The Devil Rides Out (28 page)

‘But you live in terror of him,’ I’d protest. ‘He’s a violent bully who batters you up.’

‘And if he ever turns up here looking for me then for Jaysus’ sake don’t open the door, he’ll kill the pair of us.’

Oh, great, just what I need, a drunken Finn McCool on the rampage.

He must have shrunk in the wash because when he eventually did turn up he turned out to be five foot nothing, with a cast in his eye and a stammer, his shiny, ill-fitting suit hanging off his puny frame, making him look like the stooge from a Benny Hill sketch.

One morning Liam, the youngest boy, wearing only a dirty vest, seized the opportunity of an open front door to escape. When I eventually realized that he was missing I took off looking for him in my bare feet, frantic that he’d wandered on to the busy road. Finally discovering him outside the station, barefaced and bare-arsed, I suffered the humiliation of seeing commuters on their way to catch their trains either averting their eyes completely or viewing the pair of us with a mixture of disgust and pity. A woman on her way out of W. H. Smith said that I wanted reporting to the social services for allowing a child to run around like that. Catching my reflection in the window, unshaven and unkempt, clutching a none too clean half-naked child, I could see why.

Vera hadn’t been up to Liverpool for ages, not since his mother had died, so he couldn’t possibly have gone on a crime spree breaking into the homes of wealthy Liverpool residents even if he’d wanted to. I could no more imagine Vera scaling a drainpipe with a stocking over his head and jemmying a bathroom window open in the dead of night than I could him coming home sober. It was a ridiculous notion. Besides, he had an alibi – me. I set off to Hornsey Police Station, Liam in tow, to prove Vera’s innocence.

I went to the flat first to get the number of the Fountains from Vera’s address book and rang them up. Pop, as Vera’s dad was known, wasn’t in the pub but the woman who answered told me that she’d send a message to him immediately to ring me urgently.

I peeled some spuds while I waited for Pop to ring back, genuinely concerned at the thought of Vera banged up in a cell just round the corner and thinking that it might be a good idea if I made him a bit of dinner and took it round to him at the station. The phone in the hall rang. It was Pop.

‘All right, lad,’ he growled. ‘What’s the score then?’

I explained what had happened and waited for Pop’s reply.

‘OK then,’ he said after a momentary pause, sounding like a cop in an American police drama, ‘I’ll get things moving at this end. You sit tight, I’ll keep you posted.’

The desk sergeant refused to give me any information apart from the fact that they were indeed holding Vera, and my protestations of Vera’s innocence fell on deaf ears. Even though he promised to pass on the magazines, fags and corned beef dinner Vera never got them, nor did I get my plates and tea towel back. Thieving bastards.

When I explained to Rita what had happened to Vera she insisted on going up to the police station herself. Having met Vera a few times and liked him, she was determined to get him out. As she was a little drunk I couldn’t risk letting her go on her own. With Rita as her counsel Vera would probably end up getting transportation, so I piled the kids on the back of the bus and we all made our way to Crouch End.

Rita had to pop into a pub first ‘to calm her nerves’ – this coming from a woman who didn’t have a nerve in her body – while I waited outside with the kids. She wasn’t in there long but when she came out she smelled strongly of whisky.

‘Don’t normally drink the stuff,’ she explained as we trailed round to the police station. ‘It has a tendency to make me violent.’

Consequently I was a little apprehensive as she approached the desk sergeant, one hand on her big fleshy hip which she rolled as she walked. ‘This is Mr O’Grady,’ she said grandly, pointing towards me. ‘He is a social worker with the council and we would like to know why you are keeping his friend.’

‘Olivia Shelbourne,’ Rita replied without missing a beat, ‘Miss Olivia Shelbourne.’

I could feel my face burning as I clumsily explained the situation, but I could tell he wasn’t listening to me. He was more concerned about a poster for death watch beetle that Liam had ripped off the wall and was waving about.

‘Look,’ he said to his siblings, ‘there’s one of them things we had in the bathroom.’

‘What’s your friend’s name, sir?’ the sergeant sighed wearily, watching me try and fail to get four highly excitable kids to sit down and keep quiet.

‘Vera,’ Rita piped, throwing the sergeant a sly smile. ‘Vera. I’m afraid I don’t know his surname, officer.’

‘Vera?
His
surname?’

I gave the sergeant Vera’s real name, squirming under his scrutiny as I tried once again to explain. ‘Vera’s a nickname,’ I offered lamely, listening to my voice trail off as he shook his head in disbelief.

‘He’s being held until the arresting officers arrive from Liverpool tomorrow to take him back to be charged,’ he said after making a phone call. ‘That’s all I can tell you for now. Thank you.’

‘Why did you call yourself Olivia Shelbourne?’ I asked Rita on the bus home.

‘Well, you don’t want to be giving the coppers your real name, particularly if you have a bit of form like me, it’s common sense.’ She settled down in her seat and started to lard some lipstick on.

‘But why Olivia Shelbourne?’

Vera was released the following evening, for as soon as the arresting officers turned up they realized that Vera was not the same person they’d nicked in Liverpool. Whoever they’d arrested was obviously someone close to Vera as he knew all his details, passing himself off as him.

‘Look at me,’ he said, safely back at home. His hand was shaking so violently it sent waves of tea crashing over the side of the mug he was attempting to pick up to wash a Valium down. ‘Just look at the state of me poor nerves.’ Another one with nerves of steel.

One of the other peripatetics had offered to mind the kids for me so I could go back to the flat for a couple of hours to see him. I wanted all the details. ‘What was it like in there?’ I asked. ‘Being locked up?’ I still couldn’t believe that you could be locked up for two days for a crime that you couldn’t possibly have committed.

‘Terrible, Lily, terrible. I nearly went mad banged up all that time.’ He spoke as if he’d just been released from the horrors of a long spell in solitary on Alcatraz. ‘They took me glasses off me,’ he screamed, outraged. ‘In case I committed suicide with them, how stupid is that?’

‘I suppose you could break them and then cut your wrists.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Vera spluttered, a trickle of tea running down his chin.

‘Killing yourself with a pair of glasses.’

‘How the hell do I know?’ he said, taking his off and wiping them shakily on his T-shirt. Had the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank broken down then Vera’s lenses would’ve made a more than adequate substitute. In fact he could’ve held them up to the sunlight, that’s if his cell had such a luxury as a window, and burned the lock off the door.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘pop in the Cap with me for a drink on your way back to work. I certainly need one.’

Later on, as we stood drinking our lagers in the Cap, I noticed some leaflets advertising something called ‘Regina Fong’s Saturday Morning Madhouse’. What interested me was the bit at the bottom proclaiming that everyone was welcome to come along and do a number. It was all the encouragement I needed, desperate as I was to tread the boards of the Cap’s tiny stage, and I made my mind up there and then that come hell or high water I was indeed going to get up and ‘do a number’.

I’d taken the children to see their mother in hospital. She was a nice woman, a loving mother trying to raise her kids on what she received from the government and nothing at all like her errant sister.

Tucked away at the back of the electricity meter, wrapped in a carrier bag, I found my answer. A gun. I unwrapped the bag and stared at it, wondering what I should do now. I couldn’t have four lively kids running around a flat with a gun waiting to be discovered by inquisitive fingers, nor was I prepared to put them and myself at risk by living in a possible secret armoury for the IRA. The uncle had either been looking for the gun when I disturbed him, which meant he’d probably be back, or been hiding it. Either way I didn’t feel particularly safe that night and slept with one eye open.

In the morning, as I was about to ring Maura for her advice, the children’s mum turned up. Having made up her mind that she was well enough to go home she’d discharged herself. I didn’t want to worry her but felt I had to tell her about the gun.

‘If you’d lifted them floorboards up you’d have found a few other bits and pieces,’ she said resignedly. ‘That bloody Gerry, I’ve warned him about using my house to hide his arms. Don’t worry, I’ll see that it’s out of here by tonight and that will be the last of it. Forget you ever saw anything, d’ye hear?’ I wasn’t sure if I was to take her last remark as a piece of sound advice or as a threat and kept my mouth shut, telling no one apart from Maura, who replied somewhat darkly that she would ‘deal with it’.

It was basic to say the least, but as pub dressing rooms go, as I was soon to find out, far superior to the majority of rat-holes that the acts were expected to get ready and changed in. The bright fluorescent lighting picked out the glitter impacted on the bare concrete floor, the residue left behind by a lifetime of drag queens, making it sparkle in places, reminiscent of the rocks on Aladdin’s Cave in Blackler’s Christmas Grotto. A dress rail, hanging with a colourful assortment of the Sisters’ costumes that I was slightly disillusioned to see didn’t look quite so spectacular at close range as they did under the lights of the Black Cap’s stage, ran alongside one wall. A long mirror hung on the other wall, the makeup shelf underneath pockmarked with cigarette burns and splattered with tiny yellowing pools of hardened spirit gum.

In the corner was the unheard of luxury of a sink, used by the acts not only to wash and shave in but also as a convenient lav. To reach the stage from this dressing room, you had to go down a couple of steps and past the gents’ toilet. If it was a busy night it meant wading through the overspill of pee and if it was raining you got soaked as there was no overhead cover in the alley, so either way you got wet. Nevertheless, it was the tingeltangel, the gutter glamour, that I craved with an intoxicating eau de parfum all of its own. A combination of stale booze and fags, hairspray and sweat.