Brotherhood of Blades (2 page)

Aunt Haley banned him from seeing her niece, but he and Chantelle still met secretly, as well as at their street-dancing class. The rest of his time was spent with the Buzzards, and doing the burglaries and robbery. He needed quick money, to get a place for him and Chantelle. And he still had to help his gran.

But then he took another tumble.

He had nicked a car for a getaway after the Buzzards did a post office, and he had his handgun in his waistband. How green was that, he thought. He was lucky it hadn’t gone off. It would have blown his baby-making equipment into another century. He wouldn’t think of doing anything that stupid now. He wouldn’t carry a gun any more, so it wouldn’t be an issue. He was given another lump for that and served a couple of years in Wandsworth. He would never admit to anyone how hard that was, or how many nights he’d cried in there, or the times he had tried to hang himself in his cell. He felt so alone. Chantelle stopped visiting, and the Buzzards were gone, either fatally stabbed, shot by rival gangs, or doing time. His mother had died from a dodgy heroin fix. He had no one.

There was the sound of a door slamming shut, and he turned his head in the direction of the derelicts to see people heading down the path. A few of them were involved in a heated shouting match with a woman. He ducked quickly down as a torch shone along the dark path; he slid under the bush, and turned part of his face up at the other side, so he could still see the pathway and the people on it, but only from their feet to their waists. He took a deep breath as one of the men drew nearer; the letters BB were clearly stitched on the side of his jeans.

Jason became still as a statue, hardly even daring to breathe as the group drew nearer the alley, still shouting and cursing at the woman, telling her she was going to be punished. His heart was beating like a trapped bird, and he calmed himself with the thought that he was lucky that they didn’t have their pit bulls. Very quietly he pulled his shank from the safety of his pocket, and prayed he wouldn’t have to use it.

Then a beam hit the ground just in front of his hiding place.

He watched four pairs of trainers walk, one following the next, to within three feet of him. Despite the bitter cold and biting wind his hand was sweating as he gripped his knife and they stepped towards the alley.

Then the eight trainers walked straight past the end of the alley. They hadn’t noticed him, and the torchlight hadn’t picked him up. They started to push one another, still embroiled in their heated argument with the brown-skinned female, whose flat black shoes he could now see.

When the woman shouted at the gang he recognized the voice. It was Chantelle’s Aunt Haley.

He stood up slowly and crept up to the fence. He was experienced at moving stealthily, not being heard: a legacy of the house burglaries. He leaned in towards the fence and strained his eyes. First he recognized Stuart ‘Yo-Yo’ Reilly, leader of the Brotherhood of Blades. Who wouldn’t? The fat bastard was at least twenty stone. This was the toerag who had fed Chantelle drugs and put her on the game. Jason had the knife in his hand, and it took all his willpower not to jump out and stick the bastard there and then. With a huge effort, he got a grip on his volcanic temper.

The gang stopped. They were at the back of the Sparrow block, close to the edge. One of them twisted Haley’s arms behind her back and pushed her head so her face hit the graffiti-clad brick wall. All four had their backs to Jason and their attention focused on Haley; he felt confident enough to lean toward the edge of the fence. He flicked a glance up at Chantelle’s flat. The light was on. He cursed silently. He was trapped; he dared not chance moving.

One of the gang started smacking Haley’s head into the brick wall, and she screamed.

‘That’s just a taster,’ Jason heard Reilly tell her. ‘You cross the Brotherhood, you pay.’

She was wearing a long black skirt, and her hair, usually plaited, had fallen loose and hung down her back. Jason wasn’t so bothered that Haley was getting a slapping, but he was uneasy because it could be to do with Chantelle’s drug-taking, maybe her debt to Reilly for the gear she was sniffing. If that was the case, Jason had to get to Chantelle before Reilly did. If Reilly hurt Chantelle, Jason was sure as hell going to use his shank on the fat, evil bastard.

But right now, he was trapped.

Jason heard the rip as someone cut Haley’s skirt from her body. That confirmed that the Brotherhood carried razor-sharp knives, which could do serious damage.

Haley started fighting like a cornered wildcat. She was repaid with a heavy kick, which knocked her on to the wet concrete path.

Reilly warned her to get up and shut up. She obeyed.

Jason squeezed his lips together. He hated Haley; he held her responsible for everything that had gone wrong for him and Chantelle. If they gave Haley a slapping, or even shanked her, she probably had it coming; that was what they did to grasses on this estate. But there was more at stake here. Jason didn’t want to see what was about to happen, but he knew he was unable to avoid it.

The boy holding the knife pulled his tracksuit bottoms down and his penis sprang free. Jason turned his head away. He heard another tearing sound and a desperate terrified whimper from Haley, and as he turned back her white knickers fell to the ground, leaving her skirt hanging from its waistband and her lower body fully exposed.

The boy mounted her from behind. She screamed out as he forced his penis inside her. Jason lowered his eyes again as the boy put his hand across Haley’s mouth and rode her like a rodeo horse.

Jason didn’t watch; he just heard the gang’s cheers and Haley’s muffled cries and pleas. He turned back when it became quiet. Another of the gang had covered her face with the black chiffon scarf she had around her neck, and he was knotting it behind her head. It made her face look like a monster’s. She struggled to stop him, but two others held her hands to prevent her resisting. As she tried to protest, she sucked chiffon fabric into her mouth and started to choke.

The boy arched her body back and entered her from the front. Jason couldn’t watch.

Within seconds he heard Stuart Reilly tell them to take the scarf off Haley’s head. Jason turned back to see what they would do next.

‘Get on your knees,’ Reilly ordered.

She hesitated, then knelt on the path.

‘Suck it,’ Reilly said, releasing his large erection and pushing it into her face.

Haley instinctively turned her head away and was rewarded with a punch in the face. She toppled clumsily sideways.

Reilly pulled her up by her hair and pushed his erection into her face again. ‘Take my cock in your mouth and suck it, slowly, or I’ll cut your fucking eyes out.’

Jason looked away again, but was still forced to listen to the sickening sound of Yo-Yo Reilly getting a blow job. It seemed an age before the perverted bastard shouted out that he was coming.

The woman gagged.

‘Say you’re sorry.’

Jason turned back to see the woman slumped on all fours, vomiting and crying as she tried to do as she was bidden.

Yo-Yo gave a nod, and one of the others stepped forward, a knife gleaming in his hand. Everything seemed to dissolve into slow motion. The woman looked up, opened her mouth to plead, then screamed out as the knife entered her body. She tumbled back and hit the wall behind her, clutching her stomach. Blood soaked through her fingers and ran over her hand.

The gang scattered, leaving Jason pressed against the fence, staring at Haley who was crying out for help.

He had to make a quick decision. A lot would depend on it.

TWO

D
etective Inspector Georgia Johnson tapped the end of a bundle of papers on the wide boardroom table, then turned the pile up and tapped the other end. She carefully pushed the neat bundle into the green file in front of her on the table, then clipped the two poppers to close the folder and keep the papers safe. The words SOUTH LONDON GANGS had been written in large letters across the front of the file with a black marker pen. The same pen was tucked inside the file, clipped to the edge, in case she needed it to alter it. New gangs grew up all the time in this area, and meetings were called to keep everyone up to speed with the gang-related fights, stabbings, and more recently firearm usage. It didn’t matter how many of these meetings the police called; Georgia thought they went nowhere. She hated sitting around talking about postcode gangs and drug-related crime; she wanted to get out there and stop it.

But she kept her thoughts to herself. Being a DI in a busy South London station meant many meetings and much paperwork, as well as catching criminals.

Georgia was just thirty, quite young to have climbed to the position of Detective Inspector, and she looked younger than her years. She had started at the bottom as a cadet, and worked her way up through exams and experience, beating many other candidates to each post on her way up. Around here, being a woman no longer held you back in the force. Not only was she a high-ranking female police officer; she was also brown-skinned. Despite the official line on the absence of race or gender discrimination, she knew both still existed among her colleagues, but she was tough enough not to care, and clever enough to use the disadvantage to her advantage. Life had taught her that she couldn’t change some things, but she could make them work for her. She never let her vulnerability be seen.

She was as ambitious as she was handsome, and had her sights firmly set on a DCI job. She came from a family of achievers and she wasn’t going to let the side down.

Her work clothes were blue jeans that fitted snugly around her slim hips, a clean T-shirt, usually white, and a black leather jacket or coat. She was well educated and from a good family; there were three brothers and one other girl, and she was the youngest. The rest of her family had all gone into medicine. She was born of a white English father and a mother who was half Jamaican and half Indian. Her father, Henry Johnson, was a GP, the head doctor in a local South London practice. Her mother had been a pharmacist, and her brothers were all now consultants at various hospitals. Her sister’s career was closest to her own; she had gone into forensic medicine, and worked in a laboratory near Brighton testing new formulas.

From an early age Georgia had wanted to be a physiotherapist, and had worked hard at the science subjects at school with the aim of going on to do a medical degree. But all that had changed one night when she was fifteen. She’d spent the evening with her school friend revising for their exams, and decided to ignore her parents’ rule about not walking the streets alone at night. She left with the taxi fare her parents had given her in her pocket, planning to save it towards the pair of shoes she’d seen and dreamed of having. It was only nine o’clock and home was only fifteen-minute walk – if you took the short-cut, across the tree-lined common. It was dark and isolated, but she didn’t mind the dark. So she set off to walk, thinking of those shoes.

She had walked briskly, unaware she was being followed, until a strong hand, reeking of stale fried food and tobacco, slid across her face and gripped her mouth. She found herself being dragged backwards, and before she knew it she was behind a large copse of trees, in dark shadow, out of sight of anyone passing on the common.

She kicked out hard as the dragging started, but lost her balance and fell to her knees. The stones and tree roots felt as if her mother’s sewing machine was dropping its needle in and out of her knees and shins, and a potato peeler was at work on the rest of her legs. Dirt and grit lodged in her bleeding flesh; it smarted and stung as if a hive of bees had descended on her. On top of that was the agonizing pain as her twisted and dislocated muscles rebelled against the force, and the pressure of the stinking hand crushing her young face made her terrifyingly aware that her life could be hanging by a thread.

Everything happened so quickly. The base of the tree trunk scratched her eye; then came the shock as he ripped her white knickers off and pushed himself into her.

She’d read and talked about sex, but had no experience of it. It felt like a concrete brick being thrust inside her, and it hurt like hell. Almost as bad was the way his knees gripped her bony hips, and the grunting and spitting as he pushed at her.

Mercifully it was over quickly, but the smell of autumn earth, mouldering leaves and animal faeces affected her still. Even now, as the season changed and the first few leaves fell, the memories and the migraines started.

After he had raped her, he told her to stay where she was for at least half an hour; he would be watching, and if she moved he would know, and come back to kill her. He would also kill her, he added, if she told a soul what had happened. She was to say she fell over crossing the common.

She didn’t tell: not because she believed he would kill her, but because she thought it was her own fault. She had been told never to walk home alone, and she had disobeyed. Besides, what good would it have done? They would never catch him; she hadn’t seen his face, and though she would never forget his gruff, tobacco-roughened voice, unless she heard it again, she would never know her attacker.

From that evening she changed, vowing never to allow herself to be vulnerable again. She lay in bed at night, that voice reverberating around her brain.
If you move before half an hour is up, I’ll see, and then I’ll have to kill you
. Each night she told herself she had got through another day, and she would keep on surviving.

She hadn’t known at first that she was pregnant, and would have to have to face the humiliation of a cheap abortion, which would ruin any chance of having her own child.

Her sister had given her the money. Georgia told her she owed it to someone, after a bet. They both knew it wasn’t the truth, but neither ever mentioned it again. Her sister was a student at the time and had her own bank account. Georgia paid her back out of her first pay cheque from the police, and still neither of them mentioned what the loan had paid for.