by Rosie Harris
As she laid out the spread – jelly, blancmange and a sponge cake with white icing that had chocolate grated over the top – she wondered if her dad had bought Benny a present like she’d begged him to do.
The moment Eddy arrived home from work, and had given Benny the football he’d been longing for, she made the tea. She knew her father wouldn’t want to join them and she suspected that Eddy would want to get their party over as soon as possible since it was his night for seeing Rita.
She was quite taken aback when, within minutes of Eddy leaving, Bill Martin came through from the shop with a present for Benny. When he saw the clockwork train, complete with rails and a set of carriages to run on it, Benny was overawed. He’d never had a present like it. Excitedly, he thanked Bill and asked if he could play with it right away.
‘Of course you can, whack,’ Bill told him. ‘Come on, let’s clear a space on the floor and I’ll fix the rails for you … that’s if it is all right with Vera.’
Vera wanted to say no, to ask him to leave and take his present with him, but she realised that her father had followed Bill into the room. She felt as if her privacy had been invaded. Seeing Bill Martin in the shop was bad enough, but she resented him coming uninvited into their living room. She bit back her refusal, though, as she saw the ecstatic look on Benny’s face as he helped unpack his new present.
‘Perhaps you should finish your tea first, Benny,’ she suggested.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he said dismissively, his entire attention focussed on the train set.
An hour later, Michael Quinn had finished reading through the Liverpool Echo and was impatient for his own meal.
‘Come on, Vera, pack young Benny off to bed and do me and Bill a fry-up,’ he ordered.
Benny objected. He wanted to go on playing with his new toy, but their father was tired of him being underfoot. Vera knew the signs, knew her dad’s expansive mood was about to revert to a skull-thumping session.
‘I’ll take him upstairs while you see to the food,’ Bill suggested.
Vera hesitated. Benny was used to her putting him to bed, she wasn’t sure how he would react. She also wanted to avoid Bill invading their home any further, or getting even closer to Benny.
‘It’s all right,’ she said quickly. ‘Leave him to play, I’ll cook something for you two and then I’ll take him up.’
‘What’s wrong with you, girl, are you deaf?’ her father muttered irritably. ‘It’s his bedtime … NOW! Go on, you take him upstairs, Bill.’
‘No!’ Vera laid a hand on Benny’s shoulder, propelling him towards the stairs. ‘I said I would see to him. If you want him in bed first then you can wait for your fry-up.’
Bill leaned against the door and pursed his lips in a silent whistle, then at a nod from Michael he quietly followed Vera up the stairs.
Benny was overtired and sulky. He wanted to stay and play with his new train set and he resented being sent to bed. Vera did her best to calm him down, but she knew she wasn’t being as patient as usual because her own nerves were on edge. She blamed it all on Bill Martin gate-crashing the party and buying Benny such an expensive present.
‘While you’re getting undressed I’ll go down and fetch you a glass of milk, and another slice of cake, and you can sit up in bed and have them,’ she cajoled.
‘And can I look at the new book you bought me?’
‘Yes, I’ll bring it back upstairs with me,’ she promised.
As she walked out onto the landing, Vera almost jumped out of her skin when she found Bill had followed her upstairs and was standing there waiting for her.
Before she could cry out he’d clamped his hand over her mouth and roughly pushed her into one of the other bedrooms.
She struggled wildly as he tried to overpower her, his eyes gleaming. She screwed up her eyes, trying to shut out his hideous leering face, as he thrust her backwards onto the bed and pinned her there with the weight of his own body.
Her heart thundered and she could hear her own breath rasping as she tried to twist free. One of his hands remained clamped over her mouth, with the other one he tore at her clothes.
She felt bile rising, burning and bitter in her throat as his calloused hand explored the soft flesh of her inner thigh. She knew that something terrible and irrevocable was about to happen.
Although she managed to fight him off, Bill’s brutal attack as he tried to rape her left Vera on the edge of hysteria. For a minute, after he released her and moved away, she remained lying prone, trying to calm the fearful churning in her head. Benny was in the next room, so for his sake she had to try and act calmly.
Trembling, she scrambled from the rumpled bed and straightened her clothes as best she could. With tears streaming down her face she headed for the stairs. Bill followed her, straightening his own clothes as he did so.
Her father guffawed loudly as she entered the living room and she felt sickened as she saw the smug look on his face.
Bill flopped down onto one of the chairs. ‘So what about that fry-up?’ He smirked. ‘I hope when we’re married you’ll treat me a damn sight better than you seem to treat your old man,’ he went on. ‘If I ask you to see to my meal I’ll expect you to do it right away, not keep me waiting half an hour.’
‘Me marry you, after the way you’ve just treated me?’ Vera exclaimed scornfully.
The sharp slap across her face from her father’s open hand sent Vera reeling.
‘Hey, steady on! I don’t want her marked before I take delivery!’ Bill laughed.
Cowering back against the table, Vera looked from one to the other. The loathing she felt for both men choked her. Defiantly she held her head up.
‘I wouldn’t marry you Bill Martin if you were the last man left in Liverpool,’ she told him contemptuously. ‘You’re so uncouth it turns my stomach just to look at you!’
‘Then we’re quits!’ Bill Martin snarled, his face livid. ‘I don’t want to marry a snooty bitch like you!’
In anger, he kicked his foot out and smashed up the train layout, then he ground his heel on the train and its carriages. As he left, he slammed the shop door behind him so hard that the glass in the upper half splintered into an unsightly crack.
Chapter Eighteen
The atmosphere between Vera and her father reached an all-time low after Bill Martin walked out of their lives.
‘Do you know what you’ve done, you stupid bint,’ he railed.
‘Of course I do,’ she told him with a show of bravado, struggling to hold her tears in check. ‘He tried to rape me! He’s the most hateful person I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man Liverpool. I don’t know what gave you the idea that …’
The rest of her sentence ended in a scream of pain as Michael, his face mottled with fury, seized her by the hair.
The severe beating that followed left her bruised, breathless and terrified. He’d often threatened her, but a beating that left her in such pain that she was almost unable to move not only horrified her, but filled her with foreboding.
She knew that her dad had changed over the years, that he had been partly responsible for her mother’s death, that he had no time for Eddy and generally ignored Benny. Right up until a few months ago, though, she had always thought that she held a special place in his heart. That belief had stood her in good stead when his bad moods made life difficult for all of them.
Although she would never forgive him for driving Steve Frith away, she understood his reason for doing so. She realised that he didn’t want her to marry Steve because it would mean that he was left with no one to run the home and take care of Benny.
For the same reason she’d not taken him seriously when he talked about her marrying Bill Martin. Not only was he twice her age, but it was well known that he was a dubious character. She’d thought it was all talk, some jape they’d dreamed up when they’d been drunk, and that her father was using it as a threat. She’d thought his talk of money-making
schemes involving Bill had also been figments of their imagination.
Now she knew better. Her father had made it quite clear that he had not only believed in these schemes, but had built his hopes on the two of them making a fortune.
She was to have been the bait! She was the reward, or prize, that he had promised to Bill in return for his cooperation.
For weeks afterwards, Vera and her father avoided each other. When he came into a room she left it. When Eddy realised what was going on he demanded to know what was wrong. When she eventually told him, and showed him some of her bruises, Eddy wanted to sort things out with him once and for all.
‘I’ll beat the living daylights out of him,’ he threatened. ‘I should have done it years ago, only I’ve always been too scared of him.’
‘Don’t do anything that either of us will regret, Eddy,’ she begged. ‘You can leave any time and clear off, but what about me and Benny? I don’t earn enough to support him on my own.’
‘I could look after you both!’
She shook her head ruefully. ‘You are still planning to marry Rita …’
‘Well? You could come and live with us.’
‘Rita wouldn’t like that, now would she,’ Vera pointed out in a toneless voice.
Eddy shrugged. ‘She’d understand. She knows what a pig the old man can be.’
Vera smiled uneasily. ‘I don’t think it would work. It wouldn’t be fair on the two of you and I don’t suppose for one minute that Dad would let Benny come with us. He’d rather see him in a home,’ she added bitterly.
‘You can’t go on living here, Vee … it’s not safe. Next time it mightn’t simply be bruises. You could end up with a broken arm, or worse … just like Mam!’
‘I don’t think he’ll hit me again … he seemed sorry after it happened.’
‘Did he say so?’ Eddy asked cynically.
‘Of course not.’ Vera gave a harsh little laugh. ‘You’ve never heard him say sorry in his life, now have you?’
‘No, you’re right, about that! Take care, though, Vee. If you are worried about the way he’s acting then tell me and let me deal with it.’
Gradually life returned to normal. Vera and her father stopped avoiding each other, but they were still uneasy in each other’s company, and they spoke to each other only when they had to do so.
Michael spent more and more time out drinking with his cronies. Vera left a covered plate of sandwiches on the table for him each night and made sure that she was in bed when he came home.
It was quite by chance that Vera discovered that when Benny came home from school her father was sending him on messages to the manager of James Coombes’s, a company-owned boot and shoe repairer’s in Great Homer Street.
She didn’t approve of Benny going there on his own, but at eight years old he was big enough to carry out such a simple task. When he assured her that there was no money involved she reasoned that it was unlikely he would be waylaid, even though he nipped through the jigger behind their shop.
However, she discovered the true nature of the messages Benny had been delivering when one evening, shortly before closing time, a drunken, brassy blonde, with a cigarette dangling from one corner of her vividly painted mouth, came into the shop.
When she started threatening to report what she declared she knew about Michael’s apparently illegal dealings in front of his other customers, he hurriedly propelled the woman out of the shop and into their living room.
‘Trying to shut my mouth are you, Michael Quinn?’ she laughed garrulously, when he ordered Vera to make her a cup of tea. ‘Well, you’ll have to offer me more than a cuppa to make me do that.’
‘The minute I close the shop I’ll take you for a bevvy,’ Michael promised. ‘For the moment though, sit down by the fire and talk to my daughter, Vera.’
As the woman lurched across the room and flopped down in Michael’s armchair by the fire, the smell of cheap California Poppy perfume mixed with fumes of alcohol almost choked Vera.
‘I suppose you’re wondering who the hell I am and what I want,’ the woman stated. She took a long draw on her cigarette, letting the grey ash spill down the front of her low-necked bright red satin blouse and onto her short black skirt.
Vera watched, fascinated as the woman crossed one shapely leg over the other, her cheap silk stockings rasping against each other as she did so.
‘Did you say you’d like a cup of tea?’ Vera asked non-committally.
The woman shrugged. ‘If that’s all you have to offer me. What I really need is a drink … a real drink.’
‘I’m afraid we haven’t any beer in the house,’ Vera told her stiffly.
‘Beer! Who mentioned beer? I need a proper drink. Whisky, brandy, gin, or even a port if you’ve nothing else.’
Vera shook her head. ‘You’re out of luck. There’s nothing like that in this house.’
‘Bugger me! No wonder Mike is down at the pub every night. What sort of home is this?’ She looked round the room disdainfully. ‘Not much of a place by the look of it.’
Vera felt her anger rising. Their home might be sparsely furnished, but she kept it spotlessly clean. As far as she was concerned her first priority was to use the limited money she had to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. And since most of the clothes she bought for herself and Benny were seconds from Paddy’s Market she couldn’t economise any more than she did.
It was with difficulty that she managed to hold her tongue as she made a pot of tea and poured out a cup for both of them. She watched in silence as the stranger spooned three helpings of sugar into hers.
She was relieved when her father came through from the shop. Quickly, she poured a cup of tea for him and then offered to refill their guest’s cup.
The woman shook her head. ‘No more cat’s piss for me! I wonder you can drink it, Mike, when you’re used to something a damn sight stronger,’ she jibed.
‘Not during the day! I never drink while I am working. I save my thirst for when I go for a bevvy in the evening.’
‘You certainly put it away then!’
Vera waited for him to explode in anger at her comment, but he merely smiled. ‘So now, Di, to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?’
Her heavily rouged lips pressed together in a grimace and her sharp green eyes gleamed. She leaned forward, displaying her ample cleavage, and tapped the side of her nose with a nicotine-stained finger.
‘I’ve just come from Coombes’s shop in Great Homer Street,’ she stated with a knowing grin.
‘Patronising the opposition are you? So why come to tell me about it?’
‘Not patronising them, Mike Quinn, but picking up nuggets of information!’ She sat back with a gloating expression on her face. ‘I know all about the little racket you and the manager there, Tom Gray, are running between you.’
Michael Quinn straightened up in his chair. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I hardly know the man.’
‘Come off it! I’m not blind and I’m not green. I’ve seen the two of you in a huddle down the boozer, and then passing a wad between you!’ She paused and took another long drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke out so that there was a blue haze in the air around her. ‘I couldn’t help wondering what might be going on, so I made it my business to find out.’
Vera tried to quell the thundering of her heart. James Coombes’s was where her dad regularly sent Benny on messages, so what was going on? She didn’t want to believe what she was thinking, but she was pretty sure from what the woman was saying that her dad was engaged in some sort of a fiddle again.
‘Knowing that your cosy little arrangement with the bookie was at an end it didn’t take much for me to work out that you had a new enterprise under way.’ Di grinned. ‘One that amounts to thieving, no less!’
‘You’re talking a load of rubbish, Di Deverill,’ Michael blustered. ‘Any transactions you’ve seen between me and Tom Gray are strictly business dealings. As fellow cobb
lers we help each other out. Sometimes I run short of soles and he loans me some until my next delivery comes through. I then repay him by sending the same number back.’
Di laughed coarsely. ‘Of course that’s what’s going on! He pinches the bloody things, passes them on to you and you pay him half what they’re worth.’
‘Nothing of the sort! We simply loan them to each other.’
‘Bloody rubbish! The soles you send back to him are only half the number he has loaned you. And, more to the point, they are cheap and inferior. You must be making a tidy sum out of this little racket, Mike!’
He opened his mouth to refute her claim, then held back. Giving her a cool smile, he asked calmly, ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
Di Deverill again took a long pull on her cigarette. ‘Depends!’ she said cryptically.
‘Depends on what?’
‘Well, I did think of going to the police, but I don’t like getting involved with scuffers, even when I am in the clear. Then I thought I would let the top boss man at Coombes’s know what was going on. That would get Tom Gray the sack. It would also get you into trouble. That kid of yours, who shuttles the stuff between the two of you, would probably end up being sent to Borstal. Now what good would all that do me?’
‘None at all!’ Michael agreed heartily.
‘So then I had another idea.’ Di paused and stubbed out her cigarette in her saucer.
Vera and her father waited anxiously for her to go on, but it was obvious she was enjoying herself and in no hurry to do so.
Di looked across the room at Vera and then turned back to Michael with a knowing wink. ‘I think it might be better if we went somewhere else, somewhere we can be on our own, before we discuss my idea any further,’ she said with deliberate coyness.
He frowned. Inwardly he was shaking with fear knowing that if she did go to the police they would be more than happy to pursue the matter. He might have escaped from their suspicions over handling the betting slips, but he knew they didn’t believe he was innocent. PC Walters would take a perverse delight in seeing him up in court on some other charge.