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If you enjoyed BLOOD SISTER, look out for the gripping new novel in the FLESH AND BLOOD trilogy
BLOOD MOTHER
1972
Babs is a girl in trouble. But when she falls for charmer Stanley Miller the trouble gets worse. Much worse.
Coming February 2017
Read on for an exclusive sneak peek.
Blood Mother: Sneak Peek
1972
‘You’re a whore! And a murderer!’
As if the spitting rage coming from the normally quiet and gentle Doctor McDaid was not enough, there was worse to come. Babs Wilson had, unfortunately, left the door to his surgery open as she fled out of it back into his waiting room so that several rows of patients could all hear him tearing a strip off her.
A few minutes earlier she had been sitting among them, waiting her turn, fists clenched white, hoping against hope that there was some mistake in the test results she’d got yesterday. In his surgery McDaid had soon killed that off; fear and last-minute hope turned to horror and a thin film of sweat appeared on her face. Then, when he turned on her in fury, she’d gone into shock. Now she stood in front of the other patients like an actor who’d forgotten her lines.
Some of her audience looked away in embarrassment, while others watched her with curiosity. Among them were several proper gossips who were already eagerly trying to work out what was going on so they could spread the word. She could imagine what their malicious patter would sound like once it started doing the rounds: ‘Did you hear about the Wilson girl? I was down the quack’s when Doctor McDaid called her a whore and a murderer. Old Jim McDaid was in a right two and eight, I can tell you. I wonder what that was about. As if we didn’t know . . .’ Babs caught the eye of the Jackson woman, aka Dirty Laundry Jackson, who lived on her street. She’d be straight to work on the gossip mill, no doubt adding her own poisonous flavour and flesh to the story. The old bitch.
Babs was eighteen, a proud girl from a proud family. Her father had always told her to keep her head up and walk tall, no matter what. So she raised her head, stared down the gawpers and tried to walk tall. But when everyone heard the doctor call out again, to no one in particular, ‘Whore! Murderer! The shame of her honest family!’ she caved. Her shoulders sagged and teardrops stung her cheeks.
The receptionist called out, ‘Mrs Donovan? Doctor McDaid will see you now. Could you remember to close the surgery door on your way in?’ Then she gestured at Babs to tell her to sling her hook. Babs moved with gathering speed.
Out on New Road in Whitechapel, she pulled in gasps of air. Without realising it, she found herself wandering into the traffic. A car slammed on its brakes and squealed to a halt a few inches short of her. The driver shook his head and pointed at his eyes before shaking his head again and driving round her. For a brief moment, Babs wished the motor had hit her at speed and dragged her down the road into oblivion, because she was a young woman in Big Trouble. In fact she was in Big Trouble twice over.
She might have been able to cope with one or the other but not both. She couldn’t go home to her parents’ house and she couldn’t go and see her friends. But as she tramped the streets of the East End, she realised she didn’t have to. She would just go and see Nev straightaway. He would sort her out. It was almost his catchphrase. ‘There’s nothing I can’t sort out, baby. Nothing – you only have to ask and I make it happen.’
She hadn’t seen Nev for a week or more. He was busy at the moment and couldn’t fit her in. But she was proud of how busy he was. He wasn’t a lazy bloke like some of the lads she’d grown up with. No, her Nev had prospects. Ambition. Perking up without realising it, she began the trek, crossing over Commercial Road, towards the Bad Moon boozer in Shadwell where Nev held court most lunch times, although he’d never taken her there himself. He would sort things out. Then she whispered out loud to no one, ‘He’ll have to, won’t he?’
Nev was Babs’ fiancé. Of course it wasn’t official like; Nev didn’t do ‘official’. He didn’t buy engagement rings or hold celebration parties; that wasn’t his style. He was his own man who went his way and lived by nobody’s rules but his own. That was one of the things she loved about him. But it was ‘understood’ that they were engaged. When she stopped outside jewellers and gave lingering glances at the array of silver and gold rings, Nev would squeeze her arm and say, ‘No need to rush things, baby. We’re happy as we are. All in good time. Everything comes to him who stands and waits.’
So she’d waited. And waited. And waited.
When Rosie Wilson clocked old Ma Jackson coming down her street, wearing her trademark black hairnet, she picked up speed so she could get into her house before the evil old crone collared her and wasted her time spreading the malicious natter that she specialised in. The big slob of a woman was legendary for sticking her snout – misshapen and red from years of stout and gin – into any and everything that wasn’t her business.
Rosie always wore her headscarf when she went out because it was proper for a woman of her age, just like her George wore his tie without fail. The Wilsons were a respectable family, unlike many of those who lived in the streets behind the London Hospital in Whitechapel. That’s why she didn’t care for back-fence talk. Besides, most of Dirty Laundry Jackson’s was made up anyway. But the old dear was too quick for her. As Rosie got her key out, Jackson caught her on the doorstep.
‘Hello, Rosie love. Long time no speak. How’s the family? Everything alright?’ Then she added with a snide smirk, ‘How’s your girl Babs getting on? Everything OK?’
Rosie looked in the old woman’s spiteful, watery eyes. Jackson had the manners of a door-to-door salesman. She was that annoying. Babs cut her short. ‘Yeah, we’re very well, thank you, and Babs is fine. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .’
But Jackson wasn’t fobbed off so easily. She was an expert at this game. ‘Oh that’s good, that’s very good. So Babs is alright then, is she?’
Rosie pursed her lips, annoyed as hell that this woman wouldn’t take her loathsome business elsewhere. ‘Yes, Babs is fine. I just told you.’ She turned the key in the lock.
Jackson moved in for the kill. ‘Are you sure? You know me, dear, I don’t like to spread gossip . . .’
Rosie interrupted with leaden sarcasm, ‘No, I know you don’t.’
‘. . . But I was down Doctor McDaid’s this morning and your Babs was there having a right old barney with the Doc. He was in a fair old state, thought he was going to burst a blood vessel for sure. Effing and jeffing at her, he was, while your girl gave it back to him like a proper fishwife. He was calling her all sorts of vile names that I wouldn’t like to repeat, dear – then Babs marches out of the surgery giving him the old Harvey Smith.’ She rolled her eyes dramatically. Rosie couldn’t imagine her darling Babs sticking two fingers up at anyone, like that show jumper Harvey Smith had done the year before.
But Ma Jackson cracked on. ‘I’ve never seen the like in my life. So I thought to myself, there’s something not quite Kosher here; I mean old man McDaid is always as quiet as a mouse and your Babs is such a nice girl . . . usually.’
Rosie kept it zipped. The mud that this poisonous old trout liked to sling around was always embroidered – though sometimes, just sometimes, there was a root of God’s honest truth in there somewhere. But Rosie found this particular bollocks story impossible to believe on any level.
Fortunately, the two women were interrupted by the appearance of a striking girl dressed in flared slacks, a ch
eese cloth blouse and platform heels.
‘Hello Mrs Wilson, is Babs in?’
‘Hello Denise – no, she’s out I’m afraid.’ Denise Brooks was her Babs’ best mate and Rosie liked her. She was a sweet girl, unlike many of the young ones around here who were growing into loud-mouthed replicas of their parents. The only problem with Denise was her unfortunate ‘lights on but no one at home’ expression.
Rosie could see that Ma Jackson was eagerly hoping that this new arrival would shed some light on the incident at the doctor’s and was disappointed when Denise looked surprised and said, ‘Oh? That’s a shame; she said she’d be in. I thought we were going to the pictures later to see the ‘Steptoe and son’ film. Can you tell her I called?’
Rosie nodded and the girl turned and walked back in the direction she’d come.
Ma Jackson put the needle back on her stuck record. ‘So, Babs alright then? You know me, if there’s a problem and I can help in any way . . .’
Rosie pushed the front door open. ‘I think you must have got the wrong end of the stick. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Of course, dear.’
Rosie closed the front door behind her. Her husband did shift work and was dozing in his armchair in the sitting room. With a mixture of alarm and anger, she prodded him and asked, ‘Have you seen Babs today? Did she say she was going down Doctor McDaid’s?’
Her husband shrugged his shoulders. ‘No, I haven’t. What’s she doing that for anyway? She’s not ill, is she?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
Her husband closed his eyes and turned his head away. Rosie walked around the house pretending to do a few things before marching back into the front room and shouting, ‘Where the hell is Babs anyway?’
Even before she pushed open the door of the Bad Moon pub, gut instinct told Babs her fella wasn’t there. There were only a few punters inside, a stocky barman and a busty, hard-faced landlady wiping down the surfaces. As soon as she reached the bar, the landlady stopped polishing and asked, ‘What can I get you, love?’ But she didn’t seem very pleased with her new customer. The Bad Moon was a bloke’s pub and Nev always took her somewhere else.
‘Has Nev been in today?’ Babs knew her voice sounded desperate, but she couldn’t hold her emotions back.
‘Nev? Don’t know any Nevs.’
‘Yeah, you know – Neville.’
‘Oh, him.’ The landlady looked at her with sympathy. Babs’ stomach rolled. ‘No, I haven’t seen him around for a while.’
Babs’ desperation grew as the other woman got back on with her cleaning. While there was some hope she’d kept things under control, but this was her first port of call and already hope was draining away.
‘What do you mean you haven’t seen him?’
The landlady looked back up, her eyes as tough as stone. ‘What I say – I ain’t seen him. It’s not a very complicated sentence, is it?’
Babs clenched her fists. ‘You’re a liar. He’s always in here. I know.’
The other woman put her dishcloth down and placed her palms on the bar. Her fingers twitched ever so slightly, showcasing knuckles that said she knew a thing or two about the hard knocks of life. ‘Look, love, I’m not taking any lip from a slip of a girl like you. He’s not here and we haven’t seen him for a while. Now – do you want to order a drink or what? Otherwise I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
Babs looked around at the patrons nervously. They were looking back at her in the same way as Doctor McDaid’s patients earlier.
She left.
So she never saw the barman shift up to the landlady and ask, ‘Who was that?’
‘Some dopey bird looking for Neville,’ she answered, pulling out a Virginia Slim and lighting up.
And Babs never saw the barman burst into laughter. ‘Silly bitch. Her and half the other scrubbers in the East End.’
Once she hit Commercial Road again, Babs caught a bus to Limehouse. When she’d first met Nev, he’d had a pad there. In fact, it was there that they’d first had sex, later on the same night she’d met him. She’d gone up to the Reno nightclub in Stoke Newington with her friend Denise as they’d heard they had a classier clientele than the usual wide boys, spivs and pretend bank robbers they met on a night out in the East End. At first, it seemed what they’d heard wasn’t true, but that was before she met Nev. He hadn’t seemed that interested but when she turned him down for a dance, he suddenly became very interested indeed. Nev wasn’t the kind of bloke who took refusals lightly. He spent the rest of the night pursuing her and chatting her up. Once he had his big strong arms wrapped around her for a slow dance in the small hours, she didn’t remember making any more decisions. She followed him in a dreamlike state to a cab and then to his flat and then to his bedroom.
She’d had other guys, of course, but he was different. He was tall, he was strong and he was cool. He didn’t show off or play act because he didn’t need to. The hard boys in the Reno all got out of the way for him. The manager and the bouncers all knew him by name. So she knew no geezers were going to lean out of a car window and shout, ‘Oi darlin, show us your tits!’ while Nev was around. Not if they wanted to keep a matching pair of ears. He was polite, he was protective and he had good manners. And as guys like that were at a premium down her neck of the woods she wasn’t going to let him go without a fight.
So the morning after the Reno, after she’d waited patiently for him to arrange to see her again, she got angry when she was finally forced to ask, ‘Are we going out together then or what?’ – and he didn’t seem to understand the question. She got even angrier when he said nothing in reply. So she’d yelled, ‘I’m not a fucking tart, Neville’ so loudly that the neighbours must have heard.
He’d gifted her with his one hundred watt smile. ‘Yeah – sure we’re going out.’
Afterwards, she apologised to him for getting the nark. It was obvious to her later that he was just upset she’d even asked the question in the first place. And that was the first excuse she’d made for her new boyfriend.
As she looked out of the bus window at the estate in Limehouse, she realised in the pit of her guts that she’d been making excuses for him ever since.
She’d never seen the estate he lived on in daylight before. It was one of those old style thirties estates, on its last legs, looking dirty and dingy. She walked up to the fourth floor where the flat was. At first Nev had claimed it was his place but later he’d admitted that he was looking after it for a friend who was on remand for something that he totally and absolutely hadn’t done. Of course, she believed him. She knew Nev wasn’t at the flat anymore but kept her fingers crossed that he had left a forwarding address.
Whoever was occupying the flat now had a poster in the kitchen window that said, ‘Demand the Impossible!’ so she guessed they were squatters. The same poster had been in the window of a squat on the street where she lived with her mum and dad. That was before the Rozzers had come round and dragged the squatters out by their long, greasy hair, giving them a good kicking on the street before they’d been chucked in the back of a Black Maria.
The lock on the flat in front of her had been kicked off and replaced with cardboard. It was a squat alright.
Babs tapped on the door. It was opened slightly by a young man with long, straggly blonde hair nearly down past his nipples. He wore flared jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m Neville’s fiancé. He used to live here. Have you got a forwarding address?’ Babs realised how stupid she sounded, standing at the door to this flat, on this estate, asking for a forwarding address for her ‘fiancé’.
‘Never heard of him . . .’ The door slammed shut. But a few moments later it opened again, more widely this time. ‘Neville, you say? Wait there a minute.’ The freak disappeared before returning with a handful of mail. He passed it to Babs without a word and the door shut again.
As she slowly made her way downstairs like a mourner at a f
uneral, she quickly scanned the front of each envelope – all addressed to Neville but with various surnames. It was bad enough finding out her boyfriend maybe wasn’t who he said he was, but she was in for another shocker when she tore open each letter and looked inside. They were final demands, summonses and threatening letters about unpaid loans and overdrafts. Nev had always told her he was ‘in business’. That he had various ‘irons in the fire’. That he was looking at ‘investment options’. Now it was clear why he was so well dressed and could afford such expensive things. He wasn’t actually paying for anything but living on the never-never.
Then there were the postcards. She’d cried no tears since her visit to Doctor McDaid hours earlier. Now they erupted again. But this time they were acid ones that stung her face.
‘Hi Nev! Found a great spot for some nudey sunbathing! Can’t wait to get back and show you my new all over tan. And I mean all over! Loads of love! Tania!!!’
Another one from Petra in West Berlin.
‘Baby! Course finish next week. I’m in London from Monday. I call. Petra XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ps but please don’t call me Nazi anymore, yes?’
She checked the postmarks on the cards. They’d both been written after she’d met Nev at the Reno club.
All those nights the little bastard was ‘busy’ or doing ‘business’. Or ‘seeing his family’. Of course he never asked her to meet his family. It seemed that Nev had taken the same view as Doctor McDaid all along – she was a whore. What a proper fucking moron she’d been. And worse, what a fucking moron he must have thought she was.
When she got down to the courtyard below, she scattered the envelopes and letters in the gutter. She took the postcards, tore them into tiny pieces, spat on them and threw them on the ground before grinding them with her heel in fury.
Blood Sister: A thrilling and gritty crime drama Page 40
