Guts for Garters

by Linda Regan

  Guts for Garters

  Linda Regan

  Guts for Garters is the first in an explosive new series featuring the Alley Cats and DI Georgia Johnson as they make lives for themselves on London’s meanest streets

  Life’s not easy growing up on the Aviary Estate in South London. Alysha and her mates have survived being abused by people who should have cared for them, their lives ruined by crime and deprivation. Now they’re taking control of the estate so children can grow up safe with real prospects in life.

  When a rival gang starts encroaching on their territory, Alysha and the Alley Cats decide to teach them a lesson. The last thing they expect is to find one of their rivals murdered on their patch. The last thing they want is for the police to start sniffing around. But DI Georgia Johnson wants answers. Johnson trusts Alysha – but will she still trust her when she realises her prized informant is leading a gang herself? When another body is found – a teenage girl this time – Alysha decides to frame the evil leader of the rival gang … but he has a few nasty surprises of his own in store for the Alley Cats girls.

  This book is dedicated to my husband,

  Brian, who will always be my hero.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you so much to all at Accent Press, who have been sooo lovely to work with.

  A million thank yous, and a few sweeping salutes, to my brilliant editor, Greg Rees, who with the eye of an eagle has helped make this book better.

  Also to every single Metropolitan Police detective and C019 officer whose ear I have bent with a million questions. You have helped me keep my technical and procedural descriptions accurate, and I am so grateful for your precious time.

  Finally – to all the gang members who spoke to me, and all the residents on high rises, and all the street girls who told me how it was. You made this book spring to life. THANK YOU.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  One

  The blade of the machete was sharp, and Alysha’s aim was practiced and precise. It sliced into the skin between the inch-high letters – SLR – that adorned Burak Kaya’s muscular forearm.

  Kaya drew a sharp intake of breath as the pain hit. Dark blood erupted and snaked downward, onto and over his wrist, onto the dirt and grime of the concrete floor. He was tied up in a derelict garage, Alysha’s three lieutenants standing guard. This was the Aviary Estate in South London, where killing came easy but respect was a lot harder to come by.

  Alysha Achter had earned that respect. Fifteen years old, she was a queen, the leading light of the Alley Cats, the all-girl gang that owned this territory. She made the rules and no one was going to fuck with her or the residents of the Aviary any more. Those days were over. All the top Alley Cat soldiers had grown up on the estate, been abused as children, become underage prostitutes or thieves or muggers. All had been users of hard drugs to get them through. Some had been young’uns and firearm-holders for the drug barons who fed their habits. Some had ended up in institutions, others in foster homes, where they were abused again.

  Now things were going to be very different.

  The Alley Cats ran the Aviary now. They made the ‘corn’, the money, on the estate. All drugs, weapons, and street trade around the estate belonged to them, and they had big plans for how the profits would be spent. They didn’t want violence and fear; they wanted families, kids of their own, but they wanted a better life for them first. They wanted them to have opportunities, opportunities which weren’t limited to selling drugs, prostitution, thieving, or prison. Right now there was nowhere for kids to be kids. The estate playgrounds were vandalised and burnt, the community hall closed down, the shops boarded up. The council had refused grants to improve the estate, so the Alley Cats were doing it their way. They had recruited nearly forty soldiers and these girls now policed the estate. They sold drugs only to existing users, no kids, and they pimped their girls fairly and gave them good protection on the streets.

  Despite the endemic problems it was a large and thriving estate, so a lot of nearby gangs were targeting it. The Alley Cats knew this; they also knew if they were to keep their territory safe so the residents could walk around without fear of being mugged, or worse, then they had to send the message that this was their territory. Anyone that dissed them, who broke their rules, had to pay.

  Kaya squeezed his face taut and threw his head back as he waited for the agonizing pain to subside. When Tink and Lox had tied him up they’d used rope to bind his upper torso to the back of the chair, then secured each of his legs to a chair leg, leaving his groin accessible so that the girls could get a good aim if they decided to stamp his balls in. They had also stripped him of his sweatshirt, and snapped his silver chain, breaking its symbolic SLR charm into pieces and dropping them on the floor in front of him.

  Leaving his torso bare for the punishment it would endure. Kaya was well known to the Alley Cats. He was a top lieutenant for Harisha Celik, his cousin, the leader of the South London Rulers gang from a neighbouring estate. The Alley Cats had recently discovered that Celik had taken over this garage on the Aviary. He had first had the owners’ car stolen. It had belonged to a couple of pensioners from the Raven block, and Celik knew if he took their old Nissan, then they wouldn’t bother using their lock-up. He had broken in, changed the lock, and now used the space to store an assignment of weapons smuggled in from Europe.

  To add insult to injury, he hadn’t even given the pensioners any corn for nicking their car.

  Celik needed to learn a lesson, and the perfect opportunity arose when they caught Burak Kaya red-handed on their territory, together with Celik’s girlfriend, Melek Yismaz. The two of them were sneaking into the lock-up with two cases of machetes and handguns.

  The Alley Cats had pounced on the pair and had taken them hostage. Kaya was tied to the chair. They had tied Melek to the inside of the door to the lock-up to watch. It wasn’t Alley Cat policy to hurt, or start a fight, with another girl, even if the girl was in an enemy gang, or a rival’s baby mother. But heaven help any girl that picked a fight with an Alley Cat. A screwdriver, a cricket ball, even a knife in the gut: if that’s what it took to protect their territory – and one another – they’d do it. All the girls had learned to fight well; they’d had to, to survive on the estate. All were prepared to fight to the death for the other girls, and the estate kids, and anyone else who was vulnerable or bullied on their territory. They saw it as their job. And today was a working day.

  Melek was tall, leggy, and olive-skinned. Her long dark hair hung down her back, reaching way past her shapely bottom. The Alley Cats had tied her hands to the garage door handle, allowing her a good view of the torture they were bestowing on Kaya, knowing she would report it all back to Celik. Melek shivered as she watched. Cried her pretty dark eyes out.

  None of this had been planned beforehand, it was just a lucky catch. Panther and Tink had been on Alley Cat business around the estate when they stumbled across Kaya and Melek sneaking into the lock-up. The girls had been photographing the estate playground. The ground was covered in dog shit, and huge rats scurried around, feasting on mouldering fast food containers that had been left to rot. The playground had been se
t fire to so many times that the estate kids had to look elsewhere for recreation, and the council did nothing to help.

  The girls had their own plans for the neighbourhood. Panther was going to give self-defence lessons to the estate women as soon as the community hall was repaired and open. She’d already taught Lox how to fight properly, how to use her teeth or stiletto while locating her weapon – shank, broken bottle, or the .38 that top ACs now carried when they needed to. Lox wanted to make records, or be a DJ or an accountant, she hadn’t fully decided yet. She’d gone to a top school and was good with numbers. She did all the book-keeping for the ACs and was in charge of the rebuilding plans the girls were making.

  So Harisha Celik trespassing on the Aviary, taking a garage from pensioners, and using it to store weapons – and drugs which he intended to sell to children – had more than insulted Alysha. She had been waiting patiently for this opportunity and, now she had it, she was burning with anger. She dug the edge of the machete into the open skin on Kaya’s arm. He screamed in pain.

  ‘And he calls us pussies,’ Panther laughed sarcastically, raising her eyes to heaven.

  Panther bore many scars from past scraps. She was capable of taking anyone on and coming out on top. She was tall – over six feet though only sixteen – Jamaican, and angry. Her mother had died when she was four, and she and her older brother had been in and out of care until her uncle took her in when she was eight. He regularly abused Panther, and prostituted her to make money. When she was fourteen the brother she’d never really known died of gunshot wounds and her uncle had a stroke which confined him to a chair. It was left to Panther to look after him and to make enough money to provide for them both, which she had dutifully done by continuing to work as a prostitute, for Alysha’s pimp. That was how they’d met. When Panther’s uncle died a few months later, she moved into Alysha’s top floor flat on Sparrow block of the Aviary and became an Alley Cat lieutenant. Her job in the gang was pimping the street girls, looking out for them and protecting them from vicious punters.

  Alysha handed the machete to Lox, whose street name came from her waist-length hair – and her aptitude for picking any lock in record time.

  Lox had run away from her alcoholic mother and a father who had sexually abused her from an early age. She started working the streets, alone, to make enough corn to buy drugs, which was how Alysha had met her. The local pimp had found Lox on his territory, trying to get punters, and started to beat her for trespassing on his patch. Fourteen-year-old Alysha had been chosen as his ‘mistress’ a year earlier. He was a violent pervert, and Alysha hated him, but had chosen him over being alone, over screwing up to twelve punters a day for him. Alysha intervened on Lox’s behalf and persuaded the pimp to take her on as one of his whores. Lox looked young for her age, so was hired out to well-paying and sadistic punters who liked hurting underage girls. But Lox was angry and always hurt back when they abused her. The pimp regularly beat her because she bit or kicked the punters when they burned her. Alysha liked her spirit, saw gang potential in her. When Alysha, single-handedly, took on the pimp and took over his territory, she immediately offered Lox a way out of prostitution. Alysha taught Lox about surviving on the Aviary, got her off drugs, and invited her to live in the Sparrow block flat. Lox did so well that Alysha made her a lieutenant in the Alley Cats. Lox repaid Alysha with fierce loyalty and Alysha adored her; they would lay down their lives for one another.

  Lox took the machete from Alysha and brought it down across Burak Kaya’s upper arm. Fresh blood erupted, and Kaya let out a huge wail in pain.

  Panther was holding a large roll of black gaffer tape. She pulled a piece about six inches in length from the roll, bit it free, then moved to secure it across his mouth with her large hands, white and floral plastic nails digging into his skin. Kaya jerked his head away, puffed out his cheeks, and spat a mouthful of sticky phlegm at her. It landed on the dark brown skin of Panther’s cleavage and the edge of her leopard-print T-shirt.

  No sooner had it landed than Tink retaliated. She swiftly planted her pink Doc Martens boot hard into Burak Kaya’s balls.

  Tink, too, had grown up on the Aviary. Her mother was an addict and Tink had no idea who her father was. As kids, Alysha and Tink were close friends, living from hand to mouth. Alysha’s mother had died when she was less than a year old and she’d grown up with an alcoholic father who was never around. She and Tink used to stand together outside the fried chicken shop and beg for scraps. One day a dealer approached them and offered them money to run errands for him. They were about six years old and happily agreed to deliver drugs and hide guns for him when the feds were around. Eventually both girls went on the game, and then Alysha was taken in, at the age of thirteen, by the pimp, to be used for his sadistic pleasures alone. Once Alysha had taken control of the territory she took Tink, like Lox, out of the misery of prostitution. Tink had lived on Sparrow block on the Aviary, same as Alysha, but in the flat one floor down. Now, like Panther and Lox, she had moved in to Alysha’s place. Officially, Alysha lived there with her father, but her father rarely came home. When he did Alysha gave him a wad of money, and he went off to drink himself stupid until the money ran out.

  Melek Yismaz rattled the garage door she was tied to and shrieked as Tink kicked Kaya in the balls. ‘No, please!’ she screamed out. ‘That’s enough. No more.’

  ‘Gag her,’ Alysha told Panther without even glancing in Melek’s direction, ‘she’s doing my head in.’ Alysha then followed Tink and kicked Kaya in the balls, hard. As he grunted in pain, she leaned in towards him until her face was just inches from his. ‘A message for your prick of a leader. Remind him this is Alley Cat territory. Tell ’im, if he thinks he can steal from my residents, an’ do our kids with drugs, then this is just a taster. Got it?’

  He didn’t answer.

  She kicked again.

  ‘I said, ’ave ya got it?’

  Kaya’s dark eyebrows had lifted and his lips were squeezed together in pain. He still said nothing.

  ‘Yes or no?’ Alysha withdrew her boot and then kicked hard several times.

  He screwed up his face in pain but stayed silent.

  ‘He’s got a death wish,’ Panther said. She was attempting to tape Melek’s mouth. Melek was pulling her head away like a horse refusing a bit. ‘Please don’t, please!’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll keep quiet, and I’ll take your message to Harisha.’

  ‘Fine,’ Alysha said, barely turning her head more than a few inches to acknowledge her. ‘You do that.’ She leaned in to Burak again. ‘See, your cunt of a leader thinks he can take this lock-up, and sell his gear round ’ere, so until you agree to tell him that we said no, then you are gonna keep getting hurt.’

  He spat at her.

  Lightning-quick, Alysha grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. She lifted her leg and dug the dirty stiletto heel of her boot into the cut on his forearm.

  As he screamed out in pain, she twisted her heel further in.

  ‘The SLR owe money to two old dears on my estate,’ she told him. ‘You tell ’im to pay, or face the consequences.’

  Rivulets of perspiration were breaking out over his forehead, but Kaya stayed silent.

  She took the machete from Lox and held it in the air. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’

  He didn’t move.

  Alysha turned to Melek. ‘You might wish your mouth was plastered up, ’cos your so-called lieutenant here’s gonna keep getting hurt until he nods his fucking head.’ She brought the machete swiftly down across of Kaya’s hand. ‘Oh dear, no wanking for you for a bit,’ she said, as more blood flowed and he screamed in pain.

  ‘Burak!’ Melek half-screamed and half-pleaded. ‘Nod your head, and let’s leave Harisha to sort it.’

  Burak shook his head. ‘Not to these pussies,’ he whispered in agony.

  Tink stubbed her cigarette out angrily on his other hand. ‘Just in case he’s left-handed. Wanking’s not nice, see.’

  His face h
ad turned red and perspiration was running down his temples. Tears also ran from the sides of both his eyes.

  Melek was watched in horror.

  ‘See, the thing here is,’ Alysha said calmly lifting his head up again by his hair, and watching the tears spill from the side of his eyes and roll down his bloodstained neck as she kicked him continuously in the shin, ‘that you ain’t going nowhere until you nod your fucker of a head to say you’ll take the message back to your poxy leader. Message is: you can’t trespass on the Aviary, disrespect us, and get away with it. Got it?’ She watched him for a second before raising her voice and shouting into his face, continuing to kick his shin, ‘No one rips off our pensioners, you piece of shit. He pays them, in full, for the car he nicked, and a year’s rent on this lock-up. All these weapons now belong to us.’ She moved her face away from his. ‘That’s the message.’ She raised her voice. ‘Got it?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s got it.’ Melek’s voice, high-pitched and desperate.

  Alysha didn’t turn around. ‘I’m talking to him,’ she said, still kicking Kaya with her boot. ‘An’ ’e’s really pissing me off.’ She raised her voice and the machete. ‘If you don’t nod your head, this time it’s your eye. An’ you know I mean it!’

  He nodded his head.

  ‘Finally,’ Alysha said turning to her girls, ‘We are getting somewhere. She turned back to Kaya. ‘First clever fing you done today.’

  He was trying to keep his eyes on her, but he was slowly slipping into unconsciousness.

  ‘He’s said we agree,’ Melek pleaded again. ‘Now let him go.’

  ‘We want your contact for these machetes and firearms, the one in Europe,’ Alysha said. ‘Give me that, and then I’ll let you go.’