The Favourite Child (21 page)

‘Heavens, whoever gave you that idea?’

‘He did. He’s quite convinced you would make a perfect pair.’

‘Drat the man. All he does is adopt the moral high ground and preach at me. I swear there’d be blue murder done if I were ever alone with him for more than five seconds.’

Bella’s ‘ladies’ at the clinic were equally sympathetic but no more able to solve her financial problems than their own. Aunt Edie said baking for a living was hot, tiring work and very low paid. Mrs Solomon admitted they didn’t have any vacancies for an assistant in their fish shop, largely because they rarely had much fish to sell and even fewer customers. ‘Those who pay regular anyroad. We get by,’ she said. An oft-repeated phrase. Mrs Stobbs was unfit for work of any kind, even if she could get it, what with her numerous children and her health problems, and Mrs Blundell said that she worked a punishing shift system in the mill, which she wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

‘Not to a lass such as yourself. Though that Jinnie’s different. She’s used to roughing it and has her old friends around to make her feel at home’

‘Old friends?’

Mrs Blundell folded her arms across her floppy bosom, leaned against the door jamb and settled in for a long natter. ‘Aye. She hobnobs every dinner time with that Len Jackson and Harold Cunliffe. Right pair of loose bobbins them two, never seem to do a hand’s turn but harmless enough, I dare say, in their way.’

Bella frowned but asked no further questions. What Jinnie did was really no concern of hers. Though perhaps it was Edward’s, a voice in the back of her head quietly commented.

When Harold Cunliffe came to Jinnie with his suggestion to cheat on Billy Quinn, she refused to have anything to do with it. ‘Nay, if you value yer life so cheaply, that’s up to you. I want to live a bit longer.’

Harold pointed out that Quinn had left him rotting in jail for three months during which time his wife had been taken into the sanatorium, his children sent to an Orphan’s Home and his youngest child had died of malnutrition. ‘Otherwise known as starvation. By the time I came out I’d no job, no family, and not even a house to call me own. He’s left me with nowt, and I’m not the first he’s treated so badly. For all he’s put me back on the pay roll as his runner, I can’t forgive him for what he did. It’s time someone stood up to Billy Quinn. I thought happen you’d feel the same.’

‘Oh, I do, I do, but...’

‘You’re too much of a coward. Like everyone else round here, you want to save yer own skin.’

‘Is that a crime?’

‘It is if it leaves such as Quinn on the rampage. Like a loose canon he is. One of these days he’ll blow somebody’s bleedin’ head off.’ Harold leaned closer, eager now to share his plan. ‘We could get our own back on him if we joined forces, Jinnie lass. Make money out of him, instead of him making a fat profit out of us. He owes me that much at least. All we have to do is fiddle the clock bag by not shutting it till after the first race. Then you run and put on a last minute bet. He doesn’t get the result through quickly, so he takes bets till the start of the second race. We’d clean up, I tell you.’

Jinnie listened to the plan with mounting trepidation. ‘How would you get the result though, before he does?’

‘There are ways. Are you in then?’

‘I’ve enough to do keeping tabs on all these bets. I’m up to me ears in work.’ Jinnie wisely opted for self preservation. She collected the bets and handed them over to Harold, exactly as she was told to do by Quinn. No risks. No trouble. What Harold did with them after that was his affair.

The following week Mrs Blundell won twelve pounds and made sure everybody in the weaving shed knew about it. ‘By heck, I’m rich. Here lass, it’s all due to you,’ and she gave Jinnie a sovereign.

Jinnie stared at the coin in wonder. She’d never held so much money in her hand before in her entire life. Nervous of having the coin about her person and afraid of anyone finding it, she tucked it in the back of a dressing table drawer when she got home that night and said nothing to anyone about it. The least Edward knew about her working as a bookie’s runner, the better.

A week or two later Mrs Blundell won again, twenty pounds this time, her pendulous breasts shaking with joy as she trundled through the weaving shed, yelling to everyone about her good fortune. ‘I’ve come up trumps again. Better watch which horse I puts me money on in future, eh?’ This time she gave Jinnie two sovereigns. ‘You’re a right lucky star for me, lass. Buy yourself summat nice.’

Jinnie gazed at the money with eyes grown big and round with wonder. ‘How did you do it, Mrs Blundell?’ It didn’t seem possible to win once, let alone twice in just a few weeks. She could hardly believe it.

Neither, it seemed, could Billy Quinn.

He was waiting for her at the end of her shift, as she half feared he might be, lounging against the wall in his familiar arrogant manner. Jinnie recognised the curl of blue smoke from the end of his cigarette long before she reached him. No one else had so much money to spend on fags as Billy Quinn. She felt a chill of cold fear settle in her stomach.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t practise yer fancy new way of talking to me, girl. This punter of yours, how come she won twice? Is there something ye should be telling me, Jinnie?’

‘What can there be to tell? I’ve no idea which horse will win, have I? I just do what you tells me, give them the tip like you say I has to, then I collects the money and hands it over to Harold and he puts it in the clock bag.’ A memory stirred, of Harold’s plan to fiddle the clock bag, and she suddenly saw how it came about that Mrs Blundell had won twice. It could all be done very easily, even without her connivance. Jinnie could feel herself flushing, just as if she were indeed the guilty party, and realised with a quickening of fear that Quinn had seen the betraying blush too. The blue eyes narrowed with suspicion, and pinching the fag end between finger and thumb, he tossed it aside.

‘You and Harold wouldn’t have a little racket going, would ye?’

‘Racket? No, ’course we don’t. What sort of racket could that be? I know nowt about any racket.’ However hard she tried, Jinnie couldn’t keep the sound of guilt out of her voice. She could kill Harold Cunliffe for getting her in this mess, as if she didn’t have problems enough already. ‘I’m going to miss me tram, Quinn, I have to go.’

He struck her with the flat of his hand, jerking her head back so hard that she heard her neck crack. Jinnie felt a trickle of blood run from her nose and into her mouth. Then he slammed her up against the entry wall, making her cry out as the back of her head met solid stone. Quinn pressed the length of his hard body against hers, one hand circling her throat, trapping her so that she could scarcely breathe, let alone move.

‘Ye know what I’d do, if ye were ever daft enough to cheat on me, don’t you, girl?’ Jinnie couldn’t even move sufficiently to nod. ‘I’d cut out yer lying tongue, so I would. Then put you through the mincer, just as if you were a pound of beef.’ He smiled and the effect was chilling. ‘And ye can tell Harold Cunliffe he’ll get the same treatment, if’n he tries anything either. No, on second thoughts, don’t bother. I’ll have a quiet word with Harold meself, so I will.’ Having made this decision, he released her and stepped back. Jinnie almost fainted from relief.

‘There, I’m not so terrible am I? Now get off home, Jinnie me love, afore I change me mind. Go
now
!’ he yelled, and she wasted no time in doing so, not even pausing to catch her breath until she’d jumped on to a passing tramcar.

The minute Jinnie arrived back in Seedley Park Road, she quickly secreted the two sovereigns in the back of the drawer beside the first, shaking with fear as she did so. If Quinn had looked in her pockets he’d have found them for sure, and she’d have been mincemeat there and then. At least she was safe now, and had some privacy here to hide her money. No one would ever find them.

It was a couple of days later that a man’s body was dragged from the canal. It was identified as that of Harold Cunliffe, presumed to have taken his own life through drowning after losing his wife and children.

Jinnie listened in stunned silence to the report as Edward read it out loud from the morning paper. Her heart froze with fear but she urged herself not to panic. All she had to do, she told herself sternly, was exactly what Quinn told her. Hadn’t she always known those were the rules. Harold had understood them too, until desperation had driven him to abandon caution. On no account must she make the same mistake.

Attendance at the Clinic was increasing week by week with a regular supply of new clients, as well as repeat cases. Bella kept careful records and discovered that the first 100 or so patients had sustained between them over 500 pregnancies. One woman alone had endured eighteen, including four dead infants, three miscarriages and three children described as imbeciles. Another with four living children had lost an equal number of stillborn babies, plus several miscarriages. It was a sorry state of affairs and these pitiful stories regularly reduced her to tears.

Bella’s regulars were more hardened and would stand on their doorsteps in their crossover pinnies to ‘do a bit of camping’ as they called it. There was nothing they liked better than to exchange tidbits of gossip they’d picked up queuing on the stairs at the clinic. They’d clip their children round the ears for ‘marlicking about’, complain over being bone weary and powfagged after a long day at the mill, usually followed by several more hours cleaning and cooking at home for their large families and yet find the energy to have a good chin-wag well into the late evening.

After they’d moaned about their respective families, they’d turn their attention to the latest lovers walking arm in arm up the street for an evening out. ‘He must be a fresh catched ‘un,’ they’d say, if a girl had a new boy friend. Or if the couple seemed plain, or ill-matched, or considered odd in some way, one wit would drily remark: ‘Well, they won’t spoil a pair.

Gossiping on the stairs was also a favourite occupation. Speculation about who might have ‘fallen’ as a result of not following the careful routine set down by Dr Syd was of enormous fascination to all. They would bemoan the dozens of marriages damaged by the wife’s fear of showing affection. ‘Can you blame ‘em,’ Aunt Edie would point out. ‘When it would mean another kid.’

Mrs Blundell, having recently been delivered of a surprisingly healthy boy, jiggled the baby in her arms as he suckled at one floppy breast and told of a sailor’s wife who went into hiding whenever her husband’s ship was in port. ‘In the end he stopped coming home altogether. He were last heard of with a Chinese woman in Hong Kong.’

‘Eeh, some husbands would use any excuse to take on a fancy woman.’

‘Aye, what can you do with em, eh?’

Several rude suggestions were made, all in silent mee-maw, which caused great hilarity and a good deal of frustration to those further up the stairs who were hoping to glean some titillating piece of information.

‘Eeh,’ said Mrs Stobbs, anxious to outdo this terrible tale. ‘I know of one woman who spent years in a TB Sanatorium and got put in the family way every time her husband came to see her. She told him to give over coming in the end, so he stopped at home to look after all the childer.’

No one quite knew whether to believe this story or not but it certainly chilled the blood.

By the time they’d reached the top of the stairs and were settling themselves on the line of chairs to await their turn to see the nurse, they were back to their favourite topic of who, amongst their friends and neighbours, had recently fallen. Mrs Blundell made herself comfortable by switching the baby to the other breast and casually remarked, ‘Have you heard, Sally Clarke’s been caught again.’

‘Caught?’ Bella looked up from a card she was writing at her desk, thinking she meant the police had picked Sally up for some crime.

‘Aye. Daft beggar should’ve got off at Deansgate but went through to London Road instead.’

Even more bemused Bella said, ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Nay, lass, don’t be so gormless. She’s up the spout!’