Fogarty: A City of London Thriller Read Online Free Page A

qualified as a midwife and found a job at St Thomas’ Hospital. Roy was besotted by his fiery red headed wife, and was himself a hard working steel worker who spent his life erecting tower blocks in Greater London, both then and now. In 1969 they had moved out of their two-up two-down terraced house in East London when May Finnegan transferred to the North London Maternity Unit. As a key worker she was offered a brand new flat, with central heating, in the recently constructed Broadwater Farm Estate, an experimental high-density social housing project. The estate, soon to become known to locals as ‘The Farm’, straddled the River Moselle and was close to the Lordship Recreation ground. With brand new accommodation and so much green space, the area seemed idyllic after living in an old and seriously deteriorating East End terraced house. The flat wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but with a proper bathroom, central heating and plenty of space it seemed like a palace to the Fogartys.
    The problems for the Trafalgar House Flats residents began when houses in the other crime-ridden parts of the capital were demolished wholesale and the tenants were decanted to the burgeoning new tower blocks springing up in the suburbs. Before long the whole estate had been controlled by Morris ‘the nail’ Gibson, one of the Kray twins’ former enforcers who shared the Krays’ love of violence. His nickname derived from the time he, notoriously, nailed a police informer to the floor of a warehouse as punishment for grassing. He had been out of jail for only two years and was allegedly reformed when he joined his wife in their new home in the flats. By 1975 he oversaw most of the crime in North London from his fiefdom on the ‘estate’. By 1981, half of the men from Trafalgar House were in jail and so most of the flats were occupied by old lags’ wives who spent their weekends trudging the kids across London to Wormwood Scrubs, Brixton or Wandsworth prisons to visit their dads.
    As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Morris’ health began to fail him , and a few of his lieutenants began jostling for position so that they would be well placed to take over the manor when he passed. Dennis Grierson was one such lieutenant, perhaps the most violent. When he was only fifteen, Dennis Grierson had attacked a fifty year-old man who had just left the betting shop, stealing his one hundred and fifty pounds in winnings. Long after the man fell into unconsciousness Grierson kept laying into him in a mad frenzy, a crime which had earned him a place in a secure hospital for four years. Luckily for Grierson the man didn’t die, and his temporary insanity plea was accepted, and so he avoided a life sentence. His mother went to her grave pleading his innocence and expressing disbelief that her lovely son could be convicted by the court when her boy had so “...obviously been set up by the filth...”, her less than complimentary reference to the police. When Grierson was released he went straight back to Trafalgar House, where he took over his old dad’s flat and married sixteen year old Patricia Mooney, a skinny girl who looked no older than twelve. Proudly bearing the nickname ‘Psycho’, he maintained a low profile and ran the girls and drugs for Morris Gibson.
    Now, aged twenty-seven, he was about to become a father, but not with his wife Pat. A year earlier, Psycho had taken a fancy to a young schoolgirl by the name of Siobhan Fogarty. She was barely fourteen , but she reminded him of his wife before she had become ‘old and fat’. His wife was a size fourteen and only twenty two years old, but she had fleshed out in the six years they had been married and now had the shape of a well developed woman, and that didn’t satisfy Den’s deviant tastes. From the day she turned thirteen, Psycho plied the innocent Siobhan with drink and drugs, despite empty threats of retribution from her father, and forced the girl into unprotected sex