I find my small cosmetics bag and begin searching through it for a red lipstick. It might work well with the blonde. I very rarely wear make-up anymore. I certainly didn’t need it at Larksmere, though some of the more manageable inmates and I would make each other up from time to time, largely to relieve the monotony and to remind ourselves that we were women, women who once may even have been desirable. It’s amazing what a bit of lipstick can do to lift your mood, it really is.
‘Wit-woo! You look nice, Molly.’ Pierced Pete raises his eyebrows in quick succession as I enter the bar from the guests’ entrance. Maybe blondes reallydohave more fun. When I’d arrived at the pub earlier, I’d made sure that my long dark hair had been tucked up well inside my bobble hat so that no one would see the dramatic change when I revealed my new hair later on. ‘Hope it’s not on my account.’ He winks at me, affords me a glimpse of two gold teeth as he grins. Perhaps it’s the lipstick?
The Bull and Barrow is a typical old-school London pub with worn, burgundy velvet benches, low, orange replica Tiffany lighting, and ugly, dark wooden furnishings. Years of ingrained nicotine and grime have turned the flock wallpaper a cack-brown and I can almost still smell the stale cigarettes in the air. My eyes are drawn to a collage of sun-faded photographs on a wall featuring a timeline of people who have enjoyed a drink here – or two, given the look of some of them – over the decades. Pete, at various stages and ages, features in more or less all of them.
‘We’ve had a fair few famous faces in here over the years, sister, let me tell you,’ he says proudly, nodding at them. ‘All sorts, from Hollywood legends to legendary gangsters, and everything else in between.’
I should probably say now that I’ve deliberately chosen the Bull and Barrow pub as my London HQ. I am not here purely by chance. Though there is a chance that what I’d heard from an inmate at Larksmereisa bunch of bull.
Sandra had mentioned this place, not to me directly, but I’d overheard her talking about it many times in the stories she told other inmates. Sandra ended up at Larksmere after she became involved in drugs and subsequently, criminal activity, because one very rarely exists without the other. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression as a teenager and had spent what had sounded like a truly horrible life in and out of prison and mental institutions. She claimed to have been a well-connected drug dealer for a time and, being from London, had mentioned the Bull and Barrow in King’s Cross as being ‘the kind of place where you could get anything, fake ID, drugs, guns, girls…’ ‘A proper den of iniquity,’ she’d called it.
Sandra had shot, and killed, a fellow drug dealer while high on her own supply. Regrettably, the woman’s five-year-old son had been caught in the crossfire and was seriouslyinjured, though thankfully survived. Subsequently, Sandra tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the neck, only somehow the bullet missed every vital part that could’ve ended her life and exited her body without doing any lasting damage, save for the visible (and invisible) scars left behind. I’d been terrified of her when I had first entered Larksmere. She had the unsettling demeanour of someone who could switch on you in a hair’s breadth and was built like a barn door. Largely though, she left me alone, and I never had any trouble from her personally.
Sandra liked to tell stories, so it’s still a long shot, coming here, but I had overheard her mention a heavily tattooed and pierced guy called Pete who ran this place. It has to be the same guy I’m currently looking at.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I say. I can’t help wondering, as I stare at their faces, what they might be doing now, these people captured in these photos, smiling and happy for that brief moment in time, and what’s become of them.
‘You want a drink before you go off out and make someone’s night tonight?’
Pete grins at me again, a touch lasciviously perhaps. Is he flirting with me? Aside from that mad moment with Malcolm earlier, which I’m still trying to process, I’ve been out of the game for so long that I can’t tell.
‘Go on, why not?’ I smile, hoping I haven’t got lipstick on my teeth. That’s never a good look. ‘I’ll have a Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke.’
‘A double for the lady?’
‘When in Rome…’
‘You’re looking at the photographs there…’ He starts to fix my drink. ‘Were you looking for someone in particular?’
The fact that he asks me this question makes me think that I’m definitely in the right place – he’s suspicious.
‘Actually, I was looking for my friend, Sandra. Sandra Morton, Morty.’
His eyes widen a touch in surprise and, I’m hoping, recognition. ‘I thought she might be in one of them.’
‘Big Sandra, South London Sandra, you mean?’
Well, Sandra was definitely ‘big’ and I believe she was from Peckham, originally.
‘Yeah, that’s her. She spoke highly of this place, and of you. She said if ever I was in London, that I should come and see you and that you’dlook after me.’
He grins again. It’sdefinitelylascivious this time. I go along with it. I need his help.
‘Did she now? Well, that was nice of her, wasn’t it?’ He leans in towards me suddenly, his whole demeanour instantly changing. He appears aggressive, even a touch menacing, but he’s going to have to do much better than that to intimidate me.
‘I was at East Sutton Park with her for a while, regrettably,’ I sniff,lie.
East Sutton is an open women’s prison in Kent. I knew Sandra had been there at some point because she had talked about that too.
‘What were you inside for?’ He softens a little, though a touch of wariness remains as he grabs a bottle of bourbon from behind the bar and places it down hard on the wooden surface.
‘Drugs,’ I say. ‘My ex was a dealer. I wouldn’t rat him out so they gave me eighteen months for perverting the course of justice. I made a mistake,’ – I shrug – ‘getting involved with him, I mean.’
He pours another large slug of dark liquid into my glass, watching me carefully. ‘Cheers!’
He bangs it with his own and I swallow back half of it, relish the burn at the back of my throat.
‘Well, you’ll get no judgement here from me, sister. Like they say, if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doinganything. So,’ – he pours me another shot of bourbon, his menace dissipating – ‘your accent tells me you’re not local, not originally at least. What brings you to the big smoke then? Aside from the weather and fair prices – and the good-looking barmen, of course?’
