The Graft (7 page)

But it was much easier when it was someone else’s family in the frame and not your own. It was simple to make sweeping judgements when it didn’t really affect you personally.

Sonny Boy had always ruined everything for himself and there had been nothing she could do about it. He had stolen from a young age, even from her. He had lied, cheated, taken whatever he had wanted. She knew all that, no one knew it better than she did. But there was also kindness in him, real goodness.

Her husband Solomon said Verbena had been taken in by Sonny’s big eyes and poor-little-me act, but she knew she had connected with that boy like no one else had. And Jude’s lifestyle had affected him. How could it not? He was always smoking dope, the scourge of the young people today. He had seen it all his life with his own mother. Got a problem? Pop a pill, inject some happiness into your arm, smoke yourself happy.

Verbena hated drugs, yet somehow she understood Jude’s reliance on them. Jude used them as a crutch and she always felt that if Jude had let herself be herself she would not have found the world such a scary place, and neither would her son.

But that was in the past, and the past was best left where it was.

She sipped her tea and waited for the call that would tell her Sonny Boy was finally gone. She wouldn’t cry, not until she was completely alone.

Verbena prided herself on her strength. If only everyone else could live their lives properly, how different the world would be.

 
James and Nicholas Junior were settled into school and Nick was back in Essex. He drove off a narrow country lane in Dunton, bumping slowly along an unmade track until he came to a building site.

Getting out of the car, he stood for a while observing the frenetic scene around him. Nick was behind this development of six large detached executive properties containing everything from hot tubs to gyms. They were to be on a private gated estate and had all been sold off plan. They were at least a year away from completion but already the houses looked good.

His ganger Joey Miles walked over to him.

‘Didn’t expect to see you.’

Nick smiled.

‘Well, here I am. I had to get away for a while . . .’

Two of the brickies saw him and waved. One shouted, ‘Good on yer, Mr Leary. That little bastard got all he asked for.’

Nick didn’t answer.

Joey saw the expression on his boss’s face and felt angry with the boy who had caused it.

‘Everyone’s on your side, Nick. I mean, you never asked him to rob you, did you? If I got up in the middle of the night and some bastard was in my house robbing me, I’d have done the same. Anyone would.’

Nick looked down at the stocky balding man who had worked for him for years and said, ‘But you didn’t do it, did you? I did.’

Joey patted him on the back.

‘Look, it was on the cards with him. Someone was going to aim him out of it one day, he was scum. A burglar and a creeper from a kid. It’s been all over the papers about him, little fucker, he was. No matter what his family say about him being a nice boy, he wasn’t fucking robbing them, was he? It would have been a different story if he was, I bet ya. Thieving little bastard . . .’

Nick closed his eyes.

‘Leave it out, Joey, eh? Just tell me what’s going on with the houses and then I’ll get off.’

Joey walked with him to his car and told him all the relevant news. As Nick was getting in his Mercedes he said, ‘I mean it, Nick, you can’t hold yourself responsible. You did what any decent man would have done. You protected your own. Get over it.’

Nick nodded.

As he drove away Joey watched him sadly. Nick Leary was a good bloke. Now thanks to that boy’s stupidity he was paying a terrible price for looking out for his own family.

The world had gone mad.

 
Jude Hatcher walked into her flat and sank down on to the sofa in the living room. It was so quiet without her son.

She closed her eyes and pictured Sonny Boy as he lay dying in her arms. She would have held him all day and night if the urge had not taken hold of her. She opened her bag and took out her kit.

She laid it on her lap and stared at the small tin that held all she needed for oblivion. She heard Tyrell come in just after she had boiled her fix on a spoon. He watched her from the doorway as she injected it slowly into her left arm. Her veins had collapsed and the bruising was vicious.

The smell of it was sweet in the air. Sighing, he went through to the chaos that passed for a kitchen and put the kettle on. He opened the window and tried to air the place before going through the lounge and down the hallway towards his son’s bedroom. This room always amazed him. It was small, but usually spotlessly clean. Today, though, the drawers had been turned out and the whole place was a mess. He guessed rightly that at some point Jude had searched it for money or valuables. Tyrell tidied it all up without thinking.

As he looked into the drawers in the scratched dressing table he saw his son’s whole life and felt the urge to cry once more. Designer underwear when they rarely had any food in the house. Expensive tops hanging in the narrow wardrobe, which told him Jude had not looked in there yet or it would have been empty except for a few wire coat hangers. She always sold off anything of value they possessed. It had hurt her son that even his clothes weren’t safe from her and her constant quest for money.

Tyrell wondered what his boy had wanted from that large house in the country, wondered when the urge to rob it had taken him over. He had thought about it so much, but still could not work out what had made his son choose that place to rob.

Sonny had always been strictly small-time; he had been a hustler, a kiter. He wasn’t into heavy-duty robbery. Unless he had progressed over the last year from a young tearaway into a hardened criminal. He was just seventeen, for fuck’s sake!

Tyrell went back to the kitchen and made the tea, scrubbing two mugs back to cleanliness before filling them. The whole place was filthy.

He went into the lounge once more with the tea, but Jude was gone from him. She was lying back in the chair, staring into space.

‘Like old times, eh, Jude?’

The sarcasm was completely lost on her, as he knew it would be.

 
Tammy wandered round her house aimlessly. She saw the expensive curtains, the hand-made carpets and carefully chosen antiques.

She remembered her home when she was a kid. A council flat with coats on the bed, the constant smell of fried food and a father who would shout the house down when he got back from the pub. He still did that except he owned the pub now, thanks to Nick, and was slowly drinking himself to death in it.

Her mother had always been running off with someone, it was how she was, yet Dad always wanted her back. She had been round the turf more times than a Grand National winner and still he wanted her.

Nick had bought the pub for him. He had been so good to them all. He had come from the same road as them, gone to the same school as Tammy, had started courting her when they had been twelve and thirteen respectively.

He had worked like a demon all his life. Even then he had had a paper round, a milk round, and worked the market stalls. It was the markets that had got them the first real money they had ever possessed. Her Nick could sell a fridge to an Eskimo. He had the gab all right, and she had loved being the girl he had chosen.

Now, as she looked around her home, she was aware of just how much he had done for them all. The kitchen alone had cost over sixty grand. It had everything a kitchen could have, and was also the size of most people’s houses. It had a family area built round an inglenook fireplace that was twenty-five feet by eighteen alone. And that was without the actual kitchen itself or the utility areas.

There was an indoor as well as an outdoor pool, and stabling for ten horses. The whole place was huge and it was tasteful and it was hers. She wondered why she had never really appreciated it before. Nick’s old mum ran the place for her, and Tammy was glad to let her get on with it. It was too big for her to worry about, and she was out more often than not.

Now she was trying to imagine what it would be like to be without it, wondering for the first time if that boy had tried to rob them through envy, because they had it all and he didn’t.

But he didn’t know that they had come from nothing themselves. How hard the road had been before they had finally cracked it. And her Nick, whatever his faults, had worked day and night to get them all a better life. She should appreciate him more, she knew that. She meant to, but somehow when they were alone it all deteriorated because they didn’t know how to be alone any more. Those days were gone, the days when they’d waited with bated breath for each other. Not that Nick had ever been much of a one for sex anyway. He was always too busy. It wasn’t until her first affair that Tammy had realised what she had been missing.

It had blown her mind, what that first fella had done to her, and she had loved it. Had finally realised what her mates had been hammering on about for all those years. If she was honest with herself that was when her dissatisfaction with everything at home had set in. Suddenly having the biggest house and the newest car meant nothing, because she had quickly realised that that kind of sex kept people together even when they hated one another. She had tried the new tricks she had learned on Nick and he had gone ballistic, wanting to know where she had got them. She had told him from women’s magazines and such like, but she thought he knew.

That was what hurt. She suspected he had sussed her out but, instead of giving her a clump, he had ignored her even more.

Perhaps it was because the big I am, the big womaniser, knew he was useless in the kip. Not that Tammy had ever told him that, of course, she wasn’t that stupid. Yet she still loved him. In her own way adored him.

He was lying on the chaise-longue in the dressing room off their bedroom and he had had a drink, that much was obvious.

‘You all right, Nick? I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘They turned the machine off, Tams, the boy’s gone.’

She knelt beside him then and took his hand.

‘No one can blame you, Nick, you only did what any man would have done.’ She was surprised to see he had been crying. ‘No one can blame you, darlin’.’

She could smell the beer and whisky on his breath and guessed he had started out in the pub before coming home to finish the job properly.

She knew him so well.

He pushed her away gently and sat up. Putting his head into his hands, he groaned, ‘I can blame myself though, Tams. And I will, until the day I die.’

He was sobbing now, his huge shoulders quaking with emotion. She hugged him to her, the big man, the big I am, reduced to crying like a baby. For some reason this disturbed her more than the boy’s death.

Chapter Four

‘Given the facts of the night in question, we at the Crown Prosecution Service have decided that we shall take no action against Mr Nicholas Leary. It is not in the public interest. We feel that he was a victim of circumstances beyond his control and we offer our sympathies to the family of Sonny Hatcher. Thank you.’

The spokeswoman walked off camera. It was obvious she’d been nervous. Her voice had quavered and her hands clutched her papers until the knuckles were white. Sky News put the statement out live and Tammy watched it with relief. It was over then.

Suddenly the screen was filled with a picture of Judy Hatcher and her shrill voice burst out of it.

‘Murderers! You’re all murderers. You owe me, Leary. You owe me for my boy’s life.’

The screen was filled with the image of the grieving woman and her grey screaming mouth. Tammy sat up abruptly in the bath, causing the water to wash all over the marble flooring. Although they had been told the night before what action was going to be taken, until she had seen it with her own eyes she was not inclined to believe it. Now this woman was spoiling it all.

‘My son was murdered, he wasn’t doing any harm to anyone. He never owned a gun in his life.’

Jude sounded lucid for once. Only those who knew her well realised just how capable she could be when the fancy took her. Shame it never lasted for any length of time. She was being hustled from the room by two policemen as if she was the one in trouble. Tammy could see the toll the death of her son had taken on the woman and felt a reluctant twinge of sympathy for her.

She soon pushed it away.

The Sky reporter was saying that Judy Hatcher was under the care of a psychiatrist and that she was an ardent advocate of her son’s innocence. He said it in such a way as to make it apparent to anyone listening that Sonny Hatcher was a dangerous young man and only his mother was unaware of that fact.

Tammy couldn’t listen to it a second longer.

She lay back in her enormous bath and switched over to ITV 2 for the lunchtime edition of
Emmerdale
. She wasn’t watching it, but the sound of the voices was soothing. She took a large gulp of her Chardonnay and a long drag on her cigarette.

Sod that woman! What did they owe her? From what Tammy had heard she was a heroin addict, had brought her son up on her own and made him into the thief he had become. Tammy’s eyes strayed to the small mirror compact full of cocaine she kept near her at all times. Her own hypocrisy didn’t faze her at all.