Lethal Ties

by Christmas, Helen

  “Not really,” I confessed.

  So he’d turned the conversation around to me again.

  It didn’t matter. I was determined to prise the truth out of him sooner or later.

  “When did the nightmares start?”

  “In my teens,” I murmured, “and now they’re back, which reminds me of something else I wanted to ask. How long have you been in Bognor?”

  “Two weeks, maybe three? Dunno. I’ve been a bit out of it lately...”

  Drugs. The implications flickered momentarily, but I dismissed them. Thinking back to my nightmares, they had manifested themselves before then.

  “So what’s in these dreams? D’you wanna tell me?”

  I felt a shiver roll over me. Could I bear to recall the details, especially from last night? Staring down at my thumbnail, I was shocked to see a bead of blood forming, unaware how ferociously I had been attacking it.

  Joe followed my gaze and frowned. “Must be pretty bad, then.”

  “Yes, but the flashbacks are more recent. They relate directly to Orchard Grange. Things you might remember...”

  His gentle brown eyes clung to mine, carrying in them a mantle of protection I remembered from the day I had met him. He said nothing, though.

  “I know that place was hell,” I prompted, “but we’ve got to talk about it at some point.”

  Sipping his tea in silence, he seemed to mull over my words. I found myself holding my breath, until the buzzer of my door resonated, pulling me unsteadily to my feet.

  “Sorry, but I’d better get that...”

  “Who is it?” I called, hoping it would be Matt with a bin-liner of clothes.

  “It’s me!” Jess’s voice squeaked across the intercom. “Let me in, will you?”

  My heart plummeted for a second time that day. I buzzed her in and went to the door. In the sitting room, Joe was out of sight for now, but I’d have to explain his presence at some point.

  “Hi,” I greeted her crisply. “No date with Steve tonight?”

  “Um, no,” Jess faltered. “I’ve got a nasty feeling he’s cheating on me.”

  “He can’t be! What makes you say that?”

  Her blue eyes glittered. “Same old! Last night in Midhurst he was acting very weird. Like flinching every time his mobile buzzed, and I’m sure I could smell another woman’s perfume on him, so I didn’t hang around...”

  “Oh, Jess!” I commiserated. “Call him. At least give him a chance to explain.”

  “I’ve tried, but he’s not returning my calls!” She released a harsh laugh. “Bloody men! You’re better off without them, and isn’t it time we had a good old girlie catch up? What are you up to tonight?”

  I bit my lip. “I’ve got a visitor and I don’t want to put you off, Jess, but now is not a good time...”

  Without warning, she pushed the door open a crack. I froze, dreading her reaction, eyes scanning my sitting room like searchlights. But it was too late to throw her off the scent. Joe glanced around, freezing her mid-step; a split second later I tried to tug her away from the door.

  “Who the hell is he?” she gasped.

  Fighting to control my panic, I nudged her back into the hallway.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” I whispered, “Joe and I go way back, but I found him sleeping rough in one of the beach shelters...”

  Shock froze her face as she surveyed me. “You’d rather spend an evening with some scuzzy tramp than have a drink with your best mate?”

  “Shh!” I hissed. “Keep your voice down. Joe is not a tramp. We knew each other when we were in care and I’m dying to know what happened to him...”

  “Suit yourself!” Jess huffed with a toss of the head. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Please, Jess, this is important to me. You can fill me in on your love life any time.” Without waiting for an answer, I shut the door.

  Unnerved by the interruption, I crept back into the sitting room, but Joe was already on his feet, putting his boots on.

  “She’s right, you know,” he snapped, “it’s Saturday night. Don’t blow out your best mate on my account.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” I forestalled him, “I’m not letting you escape that easily. If it’s any consolation, she hasn’t exactly been around for me lately. I’m bored with her forever banging on about her love life.”

  “But look at the state of me,” he protested. “I’m a fucking mess!”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Then why don’t I run you a bath? You can have a good long soak, while I get on with the dinner.”

  Happy he didn’t argue, I fought an urge to smile, wandering into the bathroom to turn the taps on. The water gushed forth, a fragrant steam wafting from the tub as I added bubble bath. There was a small fire next to it and a few candles, so I flicked the flame on the gas igniter to light them all.

  “Go on in then,” I coaxed him, and grabbing a pile of fresh towels, warm from the linen cupboard, I thrust them into his arms. “I’ll leave you to unwind and as soon as you’re done, just give me a shout, okay?”

  “Thanks,” he muttered. He tried to smile but it couldn’t extinguish the pain in his eyes. “This is bloody good of you, Maisie.”

  Safe in the knowledge Joe was blissfully immersed in a hot bath, I turned my attention back to dinner. I poured myself a glass of wine, switched on my i-Pod and selected a playlist.

  Tonight I’d opted for simplicity: some barbecued chicken pieces from the hot counter and a bag of Caesar salad. But first I needed to pop some potatoes in the oven. The chicken only needed heating up, so I would save that until last.

  Thinking back to Joe, I was mentally rehearsing what to say to him. Anything to draw him out of his shell.

  Like was it wise to describe my flashback?

  I hadn’t missed the fear clouding his expression at the mere mention of Mr. Mortimer, but it left me hankering to hear his take on the story.

  Before I had a chance to ponder any further though, I heard a sharp rap on the window. Certain it would be Matt this time, I wiped my hands on a tea towel and crept out to look.

  “Oh great!” I spluttered as he lowered a bin bag at my feet. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten.”

  “As if!” he sniggered. “We had an extra delivery.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “And you got first pickings?”

  “There’s some proper decent stuff in there,” he finished with a wink, “and I didn’t skimp on the grundies either.”

  Beaming with pleasure, I thanked him and closed the door.

  A hot bath and clean clothes? I could not wait to see the look on Joe’s face.

  I wasn’t disappointed. By the time he emerged, he was a different person and it was hard to believe the transformation, a far cry from the broken man I had drawn out of the beach shelter. The heat of the water had brought a glow to his skin, his wet hair slicked back, dark as polished oak. Borrowing one of my razors, he had managed a shave, too. Gone was the mat of beard growth, in its place a finely honed jaw. It added an element of ruggedness to his features.

  “How do you feel now?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “Human,” he smiled, “and cheers to your mate for the clothes.”

  He stroked the fabric lovingly, a burgundy corduroy shirt that fitted him nicely, matched with nearly new black jeans. Matt had chosen well.

  “Glass of wine?” I offered, opening a bottle of red.

  A cheeky grin lifted the corners of his mouth. “Wouldn’t mind a beer.”

  I felt my heart swell, delighted to see the real Joe emerge at last. There had been a spikiness to him earlier, as if an impenetrable barbed wire fence was separating him from the rest of society. It left me desperate to understand what had gone wrong in his life, but for now, we kept the conversation to a light and easy banter, until I dished up dinner.

  “This is good,” Joe mumbled between mouthfuls, “‘bloody marvellous’ as Paul would say,” a refe
rence, I thought, to one of the men in the beach shelter.

  As the evening drew on, I cherished the ambience. We were starting to bond again, the barriers sliding away to revive an inseparable friendship. But the thorny subject of the care home was bound to inch its way into the conversation at some point.

  I placed down my fork.

  “I never did get round to telling you about my flashback.”

  Joe turned very still. “This is gonna be about the home, in’t it?”

  “The laundry room. You took a punishment for trying to hide me there.”

  “Yeah!” Joe snorted. “That I do remember. Fucking Mortimer!”

  His name reverberated with a harsh echo as I topped up my glass.

  “But you never told me what he did to you.”

  His eyes burned black with hate. “He was a vicious bastard. His thug gave me the worst beating of my life, and that’s saying something, coming from a rough background like mine...”

  I nodded in horror, my mouth dry.

  Joe’s father, a violent criminal in his own right, had been convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for the unprovoked killing of his mum. To think that a single punch could change someone’s life forever...

  “They threw me to the floor,” he spat, “Mortimer pressing his foot on my legs to hold me down while his thug laid into me with a steel hose. Fuckers warned it was just a taste of what they’d do if I caused any more trouble.”

  I winced. “What sort of trouble?”

  “You don’t wanna know,” he finished icily.

  The room seemed to darken all around us, the atmosphere strained.

  “Try me,” I pressed. “It might help me to understand some of the stuff that’s coming out in my therapy. Mortimer really hated you, didn’t he?”

  Joe shrugged, but he was no longer looking at me. “I knew stuff. Had me own idea how them homes were being run. Violent places at the best of times, kids being attacked and a lot of ‘em were almost feral. Truth is, Maisie, you’re either a victim or a fighter and I hate to say it, but you were one of the victims and so was Sam.”

  “Sam!” I gasped. “You do remember him!”

  His eyes slid shiftily towards mine. “That he disappeared, how could I forget?”

  “Do you ever wonder what happened to him?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Twenty years might be a long time but I always had a hunch. Should have kept it to myself ‘cos Mortimer had it in for me. I was suspicious of a lot of things but pestering him about Sam really got his blood up.”

  “So what went on after I left?”

  He turned his glass in his hands. “I never imagined things could get worse but they did. All I ever wanted to know was where Sam had gone... but Mortimer started threatening me.” His head lifted, the glow of a light bulb reflected in his angry eyes. “If he’d followed it through, I’d be dead by now.”

  I frowned and picked up my own glass. A lump of fear rose in my throat but I gulped the feeling down.

  “You seriously think he was planning to kill you?”

  “Yeah. I was trouble, ‘a piece of scum,’ he called me, and he promised that one day, he’d deal with me once and for all... I thought, fuck this! I ain’t sticking around here, and that’s why I escaped.”

  Gazing at him now, I wondered what he was trying to hide from me. I was still no nearer to understanding his reason for locking me in the laundry room, nor the secrets he harboured about Sam’s disappearance.

  “Go on,” I pressed him. “You ran away from the home but you ended up on the streets. What happened in the years between?”

  “I was coming to that,” he said, a smile playing on his lips, “but d’you mind if I grab a smoke first? I’ll go outside.”

  “Go on then,” I consented, “but don’t be long.”

  ******

  Joe kept his head down. Stealing a glance down the avenue, he made a mental note of the cars in the neighbourhood.

  The little silver Toyota was Maisie’s but a shiny white Nissan loomed behind it. Not just any car, some great big bastard of a car with tinted windows, covering almost half of the pavement.

  With little room to circumnavigate, he didn’t pay much attention to the next car in the row. Black as death, it blended into the shadows, just inches out of range of the nearest lamppost.

  Chapter Twelve

  Thrown back in time, Joe was finally beginning to remember things about the children’s home, his thoughts now focused on Sam.

  Who could forget Sam Ellis? If ever a kid was cut out to be bullied, it was him, poor sod. The others assumed he was some ‘posh boy’, his forehead too high for his dainty features, his widely spaced brown eyes almost birdlike. Small for his age with a cap of blonde hair, he was an easy target for those yobs.

  Yet what they did to him was horrible even by their standards. Joe had intervened the day they had his head forced down the toilet, their hoots of laughter pounding in his ears. Even now Joe was haunted by the sight of Sam coming up for air, choking, spluttering with smears of excrement in his hair... Joe feared he might die unless he stopped them.

  ‘Leave him alone, he ain’t done nothing!’ he screamed, and grabbing the nearest collar, he had flung the offender to the floor.

  The smack of Danny Butler’s head against the tiles was quite satisfying.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he roared. ‘Stuck up prick thinks he’s better than us and his mum was a fucking whore!’

  ‘Yeah, and so were a lot of kids’ mums,’ Joe argued, ‘it’s why they got dumped in care, you dickhead!’

  Thinking about it left him quivering with rage.

  Joe hated seeing people picked on and Sam was no exception. He had spent his early years protecting his little sisters, never knowing when they would be a target for his father’s fists. But regrettably, Brian Winterton was everyone’s worst nightmare, and not just because of his criminal reputation. Masterminding a number of armed robberies, Brian was a crazed man who could erupt at the flick of a switch.

  Joe knew. Those drunken rages had been the scourge of their lives, and although he didn’t like to discuss his own family, he was curious to know about Sam’s mother.

  ‘My mum was m-murdered,’ the boy said, trembling, and straight away they had bonded.

  Joe’s lips tightened. Growing up under the constant threat of violence had made him vigilant, but what of his little sisters? Pearl had been seven on the night their mum had met her brutal death and Trixie just five. So it seemed only natural that with no little sisters to protect any more, kids like Maisie and Sam filled the void.

  At least Maisie was still here.

  Joe felt a chill sweep over him. Hearing her describe her hallucination in vivid detail, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a ghost she had seen.

  Yet why would Sam haunt her now?

  On reflection, he didn’t want to remember Sam with his head down the toilet, covered in shit, but one of the few times he looked happy.

  Maisie had been there too, a day they were playing football in the yard. Sam, an ethereal figure in his t-shirt and shorts, knees muddy, smile bigger than a slice of sunshine as they hit a high five.

  “I remember,” Maisie said. “I was watching in the background.”

  “Yeah,” Joe muttered, “and so was Mortimer.”

  A twist of nausea gripped his gut. God, how he loathed that man, from his shiny complexion to those pale protruding eyes. The way he ran his tongue over his fat wet lips, his gaze anchored on Sam, made Joe’s flesh crawl.

  “We used to call him Toad Face,” he chuckled but it was a hollow sound.

  Yes, he was reminded of a toad, imagining that same tongue reeling out and gobbling Sam up like a juicy fly. How ironic that Sam had been invited to attend a ‘party’ that same week. ‘A treat for a select few children.’

  “Sam vanished after that party,” he whispered aloud.

  “I was going about to ask you about those parties...” Maisie intervened.

&n
bsp; He fired a stare that stalled her words in an instant.

  “Let’s not go there. Not now. All I remember is we were under constant surveillance and not just from Toad Face but those goons he hired.”

  “They started tailing us,” she shivered.

  “I know, except it didn’t end there,” he added darkly.

  The memory of Mortimer’s threats rose like an omen. Here was Joe, desperate to know why Sam had vanished. Maisie had left soon after, but filled with an overwhelming sense of emptiness, he couldn’t imagine he had anything left to lose by challenging Mortimer. Oh, how wrong he had been.

  “I had no choice but to leg it. What else could I do? We were just kids!”

  ******

  He didn’t need to tell Maisie the details of his escape. What was the point of mentioning the night he had whacked Danny Butler around the head with a baseball bat to create a diversion? By the time the ambulance arrived, no one had noticed him climbing out of the window.

  No, she didn’t need to know that.

  So maybe his dad’s violence had rubbed off on him, but Danny survived, didn’t he? And this was what this was about. Survival.

  “I headed for the first place I could think of. Finsbury Park. It’s where I grew up, so there were bound to be a few mates around. I was looking for a pub we used to go to, rough as arseholes, but a place where the old man was quite chummy with the landlord. I took a chance...”

  Sure enough, his gamble had paid off.

  Albert and his wife, Shirley, had been pretty shocked to see him turning up in the dead of night but wary of his circumstances, quick to hide him in their box room. He didn’t even need to ask. His dad’s murder of his mum had sent ripples of shock through their community, and as if to compound matters, the lad had been incarcerated in some care home.

  So great was his fear that he begged them not to reveal his whereabouts, should the authorities start sniffing around.

  “It was only a matter of time before the cops visited. From what I heard, they were concerned about my safety...” He let out a snort. “Safety my arse! I bet Mortimer was bricking it with me on the loose, shooting my gob off! I wasn’t stupid. I lay low, ‘cos if the authorities had found me, I’d be back in that hell hole before I could blink.”