Charity

by Linda Calvey

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

PRE-ORDER NOW! The highly anticipated new and final instalment in Linda Calvey's gripping gangland series. What will become of the three sisters of the Wills family? . . .

As the youngest of three sisters, Charity Wills is used to getting what she wants. When she was a teenager, she fell in love with the dashing bad boy next door and married him. If she wants something beautiful and expensive in a shop, she discreetly puts it in her bag - the Old Bill be damned. If she has enemies that need seeing to, her father-in-law can pull some strings to make the problem go away.

So when Charity finds herself suddenly on her own - her beloved Little Danny in prison and no sign of a much-wanted pregnancy on the way - she is at a loss. She wants to start pulling her weight in her influential crime family. But as she works to pull off a plan that will fly under the radar of the law, an old enemy of the Wills family grows ever nearer, determined that Charity will not have her happily ever after . . .

A gritty and gripping gangland story set in London's East End - for fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers.

Release date: July 30, 2026

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

Hope’s voice at the other end of the telephone line sounded oddly excitable to Faith but not as if she was calling with bad news as such, although at first Faith couldn’t understand why her sister Hope would be ringing her in the middle of the evening from Marbella when she, Little Danny and Charity should all be out enjoying themselves.

Even though the three sisters were extremely close and saw each other a lot as they lived near to one another in East London, they tended not to ring each other that often. Although they had recently all got themselves the latest mobile telephones, now small enough that they would fit in a handbag, they still weren’t really used to them.

Faith gave a small frown as she mouthed, ‘It’s Hope,’ to their mother Maria, who was sitting across from her at a table in the bar of the hotel where the pair were staying up in the north of England.

Maria immediately looked anxious, but Faith made sure to give a quick smile as she listened to Hope, as she was always keen to reassure her mother, knowing that Maria tended to think worst-case scenario at any given time. But bearing in mind the amount of strife that Maria had had to cope with in her life, that was perfectly understandable.

‘Well, Faith, it’s a complete waste of time you being all the way up there in Wakefield, hoping Fred Walton is going to suddenly arrive back in Yorkshire for Ted Walton’s funeral,’ said Hope, struggling to keep her voice low. The manager of the restaurant had said she could use his personal telephone in the office as Charity and Little Danny were regulars, and Hope really didn’t want to take the risk of being overheard.

‘There can’t be too many men of the right age and too much suntan and heavy gold bracelets who are called Fred, with a father named Ted, whose funeral is up in Yorkshire tomorrow. And one of them is sitting at the table right next to us in the restaurant! I’ve sneaked away to the manager’s office so I could let you know.’

Hope added that before they realised who their neighbour in the restaurant was, she, Little Danny and Charity had been laughing between themselves at this Fred’s embarrassingly heavy-handed attempts at flirting with a much younger and perma-tanned woman. His attempts at seduction mainly seemed to be trying to get as much alcohol down the pair of them as possible, both getting louder and increasingly boisterous the more they drank.

‘It was when she screeched his name – Fred – and he tried to make her laugh by saying his dad is Ted, that I began to pay attention properly. And he’s more or less boasted he’s no intention of going to Ted’s funeral, as he’s been trying to make plans for tomorrow with this bint – along the lines of: “Keep on as you are and you’ll find out that I know how to show a tart a good time. You just wait, my girl.” And so on. I wouldn’t describe her as Einstein as she seems a bit all fur coat and no knickers, but even she’s begun to look less than impressed,’ Hope continued. ‘Still, as he’s bragging about flashing the cash her way in the shops, I guess she might buckle up for a day or two to see what she can get. Gawd, that Fred is the walking advert for stupidity.’

‘Blimey.’

There was a silence. Faith needed a moment to think about what her younger sister had just told her.

For Fred Walton was the father Faith had never met.

And Faith had decided a while back that it was high time she set her sights on this monster who had wrecked her mother’s life. She was curious about him too, which was in part why she had decided to go to Ted’s funeral, as she wanted to have the opportunity at least once to study her own father in the flesh, as to Faith it was inconceivable a son wouldn’t return for his own father’s send-off.

Faith’s younger sisters, Hope and Charity, were twins, and neither they nor their mother knew who their father was, which was one of the perils of a woman getting pregnant when she was working as a street prostitute as Maria became.

Then Faith told Maria what Hope had just said, adding that Fred wasn’t within earshot in case Maria worried Hope and Charity might be in imminent danger from him.

Faith was right to be concerned about her mother’s reaction, for at the mere mention of Fred’s name, Maria had given a small gasp as her hand crept involuntarily to the livid and heavily puckered skin caused by the lacey network of scars on the cheek to the left of her nose. Fred had repeatedly slashed her there with his fist thirty years previously. His razor-embedded heavy gold signet ring on the third finger of that hand had caused irreparable, ugly damage to Maria’s face, and she was very lucky not to have lost an eye.

So although Maria was sorry for how it had worked out for the twins concerning their father, it was nowhere near the agony that her one and only boyfriend Fred Walton had let loose on her, and now she didn’t like at all that it seemed that Faith was about to get sucked into Fred’s orbit too.

Faith suspected as much, and she leaned over the table to give her mother’s arm a reassuring squeeze.

The pair had travelled up to Wakefield from London when they’d heard that Ted Walton had died, Maria because he had been good to her mother Annie and Annie’s friend Joyce, and so Maria wanted to pay her respects; Faith because, in part, if she took Fred out of the equation, she felt compelled to honour her grandfather who’d tried very hard to do right by herself.

There was a bigger reason, though, than just that.

Faith was formulating a big plan, one she doubted she would ever be able to tell her mother about.

She was determined that at some point she would wreak true and proper revenge on Fred for the terrible damage he had wrought on Maria’s face all those years ago.

And as Fred had no idea what his child looked like – his only child, as it turned out – Faith wanted to take the opportunity to study him in secret and find out as much about him as possible, so that she could come up with an effective plan for vengeance.

Faith knew that Maria would advise against this should she get wind of any such plan, and even Ted freely admitted that Fred had grown into an even more hideous man than he had been a teen, one who had carefully nourished a fearsome reputation for mindless violence to anyone he took a dislike to.

Since the attack, Maria’s many years of working relentlessly as a streetwalker on the rough East End roads in London, alongside Annie, had been exhausting and difficult, although the two women had always done their best to look out for each other.

And their hard work had meant that Maria and Annie had been able to provide a stable home for the three girls, and Maria was very proud of how each had grown into confident and strong-minded young women.

Faith had studied like a demon at school and university. To nobody’s surprise, she was now a much sought-after criminal barrister.

After leaving her days behind as a sought-after S&M mistress in a specialist bondage parlour, Hope was now proving she had an impressive head for big business. So acute were her instincts and observations that Bud Metzler, an American investor with a keen interest in British industrial property, was determined to bring her formally on board his empire, having offered her a partnership with the promise that one day she could run the British side of things.

And Charity was long happily married to her childhood sweetheart, Little Danny, with an occasional sideline in hoisting, just to keep her hand in. She didn’t do much shoplifting these days, but she liked to think she still had all her old skills.

Faith knew that she looked every inch the successful barrister, with her carefully low-lit honey-blonde haircut and her expensive tailored clothes and soft leather Italian court shoes, and so she was certain that she would have the element of surprise on her side on the day she faced Fred down in the final reckoning, as he would never expect he could produce a child who exuded Faith’s bravado and intelligence.

And so she’d had no doubt he would fail to recognise her at the funeral, which was crucial as she didn’t want him to be in any way forewarned. So it was a blow now that she had learned he wasn’t going to be in attendance.

Still, although Fred was bad through and through, both Maria and Faith were surprised that in recent years they had grown fond of Ted Walton – in fact, they had just been talking about this. And this was in spite of Ted having been a big-name gang boss back in the day in Wakefield – of the sort who left many burly men quaking if they got the wrong side of him. He had been horrified and ashamed at what Fred had done to Maria right in front of him, and he had done his best to make amends.

It took three decades for Ted and his granddaughter Faith to meet. But when they did after Annie’s funeral, they had instantly struck up a friendship that quickly evolved into something deeper and incredibly satisfying to both of them, although they both took great care that Fred never found out about their growing closeness.

Ted had begged Faith to take time to meet his wife Martina in the final months of her life. Faith was Ted and Martina’s only grandchild as Fred was their sole child and he had remained childless after getting Maria into trouble. And subsequently Faith’s kindness to Martina meant Ted never allowed Faith to forget that he owed her a debt of gratitude for making his wife so happy at what was a desperate time.

To her surprise, Faith had felt a real sense of loss when first Martina and then Ted had died.

In the last weeks of her life, Martina had gifted Faith a distinctive and extremely valuable family heirloom, a ring Faith loved to wear, and each time the light hit its precious stones in a certain way Faith found herself thinking tenderly of her grandparents.

Now, in the bar of the Wakefield hotel, Faith looked at the ring again. It glittered as always and Faith felt comforted by the sight.

‘Where’s Charity?’ Maria murmured, after Faith had passed her the phone so she could talk to Hope, even though there was a hum of other people talking elsewhere in the hotel bar.

‘Probably still holed up in the ladies’. I’m sure she’s got a kidney infection, as she’s never out of there these days. But I asked Little Danny to keep a watch on Fred for us,’ Hope told her.

Maria and Hope chatted for a while, while Faith stared at the optics behind the bar for a long time with a sombre expression on her face.

Then she indicated to her mother that she needed the handset back.

‘We need a plan, Hope, once you are all back in Hackney,’ Faith announced.

‘I hear you, gal,’ Hope agreed. ‘Too bloody true.’

Several days after Ted’s funeral, to Faith’s relief neither Detective Inspector Tom Jarrett nor Little Danny’s father Big Danny looked particularly surprised when she took them to a ramshackle Hackney pub the three of them had never been in together before. After she had settled them in a secluded nook off to the side of the bar, she bought them each a pint of best.

Faith thought that clearly Hope, Charity and Little Danny – who’d returned from Marbella the previous evening – must have wasted no time in talking about the accidental discovery of Fred Walton’s whereabouts.

Tom Jarrett was the closest thing to a proper boyfriend Faith had ever had, but somehow that step further had never quite happened between them and they had slid into the routine where these days they were as much pals as occasional lovers.

Faith suspected she might have made a difference to the dynamic between them if she had given Tom a little more encouragement now and again, but somehow there had always been something that held her back from going all in with him.

Occasionally, when she was lying alone in her bed late at night, she would wonder why she acted like this, but more recently she had begun to see that neither she nor her sisters had in any way a comfortable relationship with men. It was easy to understand why, as they only had to look at Maria’s face to see how wrong things could go, and the fact that both Maria and her mother Annie had had to work as prostitutes for many years naturally had given the household a generally jaundiced view of men.

Faith knew she held herself in reserve, while Hope seemed to have eschewed men totally, leaving Faith pretty certain that Charity was only married to Little Danny as they had grown up together and were really comfortable with one another, and if they had never met, the likelihood would be that Charity would have stayed single too.

It was a shame though regarding Tom, for in many ways he was perfect boyfriend, or even husband material, being good-looking and more than a little cheeky, as well as obviously a rising star in Special Branch. It helped too that he and Faith got on really well and he could make her laugh like nobody else could. And in the times they had shared a bed, it had been good, although not exactly as earth-shattering as had been lampooned three years earlier in the infamous deli scene from When Harry Met Sally.

Faith still remembered fondly how they had caught each other’s eye when she’d been a teenager back when everyone was living in a modest terrace in Senrab Street over in Stepney. Tom had been the keen wet-behind-the-ears copper that Big Danny, Little Danny’s dad, had brought onside with a regular tickle for passing on the odd scraps of information, such as dropping the word when there was some sort of police activity that might affect Big Danny’s business. Tom had gone out of his way to make her smile back then, and although Faith had always known that in part he had been very nice to her because he wouldn’t have risked Big Danny’s wrath if he hadn’t taken exceptionally good care of her, there was something winsome about Tom that made her feel relaxed and happy.

Even so, a while back Faith had decided her reluctance to take things to another level with Tom was also because she was very ambitious for her own legal career, despite the seediness – in the eyes of many – of her own family background, which probably would have held back many less determined legal eagles.

Instead, Faith had gone all out to turn where she came from to her advantage, and this hadn’t left much time for socialising.

While she didn’t advertise to anybody who wasn’t interested her lack of an affluent private education many other barristers had enjoyed, she would always answer honestly if anybody else asked about her background or education.

Indeed, precisely because of the real-life criminal underworld she had sprung from, and now that she had a good track record in court, Faith had learned to say she was convinced the sort of upbringing she’d had really helped her to understand many of the people she would prosecute or defend, to the point it gave her the sort of edge that consistently made her beat the percentages most barristers achieved in winning or losing their cases.

And the problem with Tom in the light of this was that just now and again Faith could see bubble through what she felt these days was an unwelcome and too-large flash of his own Stepney wide-boy background, which happened just often enough that Faith was never convinced that his police work these days was as squeaky clean as he liked to claim, or that he was above pocketing the occasional backhander from Big Danny or maybe did a little tampering with evidence. And she had been around policemen long enough in court to know that there were many who behaved much more scurrilously than Tom, and that those who trained in the 1970s as Tom had, usually saw no problem in pushing the odd boundary or two.

Faith thought actually there was probably more distance between Tom and Big Danny now, and a resulting decrease in any illicit dealings they may have had, mainly as they would both want to avoid unnecessary heat if they could.

But she couldn’t tell for sure, especially as Big Danny never tried to pretend that he didn’t keep a few serving coppers well and truly in his pocket.

Consequently, Faith told herself, in terms of her and Tom, it was only prudent to make sure there was a little clear space between them, just in case anyone at work ever asked her any awkward questions about him and his ethics, and what she might think about that in view of her friendship with him.

Faith knew she was hypocritical for thinking like this when her own father and paternal grandfather were both career gangsters (and her maternal grandfather would have loved to have been one too, although he’d never had the brains to be much more than a thug), and her mother and maternal grandmother had both been long-term prostitutes, but there it was.

And of course she was contemplating at this very moment exactly how Tom might be able to help in putting her Fred Walton master plan into action, which was taking her hypocrisy soaring up to a whole new level.

But needs must, she told herself as she stood at the bar waiting to get served, as Tom’s potentially shady qualities might well prove in this instance to be the very boon that would be hugely to her own advantage, although Faith knew that she would do nothing to coerce Tom to help her, should he be having a rare attack of conscience.

She doubted it would come to that though. Tom had been with her without seeming shocked in the slightest (although afterwards Faith thought she’d detected a vaguely suspicious glint in Tom’s eye) when a while back she had stashed some evidence Ted Walton had given her that she could use for leverage against Fred should she so choose, in a bank safety deposit box on Piccadilly in London. That made Faith feel Tom probably would come up trumps for her, even though as yet her ideas on how this might happen weren’t fully thought through.

Ted’s carefully collected evidence comprised a gun with Fred’s fingerprints on it that had been used by Fred in a still unsolved murder in Wakefield almost a decade earlier, as well as the bloodied T-shirt Fred had worn at the time.

Faith had been a criminal barrister long enough to believe these two items alone would be enough to convict Fred of a crime with a mandatory life sentence once a forensics team had gone to work, but she also knew of an innocuous-looking lock-up Ted had kept carefully hidden from Fred that contained other implicating items.

Aside from the gun and the T-shirt, Ted had told Faith also to stash in the safety deposit box a velvet bag of Martina’s jewellery, since Martina had recently died, which he’d said was just for Faith and was very valuable. He promised that should she ever need to sell any of it, every piece had been acquired legitimately as gifts for his wife. Faith had no reason to doubt this, especially as Ted had said he’d actually have liked to leave some of his physical property to her upon his death, but he didn’t dare take the risk, as an unexpected move like this would have sent Fred on the warpath just when Faith didn’t want to risk him discovering their connection to one another.

Ted admitted to Faith that much of Martina’s jewellery had been bought with the intention that Martina could wear it out of the country in case they ever needed to do a hasty fl. . .