Sweetie by Jenny Tomlin Read Free Book Online Page A

Primary School a few days later. The children had been ushered into the play -
    ground, made to line up and wait for the bell, all the while watched closely by mums and teachers alike.
    The tension in the air was sharp, Adam and Chantal still the only topics of discussion. With a lot of head-shaking, grimaces and tutting, the mums discussed Chantal’s funeral and the attack on Adam, news of which had now spread not just across the East End but throughout London as the newspapers got on to the story. Even a couple of the nationals were covering it in small pieces, and everyone seemed to know what was going on. Comments ranged from
    ‘Did you see the flowers, weren’t they beautiful?’ to
    ‘Apparently he’ll have to wear a catheter for the rest of his life.’
    The highly volatile mixture of fact and rumour had Adam close to death and on life support, when in fact he was at home with Grace, albeit subdued by a powerful combination of sedatives and painkillers to dull the constant discomfort. Those mothers who hadn’t heard the details of the attack from neigh bours 43
    and friends had been alerted by the police as they conducted their door-to-door enquiries, asking if they had seen anything suspicious in the Haggerston Park area on Monday. Despite all their efforts, though, PC
    Watson had little to report back. It wasn’t that people were being unhelpful; it was simply that no one had seen anything. DCI Woodhouse would definitely expect more, but as the weary constable peeled off his hot boots that night, he felt he had put in a lot of hard work to no avail.
    This combination of police and press interest had naturally alerted the local bush telegraph, and stories and rumours were already rife. Women leaned against the railings outside the school, reading fresh significance into every movement in the neighbour -
    hood over the last weeks, rocking pushchairs to soothe impatient younger siblings fed up with hanging around, hot and bothered in the stifling heat.
    Even a bag of cheesy Wotsits and a Ribena wouldn’t quieten them down. The women, all in tight bell-bottomed trousers and small halterneck tops, puffed on their No. 6, jittery from their morning slimming pill which just made them talk and talk and talk.
    By 9.15 it was already blazing hot and tempers too became inflamed. The stimulants of too much coffee, a Tenuate Dospan and one too many fags rapidly con verted gossip to gospel truth. One person’s prejudice had a way of becoming another’s indisputable fact, and what had started out as faint 44
    suspicions about Steven Archer were rapidly transformed into con
    firmed sightings and definite
    proof of guilt. A kangaroo court of sorts, this finger-pointing was nonetheless harmless compared to the council of war currently being held in Lizzie’s Foster’s flat on the tenth floor of a tatty council block half a mile away.
    Like Nanny Parks, Paul’s mother was a survivor of the school of hard knocks, and nobody’s fool. She lived in a two-bedroomed flat in Dunbar House, built in the early 1950s, already crumbling and given to swaying in high winds. It was one of three high-rise blocks built at the southern end of Ravenscroft Road to house locals made homeless during the Blitz.
    Although the lifts were frequently out of order, stank of piss, and were littered with used johnnies and scrawled over with a thick layer of graffiti, there was little choice but to use them if you lived above the fourth floor. The stairwells were even more dis
    -
    gusting, and at times dangerous. Washing hung from the littered balconies, but the careworn exterior of the flats was in stark contrast to the pristine cleanliness behind Lizzie’s front door.
    The lounge contained an old but immaculate Draylon-covered three-piece suite in faded gold arranged around a 26-inch Ferguson TV, a present from Paul the previous Christmas. Framed photo -
    graphs of three mixed-race girls sat on the polished sideboard, along with a Spanish doll in a