Trilogy Collection. Julie Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ minor so she had to be there when he was sentenced – he’d racked up four separate offences of violence and theft within the first month. And he was now paying the price, and it was a big one.

      The only thing she could console herself with was that if he was good from that point on – well, according to what big tits Sally had said, anyway – that three years would be chopped by at least a third. Which, given that he’d already done 18 months there, meant he could be home by the end of the summer. Please, Vin, she thought to herself, please keep your nose clean. She missed him so much sometimes, it was almost like a physical hurt. Like someone had chopped off her left arm.

      Having put her toast down on the window ledge that also served as her dressing table, she picked up her black, boy’s-style school pants from the floor. She shook them out and dressed quickly. It was getting late now, so she’d have to eat the rest of her toast on the way if she wanted to catch up with Carol. Shivering in the bitter cold as she buttoned up her school shirt, she had a glance in the triangle of broken mirror that was propped on the sill. The sight that greeted her was as unlike her mother’s as it was possible to be. Hair still cut short, boyishly, just the way she preferred it, her face – well, it was the same face that always gazed back at her. A mask behind which so much was always going on. A mask that said ‘queer’, that said ‘boy’, that got taunted. Not least, more and more, by her own mother.

      ‘Why’d you want to look such a scruff-bag, instead of a girl?’ June kept nagging, ‘You’re 13, Titch. You want to make more of yourself. You’ll never cop off with a lad looking like that.’

      Fuck her, Titch thought now. Fuck the lot of them. She looked exactly the way she wanted to. They could think what they wanted. She’d always been a tomboy. Had always much preferred being like her brother than like her waster of a sister, and since Melvin – she shivered again – that monster, that bastard – no one was ever going to mistake her for a girlie girl.

      Dressed and ready, and with the toast gone all soggy in her hand, she ran down the stairs and slammed the front door as she left, anxious to draw a physical line and forget about her own worries and catch up with Caz, who had enough worries of her own. Well, one, actually. That bastard Black Bobby. Who her mum never got shut of after all. Perhaps Caz should’ve taken a leaf from her book.

      June was excited. So excited that it was like something bubbling away inside her. She drew the curtains in the living room and piled coal on the fire, dancing round the room as she went. Warmth. It was like a drug, to have coal in such quantity. It made such a change to be able to come out of the bathroom and get dressed without shivering her tits off.

      It made everything better, she decided. She picked up her fancy new bra and twirled it around her head before putting it on. Then she smiled. She really loved Jock just lately. She must do, she decided, because since what had happened, she’d even been happy to put up with his fumblings under the sheets, which were happening pretty much every night. That was money for you, wasn’t it? While he was giving her his spoils – and the wherewithal to have all that glorious, glorious black stuff – she could just about tolerate anything.

      Though it was hardly the crime of the century. Titch might think otherwise, but in the big scheme of things, it was hardly the Great bloody Train Robbery. She finished dressing, and allowed herself another leisurely cup of tea, before grabbing her bag and heading next door to Moira’s.

      The ‘job’ had been a gift born out of real, regular work. Jock, Maureen’s Steven and their next-door neighbour, Billy, had, along with a few other blokes from around the estate, been offered a couple of weeks’ work from one of the lads down the pub who ran a demolition firm. He’d got the contract to knock down a large office premises, and needed a team to go in for two weeks to strip out all the unwanted office furniture the departing tenants – a loan company, an insurance firm and an accountants – had left behind. The better bits were getting sold on, the rest going into skips, and this was where the estate lads came in. Offered cash in hand for the fortnight and a bonus for finishing on time, there were no shortage of men keen to be included.

      But, as it turned out, there was a much greater bonus up for grabs, as Jock and Billy found out the first day. They’d been at it a couple of hours, manhandling desks and chairs down from the loan company’s office, when they decided to tackle some of the filing cabinets. The saleable ones already gone, these were all destined for the skips, having broken locks or being otherwise in a state of disrepair.

      Jock had just opened the top drawer to make the one they were currently hefting more manoeuvrable when he saw a sight that stopped him in his tracks. The drawer, which was otherwise empty, contained a huge bundle of club cheques – 50 books, it turned out, each containing £50 worth. The most unlikely – not to mention astonishing – sight he had seen in a very long time.

      Club cheques were a well-known form of currency round the estate; a way for the chronically cash-strapped to help make ends meet. Unlike cash itself, they could only be used to shop in certain places, and the local loan company agents would go round giving them out, from house to house – up to the limit any one particular person was allowed – then collecting the cash back on a week-by-week basis. Charges were high; you often paid back more than you originally borrowed just in interest – sometimes double the loan value – but for the hard-up residents of places like the Canterbury Estate, these loans were often the only way they had available to them to pay off big bills or buy Christmas presents for their children.

      Jock was astounded. Here were 50 books, seemingly just abandoned. A full £2,500 worth of cheques. And as he pointed out to Billy as soon at they’d got them out and inspected them, they were in cabinets that were destined not for another office building, but for skips; undetected, they would just get thrown away.

      A meeting was called between the lads and a plan of action formed – the first being that Jock (having been the finder, now the self-appointed mastermind) would slip out to the nearest phone box, call his sister Maureen – who had a working phone – tell her to go and knock up June, and for the pair of them to meet the lads at lunchtime, in the Boy and Barrel pub in the town centre.

      By the time lunchtime had come around, they had searched all the remaining drawers and cabinets, and had a haul of three bundles of club cheques in all – with a total value of £7,500. It was the sort of money that none of them had ever seen in their lives and, though not actual cash, it represented a means to make cash, by buying goods with the cheques and then selling them on. They could be minted in no time at all.

      ‘But we need to hold our horses,’ Jock cautioned at lunchtime, once they’d all gathered at the pub – him and June, Steven and Maureen, Billy and his wife Moira, plus the two younger lads that were working on the job with them, and who’d get a handsome cut just for keeping their traps shut. ‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he went on, ‘because we don’t know if or when they’ll miss them. There’s a chance they might realise they’ve left them, and go back to get them, then see they’re gone, and start asking questions.’

      ‘You’re not going to put them back, are you?’ asked June, who had by now stashed the bundle Jock had given her safely in her bag. ‘Not now we’ve got ’em. That would be fucking bonkers!’

      Jock flapped a dismissive hand at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been thinking about that. We’ll hang on to one bundle – that one you’ve got. Be senseless not to do that. You and Maureen can take it now and stash it safe at home. But we’ll leave the other two where they are and leave those cabinets till last. That way, if they do come sniffing round trying to find them, they’ll turn up two, think that’s the lot, and hopefully won’t miss the other one.’

      ‘But what about after?’ said Steven. ‘What if they don’t realise till СКАЧАТЬ