Secrets to Keep (33 page)

Only a street away, Aidy was tearing past an abandoned factory site so fast that she didn’t hear her name being called. She was vaguely aware that someone was shouting, but her mind was so filled with worry for her siblings it wasn’t registering with her just what was being yelled.

She had travelled another street away before she felt a hand grab the back of her coat and yank it to bring her to a halt.

‘What the hell …’

As her eyes fell on the person who’d accosted her, she fell to her knees, and grabbed her brother to her, hugging him fiercely and crying, ‘Oh, George, you’re safe. Thank God!’ Then she pushed him back from her to look into his face and demanded, ‘Where’s Betty? Is she safe. Nothing has happened to her, has it?’

He was panting hard, gulping for breath. ‘She’s … fine … She’s … she’s in the old factory. We … Oh, just a minute, Sis, let me get me breath back.’ He took several deep ones while patting his chest. Breathing more easily now, he said, ‘That’s better. You can’t half run when you want to, our Aidy. I had hell of a job to catch you up. I was shouting your name at the top of me voice, but you never heard me. Anyway, me and Betty were both waiting in the old factory. It were bloody freezing and we ain’t half hungry.’ Then he realised he had blasphemed in front of his sister and exclaimed, horrified, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean …’

She ruffled his hair. ‘You can swear as much as you like right this minute, George, I don’t care. I’m just so happy you’re safe and Betty too. But let me hear you blaspheme again after tonight and you can expect a clip around the ear and your mouth washed out with soap and water.’ Then something he’d said struck her and she looked at him quizzically. ‘What were you waiting in the old factory for?’

‘For you to come and get us, so we could go home with you.’

She stared at him in astonishment. As far as she was aware, their father had sent them on an errand to a house in Cobden Street, so why were they in a derelict factory only a couple of streets away from where they lived, waiting for her to collect them and
take them home? Her knees started to smart from the icy cold off the cobbles she was kneeling on. She stood up and vigorously rubbed them to warm them up, saying to him, ‘None of this is making any sense to me, George. Let’s get back to Betty. Then you can explain to me properly just what is going on.’

They found the girl where her brother had left her to give chase to Aidy. Part of the low crumbling factory wall at the front of the building had collapsed, and with the bricks someone – kids, most likely – had fashioned a three-sided, den-like structure, putting rotting planks across the top to form a roof. The bricks forming the sides of the den were piled higgledy-piggledy. The structure appeared totally unsafe, in danger of collapsing at any minute. From inside it there was a clear view through a hole in the wall out into the street.

Betty was squatting inside the makeshift den on a pile of tatty old bedding. She looked mortally relieved to see both her brother and sister step through the gap in the wall and scrambled over to greet them, flinging her arms around Aidy and hugging her tightly.

‘I was so scared being left on me own after George chased after you. I’m sure I heard rats.’

‘You shouldn’t be in here, it’s dangerous,’ Aidy scolded them.

‘We play here a lot, Sis. It’s safe, honest, and we have loads of fun,’ George told her.

It was far from safe. One of the long gabled walls was buckled and looked to be in serious danger of caving in at any minute. But Aidy had too much on her mind at the moment to waste time discussing safe and unsafe places for the children to be playing.

Moments later they were all squatting in the den. Aidy hugged the children to her for warmth and said to them, ‘As far as I know from what Gran told me, Dad sent you on an errand to a house in Cobden Street, so how come you landed up in here, waiting for me to get you and take you home?’

‘Well …’ they both began together.

‘Just one of you tell me,’ she interrupted them sharply, by now desperate to make sense of all this. She saw they were about to argue the toss over it so made the decision for them. ‘George, you tell me.’

‘As soon as we got in from school, Dad told us he’d an errand we had to run for him. We was to go to a house in Cobden Street, go in the back way, and when a man opened the door, we was to tell him Arnold sent us. Dad said the man would give us a shopping bag and we was to take it where he told us to. He would give us an envelope and we …’

‘No, that’s not right,’ cut in Betty. ‘When we deliver ed the shopping bag to where the man told us to, that’s where we’d get the envelope from.’

‘I’m telling it,’ he snapped at her.

‘Well, get it right then,’ Betty snapped back.

Aidy snapped at them both: ‘That’s enough. What were you to do with the envelope when you were given it, George?’

‘Take it back to the man in Cobden Street, and then he’d give us half a crown which we’d to take straight back to Dad. He told us he’d give us a penny each, and said we’d get a penny more every time we did these errands for him. We told him we weren’t allowed to go that far from the house, honest we did, Sis, but he shouted that he was our dad and we were to do as he told us.’

Aidy’s face was set tight, her eyes ablaze with anger. So their father’s pub tricks weren’t reaping him the rewards they had any longer and he’d found himself another way to line his pockets: by farming his children out to no-good types to act as messengers, delivering their contraband to customers and collecting the payment in return. Who would ever suspect two children carrying a shopping bag of being up to no good? And how low did a man have to be, to trade his own children’s involvement in a probable criminal act rather than make the effort to get himself some honest work? Well, he’d gone too far this time.

She hugged the children closer and said to them, ‘We’d best get back before we freeze to death. Dad will be waiting for his money.’ She noticed a look pass between brother and sister and a horrible thought struck her. ‘Oh, no, you haven’t lost the money, have
you? Is that why you were both waiting for me, because you daren’t go home and face him alone?’

‘No, we ain’t lost the money, Sis, but we ain’t got it,’ said Betty.

‘I don’t understand?’

‘Well, we ain’t got it ’cos we never went on the errand at all,’ George told her. ‘After you told us what you thought Dad was up to, showing us his tricks, and said that if he did anything else like that then we was to tell you, well … we thought we ought to ask you before we went on the errand, just in case you wasn’t happy about it. That’s why we’ve been waiting here, ’cos we knew if we weren’t home when you got back, you’d come looking for us. We know you don’t like us out when it’s so cold and dark and that you’d be worried.’ His little face creased in worry. ‘Did we do right, Aidy?’

She was looking at them both, stunned. So they did pay attention to her after all … and she hadn’t believed they listened to a word she said. ‘You did right. You did very right,’ she assured them.

‘What we gonna tell Dad, though? He ain’t gonna like it that we never did what he told us,’ said Betty tremulously. Her father had not as yet actually hit her like she knew some of her friends’ fathers did, but his nasty shouting whenever any of them had invoked his wrath was frightening enough for a little girl like her.

Aidy was thinking. No, he wasn’t going to like it at all, especially as she suspected the money the kids would have made he’d been banking on getting. She smiled at the children reassuringly. ‘I know, you tell Dad you knocked several times, very hard, but no one answered the door at the house. Tell him no mantles were lit inside so you didn’t think anyone was in. You waited around for ages for someone to come back but they didn’t, so you came home. He can’t tell you off for not doing his errand for him then, can he?’

‘No, he can’t,’ they both said together.

‘And do we do the same if he sends us on another errand like this one, Sis?’ asked George.

She eyed him proudly. ‘That’s exactly what you do.’

They spent a few minutes discussing their plan of action then set off home.

As soon as they rounded the bend in the jetty Bertha was on them, her relief to see them all safely back most apparent. Despite the bitter cold, she had not trusted herself to return inside the house and await their return, so afraid was she that she would not have been able to hold back from telling her despicable son-in-law exactly what she thought of him.

Aidy quickly outlined their plan to Bertha. They decided they would go in first, leaving the children
waiting outside for a few minutes. They’d pretend they had just met up on their way home and knew nothing of where the children had been.

As soon as they walked in, Arnold appeared in the back-room doorway and looked mortally disappointed to see the new arrivals were not who he was expecting.

As she stripped off her coat, Aidy said to him, ‘You look like you’re expecting someone?’

He growled back at her, ‘I sent the bloody kids on an errand and they should’ve been back by now.’

She responded lightly as she took her apron off the hook on the back of the pantry door and tied it around her, ‘Well, this time of evening the shop will be busy or they could have bumped into friends and be having a quick natter. They’ll be back in a minute with your baccy, I expect. Best get the dinner started or I’ll be late back for work.’

An anxious Arnold returned to the back room.

Bertha was collecting potatoes out of a sack in the pantry and having a job controlling her glee. This was the first time since his return that the family had been given an opportunity to get one over on Arnold, and she was enjoying every moment.

The back door opened then. George and Betty barely had time to get a foot over the threshold before he was back in the doorway, his relief to see them very apparent. He demanded, ‘Give me what yer got then.
Come on, I ain’t got all day.’ He was holding out his hand expectantly.

Aidy and Bertha were pretending to be taking no notice of what was going on around them but getting on with their tasks.

George and Betty stood pressed together by the back door.

It was George who nervously told him, ‘We ain’t got n’ote ter give yer. The bloke weren’t in.’

Arnold’s eyes narrowed darkly and he growled, ‘Wadda yer mean, he weren’t in? Why, yer lying little bleeders!’ Clenching one fist, he raised his arm, shouting, ‘He
was
in and you’re …’

Seeing things were turning ugly, Aidy jumped over to stand before him, blocking his way.

‘The kids don’t lie. If they say the man you sent them to see wasn’t in, then he wasn’t. It’s the bloke you made your arrangement with that’s let you down, not them.’

Arnold was so fuming, Aidy felt sure she could actually see steam coming out of the top of his head. Banging one fist furiously against the back-room door, the vibrations shaking the house, he stormed back inside uttering a string of expletives that could be heard out in the street.

Aidy dashed over to the children, gathering them to her. ‘Hopefully this has taught him a lesson: if he wants a job doing, he does it himself. But in future, to be on
the safe side, me and Gran will do our best to make sure between us that you’re never left alone with him. One of us will meet you out of school, and one of us will be here with you all the time in the house.’

‘Yes, we will, kids,’ confirmed Bertha.

Aidy became conscious that time was wearing on and she needed to get back to work. ‘Betty, go and fetch Marion from next door. George, after you’ve taken your coat off, start setting the table. I’ve just about got time to get your dinner before I have to rush off back to work. I’ll have mine when I come back.’

After they had each gone off to do her bidding, she worriedly whispered to Bertha, ‘It’s obvious he’s no money to go out with tonight so you’re going to have to put up with him. But then, hopefully, he’ll go out for a bit to see the bloke he made the deal with and find out what went wrong. I should be back from work by then and you won’t have to put up with his mood on your own.’

Her face set gravely. ‘We’ve got to do something about him, Gran. There’s has to be a way to get him out of our lives. I can’t risk him dragging the children down with him into the world he seems to be getting himself involved in.’

As the family sat around the table in the back room eating their meal, Aidy was just about to put her coat on to take her leave for work when someone knocked
purposefully on the back door. For a moment she wondered who it could be. No one called at this time of evening. Like this household, all the neighbours were busy having their dinner. Oh, all but one person … the rent man. With all that had happened in the last couple of hours, Aidy had temporarily forgotten it was Friday and his time to call.

She went to get the rent book from where it was kept in a drawer of the dresser in the back room, and then stopped short. A sudden thought struck her and panic rose within her. The wage packet that the doctor had given her at the end of her morning shift was in her handbag. With everything that had happened tonight, she had forgotten to take it out and hide it on her person. Her mind raced frantically. Where had she put her handbag when she had arrived in? Then she spotted it on the draining board. Dashing over, she unclipped it and pulled it wide open. Then breathed a deep sigh of relief. Tucked in by her purse was her unopened wage packet.