The Lighterman: The Kray Twins are out for revenge... (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 3)

by Simon Michael

  ‘Whatever you say, guv.’

  The streets are still empty and within twelve minutes the cabbie is waiting outside “Patisserie Valerie” with the engine running. Charles exits the shop at a jog, warm paper bag in his hand, and gets back in. Eight further minutes, and he’s walking through the doors of the apartment building on Fetter Lane. He runs upstairs, picking up his Sunday paper from the reception desk as he goes, opens the apartment door and put his head round the door jamb. He smiles; Sally’s still asleep.

  He steps into the kitchen, puts the kettle on the stove and places the two freshly-baked croissants in the oven to keep warm. He makes a pot of coffee which he puts onto a tray with two cups, milk and the croissants. He tucks the newspaper under his arm and carries the tray quietly into the bedroom, placing it on the end of the bed and sitting down carefully by Sally’s side. She has turned onto her back and is still asleep. Charles watches her chest rise and fall. He’s aware of the dark outlines of her brown nipples through the thin cotton of her nightie and feels blood start pumping to his groin. He lowers his mouth to hers and kisses her gently.

  ‘Morning,’ she mumbles. She half opens her eyes, shading her face from the sunlight streaming through the window. ‘You already dressed?’ She reaches up to touch Charles’s dark curls. ‘And showered, I see.’ Then she smells the coffee. ‘Ooh, coffee.’ She struggles to sit up, and bashes the pillows behind her into a shape to support her. ‘And croissants! You have been busy.’

  ‘Very nice, Charles,’ says Henrietta’s dry voice beside Charles’s head. ‘You never brought me breakfast in bed.’

  Sally reaches across, takes one of the cups of coffee and sips. ‘Hmm, lovely.’ She glances again at Charles. ‘Shame you’re dressed, though.’

  Charles grins. ‘Easily remedied,’ he says, ignoring Henrietta and undoing his belt.

  An hour later, faint tinny sounds of pop music courtesy of the Light Programme emanate from behind the closed bathroom door, and Charles can just make out Sally humming along with John Lennon’s wailing harmonica on ‘Love Me Do’. He pushes his chair back from the table in the lounge, puts down the newspaper, and steps quietly to the bathroom door, inclining his ear to listen for the sounds of water running.

  Satisfied, he walks the two paces to the window overlooking Fetter Lane. He pulls back the curtains slightly and scans the street: deserted. There had been a man loitering in a doorway twenty minutes before. Charles couldn’t see his face from above due to the brim of the man’s hat, and he could easily have been waiting for a bus. In any case, the doorway is now empty.

  ‘Easy Beat’ is extinguished as the transistor radio in the bathroom is turned off, and Charles swiftly resumes his seat and picks up his cup. He hasn’t said anything to Sally about his “problem” with Ronnie Kray and doesn’t want to worry her. The bathroom door opens and Sally steps across the hallway into the lounge.

  ‘More coffee?’ asks Charles, reaching for the now replenished pot.

  Sally’s hair is tied in a towel and she wears Charles’s white towelling dressing gown. Charles, on the other hand, is wearing a woman’s pale blue silk bathrobe with a word in Japanese embroidered on the back which, Sally tells him, says “Happiness” but which for all he knows translates as “Idiot”. The garment was once Sally’s, but he’d been forced to start wearing it when she commandeered his more suitable bathrobe. Sally has told Charles many times that he looks ridiculous — huge square hands, hairy forearms like great hams, and a heavily muscled neck emerging from a woman’s silk robe — and has asked him to buy her a second towelling one to match his. But, for reasons he has avoided examining, he hasn’t managed to find the time to do it yet.

  Charles looks up at her and pauses, coffee cup in hand, marvelling again at his luck. Sally is petite and slim, a little over five foot in height, and his towelling robe is huge on her, hiding the contours of her body as it wraps round her almost twice. It hangs only a couple of inches off the floor and that, together with the towel wrapped round her head which accentuates her large round eyes and small features, make her look childlike.

  Charles knows that this waif-like vulnerability is deceptive; underneath the robe is a demandingly hungry body, and he finds the contrast irresistible. When they make love he feels powerless, as if carried away in a tidal wave. Her selfishness, her demand to be satisfied, inflames him and, though he would never admit it even to himself, scares him slightly.

  It’s not just the amazing sex that has made their first few months together so unexpectedly happy. In contrast to Henrietta, who was the daughter of a viscount, a sophisticate whose pleasures were largely intellectual, Sally engages life with a physicality he finds infectious. She disdains diets, demanding proper meals — three courses, wine with each, and a dessert — and despite being half Charles’s size will match him course for course and drink for drink. When they play games, Monopoly on wet afternoons or football in the park, she plays to win, cheerfully cheating, tripping and fouling him if necessary, and her cooking is enthusiastically slap-dash, as likely to produce something inedible as wonderful.

  Charles never met anyone who possesses such an uncomplicated enthusiasm for life. Despite her small stature, Sally is the strongest and most alive woman Charles has ever met.

  Lastly, Sally shares with Charles something that none of his past girlfriends have. She’s a Cockney like him, from a poor family and, like him, she has made something of herself by applying a more polished mask. They “get” each other without effort, and Charles can be closer to his true self with Sally than he has ever been with anyone else.

  He stands and goes to her, wrapping his great arms around her, squeezing the breath from her chest, nuzzling his face against her neck and luxuriating in the smell of her freshly washed skin. The knowledge that this wonderful young woman’s soft curvaceous body is a mere towelling belt knot away, is there and available to him, still seems miraculous to Charles. But it’s not available this time. As his kisses descend in inch by inch increments towards her supraclavicular fossa, the velvet depression between her clavicle and her neck, the name of which he learned specifically because he loves hers so, he runs a hand down the curve of her back and starts rucking up the bathrobe to reach for the soft globes of her buttocks, still hot and slightly damp from the shower. Sally grabs his wrist.

  ‘No,’ she says simply. ‘I want to go out.’ Charles stops but doesn’t release her immediately. ‘Seriously, Charlie. Let’s do something.’

  She pulls herself away from him, and his renewed interest in her becomes obvious through the inadequate robe. He looks down and demonstrates his predicament with both hands open.

  ‘Tough. You’ll just have to save it. Get out of that ridiculous gown and get dressed.’

  ‘What, this?’ asks Charles disingenuously, making himself decent and twirling round like a model. ‘I thought it made me look elegant.’

  ‘Whereas it actually makes you look like a Sicilian boxer in drag. Now fuck off and put some clothes on.’

  Charles bends and plants a kiss on the end of her upturned nose. ‘I’ll get changed then.’

  He disappears into the bedroom. The apartment was never intended for occupation by more than one person, and with a double bed in the bedroom there’s only room for one person to move around, so Sally sits on the settee and picks up the newspaper, leafing to the section on business.

  Sally is now the senior clerk at the chambers where Charles once practiced, and the youngest senior barristers’ clerk in the Temple. Confounding all predictions, she’d been hugely successful, increasing both the turnover of the set and the number of clients in a year, but the longer hours meant that she could no longer care for her ailing mother. She’d been forced to employ an ex-nurse, Betty, to take her place. Despite Sally’s fears, the two older women got on instantly, becoming in a few short months more like friends than carer and client.

  That started Sally thinking. She knew several elderly people in the same situation as her mother, all w
ar widows with good pensions but distant families. So Sally interviewed and hired three other carers, all mature women with nursing experience acquired in the war, to carry out home visits in the East End and surrounding boroughs. It was a novel idea, and it caught on. Sally is now looking to expand what she has named “The Domestic Care Agency” and, for the first time in her life, she finds the business news of interest.

  ‘What do you fancy, then?’ calls Sally from the lounge. ‘Can I meet any of your friends? Or your family?’

  Charles doesn’t answer, so Sally follows him into the bedroom. He’s sitting bare-footed on the edge of the bed in his slacks, his enormous chest about to disappear into a vest. He stands and starts looking under the covers for his socks.

  ‘Look at me, Charlie,’ she orders softly from the doorway. He avoids her gaze for a moment longer. ‘I’ve told you, I won’t put up with this. It’s been over eight months since Dad’s trial. In all that time I’ve met none of your family. You never even mention them. I’ve never met any of your friends — and don’t give me that line about not having any, ’cos we both know it’s balls. I used to be your clerk, remember?’

  She approaches him, puts her hand under his chin and lifts his head up. She holds his face firmly between her hands to keep him focused on her.

  ‘You know how much I love it here in our own little world. It’s sexy and special, and I’ve been perfectly happy curled up in your pocket for months. But now I want to be part of your life.’ Charles doesn’t answer, and his eyes drift off hers and over her shoulder. ‘You’re ashamed of me, Charlie Holborne, aren’t you?’ she asks.

  ‘No. I’m not ashamed of you.’

  ‘Then why am I still a secret? Why do we never meet in the Temple? Why do we never go anywhere? This is turning into a tacky affair. It’s not what I want.’

  Her voice is calm and there’s no sense of her nagging, but he hears the intensity in her tone and knows how much this means to her. Charles takes her small white hands from his face and holds them together in front of him. He closes his eyes and kisses her fingers tenderly.

  ‘This isn’t a tacky affair. You know that’s not me.’ But there is an unspoken “But” after these words, and they both hear it.

  At the start there’d been an unspoken accord between them to keep their relationship quiet. There was a taboo against barristers having relationships with barristers’ clerks and, more immediately, the press were still looking for more angles on Charles’s life to fan the public interest in the East End criminal barrister framed for the murder of his titled wife. So they’d both been anxious to avoid further publicity.

  Furthermore, the physical attraction between them was so overwhelming that in the first few months they preferred to be locked away in their private cocoon. They never strayed far from Fleet Street, grabbing hasty meals after work to rush back to the flat and tear one another’s clothes off.

  But that was then. Charles’s face hasn’t appeared in the newspapers for months and Sally hungers for a normal relationship. Charles is finding it difficult to understand his own reluctance.

  ‘You have to give me some time, Sally. I’m finding this very difficult. It’s not only the professional thing. I’m old enough —’

  ‘To be my father, yes, you say it all the time. It’s not actually true. You’re only thirty-eight.’

  ‘And you’re barely twenty-three.’

  He stands and, mirroring her earlier gesture, takes her soft face in his hands. He stares deep into her light brown eyes with the tiny golden flecks around the pupils.

  ‘Sally, twenty years from now I’ll be just short of sixty. That’s old. Bits’ll have started falling off. You’ll still be in your prime. I don’t want to be constantly looking over my shoulder, worried about all the young bucks trying to get into your knickers.’

  This is a familiar refrain and she knows that, despite his jocular tone, it worries him. She reaches up and brushes the hair at his temples with her fingers, failing to get the few wiry white hairs to lie down with the sleek black ones.

  ‘That’s in twenty years’ time. Who knows what might happen by then? What about now? We’re together now.’

  ‘Listen to her, Charles,’ orders Henrietta.

  But Charles can’t answer. He hates to admit it to himself, but the age difference is only part of it; he’s also concerned at the gossip that’s bound to fly around the Temple, just after it’s all died down. The Bar is the province of upper class, well-heeled, Oxbridge graduates for whom dating a clerk would be akin to walking out with one of the domestic servants.

  At the same time Charles is ashamed of his embarrassment. He acknowledges dimly to himself that he’s at risk of acting out the very class snobbery he so loathes when it’s directed at him. And then there’s the Jewish thing. Charles is not interested in his parents’ religion, its weird rituals, its adherence to two thousand-year-old dietary rules, but having just managed some form of rapprochement with his parents, what would be the effect of introducing them to yet another shiksa as his life partner? Another ten-year silence?

  And then … then … what about what Davie said? Could this reluctance be about Henrietta, too?

  So for some months Charles, never good at disentangling or understanding emotions, especially his own, has placed the knotty problem of his relationship with Sally on the back-burner, hoping that somehow it would resolve itself.

  He looks into her eyes and smiles. ‘I’ve never met your mum,’ he offers.

  A slow smile spreads across her lips. ‘Are you suggesting you should?’

  ‘Why not? Have you told her anything about me?’

  ‘Have I? She’s bored to death of me banging on about you. She’s even started saying she doesn’t believe you exist ’cos she’s never met you.’

  Charles shrugs. ‘Well, then…’

  Sally pulls his head to hers and lands a wet kiss smack on his lips, releases him as suddenly, and runs back to the lounge. ‘I’ll give her a ring!’ she calls. Then she reappears in the doorway, frowning. ‘You sure about this? Sunday lunch in Romford, with my sisters, their blokes and a baby? Bit of a baptism of fire.’

  ‘Compared to meeting my family, it’ll be a walk in the park.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  When she’s not with Charles at Fetter Lane Sally still lives with her mother in the narrow, terraced house in Romford where she and her sisters grew up.

  Sally lets herself in by the front door and Charles follows her into the hall. The home smells different from that in which Charles grew up in Mile End — no Jewish cooking — and it has none of the paraphernalia to be found in every Jewish home, but otherwise it’s instantly familiar to him.

  Almost identical to the house on British Street where he grew up, it has a narrow corridor with a “best” lounge opening off to the left and a staircase on the right; at the end of the corridor is a kitchen which has been extended into what was once a scullery and coal shed; and upstairs there will be a main bedroom and a room for Sally and her sisters to share. He also knows that when this house was built it would have had an outside toilet at the end of the yard but he suspects, rightly, that an inside bathroom and toilet have been installed in an extension over the top of the scullery sometime since the war.

  Sally closes the door and leads to the end of the short, tiled corridor. From behind the closed kitchen door facing them come gales of laughter and an indistinct tangle of conversations. Sally puts her fingers to her lips and listens for a moment.

  ‘Ready?’ she asks quietly.

  Charles looks up from examining a notebook hanging from the kitchen door jamb. He recognises Sally’s handwriting in some of the entries and realises he is looking at a handover record for Mrs Fisher’s carers.

  ‘Ready,’ he replies with a smile.

  Sally opens the kitchen door quickly and the conversations from within are instantly snuffed out. Facing Charles is a woman in her late forties or early fifties, who Charles guesses is Sally’s mother. Around
the scrubbed pine kitchen table also sit two young women and a man in his late twenties gingerly cradling a young baby. Charles smells roast meat cooking — lamb perhaps — and boiled vegetables.

  ‘Mum, this is Charles Holborne. Charlie, meet my mum, Nell Fisher. Next to her is my sister Michelle — that’s her husband Frank looking likely to drop the baby — and next to Frank at the end is my baby sister Tracey.’

  ‘I’m nineteen,’ clarifies Tracey, ‘nearly twenty, and I’m married.’ Charles can see her resemblance to Sally. She, too, is very pretty, though taller and slimmer and her black hair is worn longer and at this moment is tied in a ponytail.

  Frank stands and awkwardly extracts a hand from under the baby which he offers to Charles over the table. He is tall and thin, with thick brown hair cut in a severe horizontal line across his forehead. Charles shakes his hand.

  ‘How do you do?’ they say simultaneously.

  ‘You haven’t introduced me to the most important person here,’ says Charles, indicating the baby.

  Michelle laughs. ‘That’s Denise,’ she says.

  Charles leans forward and puts his enormous stubby forefinger into the baby’s curled hand and feels her grip it. He lowers his head to the baby. ‘Hello, Denise,’ he says softly. ‘Six months?’ he asks, looking up at Michelle.

  ‘Five,’ says Frank with unmistakable pride.

  Charles sees an enquiring glance flash between Michelle and Sally.

  ‘You don’t have kids, do you?’ asks Michelle.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you seem to know about them…’ says Michelle. She is fairer than her two sisters, of larger build, and looks more like their mother.

  ‘Not really,’ says Charles. ‘But I like them. Especially at this age.’

  ‘You never told me,’ says Sally, with surprise.

  ‘I’ve never told you lots of things,’ replies Charles with a twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘Ooh, that sounds mysterious!’ says Tracey.