She hadn’t found his disparaging remarks remotely funny.
Not for the first time, she wondered why she continually put herself in danger. The answer, of course, was as simple as it was obvious: money and the promise of free drugs. God knew she needed as much as she could get of both. What she raked in from being on the game was never enough; nor was the extra income she cobbled together from a doing bit of random shoplifting or robbing the female Vietnamese DVD sellers who floated through the area every now and again.
Besides, that could be dangerous; the last woman she’d tried to turn over had brought a minder with her, and the fucker had chased Angela down the road with a meat cleaver.
She knew Garston didn’t give a toss if anything happened to her. In his eyes, she was a worthless, expendable whore. She hated the way that he looked down his nose at her as if she had willingly ended up as a drug addict, like it was a career choice or something – not that he was the only one who did that; the police, her punters, the staff at the needle exchange, even the pious little nurse practitioner who performed free health checks at The Sutton Mission, they all looked at her the same way.
When she’d been younger, Angela had been as full of dreams and aspirations as any other kid, but life was fucking cruel, and sometimes it forced you down a path you would rather have avoided.
She hadn’t even reached puberty the first time that her step-father skulked into her bedroom during the middle of the night. What he had forced her to do after quietly closing the door and slipping into bed beside her had made her young skin crawl. Afterwards, as she lay there sobbing, he warned her not to say anything, that no one would ever believe her, and that she would only get into trouble for making things up – and he had been right. Her alcoholic mother had been more interested in the contents of a gin bottle than her daughter’s welfare, and when, after weeks of inner turmoil, Angela eventually found the courage to tell her, she dismissed her accusations of abuse as the malicious ramblings of a spiteful girl who just wanted to cause trouble for her family.
When Angela timidly broached the subject again, a couple of weeks later, the woman who had bought her into this world, and who was supposed to love and protect her, had given her a severe beating for making up stories. Angela had kept quiet after that, choosing to suffer the repulsive nocturnal visits in silence rather than risk her drunken mother’s wrath again.
At school, her behaviour had gradually deteriorated; she became disruptive in class and repeatedly got into fights with other children, often over the most trivial things. Her teachers came to consider her a problem child, a delinquent, and they were quite happy when she started bunking off.
By that stage, Angela had come to feel totally isolated; she was all alone in the world, with no one to turn to and no one to help her. As soon as she reached sixteen, she had run away from a home that felt more like a prison and started sleeping rough. It was better than living with the constant fear of being raped; the indescribable dread that every night time noise heralded the approach of a man she loathed and detested with every fibre of her being.
One evening, as she was walking through the park on her way to a squat she had started dossing down at, she was approached by a local dealer who offered her a freebie. He promised that the magic chemicals would bring contentment and happiness; a brief respite from the pain and misery that was her day-to-day life.
With nothing to lose, Angela had given the Golden Brown a try. Getting hooked had been that simple.
The second sample the dealer had supplied her with had also been free, but not the third. Having reeled her in, he was now demanding cold hard cash in exchange for his merchandise. Angela didn’t have any money, but she needed the gear, so she nicked some electrical goods from a nearby Woolworth store and swapped them for the smack.
Shoplifting financed her fourth and fifth purchases as well, but by then the store guards had grown wise to her and had barred her from most of the local shops.
On the sixth occasion that she sought out her dealer, she hadn’t had any drugs for a few days, and she was clucking badly. It was a horrible new experience, as unpleasant in its own way as the abuse she had suffered from her step-father. She was desperate for a fix when she met up with him, and with no other means of paying for it, she had performed oral sex in exchange for heroin. It had been the first step down a very slippery slope. That had been a lifetime ago, but she still relived the horrors every night in her dreams and she suspected that she always would.
Tearing her mind away from the past, Angela glanced up and down the road again, flinching as the wind lashed at her face.
According to an advert she’d found in the local Yellow Pages, the funeral parlour Horace Cribbins worked for closed at six p.m. It was only a few minutes’ walk from there to his house, so why was she still stuck out in the cold at a quarter-past, desperate for a piss, and still waiting for
