Gangsters' Wives (13 page)

I had what I would call a very ‘normal’ upbringing in Essex. My mum and dad are straight, hard-working people. I was brought up to think that, if you want something, you go out and work for it. I still believe in that despite what people might think. My mum and dad didn’t buy me everything I wanted. I had to work for it. I never expected it to be handed to me on a plate.

My dad worked for BT all his life. He started as an engineer and went on to become a manager. And my mum had a lot of part-time jobs. She worked in a shop and as a cook in a pub. The work ethic was always there, and I picked that up from them.

I didn’t know about gangsters when I was a child – that certainly wasn’t the type of thing my parents would talk about. But as I got older and started going out to clubs, often the people I ended up going out with and mixing with did move in those circles. There was a bit of a myth about certain people, but I was never in awe of any of them.

The way I was brought up is that people are just people. Someone who’s been in the papers or on the telly is still just a person. You go and talk to them as you would anybody else. My mum and dad never brought me up to put anyone on a pedestal, especially not a man. I was always taught that I was equal to anyone else.

When I left school, I worked for a while as a secretary in the City. My aim was to save up to put a deposit down on a house, so I started topping up my wages by doing lap dancing on the side. I started off in London then did it locally at the weekends. Then I worked out I could get more money doing the dancing than the City job, so I did that full time.

It’s funny people always think lap dancing is somehow exploitative or demeaning, but I absolutely loved it. Best job I ever had. It was like going out clubbing every night, only you’d come home with loads of money!

Soon I had enough to get a mortgage on a house and things were going pretty well. I had plenty of money, a job I loved; I wasn’t looking for anything else.

Then one night in March 2006, the manager of the club said there was a group coming in to celebrate a birthday, and he mentioned the name Carlton Leach. Even though I’d later tell Carlton I’d never heard of him, just to make sure he didn’t get big-headed, I’d actually met him once or twice years before when I was with an ex-boyfriend who vaguely knew him. But that night it didn’t really register. All I was interested in was the fact that a big group meant more dances – and more money.

Carlton’s group came in quite late. I was walking by and a friend of his stopped me and called me over. ‘I’d like you to have a dance with my friend,’ he told me, and he paid for Carlton to have a dance with me. It wasn’t love at first sight. For a start, it was his forty-seventh birthday and I was only twenty-seven, so there’s a twenty-year age gap. But more to the point, as far as I was concerned I was at work and he was a paying customer. I was just there to get money to pay my mortgage. I wasn’t interested in anything else. But after the dance we got chatting, and I started thinking he was really funny – nice and friendly. He didn’t come over as a show-off at all. And he seemed genuinely interested in me, asking me lots of questions.

I still didn’t let on that I knew who he was or that I remembered meeting him. I don’t like to give anyone a big head. So I asked him questions like ‘what do you do for work’ and things like that. He said he did ‘this and that’, and inside I was thinking: I know exactly what you do.

We spent most of the night chatting and at the end he asked if he could take me out. I said ‘OK’, and he gave me his number. He always jokes now that he had to pay £60 for me to let him give me his number.

When we went out I finally let on that we’d met before and that I had heard a bit about him. He said he remembered meeting me but I’m not sure if he did. I didn’t know what to expect when we went out for that first dinner. I knew to a certain extent what he’d done in the past. But because that kind of thing was never a major fascination to me, I knew only a limited amount. I had a vague impression that he had some kind of ‘gangster’ reputation, but it was never something I’d have gone out of my way to find out so I hadn’t formed any preconceived expectations of him. The way I see it, there’s no point in being judgemental about anybody. You can hear stuff about someone, rumours about them, and half the time it’s all a load of rubbish anyway. You never know until you talk to someone what they’re going to be like. If a friend of mine said, ‘I don’t like so and so’, I’d still give them a chance. Then if I don’t like them, I don’t like them for myself, not because someone else has told me to think like that.

Even though I hadn’t been looking for a relationship, things moved very quickly between us after that first date. We saw each other every day. It’s really weird because I’d never been the kind of person to rush into things. I’d have always been the one saying ‘you must be sensible and take your time’. But right from the start we spent every day together and within two weeks I’d rented out my own house and moved in with him. If someone had told me beforehand I’d be moving in with someone I’d only just met, I’d have said ‘no way’, but it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

My family were accepting of him right from the start although I admit I sort of drip-fed them information about him and what he’d done. But if I’m happy, they’re happy. I think some of my friends were a bit worried because it was so out of character for me to rush into anything. Some people asked: ‘Do you not think you should be a bit more cautious?’, and there were others who told me about things he was supposed to have done; they weren’t necessarily scaremongering, but they were warning me to be careful. But I just thought: He’s all right with me.

Inevitably, as I got to know Carlton better, I found out more about him. But the person I wanted to get to understand was the person inside. I was never interested in the other part of him, the darker part. I’m not naive enough to think it doesn’t exist, because obviously it does, but that was never really the side I saw so I just didn’t want to know about it.

Mind you, we did sort out some boundaries, right from the start, so that there was no confusion. I told him very early on that I wanted to live a ‘normal’ life, and I wasn’t interested in anything to do with violence. I said, ‘If you’re going to live your life like that, that’s fine, you go ahead. But that’s not how I want to live my life. So if you decide to live that sort of life, I’m not going to be with you.’

He was honest with me. He said, ‘This is who I am’, and I said, ‘Well, this is my line. If you go over that, we’re finished. I don’t want things coming in my home that I don’t feel comfortable with. I don’t want to be worrying where are you, what‘s happening, who are you with, are you going to come home. I don’t want to live my life like that.’ I think it helped that, right from the start, there was no confusion about what I would and wouldn’t accept.

Mind you, even after establishing those ground rules, there were some things about being with Carlton that I just had to get used to – like the way he checked out places before we went in, standing in the doorway and doing a quick scan with his eyes, and his slight paranoia about going anywhere new – all throwbacks to his old life.

We’d only been together about a month when he proposed. It came completely out of the blue. We’d gone out for lunch and then he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I was completely taken aback. In fact, at first I thought he was joking. But when I realised he was serious I said, ‘Yes.’ Despite only having known each other such a short time. It just felt right. Afterwards, we went to a jeweller’s and I chose a ring.

When I told my mum, she was a little surprised but she just said, ‘You’re old enough to know what’s best for you, and if he makes you happy, I’m pleased for you.’ My parents know I’m level-headed and wouldn’t have jumped into anything without being sure it was right.

I carried on working at the lap-dancing club right up until the wedding, as I really valued my financial independence. In fact Carlton used to come in some nights, and I was impressed at how controlled he was. Not many men could watch their girlfriends dancing provocatively in front of other men, but he took it all in his stride which I took as a really good sign.

Right from the start I knew I didn’t want the big fairy-tale wedding. I was never one of those girls who dreamed of wafting down the aisle in a frothy white dress in front of hordes of admiring people. All I wanted was to be with him, and to have a private ceremony that would mean something to us.

Also, I knew that if we had a ‘proper’ wedding, it would turn into a circus. Carlton knows so many people it would have turned into a huge show wedding. He’s been best man nine times, there would have been no way of keeping numbers down. And he would have felt obliged to be on show all day, being larger than life. It would have been like we were getting married for everyone else, not for us. I didn’t want that. Besides, I’m the youngest of three so my mum and dad had already been to two weddings.

So, six months after we’d met, we slipped away up to Scotland, just the two of us, and got married in beautiful Comlongon Castle. There’s a manor house next door where we stayed in a gorgeous room with a four-poster bed. The actual wedding ceremony was in the castle next door, which was candlelit and atmospheric with a big log fire. I wore a lovely white dress and we said the traditional vows, and it really meant something because it was just the two of us there. We weren’t playing to some crowd, or having to live up to anyone else’s expectations. It was absolutely perfect.

After the wedding, we went to Ibiza on honeymoon, which was a bit more sociable, but still I tried to keep it as low-key as possible. We went out a few times, but I didn’t want to spend my whole honeymoon clubbing so we also had lots of romantic meals and a few evenings just staying in the hotel suite.

I think the wedding made Carlton and everyone else see that I’m very much a low-maintenance kind of girl – I just don’t go in for the footballers’ wives-type extravaganzas. I don’t need all that to feel good about myself. Of course it’s nice to have a few designer clothes but it’s what you’re like inside that matters. I was never one of those women who want to be bought things all the time. I’d rather Carlton was with me than going out trying to raise the money for me to have all this stuff I don’t really need.

I’d never start demanding things from him. That’s just not who I am – I’m too much my own person. If he ever went out and did something that got him into trouble I don’t want the responsibility of people thinking it was me pressurising him into that to support my lavish lifestyle.

About six months after we got married, filming started on a film about the earlier part of Carlton’s life. It was called
Rise of the Footsoldier
and it dredged up a whole load of very difficult memories for him. That was quite a tough time in our relationship. He then reverted back to the person he’d been and that was quite hard. It brought up all those raw emotions.

He wanted to be quite heavily involved with the making of the film, and I can see why, but in some ways it dragged a lot of things up for him that he’d managed to bury. He became very moody. Everything I did would be wrong. All the things that had happened would be playing on his mind and I would have to deal with his bad temper.

I was really thrown in at the deep end because we’d only just been through the lovey-dovey stage and then I had to deal with that moody person I didn’t really recognise. Ultimately, it made our relationship stronger because I knew him better, but at the time it was very hard to deal with.

The worst part was when they were filming the scenes about the Range Rover murders at Rettendon when Carlton’s best friend Tony Tucker was killed along with two others. At first I didn’t think he should go along to see the filming of the murder scenes but then I started worrying about the effect it would have on him seeing it for the first time in the finished film, so I started thinking that maybe if he watched it being filmed with all the make-up, it wouldn’t affect him so much.

It was a really, really difficult thing for him to go through, but it was like a bit of therapy. He revisited some of these very dark memories, and in a way he was then able to put them to bed. But it was very hard.

Tony’s death affected Carlton very badly. He took me to visit the grave and I know it’s really important to him, but though it might sound quite unfeeling, I don’t let him think about it too much because then he gets too deep about it all and it makes him unhappy. I say to him: ‘It’s happened and nothing can change that. Tony will always be your friend and no one can ever take that away but you can’t be living your life thinking about it all the time, or it’ll end up ruling you and I don‘t think that’s healthy.’

I didn’t know Tony and I can’t pretend I did because that would make me a hypocrite. People who knew him can talk to Carlton about him but you get a lot of people who’ve seen the film or they’ve heard about Tony. They talk to Carlton and I think they try to pull on his heart strings a little bit and I don’t like it when they do that. They don’t even know him and they’re trying to manipulate him for their own reasons. That’s not right.

Growing up in Essex, I’d known about the murders for years. Everyone in Essex knew about it all when it happened, so that part of the film wasn’t a shock. In fact none of it was a shock really, because I’d prepared myself before I went to see it at the premiere. I knew I’d be seeing things I wasn’t going to like. Even so, there’s a big difference between knowing something in your head and seeing it visually on the big screen. It was so bloodthirsty. I didn’t really like it, to be honest. That sort of violence isn’t something I’d normally go to see.

I think it helped that the events in the film ended fifteen years ago. In a way, because he was so much younger then, I can accept it more. I’d only have been fifteen then, so it does seem like a different era. I’m not saying Carlton is an angel now or anything, but he has moved on from that excess of lifestyle in so many ways. You can’t carry on living your life with all the violence, the fights. If he’d been behaving in that way now I wouldn’t be married to him. Anyway, he’s fifty years old now and if he was still acting like that it wouldn’t be right. It’s OK when you’re thirty and you can say you’re on a learning curve, but when you’re fifty and behaving like that, it’s a bit different.