Kith and Kin Read online

  ‘And I’m saying I don’t believe you.’ Clem was convinced that this was a bluff and that the man, though apparently unperturbed, was still a man and would respond, as any man would, to a gunshot. He cocked his revolver and fired one round close to the big man’s feet and then all hell broke loose.

  Clem and his people found themselves surrounded by men with cudgels and boys with knives and women with cast-iron pans. They had taken up whatever weapons they could grab, and Bailey’s men, though they managed to get off the odd shot, found themselves beaten back. Clem was grabbed, the big man’s arms wrapped from behind around his chest. His weapon fell to the ground and he felt himself choking and breathless, his ribs cracking under the strain. Finally he was dropped to the ground and kicked, in the buttocks and the ribs and the head, and when he felt sure that he could no longer breathe, he was hauled back to his feet and given a shove that sent him staggering back towards the perimeter fence. Through a haze he heard a shotgun discharge and then a second, but when he attempted to look back he was met with further blows and shoves. He raised his arms to protect his face and then turned away, fled back to the safety of the waiting cars.

  Bloodied and bleeding, what was left of Bailey’s contingent made it back to their vehicles. Three were missing and Clem was told that two for certain were dead. They didn’t know about the third, a young man by the name of Bates who had only recently joined Bailey’s crew. This was meant to have been his chance to prove himself.

  ‘I saw him go down,’ Clem was told. ‘Three of them beating on him with cudgels.’

  Clem gave the order to return to base; he was in half a mind to turn tail and run, and only the presence of others in the car stopped him. ‘But we had guns,’ he said, pre-empting what he knew Bailey would say. ‘We had fucking guns and we were bested by a rabble of gypsies.’

  He looked at his watch. The whole episode had taken less than half an hour.

  Back at the camp they were taking account of their own wounded. No deaths, thankfully. But a few cracked heads that would take some dealing with and two bullet wounds that would need some explaining when the police arrived, as they surely would. Close neighbours to the camp would have heard the rampage and the gunfire and would have reported it.

  The big man, Fred, was used to dealing with such concerns and within minutes he had everyone organized. No one took notice of a flatbed leaving in the middle of the night and their own wounded were patched up and put to bed. The children knew better than to speak to the police and Fred handed over the role of liaison to Sarah, sister to the late Dalla Beaney and a woman of status within their community.

  The camp was quiet when the police arrived an hour later, a sergeant and two constables, cycling into camp and propping their bikes by the gate. A camp fire was burning close by and a man rose to greet them.

  ‘We heard reports of a disturbance.’

  The man shrugged. ‘Two of our young ’uns out late, drunk more than they should have done, got into an altercation over some card game or other. A few of the local lads followed them back in and they set to brawling. Our Sarah sorted them, mended heads and sent the rest on their way.’

  ‘Then we’d like a word with our Sarah,’ the sergeant told him.

  The man shrugged and directed him towards Sarah’s caravan. Now the children were old enough to set up on their own she had her own vardo, and lived with just her husband. She opened the door and came out to them, wrapped in a large shawl.

  She and the sergeant had had dealings on several occasions and he knew he would get nothing out of her that she didn’t want to say, and she knew that he would go away satisfied with her explanation because it was too much trouble for him to do otherwise. She repeated the story that the sergeant had already heard.

  ‘Our Billy got a black eye and his head cracked,’ she said. ‘So I’ve bedded him down here for the night.’

  ‘I’ll need to see him.’

  ‘You’ll not set foot inside. This is my home. You may look through the door.’

  The sergeant nodded and she opened the door a little wider. Her son Billy lay on one of the bunks. He roused himself briefly and looked the sergeant in the eyes.

  ‘Got into a fight, did you?’

  ‘A bit of one.’

  The sergeant stood for a moment, considering. He knew there was more to it than he was being told. And he also knew that he wasn’t going to get any further or any deeper into the matter. He and Sarah had their script and so far they were sticking to it.

  ‘I’m told there was gunfire.’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘One of the men might have fired into the air. The little bastards didn’t want to break it up and go on their way.’

  ‘Language,’ he said, mildly.

  ‘I’d defy you to be polite if a rabble came and disturbed your night. We deal with our own; go and deal with the idiots who followed ours back. They should think theirselves lucky they got off with a few bruises.’

  ‘And it’s no good my asking who these others were.’

  ‘No good asking me, and I don’t suppose Billy knows names. Just kids, the lot of them, and stupid with it.’

  ‘I’ll have the constables come back in the morning, look around.’ The last piece of the script.

  Sarah closed the door to her van. ‘Best keep the heat in,’ she said.

  She watched as the sergeant and his constables left and then retreated into the vardo.

  Once the police had gone, Fred knocked on her door. She came out on to the steps again to speak to him. ‘Why would they come looking for my sister?’

  ‘Only one reason I can think of. The same reason that brought her back here in the first place.’

  Sarah nodded. She couldn’t think of any alternative either.

  ‘You best give the young ’uns a warning. If Bailey sent his thugs here then the chances are they’ll be looking for them too.’

  ‘I’ll go to the telephone at first light, see if I can catch Malina before she goes off to work. My sister is dead and gone, they should be leaving her bones to rest in peace.’

  Fred paused. ‘It never seemed to me that she had much peace living,’ he said after a while. ‘Not even after she came back here. If you know what was bothering her, Sarah, then you best try and put it right. Or they’ll be back again and they’ll be more prepared this time.’

  ‘I’ll give it thought,’ she said. ‘But my sister was as close mouthed as our ma was. I know she was hiding something, but she never told me what. I know whatever it was, it weighed on her conscience, but she wouldn’t speak it, not even when she knew she was dying. She didn’t want to taint the kids.

  ‘And she never made confession. At least not so far as I know. She went to her death with whatever it was on her conscience, so she’ll not rest easy until it is put right. And neither will her young, no matter how much she tried to protect them. Better for them to know, so we can lay that to rest too.’

  TWELVE

  Mickey had reached home just after four a.m. Belle was up, waiting for him, wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire.

  ‘I thought you might be cold,’ she said. ‘So I kept the fire going. The kettle’s hot. Would you like some tea?’

  Mickey watched contentedly as she warmed the pot and then poured boiling water on to the leaves and set it by the hearth.

  ‘Bad, was it? I’m guessing it was if Prothero called you and Henry out there.’

  ‘A man called Grigor Vardanyan. You may have run across him. He was from your neck of the woods.’

  She frowned for a moment. ‘Small man, had a three-card Monte pitch? Bailey used him as an informant, if I remember right. He was good at watching and listening.’

  ‘That’ll be the one. He either watched the wrong thing, listened to the wrong thing or failed to report those things back to Bailey. We don’t know yet, but what Bailey did to him was vindictive and cruel.’

  ‘And why should that surprise you?’ Belle had grown up a few streets from Bailey’s family. She
had moved away at fourteen and had been making her own way ever since. Her parents had left London only a short time afterwards. She and Mickey had met ten years earlier, when she had been only eighteen, and had met again some time after that and been married within a month. It was perhaps the only impulsive act that Mickey could ever have been accused of, and they had been married now for just short of five years. At twenty-eight, Belle was almost eleven years younger than her husband.

  ‘So, you’ll be off again in the morning, then?’

  ‘Got to grab a few hours’ sleep, then the boss wants to go back to Rainham. He thinks we need to look at Otterham Creek again. Get some more local knowledge on this.’

  ‘So how does he think it’s all connected up?’

  ‘I think he’s got about as much idea as I have at the moment. But we’re just as concerned that it isn’t Bailey as we are that it is. If someone is trying to move in on his territory it could escalate fast, and none of us want that.’

  Belle nodded. ‘Best go to bed, then,’ she said. ‘I had a chat to the neighbours about strangers hereabouts, maybe a child. Mr Briggs, three doors down, he thinks he might have seen something, or rather someone. A skinny little kid, about ten or twelve, not local. Briggs must’ve been walking down just after you came home and he spotted the child looking at door numbers. He thought he might be looking for someone and asked if he could help, but the boy just ran off. Might be nothing, of course.’

  ‘I’ll have a chat with Mr Briggs before I go in tomorrow. Like he says, it might be nothing. I might have been imagining things.’

  Belle smiled at him. ‘For that, you’d have to have an imagination,’ she said.

  THIRTEEN

  At seven o’clock the following morning Sarah phoned the residential club in Guilford Street where her niece was staying. She had a room there, with a little stove and shared bathroom. Ten other girls roomed on the same floor and she had friends amongst them. A caretaker and his wife minded the place and there was a phone in the vestibule where residents could call out and friends and relatives could call in. The concierge or his wife would then go and fetch them to the phone. Sarah had only done it twice before; she rarely used the phone and was hoping she had enough change for the call box and that her niece hadn’t left for work already.

  It turned out that she just caught her: Malina was on her way downstairs when the caretaker’s wife came to find her.

  Quickly, Sarah filled her in about the night’s events.

  ‘But why would anyone come looking for Ma?’

  ‘That we don’t know. We don’t know whose men they were, though we can make a few guesses.’

  ‘You mean Josiah Bailey? Isn’t he dead?’

  ‘The old man might be, but not the son. From what I hear, the son is far worse than his father ever was. You just keep looking over your shoulder, girl, and try and get word to Kem, if you can. Now this Bailey knows your ma’s dead, he might come looking for you.’

  ‘But we don’t know anything.’

  ‘Since when has knowing anything mattered to anyone?’ Sarah said.

  Malina was very thoughtful as she made her way to work. She’d started off in the typing pool and worked her way up so that she was now one of the secretaries shared by a commercial office that dealt with imports and exports, ten minutes’ walk away from her lodgings. She didn’t particularly like the work, but it was a job and the pay wasn’t bad for a girl her age. This phone call from Sarah bothered her a great deal. She remembered the night they fled their cottage – or rather had been forced to flee. Remembered it clear as day, and remembered the effort she had put in afterwards, trying to get her mother to tell her what had caused the problem and who had killed their father.

  And why.

  By seven a.m. Josiah Bailey had already spent several hours venting his anger on the returning men, and most of all he blamed Clem. Blamed him all the more because he wasn’t present to take the blame. As they’d come back through Gillingham, Clem had made a decision. He’d stopped the car and waited for the others to pull up behind him. Clem Atkins was a single man with no family to suffer retribution for his actions, and the mood his boss had been in these past weeks, he didn’t give much for his own chances.

  He was quite blunt about it. ‘I’ll not be going back with you. Any of you that are of the same mind, we’ll take one of the cars and we’ll disappear. The rest of you can tell whatever story you like. Tell him we died in the gypsy camp. If you want, tell him you don’t know what became of us. He’ll hold me to blame, none of you will suffer for it.’

  Clem paused and looked from one face to the next. The eight men left to him of the twelve who had gone out that night. He could see their uncertainty, and their fear. Five of them he knew were family men and tied quite closely to Bailey because of that. They would not leave their families to suffer. The others were single, young, their path not yet set, and these three shuffled uncertainly and looked to him for guidance.

  ‘Not easy to disappear with no cash, no nothing,’ one finally said.

  ‘But not impossible.’ Clem paused. ‘I can give each of you a bit of walking round money; once we get away from here we can figure something out. But I’ve had it. I go back and I’m a dead man.’

  ‘Run and you’re a dead man. He won’t stop looking for you.’

  Clem shrugged. ‘I’m all for taking a chance,’ he said. ‘Besides, I reckon he’s got enough on his plate at the moment without chasing after me. I’m small fry. Disposable.’

  There had been arguments, but Clem had finally got his way and he and two of the others took a car and left the rest of the group behind. He had no idea whether he was doing the right thing, only that some chance is better than no chance – and no chance was what he figured he had if he went back and reported what had happened that night.

  Bailey’s anger had been hot at first. At first he hadn’t believed the story. Couldn’t believe that twelve armed men had been defeated by a rabble of largely unarmed gypsies. They all had the sense not to say that some of the fighters had been women; that would have been the final straw. Even if Bailey had spared the rod they’d never have lived it down. And Bailey was in no mood to spare the rod. He took out his anger on two of the older and most experienced men of the group, forcing the others to hold them while he punched and kicked and bent and broke, and then left them half alive on the floor.

  His anger turned cold then, his changing mood taking everyone by surprise as he straightened up and wiped the blood from his hands.

  ‘No more,’ he said. ‘No more foolishness, no more failures. The line is drawn now. And they are going to pay.’

  He’d been gone for several minutes before anyone dared to ask who they were. Those encamped at Ash Tree Lane? There was something in his tone that suggested larger issues and his comments chimed with what Clem had said about the man having enough on his plate.

  ‘He’s not been right since Cloughy came back,’ someone muttered. He was hushed immediately.

  ‘If he’d been with us last night, it would have gone off a bit different. You bet your sweet life on it.’

  ‘You want to share space with that mad bugger?’

  No one made comment after that. The trouble was, Bailey didn’t just own them; he owned a community, and a community couldn’t do what Clem had done and just flit when the going got too much.

  They helped the injured men home, those that had held them fast while Bailey took his pleasure with fists and feet and blackjack. One had a knee that would never mend, another was now missing an eye and had a head wound that bled ferociously. They helped them home, and helped wives get the wounded into bed, and no one so much as said a word about what had happened to them. And no one, weeping and grieving and scared though they might be, no one was stupid enough to ask.

  The post-mortem took place at St Mary’s; it had been squeezed into the schedule early, but it told Henry and Mickey little they had not already surmised.

  Grigor had been beaten slowly a
nd systematically, probably over a number of hours and probably with the same weapon. It was only the death blow that was different and the fragments of plaster and whitewash suggested that he had been shoved backwards and his head smashed into a wall.

  Henry and Mickey left St Mary’s and began their journey back to Upchurch. This time they had a car at their disposal and Mickey drove. Both men were tired and somewhat dispirited and the weather seemed to reflect their mood. A cold slush of snow and rain fell steadily and the windscreen wiper struggled to clear it away.

  ‘So, Grigor Vardanyan.’ Henry was looking through the file he had brought along. ‘A varied career. Arrived in England in 1912, in the company of his parents and a younger sibling who died of Spanish flu in 1918. He was nine years old when he arrived in this country and only twenty-five when he died. Recently released, after an eighteen-month sentence for fraud.’

  ‘What kind of fraud?’

  ‘Nothing sophisticated. Stole a cheque book, cashed two of the cheques, but unfortunately for him the bank cashier knew the owner of the account by sight and Grigor was clearly not a sixty-year-old man with a grey beard.’

  ‘Belle says he had a three-card Monte pitch since he was a little kid. Says he was a runner for Bailey senior, and the present Josiah Bailey used him as a casual informant. A man like that hears things, sees things, is sensitive to the mood on the streets, I suppose.’

  Henry nodded. ‘The very reasons we might use one of his ilk as an informant. So, he was younger than Billy Crane and Max Peterson, but almost certainly known to them. And involved in petty crime from a very young age.’ He paused. ‘Not that this in itself is a signifier of anything. Many children steal or practise deceit of one sort or another just to survive, and it’s a long stretch from standing on a street corner and duping a crowd playing Find the Lady, to whatever it was that brought such violence down on his head. He’d have paid his dues to Bailey’s family, even as a boy.’