Wishing and Hoping (2 page)

She sat there thinking for a moment. ‘I suppose I do, and yet . . .'

‘You think that p'rhaps you don't need to. You think she'll know herself?'

Rosa Brooks nodded. ‘I think the time has come.'

Someone had tied a huge red bow around the switch that would turn on the neon light of the Blue Genie.

‘Your very own nightclub,' Marcie whispered to her husband proudly. He deserved his success – he worked so hard.

Michael smiled back at her. ‘
Our
nightclub. Just remember that, babe. Everything that's mine is yours too – yours and the kids.'

When he kissed her, his lips were soft and warm on hers. Neither of them cared that everyone was watching them, though if they'd been in private they would have done much more than kissing. That's how it was between them still even after almost two
years of marriage; they couldn't get enough of each other.

However, when she looked at the sign, the image from the dream came back intermittently, sending a cold chill down her spine.

She did her best to shake it off, revelling in the moment with more exuberance than she would normally show. She wouldn't let anything spoil this. She wanted everything to go perfectly for Michael's launch.

The staff and invited guests clapped as Marcie stepped forwards to turn on the switch. Her father was standing with them looking on proudly as though his little Marcie had done this all by herself – which wasn't true of course. Michael had already been in the throes of branching out into business when he'd met her. But this one, as he kept telling her, was special. He was going to be a thorn in his father's side and prove that he was a better man than his brother who was presently detained at Her Majesty's pleasure for causing actual bodily harm.

‘I'm as good as the Camilleris,' he whispered to her.

‘Better,' she whispered back.

Once again shaking off a shiver, Marcie flicked the switch. Everyone looked up as the neon flickered like a gas flame reluctant to ignite. But suddenly there it was; bright blue against the dark red brick of what
had been an old tea warehouse. The sharp blue of the neon was reflected in the pavement beneath it, which was still wet from an earlier downpour of rain.

Everything happened so fast. Suddenly the sign sputtered and fizzed, sparks flaring and falling to the pavement.

A cry of alarm rose from the crowd.

Marcie was standing to the side of the sign looking up at it. Michael pulled her back as the sparks showered down on her and a second gasp of amazement went round the crowd.

‘You OK?' It was her dad, Tony Brooks, who asked.

Michael answered for her. ‘Yeah. She's fine.'

Marcie said nothing and was far from fine. She was looking up at the sign. Earlier the nubile and very female genie had sparkled with erotic cheeriness. Now what looked down at her was dark and slightly charred, similar to the image in her dream.

‘It's a bad omen,' somebody said and sparked a rumble of amazed conversation.

Michael turned on them. ‘Cut the gossip! It's an electrical fault, that's all.'

The smell of charged electricity hung acrid in the air. Only the more sensitive would have noticed it. Marcie was one of them.

The electrician who had installed the sign shook his head and looked dumbfounded. ‘That shouldn't have happened,' he said.

‘Accident or deliberate?' growled Michael through clenched teeth.

The electrician shrugged. ‘I don't know. It shouldn't have happened.'

‘
HEY, TONY. I
wanna word with you, me boy.'

Tony Brooks had just come out of the bookies having had a decent win in the 2.15 at Kempton. His intention had been to make his way to his new girlfriend's place and give her a share.

Having a girlfriend had become something of a habit with him. OK, so he had a wife and three kids at home on the Isle of Sheppey. But he worked in London and in London he had a different life. In London he could be Jack the Lad and had the money to get away with it.

Things had gone all right since his daughter Marcie had married Michael Jones, a London lad with the nous and connections to go places.

Marcie was the daughter of his first marriage to Mary. Mary had been the love of his life but he'd always believed that she'd run off with another man when Marcie was only small. Eventually he'd divorced her on the grounds of desertion and married Babs, his second wife and mother of his three youngest kids.

But it had always been Marcie who had been the
apple of his eye and especially so now, seeing as her old man Michael had had the good grace to employ his father-in-law in his blossoming business enterprise and at his brand-new nightclub. Things would continue to go all right – or so he'd thought. That was until he saw Paddy Rafferty sitting in the back of the shiny black Rover. He instantly knew there'd be aggro.

Paddy Rafferty had started his career stealing cars and trading imported goods direct from the docks – literally stuff that had fallen off the back of a lorry or a convenient ship. From there he'd gone into the building trade. Not that he actually built anything himself. He was into importing building labourers from Ireland on the system referred to as ‘the lump'. The labourers paid him a portion of their wages – the portion that the taxman never got to see. That was what the lump was: a semi self-employed system contracted to one company, one building firm, via the likes of Paddy Rafferty. Legal thanks to a loophole in the law, it gave Rafferty his basic income. Everything else he did was not nearly so legit and it suited him fine. However, money had failed to make him a better man. He'd been born rough – and rough he would remain.

Paddy curled his finger and beckoned Tony over. Paddy Rafferty was wearing suede gloves. He always wore gloves, even in the summer. It was said that
he'd scalded his hands as a child and the skin had never healed. Some said his skin was as smooth as a snake – and purple.

Tony grinned as though he were truly pleased to see the man, when in fact it couldn't be further from the truth. Paddy Rafferty was bad news. Very bad news.

But still, if you run with the hounds . . .

Tony's mouth cracked into a smile. ‘Paddy! How are you?' He sauntered over as though he were a man of importance. Inside he was wary. Paddy was not to be trusted.

Leaning on the car door as though he and Paddy were the greatest of chums, he got out his packet of Woodbines. ‘Care for a fag?'

Paddy shook his head. He had a thick mane of hair. His complexion was totally at odds with the rumours regarding his hands, pitted as it was like a pink-skinned orange. ‘I don't indulge in the habit, Tony. It isn't good for the health so I'm led to understand.'

‘Is that so?' Tony was doing his best to sound nonchalant. Inside he was wondering what the fuck Paddy was after. A favour, he supposed. Everybody wanted a favour of good old Tony Brooks, especially now that his daughter was married to one of the Camilleris, albeit Victor's bastard son. The Camilleris were a big noise on the local manor.

Victor Camilleri was trouble, though nothing
compared to the likes of Roderico Parkhouse or the real big fish, Leo Kendal. Kendal was
numero uno
– him and his missus that is. Apparently Leo Kendal's wife was a bit of a looker with a sharp mind and a ruthless streak. Tony had heard all this by hearsay; he'd never met either of them, so he took it on trust.

In the meantime it was Paddy Rafferty who was demanding his attention.

‘I wanted to have a little talk with you, me boy,' said Paddy. It wasn't often he adopted such an obviously Irish catchphrase. Despite the flash outfits and rough demeanour, Rafferty could talk upper-crust English with the best of them, depending on what he was likely to make out of it. He could also talk bullshit. Tony decided it was some of the latter he was about to hear.

‘I hear your son-in-law's doing very well for himself. That's a nice nightclub he's got going down in Limehouse, though I doubt that the Chinks welcomed him with open arms. It's their territory after all. Has been for years.'

It was true that Limehouse had long been peopled by the Chinese, as a direct result of the opium wars. There were a lot of gambling houses around there, set up in cellars beneath old sugar refineries, and a few opium dens too, but basically there was little trouble. The Chinese did not wish to attract the presence of the police. They preferred to pay them
to keep off their backs, and as long as there was no trouble in Limehouse, they got no aggro.

‘They don't bother Michael,' said Tony smiling confidently and shaking his head. ‘My son-in-law's got a good name round and about,' he added, purposely reminding Rafferty of the fact that they were family. He only just stopped himself from drumming his fingers nervously on the car roof. What was it to Rafferty how Michael was doing?

‘That's good to hear, Tony, though I have to say that as the boy's only young he may be in need of some more mature guidance. I have to ask myself, has he really got the experience to be running that nightclub as he is? There are times when a young man is in need of a helping hand, you know, Tony, and, seeing as Victor Camilleri isn't around to guide him, I thought I might offer my services. All legal, of course. It's not so much the nightclub itself, Tony. It's the building. It's an old building and bound to be due for demolition before long. Then what's he going to do? You might like to mention to him that I know some blokes on the local council. If they see that I'm involved with the property there won't be a problem when it comes to redevelopment, know what I mean?'

‘I don't know about that,' said Tony slowly, wondering where the hell all this was leading.

He knew nothing about redevelopment, though quite a bit about collecting the rents with menaces
from the tenants of rotting Victorian tenements in the East End of London. He used to work collecting rents for Camilleri. The tenants, mostly immigrants, had paid dearly for the privilege of living in the squalor of the overcrowded London slums they'd rented from Camilleri.

Rafferty was putting him in the picture. The more he heard, the more misgivings he had.

‘The boy needs a partner with some experience in the building, demolition and development game and I'm his man. Now you tell him from me,' he said, one gloved finger tapping at Tony's shoulder, ‘that if he doesn't give me a ring about this, I'll be round to see him and explain what I'm offering in more detail. You got that then, Tony, my boy? You got that?'

Tony felt the tap of Paddy's finger turn to a stab hard enough to bruise him.

Straightening, he watched as Paddy's big black Rover drove off.

He was now in no doubt of where Paddy Rafferty was coming from. The partnership he'd suggested would only be legal as far as the paperwork was concerned. No money would actually change hands – or at least not from Paddy to Michael. Paddy wanted a cut of Michael's Limehouse property but he had no intention of paying for it. It was a glorified protection racket – extortion with menace.

Down in Sheerness, Rosa Brooks was giving the range a prod with a brass-handled poker.

Suddenly she stood up sharply.

‘Anything wrong, Auntie Rosa?'

Garth was sitting at the table layering jam on top of a well-buttered doorstep of bread cut straight from the loaf.

‘Nothing,' she said, but it wasn't true. The truth was that the blinder she became the greater her inner sight. She was seeing things more clearly than she ever had and to her mind there could be only one reason for that, a reason she would not voice to anyone, even to Garth who understood so well.

THE NEON SIGN
had been mended though it didn't shine as brightly as it had done. Every so often the light shivered as though it had seen a ghost. Despite this the nightclub was a great success from the very first night.

Marcie did not often go there but Michael had to. Running the club was mainly a night-time business so Marcie spent a lot of time with just the kids. Michael offered to hire a nanny so she could go there with him, but Marcie refused, preferring to look after them herself.

So most nights she spent alone, waiting for him to come home. Once the children were in bed she passed time doing chores around the house or watching the brand-new colour television Michael had bought her.

‘Funny to see things in colour rather than in black and white; it doesn't seem natural,' she'd remarked.

He'd laughed and pointed out to her that real life was in colour so a colour television was bound to be more natural.

Sally, one of her best friends, had thought her mad
that she hadn't taken up the offer of a nanny. ‘You're a fool to let a good-looking bloke like Michael out of your sight. Aren't you afraid that some little tart will get her hooks in him?'

Marcie replied that she was not worried. ‘I trust him.'

It didn't mean to say that she didn't sometimes wonder whether he really was where he said he was and doing what he should be doing. But it wasn't often.

The hours until midnight seemed to drag. The hours between her getting into bed and falling asleep went more quickly. Instinctively she always woke up just before he put the key in the lock.

Just as she usually did, Marcie woke up aware that he was home. The room was dark, and when she looked at the illuminated figures on the bedside alarm, she saw that it was three o'clock.

Adjusting her eyes to the darkness and her ears to the silence, she waited for the light to come on in the hallway below or the soft tread of his foot on the first stair.

The house was a bay-windowed semi-detached built in the 1930s that had survived the war and offered them a proper family home away from his business and the more crowded tenements of London's East End. He'd been trying to get her to move to a more palatial house in Richmond, but she'd argued that the kids were settled and that their
present home was cosy. A big house in Richmond would be less so, though at times she wondered whether they should make the move. They certainly had the money to do so.