Guts for Garters

Book 0: The DI Johnson Series

by Linda Regan

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Guts for Garters is the first in an explosive new series featuring the Alley Cats and DI Georgia Johnson as they make lives for themselves on London?s meanest streets Life?s not easy growing up on the Aviary Estate in South London. Alysha and her mates have survived being abused by people who should have cared for them, their lives ruined by crime and deprivation. Now they?re taking control of the estate so children can grow up safe with real prospects in life. When a rival gang starts encroaching on their territory, Alysha and the Alley Cats decide to teach them a lesson. The last thing they expect is to find one of their rivals murdered on their patch. The last thing they want is for the police to start sniffing around. But DI Georgia Johnson wants answers. Johnson trusts Alysha ? but will she still trust her when she realises her prized informant is leading a gang herself? When another body is found ? a teenage girl this time ? Alysha decides to frame the evil leader of the rival gang ? but he has a few nasty surprises of his own in store for the Alley Cats girls.

Release date: June 22, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 280

Sample

One

The blade of the machete was sharp, and Alysha’s aim was practiced and precise. It sliced into the skin between the inch-high letters – SLR – that adorned Burak Kaya’s muscular forearm.

Kaya drew a sharp intake of breath as the pain hit. Dark blood erupted and snaked downward, onto and over his wrist, onto the dirt and grime of the concrete floor. He was tied up in a derelict garage, Alysha’s three lieutenants standing guard. This was the Aviary Estate in South London, where killing came easy but respect was a lot harder to come by.

Alysha Achter had earned that respect. Fifteen years old, she was a queen, the leading light of the Alley Cats, the all-girl gang that owned this territory. She made the rules and no one was going to fuck with her or the residents of the Aviary any more. Those days were over. All the top Alley Cat soldiers had grown up on the estate, been abused as children, become under-age prostitutes or thieves or muggers. All had been users of hard drugs to get them through. Some had been young’uns and firearm-holders for the drug barons who fed their habits. Some had ended up in institutions, others in foster homes, where they were abused again.

Now things were going to be very different.

The Alley Cats ran the Aviary now. They made the ‘corn’, the money, on the estate. All drugs, weapons, and street trade around the estate belonged to them, and they had big plans for how the profits would be spent. They didn’t want violence and fear; they wanted families, kids of their own, but they wanted a better life for them first. They wanted them to have opportunities, opportunities which weren’t limited to selling drugs, prostitution, thieving, or prison. Right now there was nowhere for kids to be kids. The estate playgrounds were vandalised and burnt, the community hall closed down, the shops boarded up. The council had refused grants to improve the estate, so the Alley Cats were doing it their way. They had recruited nearly forty soldiers and these girls now policed the estate. They sold drugs only to existing users, no kids, and they pimped their girls fairly and gave them good protection on the streets.

Despite the endemic problems it was a large and thriving estate, so a lot of nearby gangs were targeting it. The Alley Cats knew this; they also knew if they were to keep their territory safe so the residents could walk around without fear of being mugged, or worse, then they had to send the message that this was their territory. Anyone that dissed them, who broke their rules, had to pay.

Kaya squeezed his face taut and threw his head back as he waited for the agonizing pain to subside. When Tink and Lox had tied him up they’d used rope to bind his upper torso to the back of the chair, then secured each of his legs to a chair leg, leaving his groin accessible so that the girls could get a good aim if they decided to stamp his balls in. They had also stripped him of his sweatshirt, and snapped his silver chain, breaking its symbolic SLR charm into pieces and dropping them on the floor in front of him.

Leaving his torso bare for the punishment it would endure. Kaya was well known to the Alley Cats. He was a top lieutenant for Harisha Celik, his cousin, the leader of the South London Rulers gang from a neighbouring estate. The Alley Cats had recently discovered that Celik had taken over this garage on the Aviary. He had first had the owners’ car stolen. It had belonged to a couple of pensioners from the Raven block, and Celik knew if he took their old Nissan, then they wouldn’t bother using their lock-up. He had broken in, changed the lock, and now used the space to store an assignment of weapons smuggled in from Europe.

To add insult to injury, he hadn’t even given the pensioners any corn for nicking their car.

Celik needed to learn a lesson, and the perfect opportunity arose when they caught Burak Kaya red-handed on their territory, together with Celik’s girlfriend, Melek Yismaz. The two of them were sneaking into the lock-up with two cases of machetes and handguns.

The Alley Cats had pounced on the pair and had taken them hostage. Kaya was tied to the chair. They had tied Melek to the inside of the door to the lock-up to watch. It wasn’t Alley Cat policy to hurt, or start a fight, with another girl, even if the girl was in an enemy gang, or a rival’s baby mother. But heaven help any girl that picked a fight with an Alley Cat. A screwdriver, a cricket ball, even a knife in the gut: if that’s what it took to protect their territory – and one another – they’d do it. All the girls had learned to fight well; they’d had to, to survive on the estate. All were prepared to fight to the death for the other girls, and the estate kids, and anyone else who was vulnerable or bullied on their territory. They saw it as their job. And today was a working day.

Melek was tall, leggy, and olive-skinned. Her long dark hair hung down her back, reaching way past her shapely bottom. The Alley Cats had tied her hands to the garage door handle, allowing her a good view of the torture they were bestowing on Kaya, knowing she would report it all back to Celik. Melek shivered as she watched. Cried her pretty dark eyes out.

None of this had been planned beforehand, it was just a lucky catch. Panther and Tink had been on Alley Cat business around the estate when they stumbled across Kaya and Melek sneaking into the lock-up. The girls had been photographing the estate playground. The ground was covered in dog shit, and huge rats scurried around, feasting on mouldering fast food containers that had been left to rot. The playground had been set fire to so many times that the estate kids had to look elsewhere for recreation, and the council did nothing to help.

The girls had their own plans for the neighbourhood. Panther was going to give self-defence lessons to the estate women as soon as the community hall was repaired and open. She’d already taught Lox how to fight properly, how to use her teeth or stiletto while locating her weapon – shank, broken bottle, or the .38 that top ACs now carried when they needed to. Lox wanted to make records, or be a DJ or an accountant, she hadn’t fully decided yet. She’d gone to a top school and was good with numbers. She did all the book-keeping for the ACs and was in charge of the rebuilding plans the girls were making.

So Harisha Celik trespassing on the Aviary, taking a garage from pensioners, and using it to store weapons – and drugs which he intended to sell to children – had more than insulted Alysha. She had been waiting patiently for this opportunity and, now she had it, she was burning with anger. She dug the edge of the machete into the open skin on Kaya’s arm. He screamed in pain.

‘And he calls us pussies,’ Panther laughed sarcastically, raising her eyes to heaven.

Panther bore many scars from past scraps. She was capable of taking anyone on and coming out on top. She was tall – over six feet though only sixteen – Jamaican, and angry. Her mother had died when she was four, and she and her older brother had been in and out of care until her uncle took her in when she was eight. He regularly abused Panther, and prostituted her to make money. When she was fourteen the brother she’d never really known died of gunshot wounds and her uncle had a stroke which confined him to a chair. It was left to Panther to look after him and to make enough money to provide for them both, which she had dutifully done by continuing to work as a prostitute, for Alysha’s pimp. That was how they’d met. When Panther’s uncle died a few months later, she moved into Alysha’s top floor flat on Sparrow block of the Aviary and became an Alley Cat lieutenant. Her job in the gang was pimping the street girls, looking out for them and protecting them from vicious punters.

Alysha handed the machete to Lox, whose street name came from her waist-length hair – and her aptitude for picking any lock in record time.

Lox had run away from her alcoholic mother and a father who had sexually abused her from an early age. She started working the streets, alone, to make enough corn to buy drugs, which was how Alysha had met her. The local pimp had found Lox on his territory, trying to get punters, and started to beat her for trespassing on his patch. Fourteen-year-old Alysha had been chosen as his ‘mistress’ a year earlier. He was a violent pervert, and Alysha hated him, but had chosen him over being alone, over screwing up to twelve punters a day for him. Alysha intervened on Lox’s behalf and persuaded the pimp to take her on as one of his whores. Lox looked young for her age, so was hired out to well-paying and sadistic punters who liked hurting underage girls. But Lox was angry and always hurt back when they abused her. The pimp regularly beat her because she bit or kicked the punters when they burned her. Alysha liked her spirit, saw gang potential in her. When Alysha, single-handedly, took on the pimp and took over his territory, she immediately offered Lox a way out of prostitution. Alysha taught Lox about surviving on the Aviary, got her off drugs, and invited her to live in the Sparrow block flat. Lox did so well that Alysha made her a lieutenant in the Alley Cats. Lox repaid Alysha with fierce loyalty and Alysha adored her; they would lay down their lives for one another.

Lox took the machete from Alysha and brought it down across Burak Kaya’s upper arm. Fresh blood erupted, and Kaya let out a huge wail in pain.

Panther was holding a large roll of black gaffer tape. She pulled a piece about six inches in length from the roll, bit it free, then moved to secure it across his mouth with her large hands, white and floral plastic nails digging into his skin. Kaya jerked his head away, puffed out his cheeks, and spat a mouthful of sticky phlegm at her. It landed on the dark brown skin of Panther’s cleavage and the edge of her leopard-print T-shirt.

No sooner had it landed than Tink retaliated. She swiftly planted her pink Doc Martens boot hard into Burak Kaya’s balls.

Tink, too, had grown up on the Aviary. Her mother was an addict and Tink had no idea who her father was. As kids, Alysha and Tink were close friends, living from hand to mouth. Alysha’s mother had died when she was less than a year old and she’d grown up with an alcoholic father who was never around. She and Tink used to stand together outside the fried chicken shop and beg for scraps. One day a dealer approached them and offered them money to run errands for him. They were about six years old and happily agreed to deliver drugs and hide guns for him when the feds were around. Eventually both girls went on the game, and then Alysha was taken in, at the age of thirteen, by the pimp, to be used for his sadistic pleasures alone. Once Alysha had taken control of the territory she took Tink, like Lox, out of the misery of prostitution. Tink had lived on Sparrow block on the Aviary, same as Alysha, but in the flat one floor down. Now, like Panther and Lox, she had moved in to Alysha’s place. Officially, Alysha lived there with her father, but her father rarely came home. When he did Alysha gave him a wad of money, and he went off to drink himself stupid until the money ran out.

Melek Yismaz rattled the garage door she was tied to and shrieked as Tink kicked Kaya in the balls. ‘No, please!’ she screamed out. ‘That’s enough. No more.’

‘Gag her,’ Alysha told Panther without even glancing in Melek’s direction, ‘she’s doing my head in.’ Alysha then followed Tink and kicked Kaya in the balls, hard. As he grunted in pain, she leaned in towards him until her face was just inches from his. ‘A message for your prick of a leader. Remind him this is Alley Cat territory. Tell ’im, if he thinks he can steal from my residents, an’ do our kids with drugs, then this is just a taster. Got it?’

He didn’t answer.

She kicked again.

‘I said, ’ave ya got it?’

Kaya’s dark eyebrows had lifted and his lips were squeezed together in pain. He still said nothing.

‘Yes or no?’ Alysha withdrew her boot and then kicked hard several times.

He screwed up his face in pain but stayed silent.

‘He’s got a death wish,’ Panther said. She was attempting to tape Melek’s mouth. Melek was pulling her head away like a horse refusing a bit. ‘Please don’t, please!’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll keep quiet, and I’ll take your message to Harisha.’

‘Fine,’ Alysha said, barely turning her head more than a few inches to acknowledge her. ‘You do that.’ She leaned in to Burak again. ‘See, your cunt of a leader thinks he can take this lock-up, and sell his gear round ’ere, so until you agree to tell him that we said no, then you are gonna keep getting hurt.’

He spat at her.

Lightning-quick, Alysha grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. She lifted her leg and dug the dirty stiletto heel of her boot into the cut on his forearm.

As he screamed out in pain, she twisted her heel further in.

‘The SLR owe money to two old dears on my estate,’ she told him. ‘You tell ’im to pay, or face the consequences.’

Rivulets of perspiration were breaking out over his forehead, but Kaya stayed silent.

She took the machete from Lox and held it in the air. ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’

He didn’t move.

Alysha turned to Melek. ‘You might wish your mouth was plastered up, ’cos your so-called lieutenant here’s gonna keep getting hurt until he nods his fucking head.’ She brought the machete swiftly down across of Kaya’s hand. ‘Oh dear, no wanking for you for a bit,’ she said, as more blood flowed and he screamed in pain.

‘Burak!’ Melek half-screamed and half- pleaded. ‘Nod your head, and let’s leave Harisha to sort it.’

Burak shook his head. ‘Not to these pussies,’ he whispered in agony.

Tink stubbed her cigarette out angrily on his other hand. ‘Just in case he’s left-handed. Wanking’s not nice, see.’

His face had turned red and perspiration was running down his temples. Tears also ran from the sides of both his eyes.

Melek was watched in horror.

‘See, the thing here is,’ Alysha said calmly lifting his head up again by his hair, and watching the tears spill from the side of his eyes and roll down his blood-stained neck as she kicked him continuously in the shin, ‘that you ain’t going nowhere until you nod your fucker of a head to say you’ll take the message back to your poxy leader. Message is: you can’t trespass on the Aviary, disrespect us, and get away with it. Got it?’ She watched him for a second before raising her voice and shouting into his face, continuing to kick his shin, ‘No one rips off our pensioners, you piece of shit. He pays them, in full, for the car he nicked, and a year’s rent on this lock-up. All these weapons now belong to us.’ She moved her face away from his. ‘That’s the message.’ She raised her voice. ‘Got it?’

‘Yeah, he’s got it.’ Melek’s voice, high-pitched and desperate.

Alysha didn’t turn around. ‘I’m talking to him,’ she said, still kicking Kaya with her boot. ‘An’ ’e’s really pissing me off.’ She raised her voice and the machete. ‘If you don’t nod your head, this time it’s your eye. An’ you know I mean it!’

He nodded his head.

‘Finally,’ Alysha said turning to her girls, ‘We are getting somewhere. She turned back to Kaya. ‘First clever fing you done today.’

He was trying to keep his eyes on her, but he was slowly slipping into unconsciousness.

‘He’s said we agree,’ Melek pleaded again. ‘Now let him go.’

‘We want your contact for these machetes and firearms, the one in Europe,’ Alysha said. ‘Give me that, and then I’ll let you go.’

Nothing.

‘Tell us, and you can go,’ Panther said to him.

Kaya was silent.

Alysha shook her head and turned to the other girls. ‘He’s not answering again, how rude’s that?’ She stood up and pulled a small, but very sharp, knife from her boot. ‘’Fraid you ’ave to learn,’ she said. ‘It’s fingers this time.’

‘No. Don’t! Stop!’ Melek shrieked wiggling desperately trying to release herself from the door-handle she was tied to. ‘He doesn’t know who the contact is in Europe. Neither do I, or I’d definitely tell you. But if you let him go, I’ll give you my word that I’ll find out, from Harisha, and I’ll tell you.’

‘What, you think we was born yesterday?’ Panther said to her. ‘You think we’re gonna believe that you’ll do just that, fuck Harisha’s brains out believing he’ll tell you, and then you’ll come running and tell us.’

‘I swear I will.’

Alysha turned to her. ‘Listen, darling, you’re more stupid than I thought. Harisha ain’t gonna tell you nothing; he ain’t even faithful to you. If his lieutenant,’ she kicked Kaya’s boot, ‘really don’t know, then Harisha ain’t gonna tell no one, ’specially not a skank he’s honking. Which, incidentally, is all you are. Once ’e’s got you up the duff, he’ll cast you aside. That’s the way it is with him.’

‘I know where he keeps his other weapons,’ Melek said after a beat.

Alysha and the girls looked at each other. Alysha turned to Burak Kaya. He had gone a very pale colour. She turned back to Melek.

‘Tell, now. You need to take him away and look after him.’

‘You’ll let us go if I tell you?’ Melek asked.

Alysha clicked her tongue against her teeth angrily. ‘I just said, didn’t I?’

‘They’re in the old war tunnel,’ Melek said, turning to look at Burak. He showed no reaction.

‘Where’s the war tunnel?’ Lox asked her.

‘It’s near Lambeth Bridge, in Keepers Street,’ Melek continued. ‘There’s a big manhole by the steps to the river. Just by that is another drain, a bigger one. It’s at the base of the steps. He keeps a padlock on it. If you can undo the padlock, there’s a rope just inside the grille, on the left, it’s fixed to the inside of the tunnel. You tie that around yourself and then you have to lower yourself down and into the tunnel. It’s narrow and it’s a long drop, but there are firearms and crates of machetes and drugs there. He sells from there. It’s safe, but hard to get in and out of.’

‘Where is the key to the padlock?’ Alysha asked her.

‘Harisha has it. He keeps it in his flat somewhere.’

‘I can pick it,’ Lox said.

Alysha nodded. ‘Yeah, you can pick anything, mate.’

‘Except a decent bloke,’ Tink teased.

‘Let him loose,’ Alysha said to Panther.

She turned back to Melek and looked at her. ‘Your fella is the lowest of the low, don’t you know that? He’s robbing old pensioners, and filling eight-year-olds with crack.’

‘And you are so much better, I suppose,’ Melek spat back. ‘If I don’t get Burak to hospital, he’s gonna die.’

‘We ain’t cut any arteries,’ Alysha told her. ‘An’ we only sell drugs to addicts, not to kids. An’ we look after the elderly on this estate, and help the addicts when they want it. So don’t you give me all your fucking lip.’ She held Melek’s angry eyes, then she said evenly, ‘Lower than your man ain’t born, you must know that. If you get fed up being pushed about, and want proper loyalty, we’re recruiting soldiers. But you’d have to pass a lot of tests, cos you’re well fucked up with that lot, an’ you’re the loser, believe me. So, till we’re sure of a soldier, they stay the enemy, got it?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Get them out of here,’ Alysha said to Panther.

Albert Wilkins was standing at the side of the window watching the goings on the estate grounds below his first floor flat. He was a nervy man in his early seventies, thin and small, with fine, thinning hair and astute, but frightened, blue eyes. He was holding back the frayed pink and yellow floral-patterned curtain that covered their lounge window. His fingers, nails bitten down to the quick, twitched nervously as he watched Melek Yismaz with Burak Kaya’s arm draped around her shoulders, practically dragging him across the estate grounds.

‘Someone out there looks as if he’s half dead,’ he shouted to his wife. ‘He’s bleeding like a pig in an abattoir. There’s a girl with him. Come and look, Vera! It looks as if she’s dragging him.’

‘None of our business,’ came the reply. ‘Less we see, less we know.’ Vera walked into the room and saw Albert looking out the window. ‘Get away from there before you’re seen! Get away, d’you hear? If someone’s dead, we don’t want to get involved.’

‘They can’t see me.’

‘They can, and they know who lives here.’ She raised her voice yet again. ‘Let the curtain go and move away from the window, will you, or they’ll come after us again.’

Albert ignored her. He pulled glasses from the pocket of his home-knitted cardigan, and pushed them on and moved in closer to the window.

‘I’ve seen them before. I know who that boy is.’

Vera hurried back into the kitchen.

‘It’s one of them Turkish boys,’ he shouted to her. ‘I don’t know which one, but it’s one of the ones that broke all your eggs when they tripped you up and you tore all your tights and grazed your legs. You know, when they stole your pension money and your keys.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Al! Less we know, the better. Who knows what any of them are capable of now? The police never sort anything and we can’t stand up for ourselves.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Al, please, leave the curtain be. They’ve got the car, just leave it be.’

‘He’s being dragged, or half carried, by that dark girl. And that’s blood, or I’m an elephant. It’s leaking all over the ground.’

There was a rattle of china teacups, but Vera didn’t answer.

Two

14:00 Monday

Georgia Johnson enjoyed the challenges of being a DI in South London. The murder department especially was always busy. In this area of London, gang warfare was fast accelerating, and shootings and stabbings over territory were becoming everyday occurrences. When a gang leader was sent down by the police, or taken out by a rival, another gang usually emerged, and the turf, the territory, was taken over. Often, some of the previous gang would reunite and fight for their old turf, which usually resulted in a lot of bloodshed.

Being black as well as female, in a force like the Met, still meant you had to work harder to prove your worth, despite all the race and gender equality pamphlets that were handed out at regular intervals within the department. Georgia ignored the jokes and remarks made at her expense, despite knowing she could pull any of those responsible into a disciplinary, but she chose to let the discrimination wash over her head. She’d joined the force to catch criminals, and she was doing well. She was quite young, at just over thirty, to have made DI, but her sights were set much higher. Murder investigations were all-consuming and usually exhausting, but the feeling of euphoria when her team had tracked and caught a killer, and she stood in court watching the families of the victims seeing justice done for their loved ones, knowing their own lives could move on because of it, was worth everything she had been through to catch that killer.

Georgia was strong and independent. Her Caribbean mother and her Indian father were both doctors, and her four siblings had followed suit; only her sister had also moved a little towards the world of crime, becoming a forensic biologist. Georgia was the youngest of the children. At one time she’d aspired to be a physiotherapist, but had changed her mind at fifteen, after the winter’s night when she walked home, at nine o’clock, across Clapham Common, disobeying her parents’ rule to never walk there alone in the dark. That fateful night changed her life.

The man that raped her could still be alive and free. Georgia had no idea who he was, although she would never forget his voice, or the words he spoke after he brutally stole her virginity. She had been too afraid of the consequences to ever tell anyone what had happened that night. Even all these years later she never spoke of it. There was no point, she thought. No evidence now. But the mental scars had never healed; and even all these years later, if she closed her eyes, she could still hear that voice, and feel her heart beating in terror as the memory of her knickers being torn from her young body jumped back into her brain. Then the reek of stale tobacco mixed with garlic would engulf her nostrils and the ghastly sensation of his foul tongue pushing into her mouth and his penis into her virgin body, as he grunted and bounced like a wild animal, clamping his hand over her mouth while his sweaty unshaven cheek rubbed back and forth over her breast. After he was done, his heavy fingers pinched into her cheeks and he spoke those words that were implanted in her mind: I will kill you, if you tell. I will know, and I will come after you, and then I will really hurt you.

He took her white knickers as a souvenir, pulling what was left of them from between her bare, bruised, and bleeding thighs and pushing them into his pocket, leaving her to get up from the filthy ground and limp home, bruised and terrified. Even now, if a prisoner had grubby nails, or a heavy buckle on the belt of his jeans, or smelled of stale tobacco, she had to go to the loo and wash her hands continually until the memory once again left her mind. Often just the sight of dust or dirt would start her hand-washing ritual. Working in the murder division meant she was constantly called out to dirty locations, derelict murder sites or the crime-ridden high-rise estates where gang stabbings and shootings were far too frequent. She had learned to deal with it. She kept disinfectant hand gel with her mobile phone, and never went out without either.

Having to constantly wash her hands she felt was a small price to pay for keeping people safe and London rid of criminals. Sometimes she resented being born a woman. But if she was a man, could she really do more? She didn’t think so, even if there were some in her department who would disagree. She trained constantly and kept herself in top condition, and could outrun any of the men in her squad. And she was afraid of no one. If someone broke the law, she went after them, and if their crime involved rape, then she was like a greyhound after the hare: on their trail, chasing hard. She’d never let up, not until the perpetrator was caught and charged.

Despite the terrifying ordeal of the rape, Georgia hadn’t shut herself off from sexual relationships. For her, intercourse was like a good massage, It helped her to focus, and unwind, particularly on demanding and difficult cases, but it could only happen in her own bed; she would never sleep in anyone else’s. And she chose her partners very carefully, never allowing any of them to get too close, though she kept the same ones. Currently there were three in her life, all very good friends as well as lovers, and chosen because she knew they wouldn’t get clingy or emotionally needy.

Sergeant Stephanie Green, Georgia’s close friend and confidante, always said Georgia didn’t get laid often enough, but then Stephanie had to bed at least one new man every week. Stephanie collected sexual conquests, she wanted as many as she could have, . . .