The Graft (50 page)

Tammy’s voice was louder now, and the utter contempt in it was like a physical blow to the old woman trying desperately to find the words that would explain her son’s sexual preferences.

Suddenly, Tammy thought of her sons and she said in a whisper; ‘What about me boys? Has he been near me boys?’

All the motherly concern missing from her for so long was now flooding her brain. She half rose from the chair in a panic.

Angela pushed her back down none too gently. ‘Hush, don’t be letting your imagination run away with you.’

Tammy stared up into her face earnestly and then it all fell into place for her. ‘That’s why you lived with us, ain’t it? You were protecting him and at the same time you were protecting us.’

Angela walked to the worktop and poured two more large brandies. She placed one in her daughter-in-law’s hand and, sitting down heavily, she sighed before saying, ‘Nick had a kink even as a child. He was eleven when a neighbour first accused him. I didn’t believe her, of course, my big handsome lad doing something like that to her little boy. And he
was
a little boy, no more than seven. I put it down to a boyish prank, see.’

She took a large sip of brandy.

‘What had he done?’

Angela shook her head, ‘You really don’t want to know. But what you do need to know is what my husband and his friends did.’

She finished off the brandy quickly, then wiped her eyes on a piece of kitchen roll before saying, ‘I couldn’t stop it, you see. Those days his father was drinking all the time, he hated us all, it’s why I don’t see much of my daughter. She forgave me but I could never forgive myself.’

She took a deep breath before continuing slowly.

‘They were children,
my
children and I couldn’t help them.’

As the memories she had suppressed for so many years flooded her mind, the history she had rewritten, and which she almost believed, was crumbling in the face of her daughter-in-law.

She poured more brandy before saying to the dumbstruck girl before her, ‘They were vicious to him, hurt him so much and if I tried to interfere they would turn on me. It’s not all about grooming that they talk about now, this was brutality, and that was all they could enjoy. Nick, well, Nick never knew any different, did he? Poor Nick. For some reason he started wanting it, he liked the money, he liked the affection, he was doing something right for his father for the first time ever. He was being
good
.’

She laughed sadly. ‘Can you imagine how that made me feel?’

She wiped her eyes once more, but the tears had stopped now.

‘That bastard destroyed any natural feelings Nick had and when he was older and he fought him back I thought that was an end to it all, see. He beat his father nearly to death and it all stopped then. It was over.’

She stared at her daughter-in-law with tired eyes.

‘You have to believe me. I didn’t realise he had gone on to the same kind of life as his father. You see Nick has always been what he wanted to be, has always had the strength to make you believe that he was the person you saw before you. But he isn’t, he doesn’t know who he is any more.’

Tammy was trying to take in what was being said to her.

‘This is fucking mad. Are you trying to tell me Nick is a fucking nonce, a proper kiddy fiddler not just a fucking queer?’

Angela nodded.

‘It was Gary who liked the older boys, the teenagers. Nick liked them much younger, see. He used the older boys to gain access to younger, more tender boys. Look
closely
at the photos, Tammy.’

Tammy picked up the photos and stared at them, then gradually she realised what she should have been looking at instead of her husband’s smiling face. It hit her. The room in the photos had ripped and dirty Thomas the Tank Engine wallpaper on the walls; it was so dilapidated that unless you looked closely you wouldn’t notice it. And there were kiddies’ toys strewn all over the small single bed that they were all happily posing on.

‘Now you know why he was terrified of being found out all these years. Now you know why he let you sleep your way across Essex and the East End of London without a murmur.’

Tammy’s brain was struggling to absorb it all yet, in her heart of hearts, she knew it was true. In a way, she realised, she had half guessed it many years ago.

‘Why are you telling me all this now, Angela? You could have saved us all years of unhappiness and heartache if you had told me before or made him get help. He listens to you, no one else but you.’

Angela poured yet more brandy, but it was not helping either of them. It was just something to do.

‘Nick had many accusations over the years. In my heart, I knew they were true, but I didn’t want to believe them, see. No mother does. So I did what I had always done.’

‘What was that?’

‘I played the game. Until now, of course.’

Tammy stared at the floor, her first instinct of protecting her children was long gone. This was damage limitation now. She started to cry once more only this time it was quiet, more restrained sobbing.

Holding her tight in her arms, Angela looked at the doorway to the hall, and said clearly, ‘I know you’re there, Nick. Come and talk to the mother of your children. You owe her that much at least.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Gordon Winters lay on the balcony and realised he was in for a hammering from the big man with the mad eyes and the clenched fists.

The black bloke didn’t look too good either.

Terry had completely lost the fucking plot. This place was doing his head in and he was being very vocal about it. Terrified kids were sitting there listening to him rant at them and wondering where all this was going to end.

Winters was watching from the balcony as Terry stood in the front room and harangued all the people in there. Every now and then, in Winters’ world especially, you came up against a force that nothing and no one could harness. He knew that writing out the mathematical formula for nuclear fusion would be far easier than calming down this man who had invaded his home.

And this
was
his home, he only rented it out to pay his bills, but he knew that these three guys would not understand that because none of them shared the same sexual peccadillos as him and his friends.

Tyrell and Louis had stayed on the balcony with him.

‘Did you know Sonny Hatcher?’

Winters smiled then, a slight smile but Tyrell saw it nonetheless. It was a smile that said he’d known him intimately and Tyrell had to contain himself once more. There was plenty of time for revenge when he had found out all he wanted to know. He shook his head slowly as he looked at the man.

‘He came here then, did he?’

Remembering what was going down, Gordon Winters started desperately trying to justify himself. He pointed one tobacco-stained finger towards the window.

‘None of them in there is under sixteen, you can check that. They might look under sixteen but they ain’t.’

Tyrell kicked him hard in the legs, containing his anger with difficulty. Unlike Terry, he could control his urges and he was glad of that fact now more than ever before. It was one of the reasons why he had never tried for the big time: you needed to be constantly on a short fuse to live in that world, or, more to the point, survive in it.

‘Did
my
Sonny Boy come here or not?’

It was the
my
that finally made the other man understand what he was dealing with here.

He nodded.

‘Look, mate, you don’t want to hear this but he loved it here, he was
always
here. He would even tout for us; younger runaways were his speciality.’

Louis walked away then. Going inside, he shut the door on Tyrell and Winters, leaving them out there in the cold alone. Somehow he knew that Tyrell would not want an audience for what he was going to hear next and in all honesty Louis didn’t want to hear it, either.

Terry was on the phone to Billy, and Louis guessed from the conversation that their brother was on his way.

Tyrell could hear his own heart beating in his ears now. He remembered his mother saying that was what happened to her when she tried to leave the house.

‘Who brought him here?’

The man shrugged.

‘I can’t remember, to be honest.’

He was lying and Tyrell knew it.

‘Do you want me to get my mate back to ask you these questions?’

He had a feeling that Gordon Winters, like anyone with half a brain, would be far more scared of Terry Clarke than he would be of anyone else.

And so he fucking should be.

Winters sighed, trying it on, fronting it all out.

‘Get who you like, mate, he ain’t the only person who scares me.’

Tyrell understood what he was trying to say.

He now knew that whoever was behind all this was obviously a well-known face. Was someone to be reckoned with. And after the way Terry had carried on this person had to be very dangerous indeed.

Tyrell decided to front it out himself. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. ‘Well, I am Sonny’s father and I ain’t going nowhere.’

It was said gently but with a dangerous edge to the words. He was trying to appeal to the other man’s better nature. That was assuming he had one. If he didn’t they’d have to terrify him into talking. And if he didn’t start talking soon Tyrell would happily kick the knowledge from him.

The other man was quiet for a few moments as if weighing him up. Then he got to his knees on the cement floor, wincing at the pain in his legs from where Terry had gripped them while dangling him over the edge.

‘Look, mate, no one
made
him come here, he
wanted
to be here. When I found him he was on the pavement, selling his little arse round the fucking cottages. Like it or lump it, he was safer here in the long run.’

He was getting his bit in before he crumpled, Tyrell understood that.

‘Who was the man - the older man he was caught up with?’

‘I can’t tell you that. I wish I could but I never knew him personally. This ain’t the kind of place where you ask names, know what I mean?’

Tyrell took back his fist then and, grabbing Gordon’s shirt, pulled him forward as he smashed it into his face with all his might.

He felt skin and bone crumple under the force of it.

‘Once more, Gordon, answer the fucking question!’

The man was bleeding profusely now. His nose was flattened and his eyes streaming with tears.

But he still shook his head.

‘Please, it’s more than my life’s worth . . .’

People amazed Tyrell sometimes. This man actually expected him to play the
white
man, be the good guy, let him
off
.

Feel his pain
, as they said these days, and respond to it.

Which was exactly what was wrong with the world nowadays, a nanny state had seen to that. This man had no conception of what he had done to Tyrell and his blood. Didn’t really see he had even done anything wrong.

This was the way of things now and it scared Tyrell. You could pick up your girlfriend’s baby and swing it round a room by its leg, and if you said you were suffering from stress, you walked away from it. Kick your wife to death, just say she was a nagger, and who cared any more? Be a bully-boy twelve year old, torture your elderly neighbours, and when they came back at you, finally snapped, maybe hit you with a walking stick or went after you with a bread knife,
they
were the ones breaking the law.

No one was ever held accountable for their own badness any more.

And even more scary was the fact that these morons believed it really
wasn’t
their fault, that
they
were the victims in it all, and then they were let loose on society once more without so much as a slap on the wrist.

No one took any responsibility for the damage they inflicted on the innocent.

It was a whole new ball game.

Yet a villain like Terry, who was a borderline lunatic in other ways, would no more harm a child or a pensioner than he would cut off his own arm. It was all to do with having
some
kind of moral code. However wacky it might be, the point was, he still had an idea of how to behave. So did his brothers and so did Tyrell. So did most of the people he had grown up with, though they were not the most upstanding members of society in some ways, granted.

But Sonny Boy had looked for an easy way out. He was just the kind people like Gordon Winters prayed for. He was weak. Jude had brought him up to get money in any way he could. Not earn it like everyone else, oh, no. And people like this Winters, well, they fed off these kids like a lion off a carcass, and when they had had enough discarded it in favour of a newer, fresher one.

Yet, if you robbed a bank you would get twenty years in jail, but if you mugged an eighty year old, by the time the social workers and psychologists were finished making excuses for you, the old lady should not have been there with her pension in the first place. There was no cause and effect any more.