A Deadly Queen (Larkin's Barkin' Book 2)

Book summary

In 1969 East End London, psychiatrist Wendy Richards is caught in a web of dangerous power struggles between rival gangs and the IRA. As love, both alluring and treacherous, drives her into perilous territory, Wendy must navigate a world where darkness threatens to consume everything she holds dear.

Excerpt from A Deadly Queen (Larkin's Barkin' Book 2)

Chapter 1

Saturday, 21st June, 1969 – London’s East End swelters in a stifling heat wave. Feelings effervesce and contention sizzles inside and outside Incubator Street School playground.

Reputedly the most cold-blooded gangster in the East End of London, Chas Larkin, wept. He was ruthless. He was, or could be, kind and generous. He was no doubt damaged goods, and even with all of that, he quite possibly had saved London in 1966. I suppose you could say he was an enigma, but without doubt, Chas Larkin was barkin’ mad.

Blossom Temple, Chas Larkin’s common-law wife, wept. She was inconsolable as she stood behind the lead milk float; she refused to ride. She would walk to the cemetery alongside other prominent local women and men mourners, crowded in by soldiers; only the elderly or infirm rode. Head bowed out of respect, her red raw eyes stared through her forehead, all she wanted to do was wrest the body of her son from within the coffin and hold him, one more time. Blossom, like so many other children of her time, now grown, was also damaged goods, but a survivor. Her son was damaged physically but loved, cared for, cherished. He had not survived.

‘You okay?’ Chas asked. He loved Blossom but did not have the where-with-all to comfort her in this harrowing time. Chas had come a long way thanks to the counselling from Wendy Richards, but still, he had difficulty expressing his innermost emotions, aside from his occasional violent rages, and you wouldn’t want to be around him then.

The petite and cherubic Blossom looked up to the no longer crooked Chas, no longer the hunch-backed cowering shell of a young man; he was tall, six foot and handsome. ‘What do you think?’ She answered with a sideways glance. She saw him struggling to know what to do, so once again she rescued him, pretty much as she had always rescued Chas when he was a much-bullied runt of a child; his sanctuary, the bombed-out shells of buildings and his enduring love, Blossom. ‘It’s okay Chas,’ she touched his hand, ‘I’ll be okay after today. You know…’

‘I love you, Bloss.’

Blossom felt even more tears flood her cheeks, if that were possible. Since the killing of her 8-year-old son, she had barely stopped crying, but she did have Chas as a stalwart lover, companion. Husband? Would he marry her? She knew he loved her. She knew she was his one and only love. He had told her so many times, but was this was enough? Blossom had never known emotional security, she just offered it to so many in need. Was this as good as it gets? You cannot push a man like Chas Larkin. ‘I love you too, Chas.’

Standing beside Blossom, offering the occasional comforting stroke of her hand to the grieving mother, Bess Saint wept. She in turn was held fast around her burgeoning pregnant belly by her more stoical wife, in all but law, Maude Larkin. Maude took every opportunity to feel for movement from the baby; she hoped it would be a girl. For Maude, life held the risk of being fleeting, and this awareness as an imminent parent worried her, not that you would know it. Maude wanted to change, but couldn’t, and in her mind she believed that she dare not. This was who she was and what people expected of her. It was her life, and Bess made her complete.

Maude was mad. Stark raving, some said. Furthermore, she was enraged at what had happened, and combined with being mentally unbalanced, which she would deny and few would challenge her, this made Maude certified loony bin material, a fact that the trick cyclist Wendy Richards would very likely concur. Yes, Maude was dangerously mad, at least this is what people thought, and they would not be too far off the mark. However, today, on this sad but tinderbox occasion, Maude knew she had to hold her emotions in check; this was not the time for revenge. Chas had said she needed a clear head. She needed to martial her thoughts in order to later martial her troops, and, well, Bess had also told her to. So she would.

‘She moved,’ Maude remarked hardly able to disguise her joy. She rapidly reinstated her sad face.

‘How do you know it’s a girl?’

‘It had better be.’

‘It’s hard to feel joy about our baby in this sad time, but Maude, I do feel a great happiness, you, me, and the baby in a few months’ time. But then, the worry will start.’

‘Worry? What worry?’

Bess looked at Maude and wondered sometimes how she could love such a dozy cow, but she did. ‘Worry for the bairn’s safety, dipstick.’

‘Shush.’

‘Shush yer fuckin’ self, Paddy,’ Maude railed back, irritated by the Irishman, mainly because he was a man, but mostly because he was right. She should shut up; Bess had said.

This contretemps did, however, amuse Blossom, and for this Chas was grateful to his lunatic cousin.

Detective Inspector Paddy Casey chuckled, but still he wept. He was weird and a true enigma; who was he really? He also hugged his love, his arm encircling the waist of Dr Naadhira Khalid, known as Nadia. She had done all of her crying, and today she held Paddy together. Bloody men, she thought. But, she did love him. Theirs was a powerful love born out of extraordinary circumstances. An awkward and alien relationship, an Irish police detective and quasi-MI5 agent, a lapsed catholic, in love with and living with a Palestinian surgeon, a Muslim woman. Yes, they loved each other, and he wept for both of them. He was a hard man and an emotional Irish drip, but they shared a mutual pain. Nadia had lost family in Palestine to the Israeli army, and Paddy, his father and one of his sisters had perished in the troubles. She understood his pain, his desire to unify his country and to do it peacefully. She suspected, but never knew for sure, that Paddy had been involved with the IRA. She had not asked, afraid that one day he may tell her.

‘Come here, you dozy sod,’ and Paddy cuddled into his woman. She was tall with an elegant beauty and was emotionally stronger than her limp-lettuce Paddy.

Casey did not return to Ireland following the midsummer events of 1966 as was his original intention. He had stayed in London after completing his mission. Why? Because he loved Nadia. Nadia stayed because she had fled the violence to her family and her people. London was a new life for her, fraught with social land mines, dangerous territory, but she did love her Padraig (O’Neill) Casey. And there it was, Paddy was not just a dangerous conundrum, what was his name? O’Neill or Casey? He never went by O’Neill, so Nadia, now familiar with her lover’s smoke and mirrors, believed he was an O’Neill. But, was he MI5 or, and most perilously, IRA? This she could not fathom; did she love the danger? Something Wendy Richards had suggested to her.

‘Who are you?’

‘What?’ Paddy answered, always confused when interrogated by Nadia. She had this power over him whereby his mind went to mush and he could never think of an answer, and then he did. ‘I’m the man who loves you.’

‘Fuck you…’

‘Yes, please.’

And discreetly amused, she settled for that; this was not the time. ‘I love you too, whoever you are,’ and she enjoyed the look of confusion on his dangerous, and not particularly handsome, face.

Detective Sergeant Flora Wade wept. Beside her stood her trick cyclist lover, Wendy Richards, consultant psychiatrist at the Royal London Hospital, the same hospital where Dr Nadia worked. Wendy comforted her tough partner whilst monitoring her patients, Chas Larkin and Blossom Temple, two people who carried substantial emotional baggage, but her eyes rarely strayed from Maude Larkin; what was it about that woman? That woman gangster? The Queen of the East End of London. A woman who scared the living daylights out of her. Had scared the living daylights out of her, and in just one consultation, for anger management of all things. All had later been explained, but still, and despite her fear, Wendy could not resist the perilous fascination, and if truth be told, Maude Larkin offered more intellectual depth to her research into life in the East End of London than all of the other players. It is about survival. Of the poor? The choices for the poor? Living always with the threat of death; often a violent death and this applied to Maude also.

To say this was an incendiary situation may be an understatement, and for so many reasons. Just about everyone attending the funeral had cause to worry, cause to look over their shoulder.

Chapter 2

The cortege of milk floats had been prepared for the journey to the cemetery. The route would be lined with people, most genuinely distressed at the murder of the eight-year-old Tommy Temple, known affectionately as Tommy Little Legs. Others would be there because the Larkin Saint criminal family would expect it, and there were many informers. People lived on the edge in Stepney, the East End of London borough.

The electric milk floats were quiet and excruciatingly slow, but this suited the mood of the cortege. The vehicles had a driver’s cab with no doors; if you fell out at the governed speed, a maximum of ten miles per hour, you were not likely to be hurt. The back was an open platform for the milk crates with a hard canopy. For the occasion of the funeral, there were ten floats, eleven if you counted Flan’s specially modified lead float; he could do sometimes up to fifteen miles per hour, but he would only use this racy speed if his mum had not woken him in time to start his delivery round. Yes, he was back living with his mum, arguably safer than the times he had spent in the homes, having been, notionally, saved from neglect by welfare services.

Flan’s Achilles heel was he was a lovely-looking boy, after he had been cleaned up, and he had grown into a most handsome, though emotionally retarded and damaged man. People said he looked like Clark Gable and that they had a Hollywood star for a milkman. However, of all the local kids now grown, Flan was likely the most screwed up. Learning impaired, people said, offering sympathy for the young man. He had developed a shell of impenetrable hurt. Wendy could see it, but even she could not get into Flan’s head and imagined she never would; he had suffered too much.

For the funeral, each float of white with blue flashes had been respectfully draped in black cloth. The dressed flatbed to the rear had a central raised plinth of upside-down milk crates, cloaked in black, upon which were an abundance of flowers. This left a space on the left and right edges where the frailer mourners could sit, except for Flan’s vehicle; his box was designed to take the small and unpretentious coffin, flowers atop. Alongside was Tommy’s Space Hopper. Immediately behind the float, Blossom Temple, his mother, walked with Chas Larkin, Blossom’s de facto husband, an unconventional relationship born out of a tragic childhood. They walked to the cemetery and after the interment, followed the milk floats back to Incubator Street, to await. To await what? The wake? More…?

The disrespectful noise from the school playground was difficult to zone out. It was a contrast of emotion; in the playground, celebration, and Incubator Street, deep sadness. The women, mourning: mother, doctor, psychiatrist, copper, gangsters, Bess Saint, Consort to Maude Larkin, Queen. In the East End, homosexuality was accepted as a part of life, and everyone would acknowledge the two women as wife and wife. Even if you disapproved, you kept that to yourself. Bess was the calmer of the two gangsters, gentile in comparison if you screwed your eyes to look, and if you dared open them, Bess was an attractive, bleach-blonde bubbly woman with the look of a mature Rubenesque Shirley Temple. However, she was most certainly the brains of the outfit. In contrast Maude, the muscle, was tall and sinewy, lean, a long narrow face dominated by a Roman nose, black hair slicked back, dark threatening hooded eyes. She wore masculine black suits, and the ever-present sunglasses concealed those menacing eyes. If she removed the glasses, most knew it signalled Maude was angry and you wouldn’t want to be in the vicinity, and there had been a lot of that lately, so much so the violent reputation of the East End had been well and truly re-established. The knowledge spread far and wide and never more so than in the territories of the west and north where, strangely, it was received with undisguised pleasure.