by Jessie Keane
To Cliff, as always
For the love of money is the root of all evil. Some have wandered away from the faith and impaled themselves with a lot of pain because they made money their goal.
1 Timothy 6:10
Common English Bible
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
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EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Soho, London, February 1962
It happened on a Saturday night. She was at the Carmelo, working in the office over the club, when there was a commotion downstairs and Mitch the barman burst through the door, wild-eyed, dishevelled, and so scared it was all he could do to breathe.
‘It’s fucking Sears!’
The words came out as a strangled yelp, and then he was gone as quickly as he’d appeared, leaving the door swinging on its hinges behind him.
For a moment she was so stunned by Mitch’s sudden entrance that all she could do was sit there, immobile, the pen poised over the accounts, listening. When she’d passed through the club earlier, it had been packed with a typical Saturday-night crowd, out for a good time. With the door closed and her mind on the accounts, she’d barely registered the disturbance until Mitch came up to give her the glad tidings.
Now, above the sudden mad pounding of her own heart, she could hear glasses smashing, tables being overturned, women screaming and a man’s voice roaring threats.
Oh shit. It was happening, just as Marcus Redmayne had said it would when he came into another of her clubs two weeks earlier, trying to scare the arse off her.
She was scared now all right. Her legs felt weak underneath her as she forced herself out of the chair and hurried to close the door. For a moment she stood with her ear pressed to the wood, listening to the pandemonium downstairs.
Oh fuck oh God oh help . . .
Trembling, she turned the handle, stepped out onto the landing and peered over the banisters. There was a fight going on, people with baseball bats and bike chains striking out at anyone who got in their way, and women were running, shrieking in fear.
Clara’s heart was beating so hard she was afraid it would tear its way through her chest wall and thump to the carpet in a bloody heap.
Fulton Sears.
There he was, in the centre of the room, huge and bald and ugly as sin, swinging left and right with brass knuckledusters, his hands red with blood all the way up to the wrists, wallowing in this bloodbath like a hippo in the mud. Limp with fright, Clara edged backward, trying to be invisible – but before she could make it back to the office he looked up and saw her there.
She froze.
His face split in a wide grin. She saw him knock one of the waiters to the floor and then glance up again, up to where she stood on the landing, and . . .
Shit! He was coming up!
He was surging through the fight, barging people out of the way. Clara raced into the office and slammed the door closed. Instinctively she fumbled for a bolt or latch, but there was no lock on the inside of the door – why would there be?
Improvising, she jammed one of the chairs under the handle and stood there, watching it, panting with terror. Then she lunged for the desk, snatched up the phone and dialled 999, her eyes never leaving the door, the handle, all the time waiting for it to turn, waiting for that monster to try to get in at her.
As she was dialling, she could hear Toby’s voice in her head: Whatever happens in the clubs, we don’t ever call the police. We never involve the Bill, not even the ones on the payroll. We sort things out ourselves.
Clara paused for a long moment. Then she slammed the phone back down onto its cradle. Looked around for a weapon, anything, to defend herself.
There was nothing.
Sweating, trembling, all she could do was stand there, listening to the chaos downstairs and waiting for the handle to turn. How long would a chair hold him? About two seconds. Unable to look away, she carried on staring at it.
Oh God, please help me, she thought, her pulse deafening in her ears. She felt she was going to pass out or throw up, sickened by the images flashing through her mind of what he’d do when he got his hands on her.
The noise downstairs seemed to be fading. She could hear only men’s voices now, shouting, no more screams. Groaning, did she hear groaning? She thought she did. And . . . oh sweet Jesus, she could hear someone coming up the stairs. She could hear him, moving stealthily, creeping up the stairs. Her eyes were riveted to the handle. To the door. To the chair. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t even breathe.
The handle was turning.
Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, it was starting to turn.
With a desperate cry Clara flung herself forward, put her full weight against the flimsy barrier of the chair. Her chest was tight with fear. She was right up against the door, she could almost feel him there, right there, on the other side of it.
The handle continued to turn. She could feel his weight go against it, felt it shuddering through the wood. The chair bucked beneath her. He was going to get in here. He was going to get her.
She waited, sweat trickling down her temples, sliding down her back. She could smell her own fear. If he got in here . . .
There was no if about it.
He was going to.
And then . . . oh God, what was
going to happen to her?
A faint, deep-throated chuckle came from the other side of the door.
The hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end. He was laughing at her. He knew she was here, she was trapped, and he was mocking her. Any moment now he would burst in here and hurt her, kill her. She could almost see him on the other side of the door, barrel-chested, bloodstained, sadistic and out for revenge.
God, please help me, she thought. I’ll do better. I’ll be good, I promise, just help me right now, will you?
God wasn’t listening.
Was it any surprise? Would anyone, God included, actually care if she came to grief? Not her family, that was for sure, and she had no friends.
The only thing she had left was a reputation – and it wasn’t a good one.
She was Black Clara – twenty-four years old, twice married and twice widowed, a hard-hearted gold-digger, a cold-blooded chaser of men and their money. Clara Dolan, the hopeful young girl she had once been, hadn’t survived the move from the slums of Houndsditch. But all she’d ever done was what she had to do. Wasn’t that the truth?
Suddenly the door buckled as he launched a ferocious kick. Jarred by the impact, her teeth snapped together so that she bit her tongue and made it bleed.
Clara flinched and let out a hopeless yell.
Then another.
Jesus, oh please, please . . .
Another kick. Clara was thrown backward against the desk, floundering. Then the door and the chair flew inward, and Sears burst into the room.
1
Houndsditch, London, 1953
Clara was fifteen when she found out that love is dangerous, that it will destroy you. It was a lesson she learned at her mother’s side, when Kathleen Dolan went into labour for the fifth time.
Kathleen’s first pregnancy had brought Clara into the world; then came a stillbirth, followed five years later by Bernadette, or Bernie as she was always known; and then, two years after that, came Henry. Now there would be another baby and it was the last thing they needed, any of them, because Dad had run off to avoid a prison sentence, leaving them with nothing.
So here they were, what was left of the Dolan family: Kathleen, Clara, Bernie and Henry, living in a hellhole, with barely enough money to feed themselves on post-war rations and a constant struggle to find the rent, which was so high – six pounds a week! – that Clara thought Frank Hatton the rent man ought to be wearing a fucking mask, since he was committing daylight robbery.
Clara still couldn’t believe that Dad had left them. Night after night, she dreamed that he would come back to tell them it was all a joke, a mistake, they were going home. It was eight months since he’d abandoned them. Not long after, Kathleen his pregnant wife learned that he’d been fiddling the books on his business and she had confided as much, amid floods of tears, to her eldest daughter Clara.
It all came out then, as disgusting and unsightly as spilled entrails unravelling. Tom Dolan’s engineering firm was deeply in debt, while all the money he’d scraped off the top had been squandered on living like a lord. The firm – which had been a successful growing concern employing two hundred and fifty people – was in ruins. And there was worse to come. Without telling Kathleen, Tom had taken out a raft of huge loans from the bank and put their home up as security.
‘It’s going to be fine, Mum,’ said Clara, sitting on the bed, which was soaked with her mother’s sweat, and dabbing gently at her feverish brow with a cool flannel. Kathleen moved fitfully, and the old newspapers they’d put under her to save soaking the mattress crackled.
Oh, is it?
Clara was trying hard not to let her fear show in her face. She kept glancing nervously at the hugely swollen belly straining beneath her mother’s sweat-stained nightdress. She knew nothing of childbirth. All she knew was that her mother had been lying here in agony all night. Now, morning was nudging at the curtains, sending strands of light through, and the daylight made her more anxious than ever. Was this right, for the labour to go on so long?
Against her better judgement, she’d sent Bernie out in the small hours to fetch the district nurse. They all hated being in the flat, but venturing outside it was even worse. The Dolans occupied the attic, but on the floors below them there were other families, some packed in ten to a room, and often they spilled out onto the communal stairs, blocking access to and from the top floor.
Hatton the rent man had told Kathleen that their landlord Lenny Lynch had ‘put the schwartzers in to de-stat’, and Kathleen had to explain to Clara what that meant – that since the 1952 McCarran–Walter provisions blocked the Caribbean’s emigration outlet to America, West Indians had been pouring into Britain and landlords had seen this as a golden opportunity.
People like Lenny Lynch had lost no time in packing the immigrants into places previously occupied by white families, and had ruthlessly encouraged them to do their worst: to piss in doorways, leave rubbish up and down the pavements, play jazz at all hours, install white prostitutes to pimp off, behave in a threatening manner toward the whites so that they would move out . . . and then landlords could move the more profitable, more easily exploited blacks in.
So Clara spent a long, anxious time waiting for Bernie’s return. When she eventually made it home in one piece Clara was relieved. But the news wasn’t good. The district nurse was off across town attending some other poor bitch who couldn’t afford the ten shillings a proper midwife would cost.
‘But her husband said she’d come straight over as soon as she got back,’ said Bernie, who was now hovering, fidgeting, her pixie face screwed up with worry, in the bedroom doorway. Little Henry was clinging on to Bernie like she was a life raft in a sea of doubt.
Hours crept by.
‘Should I go over again and see if she’s back yet?’ asked Bernie finally, her face wet with tears of terror at the sight of her mother in such pain.
‘Yeah,’ said Clara. She thought of the doctor’s place, several streets away, but they didn’t open until nine, that was hours off, and anyway the doctor was never there, he hadn’t been there yesterday because it was Sunday and no one worked on a Sunday, it was a Holy day. Still, they had to try. This couldn’t be right, not this long. ‘And I’ll write you a note for the doctor – you can drop it through his letterbox too. And for God’s sake, be careful. Don’t talk to anyone.’
They could only hope. They could only try.
Bernie charged off down the stairs and at the noise of the door slamming behind her Kathleen’s eyes fluttered open. She let out another deep, growling moan. Then, pitifully, she tried to give Clara a reassuring smile. Clara thought her heart would break, to see that smile. A bleak bitterness gripped her. Fucking men. There had been a time when she believed her father could do no wrong – not any more. There he was, swanning about who knew where, having ducked his creditors, and a jail term too, and here was poor Mum, who was worth ten of him, no twenty, suffering because of what he’d done to her.
‘Mum, I think we’re going to have to try and get you over to the hospital,’ said Clara.
‘Oh yeah? What we gonna do then? Fly? Or walk?’ Kathleen smiled and then winced as a fresh contraction hit her.
Clara winced too as Kathleen gripped her hand and let out another one of those gut-wrenching moans.
She could die, thought Clara with a thrill of real horror. Oh, Dad, why did you do it? How could you leave us like this?
They’d lost their lovely house, their precious home, when he’d done a runner. Clara felt ready to puke her guts up when she thought of their house; it had been so beautiful, with its manicured lawns. They’d had a gardener then, and a cleaning lady who came in once a week, and there was a fish pond with a fountain shooting up to the sky. There was an elegant top-of-the-range Jaguar on the drive that Dad liked to use as a runabout, and a Rolls-Royce in the garage for family outings.
Clara would never forget that life, their other life, their real life. There were trips out to the races, expensive holiday
s at the seaside. She could still see him in her mind’s eye, Tom Dolan, her father, that bastard, laughing and flicking his silver monogrammed Ronson lighter, the flame flaring as he lit another Havana cigar. His gold tie-pin and matching cufflinks would glint in the sunlight. His black hair – like Clara’s own – was thick and glossy, and his eyes – also like hers – were the striking violet-blue of an English bluebell wood, always shining with confidence.
And Mum, she’d looked so different then! Mum in designer dresses, her copper-brown hair swept up, styled by the hairdresser at a costly salon up West. Five pounds a week each – a bloody fortune! – for Clara and Bernie, and Henry, the apple of his dad’s eye, indulged so much. Too much, maybe. No expense spared, not then. The sky was the limit. But suddenly it had ended, it had all come unwound, the threads of their once-gilded lives. Clara had been vaguely aware that creditors were queuing up, staff were being laid off, suppliers who hadn’t been paid in a long while were baying for blood and demanding money that was no longer there.
And then the biggest shock of all.
The money was no longer there because Dad had been systematically robbing the company. He’d creamed off sixty thousand pounds to live a lavish lifestyle way beyond his means, all so that he could impress his friends, play the big I-am, buy Rollers and spend days out at Ascot and mix with the nobs he so admired, so wanted to be like; pretending he wasn’t an ordinary working-class bloke who’d made good, pretending he was something he wasn’t.
But what use was it, thinking about that now? Kathleen had rented this flat. They were here. They had to cope.
‘I’ll get hold of a copper, see if he can’t whistle up an ambulance,’ said Clara. She knew this was like wishing for gold bars down a sewer. The coppers never came round this area if they could avoid it; and on the rare occasions they did, they came in twos and threes, never alone.
They didn’t have a phone here – a phone, what a bloody joke! – and no one else who lived in these rat-hole flats did either. The telephone box out in the road had been vandalized months back and no PO engineers had proved brave enough to venture into this warren of thieves to fix it.
‘We could get a taxi,’ gasped Kathleen, still trying to smile through the agony.
This too was a joke. They couldn’t afford a taxi. A taxi was the stuff of dreams. They couldn’t afford fuck-all. Not any more.
So this is what they mean by being up shit creek, thought Clara.