TRAPPED by JACQUI ROSE Read Free Book Online Page B

Lola’s kids, she’d envied them. Wishing someone could swoop down and take her away from her childhood. She would’ve happily traded a place in the Donaldson household for a place in care on any given day.
    ‘Whatever’s troubling you babe, it won’t help any sitting with your bum jammed to the floor. When you’ve got an arse full of piles from sitting on that cold step, let me tell you, you’ll really have something to cry about. Come on love, why don’t you come and have a cup of Rosie Lee with me?’
    ‘No thanks, Lola. I’m waiting for Gina.’
    ‘Well I reckon you’ll be waiting a long time. She’s probably got her knickers off somewhere.’
    Maggie scrunched her forehead into a scowl.
    ‘I thought she only worked as a maid now, thought she was off the game.’
    ‘She says she is, but nobody ever really is.’
    ‘You are.’
    ‘That’s because no one will have me. I’d end up having to pay the bleeding punters.’ Lola roared out a cackling laugh, making the passing Chinese couple huddle together and quickly cross over to the other side of the street in fright.
    ‘Sure you don’t want that brew, Maggie?’
    ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘Okay love, but you know where I am if you change your mind and want a chat. Say hello to your mum won’t you, and ask her why she hasn’t left that rotten bleeder yet.’
    Another roar of laughter left Lola’s mouth and Maggie watched her walk away towards Soho Square. She wondered how after such a hard life Lola could still always find a joke; still see the bright side in the darkest of situations.
    Maggie sighed, closing her eyes when she lost sight of Lola to the throng of the crowds. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since she’d been back in Soho, yet sitting waiting in the filthy doorway, surrounded by the smell of piss, made it feel like she’d been back a lifetime. But however bad the homecoming, she was still glad to be home. A year away had been a year away too long.
    It’d been her own fault she’d been sent down. When the police had raided the house as they often did, hoping to find something they could pin on her father, she should have let them just get on with it.
It was nothing new. Since she could remember the house had been raided. Every six months or so there’d be a hammering on the door, before it was booted in by a dozen or more boys in blue who charged through the house like elephants on crack.
    The law knew who Max Donaldson was and he knew the law. He had his fingers in lots of businesses but first and foremost her father was a loan shark and a bag man. He extorted payments off landlords and shop owners. Charging a thousand per cent interest to old ladies who hadn’t been able to pay their winter fuel bills. With no strong credit history to take out a loan from a bank, they turned to her father for a hundred pound loan, only to find themselves paying back thousands of pounds from the interest on the interest on the interest. And if they couldn’t pay, her father would happily pay someone to break a bone as a warning. A taste of what was to come if they messed him about.
    Her brother Tommy had been recruited by her father to join the family business. He hadn’t had a choice. And he hadn’t been able to drop out of it like Nicky had by default.
    Nicky was soft like freshly picked cotton but his drug habit was out of control. It had been since he was twelve. It was this, not his soft kind nature which made him unreliable. Their father had eventually given up with him, giving him only the odd job to do now and again. Therefore it was poor Tommy who took the brunt, forced to work day in day out with their father.
    Even though Maggie didn’t work for her father, she might as well have done. Everything came from him, whether she liked it or not. Her father owned their house, paid the bills, paid for food, for clothes, for the lot. Everything which was bought had to be run by him before he decided to put his hand in his wallet. She had