The Knock

To my mother –
And to mothers and daughters everywhere.
And of course, as always, to Cliff, with all my love.
You make it possible.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Steve and Lynne Ottaway, to my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram followers, in fact to everyone on Team Keane who regularly get me up there in the Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller List, thank you, guys. It is appreciated.

BOOK ONE

1

1955

There were three of them, the O’Brien girls, growing up. Lil the eldest, then June with the remaining limp after the childhood spent in callipers and orthopaedic shoes, then Dora the baby of the family. While Mum worked part-time at the local shop to bring in a few extra pennies, big capable Lil saw to the two younger girls and helped keep the house clean. Not that it was much of a house. It was a measly little rented two-up-two-down in East London, so the three girls had to share a bed and the lav was out in the back yard, a tin bath hanging on a nail beside it.

The girls amused themselves on winter evenings by scraping the ice off the inside of their bedroom window, making pretty patterns. Sometimes the older two would make their hands into rabbit heads and horses and project them onto the wall by

the light of the gas lamp. Christmases and birthdays, if they were very lucky, they got one gift each, and it was never a lavish one. Dad was on the bins. They were poor, but happy.

Except for the bitching, that was. Lil was stoic, robust. June

was nervy, skinny, always cold, shivering in the winter, her feet and hands like blocks of ice even in the heat of summer. And Dora?

It was as if a good fairy had come down off the Christmas tree, waved her magic wand and said: ‘To you, Dora, I give the gift of beauty.’

Dora the baby of the family was the pretty one with her silvery hair, pouty lips and languid blue eyes. The one Mum cuddled, and sighed over, the one people stopped in the street to stare at.

‘What a little beauty!’ they exclaimed.

‘She could be a film star, looks like that.’

‘You must be so proud!’

Dora’s mother Freda was proud of her youngest. None of her family were prizewinners in the looks department. But Dora was the exception and so she was full of confidence, buoyed up by praise, radiant with it. She twirled around their little sitting room to the radio, while Perry Como sang ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ and Dean Martin crooned ‘That’s Amore’. Times were pretty good, things still tight but mending. The war was long over, rationing was – at last – being phased out.

Lil as the eldest child watched her mother clapping and laughing as Dora ‘The Adored’ – her sisters’ nickname for her – leapt around the room. Lil vacuumed the carpets, washed the scullery floor, shopped, caught the rag-and-bone man with his cart at the gate to get the pots mended or sell their old clothes on for a few pennies. She spent most of the week too tired to drag herself around the place, and what thanks did she ever get?

Dad was sitting in his chair nearest the fire, smoking his pipe. He’d been too old to enlist, there was that to be grateful for or they really would have been in the shit, Freda alone with three kids to raise. He read the paper and didn’t look up at Dora dancing and throwing her arms around.

‘You’ll ruin that kid, praising her all the time,’ he often told his wife; he was a firm believer in children being seen and not heard. He’d never had all this claptrap going on with Lil or June, why with Dora?

‘Ah, she’s full of joy, little Dora,’ Mum would say indulgently. ‘Let her dance, where’s the harm in it?’

Mum’s indulgence to Dora seemed to know no bounds. She scrimped and saved enough to send the girl for a few elocution lessons, to iron out the thick Cockney accent in her voice. Singing lessons followed, and then dance classes down at Harry Willoughby’s decrepit old dance hall. It all cost the earth and there had been rows over it, Dad said it was more than they could afford, but to Freda nothing seemed too good for Dora.

Dora was aware that Lil and June watched her resentfully. Poor scrawny June with her built-up left shoe was always eager to please, so eager that being a tell-tale never bothered her for a minute. Dora would watch almost pityingly as June loaded the washing into the Baby Burco in the scullery every Monday before school, getting her hands red and cracked from handling the washing powder, winding the whites through the mangle, then the coloureds, then hanging the clean washing out on the line in the yard. No one ever gave her a pat on the back, but Dora got plenty. She was destined for better things, and she knew it.

So Dora danced and twirled and very soon she blossomed into a beauty, as they all knew she would.

Lil was twenty years old in 1955 when she got married to a dull nervous man twelve years her senior. His name was Alec and he worked as a clerk down the bank and was shell-shocked from being in the infantry during the war.

By her eighteenth, when she was bridesmaid for Lil, June was courting a long lanky streak of piss called Joe who’d been a conscientious objector. Now he painted houses and kept very quiet about his past when he’d been banged up at Her Majesty’s pleasure for refusing to fight. He worked cheap, so even if people

were put out about his history, they were still pleased to employ him. The war had thinned out the men, there wasn’t much for a girl to pick from any more. So Dora knew that June – although Dad raged about it and called him a lily-livered coward and a disgrace – would probably settle for twenty-nine-year-old Joe. What with the club foot, she was lucky to get anyone, really.

Dora was sixteen when she too was bridesmaid to her eldest sister Lil. And it was at Lil’s wedding reception, held in the local church hall, that she first met Dickie Cole.

2

Dora was dazzled by Dickie Cole. She’d heard things being said about him, bad things. That he’d been a spiv during the war and dodged the draft, and that he’d flog his own granny for tuppence. But Dad was pleased enough to buy the cooked meats for the wedding off Dickie at a knock-down price. Of course it had all been nicked from down Smithfield, everyone knew that, but it was cheap and good quality, what else mattered?

Dora was a very pretty girl and boys chatted her up all the time. But they were boys. Dickie Cole was a man. He had to be at least thirty, but she liked that. He had an air about him, of confidence, almost arrogance. He sat a little apart, neatly turned out, sipping whisky, smoking cigarettes and listening to the speeches, then later watching the dancers.

Dora, seated across the room after the wedding breakfast had been consumed and then all the tables and chairs pushed back to allow for the dancing to start, stared and stared at Dickie Cole. She wasn’t the type to be a wallflower. She sat there in her bridesmaid’s gown of cheap turquoise blue cotton, but every few seconds one boy or another would come up and ask her to dance. Then she’d twirl around the room with them to ‘Young at Heart’ or ‘Secret Love’, played by a crappy little four-piece band hired for the occasion.

As ‘Secret Love’ came to a finish, June hobbled over and plonked herself down beside her younger sister.

‘Christ, it’s hot in here,’ she complained, waving gaily to her boyfriend Joe, who was propping up the bar with his mates. He blushed and turned away. The turquoise bridesmaid’s gown suited June, brought her muted colouring back to life. Dora thought that June looked almost pretty tonight, her limp barely noticeable.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Dora, indicating the intriguing man who was seated across the other side of the room.

‘Who, him? That’s Dickie Cole. He was a spiv when the war was on. Didn’t fight. Dodged the draft. He’d fleece anyone for a tanner.’

Dora took this information in, her eyes glued to Dickie. The thing was, Dickie Cole was much better dressed than any other man in the room, including Alec the groom – who never looked good in anything, poor slope-shouldered bastard – and his best man Joe. Dickie’s suit was double-breasted, beautifully cut to show off a fine pair of shoulders, with a silk paisley kerchief at the breast pocket. He wore a flashy gold snake ring on the little finger of his right hand. His hair was dark, slicked back with Brylcreem, and he had a thin pencil moustache, like Clark Gable. His eyes were dark blue and very deep-set, giving him a hawkish look. And . . . he was looking over at Dora, while stubbing out his cigar on a cake plate.

‘He’s so handsome,’ said Dora, her heart thumping in her chest.

‘Yeah, but he’s no good,’ said June, primly, and she stood up and went over to the bar, leaving Dora on her own.

Dora watched, mouth drying, as Dickie stood up. He was coming across the dance floor and the band was striking up ‘Three Coins in a Fountain’. Then some idiot boy came tearing up from her right.

‘Wanna dance, Dora?’

It was sodding William Maguire, who was always mooning around after her, staring at her cow-eyed. She’d left school last year and started work in the grocer’s, which was easy enough now that rationing had finally come to an end, but dull as fuck. When they’d been in the school playground William hadn’t given her a moment’s peace, and now once again he’d started being a pest, hanging around on the corner near her house with his mates, making stupid remarks as she passed by. These days he had a job as an apprentice down the foundry, he had wages coming in, and he was full of himself.

Dora opened her mouth to speak. Shit! Go away!

‘No she don’t, sonny,’ said Dickie, arriving in front of her. He was taller than she’d thought. Up close, even more gorgeous, too. He had beautiful eyes. ‘So clear off.’

‘And who the hell are you?’ pouted William. ‘Her fucking minder or something?’

Dickie stepped toward him, looked him dead in the eye. ‘I told you. Piss off,’ he said.

Cornered, forced into bravado by Dora’s watching eyes, William puffed himself up.

‘Make me,’ he said.

‘I fucking will, you cheeky little shit,’ said Dickie, and surged forward, grabbing William by his shirt front and yanking him up on his toes to glare nose to nose into the youngster’s eyes.

Everyone in the room turned and looked. The four-piece band fell silent in a discordant series of honks and drumbeats.

‘Hey!’ It was William’s older brother Donny, striding over.

Donny was older and a lot taller than William, more athletic in build, with dark hair and eyes. Donny had always struck Dora as being very intense. He had a wired, buttoned-up look about him, like a spring wound too tightly. He shoved Dickie back, off William.

‘What’s up?’ he asked his brother, his eyes staying on Dickie Cole. He ignored Dora.

Dora had felt a flutter of secret delight at what had been building up between Dickie and William – they were actually fighting over her! – but now she felt a spasm of irritation. Trust him to spoil the fun. Donny always ignored her. At sixteen she was already so used to males falling over themselves to get close to her that his seeming ‘indifference’ offended her deeply. But of course he was on the police force, a newish copper, so Dad said that he thought his shit didn’t stink. Dora felt a sizzle in the air whenever they were in the same space, though: he might not look at her, or speak to her, but she knew, in the way that women always know, that he fancied her.

The Maguires were a tight-knit Irish family who lived two doors up from the O’Briens. They seemed affectionate and protective of each other. Warmer than her family, Dora always noticed. Dora envied them that. She thrived on admiration but never got so much as a smile or even a peck on the cheek from her dad, and that hurt her.

If ever William was in trouble, Donny was always close by, ready to put things right. That was sort of nice. If only Dora’s sisters were as protective, as caring of her as the Maguire clan were of William. But she knew her sisters thought her a spoiled little madam and hated her for it. And she knew damned well that Dad did, too, and that killed her. She craved his affection, but he never ever gave it to her. To others, yes – but never to her.

‘Nothing’s up,’ William said awkwardly to his brother, his face red. He stalked off, embarrassed.

Donny Maguire stood there for a beat longer, his eyes narrowed on Dickie’s face. Dickie returned his stare.

‘You want to watch yourself, mate,’ said Donny. Then he slowly turned and walked away.

Dora looked up at Dickie. ‘That was a bit cheeky of you,’ she said. ‘I might have wanted to dance with William.’

Dickie stopped scowling after the older Maguire brother and half-smiled at her.

‘Did you?’ he asked.

‘No. Actually I didn’t.’

‘Saved you some hassle then,’ said Dickie, holding out a hand. ‘Dance?’

As if in a dream Dora stood up, took his hand. His was hot, dry, his grip strong.

Oh he’s gorgeous . . .

She concentrated on getting her steps right. It would be just awful if she stepped on his feet, she’d die of embarrassment. But she found it hard to concentrate. He was holding her tight against him, actually leading her in the dance, something she’d never experienced before, his thighs nudging hers, and it was almost effortless, it was like magic, like Cinderella and her prince in the Disney film they’d seen down the local fleapit, it was wonderful.

‘Did you see the film?’ he was asking.

His breath was tickling her face. He was so close.

‘What film?’

‘Three Coins.’

‘No, I . . .’ Truth was, the family could rarely afford the luxury of the pictures.

‘I’ll take you. It’s on at the Roxy. You’ll love it. You’ll fall in love with Rossano Brazzi, all the girls do.’

Dora didn’t think there was any danger of her falling in love with Rossano Brazzi. She was already falling in love with Dickie Cole. Christ, he must be used to sophisticated women, women who could discuss the arts and stuff like that. Whereas she . . . well, what did she know? Fuck all. Her family never read books or went to the theatre, although she would love to be up there

on the stage, acting, singing, being admired. There was never anything like that in her life. Even education had been something that was done in between chores, and never given much thought to. You just got through school, one way or another, through the humdrum boredom of lessons, and then you started work. Then if you were a girl you got married, you didn’t have to work outside the home any more – if you were very lucky – and you could spend your time looking after your husband and children. That was all Dora had to aim for. It was like the only possible reward at the end of a lot of boring, endless shit. The prize on the plinth. The silver cup. Marriage.