The Liverpool Trilogy (102 page)

Tom groaned. Ernie’s mother would be spinning in her grave. ‘I’ll kill the bloody pair of them,’ he said. ‘My sons are criminals. I suppose Seamus’ll join
them in a few years.’

‘He won’t. My Seamie’s a good lad.’

‘So were Fin and Michael till they went and found the uncles down the East End of blinking London. Come on, let’s sit in the shed for a minute, because my legs don’t know
whether it’s Tuesday or dinner time.’

They had scarcely opened the shed door when it happened. A large, black car slid almost noiselessly to the front of Scouse Alley. Two men emerged with machine guns. It was unreal. The shiny
vehicle reflected moonlight, as did the weapons in the criminals’ hands. It was real. Tom pushed his wife into the shed, then hid himself behind the partially open door.

He grabbed his wife’s bag, pulled out the gun and, with just two bullets, shot the intruders in their heads. He’d been a good sniper, though never with a weapon as small as this one.
It was unreal again. But the car door opened once more, and that was very real. Tom felled the third man with professional accuracy; his time in the Lancashire Fusiliers had not been wasted. His
knees buckled and he sank to the floor. It was all too bloody real. Never since the war had he killed. Trained for weeks in a firing range, Tom had become an asset to his regiment. He had medals.
He had medals for his chest, and British civilian blood on his hands. Yet those machine guns would have killed everyone in the hall. He had saved many lives, but he felt sick to the core.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ his sobbing wife prayed.

The doors of the main building slammed shut, and lights were turned off. That would be Paddy’s doing. Tom’s mother-in-law was always on the ball, and she was following well-sharpened
instincts. ‘Stay where you are,’ he ordered Maureen. ‘There could be a second car. I’ll be with you, so don’t worry.’ He dug in her bag and found spare
bullets.

No second car arrived. When half an hour had disappeared into eternity’s backlog, Tom left the shed and knocked on the door of Scouse Alley. ‘It’s only me,’ he
stage-whispered. He entered a silent room lit only by the small red ends of thirty or more cigarettes.

‘What happened?’ Paddy demanded. When her son-in-law had supplied the quiet answer, she walked to the door and stepped outside. Three bodies. No visible witnesses. She thanked God
for the moon before fetching Maureen from the shed. ‘Not a word,’ she threatened. Inside, she told the audience that an old car could have backfired, but they must all stay where they
were just in case something was about to kick off, since it might have been gunfire. Then she shone her torch and picked out Kev and two relatively sober and trustworthy men. Tom led them out.
Three nearly sober men, three dead gangsters, three machine guns. Everything was coming in threes. Guns, ammunition, a car and three bodies had to disappear before daybreak. And Paddy’s two
eejit grandsons were at the back of it. She would rip the truth out of them even if it took a scalpel to do it.

People were getting restless. ‘Look,’ she told them.

‘We can’t look – it’s too bloody dark,’ replied a disembodied voice.

‘Listen, then, Smarty Pants. Very, very quietly, let’s sing “Faith of Our Fathers” in thanksgiving for a lovely wedding on a lovely day. The bride and groom are gone, but
the rest of us must stay here until we find out what’s afoot outside.’ She switched on a few of the lights.

So they sang in an almost whisper the battle hymn of all Catholics: ‘
Faith of our fathers living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword
. . .’

Paddy nudged Maureen, who was crippled by near-hysteria. ‘When we don’t want you singing, you fire on all cylinders. Come on, now.
Fa-aith of our fa-a-ther-ers, holy faith, we
will be true to thee till death. We will be true to thee till death.
’ Three dead. Three corpses, three semi-automatic guns, one huge car in front of Scouse Alley. Fortunately, all the
blinds were closed, so no one could glance out at the horrible scene. She did, though. Tom was swilling blood off the paths. In the moonlight, it looked black, like thick oil. The car and the
bodies were gone, and Kev was searching the ground with a flashlight. She thanked God that ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ was such a long and repetitive hymn.

‘Paddy?’

‘What?’

‘Can we go now?’

‘Just stack the chairs, then leave through the kitchens. I want to see none of you at the front in case that was a gun firing. We’re not far from bonded warehouses, and some Saturday
nighters might have a thirst and no sense. Go on with you. Maureen, pull yourself together and take your son home. Walk with the men. Tom will be back soon, I promise.’

Maureen blinked stupidly, like a woman trying not to wake on a workday morning. ‘He killed—’

‘Shut up. Shut your mouth before I find a padlock for it. He did what he had to do. He saved my life, yours, Seamus’s. Your husband’s a good man, and well you know it. This was
never murder.’

‘But Mam—’

‘I’ve changed me mind. Stay here with me. I don’t want you strolling along and letting your brains pour out through that colander you call a skull. I can’t trust you not
to talk out of the holes in your head, especially the one gaping above the jaw.’

The scraping and stacking of chairs drowned the women’s words. Paddy warned her daughter again. ‘Not a syllable in front of Seamus. And you’d be best off saying nothing when
your daughter manages to separate herself from the Teddy boy she married.’

‘I’m scared, Mam.’

‘And I’m not?’

They were alone at last when Tom came in. ‘Done and dusted,’ he mouthed. ‘Maureen, your gun’s in Davy Jones’s locker. Car burned well away from here, petrol tank
exploded, everyone of ours safe.’

‘And the bodies?’ Paddy kept an eye on Seamus, who was picking debris from the floor. ‘Well?’

‘Cremated in the car.’

Paddy, still strong as a horse, suddenly felt her age. A woman in her early sixties should not be needing to worry about delinquent brothers, sons and grandsons. Michael and Fin had gone south
to look for work, and they had probably found it with their uncles and great-uncles. Paddy’s brothers, too old now to carry weight in the East End, had passed their unstable crowns to her
sons. Those sons, in their forties, were now training their own children and poor Maureen’s boys.

‘Mam?’

‘Leave me alone a minute, so, Maureen.’ She walked into the huge rear kitchen and leaned on the sink. Descended as she was from a determined Irish clan and from shipwrecked
Armada-ists way back in time, Paddy had a temper fit to strip paint. It was bubbling now in her throat like heartburn after too hefty a meal. ‘Ganga,’ she whispered. ‘Ganga,
Daddy, Muth, I’ve let you down. I’m sorry, so sorry.’ She hadn’t been the oldest in her section of the huge family, but she’d been the oldest girl – hence her
Irish/Spanish name. In the mother country, women kept the men on a path as straight and narrow as possible. But she’d let her brothers go, and they had married southern Protestants.
‘And look at the result,’ she spat softly.

Her sisters were probably fine. They would have married within the church and were doubtless scattered hither and thither throughout the north of England. A few of the lads were said to be
decent and hardworking, so she could be proud of most of the original immigrants. But her brothers Peter and Callum had gone to the bad, and the result had turned life upside down tonight. In her
head, she carried a picture of what might have been. She saw Scouse Alley, currently Lights, filled with crumpled bodies, blood and flesh everywhere, no movement, just the odd groan from those who
hadn’t died immediately.

‘Gran?’

She dried angry eyes. ‘Seamus, hello.’

‘Don’t cry, Gran.’

She squatted down and held his shoulders. ‘Promise me, lad. Promise me you’ll never go to London.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘They could send me anywhere.’

Paddy swallowed. ‘Who could?’

‘The army. I want to be a crack shot like my dad.’

A knife pierced her heart. ‘Why would you want to be a sniper, son?’

He shrugged. ‘I just do.’

It would be all right, she consoled herself. Last week, he’d wanted to be a train driver, and she remembered from months ago his determination to be a fireman or a bobby. He would grow out
of the army idea, had to grow out of it. ‘Go home with your daddy, sweetheart. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Alone except for Maureen in the hall, Paddy began to focus on Finbar and Michael, Maureen’s older boys. Poor old Ernie Avago was lumbered with them. They had brought hell to Liverpool, to
their own family, to a lovely old retired dock worker who hadn’t a clue about his lodgers’ true nature. What was his real name, now? Ernie had been christened Avago by his fellow
dockers, because whenever he encountered a man with a difficult task, he always said, ‘’Ere, lad. Let me ’ave a go.’ Avago. He would help anybody, would Ernie. And now, he
was nursing in his generous heart two devils from the depths of hell.

Maureen entered the kitchen. ‘Mam?’

‘Did you calm down at all?’

‘A bit.’

‘Right, well make sure it’s a big bit by morning. I want to go and save Ernie Avago. I can’t have him full of bullet holes courtesy of the Kray twins.’

Maureen hung her head.

‘Well? What are you hiding from me, madam? All your life you’ve been unable to lie to me.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘And? Lift your head this minute.’

Slowly, the younger woman raised her chin and faced her angry mother. ‘Fin and Michael are with the Spits, I think.’

‘The Spitalfields Soldiers? Are you sure? Not the Bow Boys?’

Maureen shrugged. ‘They’ve stolen something from somebody, and that somebody sent our visitors to get it back or whatever.’

‘Whatever? Whatever’s whatever?’

‘Blood. They would have shot my sons or members of the wedding party until they got the truth. Fin and Michael must have mentioned the wedding. Each gang has spies in the others. So
whatever the Spits know, the Bows, the Krays and the Greeks also know.’

‘So who did we kill and cremate?’

Maureen had no idea.

‘And you knew this might happen today? How could you let the wedding go on if you knew what could arrive here?’

‘Reen would have been heartbroken if I’d stopped her big day.’

‘Heartbroken is better than dead.’

Maureen straightened her shoulders and stuck out her chin. ‘Always so sodding sure, aren’t you, Mother? I stayed sober and did what I could. We can’t all be like you, patron
saint of the righteous. Just stay out of my way, because you are getting on my bloody nerves. I’ll deal with this.’ She paused. ‘My husband and I will deal with it. Keep out of
our business.’

Paddy sat on a stool. It hadn’t been easy, any of it. For a start, there was a whole dynasty to think about, and she didn’t know half their names. Muth, Daddy, Paddy and her siblings
had been the last to be shipped out of Ireland, and all the others seemed to have been gone for years. Muth had been a useful sort of person in the house, and Paddy had pulled her weight on the
land, as had her father, brothers and sisters, so they had been kept on until Ganga had saved that final pile of cash. ‘Just me, now,’ he had declared. ‘And I’ll be grand,
so. In a few months I’ll be with you. Micky Malone’s missus will do me a bit of baking, and I’ll be down to the ferry boat quicker than a bull at a cow, so I will.’

With her head in her hands, Paddy placed her elbows on the huge wooden drainer next to the sink. Ganga had died in the old country. Muth hadn’t thrived. Liverpool had crushed her with its
crowds, its noise, its busy-ness. At the beginning of the Great War, she had taken to her bed and faded away. After a short period of mourning, Paddy’s generation began to disperse, marry and
move to various parts of England. ‘Including London,’ Paddy whispered. ‘To hell with London and its gangs.’ But she should know where her siblings and their offspring were.
Too busy working, too busy establishing Kev’s stall on Paddy’s Market, the business that had provided the funds for Scouse Alley.

She’d married Kev, and had borne three children. Her brothers, Peter and Callum, were lost for ever. Her sons, Martin and Jack, were similarly doomed. No God would ever forgive the deeds
performed by members of those East End gangs. Paddy had learned about her brothers only when two more generations had joined them. The situation had been further clarified by newspaper accounts.
Reading about her own son in jail for GBH, seeing his photograph on the front page . . . Oh, God. That a child of hers could beat halfway to death an old jeweller who refused to pay protection
money . . . ‘Stop this,’ she told herself.

Maureen was still here, but two of her sons had followed Uncles Peter, Callum, Martin and Jack to hell. Reen had married today, and Seamus had moaned about his white satin cap. ‘I’m
glad you weren’t with us, Daddy.’ Paddy’s father had followed Muth to heaven within a year, and Paddy felt glad that he hadn’t survived to a great age to see the performance
here tonight.

What next? Maureen and her husband Tom might well be in danger. Their sons Finbar and Michael were definitely as safe as if standing in quicksand, while poor little Seamus, Maureen’s
precious afterthought, must be protected at all costs. And what if the London lot knew about other members of the clan? They lived all over the place, and Paddy hoped they were, for the most part,
decent and honourable folk doing jobs, raising families, living the ordinary, acceptable life.

She raised her head and looked round the huge room. No matter what, cauldrons of scouse must be ready by Monday lunch time, soda bread must be prepared, with tea or cocoa to finish. For the
first time in many a year, Paddy wished she’d stayed in Ireland. She had never been one to look back in anguish, to complain about the English, to mourn the loss of a prettier, greener home.
Children got educated here, got jobs, got on in life. She had good company, shops, a business to run.

Maureen. Ah, she would calm down quickly enough, because she’d never manage without her mother. Paddy and Maureen were close, and this was a serious problem, far too tangled and dangerous
for Maureen and Tom to handle. But who could manage the unmanageable? Where to start, where to go, what to say?