from the look of them. They wore blue shorts, pink halter tops, and white cowboy boots with rhinestone decoration, and one of them carried a sequined baton.
She used this to bop her little brother on the head.
Brucie screamed. He flew to the attack, hurtling past his mother and catching his sister in the midriff. His jaws locked over her arm.
"Wha' is it?" Mrs. Ruddock appeared not to notice the shrieking and scuffling that was going on behind her as the other sister endeavoured to disengage Brucie's teeth from her sibling's arm.
The two girls began yelling, "Mum! Make him stop!" Mrs. Ruddock continued to ignore them.
"You looking for my Trevor?" She looked old and tired, with washed-out blue eyes and lank bottle-blonde hair that she'd tied away from her face with a purple shoe lace.
Barbara introduced herself and dangled her warrant card before the woman's face.
"Scotland Yard CID. I'd like a word with Trevor. Is he home?"
Mrs. Ruddock seemed to stiffen even as she reached for a feathering of loosened hair and tucked it behind her ear. "What d'you want with my Trevor? He i'n't in trouble. He's a good boy."
The three wrangling children behind her lurched into the wall. A picture above them crashed to the floor. A man's voice yelled from upstairs. "Jesus! Can't a bloke sleep round here?
Shirl! Jesus! What're they on to?"
"You! That's enough!" Mrs. Ruddock grabbed Brucie by the collar of the jacket he wore.
She grabbed his sister by a handful of hair. All three children howled. "Enough!" she shouted.
"She hit me!"
"He bit me!"
"Shirl! Shut them up!"
"Now you've gone and waked your dad up, haven't you?" Mrs. Ruddock said, giving the warring parties a good shake. "You get into the kitchen, all three of you. Stella, there's ice lollies in the fridge. See everyone gets one."
The promise of a treat seemed to mollify the three children. They trotted as one in the direction from which their mother had come. Above their heads, someone's feet thudded across the floorboards. A man cleared his throat violently and hawked with enough force to make Barbara wonder if he was engaging in a do-it-yourself tonsillectomy. She couldn't understand how he'd possibly been asleep in the first place prior to her arrival. At a committed volume, a rap group was chanting about Gettin it, doin it, havin it, WOE-man.
And in competition with this, two regulars were having a heads together about some floozy on Coronation Street, and at a roar that left nothing to the imagination.
"Not exactly trouble," Barbara said. "I have just a few questions to ask him."
"About what? Trev gave back them jars of whatever-it-was. Okay, so we sold a few 'fore the coloureds caught on, but it's not like they really missed the money. He's rolling in beans, that Akram Malik. You seen where they live, the lot 'f them?"
"Is Trevor here?" Barbara was striving for patience but with the sun bearing down on her, what little she had was evaporating quickly.
Mrs. Ruddock favoured her with a marginally hostile look, apparently realising that her words were making little impression. She shouted,
"Stella!" over her shoulder, and when the older of the two girls returned from the kitchen with an ice lolly plugged into the centre of her mouth, she went on with "Take her up to Trev. And tell Charlie to turn down that racket while you're at it."
"Mum ..." Stella's whine made the appellation two syllables, a difficult feat to manage round the ice lolly, but she looked like a girl who was up to any challenge.
"Do it!" Mrs. Ruddock barked.
Stella removed the ice lolly from her mouth and blew out a breath that flapped her lips together noisily. "Come on, then," she said, and began to trudge up the stairs.
Barbara felt Mrs. Ruddock's inimical gaze following her as she walked in the trail of Stella's clomping white cowboy boots. It was clear that no matter what offence had caused Trevor to lose his job at the mustard factory, it was no offence to his mum.
The guilty party himself was in one of the two bedrooms on the first floor of the house.
The raucous chanting of rap music throbbed right through the door. Stella opened this unceremoniously, but six inches only because something hanging above it seemed to prevent its further movement. She shouted, "Charlie! Mum says you're s'posed to turn that the fuck down!" She said to Barbara over her shoulder, "He's in here ^64. if you want him," as Mr. Ruddock shouted from behind the other