The Graft Page 14

  Lance shrugged with difficulty.

  ‘It happens. You know the score, we’ve all been there before and no doubt we’ll all be there again. It’s the nature of drug dealing, unfortunately it’s illegal, and the filth do tend to try and stop the bigger operations. Annoying, true, but also a fact of our fucking lives. You can’t win every time, Nick.’

  Nick knelt down and said loudly now, ‘I have it on good authority, that the puff that was dumped over the side of the boat was in fact straw, and that filth had been alerted days before. When they finally stopped chasing us and looked in the plastic sacks they realised that we had all been had over. Now, I wonder who could have set that up? You, by any chance?’

  ‘Who told you that load of old pony?’ The man’s voice was high with indignation and also with a trace of fear.

  Nick grinned once more and Lance knew it was over.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know? Now, for the last time, where the fuck is my money?’

  Lance’s biggest problem was the fact he would happily cut off his own nose to spite his face. Any other man would have tried to placate the person who was willing and happy to remove him from the earth. Not Lance. It had now become a battle of wits and instead of putting his hands up to the capture he closed his eyes and said in a slow guttural voice, ‘Bollocks to you and bollocks to your fucking money. You think you are so hard, don’t you, but I know all about you, Leary, everything. You would do well to remember that.’

  Nick did laugh then and it was loud, heavy laughter. Lance knew that no matter how much he screamed no one was going to hear him.

  He wondered once more where he was but knew that Nick was not going to tell him. Standing over the man, Nick brought his foot down with all the force he could muster on to Lance’s face, then he ground the heel of his shoe into the man’s bloody and bleeding nose.

  ‘You are really fucking me off, Lance, now for the last fucking time, where is my poke?’

  Tammy was shopping in Brentwood. She was wearing clothes that cost enough to fund a year’s missionary work in a Third World country, and she was starving. Only not for food. Her favourite sustenance came from young men.

  She punched Costas’s number into her mobile and when she got no answer just stopped herself from leaving a message. She wasn’t stupid. She never left messages or texts, nothing that could put her in the frame should it all fall out of bed with her current squeeze.

  The first time she had almost been blackmailed it had hit her hard. She had believed it was her sparkling personality and humungous breasts that had been the attraction. It had never occurred to her that it was also her seemingly inexhaustible credit cards. So now she didn’t buy many presents for her amours, and then only if they serviced her according to her wants and not theirs.

  But it had been a learning curve and Tammy was always open to new experiences. It was, she thought, part of her charm.

  If only she could get her husband out of her head for longer than five minutes at a time, she would be all right.

  She walked inside a small boutique, her eye having been caught by a black Fendi radio bag. As she examined it and caressed the luxury of the leather she decided to treat herself. At only six hundred quid, she reasoned, it was in fact a snip.

  She handed it to the pretty assistant and smiled.

  ‘I’ll take it, sweetheart.’

  The assistant, a tall blonde in her twenties, smiled back happily as she began the elaborate packaging of the handbag. It was like a work of art when she had finished and Tammy happily passed her one of her gold cards. She sat on the suede chair awaiting her credit card slip, planning the outfit she would wear to show the bag off to its best advantage and who to invite to the bag’s debut outing. She always treated her purchases as if they were life-changing events - which for Tammy they often were.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Leary, but the card has been declined.’

  Tammy stared at the girl for long moments, before she said quietly, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The card. It’s been declined.’

  The girl was more embarrassed than she was and for some reason this made it all the worse for Tammy. She had shopped here regularly for years but this would be her last visit, she was convinced of that already.

  ‘There must be some mistake, love, try it again.’

  ‘I did, Mrs Leary, and it was declined a second time. Maybe another card?’

  The girl was still smiling but it was forced.

  Five credit cards later Tammy was walking from the shop empty-handed. Her face was still burning from the humiliation as she climbed behind the wheel of her Mercedes sports.

  She would kill Nick. If it was the last thing she ever did she would kill that bastard stone dead.

  Sally was sitting with the boys watching a video when Tyrell arrived home. She did not acknowledge his presence and neither did the boys other than by quick smiles in his direction when he came into the lounge. They had always picked up on atmospheres and Sally, love her, could cause atmospheres that would not look out of place on the moon.

  This was a lovely room, and after his night at Jude’s Tyrell appreciated it more than ever before. It was painted pale green with white woodwork and a cherrywood floor. To his mind it was beautiful. Sally had a way with rooms. She made them all light and airy, but today it was the smell he liked most - the smell of cleanliness and pot pourri, something that had annoyed him in the past, reminding him a bit too much of his mother’s house. Today, though, this room was everything he wanted from a home. It was funny but Sonny Boy had loved this house too. Had always boasted to his friends about his dad’s home. It was the only place the boy had ever really relaxed in.

  Like his father before him, Jude had stressed him out. It was only here in this calm environment that he totally chilled. He would smooch down on the sofa with his little brothers and watch TV, laughing and joking with them, watching their antics and enjoying the feeling of belonging.

  Who was he kidding?

  Tyrell was still standing in the doorway trying to convince himself when Sally’s words hit him.

  ’Are you coming in or not?’

  Her voice was more of a bark. She was talking to him as if he was one of the kids and this annoyed him. Ever a believer in attack as the best form of defence he took the bait willingly.

  ‘You talking to me, Sal?’

  The boys dragged their eyes from the screen at the sound of his voice. This was not the way their father talked to their mother and it shocked them. Both of them sat watching with wide eyes as their father stared his wife down.

  ‘You know something, Sal, you’d better give me a break, girl, because you are starting to get on my nerves.’

  Sally just stopped her mouth from dropping open in shock.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Her own voice was high and this annoyed her.

  Tyrell was on a roll now. He laughed as he said: ‘You heard me. You talking to me now, not one of the kids or one of their little friends. It’s me, Tyrell, your husband, the man who buried his child yesterday and had to spend the night placating a woman who has nothing left in the world. You hear what I’m saying? Nothing.’

  He knew he was deliberately making her feel bad but didn’t care any more, he was not in the mood for any of this. He was tired, he wanted a bath and something to eat. He also wanted to throw his suit in the trash because he knew he would never wear it again.

  And he felt an overpowering urge to slap his wife’s scornful face. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to do that but the urge was getting stronger by the second.

  ‘Upstairs.’

  The boys scrambled from the sofa and Tyrell watched them run from the room. His wife’s voice could be very cold at times, he had never really noticed that before. Her hands were on her hips now as she stood up and looked at him dangerously.

  ‘You come in here, into my home, and you try and put me down in front of my children when you spent the night with another woman? I can smell her on you, T
yrell. I can smell the dirt and the stench of that woman and her life, it’s still clinging to you after all these years. Now you can go upstairs and you can pack your bags and you can get out and go back where you came from. I don’t need you. We don’t need you.’

  She didn’t know who was the more shocked by her words, her husband or herself. But he had asked for it. He had been asking for it for years. Well, this time it was finally over for them. Jude Hatcher had got what she wanted. Sally only wondered if it was what the man in front of her wanted.

  ‘You don’t care about my Sonny, do you? You never did.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be stupid, Tyrell, of course I cared about him. Why wouldn’t I? He was a nice kid in his own way. But it’s over now, and I am not living with Jude in our lives any more. I can’t. If his death means you have to be there for her from now on, then that is it. I’ve had it.’

  It was a fair comment, Tyrell knew that in his heart.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sally, but it’s been so up in the air lately, and Jude was in bits yesterday . . .’

  ‘ ’Course she was.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic, Sal. Her son’s . . .’

  Sally sighed.

  ‘I know her son’s dead, but she is always in bits about something, Tyrell. She plays you and you can’t see it. If it hadn’t have been Sonny’s funeral yesterday it would have been something else. You spend more time over there than you do here, and it’s because of her, not poor Sonny. I could have understood it if it was Sonny.’

  She was talking through clenched teeth now and forced herself to relax.

  Tyrell slumped into a chair. It was so comfortable he could quite easily have sat back and dropped off into a nice dreamless sleep.

  ‘This has to stop. You are either here with me and the boys now or it’s over, I mean it, Tyrell. You have to keep away from Jude. She is not your responsibility any more.’

  He started laughing then, really laughing, it was almost tinged with hysteria.

  ‘Oh, is that right? I am sorry, Sally, I was under the mistaken impression that I was a grown man. I didn’t realise I had exchanged one mummy for another.’

  He leaped from his seat then and was gratified to see his wife jump in fright.

  ‘Oh, have I raised my voice to you, Sal? Forgive me. Shall I get on the floor and kiss the hallowed ground you walk on? Or better still, how about I write out fifty times, “I shall not fuck off said wife”.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody childish. Anyone would think you’d never been hurt before. Sonny is dead but what about us? We’re all still alive, if you’d bother to take any notice.’

  He stared at her in disgust and all his real feelings, his suppressed feelings, spilled over.

  ‘You could never compete with Sonny, so don’t even try. You made it your mission in life to keep him an outsider. I would watch him trying to get into your good books, trying to make you like him. He was a kid, for fuck’s sake, and you made him nervous with all your tidying up and your constant fucking correcting him about how he ate, how he sat, how he spoke. Yet he had more life in his little finger than you have in your whole body!’

  Sally was hurting now, really hurting. Whatever she had expected today this was not part of it. Yet she knew what he said was true, she had resented the boy. It was only human nature, but the guilt was there nevertheless.

  ‘If I’m that bad then why don’t you leave, Tyrell? It sounds to me as if you’re only looking for a reason to go. Well, you go, boy, I don’t need you.’

  She waved him away from her.

  ‘I did everything for your son, everything I could, and it wasn’t easy, I can tell you. Jude made sure he didn’t feel comfortable with decent people. He robbed you, robbed your family, robbed me. Yet you would put him above me and mine? He took the boys’ money on many occasions and they covered up for him. So you go, Tyrell. Go and live with that piece of dirt who mothered your darling Sonny Boy and leave me and my sons to get on with our lives in peace.’

  He knew she had every right to say what she was saying but it still felt all wrong to him. She should respect the fact that the boy was dead. Now was not the time to pull Sonny to pieces. She should be helping him through his grief, not making it worse.

  He poked a finger in her face.

  ‘You listen to me, Sal, and you listen good. I am that far . . .’ he opened his right finger and thumb about half an inch ‘. . . from topping myself over my boy. I dream of him. I think of him all the time. The guilt I feel is so bad I can’t breathe sometimes with the thought of his life and how it turned out. So don’t you dare fucking try and give me the bum’s rush in me own back yard. Because it won’t work. This time it won’t work.’

  He rifled his pockets for his cigarettes. As he lit one she shrieked, ‘Oh, no, you don’t! You’re not tainting my air with your cigarette smoke. Another of Jude’s filthy habits that you’ve taken up once more.’

  He walked from the room, drawing on the cigarette to make as much smoke as possible. As he stamped up the stairs he made loud puffing noises to annoy her. Then in the bathroom he sat on the toilet as the bath ran and cried like a baby.

  ‘Where did he get the gun, God? Just tell me that.’

  Tyrell shouted the words over the rushing of the water then he lit another cigarette and lay back in the bath. It wasn’t until the water was stone cold that he stopped crying. The boys were playing Sean Paul and Blu Cantrell and the words made him want to cry once more. The track was called ‘Breathe’ and Sonny Boy had loved it.

  Tyrell wondered briefly if he was having a breakdown.

  Then he got out of the bath and, still dripping wet, packed a bag. With his wife’s eagle eye on him all the time he dressed himself and walked from the house without another word. He didn’t know where he was going, but one thing he did know: he could never stay under that roof again.

  In his BMW he lit another cigarette and as he drew its smoke into his lungs realised that for the first time in years he felt free.

  Angela Leary ran into the hallway as her son’s key went into the lock. She had heard his car coming up the drive and was waiting for him as he fell through the front door.

  ‘She is like a lunatic, Nick! She’s wrecked the bedroom and the en-suite . . .’

  He nodded wearily.

  ‘Good. Can I have a cup of tea, Mum?’

  He was not bothered in the least.

  ‘ ’Course you can, son, but don’t you think you ought to talk to Tammy first?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No.’

  Nick laughed.

  ‘Why would I want to talk to her? Anyway, we’ll see her soon enough.’

  Tammy was tearing down the stairs as he spoke and he looked at his mother as if to say: See.

  ‘Hello, darlin’. What’s the matter with you today?’

  ‘You’re drunk!’

  ’And you’re ugly but I’ll be sober in the morning.’

  As a good Irishman his father always maintained that was the only sensible thing Churchill ever said.

  Nick pushed Tammy out of his way.

  ‘Make the tea, Mum, I am parched.’

  ‘You bastard, Nick! You’d humiliate me by cancelling me cards . . .’

  He laughed once more.

  ‘Oh, they did it then? I thought it would take longer than this.’

  Angela watched the two of them gleefully. If he had cancelled Tammy’s credit cards then this was going to be a fight. And she for one wanted a ringside seat.

  She decided on the kitchen for the venue as there were not too many breakables easily within reach there and she knew that Tammy would be going for anything within arm’s reach. But Tammy, for once, just stood there and looked at her husband as if she had never seen him before.

  He saw how pretty she was when she wasn’t plastered in make-up, saw the cut of her curvaceous figure and the defeated look in her eyes, red-rimmed from crying yet still the same deep blue that had attracted him all those years ago at school.


  ‘You’d really do this to me, Nick?’

  He nodded, but even through his drink-fuelled state realised he had done something terrible. Maybe not in other people’s book, but what he had done to Tammy was unforgivable in her eyes.

  And the worst thing was, he had done it for pure spite. He opened his arms wide and Tammy threw herself into them. As she cried he rubbed her back and kissed her hair, murmuring endearments.