Survivor: Only the strongest will remain standing . . .

by Roberta Kray

  She sighed into the still summer air, her hands twisting in her lap. ‘I should never have let her talk me out of it. It would have been done then, wouldn’t it, over with one way or the other? But she talked me round, said I could go up to my sister’s in Glasgow for the last few months, tell my Mick that she was sick and needed looking after. That way he’d never guess. And then after the baby was born… well, she’d take it on, wouldn’t she? Angela. She’d always wanted a kid but she couldn’t have one of her own.’

  Nick nodded, starting to get the picture. ‘I take it the deal was that she wouldn’t come back to Kellston?’

  Maeve flinched at the word ‘deal’. ‘Manchester. That’s where she said she was going, reckoned she had friends there.’

  ‘And it all went smoothly?’

  ‘Smooth enough until five years down the line when she suddenly appeared again.’

  ‘That must have been a shock.’

  ‘She was acting strange too, not like the old Angela. Always looking over her shoulder, if you know what I mean. And she said there were voices in her head telling her what to do, voices that had told her to come back to Kellston. I took her to the doc straight off and he put her on some pills. She was all right for a while after that. Things settled down and I got her a job at the Fox.’

  ‘You must have been worried.’

  Maeve shot him a sidelong glance. ‘Course I was worried. You don’t know my Mick. He’d have lost the plot if he’d ever found out. But she swore, swore on her life, that she’d never tell.’

  ‘Who was Lolly’s dad?’

  The sudden change of tack took her unawares. ‘No one,’ she said sharply. ‘Least no one worth remembering. I can’t tell you his name so don’t bother asking. And when I say can’t, I mean can’t and not won’t. It was just a drunken mistake. I’d never met him before and I wouldn’t know him if he walked straight past us now.’

  ‘Okay.’ Nick was still trying to absorb the fact that, with a little help from Sheila Barstow, he’d actually discovered who Lolly’s mother was, but he felt no sense of triumph. There were no winners in this tragic story. And although he’d succeeded where his uncle hadn’t, this hadn’t been down to any great detecting skills. Stanley had mistaken Maeve’s anxiety for a fear of Joe Quinn, and he’d have probably done the same in his position. ‘It must have hard for you though, seeing Lolly around all the time, knowing she was really yours.’

  ‘She was never mine,’ Maeve snapped. ‘Angela was her mother.’

  Nick moved swiftly on. ‘And then Billy Martin turned up. I guess that’s when things got really complicated. I mean, he knew Angela couldn’t have kids, didn’t he? He must have asked a lot of awkward questions.’

  ‘That man…’ Maeve spoke through gritted teeth, as though even the mention of his name caused her pain. ‘He just wouldn’t stop. He was at her all the time, pushing and pushing. She told him Lolly was adopted but he didn’t believe her; she didn’t have any legal papers, didn’t have any proof at all. And Billy couldn’t stand her holding out on him. He was a nasty piece of work, a control freak, the sort of man who isn’t happy unless he’s making someone else’s life a misery. Ruining her life once wasn’t good enough for the bastard; he had to start all over again.’

  ‘Why didn’t she just go somewhere else, get away from him?’

  ‘I kept telling to leave, but she wouldn’t. She said that would only make it worse, that he’d come after her, track her down, and then he’d be angry, and when Billy was angry… well, you can guess the rest.’

  ‘So how did the whole Fury business come about?’

  Maeve lifted a hand to her mouth and chewed on a nail. ‘It was just another way of tormenting her. When she wouldn’t tell him where Lolly had come from, he started joking that she must be Kay Fury, the missing baby. Everyone knew about that; it was all over the papers. But nothing ever stopped as a joke with Billy. This was around the same time he flushed her pills down the toilet, told her she didn’t need them, claimed he was doing it for her own good.’

  ‘And that’s when she began getting ill again?’

  Maeve nodded. ‘She started getting confused about things, and the more confused she got the more Billy took advantage. He said Mal Fury and his wife had spies everywhere, people feeding back information about children who might not belong to the parents they were with. He said he’d protect her, keep them away, but that if she ever left he’d pick up the phone and she’d never see the kid again. It was just a sick game for him, a way of playing with her head.’

  ‘But she knew Lolly wasn’t Kay Fury so why should she be worried?’

  ‘Because she started having doubts. She began to wonder if she really did know. She came round to see me, asked if I’d ever actually been pregnant. She hadn’t seen me in those last few months, not while I’d been up in Glasgow, and she wasn’t there at the birth. She only saw Lolly for the first time when she was a few weeks old.’ Maeve released a sigh of frustration. ‘There was no telling her. She had this idea that Joe Quinn had organised the kidnap and that when it all went wrong he’d given me the baby to get rid of. I told her it didn’t make any sense, that even if Joe had done it – which he hadn’t – he wouldn’t have known in advance what was going to happen. Why would he make plans to offload the baby if he was hoping to get a ransom for returning her?’

  ‘And what did Angela say?’

  ‘She couldn’t think it through properly. One minute she was saying that maybe Joe had never planned on returning her, that he was just going to take the money, and the next suggesting that I’d double-crossed him, told him the baby was dead and passed Kay over to her instead. I even went to the library and got a copy of a newspaper article, one that had a picture of Kay, but she said it was fake, that I was just trying to fool her.’

  ‘Billy did a good job screwing with her head.’

  ‘Oh, it didn’t stop there. He even produced a button he claimed had come off Kay Fury’s cardigan during the kidnap. It was nonsense, of course – he must have checked out the pictures in the paper too – but by this time she was too confused to know what day of the week it was, never mind remember what buttons had been on the clothes Lolly had been wearing when I passed her over. But he kept pressing her saying, ‘It’s the same, isn’t it?’ I asked her how the hell Billy could have got hold of something like that, but she just shrugged and said that he ‘knew people.’

  ‘And then Billy suddenly disappeared. What do you think happened there?’

  ‘Happened?’ she echoed.

  Nick didn’t elaborate. She knew exactly what he meant.

  Maeve’s thin shoulders shifted up and down. ‘He just took off, didn’t? Maybe he got bored. Maybe he found some other poor cow to torment. Who knows? Who cares? She should have been glad to see the back of him.’

  ‘Except she wasn’t. Billy had convinced her he was keeping her safe, protecting her from the Furys. And now she didn’t feel safe any more. She reckoned Joe was behind it, didn’t she?’

  ‘Only because of what Billy had been telling her.’

  And Nick wondered what Maeve had been telling Joe about Billy: something inflammatory, some lie to get the old gangster pissed off enough to dispose of a lowlife no one but Angela would miss. That he was a grass, perhaps – or that he’d been badmouthing Joe behind his back. From what he’d heard, Joe Quinn’s fuse had been a short one.

  ‘It must have been a worry for you, all this.’

  Maeve turned a pair of suspicious eyes on him. ‘I was worried for her.’

  ‘Is that why you got her fired from the pub?’

  The direct question made her wince. Her hands began their restless dance again. ‘That was Joe’s doing, not mine.’

  ‘But you were the one who put the idea in his head. You must have been scared that she’d let something slip, that the truth about Lolly might finally come out.’

  Maeve didn’t deny it. Her eyes narrowed and her voice turned ugly and peevish. ‘I just wanted her to go
away, for God’s sake. I’d had enough of it all. I thought… I thought if she didn’t have a job, if Billy wasn’t around any more, then she might go back to Manchester. She was asking weird questions in the pub, saying crazy stuff. It was only a matter of time before someone put two and two together. I didn’t have a choice. I told Joe he should let her go before she scared off all the customers.’

  Nick guessed she’d said a damn sight more than that, but kept his suspicions to himself. ‘But she didn’t leave.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That can’t have been easy for you.’

  ‘I just stayed out of her way, avoided her.’

  ‘For eight years?’

  ‘What else could I do?’

  Nick saw the agitation in her again, knew that she was hiding something. ‘But you talked to her before she died.’ It was a shot in the dark, but he knew he’d hit pay dirt. Her whole body stiffened, the blood draining from her face. She looked as pale as a body laid out in the morgue.

  ‘It-it wasn’t my fault,’ she stammered. ‘You can’t blame me. I only wanted her to go away, to get out of Kellston. That’s all I ever wanted.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘She grabbed hold of me on the high street and wouldn’t let go. She was gabbling, talking nonsense, going on about spies and Billy and some Teddy guy he’d met in jail, and how she was being followed. I couldn’t take any more. I’d had enough. I mean, I had my kids with me. It wasn’t right. She was scaring them.’

  Nick squinted into the sun, almost afraid of what was coming next. He held his breath and waited for the revelation.

  Maeve wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering as though it was the middle of winter rather than a hot summer’s day. ‘I told her she should go home, pack up her stuff, take Lolly and get out of Kellston as fast as she could. I said it was true about the kidnap, that Lolly wasn’t my baby. I said Mal Fury had been in the pub looking for her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she insisted again. ‘How was I to know she’d do a thing like that?’

  Nick slowly turned his face to look at her. She wouldn’t meet his gaze. He felt disgust and contempt and something he couldn’t quite describe – a kind of pity, perhaps, for all the dreadful mistakes that human beings made.

  62

  It was two weeks now since Lita had learned the truth about her birth mother. It still hadn’t quite sunk in. Maeve Riley? When Nick Trent had broken the news, she’d shaken her head, laughed, said he’d got it all wrong. Not Maeve, it couldn’t be. She was the woman who worked at the caff, the friend her mum had fallen out with, not… But the words had dried on her lips as the story unfolded.

  At first, bombarded by emotions – anger, bitterness, resentment – she had withdrawn into herself. How to make sense of it? She didn’t think she could. It was hard not to dwell on the fact she’d been unwanted, ‘a mistake’, something to be flushed away at the first opportunity.

  ‘You can’t think like that,’ Stella had argued. ‘She was young and scared, knocked up by a man who wasn’t her husband. That Mick, he’s got a temper on him. Jackie says —’

  ‘She’s known all along, hasn’t she? That’s why she didn’t want me here.’

  ‘She and Maeve go way back. They grew up together. She was just looking out for her in her own stupid way.’

  ‘By being vile to me?’

  ‘She thought you’d come here to cause trouble, to start digging up the past. That guy Trent was sniffing around, asking Maeve about Angela, and then you showed up too and… I don’t know, love. What can I say? When people have secrets, they want them to stay that way.’

  Lita thought about secrets as she gazed across the table at Mal. They had been his undoing too. Did the damn things ever stay buried? The visiting room was crowded, with all of the tables taken. Voices, male and female, wrapped around each other, kids shouted and babies cried. She was glad of the noise because it made talking easier, their conversation less likely to be overheard above the surrounding din.

  She studied his face, looking for signs of fear or despair, but he appeared surprisingly calm. Perhaps it was a relief to shed that burden, to stop living in dread of the truth coming out. Having just finished her revelations about Maeve, she shrugged and said, ‘But you don’t want to hear all this. Tell me what’s going on with you. What’s it like here? Can you bear it? Is it too awful?’

  Mal placed his elbows on the table and smiled. ‘No, don’t stop. I want to hear the rest. There’s nothing interesting to say about prison. It is what it is. You don’t have to worry about me. Have you talked to Maeve yet or would you rather not?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t see the point, but then I thought… I’m not sure what I thought.’ Lita played with the plastic cup, turning it around in her fingers. An inch of cold tea sloshed around in the bottom. ‘We met in a café in Shoreditch. The very first words out of her mouth were, “Are you going to tell my Mick?” I despised her for that, for not even pretending to care about anyone but herself.’

  ‘She was scared. People behave badly when they feel threatened – or guilty.’

  Lita wondered if he was talking as much about himself as Maeve. She remembered how angry she’d felt when she’d heard Maeve’s question, and how this had been quickly followed by another more corrosive emotion. She’d felt powerful too, knowing how much damage she could inflict, knowing that just by telling the truth to the world she could rip this woman’s life apart. And why shouldn’t she? Why should Maeve be allowed to get away with what she’d done? ‘I wanted to hurt her. Is that terrible? I wanted to make her suffer.’

  ‘But you haven’t,’ Mal said. ‘And you won’t.’

  Lita shrugged, knowing he was right. When push came to shove, she didn’t have the heart for it. ‘Well, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? Not really. It wouldn’t bring Mum back. It wouldn’t change anything that’s happened.’ She glanced around the room, looked back at Mal. ‘It was tempting though.’

  He smiled. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘And I’m glad I met her. I wanted to see her face to face and make sure… I wanted to be certain there was nothing there between us, no weird connection or anything, and there wasn’t. So much for biology!’ As soon as she said it, she wished he hadn’t. Mal still didn’t know the fate of his own daughter, whether she was dead or alive – and maybe he never would. ‘I suppose it’s different for everyone.’

  They were quiet for a while, two people trying to come to terms with their respective pasts. It was Mal who broke the silence. ‘Angela must have loved you. I’m not saying that what she did was right, but she must have wanted you enough to be prepared to live a lie. I understand how hard that is, what it means to be always looking over your shoulder. She must have lived with the fear of losing you every single day.’

  ‘I know.’

  Lita thought about the tin box Maeve had passed over in the café, perhaps the only decent thing the woman had ever done. She had stolen it, using the spare key Angela had given her before they’d fallen out, to gain access to the flat. Inside the box were all the items Lita remembered: the beads, the brooch, the pink ribbon, the cinema tickets and the hair grips. Small unimportant things, except they weren’t unimportant to her. They were all she had left of her mother. The letters had gone, of course, destroyed by Maeve – incriminating letters written from Glasgow that said too much about their plans.

  Mal cut across her thoughts. ‘Can I ask you something? Why did you leave home? Did Esther make you?’