Wishing and Hoping Read Free Page A

a partner with some experience in the building, demolition and development game and I’m his man. Now you tell him from me,’ he said, one gloved finger tapping at Tony’s shoulder, ‘that if he doesn’t give me a ring about this, I’ll be round to see him and explain what I’m offering in more detail. You got that then, Tony, my boy? You got that?’
    Tony felt the tap of Paddy’s finger turn to a stab hard enough to bruise him.
    Straightening, he watched as Paddy’s big black Rover drove off.
    He was now in no doubt of where Paddy Rafferty was coming from. The partnership he’d suggested would only be legal as far as the paperwork was concerned. No money would actually change hands – or at least not from Paddy to Michael. Paddy wanted a cut of Michael’s Limehouse property but he had no intention of paying for it. It was a glorified protection racket – extortion with menace.
    Down in Sheerness, Rosa Brooks was giving the range a prod with a brass-handled poker.
    Suddenly she stood up sharply.
    â€˜Anything wrong, Auntie Rosa?’
    Garth was sitting at the table layering jam on top of a well-buttered doorstep of bread cut straight from the loaf.
    â€˜Nothing,’ she said, but it wasn’t true. The truth was that the blinder she became the greater her inner sight. She was seeing things more clearly than she ever had and to her mind there could be only one reason for that, a reason she would not voice to anyone, even to Garth who understood so well.

Chapter Three
    THE NEON SIGN had been mended though it didn’t shine as brightly as it had done. Every so often the light shivered as though it had seen a ghost. Despite this the nightclub was a great success from the very first night.
    Marcie did not often go there but Michael had to. Running the club was mainly a night-time business so Marcie spent a lot of time with just the kids. Michael offered to hire a nanny so she could go there with him, but Marcie refused, preferring to look after them herself.
    So most nights she spent alone, waiting for him to come home. Once the children were in bed she passed time doing chores around the house or watching the brand-new colour television Michael had bought her.
    â€˜Funny to see things in colour rather than in black and white; it doesn’t seem natural,’ she’d remarked.
    He’d laughed and pointed out to her that real life was in colour so a colour television was bound to be more natural.
    Sally, one of her best friends, had thought her madthat she hadn’t taken up the offer of a nanny. ‘You’re a fool to let a good-looking bloke like Michael out of your sight. Aren’t you afraid that some little tart will get her hooks in him?’
    Marcie replied that she was not worried. ‘I trust him.’
    It didn’t mean to say that she didn’t sometimes wonder whether he really was where he said he was and doing what he should be doing. But it wasn’t often.
    The hours until midnight seemed to drag. The hours between her getting into bed and falling asleep went more quickly. Instinctively she always woke up just before he put the key in the lock.
    Just as she usually did, Marcie woke up aware that he was home. The room was dark, and when she looked at the illuminated figures on the bedside alarm, she saw that it was three o’clock.
    Adjusting her eyes to the darkness and her ears to the silence, she waited for the light to come on in the hallway below or the soft tread of his foot on the first stair.
    The house was a bay-windowed semi-detached built in the 1930s that had survived the war and offered them a proper family home away from his business and the more crowded tenements of London’s East End. He’d been trying to get her to move to a more palatial house in Richmond, but she’d argued that the kids were settled and that theirpresent home was cosy. A big house in Richmond would be less so, though at