‘Maybe they haven’t got enough to run with it,’ suggested Loretta.

  ‘Or decided it was a dead duck,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s all a bit circumstantial, Loretta. I’m not sure we’ve got much either.’

  Loretta could see his attention beginning to wane and his eyes flickered to the other papers on his desk. The story did have some holes in it, that was true, but she could investigate, tease out the troublesome details. She was growing tired of writing up court reports. She longed for something meaty to get her teeth into, to show Mr Redpath what she was really capable of.

  ‘So, what shall I do?’ she asked.

  She could feel her initial excitement starting to fade in the face of Malcolm’s lacklustre reaction, but she wasn’t prepared to let it go. She had hoped Malcolm would say she had the makings of the story of the decade but something about his expression told her that she was going to be disappointed.

  ‘Keep a watching brief,’ he said instead, and she felt herself deflate a little further. ‘I doubt there’s anything in it. And the police aren’t stupid. If there were connections to be made, someone would have done it. But don’t waste any more of the paper’s time on it. I need you and your notepad at the court.’

  Then he turned his attention back to his typewriter.

  Loretta returned to her own desk and tried to look busy, but her head was full of possibilities. What if she became the paper’s expert on organised crime? Even if this wasn’t the story, one would come along before too long – and when it did, she would be ready. She could do this quietly, without fanfare. No one needed to know what she was up to and Malcolm had told her to keep a watching brief so that meant she wasn’t completely off-piste. She would find the story here, no matter what.

  In the meantime, the rest of her life continued. The family house in Barnet was too big for her now that Natalie was in Sicily and filled with too many ghosts for her to live there by herself. So they had agreed to let it out on a short-term basis and she moved into a bedsit in Clerkenwell, which put her closer to the centre of things. Each day she would walk down to Fleet Street and the courts with her nose in the air, sniffing out the stories around her. Her head buzzed with ‘what if’ questions, her imagination conjuring up the scenes behind closed doors. She knew that on a practical level her actual job was just reporting on what she saw each day in the courts, but in her heart she felt that her big-break story was just around one of those corners and she wanted to be ready to write it.

  Out of the blue she had a phone call from Liz, her oldest friend from school. Personal calls weren’t really allowed at work but given how easy it was to pretend that any call was something to do with work, it was a rule that was roundly flouted.

  Loretta had felt herself drifting away from most of her friends from Barnet. Her life was so different to theirs now and she had started to wonder whether they would ever have anything in common again. But Liz was different. They had been friends since the very first day of primary school and Loretta would always make time for her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said down the phone, glancing around to make sure that no one was listening in. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Same old same old,’ said Liz. ‘I’m stitching knickers for a living now. There must be more to life than that. Fancy a night out? A proper old knees-up? There’s a fundraiser for the miners at the club. A bit of a band. A disco too. Wondered if you might want to come for old times’ sake.’

  The club was the working men’s club on the estate, scene of many of Loretta’s notable firsts. It wasn’t really her kind of place anymore but she loved Liz and the evening did sound fun. Plus supporting the poor miners was a cause she could put herself firmly behind.

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘When is it?’

  ‘Tomorrow night. Do you want to call round at mine first and then we can walk down together?’

  Loretta mentally ran through her diary. She was on earlies at work and there was nothing else pencilled in for that night – no reason at all why she couldn’t go.

  ‘Great. Pick you up at seven?’

  Loretta heard the payphone that Liz must have been calling from start to make a pipping sound. Her money was about to run out.

  ‘Yes. And bring your . . .’

  But Loretta would never know what she was supposed to bring because the call was cut before Liz had the chance to tell her. She guessed it would have been her dancing shoes.

  48

  Loretta had only been gone from the estate for a short while but already it felt like it was no longer a part of who she was now. As she got off the bus and walked up the high street towards Liz’s parents’ house, she could feel the smallness of it, all its parochial undertones. It seemed silly to call a part of the sprawling metropolis that was London ‘small’. Millions of people lived in this borough. Yet to Loretta’s mind, the people who had settled in this tiny corner of it, the people she had grown up with, had never looked beyond its borders, never asked themselves what else there might be for them. They were content in their little patch and weren’t seeking more.

  There was nothing wrong with that, Loretta was sure. It had been enough for her parents and their parents before them. But it wasn’t for her. She had pushed out into the open sea and left them all behind without so much as a backward glance. Like the Jumblies in the Edward Lear poem, she thought, setting sail against all advice to discover what else there was out there.

  Looking now at the tatty shopfronts, the off-licences with their barred windows, the greengrocers with broken pallets and cardboard boxes piled head high outside the door, it didn’t look so very different to the part of Clerkenwell where she was living. But it was different and that was the point. Some of these people had never moved more than a mile from where they were born, some of them never would. But Loretta wanted more and she was going to make that happen.

  For tonight, though, an evening out with Liz would be great. She made her way up Liz’s road, just one along from where she had grown up, and knocked on the door. Liz’s mum answered it.

  ‘Oh, Etta, darling. How are you? Come in, come in. Not seen you for donkey’s. How’ve you been? How’s Nat? I heard she’d gone off to live abroad somewhere. That right, is it? And don’t you look lovely. Life doing you proud, is it? Liz won’t be a minute. She had to wash her favourite top. Assumed I’d done it. I said to her, “What do you think I am? Your skivvy?” Been trying to dry it with her hairdryer. I ask you! A hairdryer!’

  Liz’s mum rattled on like a machine gun, barely drawing breath, and Loretta just smiled and didn’t even attempt to interrupt her but followed her through to the front room, where Liz’s dad was sitting on the sagging sofa watching Play Your Cards Right. Bruce Forsyth was whipping the studio audience into a frenzy as they tried to predict the next card to be turned over.

  ‘Lower, you stupid mare,’ Liz’s dad muttered. ‘Lower.’

  ‘Look who’s here, Jim. It’s Etta. Say hello, then.’

  Jim pulled his eyes from the screen, saw Loretta and toasted her with his can of Watney’s.

  ‘All right, Etta.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Young,’ said Loretta.

  He reached down the side of the sofa and grabbed the last can from a four-pack, the plastic that had held them together still dangling round its neck. He offered it to Loretta but she smiled and shook her head.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said, just as Liz arrived dressed in a checked shirt, a pair of baggy jeans and her Doc Martens, a twisted scarf holding her hair away from her face.

  ‘Stop trying to fob that crap off on Etta,’ she said. ‘We’re sophisticated women, I’ll have you know.’

  ‘That’ll be blackcurrant in your lager then, will it?’ deadpanned Mr Young and Liz glared at him, but it was an affectionate glare.

  Liz’s mum was looking in her handbag and she pulled out her purse and fished out a pound note. She offered it to Liz.

  ‘Stick this in the collecting bucket from me, would you. It’s the wives and kiddies I feel for. None of this is their fault but them’s the ones suffering.’

  Liz took the note and stuffed it in her pocket.

  ‘You take care of that, my girl,’ said her mother sternly. ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. And mind that makes its way into the collection. Don’t you be spending it on drink now.’

  ‘Cross my heart hope to die,’ replied Liz, running a finger in a diagonal cross over her chest.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Etta. You make sure she doesn’t spend it herself.’

  ‘Will do, Mrs Young,’ said Etta with a grin.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Liz, whipping a key up from a bowl on the sideboard. ‘Anyone would think we were fifteen, not twenty-four!’

  ‘Lovely to see you both,’ said Etta as Liz dragged her away from the house.

  ‘God, don’t parents drive you mental,’ said Liz as she pulled the front door closed behind them with a healthy slam. And then she stopped, standing stock still, her hand over her mouth. ‘Shit, I’m so sorry, Etta. I didn’t think.’

  Loretta shrugged it away.

  ‘If mine were here they’d drive me mental too,’ she said, and she was sure it was true.

  They could hear the music pulsing on to the street as they approached the club. Someone had made a banner using a bed sheet. ‘Suport the Miners’ was daubed across it in black letters. The spelling error leapt out at Loretta but Liz didn’t mention it and Loretta wondered if she hadn’t noticed. She kept her mouth shut.

  Familiar faces stood around the door, one with a bucket that had coins and the odd note sitting in the bottom.

  ‘Coming in, girls?’ said a man who Loretta had known since childhood. ‘It’s fifty pence each and there’s a raffle inside.’

  ‘Certainly are, Sean,’ grinned Liz. ‘And look! I’ve even fished Etta out of her posh new life to come along.’

  Loretta felt the colour rise up her throat. She had wanted to leave but she didn’t want people to think badly of her. She knew they probably did.

  ‘Hi, Sean,’ she said. ‘Are you well? And Margi?’

  ‘Fine, darlin’,’ he replied and held his bucket aloft.

  They both dropped fifty pence in. Liz held back her mother’s pound.

  ‘Not putting it in there,’ she said under her breath as they walked in. ‘I don’t trust Sean not to siphon off all the notes for his beer fund.’

  Inside, the air was heavy with cigarette smoke and smelled of beer and hot bodies. A string of multicoloured light bulbs had been hung over the bar and there was a roadworks light flashing orange in one corner. The closed doors didn’t quite manage to disguise that it was still light outside. The room was filling up, though, with enough already there to show promise for a good night ahead.

  They made for the bar. A ‘Coal Not Dole’ collecting tin was chained to one end and Liz curled the pound note into a tube and fed it into the narrow slot.

  ‘There. Now. What are you drinking?’

  49

  Loretta was having a great time. The DJ was doing a fantastic job and the floor-fillers just kept coming. They had danced to every song that he played: Blondie, Wham!, Elton John, Abba, The Jam. Each time the style of music changed they looked at one another, brows furrowed, until they recognised the tune and then set off again with renewed vigour, breaking off only to go to the bar.

  Loretta bought a strip of raffle tickets – it was all in a good cause, after all – and then stuffed them in her jeans pocket, forgetting all about them, but around ten thirty the lights came up and the DJ asked for hush whilst the raffle was drawn. Sean had appeared next to the DJ with a plastic tray of chops, sausages and bacon. Loretta wondered how long it had been out of a fridge.

  ‘And the lucky winner of the top prize, a tray of choice cuts from our very own Wainwright’s butcher’s, goes to . . . drumroll, please . . . and it’s a green ticket. Green twenty-seven.’

  Everyone checked their tickets and groaning came from various parts of the room.

  ‘I never win anything,’ someone said, and, ‘Could have done with bagging that,’ said someone else.

  ‘Come on. Which lucky person has won this amazing prize? Who is it?’

  Loretta fished her tickets out of her pocket. They were green and she scanned down the numbers. The winning ticket was amongst them. Quickly, she screwed the strip up and stuffed it back into her pocket.

  ‘Not you?’ asked Liz.

  Loretta shook her head and tried to look disappointed. What was she going to do with a tray of meat? Carry it back with her on the bus? Winning meat at the club wasn’t part of who she was now. It was better to let them redraw and have the prize go to someone who wanted it, or needed it.

  ‘Okay. Number twenty-seven must have gone home. Let’s go again.’ The DJ stuck his hand back into the bucket of tickets. ‘And it’s pink. Lucky for some, number thirteen.’

  He held the ticket aloft and a middle-aged woman with a blonde perm squealed.

  ‘It’s me! It’s me!!’ she shouted, waving her ticket. She strutted across the floor, her white court shoes tapping as she went. She turned and gave a little bow and everyone cheered.

  The ticket was exchanged for the tray and Loretta thought again how far she had travelled from where she’d begun.

  ‘Drink?’ asked Liz.

  Loretta nodded. ‘And a sit-down. My feet are killing me.’

  They got the drinks and found a table over near the flashing roadworks light. The Formica tabletop was sticky, ringed with the traces of previous glasses.

  ‘What a laugh!’ said Liz, leaning back in her chair, her face glowing from the dancing.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. Best night out in ages,’ replied Loretta.

  Liz raised an eyebrow but didn’t pass comment.

  ‘And it’s going well, the being a reporter thing?’ asked Liz.

  ‘I like it,’ nodded Loretta.

  ‘Got any big scoops yet?’

  Loretta shook her head. ‘No, but if you happen to have any big stories you’d care to share . . .’

  They laughed, running through events from their childhoods and recasting them as news stories.

  ‘Actually,’ began Loretta, ‘I’ve been doing a bit of background on crime families. You know, like the Krays and the Richardsons.’

  ‘Find anything?’ asked Liz and then, ‘You do know the Youngs are the most feared family in Barnet?’ Liz flexed her biceps and Loretta shook her head in mock despair.

  ‘No. Not really,’ she replied. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much to find.’

  ‘Nasty world though,’ said Liz. ‘I heard that if you cross these blokes they’d think nothing of kneecapping you and ditching you out at sea. No body, no crime.’

  ‘What, still? I thought that all ended years ago.’

  Liz shrugged. ‘It’s just what you hear,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty scary.’

  ‘Who are?’ Loretta’s story antennae were twitching.

  ‘I don’t know. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I quite like you, Etta. Don’t want you ending up in a concrete coffin at the bottom of the Thames.’

  ‘Nat says there’s Mafia over where she is in Sicily,’ Loretta said.

  Liz blew her lips out. ‘Now, they’re the ones you really want to be scared of, by all accounts,’ she said. ‘They don’t mess about. They make our British villains look like playground bullies. And they can hold a grudge. If they want you dead, they don’t forget. It can go on for decades.’

  Loretta’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘How do you know?’ she asked. She hadn’t spent much time with Liz for almost ten years now. Maybe she had got herself caught up in something in that time, something that Loretta knew nothing about.

  ‘Have you never seen The Godfather?’ Liz laughed.

  Loretta’s shoulders slumped. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I thought you were serious there for a minute.’

  ‘Crime families? Round here? Give me a break. It’s more likely that old Sylv over there will stop dyeing her hair.’ She nodded at the woman who had won the tray of meat.

  And then the opening bars of ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ came on. People stopped dancing and sat on the floor, one in front of the other in long snakes. Liz grabbed Loretta’s arm and pulled her to her feet.

  ‘Come on!’ she said and within seconds Loretta too was sitting on the tacky floor, legs wide. Liz was behind her, her arms holding on to Loretta’s waist, and a man her dad used to drink with was in front of her. Loretta could see his bald patch, visible despite the efforts he’d made to hide it with a comb-over.

  Soon the whole row was rowing backwards and forwards in time with the music and then spreading their arms and tipping from side to side like manic little aeroplanes. It was surprisingly hard work.

  ‘You see,’ Liz shouted in her ear, ‘this is what a good night out looks like.’

  Loretta had to agree.

  50

  2022 – Ripon

  Bronte was in her shop. She liked the way being there soothed her as she pottered around working through boxes of other people’s rubbish, sorting the wheat from the chaff. What she could sell changed with the seasons, just like fashion did. Recently, there had been a huge demand for small items of rattan furniture, then macramé. At the moment, it seemed to be mismatched vintage crockery. Part of the fun for Bronte was trying to stay one step ahead of the trends so that she could foresee the next Instagram-fuelled craze and be ready with suitable stock accordingly.

  She pulled out a little shoebox that she had just acquired. Its contents slid around heavily as she handled it. Whatever was inside hadn’t been carefully wrapped. The box had a red lid and the Start-Rite logo on the side of two children wrapped up well and walking down a tree-lined avenue. Bronte had seen plenty of these vintage shoeboxes and had often wondered what the logo really had to do with shoes other than the fact that the children were walking.

  She lifted the lid. The box was full of little Whimsy animals, mass-manufactured pottery figurines with a high-shine glaze in realistic colours. This lot had no doubt been somebody’s pride and joy back in the sixties or seventies. She could almost visualise someone running a duster over them. It wasn’t a full set, she noticed in dismay, but a mixture of animals, presumably whichever ones had caught the collector’s eye. A couple of them were chipped. Bronte wondered if they had been intact when they were unceremoniously swept into the shoebox for disposal, not that it mattered. They weren’t valuable and could be found in house clearances the world over. Someone could enjoy them again, though. She would give them a second lease of life.

 

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