Gangsters Wives (2 page)

Sadie almost pissed herself with fear. If Eddie knew what she had been doing… ‘It's you doll,' she replied. ‘And all that dough. It's enough to make a nun wet.'

‘And you ain't no nun,' said Eddie. ‘How about a quickie, then lunch? You can shop tomorrow.'

Sadie forced a smile. Quickies with Eddie were the reason that she used her boys. ‘Lovely darlin',' she said. ‘Can't think of anything nicer.'

So, on a bed of money Sadie was shagged for the second time that day, and it wasn't even lunchtime yet. But she knew it wouldn't last long. Eddie's fucks never did. And for that she was grateful.

Connie Smith, Eddie's partner in the robbery on the diamond merchant, got home at roughly the same time as Eddie. But it was a different kind of homecoming, and a very different location. Not for him a mansion in Essex, but a little end-of-terrace house on the Isle of Dogs where he'd lived with his parents all his life, and had inherited when they'd both died within months of each other ten years before. True, he'd added a conservatory at the back and a brand new kitchen, but Connie had always been careful with his money, and didn't like to be too flash. He'd seen an awful lot of his mates go potty with a few quid, down the casinos and at Walthamstow Dogs in their Bentleys and Jags after a good result, and end up behind bars when someone took exception and grassed them up. Connie drove a Ford Mondeo and liked it. He also knew he didn't have to work for a bit with the forty grand he had in a sports bag, identical to Eddie's. Good graft. He worried about Eddie too. He was a flash monkey, and up in front of a jury at the end of the month for a job that Connie had helped out with. Connie and Joseph and Robbo. They'd been working together since they were kids in the Seventies. Little stuff at first, but as the Eighties came and went they'd moved up into the big time. Armed robbery was their game of preference, and they were bloody good at it. But they were up for any bit of business worth a few bob. They lived charmed lives with the help of backhanders here, there and everywhere. Substantial backhanders, and if they didn't work, a little ultra violence usually did the trick. And Connie was always up for that. True, there'd been a few pulls now and then, with maybe a month or two on remand. But never a guilty verdict. Eddie had got nicked a few months before because of a copper on the payroll who decided to turn Queens to save his own arse. But not a word had been spoken. Eddie had remained staunch. Followed the code. No grassing. Anyway, Eddie had a terrific brief, even if he did cost an arm and a leg, so he wasn't inside long.

Everyone knew Connie was the maddest fucker of them all when it came to putting the frighteners on. Which was exactly why, when the tickle down on the coast had come up, Eddie had rowed Connie in. Joe and Robbo had moaned a bit, but it was strictly a two man operation and both Eddie and Connie had agreed to drop the other two a few bob to keep them sweet.

Connie parked his motor in the resident's zone, took the sports bag, and went to see his wife Niki.

Now, Connie had never had much luck with women. Not until Niki came along. He didn't have the patter that the others did. Didn't have the chat, or the looks. His thinning red hair (that he'd started to lose when in his early twenties) didn't help either. He'd always hated being called a ginger. Hated the nicknames it earned him, which was one reason he'd turned into such a vicious bastard. But then he'd hated going bald worse. No bird ever looked at him twice after that started happening. So one day he'd gone on the net and started surfing. That was when he found a site where young Russian women advertised themselves as looking for husbands in the West. Connie couldn't believe his luck when he found Niki's photo and sparse details. She'd been born twenty years previously in a village outside Moscow. Orphaned at eleven, she'd lived with her grandmother and grandfather until their death and now she wanted out. She was beautiful, olive skinned with green eyes and long, thick black hair. Surely no woman who looked like that could be interested in him, but she was.

Connie plucked up courage to reply to the advertisement, and after a brief courtship by e-mail he'd sent her a ticket and she came over on holiday. He'd heard of women using false photographs to interest men, and as he stood waiting at the arrivals barrier at Heathrow he wondered if she could be as perfect as she appeared to be on the screen of his PC, but she was. More so in the flesh. Within a month they were married, despite the piss-taking from the rest of the gang. And now she was Mrs Niki Smith. Left alone regularly as she was, she spent the time practising her English skills. In Russia, her family had been the proud owners of a satellite box and dish, which was where Niki had learnt most of her English idiom. Now she loved
EastEnders
, although it seemed to have little to do with the East End that she lived in. But she gobbled up the slang and used it as much as possible, much to the amusement of Connie and his crowd. But she didn't care.

Niki was waiting in the living room when Connie let himself in. He noted that the place was spotlessly clean, just like he expected it. Niki was an extremely good housekeeper, and that was where Connie liked her to be. In the house. Although she could drive he didn't allow her a licence, or the use of his car. She had no bank account or credit card. He doled out cash when she needed it. Sparingly. He took her shopping and bought her what she needed or wanted. Louis Vuitton handbags, Chanel make-up, anything. She was his exotic bird in a gilded cage. She rarely left the house alone, just occasionally to have lunch with Sadie and the wives of the other members of the gang. Gangsters' wives. Women he could trust. Or so he thought.

He was also insanely jealous of any other man looking at her. A couple of times when they'd been out together he'd seen a young bloke giving her the once over, so he'd taken them outside and delivered a good kicking. In fact, sometimes he thought that was the best part of the marriage.

So Niki knew her place, but Connie never noticed the looks she gave him when his back was turned. Her father and his forefathers before him had been Cossacks. Men who were even more frightening in their capacity for violence than Connie and his gang. She was her father's daughter. Niki wanted what the West could provide. She'd married Connie to get it all, and all she had was a well-decorated prison in East London. When she lay next to him in their bed at night, she often cried herself to sleep. But they were tears of rage, not sorrow. As he mounted her for his twice weekly orgasm, which gave her no pleasure, she knew that one day she would have to kill him to escape. How she envied Sadie, and Joseph and Robbo's wives, their perfect lives nothing like hers. Except nothing in this world is perfect, as they'd all discovered one way or another.

Kate Ellis for instance. Beautiful Kate. She of the long red hair and porcelain skin. Married to Robbo Ellis and daughter of Johnny Wade, one of East London's most feared villains of the latter half of the twentieth century. The good old days when anything went, on the dirty streets of Plaistow, Beckton and Canning Town, where Johnny made his fortune from protection and drugs, prostitution and money laundering, and where more than one chancer, trying to muscle in on Johnny's territory, found himself trussed up in the boot of a stolen motor and sent to a watery grave in the old docks.

Johnny was an old man now, but still had the kind of respect in the area that only fear can bring. Robbo had worshipped him, but Kate hated him. He had ruled his extended family with the same kind of violence as he ruled his manor. Four sons who'd accepted anything the old man doled out. Then Kate came along. A late child when her mother and father were already middle-aged. He tried the same medicine with her. Kate had lost count of the times he'd taken his belt to her when she was a teenager, only interested in clothes and house music. So when handsome Robbo Ellis had come along, all flowers, chocolates, flash motors, expensive restaurants and clubbing up West, how could she resist? The answer was she hadn't. She gave up her closely guarded virginity in the bedroom of his flat in Limehouse one Saturday night and he was everything she'd dreamed of, passionate yet tender. Robbo proposed on a floating Chinese restaurant on Millwall Harbour next to Docklands Arena a few months later, where they'd seen Oasis play from the VIP area, and Liam Gallagher had smiled at Kate over chow mein after the concert, as the band dined at the next table. There were roses and an engagement ring worth fifty-grand, with a diamond as big as an egg. So how could she refuse? Once again she couldn't, and the waiter brought champagne as the entire staff and clientele cheered at the news of her acceptance.

Kate was nineteen at the time.

The wedding was one of the biggest the area had ever seen. White Rollers ferried the family and guests to the Wren Church in Poplar, then a glass carriage pulled by four white horses took the bride and groom to the wedding breakfast in a five star hotel just opened at Canary Wharf. Enough Cristal champagne was drunk to sink the Titanic and Kate was glowing in a couture wedding dress that she'd seen in
Vogue
. The wedding pictures wouldn't have looked out of place in the pages of a glossy magazine—if the whole thing hadn't been funded by violence, extortion and drug money.

Kate had never been so happy, but that was all about to change.

Robbo quickly turned from the loving fiancé to an abusive husband. On their wedding night at the hotel he beat Kate black and blue when she refused his drunken advances. This was after leaving her alone for hours in the bridal suite as he drank whiskey with his mates in the bar, until dawn broke and the last of the guests made their drunken way home. But Robbo was no fool. He didn't hit her where it showed. Not her face. Just her body, so that on their honeymoon in St Lucia, Kate could not wear the bikinis she had so happily bought as part of her trousseau, but instead had to do with a mumsy one-piece bathing-suit purchased from the hotel boutique. ‘You tell your father what I've done,' said Robbo, ‘and I'll kill you.'

But Johnny wouldn't have cared. ‘No more than you deserve,' he would have said. Kate knew, because she'd witnessed the damage her father had done to her mother, Dolly, over the years. Black eyes, split lips, and even the occasional broken bone. That was Johnny's way, and Kate had pleaded with her mother a hundred times to leave her brutal husband, but her mother had been too frightened to go. ‘He'd find me darlin',' said her mum. ‘Hunt me down and kill me. I belong to him, see. Body and soul.'

Then kill him first, Kate thought, but she never said a word.

When the cancer hit Dolly Wade it was almost a relief. She lived for just a few months more, long enough to see her daughter engaged, but not long enough to attend the wedding, or witness what happened afterwards.

It seemed to Kate that Johnny hardly noticed his wife's absence. Only moaning about his lack of tea in bed in the morning, and a bit of the other after Sunday dinner.

You disgust me, thought Kate as her brothers laughed at his joke. Within a few months of Kate's nuptials he'd met and moved a younger woman into the family home. A brassy blonde he'd picked up at one of the nightclubs he still had control over in Ilford. After that Kate hardly saw him.

Not that she cared. She'd gone from one abusive relationship to another, and it seemed to her that was exactly what she deserved.

So now, she and Robbo lived in splendour in a detached house in Harold Hill. Robbo, Joseph, Eddie and Connie carried out their various crimes, and Kate took her regular beatings stoically. But Robbo was getting worse. More violent as he grew older, and now sometimes Kate had to layer on the concealer and wear dark glasses to hide the marks from her husband's fists when she went to the shops, or to meet her friends.

Sadie was the closest to her, and they met for long lunches when the men were away, as they often were. ‘Leave the fucker Katie,' she said.

But Kate knew, as her mother knew before her, that it would do no good. ‘He'd find me Sade,' she'd say, mimicking Dolly's words. ‘Hunt me down and kill me.'