‘Well, if you’ve got any old fivers stashed you got to change them up or use them soon as they’re gonna be withdrawn come September.’
‘No more fivers? You gotta be jokin’, gerraway with you. I got one in me purse right now. Who told you this, David?’
‘When I got my benefits the other day the lady there mentioned it,’ he lied.
She shrugged and began placing the cutlery in a drawer.
‘It’s a terrible world, and I think they’re doin’ all these changes to rob us blind. I mean eleven pence for a bloody loaf of bread.’
David smiled. The record player had stopped so he went to put another LP on. He contemplated putting on Des O’Connor hoping it would encourage the remaining few guests to leave, but he knew how much his mother disliked him so he just replayed the Elvis album.
Renee didn’t want to go back into the lounge. The smell of cigarettes and cigar smoke always brought on her asthma. She cleared up most of the kitchen and downed her stout before she slipped along the hall to her bedroom. Clifford’s plastic prison bag of belongings was on the floor. It was full of dirty socks and underwear, old denim shirts and jeans, and there were two pairs of old trainers that smelled terrible. She decided she’d do his washing in the morning, and was about to tie the top of the bag in a knot to stop the sweaty odour filling the room when she noticed a small cardboard box. She took it out and opened it to discover a bunch of letters with an elastic band round them. She cautiously looked to the door, and took the packet to the bed, pulling off the elastic band. There were a few letters from the boys, birthday and Christmas cards, and then a considerable amount of pale-blue envelopes. She had rarely, if ever, written to her husband. She never saw the point as she knew his ‘bit on the side’ visited him on a regular basis.
She opened one that smelt of violets and saw the unfamiliar looped handwriting and immediately knew who it was from. She sighed. To her the slut had always been a disgusting bitch, a woman who had been hanging on by her fingernails. Cloyingly sentimental, the letters were badly spelt outpourings of adoration for Clifford which sickened Renee. She had put up with her husband’s infidelity for many years.
Before this woman there had been others; she suspected there had even been whores. But the most humiliating discovery had been that some of her friends had been having sex with Clifford. He could never keep his dick in his pants, but now she realized how much she had chosen to ignore his unfaithfulness. She had always told herself that it was because she put her two sons first, but now they were older and mostly taking care of themselves. She had accepted the abuse, anything for a quiet life, but holding the woman’s letters made her feel wretched. She carefully replaced them in the box, then into the plastic bag. Whilst tying it tight she imagined it was Clifford’s neck.
She stood, arms folded, looking out of the bedroom window and listening to the Elvis song coming from the living room:
Renee carried the hard-backed chair by her bed over to the wardrobe, opened the door and got up on the chair. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach for the hat box at the back of the shelf behind the shoeboxes. She eased it out and unsteadily got down before sitting on the chair and opening the lid. She lifted the soft tissue paper and removed the pristine white gloves, followed by the dark navy straw hat which had a yellow rose sewn onto the headband. She had worn it to a wedding twenty years ago, but not since. Now that the hat box was empty she pushed one side of the flat base up from the outside so she could remove the false interior bottom.
The notes were all ironed flat, and covered the entire secret compartment. She didn’t touch them but stared at the thick neat rows. Some of the money she had discovered in the airing cupboard after Clifford’s arrest. She had lied and intimated that the detectives searching the flat must have nicked it, which her husband and John had accepted. Now Clifford was home she wondered if the money would be safe in the hat box, but she could think of nowhere better to conceal it. She thought about what David had said about the £5 notes and began to sort them out, stacking them on the bedside table one by one.
Renee returned the other notes to the hat-box compartment, put back the false base, then carefully replaced the hat and gloves and the tissue paper before concealing the hat box once again behind the shoeboxes in the wardrobe. She began to count her £5 notes but stopped abruptly when she heard Clifford shouting for her.
‘Eh, where are you at, Renee?’
She quickly stuffed the notes into her underwear drawer and covered them with stockings and panties.
‘Renee, what yer doin’?’ he shouted.
She stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘Wishing I’d run away,’ she said softly to herself.
She went to the lounge where Clifford was standing, legs apart, a large tumbler of Scotch in his hand, as he chatted to two friends who were sitting on the sofa drinking port and brandy mixers.
‘We’re starvin’ — fry us up something.’
‘Where are the boys?’ she asked.
‘Takin’ some pals home and then goin’ out to a club.’
‘Bacon an’ eggs, sausages and baked beans do?’
‘Yeah, and do some of that fried bread, luv, and a pot of tea.’
Renee gave a smile and walked out. It was almost 9 p.m., and it surprised her that David had gone out clubbing — after all it wasn’t as if he could dance.
Chapter twenty
It was almost 10 p.m. by the time John finished fixing the brake on David’s wheelchair and dropped him off at the top of the multistorey car park, as the lift was still broken. David sat in the chair, put on some gloves, and wrapped the blanket he’d brought with him around his knees. John handed him the walkie-talkie and a small bottle of whisky.
‘Don’t go drinking it all and falling asleep on us. Just take a wee sip if you feel cold.’
‘Cold? It gets bloody freezing up here! I’ve had to put on long johns, a vest, two jumpers and a thick coat to try and keep warm.’
‘Good, then you won’t need to drink too much of the whisky,’ John said cynically as he closed the rear door of the van.
‘God, it stinks of piss up here,’ David said, pulling a face.
‘Yeah, the tramps take a slash down on the first floor and the smell travels up the stairwell. You’ll be OK now. Only make contact if you see someone or something suspicious. And don’t use names, all right?’
‘Yeah, don’t worry ’bout me, I’m good.’
John drove down to the exit, turned right and passed the café and the bank before taking a small turning into a narrow lane behind the buildings. He pulled up by the café’s yard, got out and opened a tall double wooden gate, then drove the van inside, parked up and closed the gates. Silas was waiting by the back door. The small yard was piled high with garbage and John noticed a few rats scuttling amongst the bags of waste food.
‘Lookout’s in place,’ John said quietly, and went down to the basement followed by Silas.
Pots of paint, brushes and dust sheets were laid out and the fake painted plasterboard had been removed revealing the hole in the wall. John could see that Danny had dug a hole under the bank’s basement to get access to the bits of the iron bars that were embedded underground, which he had now cut away with the oxyacetylene torch. He told John he had done an electric-circuit test on the bars and they were rigged up to an alarm, but he had managed to bypass it.