizzy and made her feel secure and wanted. She was sharing a room with a girl called Anita, an ex heroin addict. Anita was small and blonde and full of life; she seemed to hit it off with Lizzy straight away.

Lizzy had made Kate promise not to let on she was a policewoman. Kate had been reluctant to agree, but she saw the sense of it. In a unit where most of the people were drug abusers it would not exactly endear Lizzy to them to have a mother who was a ‘Filth’.

Lizzy’s white, drawn features haunted her. She watched her mother and daughter talking together and felt a deep hurt, as if she had somehow been the cause of it all. She had lain awake the night before, thinking, If only I’d made Dan stay. But he had not wanted to stay. She had not made Dan go, he had practically run out of her life. Bag and baggage. Lizzy had adored her father and he had only ever let her down. Kate had prided herself on never doing so, but maybe she had failed?

As they left the hospital, Evelyn grabbed her hand to cross the road to get to the car park. Kate closed her eyes tightly. Her mother still helped her across the road. It was laughable really.

She dropped Evelyn off at home and then made her way into work. She had to see Ratchette and try and undo some of the damage that had been done there. As much as she loved Lizzy, and as much as she wanted to help her, without her job they would all be up a creek without a paddle.

Something Lizzy often forgot.

As Kate and her mother left the hospital, Dan was making his way in. It was just as well they missed each other. Kate wasn’t in the right mood for him. But his presence made Lizzy happy.