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by Martina Cole

  Then he would let it explode once more, and feel the release wash over him and the peace descend as always.

  Until the next time.

  Eileen lit a cigarette and, taking a deep pull on it, she blinked back the tears that were threatening to spill over.

  A few minutes earlier she had sponged down her mother’s body and the sheer devastation of it had moved her profoundly.

  She was like a skeleton, her poor arms and legs were stick-like, her chest was sunken and bruised all over from bleeding under her skin, and the scar from her mastectomy was vicious in the half-light.

  She already looked dead and Eileen knew that it couldn’t be long before she went. But even though she knew it would be a happy release for her mother, the thought of her never being there ever again was terrifying.

  She depended on her so much, needed her so desperately that even though she knew it was selfish, she prayed her mother pulled through as she had before. Paulie, her husband, knew how hard this was for her. He alone knew she had come off the drink so she could nurse the woman who had cared for them all.

  She watched through the kitchen window as her twin sister Kathleen made sandwiches and talked to anyone who would listen to her. Poor Kath, as she was known, it would hit her hard as well.

  That bastard Lance was dead but would never be forgotten by any of them, no matter how hard they tried to push him from their thoughts.

  His death had been the finish of their mother, even though Eileen knew she had hung on until she knew he was finally gone.

  He was to be buried in a pauper’s grave, no service arranged, no nothing, and she knew that everyone in their world would wonder why. They would be expecting pomp and circumstance, assuming he would be laid to rest like all the others. They would expect a big do, even though he had died, allegedly, at the hands of his older brother. Nothing had been proved yet, and she hoped that nothing ever was.

  Lance had crossed the line, and the heinous nature of his offence had sent shock waves through the whole family. She also knew that the reason he had died would never be forthcoming from any of them. It was another secret, and they were used to secrets, being secretive was second nature to the Brodies.

  Let people guess, let them wonder, she didn’t care any more.

  It was over, it had happened, and it had been dealt with.

  Christy, unlike his brother, Pat, was in a squad car being driven into London. He had been questioned about Lance’s death as had the rest of his brothers and sisters. Too much had been swept under the carpet with his family, and even though he knew his mother thought it was all for the best, he also knew without a shadow of a doubt that old scores would soon need to be settled. Whatever she thought, and no matter how much she had begged them all not to react to circumstances and events. Once she was gone, it would be open season and they all knew that.

  He expected the rows to start, though Patrick would probably put a block on them.

  Shawn sipped at his tea and watched as his sister Kathleen made sandwiches with a speed that denoted years of practice. She had lived with their granny and Lance, and been used as a gofer for most of that time. Women were strange in that way, loyal but strange.

  He smiled at her sadly and she stopped what she was doing to grab his hand and smile down at him. These two were close, even in a family as close as they all were.

  His skin was so dark against hers, yet she never saw that, none of them did. He was the baby and they all doted on him. Most of them anyway.

  His father had wandered into their lives and then wandered back out again, turning up periodically, not really a part of the family, but accepted all the same.

  His earliest memory was of his mother’s smiling face, and his brother Patrick taking him from her arms as she got herself ready for work. He had been about three years old, and he could still smell her particular smell. Cigarettes and Estée Lauder, he had never been able to forget the aroma of safety that smell had always engendered in him.

  He wasn’t silly, he knew it had been hard for her when she had produced him, but he also knew that she had never cared what anyone thought. His brothers and sisters had loved him more if anything, yet he had been conscious of his colour from an early age, though mostly only when he left the comfort of his home. Now though, it didn’t matter, times had changed, and things were different. And he was dreading the death of the woman he loved like he loved no other.

  Lance was the only one in the family he had never cared for. He had been a bully and a vicious bully at that, but Shawn knew that his silence had been right and when it had finally come to a head, he was glad that he had not been the one to cause it.

  Like his sister, he had suffered at his hands on more than one occasion.

  He had seen him in the mortuary, identified the battered body that had not suffered enough, the sneaky bastard lying in peace, and he had finally relaxed knowing that his tormentor was gone for ever.

  He smiled as he remembered the scandalised expression on the faces around him as he had hawked in his throat and spat on the corpse of his older brother. ‘That’s him, the ponce.’

  He had said it with as much hatred as he could muster, and he had enjoyed the shock-horror it had caused. They were such a close family, put on such a united front, no one would have believed the undercurrents and the feuds their closeness covered up. Now though, all his thoughts were with the woman upstairs in her bed, and he felt the wetness of his tears as they slid down his face and was amazed to realise he had been crying all along.

  Kathleen held on to the hand that had steadied her as a child, that had washed her, brushed her hair and hugged her and the feel of its trembling and the warmth of the papery skin, were almost too much to bear.

  This woman had given them life, had taken care of them all, visited the boys in every prison in the country come rain or shine, advised her daughters on every aspect of their lives and even when times were so hard there was hardly a bite to eat in the house, had provided them with a meal through the sale of the only asset she possessed. Her strength had communicated itself to them all at some time or another, she had solved her children’s problems with a quiet dignity, or screaming anger, depending on the circumstances and her mood. She had stopped war from erupting, and welcomed back black sheep over and over again. She had held them together with the sheer force of her will and her overpowering love. What would happen to them all now? Who would keep them all together, make sure they didn’t fall apart, didn’t rake up the past and cause murders?

  She had always been the voice of reason, had been the one who smoothed over quarrels and made sure that they remembered they were family. Stopped the fights before they began and reminded them that, at the end of the day, each other was all that any of them really had. As close as they were, they had all fallen out big time over the years.

  She had been the voice of reason. She had stopped Patrick from murdering on more than one occasion. She had glossed over trouble with a smile, and she had forced them all to lie, if necessary, for the greater good of the family.

  Now though she was dying, and none of them was going to find it easy to live without her.

  Book One

  O Lord, thou hast seen my wrong:

  Judge thou my cause.

  - (Lamentations 3:59)

  Chapter One

  ‘He’s a spiv, like his old man, but what can you do?’ Barry Caldwell held out his arms in supplication and the men in the public house smiled with him. They were strained smiles though, and Barry observed that much and learned a valuable lesson. He had fucked with the wrong person.

  Patrick Brodie, however, laughed heartily at the man’s words.

  It had been said about him in jest many times but he knew it was the truth. Barry had been well and truly had over and, like many a man before him, he was finding out that Patrick Brodie was not a man to cross.

  Pat knew, better than any of them, what he was. But unlike the men around him, he knew exactly how far he was prepared to
go to get what he wanted. All his life he had been looked down on, abused and treated like shit. This was in part because his father was a big, drunken Irishman with a mouth that ran away with him, and a gambling habit that he had never been able to afford. Consequently, his son, Pat Junior, was close-mouthed, hardly drank, and made his living from the bets amongst other things.

  But it was also because he had been abandoned by his mother, had had no formal schooling, dodged the draft with a cheery smile and his natural ambivalence, that made him a law unto himself very early on in life.

  He had no intention of fighting for a country that he saw as holding men down and offering them nothing except back-breaking work. He had said as much to his commanding officer. He had also robbed the army stores blind; the black market was still thriving at the time, and he had used that for his own ends.

  They’d thrown him in the glasshouse for a year, and in that time he had learned a lot about life, the human condition, but most importantly, he had learned that you had no one to depend on in this life, except yourself.

  He had inherited his father’s fighting spirit and his absent mother’s disregard for others, along with her knack of rewriting history when it suited her, and this had proved to be a winning combination on more than one occasion.

  The army had finally waved him off with a sigh of relief and a dishonourable discharge because he fought anyone who disagreed with him about anything. And invariably, he won. He had been as relieved as they were, when they finally parted company.

  Now, the last stage of this education was for him to make the final killing and set himself up for life. Barry had tried to have him over, something he would never forgive or forget. Patrick was a force to be reckoned with, and this was made all the more amazing by the fact that he was basically a loner. He worked his scams himself, collected by himself alone, and had garnered a reputation as a man only a fool would cross.

  But the main men were old now and, consequently, his job was getting harder and harder. They were like old women, dithering ponces, worried about getting nicked because the judges were suddenly handing out great big lumps and making examples of people. This was now a world waiting to be taken, he was aware of that, and he reassessed his position as and when the occasion merited it.

  His father had tolerated hangers-on, had bought himself flaky friendships with pints, with his stories and with his Irish charm. His son, however, trusted no one, needed no one, and his instincts had been proved right time and time again. He had no time for family, none of them had ever been anything except hangers-on, and he had put paid to their leeching. He was a one-man band, he could only trust himself and he accepted that and understood it.

  He had a few young men working for him, but he had suddenly realised that after this debacle, he would need to recruit properly. The operation was getting too big for him to work alone. He was lucky that Barry had no serious backup; if he had, then this would end differently.

  It was time to share his good fortune, he knew that, but at the moment he was collecting a debt that was long overdue. A debt that Barry had tried to ignore, believing that he would not have the front to come after him.

  Brodie’s name was synonymous with skulduggery, and he knew that only the rumours surrounding his dishonourable discharge and his phenomenal temper, coupled with the element of surprise, had stood between him and a firearm this night.

  But there were others Barry dealt with, and they had their creds. Barry would be all over him like a rash once the shock wore off and he realised that he and his associates were more than capable of taking on a lone man with a large amount of dosh.

  He smiled and it occurred to him that whoever he decided to pal up with needed to be a new Face, an up-and-coming lad like himself with the heart and the nerve to take on the more established of their counterparts. The world was changing, and the younger men were needing money and the older men were needing a lesson in the real world. The country was still rebuilding, not only buildings, but the economy, and the pickings were juicy enough to make Brodie not just a man of means, but also a man to be listened to, and more importantly, a man to respect.

  Everything had changed with the war, and Patrick had seen that it was a new era coming, and that the new world they would finally inhabit was open to all sorts of money-making schemes. This meant a new criminal fraternity, and Brodie was determined that he would be a big part of that change. It was what he had worked towards, it was what made him the man he was, and it was why Barry was now awaiting his downfall.

  It was the sixties, and life was sweet for anyone with a bit of nous and a few quid to sweeten their journey through life.

  Patrick was one of the first to challenge the likes of Barry Caldwell and his ilk. It was in with the young and out with the old.

  They had all known this day was coming, they had just not had the foresight to make any kind of provision for when it all finally fell out of bed.

  Well, fuck them. His rep would gather enough talk tonight to make him a household name in East London. The debt was large and had also been a long time coming, but when he actually went after Barry and his peers and took all their work off them they would understand that he was now not just their equal, but one of their betters. His rep would finally be strong enough for him to become the lynchpin of a new and exciting world that he would not only create, but also control.

  The war had separated the men from the boys, and the old men who had ruled because the country’s youth had been scattered to the ends of the earth, were now going to find out that it really was about the survival of the fittest.

  Their days of being the dog’s bollocks were over, finished with, gone. This lot might have been the instigators of this brave new world way back, but they had no control over it any more. They were like fucking antiques, decrepit, and frightened of the new generation who had access to guns and no real fear of the filth. It was time to make his move all right, and he was ready to take the consequences of his actions.

  His mind made up, he picked up his beer and, emptying the straight-lined Courage glass of its contents, he proceeded to smash it with all the force he could muster, into Barry Caldwell’s chubby, pasty and comically surprised face.

  Patrick had the psychological advantage, he had drawn first blood. He was quick to note that none of the men around him tried to intervene, and he knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that his instincts, as usual, had been spot on.

  They all looked defeated, they all looked shocked and they were all frightened that the next person on his agenda was going to be one of them. They were old, old before their time from piss-ups, chain-smoking and easy pickings. None of them had been seriously challenged since their call-up papers, they were rejects, they were from the past, from a life that was grey and empty, and their antiquated moral code stifled younger men like himself. They were carrion, old, wizened wankers. They were finished and they all knew it.

  Well, he was still young enough to make his mark, yet old enough to command respect. Pat Brodie was on his way up, and at twenty-nine, he was ready to put his money where his notoriously close mouth was.

  The courts were handing out long sentences, and instead of that being a deterrent, it only made him and his counterparts more reckless, more violent, because if they were going to go down then they would make sure it was for a fucking good reason.

  He looked down at Barry. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

  Lily Diamond was tired out. Her shift had been long and her legs were swelling from fourteen hours of standing in a freezing factory on a cold floor, and then waiting over an hour for the bus that dropped her off a ten-minute walk from her home.

  As she went into her house, she was already yawning and her mother took her coat from her, hung it on the back of the door and poured her a cup of steaming black tea. Then, with her usual swiftness, she placed a plate of ham and eggs in front of her.

  This was all done in silence so as not to wake the drunken man who was quietly
snoring on the settee in the small parlour nearby.

  Lily smiled at her mother but they both knew it meant nothing, these were two people who had realised that there was no real connection between them many years before.

  Lily knew that she looked like her mother. They had the same thick hair and the same grey eyes, their builds were similar enough for people to mistake them for each other from the rear, and they were both blessed with a fantastic bone structure that belied her mother’s advancing years, and reassured her daughter that her looks were probably going to last a lot longer than the majority of her friends. But other than that, they were as different in temperament as a dog and a cat.

  They had only one thing in common and that was a hatred for the man who ruled their lives, and who terrorised their every waking moment.

  Mick Diamond was not her father and she thanked God for that every day of her life, but he had married her mother when she was already pregnant with another man’s child, made her respectable and then waited for the children of his own that had never arrived. Consequently, she had not only been resented by him, but also been a constant reminder that it was his fault there were no sons around his table, no children to look to in his old age and no other wages available to assuage his unhappiness by providing him with the alcohol he so desperately craved.

  His name would live on through a bastard, through someone else’s child. The fact she existed was proof positive that the blame for his wife’s childless state must lie with him.

  Lily had grown up in a household devoid of any kind of love, or any kind of normality. She had learned at an early age that keeping quiet, staying in the background and trying to be as invisible as possible, was the only way she could hope to survive.