by Martina Cole
Briony tutted loudly. But what Danny said had given her an idea.
‘Be ready at nine-thirty tomorrow, Kerry. Me and you are off out for a while.’
‘Where to, Bri?’ Kerry’s voice was suspicious.
‘You’ll find out in the morning. It’s a surprise.’
Marcus and Bernadette listened to their daughter with shock and anger registering on their faces.
Delia played her trump card by lifting up her grubby tie dyed tee shirt and showing them the bruises on her chest and shoulders.
‘He really gave me a hiding, but I took it to stop him touching the little one.’
All eyes went to Faith who sat on the settee eating an iced cake.
Marcus felt a great rage in his chest and instinctively put up his hand to stem the erratic pounding of his heart. ‘You mean, he’s been beating up you and the child?’
Delia nodded, her eyes big and round with self-pity.
‘And you never told a bleeding soul about it?’ Marcus’s voice was high with disbelief. Not at his daughter’s story, but at the fact she had taken it all this time without telling a soul.
‘That’s why I never wanted you up the flat, see? Jimmy had people there all the time, drug dealers, all sorts ... He made me keep you away. Then, today, he really went off his head. I thought he’d surely kill me or little Faithey.’
Bernadette swallowed hard. Her maternal instincts were telling her to protect her child and her grandchild, but her womanly instincts were telling her that her Delia, whom she had loved dearly even with all her faults, was a blatant liar. It was one of her less appealing traits but she had been like it since a child. She embroidered everything, eventually believing the story she had created. Bernadette’s eyes flickered to her husband who was now pacing up and down the room, his hands clenched into fists.
‘If Jimmy was beating you and the child, love,’ she asked, ‘why didn’t you ever tell us before? You stayed here for two weeks a while ago when you and him had the last bust up. Why didn’t you tell us then? We never even had an inkling that anything was going on.’
Bernie watched her daughter’s eyes flicker and her face colour up. Delia was floundering. She hadn’t expected anyone to question her. Marcus saved her when he bellowed:
‘For fuck’s sake, Bern. The girl was obviously terrified of him! Can’t you see that?’
Bernie held up a hand.
‘All I’m saying is, she had plenty of occasions to tell us, frightened or not frightened. I mean, think about it, Marcus! She don’t exactly come from a family that scares easily, does she? What with you as her father, and Briony and the boys. This Jimmy Sellars must be some kind of prat if he thought he could get away with all she reckons!’
Delia jumped from her seat, her voice hysterical.
‘That’s why I never said nothing, Dad, because she always takes his side. Always. I knew she wouldn’t believe me.’
She stamped across the expanse of the lounge and dragged Faith up.
‘Well, if I ain’t welcome here, I’ll go somewhere else, but I ain’t going back to that bastard to get me face smashed in.’
Marcus went to her and took the terrified child from her arms. Then, cradling Faith to his chest, he said to Bernadette: ‘I don’t believe you, Bernie, sometimes you bleeding well amaze me! Your daughter is standing here bruised from head to foot and your granddaughter with a black eye, and you stick up for that piece of scum! Jesus wept, woman, when you had your last face lift they must have cut into your sodding brain by accident!’
He turned to his tearful daughter. ‘You stay here, my love, and you leave that ponce to me and your cousins. He won’t be hitting anyone for a long time. Now, is he still at the flat?’
Delia sniffed loudly for maximum effect.
‘He ain’t there now, but he will be tonight. Late tonight.’
‘Then me and your cousins will go and sort him out. Now you take little Faithey and get her upstairs. If you need any money for anything, see me later. All right?’
Delia nodded. Taking her daughter, she left the room, giving her mother a last smouldering glance over her shoulder.
Marcus shook his head in disgust. ‘I don’t believe you, Bernadette!’
She shrugged lightly. ‘Obviously not. You believe her though, I take it?’
‘Sodding right I do! That long-haired beatnik has raised his fists once too often. Tonight he gets his comeuppance. No one touches me or mine without they answer to me personally.’
Bernadette allowed herself a little laugh.
‘I’m delighted to hear it, but listen to me, Marcus, and listen good. Our little girl is a fucker, and a lying fucker at that. Take it from me, mate, I know her better than anyone. So think long and hard before you go round and see that lad. He ain’t as black as he’s painted. Christ himself knows there’s been times when I’ve wanted to hammer the cow myself!’
Marcus looked at her, disgusted.
‘Where did the bruises come from then? Answer me that?’
‘I ain’t disputing he cracked her one, Marcus, all I’m saying is, she might just have deserved it. She could make the Archangel Gabriel get the hump when she starts her antics.’
Marcus shook his head at his wife and stormed from the room.
Bernadette sighed loudly.
She loved her daughter, she did. She loved both her children. And as big a bugger as Delia could be, she was her favourite. But Bernadette had always called a spade a spade, it was one of her few saving graces. And Delia could try the patience of a saint.
Upstairs, Delia put Faith on to her old bed and stroked the child’s red hair. Jimmy had left her after the fight, telling her he wanted her out by the time he returned. He had told her she was a fat ugly bitch and he wanted nothing more to do with her. He had told her she was soapy, like a great big smelly unwashed whale. That’s what had really hurt her. That and the fact he meant every word he said. He also told her that he had been seeing Olivia Sands for six months, her so-called friend. Well, he was going to get a big shock, because no one, no one at all, spoke to her like that and got away with it.
Least of all an acid head like Jimmy Sellars. And a two-timing acid head at that!
As Faith dropped off to sleep her mother stroked the fiery red hair inherited from her Auntie Briony and smiled down at her child, wincing painfully as she looked at her black eye.
She had better not touch her here, her mother would suss it immediately.
A little while later she went into the bathroom and had a long soothing bath. She eyed herself critically in the mirror opposite the bath and felt the sting of tears as she surveyed her heavy body. Since the birth of Faith she had lost the battle with her weight and it showed.
What she would do now she was back home was stick to amphetamines and lay off the cannabis. The cannabis made her hungry, but the amphetamines would kill her appetite. Before she knew it, she’d be back to her old self again.
Humming happily, she washed her hair and shaved her legs with her father’s razor, blunting it.
She wished she could see Jimmy’s and Olivia’s faces when her father turned up that night with the twins. It really would be something to see!
The bathroom looked like a bomb had hit it when Delia finally left it. Bernadette picked up her daughter’s soiled underwear, her clothes and the towels she’d used. She looked at the thick scum around the bath itself, and sighed.
Delia was home all right.
Daniel and Boysie were like raving lunatics. Every word Marcus said fired their tempers and they sat then, three big, powerful and dangerous men, planning their course of action. Marcus enjoyed the feeling of their combined wrath. It was so real, it was positively electric. And it would see that Jimmy Sellars would never again hurt his daughter or his granddaughter. Or indeed any woman. If he survived the night, he would only do so half a man, and that thought, more than anything, calmed Marcus’s soul.
Ten minutes later they were driving to the high-rise flat
in Plaistow where their quarry awaited them.
As they pulled into the car park that surrounded the monstrous block of flats, a crowd of youths with motorbikes and long straggly hair watched them. A white Rolls-Royce was not par for the Plaistow flats. Not by a long chalk.
Boysie and Daniel looked at them scathingly, disgusted at their clothes and their attitude. A tall boy with long blond hair and watery blue eyes looked back.
‘What you looking at then?’ Daniel’s voice was hard. In the dim lights from the streetlamps he saw the boy flinch in recognition.
‘Nothing. Nothing, Mr Cavanagh.’ All his bravado gone now he knew who they were.
‘You just shut your trap and watch my motor. One little dent in it and I’ll personally have each and every one of your hearts. Get that?’
They all nodded in wide-eyed fear.
The three men walked into the entrance to the flats. Both lifts were open on the ground floor and they stepped gingerly into the one that took them to the even-numbered flats. Boysie wrinkled his nose at the smell of urine, human and canine, and the stench of unwashed aluminium.
‘Lovely place this, ain’t it? No wonder Delia never let no one visit her here.’
Boysie pressed the button for the tenth floor and the doors shut clumsily, the machinery’s cranking and groaning the only other sound in the lift itself. All three men were silent with a combined anger and lust for revenge. The lift clanged to a halt, dropping a couple of inches down as it hit the tenth floor. The doors opened and they all walked out, simultaneously letting out breath held while the lift rose through the dirty tower block. They stood in the small lobby, glancing to either side for the number of Delia’s flat. Looking in at a door to the left of them, they were surprised to see a small black child of about eight playing five stones on the concrete floor. The sounds of Janis Joplin blared out of the flat opposite, where Delia had lived, and a blasting reggae number came from an open front door which was obviously the black child’s home.
The little girl watched them with dark sombre eyes. No fear there, nothing except childlike curiosity.
Picking up her five jacks and a stone, she stood up and went into the hallway of her house. Crouching down on her hunkers, she watched the three men.
Daniel banged on the front door of Delia’s flat.
There was no answer.
He banged on the door again, this time harder.
A young white woman of about twenty-five came out of the flat opposite. Seeing the men, she pulled the little girl into the flat and shut and bolted the front door.
Boysie moved back and then gave the door an almighty kick. It sprang open immediately.
Holding up his arms as if for applause, he led the way into the foul-smelling hallway.
At the first banging on the door, Jimmy had gone out to the hall and looked through the spyhole in the front door. As soon as he had seen who was there he had telephoned the police.
Just as he put the phone down, Boysie kicked the door in. Now Jimmy stood in the front room, with its ragged nets and brokendown settee, his head clear for once, fear making the cannabis recede inside his mind, and he waited for the good hiding that he knew was coming.
‘Hello, Jimmy son, I hear you’ve been a very busy boy?’
Daniel’s voice was low, conversational. He pulled out from under his coat a large pickaxe handle, carefully wrapped with green insulating tape, the type electricians use to bind live wires.
Jimmy’s eyes were riveted to the pickaxe handle as if glued there.
‘I never hardly touched her, I swear.’
Boysie laughed. ‘What about little Faithey then, and her battered eye, you ponce?’
He clubbed Jimmy with a large meaty fist.
Jimmy spun with the force of the blow and landed on the settee. He held his cheekbone with a trembling hand. ‘I cracked her, I admit, but I never touched that child. That was her ma, that was Delia. That’s what the bloody fight was over!’
‘You lying bastard!’ Marcus’s voice was shrill and then he began kicking Jimmy, using every ounce of force he could muster. A few minutes later, Boysie joined in with Daniel. The first crack of the pickaxe hit Jimmy Sellars on the back of his head.
Jimmy thankfully lost consciousness. He would never regain it. The last voice he heard was Janis Joplin singing his favourite song: ‘Take another little piece of my heart.’ He died three hours later on the operating table of King George’s Hospital.
The police had arrived five minutes after the three angry men had left the block of flats. Miraculously, no one had seen or heard anything. But the police hadn’t expected anything else.
Limmington looked at the broken body being taken into the ambulance and gritted his teeth. He would get those Cavanaghs. He would get them, and he would put them away for good.
Chapter Forty-three
‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself, young lady? I hope you realise just what you bloody well caused?’
Delia’s face was white and stricken. Her mouth was moving, but she couldn’t seem to make any sound. Jimmy dead? Jimmy, her Jimmy, dead?
‘Your father could be up on a murder charge because of you! Your father and your cousins. And do you know what really gets to me, Delia Dowling? The fact that that boy never asked for what he got. You wanted him taught a lesson. You. Now this is the upshot!’
Delia sat up in bed. ‘You mean he’s dead, Mum, Jimmy’s really dead?’
‘As a bleeding doornail, and your father and the twins were pulled in not an hour ago. I just had a call from their brief. I warn you now, girl, if anything comes of this I’ll be up on a bleeding murder charge. Yours! Now get out of that bed, it’s nearly lunchtime, and at least try and act like the grieving girlfriend, for your father’s sake if not your own!’
With that Bernadette slammed from the room.
Delia lay in the bed, shocked into wakefulness. Jimmy was dead, her Jimmy. Her father had killed him. She heard a steady drumming noise and realised it was her heart beating in her ears.
Sweet, sweet Jesus, what had she caused?
Downstairs, Briony and Bernadette sat together, both worried and both furious with Delia. Faith was sitting on Briony’s lap, her eye still purple and blue. She smiled at Briony with pretty even teeth. Bernadette knelt on the floor and took the child’s hands into hers.
‘Tell Nanny, darlin’. Tell Nanny what happened to your little face.’
Faith, at three, was a diplomat already. She licked rosebud lips and grinned, making a deep chuckle in her throat.
‘No!’ her little voice piped.
‘Come on, sweetie, tell Nanny and she’ll give you a big bar of chocolate. Just for Faithey. No one else.’
Faith’s face straightened. Her eyes were bright and alert. She absentmindedly rubbed at her blackened eye, the unconscious movement of many battered children who don’t feel pain as acutely as a child who is rarely smacked, let alone punched.
‘A big chocolate? For me?’ Her eyes opened wide as she spoke the words and Bernadette and Briony held their breaths.
‘Did your daddy smack you, darlin’? Tell Nanny.’
Faith decided to tell the truth and shame the devil. Though she didn’t quite put it like that to herself. She decided to say what had happened because she sensed that there was a desperate need in her granny to know. This coupled with the promise of a big bar of chocolate decided her.
‘Daddy smack Mummy.’ She pronounced smack ‘mac’.
Bernadette nodded furiously.
‘I know that, baby, but who smacked your poor eye? Was that Daddy as well?’
Faith shook her head, shy now. She pushed her face into Briony’s bosom.
‘No ... Daddy didn’t smack you, Faithey? Who did then, darlin’? Tell Auntie Briony.’
Faith looked at Briony, then at her granny.
‘Mummy smacked me.’ Her lip trembled for a few seconds before she finished. ‘Hard!’
Briony looked at Bernadette and their eyes were sad
but alive with malice.
‘I’ll murder that bitch, Bri, I take oath on that.’
Briony held the tiny child to her and kissed her springy hair. ‘Calm down. Nothing will be gained if you lose your rag. What we have to do is think, girl. Think long and hard.’
She bit her lip, tasting the thickness of her Max Factor lipstick.
‘But I promise you this, Bernie, if they go down over that little mare, I’ll break her neck. You won’t even be in the running for that pleasure.’
Bernadette felt her sister’s animosity then, and despite her own temper, and her real worry for her husband, a thin trickle of fear ran down her spine. Delia had pushed the wrong people too far this time.
Harry Limmington could not believe his luck as he sat in the canteen of Barkingside Police station.
The twins had left not only fingerprints, but also the blood-stained pickaxe handle in the boot of their Rolls-Royce. He had them right where he wanted them.
Sipping at his cup of steaming tea, he grinned to himself, a wide, pleased as punch kind of grin.
They had played right into his hands. It was a great feeling. Jimmy Sellars was the scum of the earth, a drug dealer, a lazy good for nothing who had never done an honest day’s work in his life. But his death had not been in vain. No, by Christ. His death had been the big stick that Harry was going to beat the Cavanaghs’ arses black and blue with. Oh, he was sure of that.
He sipped his tea again, as if it was expensive champagne. After all, this was a celebration.
Ruby Steinway was a corpulent Jew of uncertain age and temperament. He was now in Barkingside Police station with the twins and Marcus, causing his usual rumpus.
He had been their lawyer for many long years, was quick, intelligent, and best of all as bent as a two-bob clock.
Ruby waved heavily beringed hands. Diamond and rubies glittered in the fluorescent lighting.
‘Listen to me, my boys, I have everything in hand. They will keep you overnight, but I should have things under control by the morning. Obviously your prints are in the flat. After all, you have visited it on many occasions.’ He raised thick heavy eyebrows as he said this, and the three men smiled and nodded, understanding him immediately. ‘It’s just the matter of the murder weapon, and I have a feeling that that will all come right in about twelve hours. So keep your heads down, be cool and calm, and most of all,’ he glanced at Daniel and Boysie, ‘don’t lose your tempers.’