Sisters Three

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  When word drifted down from Flint that Bobtail Boy would canter home at one hundred to eight in the November Handicap Polly had no option but to place a bet. Heaven knows she didn’t need the money. She had everything a woman could possibly want and if anything out of the ordinary did catch her fancy then all she had to do was snap her fingers and Dominic would have it delivered.

  Seven years of marriage hadn’t diminished Dominic Manone’s infatuation with the girl from the Gorbals and so far he’d shown no inclination to acquire a mistress, an omission that suggested weakness to his colleagues on the shady side of the street. Even they had to admit, though, that a guy would be hard pushed to find a mistress who could match Polly Conway for that indefinable quality that envious wives dismissed as spending power but that their husbands perceived as class.

  How Flint intended to rig the race was a mystery, for ever since Dominic had pulled out of bookmaking Polly had lost touch with racing gossip. Hot tips from John Flint were few and far between, though, and Flint would be insulted if she ignored the favour. She waited until ten minutes before the race before she sent Tony to the tote to lay a tenner on the Bobtail’s nose.

  ‘Splashing out, are we, Mrs Em?’ Tony said. ‘Know something I don’t?’

  ‘I doubt it, Mr El.’

  Polly gave him a little pat on the shoulder to send him on his way.

  After her husband’s Uncle Guido had retired to Italy Tony Lombard had taken over as Dominic’s right-hand man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had dark, lazy-lidded eyes. Most women found Tony irresistible: Polly was no exception. He was smooth and cool and polished, like her husband. In fact the men might have been brothers, except that Tony carried a faint air of menace as if you couldn’t be quite sure what he would do if you crossed him, a quality that Dominic had lost over the past few years.

  Perhaps she was partly to blame for the change in her husband. It was on her suggestion that he had sold off the book to Flint and had pulled out of the street rackets. Squawks of protest and a flurry of cables came from Dominic’s father in Philadelphia, of course, but to his credit Dominic had stuck to his guns.

  She watched Tony climb the steps to the top of the stand.

  He wore a snap-brim hat and a Raglan overcoat and walked with a straightforward, upright gait, his broad shoulders swaying as if he was just on the verge of throwing a punch.

  Polly shivered a little and tucked her chin into her fur collar.

  The afternoon was cold and still.

  Cloud blotted out the river and the graving docks and the lights of the little townships below. The cold made the horses skittish rather than eager and Bobtail’s jockey struggled to bring the animal to the starting-gate.

  Polly had no information about the three-year-old’s form or what weight he was carrying. She’d hardly had time to glance at the card before Dominic had sent her off to lunch with Tony in the grandstand bar while he went down to meet someone in the enclosure, a short, squat bullish man in his fifties whom Polly had never seen before. She had caught a glimpse of him at the edge of the enclosure just before Tony had steered her into the bar.

  Polly wasn’t the only good-looking woman in the long room but everyone knew whose wife she was and heads turned when she came through the door. Even the haughty county types who commandeered the big table by the fireplace eyed her up and down.

  Tony brought her lunch: a salmon mousse, filet of steak flanked by three boiled potatoes and a spoonful of buttered cabbage. He handed her a gin-and-tonic and settled with his back to the window. He’d bought no drink for himself, not even lager. He was, she realised, working at keeping her out of Dominic’s way for a while.

  She glanced out of the plate-glass window in the hope that she might catch sight of her husband in the crowd below and the squat little man with the big military moustache. There was no sign of either of them at the railings or among the bookmakers’ stalls. She was tempted to ask, ‘Who is that man and what business does he have with Dominic?’ but she didn’t want to put Tony on the spot.

  She sipped her gin-and-tonic and dipped her spoon in the salmon mousse while Tony slit open a meat pastry and began to eat.

  Dominic didn’t join them in the bar. He was waiting on the bench in the fifth row of the stand when Tony and she returned. He seemed relaxed, almost amused, as if the meeting with the little man with the moustache had been unexpectedly profitable.

  ‘Nice lunch, darling?’

  ‘Plain,’ Polly replied, ‘but wholesome.’

  ‘How much did you drink?’

  Tony answered for her. ‘One gin.’

  ‘With tonic,’ said Polly. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Perfectly okay.’ Dominic lifted his binoculars. ‘Flint has given us a nod that Bobtail Boy is sure-fire. What do you think, darling?’

  ‘If Flint says “sure-fire” then I wouldn’t doubt it.’

  ‘I’ve put something on, something out of the fund.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Polly.

  She was supposed to assume that the moustache had brought a message from Johnny Flint, a hot tip from the horse’s mouth. Somehow she doubted it. She had no reason to doubt it: she just did. She was being brushed off again, deceived. For the best part of a year now Dominic had been lying to her, nothing drastic, just a small, steady stream of white lies – or perhaps she was just being over sensitive. Perhaps life in the little mansion in Manor Park Avenue had become too idyllic and she and her children, Stuart and Ishbel, had become too detached from the stresses that added spice and texture to the lives of ordinary folk.

  Dominic’s business had held up in spite of the slump. Now rearmament programmes had brought full employment back to Clydeside and the ice-cream factory, cafés and restaurants in which he held shares were booming. She had every reason to feel safe and secure – but she didn’t. An Italian army had swept into Abyssinia and the left-wing government in Spain had been attacked by General Franco’s rebels and Chancellor Hitler had annexed Austria and like Bernard Peabody, her stepfather, she’d been dismayed by a headline photograph of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain shaking hands with Benito Mussolini.

  Bernard was a veteran of the Great War and the prospect of another conflict in Europe appalled him, though he claimed that he’d have been off like a shot to join the International Brigade if he hadn’t been a shade too long in the tooth.

  It wasn’t just Spain that bothered Polly, however, or the Italian crises or jackboots stamping through the Rhineland. Fanatical fascists rioting in streets much closer to home had her on edge too for Dominic had played both sides of the fence for so long that she had no idea where he really stood on any important issue. He su
bsidised the Jewish pipe band with one hand, gave money to the Union of Italian Traders and the Socialist Workers’ party with the other. He had subscribed to the purchase and renovation of the magnificent Casa d’Italia in Glasgow’s Park Circus, one of the finest fascio flagships in Britain, but had refused to become a member. He continued to back causes redder than ox-blood and causes blacker than midnight without, it seemed, being aware of the distinctions, and when she asked him to clarify his position he just smiled and politely avoided the issue.

  Dominic had never set foot in Italy. He had been born and educated in Scotland and had married outside the Italian community. Even so he still paid homage to a father whom he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, a father who, not to put too fine a point on it, was a gangster in America. In addition to all the other woes in the world, therefore, Polly had to live with the fear that one day the forces of law and order would catch up with her husband and that he would be made to pay for his past, let alone his present, mistakes.

  She watched the horse-race with hardly a flicker of interest.

  The jockey Flint had chosen to ride Bobtail Boy knew his stuff. He didn’t draw away from the field until the final furlong and then, with whip cracking and the crowd roaring, brought the Bobtail in by a nose from the odds-on favourite. Polly took no pleasure in the knowledge that she had just won a tidy sum of money. High up in the stands she felt remote from the excitement of the shiftless crowd. The next race would not only be the last on the card but the last of the season. Whitewashed stands would soon empty, snack bars and restaurants would put their shutters up and the judge’s box would be locked until April. The punters would mooch away into the burnt-out haze and soon – all too soon for Polly – it would be 1939 and the start of another year of uncertainty.

  Dominic’s face remained hidden behind the binoculars. He wore a pale grey scarf of fine lambswool. Black kidskin gloves were tucked into the belt of his overcoat. He might have been a general studying a battlefield, all his concentration focused on – on what? Not jockeys and owners and horses, not on the winner’s enclosure or numbers posted on the wall of the judge’s lodge: he was methodically scanning the crowd, looking for someone.

  Tony slid his right hand against the small of her back.

  She leaned into him.

  ‘Well, Mrs Em, looks like you’re a winner,’ Tony said.

  Without lowering the binoculars, Dominic said, ‘Tony, please take Polly home now.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Polly. ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’

  ‘No, darling,’ her husband told her. ‘I still have business to do here.’

  What sort of business? Business with that vulgar little bull of a man? What are you keeping from me, Dominic? What are you holding back? Before the questions could reached her lips, Polly buried her chin in the soft, cold collar again.

  Tony’s hand in the small of her back spread out like a brace.

  ‘Will you be home for supper, Dominic?’ she asked.

  Dominic did not answer. He had found someone in the crowd.

  Polly followed his line of gaze, saw the little man with the military moustache and beside him, hanging on his arm, a tall young woman with long shapely legs and a helmet of blonde hair who even as Polly spotted her, rose on tiptoe and waved.

  Lowering the binoculars a little, Dominic waved back.

  ‘Tony,’ Dominic spoke softly. ‘Take my wife home.’

  And Tony led Polly away.

  * * *

  On Saturdays the only way Babs could get to see her husband was to bump the perambulator down the steps of their bungalow in Raines Drive and shepherd her children round the long corner to the garage in Holloway Road.

  In spite of the bubble-headed petrol pumps, free air compressor and tyre rack and the great oily cavern round back in which his brothers worked on vehicle repairs, according to Jackie, Hallop’s wasn’t a garage at all but a ‘Motoring Salon’ – which showed just how divorced from reality Jackie had become. Manual labour was beneath him now, of course. He had risen above all that. In the office overlooking the forecourt he fiddled with purchase and sales ledgers, licences and registration forms, aided and abetted by old Miss Dawlish who was as steely and efficient as a Rolls-Royce gearbox when it came to refreshing the pedigree of vehicles come by slightly less than honestly.

  Babs had no objection to Jackie poncing about the forecourt or posing in the big bow window of the showroom or even lounging in the little kitchenette in the back listening to dance music on his Ultra 500 Magic Eye wireless set. What she did object to was Jackie out on the town, swanning it at dealership conventions or loose with a cheque-book at sales or auctions and, most of all, vanishing for entire afternoons without proper explanation or excuse.

  For this reason, Babs would occasionally dress up her offspring, pop baby into the pram, throw on her beaver lamb coat and beret and sail around the corner just to check that Jackie was actually there and doing what passed for his job.

  Hand in little hand May and June would walk primly in front of her, baby April would goo and gurgle in the high-sided Roxburgh pram, and Angus, age seven, would pedal furiously ahead on the tricycle that he had definitely outgrown while emitting an uncannily accurate imitation of his Daddy’s Excelsior motorbike – Brrrrrrroooooommm.

  ‘Ang-gus,’ Babs called out sharply. ‘Ang-gus. Stop right where you are.’

  Angus obstinately pedalled on round the corner, head down, shoulders hunched, brrroooming like mad, while May, age six, and June, age five, quickened their pace to keep the daredevil in sight. On Saturday afternoons there wasn’t much traffic in Holloway Road, only a few customers puttering into Hallop’s, a coal merchant’s or greengrocer’s cart and now and then a single-decker bus that had gone astray. But the gnashing of trams from the junction with Paisley Road and distant roars from Ibrox football stadium sent little darts of anxiety into Babs’s stomach for however selfish she might be in other respects, she was heart and soul a mother and fretted about the safety of her kids.

  ‘There!’ June pointed dramatically. ‘I see him.’

  Babs trotted breathlessly around the curve of the pavement just in time to see her son pass under the wooden archway that spanned the entrance to the forecourt. Jackie’s brother Billy had constructed the arch and fitted the wiring that picked out Hallop’s Motor Salon in coloured bulbs. Billy had made a good job of it for like all the Hallop boys he was clever with his hands. He had also erected two tall flag-poles, one at each end of the low wall that kept the motorcars from escaping into the road, but on that dreary November afternoon the flags hung limp and rubbery against their whitewashed poles.

  Refusing to be beaten by the gradient Angus rose from the saddle, pumped on the pedals as if he were kick-starting a motorbike and shot up the ramp into the almost empty forecourt. The girls, the pram and Babs all followed on.

  Babs had learned enough about the motor trade to separate browsers from potential buyers and she reckoned that the couple who were prowling around an almost-new BSA Scout two-seater had the air of seriously interested parties. The man was tall with curly fair hair and a frank and open face. The woman – probably his wife – was small, almost wispy and sported an off-the-peg overcoat a size too large for her. At a hundred and thirty pounds the Scout would be too expensive for the couple even on hire purchase, Babs reckoned, but further along the row was a Hillman, four or five years old but still gleaming and confident, that Jackie would knock down to sixty or sixty-five quid and negotiate on suitable terms.

  She quickened her pace and caught up with her daughters. They were very well behaved, her daughters. Indeed, they emanated an air of supercilious patience and precocious disapproval that they applied not only to their brother but also to Mum and Dad.

  There were no salesmen in the forecourt and no sign of Jackie.

  Babs followed the tricycle up to the bow-fronted window. There were no lights in the office or showroom and she guessed that Jackie had dropped off in the armchair i
n the kitchenette while listening to Ambrose or Billy Cotton or a football commentary on his wireless. Billy and older brother Dennis would be back in the repair shop for they only came out front when someone rang for petrol. She braked the pram next to Angus’s tricycle and pushed open the showroom door.

  Cars loomed menacingly out of the shadows: an Alvis, a Wolseley, a big black Daimler. The girls remained outside to guard the baby and Angus had already gone rocketing through the building, shouting, in his gruff, gravel voice, ‘Dad, Daddy, Dad, I’ve come to see you.’ Babs peeped into the office and found no one there, not even Miss Dawlish.

  Through the windows she could see her girls, the pram and, beyond them, the customers. The man was looking up at the showroom but the wispy young woman had disappeared. A sudden frisson of apprehension ruffled the hair at the back of Babs’s neck. ‘Jackie,’ she shouted. ‘Jackie, goddamn it, where are you?’ When no answer was forthcoming, she went back through the showroom and left Angus to find his own way out.

  The young man was waiting by the door. He smiled optimistically at May and June but they were not to be cajoled into talking to strangers. Baby April chewed the apron of her pram and slavered.

  As soon as Babs appeared the young man looked up.

  ‘Are you Mrs Hallop, by any chance?’

  Tinged with a Highland accent, his voice was softer than she’d anticipated but as soon as he spoke the prospect of selling the Hillman, let alone the Scout, vanished.

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘I’m looking for your husband.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Babs said. ‘If you’re interested in a car…’

  ‘I’m interested in your husband,’ the man said.

  ‘I’ll fetch my brother-in-law,’ Babs said. ‘He’s round in the repair shop.’

  ‘No, it’s Mr Hallop, Mr John Hallop, I want to speak to.’

  ‘Aw, really!’ Babs pushed back her shoulders: the girls watched her, eager to learn. ‘What, may I ask, d’you want him for?’

  Out of the corner of her eye she spotted the wispy young woman in the off-the-peg overcoat coming around the gable with Dennis. Big, solid, reliable Dennis, dressed in baggy brown overalls, was wiping his hands on a cotton rag.