Faith - Lesley Pearse [9]
A splintering sound, quickly followed by her mother’s scream, woke her later. For a moment she thought it was a burglar, but when she heard her father swear and make a dash down the passage to the kitchen and the back door, she realized it had to be the police.
All at once there was angry shouting from both front and back doors. Ivy and Meggie woke up and their alarmed cries added to the tumult. Clearly her father had been caught, for there were thuds and scuffles as the police hauled him back up the passage past her bedroom door.
‘What are they doing to Daddy?’ Meggie asked, clinging to Laura in alarm.
‘It’s only his friends having a drink with him,’ Laura lied.
The police often came here for her father, but they had never broken in like this before, or come at night. In fact when she was little she thought they really were her dad’s friends because they just sat and talked to him. Even on the occasions when they took him away in a police car, it had never been frightening, and mostly Dad was back within a few hours, making jokes about it.
But it was really scary now. She could hear furniture being overturned; Mum was crying and Dad was bawling and swearing. Then she heard one of the police shout at her father to tell them where the gun was or he’d rip the flat apart.
Terrified, Laura grabbed her little sisters tightly and pulled the covers over their heads. But heavy boots tramped down the passage again, this time into her brothers’ room, and judging by the sounds from there, they were ransacking it.
‘I don’t know where it came from,’ she heard Mark shout a few minutes later. ‘It ain’t nothin’ to do with me.’
Laura assumed that meant the police had found a gun in their room, and clutched her little sisters even tighter into her arms. Freddy was bawling his head off in the front room, her mother was shouting abuse at the police, and again and again she heard scuffling as if her father was trying to fight them.
Suddenly the light in her room snapped on. ‘Come on out, girls,’ a big policeman with a red face said as he pulled the covers off them. ‘We need to search in here too.’
With Ivy in her arms and Meggie clinging around her waist, Laura watched helplessly as the two policemen pulled the mattress up and looked under the bed, dragging out old toys, colouring books and bits of rubbish. They knocked over Ivy’s potty as they were doing it, and the pee ran all across the lino.
What’s this?’ one of the policemen said, pulling out a shoe box tied up with string.
‘I don’t know,’ Laura said truthfully, for she hadn’t seen it before.
The man cut the string with a pocket knife and opened it, and to Laura’s shock it was full of banknotes.
She gasped, for she’d never seen so much money in her life. A ten pound note was a rare sight to her, but this was bundles of tens and twenties, and as the box was stuffed with them, there had to be hundreds of pounds.
‘Who put this here?’ the red-faced man asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ Laura said again, and suddenly she felt as though she was going to be sick. ‘I didn’t know it was there.’
‘Don’t you lie to me,’ he said, coming right up to her and bending so he could look straight into her eyes. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve and three-quarters,’ she replied.
‘That’s old enough to know what’s right and wrong,’ he said. ‘Tell me when your dad put it here.’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him put it there.’ She began to cry then. ‘It could have been there for weeks. That’s all old stuff under there.’
The policeman ordered her back into the bed and left the room with the box in his hands, and suddenly the commotion and angry raised voices subsided. Laura couldn’t hear what was being said because Freddy was crying so loudly, but she thought she heard her mother pleading with the police. Unable to bear it any longer, she got out of bed, just in time to see her father, Mark and Paul all being led out of the front door in handcuffs.
‘You can’t take the boys,’ her mother sobbed. ‘They’re only kids – look how frightened they are!’
Laura had never seen the boys