Gangsters Wives Read online

  Johnny was an old man now, but still had the kind of respect in the area that only fear can bring. Robbo had worshipped him, but Kate hated him. He had ruled his extended family with the same kind of violence as he ruled his manor. Four sons who’d accepted anything the old man doled out. Then Kate came along. A late child when her mother and father were already middle-aged. He tried the same medicine with her. Kate had lost count of the times he’d taken his belt to her when she was a teenager, only interested in clothes and house music. So when handsome Robbo Ellis had come along, all flowers, chocolates, flash motors, expensive restaurants and clubbing up West, how could she resist? The answer was she hadn’t. She gave up her closely guarded virginity in the bedroom of his flat in Limehouse one Saturday night and he was everything she’d dreamed of, passionate yet tender. Robbo proposed on a floating Chinese restaurant on Millwall Harbour next to Docklands Arena a few months later, where they’d seen Oasis play from the VIP area, and Liam Gallagher had smiled at Kate over chow mein after the concert, as the band dined at the next table. There were roses and an engagement ring worth fifty-grand, with a diamond as big as an egg. So how could she refuse? Once again she couldn’t, and the waiter brought champagne as the entire staff and clientele cheered at the news of her acceptance.

  Kate was nineteen at the time.

  The wedding was one of the biggest the area had ever seen. White Rollers ferried the family and guests to the Wren Church in Poplar, then a glass carriage pulled by four white horses took the bride and groom to the wedding breakfast in a five star hotel just opened at Canary Wharf. Enough Cristal champagne was drunk to sink the Titanic and Kate was glowing in a couture wedding dress that she’d seen in Vogue. The wedding pictures wouldn’t have looked out of place in the pages of a glossy magazine—if the whole thing hadn’t been funded by violence, extortion and drug money.

  Kate had never been so happy, but that was all about to change.

  Robbo quickly turned from the loving fiancé to an abusive husband. On their wedding night at the hotel he beat Kate black and blue when she refused his drunken advances. This was after leaving her alone for hours in the bridal suite as he drank whiskey with his mates in the bar, until dawn broke and the last of the guests made their drunken way home. But Robbo was no fool. He didn’t hit her where it showed. Not her face. Just her body, so that on their honeymoon in St Lucia, Kate could not wear the bikinis she had so happily bought as part of her trousseau, but instead had to do with a mumsy one-piece bathing-suit purchased from the hotel boutique. ‘You tell your father what I’ve done,’ said Robbo, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

  But Johnny wouldn’t have cared. ‘No more than you deserve,’ he would have said. Kate knew, because she’d witnessed the damage her father had done to her mother, Dolly, over the years. Black eyes, split lips, and even the occasional broken bone. That was Johnny’s way, and Kate had pleaded with her mother a hundred times to leave her brutal husband, but her mother had been too frightened to go. ‘He’d find me darlin’,’ said her mum. ‘Hunt me down and kill me. I belong to him, see. Body and soul.’

  Then kill him first, Kate thought, but she never said a word.

  When the cancer hit Dolly Wade it was almost a relief. She lived for just a few months more, long enough to see her daughter engaged, but not long enough to attend the wedding, or witness what happened afterwards.

  It seemed to Kate that Johnny hardly noticed his wife’s absence. Only moaning about his lack of tea in bed in the morning, and a bit of the other after Sunday dinner.

  You disgust me, thought Kate as her brothers laughed at his joke. Within a few months of Kate’s nuptials he’d met and moved a younger woman into the family home. A brassy blonde he’d picked up at one of the nightclubs he still had control over in Ilford. After that Kate hardly saw him.

  Not that she cared. She’d gone from one abusive relationship to another, and it seemed to her that was exactly what she deserved.

  So now, she and Robbo lived in splendour in a detached house in Harold Hill. Robbo, Joseph, Eddie and Connie carried out their various crimes, and Kate took her regular beatings stoically. But Robbo was getting worse. More violent as he grew older, and now sometimes Kate had to layer on the concealer and wear dark glasses to hide the marks from her husband’s fists when she went to the shops, or to meet her friends.

  Sadie was the closest to her, and they met for long lunches when the men were away, as they often were. ‘Leave the fucker Katie,’ she said.

  But Kate knew, as her mother knew before her, that it would do no good. ‘He’d find me Sade,’ she’d say, mimicking Dolly’s words. ‘Hunt me down and kill me.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Sadie. But she knew it was true. The men they’d married treated their wives as property. Bought and paid for. And woe betide any of them who got out of line. Sadie knew that she was playing with fire when she played away from home. But she had long ago stopped considering the consequences.

  4

  Then there was lovely little Poppy. Just a shade over five foot tall, with coffee coloured skin from her mixed-race parents. Father a rudeboy from Jamaica, long time ago gone into the dark midnight, mother a reconstructed mod who got knocked up one night after a Bad Manners gig at the 101 Club in Clapham Junction. Mum and daughter lived together in a council flat in Bethnal Green. Poppy didn’t guard her virginity at all. She gave it up one afternoon when she was thirteen to a slightly older boy, down where the rubbish was kept under the flats. Even now when she has sex she could still catch a whiff of the rotten garbage overflowing from the bins. They did it standing up. ‘Can’t get pregnant if you do it like that,’ he assured her, and she believed him. She still believed it a couple of years later when she fell pregnant. She didn’t tell anyone for months, until one day during the last lesson at school she was doubled up with excruciating pain and began to bleed from her vagina. She was rushed to the Royal London Hospital A&E where the tiny, dead body was extracted from her womb and burned. She never saw the baby. Later, after her mum had been summoned from home, the attending doctor came to Poppy’s bedside and explained that it had been touch and go whether Poppy lived. ‘You were losing a lot of blood,’ he said. ‘Too much to survive, unless I did something drastic.’

  The two women listened intently.

  ‘I had to perform an emergency sterilisation,’ he continued. ‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to have more children. I’m terribly sorry.’

  Poppy didn’t care. The short pregnancy had been a nightmare as far as she was concerned. Mum didn’t say much. In fact, later she often wished that the same thing had happened to her. At least then she could have made a career, made some money, had a life. Not scratching from day to day in a thin-walled flat where every sound of the neighbour’s lives could be heard through the partitions. But she would never say as much to Poppy, and felt guilty even thinking about it. She loved her, even though she was a wild girl.

  Poppy didn’t change much. She left school early and drifted from job to job. It wasn’t that she was stupid. It just seemed that nothing much mattered except getting a couple of quid for spliff and CDs, and a few vodka and cokes at the weekends.

  And then along came Joseph Barlow.

  Tall, handsome, from the same Caribbean stock as her father whom she’d never known. His skin was the colour of chocolate, and the white teeth in his handsome face flashed each time he smiled, which he did often. His hair was sculpted in a high fade, and razored into strange, geometric patterns at the back of his head. He drove a black BMW with dark windows, carried a wad of cash big enough to choke a horse, dressed as if he’d just stepped out of the pages of GQ and wore just enough bling to be noticed without going over the top.

  From the moment Poppy saw him holding court in a local pub, she was his. She didn’t care that he was a gangster. If she was honest it made him all the more attractive.

  They were married within a month and he paid the deposit on a luxury flat, just close enough to her mum’s to keep in touch, but not
close enough that she was always round.

  Poppy had never been so happy. She quickly made friends with Sadie, Kate and Niki. They often lunched together, although Niki was a rare companion in the early days, before Connie relented and allowed her a little more freedom. Poppy loved it when they did. The four beautiful women out on the town together almost stopped the traffic, and they revelled in the attention they got. Those were happy times. Until one day, out of the blue Joseph told her he wanted kids. Lots of them. Poppy told him the truth about herself, and that was when things began to go wrong.

  Their sex life, which had been so passionate that they used to fuck at least twice a day, began to dwindle. One day a helpful neighbour of her mum’s told Poppy over a cup of tea that she’d seen Joseph with a young girl down at Sainsbury’s, buying groceries. A young, pregnant girl. Poppy didn’t believe a word. Joseph, food shopping? No chance. That was her job. But once the seeds of doubt had been sown, they soon began to grow into ugly weeds. She started noticing how often he was away from home lately, and how sex had become almost non-existent. So Poppy began to follow him. She borrowed a car from a friend and tagged after him in his Beemer. It didn’t take many days before he turned up at a council flat in Bow, where a pretty black girl in the later stages of pregnancy met him at the door with a passionate kiss.

  After that Poppy haunted the building. She saw the girl getting bigger every day, and later, she saw the pair of them coming back from hospital in Joseph’s car, complete with baby carrier. She saw the way he proudly handled the child. Bastard, she thought, as his absences became longer. She checked his credit card receipts. Fortunes spent at Mothercare. Bastard, she thought again, getting angrier.

  She turned to Sadie, her best friend amongst the girls. ‘He’s a bastard,’ said Sadie, ‘but that’s men all over.’

  Poppy’s love, once so strong, turned to something else. Her love had been soured—poisoned by his betrayal. But she still played the part of the loving wife. Cooking Joseph’s favourite curry goat with rice and peas, mixing his rum and cokes, laughing at his jokes, washing his dirty Calvins. But deep down the poison grew stronger as the love grew weaker. Poppy knew, as all women know who’ve been neglected by their men, that one day the worm would turn, and she would get her own back.

  5

  When Kate felt depressed she went shoplifting. Hoisting she called it. She’d done it all her life, and even though she could afford to buy almost anything she wanted, the thrill of nicking gave her the highs she desired in her life. Dolly had started her off when she was a kid. Dolly had been an expert shoplifter long before she married Johnny Wade, and it seemed to run in the family. Kate started as Dolly’s shill when she was barely fifteen. She would cause a disturbance by faking illness, rolling about on the floor whilst Dolly got on with the business at hand. She knew that every eye in the shop would be on her, especially the men, if she showed off her knickers under a short skirt. Or else she’d walk out with the security button still attached to a garment, as Dolly did the same, and it was Kate’s job to pretend she had accidentally stumbled past the security barrier as Dolly got away with the goods. It worked well. Kate always came over like butter wouldn’t melt, charming both shop assistants and store detectives, and she and Dolly made quite a killing between them.

  But on the whole Kate had preferred working solo. She’d visit Brent Cross or Lakeside and come home with CDs, DVDs and clothes. Anything that could be smuggled out in her handbag or up her tee-shirt.

  Now as an adult, with Dolly gone, she concentrated on Oxford Street and Bond Street and the expensive boutiques between. She’d put her face on and act as if she could buy the store with her loose change, and in all the years she’d been doing it, although there’d been plenty of close calls and embarrassing moments, she’d never been nicked. She’d always managed to talk her way out of trouble, or pay up and look big. Or as a last resort, just do a runner.

  That is, until one day in April that year, when everything started to unravel. Kate had assumed one of the disguises she used when on the hoist. Nothing spectacular. It was just a case of putting her hair up under a hat, wearing Prada spectacles (with clear glass instead of prescription lenses), and a Gucci trench coat with the collar up. She looked just right. A clone for her Mayfair sisters as she sauntered up and down South Molton Street, her big handbag over her shoulder and a mobile plugged into her ear. No one on the other end, but it helped allay shop assistants’ fears as she nattered on to a dead line.

  There was a silk blouse she fancied in one of the tiny shops, so she pointed to another item with the hand holding the phone, and as the girl behind the counter retrieved it, the blouse vanished into her bag. No security device on that one she noted. Some people were just too trusting. Herself included, as she didn’t notice the handsome Asian man checking out the contents of the window behind her, and Kate into the bargain.

  After declining the sweater the assistant showed her, Kate left and cut through towards Berkeley Square. All was well, or so she thought. It was then that she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and the Asian man was standing behind her, a smile on his face. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I think you forgot something.’

  Kate frowned. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘To pay for that blouse in your bag.’

  ‘What blouse, and what’s it got to do with you?’ At times like these Kate could come over all imperious, like Victoria Beckham being asked for proof of identity.

  ‘Depends,’ said the Asian man, as he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a leather case, which he opened to show his ID. ‘Detective Sergeant Ali S. Karim,’ he said. ‘And you love, are nicked.’

  Kate said nothing.

  ‘Want to take a walk?’ said Ali.

  ‘I’ll scream,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll tell people you attacked me. Tried to touch me.’

  ‘Leave it out darling,’ said Ali. ‘See over there.’

  Kate looked round and saw a squad car parked a few yards away on the other side of the road. The cops inside were clocking the pair.

  ‘One word from me, and you’re inside that motor and on the way to the nick.’

  Again, Kate said nothing in reply.

  Ali had checked her out as he’d followed her from the shop. She was a beauty and no mistake, he thought. A bit rich for a copper’s blood, but you never know. And he was off duty, although no copper ever was really. He didn’t give a damn about an overpriced bit of schmutter being lifted from a shop run by a bunch of toffee-nosed white bitches who he knew would immediately assume he was on the rob if he ever went inside, simply because of the colour of his skin. Fuck ‘em, he thought.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he went on. ‘Maybe we could just go for a cup of coffee and sort things out between ourselves.’

  There was another moment of silence, and Kate went for the latter option. He was a good looking man, and the last thing she needed that morning was a trip down West End Central. Get him on his own, and she might just be able to talk her way out of trouble again.

  ‘Coffee, it is then,’ she said after a moment, and as Ali took her arm she smiled at the two coppers in the squad car, who as one smiled back.

  6

  There was a cafe just round the corner. Old fashioned. It had been there since God was a boy, avoiding the influx of Starbucks and Caffé Nero, or whatever it was called. The plate glass window was steamed up, and a massive Gaggia machine hissed and spluttered behind the counter. Ali sat Kate down at a quiet table in the corner and ordered two cappuccinos. ‘A sticky bun?’ he asked, but she ignored him and he grinned. Gotcha, he thought.

  He took their drinks over and sat opposite her. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You know who I am, who are you?’

  She thought of giving a false name, but he beat her to it. ‘Show me some ID,’ he said, and took her bag and opened it. He ignored the silky blouse and dug deep until he found her purse thick with cash and credit cards. ‘Could’ve paid,’ he said. ‘Naughty, naughty.’
r />   He took out her driving licence, fished out his phone and made a call. ‘Excuse me,’ he said as he turned away. ‘Police business.’

  She grimaced.

  He whispered into the phone, reading out the details from the document, and then was silent for a moment. ‘Christ,’ he said at length. ‘You’re joking,’ as he looked at Kate with a different expression in his eyes. He snapped the phone shut eventually and said. ‘You’re Robbo Ellis’s missus. And Johnny Wade’s daughter. What the hell are you doing on the knock?’

  ‘I like it. Gets my juices running,’ she said defiantly, looking straight into his chocolate-brown eyes.

  ‘And nicking Robbo’s missus does the same for me.’

  ‘You know him then?’ she asked.

  ‘Every copper in the Met knows him,’ he said. ‘But not personally. But some do I’m sure, from what I’ve heard.’ And he made the international sign for money by rubbing his right thumb over the fingers of his right hand.

  ‘So what?’ she asked, ignoring it. ‘It’s me that pinched the blouse.’

  ‘So you admit it?’

  ‘In here. Not at the nick.’

  ‘Been there before, have you?’

  ‘Only to report a lost dog.’

  ‘Did they find it?’

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact.’

  ‘See. We are good for something.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she replied.

  He smiled, and she had to admit the smile did something for her. ‘So what am I going to do with you?’ he asked.