Gangsters Wives Read Free Page A

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.’
    â€˜Bastard,’ said Sadie. But she knew it was true. The men they’d married treated their wives as property. Bought and paid for. And woe betide any of them who got out of line. Sadie knew that she was playing with fire when she played away from home. But she had long ago stopped considering the consequences.

4

    Then there was lovely little Poppy. Just a shade over five foot tall, with coffee coloured skin from her mixed-race parents. Father a rudeboy from Jamaica, long time ago gone into the dark midnight, mother a reconstructed mod who got knocked up one night after a Bad Manners gig at the 101 Club in Clapham Junction. Mum and daughter lived together in a council flat in Bethnal Green. Poppy didn’t guard her virginity at all. She gave it up one afternoon when she was thirteen to a slightly older boy, down where the rubbish was kept under the flats. Even now when she has sex she could still catch a whiff of the rotten garbage overflowing from the bins. They did it standing up. ‘Can’t get pregnant if you do it like that,’ he assured her, and she believed him. She still believed it a couple of years later when she fell pregnant. She didn’t tell anyone for months, until one day during the last lesson at school she was doubled up with excruciating pain and began to bleed from her vagina. She was rushed to the Royal London Hospital A&E where the tiny, dead body was extracted from her womb and burned.