her. She was trapped, unable to defend herself properly for fear of hurting the old man she loved, but knowing that whatever she did would probably be bad for him. And I hadn’t been there to help her. The thought made me feel savage.
‘Write your address there,’ I said, pushing paper and pen towards her. ‘And when I send a lawyer here don’t refuse to see him.’
‘I already have a lawyer.’
‘You haven’t. I just fired him.’
‘Oh, really? Bully Jack is showing his teeth now, is he?’
‘You’d better believe it. From now on Bully Jack is going to bully to some purpose. Starting with getting you out on bail.’
‘I don’t want bail.’
‘You’ll do as you’re damned well told.’
That made her stare. She wrote the address down and pushed the paper towards me.
‘The lawyer will call soon,’ I said, pocketing it. ‘Do everything he tells you, and sign a paper authorising him to tell me anything I want to know.’
‘He’ll tell you anyway.’
‘True, but let’s keep things legal.’
I regretted the words as soon as they were out.
‘You had to put it like that, didn’t you?’ Della asked bitterly. ‘Keep things legal. You simply had to say it.’
‘It was a slip.’ I backtracked hastily. ‘Just a meaningless phrase.’
‘It was you stomping all over me with your size nines, Bully Jack.’
‘Oh, great! And that was something you had to say, wasn’t it? OK, you’ve had your revenge. I’m going. I’ll be in touch.’
Why did I bother? Why did I take such trouble for a sulky, ungrateful, sharp-tongued female? Asking these questions of myself, I stormed out of the prison and around the corner.
And there was my Rolls, with all the tyres removed.
Chapter Nine
Della’s Story
LOOK, I’ve got a great family, OK? They’re not quite like anyone else’s family, but they’re great. Especially Grandad.
My mother was his daughter, and the person Grandad loved best in all the world after his wife had died. When she got married everyone in the family thought Grandad would hate sharing her, but he and my father took to each other from the first.
They shared the same vice—gambling. Nothing serious. Just the odd visit to the bookies and a bit too much wagered on how fast a horse or dog could run. Kindred spirits.
They moved in with him, everyone lived happily until I was born, and then they were even happier. It lasted for three years. Until Mum and Dad died together in a car crash. After that, as I’d told Jack, Grandad raised me.
It took a while for me to understand that I came from a family of crooks. Or, as Uncle Alec used to say, we lived on the edge. He meant the edge of the law, the edge of a jail sentence.
Alec’s speciality was insurance fraud, or what he called ‘victimless crime’.
‘Who loses?’ he’d cry. ‘So maybe they put a penny on the premiums, but nobody notices that.’
Grandad would frown in a puzzled way, but he wasn’t great at arguing things through. And Alec could always silence him with a wink and a compliment about our new kitchen. Recently an insurance firm had replaced everything after a fire under a chip pan had covered the old one with soot. It now looked really lovely.
I’d been away staying with friends at the time, so I hadn’t seen the fire, but I knew Grandad didn’t like it mentioned.
Someone who could really argue the toss was Uncle Harry. He was a lawyer, and the one really respectable member of the family. He lived a good, decent life, paid his taxes without a murmur and maintained honest values.
The problem was his wife, who seemed to have a poor sense of direction and kept walking into doors. Alec loathed Harry. He kept making barbed remarks like, ‘Nobody’s ever seen my wife with a black eye.’
Which was true. Him, maybe. Her, never.
I was fond of Alec, and when he said that Harry was a poor advertisement for honesty I had to agree.
Their father was Grandad’s brother, Tommy, who used to refer to himself sentimentally as ‘one of the old-style villains’, trying to sound like the Godfather. Grandad said he was just a small time con artist who made a mess of everything he touched, but he had status because he’d been around so long and had done more time than anyone else. This didn’t seem to me a great recommendation, but my family sees things in their own way.
Tommy had six offspring, five of whom had gone into the business, and their offspring had followed. So I guess that made us a dynasty.
They lived by low-level crime, usually starting with shoplifting when they were under ten. Aunt Hetta: now there was an expert! She’d go into a big store with her three daughters, who’d collect things and deliver them to her. The cameras would pick up the kids, but they were always clean by the time they left the store. Aunt Hetta would sail out, loaded to the teeth, with nobody taking any notice of her.
She took me on one of these raids when I was eight, and I was really good at it. But then Grandad found out and hit the roof. I heard part of the row he had with Hetta, although I didn’t understand much. He said if he caught her leading me astray again he’d make her sorry she was born. She said he was depriving me of the family heritage.
‘How’s the poor girl ever going to earn a decent living if she doesn’t learn now?’ she wailed.
Grandad had been raised amongst all this, but he always claimed that he swore to go straight when I was growing up because he didn’t want to get sent to jail and have me put in care.
Like everything he said there was a pinch of truth in there, buried deep under a load of tinsel.
We lived reasonably well, because Grandad would occasionally have a big win on ‘the gee-gees’. But the wins were too big and too regular to be pure chance.
Later I realised that he had friends who knew what was going to win and tipped him off. I met one of them once, and he winked and said. ‘I like to pay my debts.’
But he wouldn’t say what Grandad had done to be repaid. Or when. Grandad wouldn’t say either.
He supplemented his wins with a few cash-in-hand jobs at a builder’s yard, plus, of course, all the state benefits he could apply for. Harry, being a lawyer, was a big help with getting the forms and telling him what to say on them. Alec said it was the only time in his life Harry ever did anything useful.
This was Grandad’s notion of ‘going straight’. I learned early on that he had his own version of everything. No story was ever quite as he said, but always
