Jail Bird (14 page)

Lily stared into his kind blue eyes. She could almost believe he meant it; that all he wanted from her was her trust. But she doubted she could even remember how to do that, just blindly
believe
that someone had her best interests at heart.

‘You poor little bint, you’ve really had a tough time of it, ain’t you?’ he said, and smoothed a big rough hand over her cheek.

And that was it; that was enough. The floodgates opened
and, finally, after twelve years, she let it all out and cried bitter broken tears over the front of Jack’s best suit for the wreckage of her life and for the late lamented Leo King. That
bastard.

You could buy snacks at the prison canteen once a week. You could also spend the remains of your weekly cash limit on coffee, tobacco, stationery, phone cards (although Lily eventually gave up on those: the girls were lost to her, what was the point?) fruit and batteries—one only, apparently you could make bombs with more—for a radio.

Becks had brought her in a bum bag, an item Lily had never possessed but now found invaluable. All her precious items—the most precious being a photo of her with her two lovely girls—she kept in there.

She soon got to know that if you left anything lying about or even in your locker, it was likely to go missing. So Lily quickly learned to keep all her goods on her person. She developed a prison persona. Hands in pockets. Head down. All femininity forgotten. Her and Mercy became a team, blocking out the rest of the prison world. She became numb, faceless, one of the crowd. After a while inside she didn’t bother wondering if she’d ever get her life back. Without hope, without her home, without her children, without everything dear to her, she schooled herself not to care.

Lily slept with the Magnum tucked under her pillow—just in case; she wouldn’t use it, she would
never
use it, or at least she didn’t think so, but until the security codes and the locks were changed, better safe than sorry. The clothes she’d purchased were still in the bags in the far corner of the room, and the rucksack full of the remaining huge stash of readies, and Leo’s video, was right there beside the bed.

When she woke up—starting awake, as always, from dreams of prison, from the belief that she was still in there, that she would
never
get out—she reviewed last night’s meeting with that rotten hard-faced whore Reba, thought about how she had shed tears outside and how she’d been made to look like a complete fool.

Nothing new there, though.

Leo had been making her look a fool for years—she just hadn’t known it.

She got up, showered, dressed, stashed the gun and the rucksack, and went downstairs feeling about ninety years old. Oli was in the kitchen, and there were two strange
men wandering around the house looking at the alarm sensors.

‘They’re here from Sunstyle to change the settings and stuff,’ said Oli brightly. ‘Coffee?’

Lily nodded and sat down.

‘You want anything to eat?’

‘God no,’ said Lily with a shudder.

‘Oh yeah. You never ate breakfast,’ said Oli. ‘I remember now.’

Lily smiled faintly at her daughter. So odd to see her there, full-grown. So odd and so wonderful, too. But she worried over Oli and Saz. They were rich. All right, the money they had in abundance, and this house, were all ill-gotten gains—but try proving
that,
Your Honour—and they were rich enough never to have to work, never to have to
strive.

That couldn’t be good for them, could it? Certainly it hadn’t been good for her, going from a lowbrow school to a kept—although married—woman, with no thoughts of a career, no ambition other than to play house.

‘What you going to do with your life, Ols?’ she asked, curiously.

‘Oh! God, I don’t know.’ Oli paused and looked at her mother. ‘I’d like to have a year in Paris sometime, I suppose, just living there, soaking up the atmosphere, you know. I just want to…have fun. You know.’

And meet bad men,
thought Lily.
Men like Jase.

‘And where does Jase fit into these plans?’ she asked.

Oli shrugged. ‘Maybe he’ll come too,’ she said, and turned away to pick up the cafetière and two mugs.

And maybe he won’t,
thought Lily. The boys had their own rules, they did what they damned well pleased—and that wouldn’t include following a girlfriend abroad if she
chose to go. Girls were ten a penny to men like these anyway—Reba Stuart had made that clear to her. Bad boys exuded testosterone; they attracted female attention without even trying. The girls were forever buzzing around them, like wasps round jam. And why buy a book when you can join a library?

Jesus, I’m bitter,
thought Lily as Oli pushed a full mug towards her.

‘Tell me about Jase,’ said Lily.

‘What’s to tell?’ Oli shrugged. ‘He’s Head of Security at the club.’

‘Kings,’ said Lily thoughtfully. ‘That’s still going then.’ Kings club had been started way back by Leo, Si and Freddy. Leo hadn’t lived to see the place get properly established, and she was slightly surprised to find it was still in existence, without Leo’s dynamic drive powering it along.

‘Yeah, it’s great,’ said Oli enthusiastically.

‘He worked there long?’

‘What is this? An inquisition?’

‘Nah, just curious,’ said Lily lightly, and snagged one of the security guys as he passed by. ‘Is this going to take long?’ she asked.

‘About an hour, that’s all,’ he said.

She nodded and he hurried on. ‘Oli,’ she said, taking a sip of the coffee. It was hot, strong, pungent. Delicious. You never got decent coffee in the nick. ‘About Jase.’

‘What about him?’ Oli asked warily.

‘I hope…I just want to say I hope you’re being careful.’

‘What?’

‘Careful,
Oli. As in not ending up with a fat belly.’

‘Oh God.’ Oli let out a little laugh and her eyes slipped away from Lily’s. ‘This is embarrassing.’

‘It’d be even
more
embarrassing to find yourself knocked up at your age,’ said Lily. ‘Embarrassing and bloody inconvenient. I know. I’ve been there.’

Oli’s eyes swivelled back to her mother’s face. ‘What, you’re saying Saz was an inconvenience?’

‘I’m saying you don’t want to limit your choices in life, Oli. You’re lucky, you have plenty. Don’t just throw them away when you could take a few sensible precautions to prevent that situation arising.’

Lily spoke from the heart. She knew what finding yourself up the duff at a young age was like. If she hadn’t been pregnant pre-wedding with Leo’s baby, she herself would still have had those magical things called
options.
She could admit to herself now that she had always known in her heart of hearts that Leo was a bit of a shit. And if she was really, brutally honest with herself—which in those young, innocent days she’d mostly managed not to be—she’d already known that he was unlikely to be faithful. But there had been the baby, the pressure from her shocked and ashamed old-school parents, her fear of being alone, a single parent…so, no options. No options at all.

‘Yep,
very
embarrassed now,’ quipped Oli, but she was, she really was, Lily could see her cheeks had turned pink.

‘You on the pill then?’ This issue had been troubling Lily for a couple of days and she wasn’t going to mince her words now.

‘Mum…’

‘Are you?’

‘No I’m not.’ Now Oli’s cheeks were flaming. ‘I had bad periods when I was younger. Tried the pill for that, but it just made me sick so I stopped taking it.’

‘But you
are
sleeping with him?’ Lily just knew that Jase
was not the type to act the monk. He’d want sex with Oli, and seeing the two of them together had already convinced her that their relationship was physical.

‘I’m not having this conversation,’ said Oli, getting up from the table and taking her mug over to the sink, where she emptied the contents angrily.

‘Because, Oli, there’s a certain point past which a man just can’t stop, you do know that?’

‘I’m out of here,’ trilled Oli, heading for the door. ‘I’ll buzz to get back in, okay?’

‘Get him to use a condom!’ shouted Lily after her.

The door slammed behind Oli. A different security bloke wandered through, looking a question at Lily. Oli’s car started up outside.

‘Kids,’ she said.

‘Tell me about it. We’re nearly all done here.’

‘Good.’ She hated strangers wandering about. Didn’t know them. Could be anyone. Could be working for Si. Or Freddy. Now she was getting paranoid. And jumpy. When the phone on the wall beside the sink rang, she nearly fell off her stool. With her heart hammering, she went over and agitatedly snatched it up.

‘Hello?’ she snapped.

‘Mrs…King?’ asked a hesitant female voice, rough-edged and cracked with age. There were birds chirping in the background.

‘Who wants her?’

‘I’m Mrs Blunt, Alice’s mum.’

‘Oh yeah. Thanks for calling.’

‘You wanted to talk about my girl Alice.’

‘Yeah.’ Lily thought quickly. ‘Can we meet up?’

‘I don’t get about much,’ said Mrs Blunt querulously. ‘And
…your name’s King, have I got that right? You’re not…you’re no relation to
Leo
King, are you?’

‘None at all,’ Lily lied. ‘I’m just an old friend of Alice’s, that all.’

‘Well…I suppose it’ll be all right then…’

‘I’ll come to you, okay? I won’t take up much of your time,’ said Lily. ‘Just give me your address, I’ll come over.’

Mrs Blunt gave her the address, on a council estate in Stepney.

‘Give me an hour, okay? I’ll be there.’

She tried Becks’s number before she left, but Becks wasn’t answering.

Mrs Blunt was so old she looked fossilized. She was skinny and bent double, and wavered uncertainly on a stick, peering myopically at Lily when her son let her in, before collapsing back into her chair. A dandelion fuzz of white hair stood out around her wobbling little head and her mouth was tooth-free.

There was a tray on a small table beside the chair, with a half-eaten crustless sandwich and a cup of tea on it. On the other side of the chair was a large metal cage, containing four budgies; they were making a lot of noise and scattering feathers in all directions.

The son was a bulky, crew-cut redhead in t-shirt, stretchy tracksuit bottoms and cheap trainers. He looked like he’d swallowed a lot of Big Macs, and probably the odd small sofa too. His expression and his manner were surly.

‘She gets these things into her head,’ he said as soon as Lily showed up on the front step. ‘Won’t let them go. She wanted to see you because you were a friend of Alice’s, but let me make it plain—I didn’t want you coming here. It only upsets her, talking about all that.’

As welcomes went, it wasn’t much. The trip out hadn’t exactly been great either. When the security guys had left, giving her three new sets of keys and a raft of bewildering instructions on how to set the new alarms, she had booked a taxi. The driver had talked all the way over, in a language she neither knew nor understood, then the jerk had massively overcharged her, and Lily had looked out at the rainy day and thought,
Is this worth the effort?
The driver was still out there, parked up at the rubbish-strewn pavement; the bill for all this was going to be astronomical, and no doubt he was going to want to chat all the way home, too.

Now the son was acting up.

‘She’s having her tea,’ said the man, seeming to fill up the small, overheated front room with his size and bad temper. ‘You could have picked a better time.’

No
time would have been better for this one.

‘You’ll have to wait a bit,’ he said, and Lily said yeah, okay, and sat down on the sofa.
Golden Balls
was on, roaring away—Alice’s mother was obviously deaf as a post—and when she had been sitting there for ten minutes watching the damned thing, the son came bustling over and changed the channels, just in case she’d been enjoying it, just to make his point that she wasn’t welcome.

Point taken,
thought Lily, getting tired of all this. But, finally, she was granted an audience.

She went and sat in the armchair opposite Mrs Blunt. Mrs Blunt looked at her as if she was wondering why she was here.

Yeah,
thought Lily.
Me too.

‘I don’t want her upset,’ said the son, removing the tea tray and going off into the kitchen with it, where he crashed the plate and cup into the sink.
And fuck you too,
thought Lily.

The birds sang on, irritatingly loudly

‘Do you let them out much?’ asked Lily, unable to stop herself. She was surprised at how distressed it made her feel, to see them caged there.

‘They don’t like to come out,’ said Mrs Blunt. ‘Do you, little ones?’ she cooed at the birds. ‘I open the door, but they don’t come out,’ she told Lily.

Lily could understand that. Inside was safe. Outside–who knew?

‘Mrs Blunt,’ she said, ‘can you tell me what happened with Alice?’

‘You won’t get any sense out of her,’ shouted the son from the kitchen.

Lily looked at Mrs Blunt. She didn’t look stupid, only old. And she had used the phone and given Lily her address with no difficulty at all.

‘Alice,’ Lily repeated clearly. ‘I went to see her.’ She hesitated, looking assessingly at the old woman. ‘Mrs Blunt, I wasn’t entirely truthful with you on the phone. I
am
–I mean I was–related to Leo King. I was…married to him.’

Mrs Blunt stared at her. ‘But…they said his wife shot him. She got sent down for it.’

‘I didn’t do it, Mrs Blunt.’

‘Hold
on
a minute.’ The son came full-speed in from the kitchen. Before Lily knew what was happening, he’d grabbed the back of her collar and hauled her out of the chair she was sitting in. Lily’s heart shot straight up into her throat with the shock of it. The budgies screeched and hurtled around the cage, flinging themselves against the bars. Feathers drifted around like a Christmas snow scene. Mrs Blunt cried out as Lily dangled, her feet off the ground.

‘You’re
her,
you’re that fucking psycho,’ he yelled, shaking her like a dog with a rat.

‘Malcolm!’ yapped Mrs Blunt.

He froze. Mrs Blunt was staring at him. After a tense second or two, he dropped Lily.

‘She’s a headcase,’ said Malcolm defensively.

Lily gulped and tried to get her wind back. He’d startled her badly. She sank back into the chair and kept her attention focused on the old lady.

‘That man,’ said Mrs Blunt, her gummy mouth working with emotion, ‘Leo King. He was bad. He ruined our Alice.
Ruined
her.’

‘Yeah,’ said the son, nodding sharply and still glaring down at Lily. ‘You’re a bad lot, all of you.’

Oh fuck me,
thought Lily, trying to get her heart rate back to normal.
Wouldn’t it be easier to keep a bloody Rottweiler than to have this oversized idiot about the place?

‘You were inside for years, that right?’ the son was going on, his expression sneering as he stared at Lily. ‘You done him, that’s it, right? Well–bloody good job too. Wished I’d done it myself, lots of times. He upset our Alice.’

‘And just when we thought Alice was getting on better, too,’ said Mrs Blunt. ‘What with the not-eating and everything.’

‘She was anorexic?’

Mrs Blunt’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. ‘She went off the rails, our Alice.’

‘She was fucking mental,’ snorted the son. ‘Always was, always will be.’

And now you’re flavour of the month, right?
thought Lily, glancing at him.

‘You your mum’s full-time carer?’ asked Lily.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Lily shrugged. Nice cosy job, no getting
up for work in the mornings. Just look after your old mum, hold her like a prize trophy, because your sister was mental and you were top of the heap. Sibling rivalry with a particularly nasty edge to it.