Strangers

by Paul Finch

  Except … Lucy knew that that could not be the case.

  Somewhere overhead, a floorboard creaked.

  Followed by silence.

  ‘Mum!’ she hesitantly called. ‘You up there?’

  There was no reply, so Lucy ascended. Padding stealthily, hair prickling in that old familiar way from whenever she was entering the danger zone. Not that she felt especially vulnerable. She had a spare set of appointments in her bedroom wardrobe – another baton, more body-armour, an extra pair of cuffs. But it might be a matter of reaching them before the intruder could strike … if it was an intruder.

  She halted at the top.

  The doors to the bathroom and her own bedroom stood open. Dimness lay beyond them, but the door to her mother’s room was closed – and that seemed odd considering that no one else was supposed to be here. Quickfire thoughts raced through Lucy’s mind. There’d been no signs of forced entry downstairs, but that was no guarantee of anything; she’d hardly made a forensic recce of the doors and windows.

  There was nothing else for it.

  As quietly as she could, she edged into her room, opened the wardrobe, drew the Autolock Baton from the harness hanging inside and snapped it out to full length. Then she crept back to her mother’s bedroom door.

  It was only polite to knock, to let them know you were coming.

  Yeah … right.

  She kicked the door open and barged in, baton to shoulder as per the manual.

  ‘Whoever the fuck you are, stay …’

  But no one else was in there.

  She snapped the light on and scanned the bedroom, bewildered. It wasn’t much larger than her own; there were no niches or hiding places she couldn’t see from the doorway. Unless … inexorably, Lucy’s eyes were drawn to her mother’s wardrobe. She listened again, and fancied there was faint movement inside it: a rustle, as of clothing, another low creak.

  ‘What the hell …?’ Lucy crossed the room at speed, yanking the wardrobe open.

  Inside it, her mother – her sweet, elegant, ever dignified, always ladylike mother – was curled up at the bottom, regardless of the shoes she was crammed on top of or the garments draped over her from above. Her arms were wrapped around her knees; her shoulders trembled.

  Slowly, almost painfully, she turned an ashen face up to her daughter, its cheeks wet and smeared with mascara. She attempted a sad smile.

  ‘I knew it would be you.’ Cora’s voice was feeble, tearful. ‘I knew you weren’t supposed to come home tonight, I knew you were on duty till late … but I still knew it’d be you. You’re so much smarter than people think, you coppers, aren’t you … love?’

  ‘What’s …?’ Lucy felt her world cavorting around her. For a second she could barely speak. ‘What’s … what’s going on, Mum?’

  ‘I am so … so sorry,’ Cora said.

  Lucy reached down and, with some difficulty, helped her mother climb out.

  Yet once she was back on her own two feet, the older woman didn’t even look shamefaced to have been found the way she had. She sniffled again and dabbed at her face with a scrunched, sodden tissue – clearly she had been crying for some time – which she then tucked into her cardigan sleeve. With the swift eye of a professional, Lucy checked her top to toe. Cora was in her normal clothes. They hadn’t been damaged or disarrayed in any way, though Lucy hadn’t expected that they would. Her mother had not been attacked.

  ‘Who were you hiding from?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Oh …’ Cora sat on the bed. ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’ Despite everything, Lucy was genuinely taken aback.

  ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t come home early to look for trouble, Lucy.’ Cora’s tears hadn’t dried yet, but the look she now threw at her daughter was almost accusatory. ‘That’s why you’ve got that horrible club in your hand, isn’t it? Why you’ve got a face like thunder.’

  Suddenly self-conscious that she was armed in her parent’s presence, Lucy laid the baton on the sideboard. ‘I thought we might have an intruder.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for that, I suppose,’ Cora sighed. ‘I don’t know what to expect now either, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Mum, you need to start making sense.’

  ‘On reflection that might be easier said than done.’

  ‘Look …’ Lucy struggled to give voice to her confusion. ‘At this moment I have a very perplexing picture in my mind. Of someone approaching a certain house in Didsbury this afternoon …’

  Cora nodded, raised her tissue again and blew her nose.

  ‘And that person then looking furtively over her shoulder just as I was about to take a surveillance shot of her. But, I mean …’ Lucy laughed without humour. ‘I must’ve been dreaming that bit. Mustn’t I, Mum? Mustn’t I?’

  Very delicately, Cora wrapped her tissue and reinserted it into her sleeve. ‘You weren’t dreaming, and you know you weren’t.’

  ‘Yes, I know I wasn’t.’ Lucy’s tone stiffened. ‘What I don’t know is what the devil you were doing there. Frank McCracken is Manchester’s top gangster, or one of them. And you’re my mother. What in Christ’s name were you doing there?’

  ‘I knew you’d think I’d betrayed your trust,’ Cora said from the lounge armchair.

  She’d regained her composure somewhat, but now clung tenaciously to another twist of tissue, into which she continually sniffled. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Lucy stared at her from the middle of the room. She’d met enough people in her time who’d gone through trauma to know delayed shock when she saw it. But on this occasion, any sympathy she might feel – even for her own mother – had to be tempered by a hard-headed determination to find out what the Goddamn hell had been going on. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine how her mother might have finished up on Frank McCracken’s doorstep, unless she herself had left some classified paperwork lying around. Lucy knew that she hadn’t, but even if she had, it was surely inconceivable that her mother would pick it up and do something with it.

  ‘That’s why I felt so awful, so torn in my loyalties,’ Cora added. ‘That’s why I was hiding when you came home. But I was only half-hiding, wasn’t I, Lucy? I wasn’t actually frightened. It was more a case of me not thinking I could face you. Plus I wasn’t really sure what it was I’d done … by that I mean how it might work out. I just hoped it would somehow be for the best.’

  ‘Mum … what’s going on?’

  ‘I knew you’d find out, love … like I say, you coppers are cleverer than people think. So I just knew the moment I did that thing today … I could feel it in my bones that you’d find out … that you’d come back here already knowing about it. But even if you didn’t, I was going to own up … I couldn’t do what I did today, Lucy, and not tell you …’

  ‘Okay …’ Lucy tried to remain calm. ‘So tell me.’

  Cora’s voice became a plea. ‘Do you have any idea how much I worry about you, darling? I hate you being a police officer, literally hate it.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘It’s a dangerous world out there and I’m terrified of you getting hurt.’

  ‘The trouble is, Mum, I’m an adult and I make my own decisions.’

  ‘After what happened last time … that horrible incident in Borsdane Wood …’

  Lucy finally lost patience. ‘We’re not talking about last time, Mum!’ She couldn’t keep the whip-crack from her voice. ‘We’re talking about this afternoon.’

  ‘But that’s what this is all about. Don’t you get it?’ Cora remained seated, but was visibly tensing up again. Fresh tears seeped onto her cheeks. ‘Look … two days ago I was doing the laundry … when I found this indecently short little black-and-gold number.’

  ‘Yes, it’s mine …’

  ‘I know it’s yours. I also happen to know that it comes from the SugaBabes Club.’

  In the midst of everything else, this was a cannon ball to Lucy. It almost took the legs from under her.

  ‘Mum �
�?’ It barely came out a whisper. ‘How … how on Earth is it possible you know anything about SugaBabes?’

  ‘Because, my dear, I used to work there.’

  Cora said this simply, straightforwardly. As if it was the most obvious thing in the world. But for the next few heartbeats Lucy fancied the room was tilting upright. ‘Mum, if this is some … some kind of …’

  ‘Yes, I always joke about things like this!’

  ‘You worked at SugaBabes?’

  Cora held her daughter’s gaze. She suddenly seemed stronger than before, more in control. ‘This was the early 1980s, before you were born. But I wasn’t a prostitute, Lucy. SugaBabes was different in those days. It was a strip club.’

  ‘Oh well … that’s a load off …’

  ‘They are very different things.’ Now there was defiance in Cora’s voice.

  Lucy was still incredulous. ‘You’re telling me you were a stripper?’

  ‘I suppose you find that difficult to believe?’

  At first, Lucy didn’t know how to react. Being pragmatic, it would certainly explain a few things: her mother’s air of faded glamour, her mother’s dancer’s figure – which she still kept trim and shapely despite burying it in frumpish clothes; and on the subject of clothes, that neat little cocktail frock she’d produced out of thin air. It might also explain why she’d expressed such a lack of empathy for the kerb-crawlers killed by Jill the Ripper, but conversely, why she also found Lucy’s jokes about her flirting with the local vicar disgusting – not because she thought him unattractive, but maybe because she didn’t think herself worthy.

  ‘Yes. I was a stripper,’ Cora confirmed, still defiant. ‘And I used to work at SugaBabes. It wasn’t exactly respectable. But back in those days there was a strict no-interaction with the audience rule. It wasn’t like one of these awful lap-dancing places you get now. We got up on stage, we did our bit, we went off again. We were proper dancers too. We gave them a real show …’

  ‘Good God almighty!’ Lucy exploded. ‘What in hell am I listening to here?’

  ‘I’m trying to explain!’ Cora jumped to her feet. ‘This is tough for me too … so you’ll just have to soldier on and listen, alright?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I was a young woman at the time. I had various problems in those days, which I’ve now put behind me … but I didn’t see eye to eye with your grandparents much. So after I left home, which was all pretty acrimonious and unpleasant, I took any job I could get.’

  ‘And where the devil does Frank McCracken fit into this?’

  ‘SugaBabes was a bit dodgy even then,’ Cora confessed. ‘Not as dodgy as it is now. It had a front door for one thing. It was an official licensed premises. It wasn’t so bad a place. But there was an underworld presence, and Frank worked there as … well, I suppose you’d call him a low-level enforcer.’

  ‘An enforcer?’ Just hearing her mother use such technical jargon felt as if it would knock Lucy off her feet.

  ‘He wasn’t even that important. A bouncer, really. Lucy … you have to understand, we were just cogs in a machine. We had no status. So we used to chat. We became friends.’

  ‘And you’ve stayed friends? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? After all this time?’

  ‘I’ve had no contact with him at all since I left. The instant you were born, I walked away from that sordid existence. Has there been a single hint during your life of anything improper? Have we lived any way other than respectably?’

  Lucy couldn’t reply; she didn’t think they had, but now she was wondering.

  ‘But …’ Cora sighed again, ‘there are some things that can come back to haunt you. I might be a boring middle-aged woman now, who spends all day loading supermarket shelves, Lucy … but I’m not blind. I read the papers. I’ve seen Frank’s name mentioned from time to time. It’s plain as mustard that he’s gone up in the world.’

  ‘If you can call it that,’ Lucy scoffed. ‘You know what I saw him do the other night?’

  ‘I don’t need to hear because I saw him do it plenty of times myself. We got rough customers back in the day. Drunks, football hooligans. It was Frank’s job to sort them out, and he used to … boy, did he used to.’

  ‘Jesus, mother, you almost sound impressed.’

  ‘What young girl wouldn’t have her head turned by that kind of thing? A bloke who’s handsome, who’s always smartly turned out, who can deal with the bad guys …’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Lucy shouted. ‘He’s not James Bond!’

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ Cora shouted back. ‘That’s why I’ve kept him at arm’s length all this time. I had no idea SugaBabes was still operating. But when I saw that uniform in the wash, I recognised it immediately. The waitresses used to wear that same livery back in my day … and I know you’ve been working undercover and I know you’ve been rubbing shoulders with ladies of the night. It wasn’t difficult putting two and two together, Lucy. So … well, I made a couple of enquiries.’

  ‘Enquiries?’

  ‘With a few old friends.’

  ‘Old friends, I see.’ Lucy chuckled bitterly. ‘So when you just said you’d put that life behind you … it was basically a downright lie?’

  ‘Lucy, you can’t just un-know people. You don’t lose touch with folk who were close friends during bad times, no matter how pious you might feel about what you did back then. Anyway, they confirmed my worst fears – that SugaBabes was still going but that now it was a high-class brothel. And …’ Cora’s emotions began to overwhelm her again. Yet more tears flowed. ‘I … just couldn’t stand the thought of you being in there … with those kinds of people, who’ll now be much worse than they ever were back in my day.’

  They’d had this sort of conversation before, of course. And Lucy had no reason to believe that her mother wasn’t being truthful when she brought the same argument up again. But now, it seemed, there were other factors to consider; perhaps less wholesome reasons why Cora might not want her daughter to be a policewoman.

  ‘So what exactly did you go to see McCracken about?’ she asked.

  This was the crunch question. It was actually a bone-chilling moment. Everything that occurred in Lucy’s life from this second on might depend on the next answer her mother gave.

  ‘I went to see him about you,’ Cora said simply.

  ‘About me?’

  Cora stared boldly at her. ‘To exact a promise from him that should your investigation at the club cause any problems for his firm, he’d be merciful to you.’

  ‘My investigation at the club?’

  ‘Into the Lay-by Murders.’

  ‘You told him that?’

  ‘Why should it upset you? He doesn’t want this murderess on the prowl any more than you do?’

  ‘Why! Seriously, Mum … why!’ A chill like white ice sped through Lucy’s body. ‘Because … because you’ve blown my cover? Just casually and totally blown it all to Hell?’

  ‘Lucy, I had to protect you …’

  ‘Protect me!’ Lucy didn’t want to shout again, but suddenly she couldn’t help herself. ‘You’ve probably killed me. What do you think would have happened if I’d gone back there tonight?’

  Cora shook her head. ‘Frank’s not like that.’

  ‘Frank’s exactly like that, Mum! He’s a thug and a maniac, and I’m sure you know that deep down, because that’s why you were crying when I came in here … because it suddenly struck you what you’d damn well done!’

  ‘Lucy …’

  ‘You’ve just thrown God knows how many hours of police surveillance right down the sodding drain! You’ve exposed the entire bloody operation!’

  ‘At least you’ll be safe.’

  Despite the heated atmosphere, this last comment was delivered with a certain degree of frozen calm, as if this one factor alone outweighed all other considerations.

  ‘Ohhh,’ Lucy said slowly. ‘So that was your real plan? To make certain I couldn’t go back there? I mean, that must be it. Because if you�
�re really such a worldly person, mother, that you used to rip your knickers off in front of a baying crowd, you’re not seriously going to believe that a hardcase mobster like Frank McCracken would tolerate me being in that club purely for old time’s sake! I mean, you’re not that fucking dim, are you!’

  ‘Lucy … how dare you speak to me like that!’

  ‘Oh, pardon my language … bloody hell.’

  ‘Lucy!’

  Lucy stormed to the kitchen door. ‘Don’t bother. I can’t talk to you right now.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘You think I’ll tell you? That’ll be the next fucking thing Frank McCracken knows.’

  ‘For God’s sake, you don’t understand …’

  Lucy tottered through the kitchen, but spun round at the back door. ‘I understand that you just demolished the very best chance I’ve had to get back into my bosses’ good books. In revealing your past to me the way you have tonight … in a way I can’t ignore and will now have no choice but to report, you’ve just ensured that I will never get promoted. That I will never get a transfer that’s beneficial to me. That there’ll never be a whisper behind my back that isn’t hostile. So thanks, Mum! You weren’t just a star back in the good old days … you’re a bloody star now as well!’

  Ignoring all further protests, she stalked out into the yard, snatched her helmet and climbed onto her bike.

  Chapter 22

  ‘Hello, this is Tammy. Or Tamara, if you like … if you think that’s sexier, if it tickles your fancy.’ A girlish giggle. ‘Anyway, I’m working at the moment. Busy girl, me. But please leave a message and I’ll get back to you …’

  Lucy took another sip of brandy and coke and cut the call. This wasn’t something she could do by answerphone. However, the next time she called, a few seconds later, Tammy’s real voice came chirping through.

  ‘Hi Hayley!’ It was almost nine o’clock in the evening, but she didn’t sound drunk as yet.