Trust (2 page)

“That’s... very kind of him, I guess.”

“He even said he’d like it if this old boyfriend came visiting. Said that kind of thing’s what keeps her going. I told him I’d see if I could track him down, but that was a kind of a spur of the moment thing – I just wanted to impress him, I think. I don’t know if doing that would be good or if I’m just making things worse.”

“Do what you think’s right, Jess. Can’t do more than that. Who was he? This old flame.”

“Guy called Eddie Bailey. Sounds a right charmer. Some kind of gangster, by what they said. You know anything about him?”

I was trying to be a bit clever about my questioning. Discreet. If the money behind my parents’ old business was dodgy, then Maureen would know: she’d helped them run things for years. This seemed like a good chance to find out.

“Old man Bailey?” she said now. “Him and your gran? Well, I didn’t know
that!
” She laughed, shaking her head. “No wonder they left London.”

“You think I should forget about it? Granddad seemed quite keen for him to visit if I could find him. He just wants to make her happy whatever way he can. I can’t imagine how it must be that only the thought of an old boyfriend is what brings her back to life...”

Maureen was shaking her head. “I don’t know what they’re like now, but back in the ’60s you wouldn’t want to be mixing with the Bailey family. The Richardsons, the Kray twins, the Baileys... They ran all the clubs and rackets. They liked to mix with pop stars and other glamorous types but you’d never want to get on their wrong side. It’s a long time since I heard that name.”

“Granddad said that if Eddie Bailey’s still alive he’ll be on a beach in Spain.”

“Yeah, Spain. That’s where all the gangsters end up. Long way from Poplar or Stepney where he grew up.”

We’d come to the river now, two swans sailing gracefully by in the other direction. I dropped my empty paper cup in a bin. “We used to go to Poplar,” I said. “When I was little. Family gatherings in a big old pub, kids playing football in the street among the cars. Dad used to share a bag of pork scratchings and laugh at me when I crunched them real loud.”

“The Old Duchess?”

I thought. “Maybe. The pub name didn’t really register when I was that little. I just remember how dark it was inside, the windows stained the same brown as the walls and ceiling. The smell of ciggies and beer, and the old music that used to play all the time on the jukebox. I used to bug my parents all the way home in the car by singing one bit over and over:
For goodness sakes, I got the hippy hippy shakes!
” Even now, that was the only line I could remember from that song.

Maureen was nodding. “Sounds like the Duchess. That was them. The Baileys.”

“Really? We used to go down there all the time when I was little. I never really understood who everyone was... it felt like visiting family. You know: when you call your parents’ friends ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’. I remember running wild with the kids, big gangs of us. Then someone would come out and round us up and we’d troop back into the pub for sandwiches and fizzy drinks and TV in the back room while everyone in the main bar got louder and louder. There were snooker and pool tables upstairs and Dad had to lift me off the floor so I could hit the balls. Was that really them? The Baileys?”

I tried hard to remember – there had been quite a few older people at these gatherings. They’d take over a corner of the pub and hold court while everyone else came and went. I couldn’t think of anyone who was obviously Eddie Bailey. I imagined he’d have quite a presence, from the picture of him that was building up in my head.

Suddenly the prospect of tracking down Eddie Bailey didn’t seem so daunting: I had a connection. A chance to find out what had become of him. Maybe it would help Gran come to some kind of understanding that the past was gone, that things had moved on.

“Do you have an address for the Old Duchess?”

“I could find it.” Maureen stopped and turned to me. “You take care, girl, you hear? You don’t want to get involved with the Baileys.”

“I’m okay,” I said, that rebellious streak emerging again. “I can look after myself.”

“You think you can,” said Maureen. “That’s what worries me.”

§

I drove down the same day. Grabbed a sandwich from a shop on the High Street, balanced it on my lap as I threaded my way out of town, then ate it as I headed in to the city.

Traffic thickened up once I got inside the M25, stop-starting most of the way down through Romford and past the Olympic stadium at Stratford and then, at last, I was almost there. I parked in a space that wasn’t really a space but was just about big enough for my Mini, and climbed out and got my bearings.

The streets here looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t sure if that was genuine memory kicking in or just that much of this part of London looked the same. In one direction a three-storey yellow-brick block stretched away, flats on the top two floors and the bottom level a row of shops and takeaways. Tall trees and black lamp-posts stood sentinel between shops and road. Across from the shops was a low school building, the playground surrounded by brick walls and high blue mesh fencing.

I checked the map on my iPhone and took a side street, passing rows of relatively modern terraced housing – I knew a lot of this area had been rebuilt after war-time bombing and later slum clearances, and then redevelopment when the Docklands became one of the most expensive places to live in the city. Ahead of me, peeking above the rooftops, I could see the shiny towers of Canary Wharf and Canada Square and the rest.

I rounded another corner and the scene was suddenly familiar: memories of sunny days just like this, running these streets but always coming back here, to this big hulk of a pub, the Old Duchess.

A dark green façade bore the pub name above a central door, with windows to either side, occasional bull’s-eyes in the glass. A free-standing chalkboard advertized ‘Proper Pub Grub’ and a ‘Childrens Menu’. A black iron fire escape snaked down one side of the building, alighting in a plot of rough land that was now full of cars. The upper two floors had rectangular windows with rolltop ornamentation supporting stone lintels. That was the snooker room, I remembered, and above that I didn’t know – accommodation or office space, I guessed now.

I pushed at the swing door, expecting to be assaulted by the familiar smells of beer and cigarettes but these days, of course, it was only the former.

It took a few seconds for my eyesight to adjust – the gloom of the interior was unchanged, at least. The same dark furniture, the brown walls and ceilings, although the glass was cleaner than I recalled. I was only slightly disappointed that
Hippy Hippy Shakes
wasn’t playing on the jukebox.

The place was quiet, but then it was mid-afternoon on a weekday. An old couple sat at a table by one of the windows. A teenager in a hoodie, with his pants hanging down gangster-style below his backside, slapped animatedly at a games machine. A businessman in a sharp suit and unnecessary shades sat at the far end of the bar, tapping at something on his phone, while a barmaid stood near him, as if they’d just had their conversation interrupted by my arrival.

I went up to the bar and hoisted myself onto a stool, caught the barmaid’s eye and she came across and said, “Help you?”

“Soda water,” I said, and tried not to smile at the disapproving look on the girl’s face.

When she put the glass before me, I said, “I used to come here when I was a kid, you know.”

She didn’t look that interested, but was just about too polite to ignore me completely.

“I had friends here,” I went on. “I’m looking for one of them now. You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find Eddie Bailey, would you?”

That got her attention. She stared at me for a few long seconds. Then she raised an eyebrow and said, “You’re kidding me, right? Eddie Bailey?”

I hadn’t been aware of the guy in the suit approaching.

“I think you must be mistaken,” he said.

I looked as he pushed the shades up to sit in the tangle of dark hair on the crown of his head. He had pale features, perfect teeth and a square jaw covered in stubble that wasn’t quite a beard; his dark eyes glinted even in the pub’s gloomy interior. A minor deviation in his nose gave him a slightly dangerous edge.

I realized I was staring, trying to place him in my memory. Had he been one of the kids I’d run with back then?

“No, it’s definitely Eddie Bailey I’m looking for,” I said.

He laughed briefly, and settled back onto the stool next to mine. “Nah,” he said, drawing the word out. “Eddie doesn’t live here any more. He’s been away years.”

I remembered what Granddad had said. “Spain?”

He laughed again. He seemed to find me way too amusing.

“Nah, more like Wandsworth,” he told me, flashing those teeth again.

It took a moment for me to realize he meant the prison and not just a different part of London. “Oh... I... It’s just...” There was something about this guy’s gaze that made me self-conscious, stumbling over my words. “My grandparents... they knew him. Way back. I was hoping to find him.”

The guy in the suit thought for a moment, then said, “Your grandparents? D’you mean it’s Eddie senior you’re looking for? I thought you meant my old man. Both called Eddie, see? It’s my old man who’s banged up in Wandsworth. Gramps – Eddie senior – sorry, but he died years ago.”

It was my turn now to take a few seconds to think this through. So Gran’s old flame had passed away, and his son, also called Eddie Bailey, was in prison, and so this man in the sharp suit and indoor shades was–

He smiled, straightened, offered his hand for me to shake. Said, “Dean Bailey at your service.”

His touch was cool, smooth. Just like him.

§

We took our drinks over to another window table, across from the old couple.

“I used to come here,” I said. “When I was little.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “We used to come into the pub for sandwiches: adults out here and us kids in the back with the TV.” I studied his features again. “Do you remember days like that?”

He shrugged, clearly not one to give much away if he could help it.

Maybe he hadn’t been part of that group. I’d put him in his late twenties to my twenty-two. If you applied that age-difference of five or six years back then, it would have seemed much more, so he probably hadn’t taken part in the same kickabouts in the streets that I had.

“Your family,” he said. “You say they knew Gramps? How come?”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “My gran was engaged to Eddie Bailey at one point,” I told him. “Back in the early ’60s. My granddad stole her away.”

“And you say he lived to tell the tale?” There was something about the way he said it. That smile, the twinkle in his dark eyes, the easy tone of his voice – and the absolute certainty in his words: he wasn’t joking.

Again I felt that awkwardness, the struggle for words. I remembered Granddad saying,
It could of been nasty, but he owed me. The Baileys always looked out for their own.

“Eddie owed him a favor,” I explained. “I think they were old friends. They left London, traveled for a few years, then came back to settle down in the UK.”

“Must have been a hell of a favor,” said Dean. “So what’s the story? What are you doing here looking for someone who’s been dead twenty years? And what’s all this about you coming here when you were a nipper?”

So I told him how we used to visit. How those trips had made me feel as if I had one of those big, old-fashioned families, surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles, when the rest of the time it was just me and my parents. “I don’t know why we stopped visiting. I must have been about seven or eight when we last came down here.”

“Maybe your folks wanted a clean break,” said Dean. “That’d be – what? – fifteen years ago? Things got a bit messy down here around then. That’s when my old man... went away.”

He kept doing that. Trying to sound dangerous and mysterious. I didn’t entirely buy it. Something told me this Dean Bailey was, to use one of my gran’s old sayings, all mouth and no trousers.

“So what’s all this about, then? Why come looking for Gramps now?”

I told him how Gran was, how she’d deteriorated so quickly – not explaining that I only knew this through Maureen because I’d been hiding myself away for the past year and a half. “But she’s got this thing,” I said. “She doesn’t even know who Granddad is most of the time but she remembers the ’60s as if they were yesterday. And she still thinks she’s engaged to your grandfather.”

“Nah! Get away.”

“It’s true. She’s pining away, waiting for him to visit. Hoping he’ll just come and whisk her away.”

“How does your granddad feel about that?”

“Resigned to it, I think. He says it’s the only time she’s really herself any more, when she’s remembering the ’60s. He’s pretty much lost her, and he knows she’s not coming back. He’d do anything for her – just wants to give her a little more happiness, whatever way he can.”

“That’s sweet.”

Then those dark eyes narrowed and a new intensity swept across Dean Bailey’s features, like a cloud passing over the sun.

“I could never do that,” he said, leaning forward, fixing me with his look. “I could never give it all away like that. I’d fight to the last.”

Right up until that point I’d thought I had Dean Bailey’s mark. Thought that he was all talk and show – all mouth and no trousers, as Gran would have said.

But that look, those words... I believed him.

I could never give it all away like that. I’d fight to the last.

Dean Bailey was sorted. The man.

Middle brother. Middle
man
– always the one who put the deals together, who connected people, who made things happen.

His older brother, Owen, was good with the fancy stuff, the money-moving and the legals, but he’d never really had the stomach to roll his sleeves up and get his hands dirty, like Dean would.

And Lee... Well, Lee – like all the Bailey Boys – had a heart of East End gold, but not to put too fine a point on it he was a bit of a liability at times. Wild and hair-trigger, he could scare the crap out of anyone, but he’d never claim to have the brains of Owen, or the street-smarts of Dean.