Cover

Title Page

Dedication

To Cliff, who threatens that one of these days
he’s going to write a book called Living with a Writer . . .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To all the people – friends, fans, helpers, all of you – who get me up in the top ten bestseller charts, time after time.

Thanks. It’s appreciated.

Epigraph

‘Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.’

Abraham Lincoln

1980s

PROLOGUE

Belle Barton was learning the true meaning of terror. She was learning that it brought cold sour sweat to your body and hot burning bile to your throat, bile you had to choke back because you couldn’t, you didn’t dare, show how frightened you were. Because he’d love that. He would feed on that. He was watching her, that mocking half-smile on his face. She wanted to lunge at him, to damage him, to make him pay, but she couldn’t. Two big men were holding her still, one on either side of her. She knew them. Had even grown up with one of them. Now, they were her enemies. They were Harlan Stone’s boys, his puppets, his creatures, and they would do exactly what he said. She had no power here. None at all.

‘I bet you’re thinking, round about now, that you wish you’d been nicer to me,’ said Harlan.

Belle stared at him with hatred in her eyes. Sweat trickled into them, making them sting. Outside, thunder rolled. Rain battered the roof. Inside, it was a jungle, wet ferns brushing her legs, humidifiers roaring, the heat crushing and damp, the trickle of small waterfalls a constant noise. Charlie Stone’s reptile house was kitted out with no expense spared. There was a large pond, black, brackish. Things moved in there, but she wasn’t going to think about that.

Water torture.

Yes, that was what this was. Belle’s legs were trembling. Her brain was in a panic, like a rat caught in a trap. There had to be a way out of this.

But there was no way.

I’m going to die.

The thought popped into her brain like gas rising out of a bog, bringing a fresh surge of terror with it. She was perched on the edge of the pond, standing on big ornamental rocks, the men holding her there. Water from the domed roof dripped, ran down her face. So wet and hot in here. Hot as hell. Stifling. She thought of her parents then, and pain roared up through her stomach, up into her throat. She was going to be sick.

‘Pretty little Belle,’ said Harlan, shaking his head. ‘Bet you wish you’d played ball now, eh? Been nice? But you never were. Were you.’

Belle glared at him, standing there so elegant; so handsome and calm and in control, with his neatly brushed honey-coloured hair, his pale emotionless grey eyes. While she was barefoot, wearing a tattered rag of a dress, soaked in sweat, her blonde hair plastered to her head. She was scratched and bloody from where they’d dragged her in here. If the men hadn’t been holding her up, she would have collapsed to her knees.

‘So go on,’ he said.

Belle gulped and stared at him. What?

‘Go on,’ he said again. ‘Beg me.’

She said nothing.

‘Beg me for your life,’ he said.

Belle looked down at the water. There were things moving in there. Something long slipping in from the opposite side. Eyes, she could see eyes. Reptilian and cold. The powerful swish of a tail. Her mother’s words came back to her then.

‘Keeping bloody snakes and lizards and caimans! Only weirdos do that.’

Caimans.

Belle knew that Charlie had fed them on whole dead chickens. A caiman was like a crocodile, it could take a pig. They were plenty big enough to do that. They could also take a human being. No bother at all. You needed a licence under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act to keep them, which Charlie had acquired without any difficulty.

Friends in high places.

Low places, too.

Oh Christ help me . . .

‘Waiting,’ said Harlan. ‘What do you say, Belle?’ He was smiling.

‘I know what you did,’ said Belle.

‘Did?’ He frowned. ‘About what?’

‘You know very bloody well,’ she said. ‘Beezer. Jake. And the business. The manor. I know what it is.’

The smile dropped from his face, leaving it blank.

‘Throw her in,’ he said.

1950s

1

‘You’re nicked, my son,’ said the copper, grabbing hold of nine-year-old Charlie Stone’s collar with one beefy hand.

Terry, Charlie’s best mate, kicked the policeman in the shin and hefted a dead rat at him. It was so ripe, the tail dropped off and its innards spattered the copper’s legs. The stench was horrible.

‘You dirty little bastard,’ said the copper, swiping at Terry while trying to keep a grip on Charlie, who was wriggling like an eel.

Terry darted in and kicked again. The rest of Charlie’s gang had scarpered already, headed back to the den. But Terry wouldn’t desert Charlie. They were a pair, these two. They skived off school together. Went scrumping together. And together – today – they’d shinned over the back gates of the grocer’s and started lobbing apples and pears over the top for their mates to catch.

Everything had been going good, then this filth had come out the back door of the shop. One of the neighbours must have raised the alarm.

Terry kicked again.

‘Little fucker,’ roared the copper, and let go of Charlie.

Charlie tore off and scrambled back over the gate and was gone, Terry hot on his heels. The copper snatched at Terry’s short trouser leg but Terry was up, he was over – he was away. Him and Charlie ran off down the street, gasping and laughing fit to bust.

Charlie Stone was leader of the gang. And their den – his den – was set deep in scrubby woods where the gang met under Charlie’s rule and divvied up their bounty. Bill ‘Beezer’ and little Col Crowley’s father owned a sweet shop where Charlie had spied out a big half-pound box of chocolates set high on a shelf. If Beezer and his little shadow Col wanted to be part of the gang, then that was the price.

Beezer paid it. The chocolates, the fruit from the grocery store, other things. He robbed stuff out of a few cars, teaching little Col how twocking – take without owner’s consent – worked. Then everything was taken back to the den and laid at Charlie’s feet.

‘More,’ said Charlie every time. ‘We need more.’

They were the Charlie Boys gang, and Charlie was their king. They charged across the old bomb sites on the manor, armed with dustbin lids for shields and wooden swords. Slowly they grew in strength, and purpose, and bulk.

2

At fourteen, Charlie found there were plenty of opportunities for theft and he exploited every one of them. The Charlie Boys were now teenage tearaways, villains in the making while the manor was ruled by real gangs, much older and more dangerous. Things were changing. Churchill had resigned and Eden had taken over. Charlie and Terry started boxing a bit, but they had no real talent for it, so Charlie decided crime paid better.

Charlie was leader, so Terry agreed. Why not? All Charlie’s mad schemes seemed to pay off. They started doing more cars – only nobs, flash gits and doctors had cars, so the pickings were good – and then a few houses. They nearly got caught when they were clearing out some candlesticks and jewellery from one house, but Terry tripped the furious owner up and took a punch in the back of his head that made it spin, just to let Charlie make a clean getaway.

Afterwards, in the den, when it was only the two of them, Charlie expressed his gratitude.

‘He would have caught me,’ he said.

‘Nah, you were off on your toes, mate,’ said Terry.

Charlie’s button-like dark brown eyes held Terry’s. Charlie was a short, solidly built boy, brown-haired and red-faced, while Terry was thinner, taller. With his red-blond hair and green eyes, he was shaping up to be a good-looking man one day.

‘That ain’t the truth,’ said Charlie. ‘The truth is, Tel, you saved my arse, and I’m grateful.’

‘It was nothing.’ Charlie was Terry’s mate, had been ever since the cradle. They were war babies, tough as old boots, the pair of them. He’d fall under a bus for Charlie, gladly. ‘My job, innit? I’m number two, so I protect number one, don’t I? Simple as that.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose.’

Terry eyed his mate. ‘Forever, Charlie. I’ll always look out for you. You know that.’

‘Forever,’ echoed Charlie, and held out his hand. ‘We’re going to run this whole fucking manor, Tel. You and me mate. Together. You see if we don’t.’

Terry shook Charlie’s hand. ‘Forever,’ he said.

And that was it.

The pact was sealed, the deal done.

1960s

3

At nineteen, Charlie Stone and his mob were Teddy boys, getting into all sorts, slouching around in the new coffee bars with their duck’s-arse hairdos and brothel-creeper shoes, lounging around in the cane furniture surrounded by rubber plants and big-skirted girls while listening to Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard on the juke. Charlie’s ideas were getting bigger and better all the time. They were pretty well off now, Charlie and his crew, and they were dangerous enough for Charlie to receive a warning off one of the big boys, Gordie Howard, a Scottish loan shark who’d beaten back fierce competition from the Maltese and who now ruled the manor.

Charlie and Terry came out of the Palais one night and instantly they were set upon. Charlie was taken down an alley by two men and given the thumping of his life while another two blokes held onto Terry.

Finally, humiliatingly, Gordie held a battered Charlie down on his knees and pointed an old WW1 bayonet at his throat.

‘You see this, ya cunt?’ he asked in his thick Glasgow accent.

Charlie could barely nod his head, he was that beaten. He spat out a tooth. ‘What’s that then? A fucking butter knife?’

‘Clever bastard, aintcha? Well next time I see your fat grinning ugly mug, I’ll slice you open with it, you got me, pal?’

Charlie stared up at him.

Gordie pressed the bayonet harder against Charlie’s neck.

‘I said, you got me?’ he snarled.

Charlie had to nod or die.

He nodded.

Afterwards, Terry helped Charlie home where his mother Joan threw a fit. Charlie was patched up and put to bed. Next day, Joan was ranting that they should call the police, but Charlie – through a swollen jaw and several broken teeth – insisted it was nothing, a bit of a ruckus, forget it.

When she left his bedside and only Terry was beside him, Charlie said: ‘I’m going to kill that cunt Howard.’

‘Just rest up, Charlie.’

‘I mean it. That arsehole thinks he’s the big noise around here? He’s joking. He ain’t even English. I’m a Cockney. Born to the sound of Bow Bells. These streets, this manor, they ought to be mine. I got enough foot soldiers to crush that cunt and I’m going to do it.’

Terry felt bad. He’d been right there, on the spot, but unable to help. Helping Charlie was his job in life, he’d given his word on that. And he’d failed.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said, feeling uneasy. Around Charlie, things moved fast. Too fast, he thought. He wasn’t sure, as Charlie was, of their capabilities when it came to mixing it with the big gangs.

‘We’ll do it together,’ said Charlie.

‘Yeah. But rest up first, OK?’

‘Yeah. I’ll do that.’

4

When she was seventeen, Nula Perkins fell in love with nineteen-year-old Terry Barton, Charlie Stone’s handsome number two. How it happened was like this: she went ballroom dancing with her brother, who got off with the girls while she sat there alone at the edge of the dance floor listening to song after endless song and being thoroughly ignored. Finally Jim Reeves was crooning out the last number of the night – the smoochy one where couples always got together. Couples, but not her. She sat there, red-faced, a failure. Somehow she wrenched herself out of her seat midway through the song and went into the bogs and cried. When she came out, teary-eyed and blotchy, Terry Barton was standing there.

‘Want to dance?’ he asked.

She was so grateful. And she fell for him, right then and there, because with her mousy hair and her big nose she was no looker – and she knew it. Terry was being kind; he’d rescued her from an embarrassing situation.

Of course, he didn’t linger. Once the dance was over he was out the door like a shot, with not a single glance back in her direction. She watched him peel out of there with a group of young men, at the head of which was short, bulky, hard-eyed Charlie Stone. Charlie Stone was always in the lead and, wherever Charlie went, it seemed Terry Barton was never far behind.

Still, Terry had turned her disaster of an evening – and oh yes, she’d seen her big brother laughing at her with his mates and their girlfriends as she sat there, her face burning with shame – into a good one.

‘You want to watch him,’ said her brother Jimmy on the drive home in his cream Ford Anglia, which shuddered as it went round corners. Its heater was clattering and throwing out no real heat at all.

‘Who?’ Nula asked.

‘Come on!’ Jimmy shot her a laughing glance. ‘Terry fucking Barton. He’s in with a bad lot.’

‘What, you talking about Charlie Stone?’

‘Course I bloody am. You don’t want to fuck around with that crowd, believe me.’

‘He’s a good dancer,’ said Nula. ‘Terry.’

‘Don’t get no ideas, our Nula. I asked him to ask you to dance. He did it as a favour.’

Nula shrank into her seat. So Terry hadn’t actually wanted to dance with her at all. And why would he? She was fat, plain and short-sighted – although she refused to wear the NHS specs she was supposed to. She sighed over her dismal life. Their parents’d had both her and Jimmy late. Mum and Dad were Victorian in their attitudes, elderly in their ways. They were plain people; worthy, church-going, spectacled, cheaply clothed. Thick in their heads and around the middle. Jimmy was the same. None of them seemed to have an ounce of drive, none whatsoever. They were in the gutter and were content to stay there. Ambition was a dirty word to them.

But not to Nula.

Nula Perkins might be in the gutter, but by Christ she was looking at the stars. Her life had to amount to more than it did; she’d had a piss-poor education and was now in a sorry excuse for a job on the cake and biscuit counter in Woolies. Her big weekly treat was window-shopping in town with her mates around the market in Carnaby Street and looking longingly in Biba, because she could only look; she could never afford to buy anything and anyway nothing would ever fit over her fat arse.

‘Terry Barton’s sweet on Jill Patterson,’ said Jimmy. He’d plunged the knife in and now he was twisting it. Nula wanted to hit him because she knew it was probably true; she’d seen Terry and Jill in town together recently, holding hands.

‘I could get him off her,’ said Nula, stung; she knew she couldn’t.

‘What?’ Jimmy was laughing at her. Nothing new there. Nula was used to being laughed at. She’d been laughed at her entire fucking life, by everyone but particularly by Jimmy. Four years older than her and wearing an air of smug superiority, he loved nothing so much as taking the mick out of his little sister.

Like on one of their rare family holidays, when she’d been dancing the hokey-cokey with new-found friends: ‘You looked a prat doing that,’ said Jimmy when she came off the dance floor, making her glowing smile instantly wilt to nothing.

Or the time she’d been singing in the church choir, performing a solo for the first time ever; she’d been so proud – and then he’d grinned at her afterwards and said: ‘You were off bloody key, you should have heard yourself. You sounded like a cat caught in a mangle.’

‘You know her? Jill Patterson? Wasn’t she in your class at school? She’s a stunner,’ he was saying now.

Nula felt her cheeks glow hot in the darkness. Yes, she knew Jill. Her of the silky straight blonde hair and lovely blue eyes and fabulous figure. Fucking Jill Patterson. At that moment, as they racketed along in the tinny noisy little car – nothing cool or sporty for Jimmy, he was boring as fuck, they were all, her entire family, as boring as fuck – with her breath pluming out in the cold night air, Nula came to a momentous decision.

Somehow, she was going to change.

5

Gordie Howard always drank at the Pig’s Head with his crew all around him. Everyone knew that Gordie was tooled up as a matter of routine because of the bayonet thing when he’d pasted Charlie. No one ever mentioned the bayonet thing, not in Charlie’s hearing and certainly not in Terry’s. But Charlie’s boys all knew, and approached the problem accordingly, arming themselves with knives, machetes, spiked knuckledusters and a few leftover service revolvers.

When Charlie was better and his scars healed, he made a plan. He had to take Gordie out, he knew that. And he didn’t want to leave any other members of Gordie’s gang loose about the place to take over where Gordie left off. Charlie made this plain to his boys, and they all nodded their agreement and set off on the evening’s entertainment.

‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ said Charlie as they trooped out into the night, mob-handed.

‘Too right,’ said Terry. ‘Arsehole’s got it coming.’ But he wasn’t sure. He feared Gordie Howard’s crew and thought Charlie a fool not to.

As soon as Gordie and his heavies emerged from the pub, Charlie’s boys dived in. Soon the bodies were piling up on the pavement, but Charlie wasn’t letting anyone else have Gordie Howard but himself. Some of Gordie’s boys ran off when it looked like things were going against them, leaving a hardcore few grouped around Gordie like guards around an emperor. Blood flew and before long there was no one left but Gordie, on the ground, dazed and reeling from tens of punches, cut to ribbons. Then whistles started blowing.

‘Get him up,’ said Charlie, gasping and blood-covered. ‘Let’s go.’

They hefted Gordie into the back of Beezer’s old Ford van and had it away before the coppers could arrive on the scene and start making trouble. They drove him down to the docks and hustled him, barely conscious, into an empty warehouse.

At Charlie’s instruction, Terry slapped Gordie around until he came out of his stupor. Then they tied him to a chair and Charlie stood in front of his enemy in triumph, staring down at him where he sat beaten, all the colour draining out of his face because he knew this was going to be bad.

One of the boys handed Charlie an iron bar.

‘Christ,’ panted Gordie, and seeing the man’s terror, Terry stepped forward.

‘I’ll put him out of his misery, eh, Charlie?’

Charlie stepped back a pace. Glared at his fallen enemy. Then he nodded, once.

Terry hit Gordie hard in the jaw. They all heard the snap as it broke. Gordie’s head flew back, and then he was out of it, unconscious. Terry gave Charlie a nod and got out of the way. Charlie stepped in and swung the bar back and crashed it into both Gordie’s legs and then his arms, pulverizing his limbs. Finally, satisfied, he threw the bar aside. It hit the dirty cement floor with a clatter. Charlie was breathing hard with the effort.

‘He won’t give us no more trouble,’ said Charlie. ‘Get him out. Dump him back by the pub when it’s clear.’

After the Pig’s Head incident, no one heard of Gordie Howard around town any more. He was – literally – a broken man. For a full month after the event, Charlie’s boys cruised the manor in their cars, herding up any stragglers from Gordie’s gang and seeing them out of town, until there was no one left and there was a change in the air. Now everyone knew Charlie had taken control.

The manor was his.

6

There were some things Mum saw as a treat, and having Nula accompany her to the hairdresser’s once a fortnight was one of them. There the same female hairdresser – Candy – would poodle-perm Mum’s hair into submission, leaving it frizzed out, lifeless and ready for a shampoo and tight set. Soon, Candy was doing the same for Nula. But now, having come to a decision about the direction her life was taking, Nula spoke up.

‘I don’t want her doing my hair any more,’ she said.

‘What?’ Mum looked poleaxed.

‘I don’t, OK? I’m growing this perm out.’

‘Well, if you want,’ said Mum.

‘Yeah. I do.’ Nula chewed her lip. ‘And I hate my bloody name. Nula the Loser they call me at school. What’d you call me that for?’

Mum’s myopic eyes were full of hurt. ‘It was my mother’s name,’ she said.

‘Well I hate the bloody thing.’

That little fracas caused a chill to descend that lasted for days. Nula hated to cause her mum pain, but she steeled herself to do it. Things had to change. Things had to be different. And then Nula had to find another hairdresser. She saved up and went to a new trendy one in town that everyone was talking about, Mr Fox, where inside everything was black and gleaming. As she entered, Elvis was singing ‘It’s Now or Never’ on the sound system.

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