Jen shook her head and smiled. She’d give him ten out of ten for persistence. This lad wasn’t giving up. Her mum went off to the kitchen to give her daughter time to inspect the flowers. When she came back, she was in the mood to read the riot act. ‘So, are you going out with him or what?’
Jen wrinkled her nose. She paused before saying, ‘Doubt it.’
Babs threw her arms in the air, disgusted. ‘What’s the matter with you? What’s he got to do? Turn up in a Rolls with flashing neon lights? I think you owe him one night out for the bouquet at least; they must have cost a bomb.’
‘I’m not a tart.’
Her mum was genuinely baffled. ‘I don’t get it. He’s nice looking. He’s got get-up-and-go. He’s charming and respectful to your old mum. He’s got pots of dosh and he’s going places. He’s treating you like Elizabeth blinkin’ Taylor – despite you giving him the brush-off – not like some tom on Commercial Street, on her knees for twenty nicker a time. There’s so many flowers here, we haven’t got enough vases and jam jars to put them all in. You know what the world is like for women like us, don’t you? You do realise there’s not an endless procession of good, young men to choose from? My mum was right: if a woman can find a decent man in a place like this, she should stick with him. And you won’t even go on one date?’ Her mother broke off as something caught her attention in the doorway. ‘Oi – where the hell do you think you’re going?’
Tiffany had reappeared and was shoving on her parka. She flipped the hood up. ‘Out!’
‘No, you ain’t.’ Babs marched determinedly towards her. ‘You’re stopping in here you are.’
Babs’ youngest gave her the finger and then banged out of the front door.
Jen was too wrapped up in the flowers to take a blind bit of notice of the same old, same old drama exploding in the passageway. Of course her mum was right. Nuts might be a bit of a plum but he deserved a chance and one night out wasn’t going to kill her. She swept up the flowers in her arms and took them into the kitchen to find anything that would hold water. The scent began to cover the musty whiff that seemed to be built into the walls of these old flats. While sorting the flowers, she divided up the plus points of her new suitor. He was indeed handsome. Yes, he did seem to be ambitious and looked like he was doing alright for himself already. He was a laugh – in a rather naff kind of a way. He looked kind and it was a nice touch to bring her mum something. Even his loud clothes marked him off from the herd.
When she went back into the living room, Babs was waiting like a father in a maternity ward. ‘So?’
‘So what?’
Babs rolled her eyes. ‘Are you throwing him a lifeline or not?’
Jen began finding places to put the flowers. ‘Well, he is very nice, you’re right.’ Her mum burst into a joyful smile until her daughter said, ‘But I’m not going out with him.’
Babs’ face fell. ‘Why the effing hell not?’
Jen didn’t answer. Instead she handed her mother a ripped card she’d found in amongst the flowers. Although only some of it was left after it had been torn off, it had once clearly said: Grandad: Rest In Peace.
‘You again? What do you want?’ said Tiffany’s contact at the Pied Piper, not at all happy to see her. As he’d never given her his name and she’d never asked, in her head she’d christened him Man-donna. Although he hadn’t known she was coming she’d had no problems getting in this time, Man-donna obviously having given the nod to the door staff to let her in when she came calling.
Tiffany hadn’t expected to be called back to the gay hangout so soon, but she had arrived home to find a kid loitering outside, who she recognised as the runner for the guy she was ducking and diving for. He passed on the message that she was needed back up there, and since she was on her last legs, she paid the fare this time; she was too tired to be arsed doing any running.
‘I’m here to collect something,’ she told Man-donna boldly as they stood at the bar. The Bluebells’ ‘Young At Heart’ was softly playing in the background.
The man looked at her as if she were talking some language only she understood. ‘We haven’t got anything for you.’
That butterfly feeling Tiffany had got the first time she came here was back in her tummy. ‘Eh? That scrawny little prick on the estate told me you had.’
He stared coldly at her. ‘I don’t think so. Let me make a phone call. Why don’t you have a glass of something while you’re waiting?’
Tiffany ordered an absinthe cocktail but had to settle for a V&C when her linkman told her not to take the piss. She took her drink and hid in a corner to spy on the women in the other part of the bar, careful to avoid attracting their attention. No one noticed she was there and after a while, she relaxed a little and began to sneer mentally at all the fashion errors these women had put on display – until she remembered that she wasn’t really one to talk about fashion. She was a trainers and trackie girl with untrained hair. She could doll herself up when necessary but with her run-around social life, that wasn’t very often.
Man-donna seemed to be taking his time about it and Tiffany began to get brain-numbingly bored. She’d only taken on the gig because she thought it might liven up her deadbeat life a little; now she was starting to go off it. Carrying envelopes around for twenty a pop? There didn’t even seem to be much danger of going up against Old Bill, so it was all starting to look a bit pointless. Where was the excitement she craved? The adrenaline rush?
She recalled how amped she’d been when a boy up the cemetery had asked her if she was looking for work. The kid was always shooting his mouth off about being connected and so she guessed it would be a bit iffy. When the boy told her some man was offering her a job – no names asked – and fixed up a meeting with him in the Bad Moon in Shadwell, she was even happier. Not only did it look like serious trouble, it had the added bonus that her mum would go mental if she ever found out. But that was then. Now she was bored.
Man-donna was back. ‘Nope, nothing for you – so you can run along.’ He flicked the fingers of one hand in a shooing motion.
Tiffany cocked her head boldly at him. ‘Where’s me money?’
He looked down his nose at her as if she were something manky beneath his Doc Martens. ‘What money? You haven’t done anything.’
Tiffany showed her teeth. ‘I came here didn’t I? I want my score or I ain’t coming back and you can tell that fat bastard I said so.’
She got her twenty quid. When she left the pub, she noticed a saloon on the other side of the road parked on double yellow lines, watching the entrance. Like a lot of troubled kids, Tiffany had already developed a feral nose for trouble and she knew that’s what the two guys were. She turned tail and began to pace up the street in the opposite direction. She registered the sound of car doors slamming and footsteps behind her and broke into a run, but a few yards further down they were on her, taking an arm each.
One of them said, ‘We want a word with you.’
Tiffany began to make noise, screaming and shouting. ‘Get your dirty mitts off me or I’ll call the fucking cops.’
Keeping a firm grip on her with one hand, one of the guys reached into his jacket pocket and produced a card, which he shoved in her face. ‘There’s no need for that, young lady. We are the fucking police.’
Twelve
Dee got on with the next stage of roping John in. She’d spent the day working hard to impress John that she had the skills for the job he’d given her. She made sure she’d put on a bit more slap, especially lippy to give her full mouth that ‘it’s going to blow your brains around your knob’ look before she went to his office upstairs.
She shook her head back, opened John’s office door and was surprised to see that he wasn’t alone. There was a young man sporting a baseball cap just getting out of a chair. They looked at each other warily.
John announced, ‘Dee, this is Knobby, one of my guys. Does a little bit of . . .’ – he tapped his nose – ‘you know, for me.’
/> She knew alright, but still wasn’t sure about the particulars. She gave Knobby one of her killer smiles. ‘Well, I look forward to putting a drink or two on your tab one day soon.’
Knobby grinned back and then moved past her. Good, Dee thought, he wasn’t going to be an awkward customer.
She turned her full attention to John, took a seat and slowly folded her long legs, making her skirt slightly hitch up. She hoped he got an eyeful because she’d taken off her G-string in the Ladies. He listened patiently as she gave an account of her first day on the job. He might be listening but his eyes were doing something else – zeroing in on her boobs pushing against her top.
Atta boy, Johnny.
Dee kept her voice nice and smooth, not sexy though; it wouldn’t do for him to think she was some desperate slapper. She gave him a list of her new rules and the strict new regime she’d introduced to stop his staff taking the piss. Even though she was only supposed to be in charge of security, she’d taken the liberty of reviewing some of the other work going on in his joint and she wasn’t happy. She’d dished out a couple of final warnings and a sacking.
John was alarmed. ‘You can’t give people the push. That’s my job.’
Dee shuffled forwards in her chair, making her skirt ride up even further. ‘John, it was that little ginger bouncer bloke – Ian? He couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag and he’d be no good in a ruck. Plus, he’s a ginger – the punters can’t take someone like that seriously, can they? Let’s face it, as soon as someone sees a bloke like that manning the door, they’re going to start creasing up and I’m not going to put up with anyone sniggering at you.’
From the expression on John’s face she could see he didn’t like it. ‘I suppose . . . Although my mum – God rest her tender-hearted soul – was a red head. But in the future I want all that stuff run past my door first.’
Dee opened her dark eyes slightly in wide-eyed concern. ‘I want to take all that burden off you. You’re a top-class businessman with a lot of interests and that’s where you need to be keeping your eye, not supervising your staff. There’s no need to sweat the small stuff; I like to think that’s what I’m here for.’ Dee took what she called one of her Marilyn Monroe breaths – deep, throaty and extra long on the way out. ‘I expect you’ve got some important deals on the go and clients to arrange meetings with.’
This was her boss’s cue to start blabbing to her about what his deals were and who he might be dealing with, but John wasn’t going there. ‘OK, I appreciate it,’ was all he said.
Some other woman would have taken this as a crushing blow, but not Dee Clark. She’d learnt some tough and hard lessons during her motherless childhood and the biggest one was that if you were going to stand on the edge of the gutter saying pretty please, you were going nowhere soon. Begging wasn’t her style; taking was. And she realised that the taking of John was going to demand she have more than one card up her designer sleeve.
‘Now then,’ she said, ‘what about this girlfriend of yours?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Trish? What about her?’
‘Have you bought her flowers lately? Why don’t you let me sort that out for you?’
John was horrified. ‘Flowers? You off your trolley or what? She’ll think I’m serious.’
Dee widened her eyes again and shook her head in mock sympathy. ‘You don’t know much about ladies do you? Any cash you splash out on the ol’ blooms will be amply repaid between the sheets later on. You can’t go wrong with flowers. What’s her favourite?’
John didn’t know. Dee sighed. ‘Give me her address and I’ll order her some tomorrow. A nice display and then she can choose which ones she likes for next time.’
John wasn’t convinced about the flowers but still wrote down Trish’s address on a notepad. Dee took the paper, disguising her glee, folded it carefully and put it in her top pocket.
‘I know it will be my second day on the job tomorrow and all,’ Dee let out tentatively, ‘but I already had a prior arrangement sorted, so if it’s OK with you, boss, I’m going to need to leave early.’
She could instantly tell from the expression on his face that he didn’t like it. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear when I offered you the job; I’m looking for someone reliable.’
‘Alright, not a problem.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll just have to cancel babysitting for my mate. She’s had problems . . . You know what I mean?’ Shit, Dee wasn’t happy. She needed this time to get things set up. But she was going to have to find another way.
She made sure her bum did the business as she moved to the door. As she reached for the handle, John said grudgingly, ‘Take yourself off when you need to. But make this the last time, my girl.’
Dee left him with a fat grin on her face. When she got back downstairs she went into the bar area and made a phone call to a good friend of hers and asked if she could borrow her toddler tomorrow evening.
The cops had Tiffany up against the wall. ‘What’s your name then, young lady?’ one of them asked impatiently.
Thank fuck she’d hadn’t got an envelope, ID or anything illegal on her, Tiffany thought. Getting picked up by the Plod was the last thing she’d expected after leaving the Pied Piper. It could’ve screwed her over big time, but she knew they would find dick on her so she felt free to let rip at the two men.
‘Mind your own bizz.’
She slouched against the brickwork, her lip permanently curled. She hated the Old Bill; all they ever did was spoil her fun. If they were looking for respect they’d soon learn they’d come to the wrong girl.
A look passed between the two men. The one with the black hair and crooked nose got all sarky. ‘We’re police officers; anything’s our business when we suspect law breaking is going on.’
She pulled the pockets of her trackie bottoms inside out and showed them a handful of few coins and her tube ticket. ‘No weed, no car radios, no shooters – looks like you’ve drawn a blank, don’t it?’
The other cop snatched her train ticket and examined it. Now that made her upset, really upset. ‘Oi, you can’t take that off me; how the bloody hell am I supposed to get home?’
The cop gave her a hard, intense look that said he could do whatever the hell he liked. He was a big bastard and used his bulk to loom over her, but she wasn’t scared of him. ‘Give it a rest for goodness sake.’
He turned the ticket over. ‘Come up from Mile End have you? What are you doing up here then?’
Tiffany scoffed loudly. ‘It’s a free country; I can go where I like. Listen boys, you ain’t got nothing, have you? Now let me go.’
Officer Crooked Nose let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘What we’ve got, young lady, is that we’ve just seen you emerge from a pub down the road – the Pied Piper. You know what kind of pub that is, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. It’s a butch girl and benders pub. So what?’’
‘We’d like to know what a young girl of your age is doing hanging around in a place like that?’ He was about to add that she might be vulnerable to corruption in there, but he’d already decided, in Tiffany’s case it might be a bit late to worry about that.
‘I’m . . .’ She hesitated; sometimes she forgot how old she was pretending to be. ‘Twenty-one. Yeah, twenty-one. I can go where I like. What’s your problem with gay people anyway? They ain’t doing no harm. Wind your watch up boys, it’s 1993.’
The cop reluctantly handed her ticket back. ‘Name and address.’
‘You ain’t getting it,’ Tiffany said with huge satisfaction. She drummed her fingers against the wall like this was all getting ever-so boring now.
Big Bastard looked smug like he had her handcuffed and bang to rights. ‘We’ll take you down West End Central, stick you in a cell and wait for you to be reported missing. I’m sure your parents will be very interested to find out where you go when you’re up West.’
Tiffany couldn’t resist laughing her head off. ‘Do me a favour. No one’s seen my Dad since I was in nap
pies and it’ll be weeks before my mum notices I’m gone.’ She knew the last was a lie; at least she had a mum who gave two hoots about her, unlike many of her mates down the graveyard. These two idiots were living in another time zone, where kids grew up in families of 2.4 children and Dad set off to work with a briefcase and a bowler hat and Mummy Dearest stopped at home wearing an apron and marigolds cooking chicken casserole for the rest of her life. A woman in an apron on The Devil? She would probably be gunned down for looking like a freak.
The two cops withdrew slightly to confer. Tiffany suddenly noticed that Man-donna was standing outside another bar down the road intently watching proceedings as he sucked on a fag. But when he realised that she’d clocked him, he flicked the ciggie and headed back to the Pied Piper. The strange thing was, Tiffany decided, he hadn’t looked at all put out that the cops had grabbed her.
She turned her gaze back on to the Bill. One of them was going through the motions of calling into base and asking if a girl of Tiffany’s age had been reported missing. But she knew they were doing it for form’s sake. She was in the clear. If they banged up every stray teen they found in the West End they’d need to build a block the size of Trafalgar Square.
‘Alright, sweetheart,’ Big Bastard said. He slapped his hands onto the wall, either side of her head, crowding her in. Up close he was a terrifying-looking man; the type, she suspected, who would slit your throat in a dark alley, no questions asked. ‘We’re letting you off with a warning this time. If we see you round here again, especially anywhere near that pub, we’re going to run you in. Do you understand? And we’ll be looking out for you.’
Tiffany sneered, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ The devil suddenly got into her, making her eyes twinkle with merriment. ‘Like I said, I’m twenty-one and if I want to go into that pub and tongue the life out of some girl there, ain’t dick you can do about it. Dick? No I don’t suppose me and my girl will need one of those.’
Blood Sister: A thrilling and gritty crime drama Page 8
