Goodnight Lady (72 page)

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.

‘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.’

He stood up then, his heavy briefcase banging against his short fat leg. He rubbed his thigh absentmindedly.

‘I’ll bid you goodnight.’

Without bothering to shake hands with them, he bowed his head once and bustled from the room.

 

Limmington heard about the three suspects seeing their solicitor all at the same time and hit the roof.

‘You’re telling me they were allowed to see their brief together? They’re on a murder charge, for Christ’s sake!’

The smaller man, the desk sergeant, shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘Who gives a toss? I was following orders from the Chief Constable himself, Mr Limmington. I thought you knew about it.’

Limmington bit his lip and turned away abruptly. The Chief Constable, eh? Well, the Home Secretary would have to know about that. But a little voice in the back of his mind told him that, somehow, the Home Secretary already knew.

He made his way down to the interview rooms with a stony expression on his face. He had a feeling on him that his little celebration had been premature. He had made the usual mistake most people made with the Cavanaghs.

He had counted his chickens well before they had hatched.

 

‘Hello, Mr Limmington. Any chance of a cup of tea?’

Boysie’s face was so open and ingenuous that despite himself Harry Limmington smiled. Of the twins, he had always liked Boysie. Even as a young tearaway, he’d had a way with him. Unlike his twin brother who was a different kettle of fish altogether.

‘I’ll arrange some tea, Boysie, don’t fret. I wanted to have another word with you, on your own like.’

Boysie sat back on the wooden chair and crossed his arms over his chest, his eyebrows raised as if listening intently. Harry Limmington sat opposite him and, motioning for the young PC to leave the room, he smiled. His best smile.