She shrugged. ‘Don’t know really. Thought it made me look tough. Did it first because I wanted to brag about being in a fight. I was going up to high school. I wanted everybody to see I was tough as well. People got scared of me, and I liked that. You’ve got be a bit scary to live here, Hannah. So I did it again. And they thought I was in more fights, thought I carried a knife. Tough wee Wizzie.’ She turned to face me. ‘Look at the size of me, Hannah.’
She was so tiny and thin, yet, tiny as she was, she had managed to make people afraid of her. The scars were a big part of that. Wizzie’s secret. I knew it at last.
‘I’m this size and people are scared of me. I like it.’ She sighed. ‘Or I did. I thought I wanted to be one of them.’ She nodded somewhere into the estate, where the Black Widows were maybe still being chased by the rats. Hopefully being eaten by them. ‘I always thought I wanted to be a Black Widow.’ She said it almost to herself. ‘Some ambition, eh?’
‘Are you going to tell on them, Wizzie?’
She looked shocked. ‘Grass? You’ve got to be joking. I’ve got to live here. Everybody hates a grass.’ Her face changed. The bright and cheeky look disappeared. She looked suddenly vulnerable. ‘I’d never grass on them, and they know it.’
I never thought I’d see Wizzie scared of anybody. But she was scared now. I didn’t blame her. I thought of that girl’s knife and I was scared too.
‘But if you don’t everybody’ll go on thinking it was you.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It was my fault anyway. I should take the blame,’ Wizzie said softly. ‘I told them about Erin.’ She looked at me. ‘But I swear I didn’t know they would do this, Hannah. Nothing like this.’
I believed her. Wizzie could never think up something so evil. And I couldn’t blame Wizzie. It was all my fault. I’d gone straight from one gang right into another – for revenge. All I’d thought about, talked about, was revenge.
‘Come on,’ Wizzie said. ‘Don’t want to miss your train. You might have to stay here for the night!’
‘Heaven forbid!’ I laughed.
‘I’ll walk you back to the station.’
We stood on the platform as the train pulled in. ‘Will they come after you again?’
The cheeky look was back, the ‘I’m afraid of nothing’ look I couldn’t help but admire. ‘My family’s pretty tough. I’ll be OK,’ Wizzie said. ‘They know I won’t grass on them. That’s all they care about.’ She grinned at me. ‘What made you come looking for me anyway?’
I had almost forgotten. I told her about Heather and how her confession had made me feel. ‘I kept thinking, if one person had believed me it would have made all the difference. It made me realise maybe that was all you needed as well. Somebody to believe you.’
Then she gave me the best compliment ever Wizzie could give. ‘You, Hannah Driscoll,’ she said, poking at me with her finger, ‘are the best mate anybody could want.’
I was smiling as I stepped on to the train. ‘How are you going to get home?’
Wizzie nodded to the Chinese takeaway outside the station. ‘My brother works there. I’ll let him walk me home. He’s a penny short of a pound, but nobody messes with my bro.’ She said it with pride. ‘He’ll look after me.’
The train doors were about to close. ‘We can’t let them get away with it, Wizzie,’ I said.
Wizzie shook her head. ‘I can’t grass on them. I won’t. I’ll take the blame before I do that.’
And she would too. She would risk all the trouble in the world. And she would take all the blame on herself so the rest of the Hell Cats wouldn’t be involved. She’d do all this, rather than grass on the Black Widows.
It was up to me, I decided. ‘You can’t grass, Wizzie,’ I said. ‘But I can.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
I’m going to be watching over my shoulder for a long time to come. The Black Widows don’t give up easily. They say they’re going to get me. But after I told the police what I knew, it was easy for them to prove the Black Widows were the ones who set fire to Erin’s flat. Seems they’d done the same thing before to girls who had got on the wrong side of them. Added to that, they had another grudge against the Brodies. It turned out that Erin’s brother, Calum, had ditched one of them. She was the one who broke down and told the police the whole story. In fact it was a double confession. They’d mugged the old woman too.
So, with any luck, I won’t have to be involved in any trial.