Playing Around

by Gilda O'Neill

Violet had tried to get rid of the baby she was carrying, and when that plan had failed, she had insisted she would give it up for adoption on the day it was born. It was only because Sarah had promised to help her out, had promised to do everything for her – give her money, care for the child, whatever she wanted – that Violet had relented and had agreed to keep the baby.

  Sarah had always vowed that her granddaughter would never know she was unwanted by her own mother.

  ‘I spoiled your mother rotten, when she had you. Mollycoddled her. She never lifted a finger from the day you were born. That’s why it’s all my fault. She thought she could get away with everything. Treat everyone like a servant. Including you when you were old enough. We had a terrible falling out over that. I didn’t mind how she treated me, but you were my little princess. I wasn’t having it.’

  ‘Is that why you never see her?’

  ‘Partly, but it was when she started talking about …’

  ‘About what, Nan?’

  Sarah closed her eyes and shook her head at the memories that came flooding, unbidden, into her mind; memories of Violet flying into a temper because she reckoned having a child around the place was putting off her men friends, and swearing she would send Angie away to a home. Sarah had pleaded with her, but Violet, as usual, knew she held the trump card, and only stopped talking about children’s homes when Sarah had promised to keep her nose out of her daughter’s business and to send her regular weekly payments. Sarah could only thank God that Doris had been around to help her. But Angie would never hear any of this, not from Sarah’s lips. Nobody deserved that.

  ‘Nothing, babe. We just disagreed, that’s all. I shouldn’t say anything against my own daughter, but she’s plain selfish, and that’s the simple truth of it. She had me to help her, and could have done whatever she wanted. Gone to night school. Got herself a decent job. Anything. But she was a lazy mare, always was and, I suppose, always will be. I should have been stronger, should have insisted. But guilt’s a terrible thing. You think you can go out and have a laugh when you’re young and that there’s no consequences for what you do. That you can just mess around and it’ll all be all right. Then you look back on your life and you realize.’

  ‘Me not having a dad never had her spoiling me. She never let me do what I wanted. She even made me leave school.’

  ‘She only wanted to make sure you could look after yourself. That she never had to worry about you depending on some bloke.’

  Angie knew that was rubbish, just as well as Sarah did, but she had other, more pressing, things on her mind.

  ‘Nan,’ she began slowly. ‘You know you asked me if I had something to tell you?’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘I’ve been involved with someone. I thought he loved me. Then I started to find out things about him. And now I’ve found out he’s …’

  ‘Married.’

  She nodded miserably. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Darling, I had a visit from someone who knows him.’

  Angie’s heart started pounding, but before she could run through all the horrible possibilities of who might have traced her to her nan’s flat, the doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ll get it, pet. You pour us another drop of tea.’

  ‘Evening, Mrs Pearson.’ It was Detective Constable Jameson.

  ‘You again. What do you want? See if I’m selling drugs to schoolchildren?’

  ‘No, Mrs Pearson, I’ve come to question Miss Angela Knight.’

  Sarah paused just long enough for it to register with Jameson. ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘That’s funny. Her mother said she was,’ he lied. ‘It’s serious, Mrs Pearson. Very serious.’

  ‘It’s all right, Nan.’ Angie was standing in the hall behind her grandmother.

  ‘No, Ange, it’s not. Policemen don’t come to talk to young girls by themselves.’

  ‘They do if they want to be discreet, Mrs Pearson. It’s to do with David Fuller.’ He looked at Angie. ‘And a murder investigation.’

  Sarah was in shock. Murder? David Fuller? Hadn’t Jameson said that was Angie’s bloke’s name?

  ‘You’d better let him in, Nan.’

  ‘Bobby, will you tell me what this is all about?’ Maureen shoved aside the suitcases that Bobby had just lifted down from the top of the wardrobe and sat beside them on the bed. ‘I’m not packing a thing until you do.’

  ‘Sorry, Maur, but Mr Burman—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bloke who works with Dave. He’s sorted out a job for me. In property maintenance.’

  ‘Bobby, what are you talking about? You can’t knock a flaming nail in.’

  ‘It’s not exactly that sort of maintenance, Maur. And there’s something else.’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  ‘We’ve got to go right away.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Tonight.’ He rubbed his hand over his bald head. ‘And it’s in Cyprus.’

  ‘Why would we want to go to flipping Cyprus? I don’t even know where it is.’

  ‘Maur, we’ve got no choice.’

  Sarah Pearson could hardly take it in. When Jameson had come round before, he hadn’t even hinted at a fraction of what he was saying now. This David Fuller was a proper gangster. Involved in terrible things. Not some twenty-year-old who’d made a few mistakes. And she’d been sitting here chatting away to Angie about her and her mum, and all the time the bloke was out there on the run. Say he’d come looking for her?

  ‘Angela,’ Jameson said, leaning forward and trapping his long, pale fingers between his knees. ‘I want to get David Fuller. I want to get him for the murder of two people. That’s the two people I know about, never mind all the others, and all the victims of his drug-pushing.’

  Sarah tasted the bile rising in her throat, and Angie was finding it hard to control her breathing, it was as though she was swimming under water and couldn’t catch her breath.

  ‘The others won’t be as nice as me, Angela. And if the big boys get involved at this stage, maybe they won’t turn a blind eye to all your nan’s little enterprises either. I could protect you. And her.’

  ‘Leave Nan out of this.’

  Sarah gripped her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Mr Jameson, do you swear that if Angela tells you everything she knows that she won’t get into trouble?’

  Jameson smiled like a lizard. He had them. ‘Mrs Pearson, your granddaughter is a little girl who got involved with a grown man. An evil man. I’m not treating her as any sort of a suspect.’

  ‘But if she acts as a witness …’

  ‘I have plenty of witnesses to all sorts of things, Mrs Pearson. I just need Angela as a source of information, confirmation if you like, to tie up one or two ends that I can’t quite match.’

  ‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘Mrs Pearson, I’m by myself here. If it comes to it, you can just deny everything I say. That I was even here. After all, who’d think a nice little girl like your granddaughter would have got herself involved with the likes of David Fuller?’ Jameson was telling the truth. Well, partly. He wasn’t going to bother with charging Angie with anything, because he wasn’t sure if he had anything to charge her with. Involving her in any serious way would need time and effort, and if he failed, it would distract his superiors from what would be his great success: nailing Fuller.

  And he rather liked the idea of having Sarah Pearson and Doris Barker – two women with some interesting contacts – in his debt.

  For now, anyway.

  ‘Angie, what do you think, babe?’

  She couldn’t look at her nan. ‘All right, Mr Jameson. What do you want to know?’

  David was sitting on a tea chest, the only seat, in a prefabricated office building in a scrap yard on the Beckton Marshes. He was speaking on the phone, which, apart from a pad of scrap paper and a stub of pencil, was the only nod to office equipment in the place.

  ‘This is important, Bob. I want you to make sure th
at when Jeff clears out all the other gaffs, the snooker clubs and that, that he clears out the desks and bureaux in all the flats as well. Got it? Even the legit-looking stuff.’

  ‘Sure, Dave.’ Bobby, who was listening to David with one ear, and to Maureen’s wails and complaints as she continued to pack with the other, couldn’t bring himself to say that he had already spoken to Jeff and that Bill and George had apparently done the job for him. He didn’t want to mention it because Jeff had been a bit concerned – just as Bobby was a bit confused as to who had told them to do it – and he’d thought it best not to worry Dave with all that now. Not with all this Mikey and Sonia business on his mind.

  He would have liked to have asked Dave about him and Maureen going to Cyprus, but Mr Burman had said not to, that he was keeping Dave up to speed on all of that. It was all making Bobby’s head go round, keeping straight what he had to say and not say to people.

  ‘Right, thanks, Bob. Now I’m gonna be amongst the missing for a few weeks, but I’ll be in touch. OK?’

  He put down the phone before Bobby had the chance to reply, and immediately rang Peter Burman.

  ‘Peter. Hello. It’s me, David. David Fuller.’ He had a light laugh in his voice, but a lead weight in his gut. ‘I’ve been thinking about that business you were interested in. In Marbella. If you still fancy going ahead with it, I thought I could go over there. Check things out.’

  There wasn’t an immediate response from the other end, just some mumbling as though Burman had put his hand over the receiver while he was talking to someone else.

  ‘Are you still there, Peter?’

  ‘Excuse me, David, I had someone talking to me here in the office. So, you’re interested in going to Spain, you say? Are you in trouble?’

  ‘No. No. Nothing like that. Just need to get away for a bit, that’s all. Bit of woman trouble. You know.’ He tapped his passport nervously on his knee, the passport with his photograph in it, but in the name of Stephen Joseph Townsend. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll make some phone calls. Then I’ll get back to you. Are you at Greek Street?’

  ‘No. I’m on a private number. Hold on.’ He rubbed the centre of the grease-covered dial with his finger, trying, and failing, to make out the faded numbers. ‘Look, how about if I ring you back? Say in an hour?’

  ‘Make it two.’

  Two hours to kill.

  David stood out in the scrap yard in the warm evening air. It was half past eight and getting dark. The nights were beginning to draw in. He hated the thought of autumn coming, knowing that winter was not far behind. That time of year had never suited him. Not since he’d been a kid and he’d dreaded going home from school, knowing the house would be cold, empty and in darkness.

  Still, why worry about that now? He’d be in Spain in a few days. Sunning himself on the costa. But before he cleared off abroad, he had a job to do.

  He opened the back of the Jaguar and took out a petrol can. It was a shame, but he had no choice, the motor had enough forensic in the boot to put him away for life.

  He shook the petrol can, spraying the fuel over the gleaming dark green paintwork, saving a drop to pour over an old piece of rag. Then he stood back and struck a match ready to ignite it before he threw it on to the bonnet of his precious car.

  ‘Fuller!’

  Startled, David looked up to see three uniformed coppers clambering over the high wire fence. ‘If you don’t want a good kicking, drop that match.’

  ‘Don’t say that, you’ll scare me!’ David touched the flame to the rag and then flicked the petrol-soaked cloth at the car as if he were shaking out a duster after a bit of light housework.

  As David was being led away from the yard in handcuffs, his ribs aching from the rather half-hearted beating the young coppers had given him, Burman was sitting in his office, contemplating the depressing sight of the worn-out prostitute standing in front of his desk. She was almost dribbling with anticipation as she awaited her reward for the second-rate shop-soiled information she had been so eager to pass on to him.

  Why were people so stupid?

  Burman jerked his head towards the door, and began trimming a cigar ready to smoke. ‘Get rid of her,’ he said.

  Without a word, the two men hauled the now terrified Christina kicking and screaming from the room.

  Burman stuck the fat Romeo y Julietta between his lips and thought about David Fuller.

  It had been a foolish mistake, no, more of a weakness, to let a parvenu such as Fuller anywhere near his business. The naïveté of the man was breathtaking. He had never even suspected that Bill and George, two of his supposedly most loyal workers, had gladly gone on to his, Burman’s, payroll as soon as he had approached them.

  It was something Burman always made sure of, that he had insiders in other people’s business. For security reasons.

  Good security pleased him. Just as much as amateurs annoyed him. But not nearly as much as dumb, loud-mouthed prostitutes, who thought he would pay for their pathetic gossip, infuriated him.

  Chapter 16

  ‘I DON’T FEEL right being here, Doris. Look at that lot.’

  Sarah Pearson, feeling uncomfortable, but looking elegant in her broad-brimmed straw hat and beautifully cut, lavender two-piece – especially acquired from Selfridges by one of Doris’s more talented girls – nodded to the other side of the ancient, flower-filled Sussex church. There sat Jill Walker’s family and friends, in colourful clusters on the ornately carved pews, decked out like an illustration in an etiquette book, demonstrating how the middle classes should dress for a late-summer country wedding.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for missing out on seeing my Angie all done up, I would never have dreamed of us coming here.’ Sarah tugged at her skirt. ‘Never.’

  ‘Just enjoy it, Sal.’ Doris was craning her neck to get a good look at everyone and everything, taking it all in. ‘This is the only time the likes of you and me are gonna get to a do like this.’ She took her lace-trimmed hankie from the sleeve of her lemon duster coat, and held it to her mouth as a shield for what she was about to say, despite the organ music echoing around the hammer-beam roof providing more than enough privacy for even the most intimate of conversations.

  ‘Here,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Look behind.’

  Sarah twisted round and saw her daughter, Violet, done up to the nines, walking up the aisle on the arm of a handsome, smiling man.

  ‘Blimey, Sarah, look at her, will you? Bold as brass. How the hell did she get an invite?’

  Sarah sighed resignedly. ‘Soon as she heard Angie was going to be a bridesmaid, she launched her campaign. Chance to come to a classy do like this, she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And you know what she’s like when she wants something, Doris. The Murrays never stood a chance of refusing. Angie was so embarrassed when Violet told Tilly Murray that Angie wouldn’t come if her mum wasn’t there.’

  ‘Tilly wouldn’t have fallen for that old flannel.’

  ‘No, but you know how much she hates any awkwardness. Especially in front of her new in-laws. And when Martin – and his young lady, of course – insisted on having Angie as bridesmaid, to match Jackie, I suppose, they had no choice. You know Violet, she’d have caused murders if she hadn’t got her own way. She’d have mucked it up somehow or other.’

  Doris shook her head in wonder at Sarah, such a good woman, having a daughter like Violet. ‘Yeah, but all that said, and much as I begrudge the words even coming out of my mouth, Sal, you’ve got to hand it to her. She really looks the part. Like that Jean Shrimpton.’

  ‘Being so good-looking was part of that girl’s downfall.’

  Doris and Sarah watched as Violet glided effortlessly into a pew near the back, smiling graciously at the man, who stood politely until she was comfortably seated.

  ‘You’d never have her down as an Eastender though, would you? It’s like she was born to it.’

  ‘Always was a good actress.’ Sarah turned and fac
ed the altar again.

  Doris did the same. Still hiding her words behind the cover of her hankie, she said, ‘Did Angie ever find out that she tried to get rid of her?’

  ‘No, and she never will if I’ve got anything to do with it. When that dirty old sod along the landing got done for doing abortions for the local toms, Angie was so shocked when she found out. I could hardly tell her that her own mother had gone to the very same bloke when she was carrying her sixteen years earlier, now could I?’

  ‘Just thank gawd he got it wrong that one time, eh?’

  ‘He didn’t get it wrong, Doris. She just never had enough money to pay him. So he turned her away. If I hadn’t been down Leysdown with you in your chalet, she’d have tapped it off me and …’ She sighed. ‘Well, things would all have turned out very different.’

  ‘I never knew that, Sal.’

  ‘No. Well, it’s all in the past now.’

  Doris shoved her hankie back up her sleeve and looked at her watch. ‘Here, look at the time. Nearly a quarter past two. What do you think’s causing the hold-up?’

  The cause of the delay was simple: the bridegroom, Martin Murray, was round the back of the church vomiting spectacularly into the yew hedge.

  ‘I can’t handle this,’ he moaned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Tilly, his mum, was being no help at all, having collapsed into hysterical weeping against a monument of a broken pillar that marked the passing of an eighteenth-century vicar; and Stan, his dad, would only comment that he knew too much education would only lead to some things. So Jackie and Angie had been brought round by Jill’s brother, Guy, to try and talk some sense into the reluctant groom.

  They were now standing on either side of him, a matching pair of increasingly cross, cream and lilac, fairy-tale bridesmaids.

  ‘What can’t you handle?’ demanded Jackie, shaking him by the arms and making the flowers in her hair bob furiously. ‘A lovely church? A fantastic sunny day? Stone-rich in-laws? A brilliant job waiting for you after you’ve finished college? A bloody rent-free home? A gorgeous sodding bride? Who, I think you should know, is being driven around the buggering village for the fifth bleeding time, and is probably getting fit to come in here and deck you. And I wouldn’t blame her. In fact, I might bloody well do it for her, if you don’t pull yourself together.’