Jail Bird

by Jessie Keane

  Part of me did, thought Lily. Maybe the best part.

  ‘Well I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I’m alive, Leo’s dead and here’s the latest bulletin—I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘The fuck you didn’t.’

  ‘Ladies,’ said Jack, holding up his hands.

  ‘Did you?’ asked Lily.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You heard the question. Did you kill Leo? Was it a bit more than business for you? Did he take you home, to my home, and did he give you a line or two of something, a nice little bonus from clog land. Did you have a downer and turn nasty?’

  ‘This ain’t getting us anywhere,’ said Jack.

  ‘Yeah, he took me back there, gave me the guided tour. That was some place you had, you and him. You were a lucky cow and I doubt you appreciated it one little bit. He had a good deal going on, a big carousel scam, he told me about it. Pillow talk.’ She gave Lily a sour smile. ‘Look at your fucking face. You don’t even know what a carousel scam is, do you?’

  Lily didn’t. She’d never known a thing about Leo’s business: that was the way he wanted to play it and that was just fine with her. But this news burned her like a hot branding iron pressed against her flesh. He’d kept her in the dark and fed her bullshit, okay, she’d accepted that. But meanwhile, he’d been telling all his whores the juicy details? That hurt.

  ‘Why don’t you enlighten us?’ asked Jack, shooting looks between the two. He didn’t want a ruck; he knew that once the fur started flying there’d be nothing achieved here. But Lily and Reba were eyeing each other like gladiators in a Roman arena.

  ‘Look, it’s simple,’ said Reba. ‘It’s the sweetest swindle you can imagine. You bring your goods into Britain and you’re supposed to pay VAT to the taxman and then charge it to whoever bought the goods. If they were re-exported, the exporter claimed a rebate. With me so far?’

  Jack and Lily nodded. Lily’s teeth were gritted; this smug cow.

  ‘The thing is, Leo never paid VAT in the first place, but he still claimed the rebate. He had a thing going where he imported and exported the same stuff—phones and computer stuff mostly—over and over again. Top dollar. I mean, really. We’re talking millions here. Course you can’t do it now, the taxman’s got clever. Brought in a new system, plugged the loophole. But while it was good, it was really good. Leo made a packet.’ Reba looked at Lily with contempt. ‘And you spent it I suppose. And then you went and topped the poor bastard. Talk about killing the golden fucking goose.’

  ‘Hey—smartarse,’ Lily leaned forward across the table, her lips pulled back in an expression that was more snarl than smile, her eyes fierce. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I didn’t do Leo. But by fuck I’m going to find out who did. And my best guess so far? One of you slags he knocked about with.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. You getting yourself banged up for it was all a big mistake, that right?’ Reba affected a bored yawn but Jack could see that Lily’s last comment had hit home.

  ‘Listen, you cheap cow—’ said Lily.

  ‘No! You listen: what did you think, you were marrying a saint in Leo King? Fuck’s sake, get real. Image is what matters to men like that. A mistress is a status symbol, show off to your mates, prove how much money you’re pulling in.’

  ‘Mistress?’ Lily scoffed. ‘Hardly that, luv. Just a tart.’

  ‘Yeah? Why’d he keep coming back then? You couldn’t have been keeping him fully occupied in the bedroom department, that’s for sure. Look, a man like that needs a woman on his arm when he’s out on the town. It’s a nice bonus, on top of the four-wheel drive and the luxury home in Chigwell in a couple of acres, the lovely kids and the wife who’s not too bright and don’t suspect a thing—a wife who’s happy to take the cash and not question where it comes from too closely. Am I right or am I right?’

  Not too bright.

  The words clanged around Lily’s head like a struck gong. Yeah, that was how everyone must have seen her. The little woman indoors. Meek and dim, happy to get down the shops and splurge while Leo was having a splurge all of his own with tarts like Reba, sad clingers-on like Adrienne and head-cases like Alice Blunt.

  She’d only suspected Adrienne. Hadn’t had a clue about the rest of them. And there were more. More she hadn’t met yet. She felt sick now, really sick.

  ‘You smug bitch,’ she said, low-voiced, furious.

  Reba’s eyes flashed. ‘Listen, I never hurt anyone in my life, but let me tell you, lady, Leo King was a diamond, so I’m willing to start with you.’

  Reba jumped to her feet and was half across the table when Jack caught her around the waist and pulled her back, away from Lily.

  ‘Now take it easy,’ said Jack, grappling with Reba like an all-in wrestler.

  Lily stepped around the table. ‘No, come on, let her go,’ she said. She’d dealt with some lairy old lags inside, she wasn’t afraid of Reba Stuart.

  ‘No, I ain’t letting her go,’ said Jack, and he looked angry now. ‘Go and wait outside, Lily, for fuck’s sake.’

  Lily took a deep, shuddering breath. Then she turned on her heels and walked back through the lounge, still packed with the bevy of bored-looking beautiful girls. They watched curiously as she went out of the front door and slammed it hard behind her.

  She waited, breathing hard with suppressed fury. That lowlife bitch. Suddenly she felt weighed down, weary to her bones. She could search and search forever, but was she ever going to find any answers? Suddenly it all seemed hopeless, impossible. She couldn’t win, and she ought to just admit that, give it up.

  Jack came out within five minutes.

  He stood there, looking at her with concern.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Lily’s teeth were gritted with the effort of keeping control of her emotions. Her whole life had been such a mess. Losing Nick. Losing Leo. Years in stir. And now, nothing but fighting and struggling, and she was tired, just sick and tired and worn out and sad.

  ‘Don’t act like such a hard-arse. You’re not fine at all, you’re in bits.’

  Lily started to walk away, back to the car. Jack followed, caught her arm; turned her back to face him.

  ‘Listen, Lily,’ he said gently. ‘It’ll all work out. We’ll make it, okay? I’ll help you. Be a friend to you. But don’t keep pushing me away. You’ve got to trust me.’

  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.

  30

  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.

  31

  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.’

  M
rs 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.’