by Liza Cody
How do you evaluate books when you haven’t seen published reviews? Well, here is a selection of reader’s reviews for my last four books from US and UK Amazon. Nobody pays readers to post reviews – so thank you, readers!
LADY BAG
Lesley K
Absolutely great.
Kent E. Schroder
Liza Cody has long been one of the most original and creative writers in the mystery field. You’ll like this book a lot.
Joannaon
Cody at her best. If there were a possible six stars – or even ten – I’d choose that in a minute… Nobody should miss this wonderful, thought-provoking, addictive book.
Virginia Ann Garbowski
Just don’t pick it up when you have anything else to do before you finish.
Kirsten Johnstonon
I love the dog.
MISS TERRY
Julie Greeman
Loved this book!
Kathleen O’toole
Brilliant
C. Fairweather
Wow! Miss Terry is one of the best books I have read in a long time… Wow!
K. Maxwell
Different, thought-provoking mystery.
BALLAD OF A DEAD NOBODY
iChas
A gripping story very well told…
Hilde
Another great Liza Cody
A. B. King
What a writer!
GIMME MORE
Merle K. Gatewood
Fresh and Different
Likesmysterystories
Liza Cody’s the best!
A Customer
I loved this book/Leading the field again (bought 2 copies – yay!)
Mrs L C Harvey
The Truth About Rock and Roll
Ed “ramblingsyd”
The music biz, the seventies, born again rock chicks…
Other books by Liza Cody
Anna Lee series
DUPE
BAD COMPANY
STALKER
HEADCASE
BACKHAND
UNDER CONTRACT
Bucket Nut Trilogy
BUCKET NUT
MONKEY WRENCH
MUSCLEBOUND
Other novels
RIFT
GIMME MORE
BALLAD OF A DEAD NOBODY
MISS TERRY
LADY BAG
Short stories
LUCKY DIP and Other Stories
Crocodiles
& Good
Intentions
FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LADY BAG
LIZA CODY
CROCODILES & GOOD INTENTIONS
FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LADY BAG
Copyright © 2018 Liza Cody.
Cover design by Tristan Buckland
tristanbuckland.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
iUniverse
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www.iuniverse.com
1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5073-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5074-9 (e)
iUniverse rev. date: 07/27/2018
Contents
1A Guest Of Her Majesty
2Release, Of A Sort
3My Friends Are My Enemies
4Keeping A Promise I Didn’t Make
5A Really Bad Idea
6Half Woman, Half Penguin
7Prayer Not Helping
8Sweet Charity
9Connor In Care
10Emotional Blackmail
11In Which I Save A Life
12Complete Fuckupitude In A Garage Forecourt
13Double Buggeration
14A Nurse And A Screaming Baby
15Waah!
16Betrayal
17Chaos In Suburbia
18Pierre Joins The Legion Of Homeless
19Raising The Dead
20In Which I Find What I Want But Can’t Have It
21Negotiate
22In Which Billy’s Daughter And My Mother Make Surprise Visits
23What Is Love?
24What’s Wrong With Us?
25In Which Cashmere Triumphs Over Vagrancy
26Accusations
27More Accusations
28In Which Li’l Missy Changes Sides
29A Bad Morning For The Cops
30Gimme Shelter
31A Place Of Safety
32Memory
33Maybe It’s People Power
34Leaving Billy
35Paranoia In Trafalgar Square
36Going West
37How It Ends
About The Author
CROCODILES
AND
GOOD INTENTIONS
FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LADY BAG
1
A Guest Of Her Majesty
The one thing you can say in favour of prison is that when you’re inside the Health Service is obliged to treat you. Outside, doctors and dentists can choose their patients, and if you live on the street, ninety-nine times out of a hundred they won’t choose you.
Of the many things you can say against prison, one is that the dentistry is crude.
They waited till I’d lost two stone through not being able to chew before they called in the dentist who chopped all the broken teeth out of my mouth. Then, because of years of neglect, he hauled a load of others out too. There’s something illogical about treating a person who can’t chew by removing her teeth. But no one listens to my kind of logic in prison. He said I’d thank him in the long run. I didn’t.
I was given a set of false gnashers and, like my shoes, they weren’t very comfortable. The medical warder said my mouth was as big as my feet and I was lucky they fit at all.
So now my teeth, like my shoes, are items that can be stolen if I don’t watch out. Luckily they’re made of plastic and have been in my mouth so I don’t suppose there are many thieves who’d want them.
‘Ange,’ said Kerrilla Cropper, ‘just shut up. You’ll think yourself to death. People on this wing say you’re a fruitcake and asking for a pounding. I can’t, hand on heart, tell them they’re wrong.’
There’s a Har
d Corps on every wing. Just because they’re women doesn’t mean they won’t take advantage of being nastier than everyone else.
‘Ride with the Devil,’ I said, ‘if you think it’ll make your life easier.’
‘And that’s another thing… ’ Kerrilla doesn’t feel comfortable when I talk about the Devil even though she goes to the chapel on Sundays. But she has to clean these filthy bogs every damned day just like I do, whereas Satan’s sidekicks get the cushy numbers like library, laundry and sickbay.
She’s a big, big girl but she can’t read or write. I help her fill in forms, which is why she tolerates me. But she won’t bunk with me. She says I mutter in the night and talk crazy all day.
Other than that I take my medication and I’m no trouble at all, even though the Hard Corps members spit in my soup and then have the nerve to ask me to write their letters to the parole board. That’s communal living for you. I put up with it because there’s no alternative.
‘My mum’s got a visiting order,’ Kerrilla told me, swishing bleach around a bowl with a brown-stained brush. ‘She’s bringing my Connor. I can’t wait.’ She looked anxious. She hadn’t seen her son for six months.
‘Will he recognise me?’ she asked.
No he won’t, I thought, because it’s an everyday prison tragedy. I said, ‘He’ll recognise the love. He’s too young for the Devil’s grip.’
‘Oh shut the fuck up,’ she yelled and flicked bleach at me.
However much bleach we use we can’t wipe out the grime. There are cracks in the porcelain, cracks in the plaster, and cracks in the floor, filled with the blood of thousands of lost souls.
Later, in the evening, after tea and before lockdown, I saw Kerrilla watching cartoons in the TV room and crying to herself.
‘Oh Ange,’ she said, snorting up snot and rubbing her eyes on sleeves already blackened by tears. ‘It’s hard for Mum to bring Connor all the way here. She said if he didn’t want to come she couldn’t make him. I’d been looking forward to seeing him so much. But Mum said I should of thought of that before I got myself in trouble. We ended up shouting at each other.’
‘Wanting and wishing always bring disappointment,’ I said, because that’s the truth.
‘Call yourself a friend?’ she yelled and stormed away, sobbing.
‘I don’t actually,’ I said to her back. ‘I’m here and you’re here. We occupy some of the same space at the same time, but that doesn’t make a friendship.’
I have one true friend. She isn’t human so I know I can rely on her through thick and thin, until death. She’s called Electra. Pierre sent me a photo of her because he thought it’d make my lockup seem more like ‘home’. He’s a well-meaning fool who’s never been in pokey. A senior member of the Hard Corps got her grubby fingers on it and said, ‘Your dog looks more like dogfood than a dog. Bet your mate’s starving it to death.’
I stabbed her face with a fork. There wasn’t any damage because it was a plastic fork, but she let out such a howl that the screws came and dragged me away to solitary. It was fine. I like solitary. And it did my reputation some good. I was no longer just a zombie on medication. I was an unpredictable zombie and less likely to be picked on. I’d shown an aptitude for violence – something Satan’s sidekicks understood.
But I got rid of the photo. It’s safer not to keep so much as an image of valuables in here because even images can be stolen or dirtied.
The next morning, after beans on toast soggy enough for me to chew, Kerrilla and I met over the bleach and brushes. She said, ‘Your release date’s coming up, Ange. Go and see them for me. My mum’s boyfriend doesn’t like black babies and I think he’s going to make her dump my Connor on the social workers.’
‘Your own mum?’ But I wasn’t surprised – mums don’t always have your best interest at heart. Everyone thinks they’re supposed to, but they’re human and the Devil’s worm eats their apples too.
‘She’d do anything for that poxy piece of crap,’ she said, confirming all my worst expectations about women and love. She went on, ‘They’re going to send you back to London soon. What can I do, sat here in Birmingham?’
‘What about the dad?’
‘He’d only give Connor to his mum. She’s prob’ly got a boyfriend who doesn’t like white babies. Besides they’re all in gangs.’
‘Maybe he’d be best off… ’
‘Don’t say it, Ange,’ Kerrilla shrieked. ‘Just don’t. A baby needs his family.’ This, of course is the same family who brought her up illiterate, ignorant and so abused she went with the first boy she met who was too stoned to care what she looked like. The Hard Corps on this wing call her ‘Gorilla Crapper’ and think themselves witty.
She tore off her shirt and stuffed it down the bowl with the brush. In the next cubicle she forced her sweat pants round the bend. Then her underwear, then her shoes, then the mop heads and cleaning cloths. She ran up and down, cold and wobbly, flushing, flushing and flushing till the floor was flooded.
‘Go for it Kerri,’ I muttered, and stood by watching. She was expressing her hatred of herself and her situation. Better out than in, I say, even though they will punish this one glorious spasm of rage and independence by making her even more powerless. Sure enough, three screws dragged her away to solitary.
‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ PO Brownlee asked, staring at the flooded bogs.
‘The Devil was tearing her in his claws,’ I said. ‘Circumstances beyond my control… ’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, why do I even bother asking? Just get this mess cleaned up.’
After lunch they sent me down to the dispensary and I waited in line for the pills that relieve me of the pleasure and pain of living. If the point of life is to breed, to laugh and to suffer, then my life is pointless, far more pointless than Kerrilla’s.
When it was my turn the medic looked at my notes and said, ‘We should begin cutting down.’
I leaned my fists on his desk and said, ‘Start with my feet. Cut those down and it’ll be easier to find shoes to fit. Chop a bit off the heels and a bit off the toes. It’ll be bloody at first but I’ll be more like Cinderella. It’s not my fault – my mother didn’t bind my feet at birth. Of course she found other ways of hobbling me, so that when I met my Charming Prince of Darkness I couldn’t run from him. I could only dance with him. Unhappily ever after.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ the medic said, and gave me the full dose. He’s new, but he’ll learn.
Three days later they transferred me back to London. Kerrilla was still in solitary so I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye and she couldn’t tell me where her mother lived. I was off the hook. Who but a pitiful lump of ignorance like her would ask a catastrophe like me for help with her family problems? I’d laugh, except my teeth might fall out.
Back at HMP Holloway in London my solicitor, Ms Kaylee Yost, came to see me. She said, ‘We’re looking at a release date some time next week if we’re lucky and you can keep out of trouble. I’ll have to negotiate some sort of supervision order but basically, your time’s up. How do you feel?’
Because of the pills I didn’t feel much of anything but I knew Electra was waiting for me. Once I saw her and had a little slurp of red wine I’d begin to feel more normal.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Ms Yost said, ‘Of course the first thing you’ll have to do is see your AA sponsor and a probation officer. You’re off the alcohol now and you’ll find your life much safer and healthier if you can remain that way.’ She looked so pleased with me and so full of hope that I didn’t have the heart to say, ‘Fat chance. What’s the point of being free if you can’t go to hell in your own handbasket?’
‘Will Pierre come to meet me?’ I asked. Ms Yost still thought he was my AA sponsor. For a lawyer she was very gullible. Of course she was just a baby lawyer and I had been her first client so I thought I should let her do
wn gently and not disillusion her straight away about absolutely everything.
‘He’s a lovely man. He says he’ll be outside waiting.’
‘With Electra?’
‘And your sister.’
‘Oh goody,’ I said.
The person Ms Yost calls my sister is not anyone’s sister, nor is he related to me. He thinks he’s a girl but he still has to shave every now and then. That’s another secret I keep from my solicitor who is a straight-forward woman and easily confused. If, as an officer of the court, she knew I was being released into the care of one drag artist, one transsexual and a dog, who was probably the most sensible one of the trio, she might have had second thoughts about being so helpful. And hopeful.
At association time, I went to my lockup. I don’t associate very well and I wanted to suck on Ms Yost’s gift of a white chocolate bar without interruption or having to share. I’d only just torn the wrapper off when I sensed a presence lurking close to my door. I looked up and saw a small ginger weasel hovering.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you shout at me,’ she said, sliding in and standing with her back to the wall as if she’d been kicked in the bum once too often. ‘I’m just transferred in from Birmingham and Kerrilla Cropper asked me to look you up.’
‘Who?’
‘Gorilla Crapper – don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. I was on the punishment corridor with her and when we got out she gave me half her tobacco allowance if I promised I’d talk to you, even if you’re barking barmy and live in a cardboard box.’
Half a tobacco allowance is very, very expensive for someone who smokes like a scout’s campfire the way Kerri does.
I said, ‘So?’