Baby Love Read Online Free

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    She peered through the windscreen, half-expecting to see animals in pairs forming an orderly queue outside the nearest ark. What she saw was an ugly, graffiti-scarred, derelict high-rise. Tennyson Tower’s smashed windows and rusty grilles
dominated an ominous gunmetal sky. She lowered her sights. Blake Way? Was that the one off Keats Avenue? They all looked the naffing same to her: mean streets of redbrick council semis, with scrubby front gardens and grotty nets at grimy windows.
    She took a right into Coleridge Drive. And what joker had come up with the names? Poor sodding poets would be turning in their urns, Grecian or otherwise. As for daffodils, you’d be lucky to spot one in March, never mind a bunch in
mid-November.
    Blake Way? Why’s it ringing a bell?
    A bunch of hoodies, on the other hand: you’d be spoilt for choice. There was one lot now, hanging round the chip shop. The little shits gave her the finger as she cruised past: synchronised obscenity. Class. She’d nicked one of the
bastards for dealing a few months back. Not a hand of poker.
    She tapped her fingers on the wheel. The asbo kids and druggies round here were responsible for a significant portion of south Birmingham’s crime figures. Cops nationally took sixty-six thousand complaint calls every day, three every four
seconds. Bev reckoned most of them hailed from the Wordsworth. Low-level stuff, mostly: muggings, intimidation, verbal abuse, music blaring all hours.
    But it didn’t always stop there. Shootings were on the increase and kids carried blades like old women carried handbags. It was a miracle there weren’t more killings. Bad news for the handful of decent law-abiding families who still lived
on the estate, clinging like hairs round a scummy sink. God knows what their quality of life was like. Stuff anti-social orders; give the sleaze-balls a good kicking.
    The car was steamed up as well. Bev opened the window a touch, letting in faint traces of cabbage and curry. She opened it a tad wider and caught a whiff of dog shit.
    Why does it always rain on me?
    Closure came quickly along with a generous squirt of Opium, a present from Oz in the days he still bought her things. Blake Way? Of course. Maxine Beck. The guv wouldn’t do that to her, would he? She’d find out soon enough; it was next
left, opposite a patch of wasteland laughingly known as The Green. Yeah, right. How green is my valley of rotting bin bags and rusting bike frames?
    Bev’s wry smile vanished as she spotted a police car straddling the kerb a few doors up and Les King having a crafty smoke huddled on the doorstep of number thirteen. Thank you so much, guv.
    Someone should tell that Travis. If it’s only raining, why’s he whinging?
    Maxine Beck had been one of Bev’s first collars. Over the years, she’d taken the silly cow in more times than laundry. Shoplifting, soliciting, scamming the social, you name the pie and Maxine’s digit was in it up
to the knuckle. More often than not some bloke would have pushed it in on her behalf. Maxine was a looker, not a thinker: sexy, sensual and borderline stupid, apart from the odd flash of acuity. Women’s lib had never hit her pretty radar. She
needed a man like a fish needs fins. Generally she landed sharks.
    Maxine had been cautioned, fined and given a suspended sentence or four but never served a custodial. Until she took off on a two-week jaunt to the sun with her then lover-boy piranha, leaving her daughter, Natalie, to sink or swim. The kid was ten
years old at the time. Maxine swore she’d made childcare arrangements but either they fell through or were a figment of her lack of imagination. Whatever. The kid was lucky to pull through after going down with what turned into double pneumonia.
Natalie Beck went straight from home alone to intensive care. Bev made damn sure Maxine went down: the sentence was six months in Holloway.
    WPC Morriss – as Bev then was – received a good deal of correspondence from