‘I’ve got a few quid.’
Ester suddenly gave a wondrous smile. ‘We’ll be rich soon, Julia. We’ll never have to scrabble around for another cent.’
‘You hope.’
‘Why are you always such a downer? I know she’s got those diamonds, I know it...’
‘Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. And maybe, just maybe, she won’t want us to have a cut of them.’
Ester gathered the dirty sheets in her arms. ‘There’ll be no maybes. I’ve worked over more people than you’ve had hot dinners, and I’ll work her over. I promise you, we’ll get to those diamonds, two million quid’s worth, Julia. Just thinking about it gives me an orgasm.’
Julia laughed. ‘I’ll go call a job centre. This our bedroom, is it?’
‘No, this one’s for Dolly.’
Ester patted the bed, then sat down and smiled. Just thinking of how rich she was going to be made her feel good, safer.
Mike Withey looked over the newspaper cuttings. They were yellow with age, some torn from constantly being unfolded, and one had a picture of Shirley Miller, Mike’s sister. It was a photograph from some job she had done as a model, posed and airbrushed. The same photograph was in a big silver frame on the sideboard, this time in colour. Blonde hair, wide blue eyes that always appeared to follow you around the room, as if she was trying to tell you something. She had been twenty-one years of age when she had been shot, and even to this day Mike was still unable to believe that his little blue-eyed sweetheart sister had been involved in a robbery. He had been stationed in Germany when he received the hysterical call from his mother, Audrey. It had been hard to make out what she was saying, as she alternated between sobs and rantings, but there was one name he would never forget, one sentence. ‘It was Dolly Rawlins, it was her, it was all her fault.’
The following year Mike married Susan, the daughter of a sergeant major. His mother was not invited to the wedding. Their first son was born before he left Germany and his second child was on the way when he was given a posting to Ireland. By this stage he was a sergeant; Audrey wasn’t even told about his promotion. He had sent her a few postcards, wedding pictures and baby photographs. Susan was worried about him being stationed in Ireland and, being heavily pregnant with a toddler to look after and hardly knowing a soul because all her friends were in Germany, she persuaded Mike to quit the army. He was reluctant at first, having signed up at seventeen: it was the only life he knew. It had been his salvation, it had educated him and, most importantly, given him a direction and discipline lacking in his own home.
Mike’s second son was born on the day he found out that he had been accepted by the Metropolitan Police. He never felt he had traded one uniform for another; he had ambitions and with the excellent recommendations from his CO, it was felt that Mike Withey was a recruit worth keeping an eye on. He proved them right: he was intelligent, hard-working, intuitive and well liked. Mike became a ‘high-flyer’, an officer a lot of the guys joked about because he never missed an opportunity of furthering his career prospects. No sooner was a new course pinned up on the board than he would be the first to apply. It was the many courses, the weekends away at special training colleges, that made Susan, now coping with two toddlers, suggest that Mike should contact his mother again, not just for company but because she hoped Audrey could give her a hand or even babysit. Mike’s refusal resulted in a big argument. Susie felt his boys had a right to know their grandmother as her own parents were still in Germany.
Mike took a few more weeks to mull it over. He might have been honest with Susan about his younger brother Gregg, who had been in trouble with the law, but he had not disclosed to her that his sister was Shirley Ann Miller, killed in an abortive robbery. It had been easy for him to cover it because they all had different fathers, different surnames. He was unsure if his mother had ever divorced or married each one, they had never discussed it, and his father had left when he was as young as his eldest boy was now.
Audrey was working on the fruit and veg stall when Mike turned up as a customer, asking for a pound of Granny Smith apples. She was just as he remembered her, all wrapped up, fur-lined boots, head-scarf, woollen mittens with their fingers cut off.
‘Well, hello, stranger. You want three or four? If it’s four it’ll be over the pound.’ She took each apple, dropping it into the open brown-paper bag, trying not to cry, not to show Mike how pleased she was to see him. She wanted to shout out to the other stallholders, ‘This is my son. I told yer he’d come back, didn’t I?’ She had always been a tough one, never showed her feelings. It had taken years of practice — get kicked hard enough and in the end it comes naturally. She didn’t even touch his hand, just twisted the paper bag at the corners. ‘There you go, love. Fancy a cuppa, do you?’
He had not expected to feel so much, not expected to hurt inside so much as she pushed him into the same council flat in which he had been brought up. No recriminations, no questions, talking nineteen to the dozen about people she thought he might remember, who had died on the market stalls, who had got married, who had been banged up. She never stopped talking as she chucked off her coat, kicked off the boots and busied herself making tea.
She still chattered on, shouting to him from the kitchen, as he saw all his postcards, the photo of his wedding, his boys, laid out on top of the mantelshelf, pinned into the sides of the fake gilt mirror. There had been a few changes: new furniture, curtains, wallpaper and some awful pictures from one of the stalls.
‘Gregg’s doin’ a stint on one of the oil rigs,’ Audrey shouted. ‘He’s trying to go on the straight an’ narrow, there’s a postcard from him on the mantel.’
Mike picked up the card of two kittens in a basket and turned it over. His brother’s childish scrawl said he was having a great time and earning a fortune, saving up for a motorbike. The postmark was dated more than eight months ago. He replaced the card and stared at himself in the mirror. It was then that he saw her. The thick silver frame, placed in the centre of the sideboard, a small posy of flowers in a tiny vase in front of it. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. It was one of the pictures taken when she was trying to be a model, very glamorous. Shirley smiled into his heart.
‘It’s her birthday tomorrow,’ said Audrey, ‘and you’ve not seen her grave.’
‘I’m on duty tomorrow, Mum.’
She held on to his hand. ‘We can go now.’
Audrey hung on to his arm. It was dusk, the graveyard empty. Shirley was buried alongside her husband Terry Miller. The white stone was plain and simple, the ornate flowers in a green vase were still fresh. ‘Tomorrow she’ll have a bouquet. They do it up for me on the flower stall, never charge me neither.’ Her voice was soft and she no longer held his arm, staring at the headstone. ‘She came to me two days after it happened.’
‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
She remained focused on her daughter’s name. ‘That bitch — that bitch Dolly Rawlins came to see me and I’ve never forgiven myself for letting her take me in her arms.’
‘We should go, Mum.’
She turned on him, hands clenched at her sides. ‘She was behind that robbery, she organized the whole thing. They never got the diamonds...’
Mike stepped forward, not wanting to hear any more, but there was no stopping her. ‘No, you listen. That bitch held me in her arms and I let her, let her use me just like she used my Shirley. She had them, she had the bloody things.’
‘What?’
‘The diamonds! She had them — got me to — she got me to give ’em to a fence, said she would see I was looked after, see I’d never want for anythin’.’