Survivor: Only the strongest will remain standing . . .

by Roberta Kray

  Mal shrugged. ‘It’s only a few weeks until they break up for Christmas. She can start in the New Year.’

  Esther folded her arms across her chest and went to stand by the window. Anger made her shoulders tight. ‘You’ve got no right to do this,’ she said. ‘It isn’t fair. This is my house too and I should have a say in who lives in it.’

  ‘You’ll hardly notice she’s here. No one’s asking you to be her mother or to play happy families. It isn’t like that. I’m simply her guardian, taking care of her until she’s old enough to take care of herself.’

  Esther looked back over her shoulder. ‘There isn’t any simply about it. What do you even know about this girl? I mean, other than that her mother threw herself off a high-rise block of flats? And what sort of problems do you think that’s going to cause long term? The kid’s going to be damaged. You might not see it now, but it’s going to be there.’

  ‘All the more reason to take her in.’ Mal didn’t mention the fact that Angela probably wasn’t even Lolly’s mother. Or that Lolly had recently been involved in a murder investigation. Esther held enough prejudices already without him adding to them. ‘She needs some stability in her life.’

  Esther barked out a laugh. ‘Stability? And you think she’s going to get that here?’

  ‘Why not?’ he retorted. ‘It has to be better than being in care.’

  ‘You won’t be saying that when she’s sneaking around behind your back, dating boys and getting into trouble.’

  ‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll come to it. There isn’t any doubt about that.’

  Mal pulled a face. ‘You haven’t even met her and already you’ve written her off. Why can’t you give the girl a chance?‘

  ‘She’s of no interest to me. I’ve made my feelings clear. It’s up to you what you do about it.’

  ‘I won’t be doing anything. The girl’s staying, end of story. I’m not offering her a home, a future, and then snatching it away again.’

  Esther rounded on him, storming over to the desk. ‘You had no damn right to offer it in the first place. This isn’t a bloody orphanage. How many more are you planning on bringing in? Three, four? Why not make it a round ten?’

  ‘Just Lolly,’ he said. ‘I think she deserves a break.’

  ‘And what I think doesn’t matter?’

  Mal gave her a faint smile. ‘Of course it matters, sweetheart. It just isn’t going to change anything.’

  ‘Don’t you sweetheart me, you patronising bastard.’ Esther crossed the room, opened the silver box on the table, took out a cigarette, put it in her mouth and lit it. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ Realising it wasn’t a battle she was going to win, she inhaled and expelled the smoke in a long resentful stream. ‘I won’t forget it.’

  ‘You never forget anything. That list of grudges must be getting pretty long by now.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’

  Mal raised his arms in a mock gesture of surrender. He studied his wife while she glared into the middle distance. She always smoked like she was on set, her right hand bent back at the wrist, elegantly poised as if waiting for the director to say Action!

  ‘Don’t expect me to take an interest in her. She’s your responsibility, no one else’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘All I’m asking is for you to be civil to her.’

  ‘Civil?’ she echoed, her lips curling into a sardonic smile. ‘And how exactly am I supposed to do that?’

  ‘You’re an actress, aren’t you? I’m sure you’ll figure it out.’

  35

  Stanley Parrish viewed the approach of Christmas with a dull sort of dread. It wasn’t even December yet and the shops were already full of baubles and tinsel. As he no longer got an invitation to spend the day with his sister’s family, he knew it would be time spent alone. In general, he didn’t mind his own company, could cope perfectly well with it, but the festive period was more challenging. For a couple of days everything would close down and the only company he’d have would be during the brief hours the pub was open.

  Stanley tried to take his mind off this by concentrating on the Fury case. He had brought the file home, and now had the sheets of paper spread out in front of him on the table. As he’d done so many times before, he was going right back to the beginning to look at the day of the abduction itself. The house had been protected by a good alarm system, along with serious locks on the doors and windows, but there had been no real security as regards the grounds. Although the main gates were locked, a smaller side gate was often left open during the day to enable staff to come and go. This was probably how the intruder had got in.

  The abduction had been well planned – someone knew the nanny’s routine – and yet it had all gone badly wrong. Cathy Kershaw must have fought to save the baby and in the process had lost her own life. But why had she been killed? It had either been a moment of panic or a deliberate act to prevent her from identifying him. So someone she knew, perhaps, a former member of staff or a visitor to the house.

  Stanley could still remember going to see Cathy’s parents. It had been about three years after her murder, but time hadn’t dulled their grief. Agonised eyes stared out from pale, tight faces. They could have no closure – if such a thing was even possible – as the police had still not caught their daughter’s killer. He knew from experience that at the time of Kay’s abduction, Cathy’s innocence would not have been taken for granted. Questions would have been asked about friends and boyfriends, questions guaranteed to cause additional pain. Personally, Stanley didn’t think she’d been involved. She’d been a nice girl who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was as much the victim in all this as Kay Fury.

  And what of Angela Bruce? He’d made some progress since dropping off Lolly in West Henby. After trawling through what felt like thousands of records, he’d finally discovered that Angela had changed her name from Martin to Bruce by deed poll in 1959, a year or so after Lolly was born.

  Despite the name change, Billy had still managed to track her down. He must have known that Lolly wasn’t hers, couldn’t be, but had he ever found out where she’d come from? Stanley was still mulling over this when the phone call he’d been waiting for finally came through.

  DS Donal Stewart worked out of West End Central, and was a colleague from way back. They went through the usual friendly exchange before getting down to business. ‘Okay, I’ve got something for you – if it’s the right Billy Martin. I’m presuming it is: right name, right age, a small-time villain from south London, in and out of jail for robbery and GBH. That’s the good news. The bad news, for you at least, is that he was still banged up in fifty-eight so he couldn’t have had anything to do with the Fury business. Well, not unless he organised it from behind bars.’

  Stanley wasn’t overly disappointed. It had always been a long shot that Billy could have kidnapped Kay and then given her to Angela to look after. ‘I don’t suppose you have an address?’

  ‘Nothing recent. And he’s been off the radar since… hang on, just let me check. Yes, we’re talking January 1963 when they kicked him out of the Scrubs. Not so much as a parking ticket since then. So he’s either a reformed character, cleared off abroad or gone to meet his maker. Take your pick. I’m leaning towards the latter.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. I don’t suppose you’ve got any known associates on record, have you? Or any family?’

  ‘He did a couple of jobs with the Grayling brothers, but they’re both brown bread now. And there’s a sister who used to live in Lambeth. Sheila Barstow. Do you want the address? It’s old, she could have moved, but someone might know where she is.’

  ‘Thanks. I owe you one.’ Stanley scribbled down the details, said his goodbyes and hung up. He thought it could be worth trying to look up the sister, if only to establish whether or not she’d heard from Billy in the past few years. He suspected not. If Joe Quinn’s reaction was
anything to go by, the delightful Billy had stopped breathing a long time ago.

  And that was something else to think about. If it got back to Quinn that he was asking questions about Billy Martin, he could expect another visit – and this one might not end with all his limbs intact. Was it worth the risk? The problem was he had nowhere else to go. Even though he didn’t really believe Lolly was Mal and Esther’s daughter, he still felt a compulsion to prove it one way or the other.

  Stanley drank some coffee, put the mug down and scratched his head. Someone out there must know what had happened that autumn morning in 1958. He thought it unlikely the kidnapper had been working alone. You couldn’t just throw a baby in the back of a car and drive off. You needed someone to take care of it, to stop it from crying, and later on, to feed and change it while the ransom negotiations were going on. A woman, he presumed, if that wasn’t being too sexist. A man looking after a baby alone was going to arouse suspicion.

  Of course, there was always the possibility that it hadn’t been a kidnap at all, but that Cathy Kershaw had always been the intended victim. Was there any evidence for this? No, but it couldn’t be completely ruled out. It could have been an attempted rape, during which the pram had rolled into the lake. But if that was the case, why was the baby taken?

  No ransom demand had ever been made, but that wasn’t surprising. The abduction of Kay Fury had been headline news with the police crawling all over the case. Stanley tried to put himself in the kidnapper’s shoes. It would have been too risky, perhaps, to go through with it, especially if Kay was already dead. And if she wasn’t? Then surely the logical thing to do was to cut your losses and leave the baby somewhere she’d be found.

  Stanley looked again at the long list of staff, work colleagues, friends and guests that the Furys had compiled thirteen years ago. Suddenly, as his eyes scanned down the page, one of the names jumped out at him. He pulled in a breath, reminded of something Lolly Bruce had said. As he picked up a pen and underlined the name, his heart was starting to thump. Quickly he picked up the phone and made a call. He asked the questions and listened carefully to the answers. When he put the receiver down, his pulse was racing. After years of working in the dark, there was finally a glimmer of light. He sat and thought about it for a while. Then he picked the phone up again and dialled the number for Mal Fury.

  36

  Lolly had never met a woman as beautiful as Esther Fury before. She was tall and willowy and blonde, with the kind of face you usually only saw on the covers of magazines. Her skin was smooth, her grey eyes darkly lashed, her mouth a wide perfect bow. Even her smell was exquisite, a scent that floated in the air like summer roses. She was wearing a pale green dress that clung to every curve of her body.

  As she circled Lolly, looking her up and down, Esther wore a disappointed expression. ‘Oh, dear,’ she murmured. ‘This won’t do at all.’

  Mrs Gough stood with her arms folded across her chest. ‘You see what I mean?’

  ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what Mr Fury was thinking.’

  ‘Mr Fury doesn’t think; that’s the problem.’ Esther gave a weary sigh. She took a step back and narrowed her eyes as though this might improve the view. ‘Well, we can only do what we can do. A haircut might help. She can barely see out from under that fringe. And where did all these awful clothes come from?’

  ‘They came with her. I sent Theresa to Moffat’s to buy some new ones, but I can’t get her to wear them. She’s stubborn, Mrs Fury. That’s the trouble with these London types – they don’t appreciate anything you do.’

  Lolly could have piped up and said that the reason she hadn’t worn the new clothes was that she didn’t want to spoil them, but was too overawed to open her mouth and explain. She stood very still, not enjoying the scrutiny, but weirdly entranced by Esther. She was like one of those fairy-tale princesses, a being from another world. Even her voice was enchanting, soft and sweet and melodious.

  ‘There are worse things than being stubborn, I suppose. She might grow out of it.’

  Mrs Gough made an unpleasant noise in the back of her throat. ‘And I dare say that Mr Parrish has been filling her head with all sorts of nonsense.’

  ‘Yes, I dare say he has.’

  Lolly glanced from one to the other, feeling awkward. It was no surprise she’d been judged and found wanting – she was used to little else – but her cheeks were starting to burn with embarrassment. She lowered her gaze to the deep pile carpet of the library. It was only then that Esther addressed her directly for the first time.

  ‘And what are we going to do about this name of yours?’

  Lolly looked up again, not understanding.

  ‘You see, Lolly is all very well when you’re small, but you’re growing up now. You need something a little more… sophisticated. And I don’t think we want to call you Lolita.’ Esther gave a tiny shudder. ‘No, that wouldn’t do at all.’

  Lolly was saved from having to make a response by the timely appearance of Mal. He strode into the room, came over and shot his wife a warning glance. Although he was smiling, his voice had an edge to it.

  ‘Leave the poor girl alone, darling. There’s nothing wrong with her name.’

  ‘Oh, please. There’s everything wrong with it. How’s she going to cope when she gets older? She can’t be called Lolly for the rest of her life.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Esther tossed her head with impatience. ‘For heaven’s sake, she’s got enough disadvantages without adding to them. No, we need to choose something more acceptable. How about Lita?’ She looked at Lolly as if assessing how well the name suited her. ‘Yes, I think that would do quite well.’

  ‘Doesn’t she get a say in the matter?’

  Lolly, sensing the tension between them, didn’t want to be the cause of more trouble. ‘I don’t mind it,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t mind Lita.’

  ‘There!’ Esther said triumphantly. ‘It’s settled then. Mrs Gough, you can let the staff know. And now all we have to do is sort out a school.’

  ‘She can go to the village school,’ Mal said.

  Esther frowned at him. ‘I thought you wanted the best for her, to give her a chance.’

  ‘It’s a perfectly good school.’

  ‘Not good enough for your parents to send you to, though.’

  ‘That was their choice, not mine.’

  But Esther wasn’t giving in. ‘You can’t say one thing and do another. Either you want her to get a good education or you don’t. Or would you rather she just ended up on the scrapheap like most of the kids round here? I think Daynor Bridge could be perfect. It’s not too academic and it has a decent reputation.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘You’ll have to make a decision soon if she’s going to be enrolled for next term.’

  ‘I said I’ll think about it,’ Mal snapped. ‘Can we drop the subject now? We’ll discuss it later.’

  Esther arched her eyebrows as though his tone was totally unreasonable. ‘Perhaps I’ll make some enquiries, just so we’re prepared. It can’t do any harm, can it?’

  ‘Whatever makes you happy.’

  Esther left the library with Mrs Gough, both of them looking decidedly smug.

  Mal walked over to the window and silently gazed out at the garden. Lolly continued to stand there, not sure what to do next. She’d just started to compose a letter to Jude when Esther had arrived, and the sheet of silky white writing paper was still lying on the side table. She hadn’t got further than writing her new address and Hi Jude, How are you?

  Mal glanced over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to take a walk into the village. Would you like to come?’

  Lolly nodded. ‘Okay.’