The Betrayed: A shocking, gritty thriller that will hook you from the first page

by Casey Kelleher

  ‘What in God’s name?’ Edel said, perplexed, as she stared suspiciously up at the light fitting as the lampshade started to sway. ‘My Colleen’s not even home. She’s gone to do the weekly shop for me.’

  ‘Well, someone’s up there and they certainly ain’t light on their feet, whoever it is,’ Nellie said, her eyes wide open with exaggerated concern. Though in truth, she loved a bit of a drama did Nellie.

  Only, the drama was a bit too much for her today, jumping with fright as the next thud was so loud that it immediately rendered both women speechless; the force of whatever it was, making the whole shop shake.

  Suddenly fearful for her life, Nellie let out a high-pitched, deafening screech.

  ‘EARTHQUAKE!’ she screamed as panic engulfed her, grabbing at her friend and pulling her down under the counter. ‘Jesus Christ, Edel. We need to stay low; get under cover. I’ve seen it on a documentary, stay low to the floor.’

  Crouching down on the cold cement floor of the florists, the two women huddled together in silence, as they waited for another tremor. But the banging and shaking had stopped now.

  The next noise they heard was the sound of male voices. Swearing and shouting at each other: loud, jovial banter.

  ‘Here, you old lush, you haven’t got a fella up there, have you?’ Nellie said, raising her eyes questioningly at her friend. ‘Some fancy man tucked away inside your wardrobe? Or a couple of them by the sounds of it?’

  ‘’Course I bleeding ain’t!’ Edel said, crawling back out from the shop counter indignantly, before wiping her dusty hands down the front of her trousers, purposely ignoring Nellie’s suspicious gaze as she made her way towards the back room where the staircase was. Unlike her friend here with her wild accusations, Edel wasn’t just going to stand around and do nothing.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Nellie asked.

  ‘Well, we’re not going to find out who’s up there by standing around down here playing guessing games with each other, are we? I’m going upstairs to investigate.’

  Nellie grabbed at Edel’s arm.

  ‘What if it’s burglars though, Edel? Or even worse, a poltergeist? You can’t go up there on your own.’

  The sound of someone shouting orders and the loud shrill of power tools interrupted their conversation, and suddenly the penny dropped.

  Workmen. The cheek of them.

  ‘Oh no they bloody don’t!’ Edel said firmly, as the realisation of what was going on suddenly became apparent. ‘Those bloody bastards!’ Incensed as she realised what the noise was, Edel grabbed the broom that she had propped up next to the back door. Holding it in front of her like a weapon, her face thunderous, she nodded to her friend.

  ‘You coming or you staying here?’ she said.

  Nellie shook her head, unsure what the right answer would be. She still didn’t have a clue who was upstairs, though apparently Edel had an inkling and by the look on her face she wasn’t one bit happy about it. ‘What are you planning on doing with that?’ Nellie asked, wondering what it was she was missing.

  ‘I tell you what I’m going to do with this: I’m going to go and beat someone over the head with it, that’s what I’m going to do,’ Edel said, her temper getting the better of her. ‘You know what the problem is with the world these days, Nellie? People think they can just bloody take whatever they want from you. That they can just swoop on in and snatch it away from you regardless. Well, they’ve picked on the wrong bloody gal this time, let me tell you!’

  Edel spat, reaching the stairwell. ‘You better stay put, this ain’t going to be pretty. I’m going to sort these obnoxious bastards out once and for all.’

  She stomped up the stairs like a woman possessed.

  Nellie had no intention of doing as she was told and staying put. Itching to find out what the hell was going on, and who the ‘obnoxious bastards’ were, Nellie decided to do the complete opposite of what Edel had told her, quickly following her friend up the stairs. The look on Edel’s face was murderous and knowing her friend as well as she did, if Edel Walsh was about to kick off then Nellie didn’t intend missing out on the show. Knowing just what a nutcase Edel could be when she lost the plot, Nellie Erikson was looking forward to a ringside seat.

  * * *

  ‘That’s it, lads. We’re in!’ Reggie Wilkins smiled with satisfaction at the large gaping hole he’d just knocked through into next door’s flat. ‘That’s another job well done, boys! We’re ahead of schedule, the boss will be happy.’

  Reggie was pleased as punch with the progress that his team of men were making with this project.

  ‘Does that mean we can knock off in a bit then?’ one of the workers, Jock, called out, trying his luck. They’d worked their arses off today to make good headway, now that they were in.

  Reggie rolled his eyes.

  ‘Sod off, Jock! You only had a tea break half an hour ago.’ Shaking his head, Reggie pretended to be disgusted at the suggestion. He was under strict instructions to get moving with this project, but Reggie knew better than anyone that if you looked after your workforce, they’d look after you. His men deserved a few beers after the effort they’d all put in today.

  ‘I tell you what, seeing that it’s Friday and I’m feeling generous, I’ll make a deal with you. If you clear up this mess and get the rest of this wall down then we’ll call it a day. Then the pints will be on me.’ Reggie grinned, seeing the genuine smiles plastered across his lads’ faces as they all nodded in agreement to his suggestion before getting to work with new-found motivation, clawing back the debris that had fallen around the entrance to the newly formed hole in the brickwork and loading it up into the wheelbarrows.

  The job would be done in no time, Reggie thought to himself as he eyed up his workmanship. The large gaping hole enabled him to see right through into the flat next door.

  ‘Here, whoever it was that lived there must have left in a hurry, they left their smalls behind.’

  Laughing at the selection of large granny knickers that were displayed in rows on the clothes airer above the bath, Reggie added, ‘Smalls being the operative word looking at these under crackers!’

  Eyeing the rest of the room, he noted the bathmat and towels still out on display, a pot of toothbrushes still neatly placed on the corner of the sink unit too. Bottles of lotions and potions lining the bathroom shelves – a thick film of brick dust covering everything.

  ‘I thought all the flats had been cleared out?’ Reggie said to no one in particular, irritated that this flat had clearly been overlooked. That would mean more work for them, and the last thing Reggie wanted to do today was to get his men to trawl through a flat full of abandoned personal junk that some lazy arsed tenant had left behind them. ‘This should have all been cleared before we got on site!’ Reggie said, wondering what else had been left in the flat.

  Reggie stepped closer to the hole to inspect the interior, a movement beneath the stack of fallen bricks suddenly catching his eye.

  ‘Hold up!’ he said, waving his arm frantically for the men to stop what they were doing.

  Narrowing his eyes so that he could get a better look, Reggie stepped in closer, his gaze resting on what he’d at first thought was a towel on the floor.

  Then he saw movement underneath the rubble.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  It was a cat.

  Dragging itself out from the pile of debris that had almost buried it, the bewildered cat’s fur stood on end, covered in brick dust. Reggie could only guess that the thing had probably been white and fluffy before the wall had gone down on top of the poor bugger.

  ‘That was a close one!’ he said, as the cat made a swift exit, racing across the dishevelled bathroom floor, and out onto the landing of the flat. Thankfully unscathed.

  Reggie shook his head. His instincts telling him that something wasn’t right.

  ‘Fucking hell, lads. I think someone’s still living in here?’

  Adjusting his hard hat, Reggie was about to climb t
hrough so that he could take a better look when he was suddenly stopped in his tracks as a little old lady flew at him, brandishing a wooden broom handle in his direction. A larger lady was standing behind her.

  ‘You bloody bastards, look what you’ve done to my home. Is this what you’re doing now? Using bullying tactics? Forcing me out against my will. You won’t get away with this.’ The smaller, feistier of the two women launched into her attack, bringing the broom she was holding down on Reggie’s head.

  Despite the wooden handle bouncing off his hard hat as his safety helmet took the brute force of her fury, Reggie stood there stunned. Surprised at the strength of the woman.

  ‘Jesus Christ, are you mental?’ he exclaimed, wondering if the old dear was all there in the head. ‘You nearly took my bleeding head off with that thing!’

  She was standing in front of him like a raving lunatic as she waved the broom around in front of her, screeching profanities at him. If it had been a bloke attacking him, Reggie would have had no qualms in taking the broom off the fucker and wrapping it around the assailant’s head, but as it stood, Reggie would never contemplate hitting a woman. He didn’t even like having to raise his voice at one. Especially an old girl like this one. He really didn’t know how to handle her. His only option was to try and calm the distraught woman down.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, ma’am, it’s not safe,’ he tried to reason.

  ‘I could say the same thing to you!’ Edel said, about to hit the man with the broom for a second time; only this time Reggie was ready for the woman.

  Well prepared for another blow, he managed to catch the broom handle, gripping it with his hand before it had a chance at impacting on his hard hat once again, and snatching it from her grasp, though even that didn’t seem to deter the woman’s tirade of abuse.

  ‘I’m going to have you lot for this. How bloody dare you. Look at my lovely bathroom, it looks like bleeding Beirut,’ Edel screeched, staring in disbelief at her once immaculate bathroom, which was now covered completely in brick dust and debris. The hole in the wall was big enough for Nellie to fit through sideways, and that was saying something as Nellie was a big old girl. ‘This is criminal damage. You’ve destroyed my home.’

  Reggie pursed his lips. The woman was indeed a nutjob. Speaking slowly, trying to sound as calm and understanding as he could, he tried to appease her.

  ‘These have all been sold, ma’am. You shouldn’t be here. We’re just doing our job and clearing the area ready for construction. This is a building site. Technically it’s you that’s trespassing.’ Wondering if the old bat was a sandwich short of a picnic Reggie Wilkins spoke with authority, hoping that the woman would realise that there was some kind of a mix-up. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave, ma’am! This is a demolition job; the building is being stripped down.’

  Edel’s eyes flashed with fury then.

  ‘You’ll do no such bleeding thing!’ she screamed. ‘And I’m not “technically trespassing” as you so brazenly put it, this is my home. It’s mine, do you hear me. You bloody people! Thinking you can waltz around here flashing your cash and all us little folk just have to comply with your demands. Well, I told you lot months ago, I’m not going anywhere. I was born in this flat and the only way I’ll ever leave the place is in a box. Now if you don’t all piss off away from my property, I’m going to call the police and have you all removed. Each and every bloody one of you!’

  ‘You’ll have to call them then, ma’am, because we have permission to be here and to do the work,’ Reggie said, shrugging his shoulders dismissively as the woman and her friend stomped off to make a phone call.

  He turned to his men, raising his eyes to Jock and the other workers that were now standing around him.

  ‘You lot might as well knock off early after all,’ he said to the men. ‘There’s no point us all hanging around here like spare parts, while we wait for the cavalry to arrive and sort this nutjob out. Have a pint for me while you’re at it.’

  He had been well up for an easy day today, knocking off with the lads early to have a few pints and celebrate their first productive day on the project; only, thanks to this crazy old bat in here, Reggie Wilkins had a feeling that his easy day was just about to get a lot bloody harder.

  Four

  ‘What? So you’re telling me that by the time you realised that the old girl was inside, you’d already knocked half her fucking flat down?’

  Reggie nodded. He knew how it sounded, but this wasn’t his fault and he wasn’t going to let Alex Costa pin the blame on him.

  ‘We’d tunnelled a hole into her bathroom wall big enough to get a mini through. How the fuck were we supposed to know she was still living there? You gave us the all-clear, Alex.’

  ‘You’re the fucking project manager. The groundsman. Didn’t you inspect the site before you and your men started knocking down walls?’ Alex Costa was pissed off.

  Reggie Wilkins had called an urgent meeting with him, only, as the conversation unravelled, it was becoming more apparent by the minute that it wasn’t a meeting at all. It was a circus and his men, it seemed, were nothing but fucking clowns.

  ‘Who the fuck is this Edel Walsh then?’ Alex Costa stared down at the paperwork that Reggie Wilkins had just presented him with, scanning the familiar architect’s drawings of the new development that he and Jimmy had just invested in. The plot they’d just bought out was set to make them both a fortune. As it stood now, though, it was nothing more than a shamble: a cluster of run-down shops and flats that stood like an eyesore slap bang in the middle of Soho’s Dean Street.

  Jimmy had come up with the initial idea. Soho was on the up now. Jimmy and Alex had heard it on good authority that Westminster Council was starting to invest some money into the area. The powers that be had decided that Soho would no longer be a place where every schoolboy’s dream came true. They were pulling rank. Clamping down on all the sex workers that flooded the area after dusk. The seedy backstreet sex shops and strip clubs were having their licences revoked. The illegal video shops were going too. A new era was coming. ‘The birth of the new romantics,’ as Jimmy liked to refer to it. Soho would soon be the place to be. A place filled with fancy little coffee shops, and quirky boutiques. There was already an influx in gay bars popping up in the area too. Classy places, not the sleazy jaunts that people had shoved down their throats up until now.

  The pink pound was already here and thriving in Soho and that’s what Jimmy and Alex were counting on cashing in on. They wanted to build the most exclusive, sought after apartments, right here in the heart of Soho.

  The new venture would be the perfect solution for them both to hide away money they had coming in from some of their other lucrative investments. Jimmy’s little sideline of running several brothels in the West End was creaming them in a fortune. They needed to stash the cash somewhere and ploughing the money into property was the perfect hiding place.

  Jimmy wanted no expense spared. He wanted every fixture and fitting, every item of furniture, to be the absolute best. They’d worked their bollocks off to get as far as they had with the project so quickly and Reggie standing here now telling him that there was a major setback, was not what Alex Costa wanted to hear.

  ‘This is her place, here. She owns unit number seven. The little florist with a flat above it,’ Reggie said, pointing to the sheet of paper sprawled out on the desk in front of them, tapping his finger on the only building on the plan with a bright red circle drawn around it.

  Typical, Alex thought. The one fucking flat that sat slap bang in the middle of Alex and Jimmy’s entire development.

  ‘So what? Some old geriatric’s having a senile moment and suddenly at the last minute she doesn’t want to leave her flat behind? Tough shit. Everything’s been signed. There’s no going back. Edel Walsh doesn’t have the luxury of changing her mind now. I don’t understand why you’ve called a meeting, Reggie. This is a headache, granted. But it’s nothing any half-competen
t site foreman can’t sort out surely?’ Alex said, rubbing his temples, frustrated. He had thought Reggie Wilkins would have everything in order, but now he was beginning to question the man’s capabilities – coming to him with such minor issues like this was an insult.

  ‘I’ve got a mega day on, Reggie, I could do without having to babysit you too, mate,’ Alex said, glad that Jimmy was currently off out dealing with some personal business right now on the other side of London. While Alex’s patience was already wearing thin, Jimmy would have lost his shit listening to this conversation.

  ‘Like I said, boss, the old girl’s refusing to leave the site and until we get her to leave we can’t carry on with the job. It’s a major hold up, boss,’ Reggie explained, as the age-old saying of shooting the messenger came to his mind as he recited the bad news to Alex Costa. There was no way that he was taking the flack for this.

  Someone had made a major fuck up and it wasn’t him.

  ‘It’s not rocket science. She shouldn’t be there, so get her removed. Physically, if you have to,’ Alex said, jabbing the side of his head as he stared at the few members of the workforce that had been brave enough to accompany Reggie to this farce of a meeting. ‘You’re all big enough and ugly enough to sort one old girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘She called the Old Bill out—’

  ‘Well, at least for once they would have been put to good use!’ Raising his hands up to the sky, mockingly, he said, ‘I bet the plod bloody loved that too. Finally having an excuse to stick their noses in our business. I bet that lot were all sorely disappointed with everything being above board and legit, weren’t they? Nosey fuckers.’

  Alex rubbed his head.

  ‘I take it they moved her on?’ he said, wondering why they were even still having this conversation if the police had been called.

  ‘No, boss.’

  ‘What do you mean “no”? She can’t just pull out. All the other tenants have vacated the units. All the builders have moved onto the site. The work has started. Why the fuck didn’t the plod move her on?’