The Graft by Martina Cole Page A

the house. Expensive tops hanging in the narrow wardrobe, which told him Jude had not looked in there yet or it would have been empty except for a few wire coat hangers. She always sold off anything of value they possessed. It had hurt her son that even his clothes weren’t safe from her and her constant quest for money.
     
    Tyrell wondered what his boy had wanted from that large house in the country, wondered when the urge to rob it had taken him over. He had thought about it so much, but still could not work out what had made his son choose that place to rob.
     
    Sonny had always been strictly small-time; he had been a hustler, a kiter. He wasn’t into heavy-duty robbery. Unless he had progressed over the last year from a young tearaway into a hardened criminal. He was just seventeen, for fuck’s sake!
     
    Tyrell went back to the kitchen and made the tea, scrubbing two mugs back to cleanliness before filling them. The whole place was filthy.
     
    He went into the lounge once more with the tea, but Jude was gone from him. She was lying back in the chair, staring into space.
     
    ‘Like old times, eh, Jude?’
     
    The sarcasm was completely lost on her, as he knew it would be.
     
     
Tammy wandered round her house aimlessly. She saw the expensive curtains, the hand-made carpets and carefully chosen antiques.
     
    She remembered her home when she was a kid. A council flat with coats on the bed, the constant smell of fried food and a father who would shout the house down when he got back from the pub. He still did that except he owned the pub now, thanks to Nick, and was slowly drinking himself to death in it.
     
    Her mother had always been running off with someone, it was how she was, yet Dad always wanted her back. She had been round the turf more times than a Grand National winner and still he wanted her.
     
    Nick had bought the pub for him. He had been so good to them all. He had come from the same road as them, gone to the same school as Tammy, had started courting her when they had been twelve and thirteen respectively.
     
    He had worked like a demon all his life. Even then he had had a paper round, a milk round, and worked the market stalls. It was the markets that had got them the first real money they had ever possessed. Her Nick could sell a fridge to an Eskimo. He had the gab all right, and she had loved being the girl he had chosen.
     
    Now, as she looked around her home, she was aware of just how much he had done for them all. The kitchen alone had cost over sixty grand. It had everything a kitchen could have, and was also the size of most people’s houses. It had a family area built round an inglenook fireplace that was twenty-five feet by eighteen alone. And that was without the actual kitchen itself or the utility areas.
     
    There was an indoor as well as an outdoor pool, and stabling for ten horses. The whole place was huge and it was tasteful and it was hers. She wondered why she had never really appreciated it before. Nick’s old mum ran the place for her, and Tammy was glad to let her get on with it. It was too big for her to worry about, and she was out more often than not.
     
    Now she was trying to imagine what it would be like to be without it, wondering for the first time if that boy had tried to rob them through envy, because they had it all and he didn’t.
     
    But he didn’t know that they had come from nothing themselves. How hard the road had been before they had finally cracked it. And her Nick, whatever his faults, had worked day and night to get them all a better life. She should appreciate him more, she knew that. She meant to, but somehow when they were alone it all deteriorated because they didn’t know how to be alone any more. Those days were gone, the days when they’d waited with bated breath for each other. Not that Nick had ever been much of a one for sex anyway. He was always too busy. It wasn’t until her first affair that Tammy had realised what she had been