Baxter came in to visit later that same week, and Frank told him about the parole board and that this time he was going to get out.

Baxter listened and nodded, and said that was good, Frank, that was real good news. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Frank the news that Dora O’Brien was dead. He reckoned that Frank might be out on the streets again very soon, and the first thing Frank would do was shoot the messenger – him.

So Baxter kept shtum.

Let someone else tell Frank about it.

97

For once, Donny took a back seat. He gave Angel money – just enough, and he asked for receipts – to cover everything, but it was she who did it all. It was Angel who arranged Dora’s funeral, put the notice in the paper. She bunked off work at the shop and knew she would probably lose her job over that, but she didn’t care. Depressed, she tidied the flat, and stood looking at her mother’s clothes hanging there in the wardrobe. Dora was being buried in an old sea-green chiffon dress that she’d loved, one that she’d had for years.

‘I wore that in happier times,’ she’d told her daughter, and she kept it at the back of the wardrobe, out of sight.

Angel had already made sure that the undertakers had it. The dress was the colour of the ocean, and Angel thought that was fitting; Dora had been a Pisces, always floating this way and that, never settled, always a wild child.

Then the day of the funeral dawned and Angel had to brace herself, alone, to attend. She dressed in a plain black dress – she didn’t own such a thing, it was one of Dora’s – and took the bus to the church. When the hearse turned up with the cheap pine coffin in the back, decorated with the single pink wreath Angel had scraped the money together for, she cried her eyes out, shed all the tears she had been unable to during the past long, awful days.

Her mother had killed herself.

She couldn’t bring herself to face up to that, but it was a cold hard fact. Dora had been so miserable, so trapped by her caged life with ‘Uncle’ Donny that she had seen death as her only way out. And when he’d started on Angel, it had simply broken her heart.

The day was sunny and bright, a travesty shining upon all this sadness. Angel thought it would be only the pall-bearers and her in attendance. But there was a small cluster of other people there. People she didn’t know. And among them was Tom, her cousin. He saw her come into the church, walking slowly behind the coffin as it was carried up the aisle and placed on the dais. He smiled at her.

Angel took her seat on the left side of the aisle up the front, and the vicar started into his piece about what a lovely woman Dora had been, when he had no idea of the torment she had lived in. As he droned on, Angel’s eyes were drawn over to the other side of the church. There was a thin woman of about thirty years old sitting there. She had pale ginger hair. Beside her was a big woman, dark haired and dry eyed. And there was Tom.