Hope

Book 0: Three Sisters

by Linda Calvey

Genres: Family Life; Sagas

Synopsis

Available to pre-order now! Don't miss the new gangland family saga novel from Linda Calvey, set in London's East End.


Hope has always felt the odd one out in her family.

Surrounded by strong and independent women who rule London's East End, she has struggled to find her place in the world. But she has a good head on her shoulders, and she realises that she can work in the gangs and brothels her family mix in by running the books. Injury and violence is not uncommon in her line of work, but when a punter ends up dead she must work with her sisters to bring out the best the East End has to offer to keep her family safe.

For fans of Kimberley Chambers and Martina Cole, Hope is a gritty, gripping and twisty new gangland thriller from the most authentic voice in crime fiction.

Release date: July 17, 2025

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

1994

‘Will the foreman of the jury please stand?’ asked the clerk of the court, presiding over a criminal case in one of London’s busy crown court rooms.

The jury of twelve hadn’t been deliberating for very long, and now they seemed reluctant to catch anybody’s eye. This might not bode well for the defendant.

A frisson of tension swept through the high-ceilinged courtroom, and there was a collective intake of breath and a brief shuffle of behinds on the wooden benches from almost everyone present.

Sisters Faith, the oldest, and Charity, the youngest of the three Wills sisters, glanced nervously at each other, and then at their mother, Maria, who was sitting between them.

Maria’s face – aside from the livid scar with plum-coloured, puckered skin on one side – was otherwise pale and tense, with a vein clearly fluttering above her eye nearest to Charity. Maria gripped the wooden balustrade before them all, perched high up in the public gallery, her knuckles showing white, and Charity heard the click of her mother’s swallow as she laid a hand on Maria’s thigh in comfort.

Faith looked then at the judge, a man with an unappealing jowly face, the tiniest wetly-purple mouth she thought she had ever seen, and what could only be described as a victorious glint in piggy eyes that glistened beneath the white horsehair of his full-bottomed wig. There was a red sash over his violet outer robe with its lilac facings.

Faith knew the sash was called a tippet and the fact it was scarlet indicated he was presiding over a criminal trial. But then she felt bad for thinking about this rather than what the jury’s foreman was about to say, which either way would be life-changing. She realised she hadn’t even heard the charge being read out to the jury by the clerk, a charge to which her sister Hope had pleaded not guilty.

‘Guilty,’ declared the foreman in a downbeat, deliberately serious voice, and Maria gave the tiniest squeak as she snatched a hand to her mouth.

The family knew they must keep quiet, otherwise the judge would insist they be escorted from the courtroom. He had explained this to them early on in the proceedings, in an extremely patronising way, which had rankled considering how well the Wills family knew their way around a courtroom.

Hope, the accused, and the middle Wills sister, stood defiantly in the dock, keeping her head high, eyes straight ahead and her expression deadpan. She was so still it was almost scary.

Her hair shone gunmetal black in its sharply angular bob that contrasted so vividly with her pale skin and blood-dark lipstick. She wore a tight-fitting suit. The jacket, with its bulky and extravagant shoulder pads and nipped-in waist above a flared peplum, accentuated the painfully snug fit of the pencil skirt. It was a striking look, even if the skirt was so tight it meant Hope had to go sideways to get either up or down any steps. Although Faith couldn’t see her sister’s shoes, she knew Hope would be wearing the highest and sharpest stilettos possible, most likely in a shiny patent, making her feet look minute.

Still, the raised dock looked very large and ominous for just Hope, even proud and erect as she was standing. Two prison officers were either side of her, but standing back in each far corner of the dock and looking more alert now than at any time previously in the proceedings. If Hope was going to kick off, now would be the time; this they knew from experience.

Hope’s barrister was on the courtroom floor far below her, closer to the judge, who was also raised aloft on his own dais, the barrister readjusting his black robe with a flounce as he tried and mostly failed to give an impression of confidence that he could argue his client’s sentence downwards, while the frown beneath the judge’s wig above him promised precisely the opposite.

Maria, Faith and Charity tried to send Hope messages of love and support with imploring eyes, but Hope continued to stare at the judge through narrowed and unblinking lashes, her eyebrows a straight line beneath her blunt fringe.

‘You may sit,’ the judge told her, and Hope made sure that she took her time lowering herself onto the seat, her stony expression unfaltering as she made the whole court wait for her to be ready to hear what the judge had to say.

The judge seemed unnerved by Hope’s unbowed demeanour, if the small wobble to his voice was anything to go by. After he cleared his throat he then announced, ‘I will hear mitigating circumstances from counsel, and I believe reports are ready for me today.’

He turned then to the side of the court, and said, ‘You, the jury, are excused – thank you. The case before you was full of shocking behaviour for you to examine, and I am sorry about that, but I am glad you followed my guidance and interpretation of the law that it was an open-and-shut case.’

The Wills family exchanged pained glances. In their opinion the judge’s summing up and instruction to the jury had been biased against Hope and most unfair, and they were convinced he had stretched the letter of the law shamefully in the prosecution’s favour. Innocent until proven guilty hadn’t seemed to enter his thoughts.

After the jury had been escorted out of court through their own side door, Hope’s barrister did what he could in outlining various points of mitigation, but the judge’s expression made it clear to all that he wasn’t going to be deterred from his initial thoughts, with the expectation clear that sentencing was going to be hefty.

But before he got to this, the reports from social services and a psychological evaluation that had been prepared prior to trial were handed to the judge. He read them meticulously, and painfully slowly.

‘Stand up,’ he demanded at last, pulling his tortoiseshell reading spectacles from his large nose as Hope and her barrister got once more to their feet. Hope’s unblinking gaze had never wavered from the judge since she had sat down.

‘You have been found guilty by a jury taken from your peers of one of the most heinous crimes, that of . . .’ he paused dramatically ‘. . . conspiracy. To. Murder,’ the judge told Hope, emphasising the word ‘murder’.

Most pantomime dames would have baulked at the judge’s weighting of his words in this way, thought more than one person watching the proceedings.

Hope made very sure she responded to the judge with as bored an expression as she could muster, and she jutted out a hip as she adjusted her weight on her needle-sharp heels.

The judge paused and reordered the papers before him, and then he declared, ‘And as a result of your actions that have now been proven in this court, a person lost their life. That is a tragedy, a matter of the utmost seriousness.

‘Therefore, as a lesson to others that they should under no circumstances behave as you have, I have no choice but to sentence you to a prison term of eight years, with the recommendation that you serve the full sentence.

‘I would remind you that in the case of poor behaviour in prison by yourself in any criminal sense, it is possible you could be brought back to court on subsequent charges and your sentence further extended. So it is to your advantage to accept with good grace this lengthy prison sentence and to tell yourself you will keep to yourself and demonstrate exemplary behaviour while you are inside. And I recommend that you should spend your time considering your poor conduct and deeds, and the bad choices you have made in life. You have not been the sort of person who right-minded members—’ Hope allowed a small, sly smile to lift one side of her mouth at the judge’s use of the word ‘members’, his rapid double-blink in answer, showing that he regretted this unintended double entendre ‘—of society want around them.’

Maria and her two daughters in the public seats thought they heard Hope exhale a snort of defiance. Certainly, she didn’t look the least ashamed or embarrassed over the judge’s deliberate attempt to shame her so publicly. That wasn’t to say that Hope didn’t think murder was a serious business, as after what had happened to her grandmother, she knew this wasn’t the case. It was more that Hope thought the case brought against her was ridiculous.

‘Take her down,’ the judge snapped.

And as Hope was escorted down the steps to the underground holding cells, she held the judge’s eye until the very last moment as he frowned threateningly back at her.

As the taut tension in the courtroom relaxed once Hope was out of sight, the clerk said, ‘Court rise,’ and then everyone got to their feet. The self-important judge huffed as, laboriously, he rose upright and then bowed in the direction of the barristers, before he left through a door in the wall behind his grand seat that looked a bit like a throne.

As people began to make their way out of the courtroom, Lisa, Maria’s good friend, leaned around Charity and said what they were all thinking. ‘Appeal!’ Lisa’s own family was so close in all senses to the Wills family these days, as they had split a huge house in Cadogan Terrace in Hackney into flats, and they were all now heavily intertwined with one another.

And then Big Danny, Lisa’s husband and something of a gangland kingpin in east London, poked his head forward from where he stood on the far side of Lisa, dwarfing everyone by his bulk, as he added, ‘Credit where credit’s due. Our Hope acquitted herself well through that, not a chink in her armour. She’s got some nerve, Maria, and she does you and the rest of us proud. She can hold her head up high.’

With an exhausted sigh, Maria gave a small nod.

Big Danny was right, she supposed. But Hope should never have been convicted. Hope wasn’t an angel, but then the rest of them weren’t either, except maybe Faith. In any case, none of them deserved to be linked to murder.

Not if they hadn’t pulled the trigger, or plunged in the knife.

Murder was a despicable crime, Maria whole-heartedly believed, still raw after what had happened close to the arches on the Isle of Dogs.

But murder should never be weaponised against an innocent party.

And none of the Wills party believed for a moment – not a single instant even – that Hope had had anything to do with what she had just been sent to prison for.

It was all so wrong.

Very, very wrong indeed.

One year and a bit earlier . . .

Annie Wills’ funeral wasn’t going to be forgotten easily by anyone who was there. It was the first funeral Faith, Hope and Charity – and Maria too – had been to, and the horse-drawn hearse, with the black feathered plumes aquiver at each horse’s poll, had sent the girls’ grandmother off in style, with many people standing with their heads bowed on the Stepney streets as the funeral procession passed by.

To nobody’s surprise, Maria went through it all in something of a daze.

But then she had held her mother’s body as Annie’s lifeblood pulsed to the fading beat of her heart onto Maria’s lap and then sluiced into the gutter in a seedy street close to the arches on the Isle of Dogs. The stab wound Maria’s punter had made with the knife when her mother Annie tried to protect Maria from his vicious assault looked so disconcertingly small.

But Maria had understood immediately that Annie was dying as her blood felt thick and warm – too thick and too warm for any inconsequential injury – as it saturated Maria’s skirt and stickily dripped over her legs to the dusty tarmac.

Faith, Hope and Charity knew how traumatised their mother was, as for days Maria had barely been able to eat or drink, and then she had howled uncontrollably when Joyce – Maria and Annie’s saviour when they’d fled Wakefield for London in the Swinging Sixties all those years earlier – quickly became terminally ill after Annie’s death, having hid her lung cancer for as long as she could. But Joyce running to help had damaged her fragile lungs beyond repair, and so Maria’s attacker had in effect killed two women in their sixties that same day, as Joyce was laid to rest a fortnight after Annie’s death.

But it was at Annie’s funeral, that a distinguished grey-haired man in an expensive suit stood solemnly to one side of the church. He didn’t seem to know anyone there. Other than Maria, Faith noticed.

Seeing their mother allow him to stand close by and talk quietly into her ear, with his hand laid on her back in comfort, and Maria not seeming tense or standoffish as she always was with any man who seemed to be taking liberties felt, in Faith’s opinion, extraordinary.

Of course, Maria knew thousands of men from over twenty-five years of streetwalking life, but she always took care they understood at all times that the deal was they remained punters and she was simply a prostitute who temporarily serviced their sexual needs, and nothing more or less than that on either side. Indeed Maria was known in the sex worker community for always making it crystal clear that a few minutes of vanilla sex was as far as it was ever going to go, and never once deviating from that. Her daughters had always found this firm stance somehow reassuring.

The Wills sisters glanced at each other in puzzlement when the grey-haired man’s words seemed to comfort Maria, and after a few moments, she seemed relatively eager to speak with him.

Faith, especially, couldn’t stop watching, and when Maria said something to him that made him look penetratingly towards Faith, she felt her heart bump in some sort of recognition, although she couldn’t have explained quite why this was.

After the funeral, as they waited back at their house in Senrab Street for Annie’s wake to begin, Faith stared at herself in the mirror above the living-room fireplace. And then she realised deep within her, perhaps as far inside as her bones, something she was absolutely sure of.

It was that this grey-haired man – who had a strong sense of authority about him – and she were connected in a way that didn’t apply to Hope and Charity. The longer Faith gazed at her reflection, the more she could see the face of this man looking back at her.

Maria saw what Faith was doing, and the answering expression in her mother’s eyes as the first guests arrived at the wake told Faith her instincts were correct. If this man wasn’t her father, he must be her grandfather, and then Maria confirmed he was indeed Faith’s grandfather.

A slew of questions ambushed Faith, but the worn-out expression on her mother’s face made Faith bite them back. And she heard herself say to Maria that for now Annie’s wake was paramount, and they owed it to Granny to give her a good send-off. Maria’s grateful smile in answer stayed in Faith’s mind for a very long time.

For none of Maria’s daughters knew who their fathers were.

Faith had worked out a long time ago that her own father was something to do with when Annie and Maria lived in Wakefield. Faith knew too that Wakefield was where Maria had received her dreadful injuries to her face in an attack so severe it was a miracle she hadn’t been blinded.

But it had never quite added up – Maria would have been sixteen when she birthed Faith, and Faith knew that Annie, although a sex worker herself, would never have countenanced Maria selling her body at such a tender age.

Annie had mentioned on a couple of occasions that she and Maria had had to run away from Wakefield, and if a kindly doctor hadn’t given them forty pounds on the night Maria’s face was slashed, they would have arrived in London with nothing other than the clothes they stood up in. Joyce had taken them in and, with the help of her church and the kindly Father O’Reilly, had guided them to a new life. Both Annie and Maria had claimed that their biggest bit of luck was being housed by the council right next door to Lisa and Big Danny, Big Danny letting it be known that the Wills family was under his protection now. And nobody messed with Big Danny.

Growing up, the three girls hardly noticed the still-jagged, dark and obscene scars that puckered the whole of one side of Maria’s face and made her eye grotesque as it watered constantly below a gnarly scar that puckered her eyebrow wildly.

At secondary school things altered. It wasn’t easy being the girls with a mother so badly disfigured facially that she was known far and wide in the local community, to the point that people occasionally shouted at Maria in the street, or made fun of her as she walked by.

But as time passed and Maria got used to how she looked, although she never stopped hating each whorl and flare of her scars, she began to make sure to hold her head up high and never look away when anyone stared rudely.

The days of her hiding or downplaying her injuries slowly became a thing of the past. And as for earning a living as a whore, shame on anybody who looked down on her, her square shoulders screamed silently. Indeed, it was never far from anybody’s thoughts that the chances were the husbands of those snooty women who thought her no good were probably regular buyers of Maria’s time.

And gradually the three girls learned not to feel ashamed of their mother, nor how she earned a living as a streetwalker serving grubby, needy men.

The reality was that Maria’s scars proved popular with a very particular sort of man, she was disgusted to find, but she learned to tune out their groans of excitement as they ran their rancid fingers or rough tongues over the bulbous scar tissue on her cheek, always dampened by a salty tear from her injured eye as they pounded away.

Street prostitutes had a long history of enduring immense dangers, unprotected by the police and the authorities, let alone the criminal underclass on the streets in which they plied their trade, and so Annie and Maria tried to look out for and protect each other as best they could.

Their luck had finally run out, that balmy summer afternoon a client of Maria’s viciously stabbed Annie to death when she tried to pull him away from hurting Maria.

Faith, Hope and Charity were horrified at what had happened.

But none of them had been surprised.

In fact they’d always half expected this outcome. They’d never known if it would be their granny or their mother who’d pay the price of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man.

Still, before Maria and Faith could have the discussion Faith longed for about her birth father, first Charity and then Hope threw spanners in the works that immediately diverted everybody’s attention.

And nobody had been expecting either of those crises.

But that was sisters, wasn’t it? Always ready to surprise and grab the spotlight for themselves.

It was as they sat round the lavish dining table at Christmas six months after Annie’s funeral when Charity broke down, nearby Christmas tree lights giving her tears a jewelled quality that would have made them pretty, had Charity clearly not been so obviously desperately sad and upset.

But their Christmas Day had started out so differently.

Now that his business interests (although the Wills family liked to joke about his empire) – ‘many fingers in many pies’, was how Big Danny liked to describe the ways he made his money, or ‘a bit of this, a bit of that, anything as long as it’s under the table’ – were doing well and he had a bit of cash to flash, Big Danny had insisted he was treating them all to a fa. . .