She folded her arms. ‘Out and about, you’d find drink. I understand, really I do. When we gave up smoking, Howie and myself, it was murder. Then I went to a site one day and there he was, bold as brass, smoking a rollup in one of the sheds. I already knew, because I could smell the smoke on his clothes. He blamed that on other folk smoking near him, but I knew better. So I made sure I caught him at it.’
She was a good jailer. Alan didn’t know how many years he had left, but the thought of spending the rest of his life in prison was hardly attractive. ‘I need my own money,’ he repeated.
‘Then I’ll employ you. As soon as you’re properly better, you can keep this house in good condition – decorating, putting in a new kitchen and bathroom, keeping up the gardens and helping at the sanctuary. I’ll pay well.’
She wanted to own him, body and soul. He wasn’t too sure about the body, because she showed no sign of wanting sex, but he was her reason for living, her mission, her foundling. Something had to give. Dying of a bad heart and alcohol was a possibility he understood. He had fought it and, with the help of the Welsh sheep-lover, he had won. What had he won? The chance of dying from boredom, that was all.
‘I’ll go and get ready, then,’ she said.
Alan, carrying the remains of his meal, crept into the kitchen and wrapped fish and greens in a paper towel. He buried his guilt under debris in the bin, washed his hands and stared out at the rear garden. She would be at him all the time, helping with the flower beds, supervising his painting, making suggestions, turning his life into a total bloody nightmare. He wasn’t a kid, and he hated Blackpool.
She didn’t even have a cheque book, had no need of one. The accountant paid all household bills, and she took cash from machines in the bank or in the street. He needed her pin. She had it in her personal address book, but it was disguised as a phone number. ‘Howie told me to do that,’ she had told Alan gleefully. ‘I’ve a memory like a sieve, so it was a good idea.’
So. How could he get his hands on that little book? And when would he get the chance to dial every single number until he got the false one? What if it wasn’t a false one? She might have chosen an arrangement of numbers that happened to belong to a phone somewhere on the planet. And the pin would be just part of the number. On top of all that, how long might it take her accountant to realize that she was withdrawing her limit of a thousand every day?
‘Are you ready, love?’ she called from upstairs.
‘Love’ again. She didn’t love him. He was a male version of one of those horrible, scary, pot-faced dolls some women collected; he was something to dress, to pamper, something to display in the passenger seat so that she didn’t look like a woman on her own. His misery was beginning to show, and he knew it. But what could he say? ‘Give us a couple of hundred grand and I’ll bugger off’? He didn’t own even the train fare to get out of Blackpool, and he wasn’t going to steal from her purse, oh no. He needed a lot more than she carried in her handbag.
‘I’m ready now,’ she shouted.
They sat in the car. ‘You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?’
He sighed. ‘All right, I may as well say it, Trish. I like you a lot.’ That was almost a lie, for a kick-off. ‘But I hate Blackpool. It was OK when I was a kid on the sands with Mam and Dad, but I’m not one for dancing and bingo. Why don’t you go to bingo with that Maisie next door?’
Trish frowned. ‘I always went with Howie.’ There was a catch in her throat, and she swallowed hard. ‘We did everything together, went everywhere together. We didn’t need many friends, because we had each other.’
‘But he also worked till he got ill, Trish. It’s different if a man goes to work. Lucy and I made space for each other, and—’
‘And where did that get you? In hospital with alcohol poisoning and a bad heart, while she buggers off with all the money. I’m doing my best. All I care about is keeping you well and off the booze.’
‘I need space,’ he said. ‘I’m not used to being looked after so well. Yes, I was married, but there was no contact. She cooked, saw to the kids, and that was about it. When we spoke it was usually on the phone – I’d ring to say what time I’d be home for a meal. I’m used to the company of men, and I wasn’t afraid of getting dirty. Mixing concrete, fixing windows, guttering, tiling – I’d turn my hand to anything. When I came out of Easterly Grange, I thought I’d never be strong again, but I am. In the house, I’m getting claustrophobia.’ He looked at her. ‘Don’t cry. I won’t leave you, but we have to work something out, because I feel as if I’m going mad.’
Trish nodded and dried her eyes. ‘I can’t be on my own, Alan.’
At last, she had said it. She clung to Alan because she feared isolation. He understood that, appreciated it, because Trish was a frightened little woman, and he, too, had known real fear within the recent past. He remembered only too well lying in the room with barred windows, the pain of withdrawal from his drug of choice, the inability to want to remain in a world that had no place for him. ‘I don’t want to be by myself either, Trish. I just want some space, a job to go to – even if it’s just part time.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to sit down and make a plan. You can’t work while we’re in France, but there must be builders round here that could do with an experienced man for a few months every year. Or we could buy you a partnership.’
‘OK.’ Relief flooded his veins. ‘Thanks, Trish. You’re a little gem.’
On that note, Alan and his gem set off for Tallows.
They had been stark naked for days. The robes they had worn after showers had been used while they were eating in the kitchen, but apart from those occasions they had romped about like a couple of maniacs who had escaped from a naturist club. He was her Adonis, she his Aphrodite, and nothing would spoil this honeymoon.
‘I had a dream,’ Lizzie said. ‘Mums opened the door, stood and looked at us with tears in her eyes, then she just smiled and went away.’
Simon chortled and dug her none too gently in the ribs. ‘Hey, your mother’s gorgeous. My dad fancies her rotten, but she’s hooked herself up to Dr Vincent. We aren’t the only ones following instinct. I look at Lucy, and I understand Dustin Hoffman having it away with Mrs Robinson.’
She hit him with a pillow. ‘Just because you’ve landed a job at Guy’s, don’t start thinking you can have everything you want. You can have me, just me and only me. One foot wrong, and I shall be arranging your funeral.’
Smiling broadly, he tried to look at her dispassionately, but it was no easy task. She was built like her mother, slender, but well-endowed in the upper storey. Lizzie was also intelligent, inventive, funny and uninhibited. And she was his wife. Had any of his friends at the Royal told him he would be married by the middle of September, he would have laughed them out of the building. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said for the hundredth time.
‘I know. How lucky are you?’
‘Very.’ He dropped back on to the pillow. ‘Come here.’
‘No.’
He laughed. A modern man in his own estimation, he had truly believed that virginity was not significant, yet he had wept alone in a bathroom after their first time. She was passionate. Nothing short of the greatest love would have persuaded her to give herself so freely. As for himself – he had known that first evening when he had tripped over Mum’s Zimmer, a chair and a rug. He had literally fallen for her on sight.
They had eloped half a mile to Waterloo register office, had dragged in a couple of mates from the hospital, and sealed their fate. ‘I didn’t know it would feel like this, Liz. Surrounded by pretty nurses and young female doctors, I thought I knew it all. I knew nothing.’
‘Nor did I. For me, love was something that would grow. I thought it didn’t just happen like it did with us. Are we crackers? Shall we live to regret it? And will you like London?’
‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’
‘Book of Ruth.’
‘Yes. We both kno
w we’ve taken a huge leap, yet people in their thirties and forties do the same and still end up in the divorce courts. It’s a gamble, and nothing to do with age. But I don’t want to live without you. Ever.’
Lizzie blew him a kiss, gathered up her robe and went towards the large bathroom, the one with a power shower big enough for two people. Something stopped her. Through a landing window, she saw the newly laid wooden path that spread all the way down to the distant shed. Was that a ramp leading up to the door of Mums’s little park home?
‘Simon?’
‘Boo.’ He was behind her. ‘What?’
‘We are not alone,’ she whispered. ‘And whoever’s living in the shed may have seen our car.’ The family always parked on the west side. She and Simon had used the east. ‘That’s a ramp, probably for a wheelchair. Who do we know with a wheelchair?’
He inhaled deeply. ‘Quite. OK. What do we do?’
Lizzie pondered. ‘We get clean, then we come clean.’
‘They’ll kill us.’
‘So we die together, martyrs to the cause. Come on, let’s have our shower. And don’t get frisky this time, because I’m not in the mood.’
‘First time for everything,’ he sighed. ‘Is this the beginning of the slippery slope?’
‘Shut up and fetch the shampoo. You’ll find your slippery slope when you stand on Mums’s Imperial Leather soap.’ She shook a fist at him. ‘You know, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have married a total idiot. Heart surgeon? They’re scraping the barrel.’
He turned on the shower, checked the temperature and dragged her in. ‘You’re so easy,’ he whispered between shower-dampened kisses. ‘Not in the mood . . ?’
Carol Makin was in her element. She was staying in a posh gaff overlooking a series of perfectly manicured little parks with a good view of the marina behind those well-kept lawns and beds across the road. The huge Georgian houses had been erected to contain the families and servants of successful merchants who had lived in Liverpool’s glory years. And those years were coming back, because this great, ebullient, brave seaport was soon to be the City of Culture, and things were looking up.
So was she. Well, she wasn’t looking exactly up, but she had her eye pinned to a character who kept to-ing and fro-ing on paths through the neat gardens at the other side of Mersey View. He was a funny-looking bloke with a limp. And he was too casual, as if he had set out not to be noticed. But if he thought he was blending in with the landscape, he was definitely wrong. Who the hell was he? Was he casing the joint? Scarcely fit to be a burglar, he upped and downed from good leg to bad like a marionette with a string missing. No way could he shin up a drainpipe without breaking the other leg and his mother’s heart.
Then she saw Lexi. So did Hopalong Cassidy, because he hit the deck quicker than a bale of cotton dropping from a crane at one of the cargo-landing stages. ‘Blood and guts – he’s a private dickhead,’ she muttered. ‘What the hell is—’ Carol ran to the door, opened it, folded her arms and leaned casually against the jamb. ‘Hiya, Lex,’ she called. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’
Lexi ground to a halt. She couldn’t work out what the hell Carol Makin was doing here at this time of day. As for a cup of tea, she would sooner drink arsenic with the devil. ‘Bog off, you fat cow. I’m looking for me purse and me handbag.’ She turned away and walked off.
As soon as Lexi disappeared, Limpy Dickhead jumped up and followed her. He stood out like a boil on the face of a baby as he lurched along in pursuit of the Litherland whore. Carol went back into the house. This was all the fault of him next door. It needed dealing with.
Lexi was thoroughly cheesed off. Having various kinds of sex with Greasy Bleasdale had been horrible. She’d been with some mingers in her time, but dealing with Greasy in a storeroom between bog rolls and Harpic had definitely been a low point in her career. However, she’d been granted a couple of hours on the computer, and she was ready to start putting Richard’s wife in the picture.
A kerb-crawler stopped and wound down his window. ‘Would you like a lift, love?’
He didn’t look too bad, and the car seemed decent, so she got in beside him. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m Lexi.’ He wasn’t pretty. He had what might be termed a face only a mother could love, but he was offering to take the weight off her feet, and she wasn’t one for refusing favours.
‘Tom Rice. I’ll take you home, shall I?’
She gave him the address. He looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Perhaps she’d checked him out at her till in the shop, or maybe he lived somewhere close to her.
‘I’ve been for a walk down Mersey View,’ he told her. ‘Lovely, those gardens across from the houses. They own that land, you know. The people on that stretch have to keep the parks in good condition.’
‘Oh.’ That must be where she’d seen him, then.
When they reached her home, she invited him in. He looked clean, at least, and that was more than could be said for Greasy Bleasdale, who was always sweating like a pig, especially when standing near a woman.
‘Give me your number.’ He passed her a pen and a small notebook. ‘We’ll go for a drink one night, eh? Only I’ve sprained my ankle, and I’ve learned my lesson just now pottering about near the marina. Driving’s bad enough. But I’d like to take you out.’ So would Richard Turner, but he’d want to take her out in a different sense … He retrieved his notebook. ‘Thanks. I’ll sit here till you’re safely inside. And I’ll phone you when my foot’s better.’
She got out of the car. He would sit and make sure she was safe. Nobody had ever cared enough to think about her wellbeing. Had she met a decent man tonight? Perhaps, at long, long last, she could be with a bloke without money changing hands. He was no beauty, no spring chicken, but he’d treated her like a lady.
He picked up his phone as soon as he was out of her street. As always, he said as little as possible when communicating with a client. ‘Dr Turner? Tom here. Contact has been established.’ He severed the connection immediately. As an ex-policeman, he was only too aware of the level of surveillance that could be achieved these days.
Tom Rice had always approved of working girls, because they saved other women from bother. As long as they kept themselves clean and checked by a doctor, they did more good than harm. He’d served alongside officers who had seemed not too keen to solve a crime when a prostitute had been the victim. It was as if they didn’t matter, as if they were less than human. Poor Lexi. He quite liked her. If he wasn’t being well paid by Richard Turner, he would definitely have been on her side. He’d never liked bloody doctors.
As they neared Bolton, Alan began to feel nervous. He didn’t know why. All he wanted was to enter the house in which he had lived since the death of Lucy’s mother, and there would be nobody at home, since his so-called wife, soon to be ex, had buggered off to bloody Liverpool, and the kids could be just about anywhere in the world. All the same, he imagined pain in his chest, but he told himself that the pain was just a memory, and that he was not about to enter a nest of vipers.
They stopped on Darwen Road. ‘So you want me to wait here, then?’ Trish asked, her voice high and unsteady. She was afraid that he might never come back. She was just the taxi driver, and he was going to make up with his wife and disappear for ever. Panic closed in on her, and her rate of breathing increased. She had never lived alone, couldn’t cope alone, and her terror might frighten Alan off if she let him see the true extent of it.
‘Trish?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll be back. There’s no way I’ll be stopping here. My business has gone, she’s sold the plant right down to the last cement mixer, and the project I’d planned is down the pan to pay all the debts she never cleared. As for the house, well, it’s mortgaged from footings to chimney pots.’ The mortgage company would be looking for him. They couldn’t get their money back from Lucy, because she’d never borrowed it in the first place. ‘Oh, and if you do buy me a partnership, it’ll be in your name
,’ he said. It would have to be. Any assets he obtained would be taken to repay the money he had borrowed by forging Lucy’s signature. He could very well go to jail for fraud …
‘It doesn’t seem right to be just in my name, love. You’ll be doing all the hard work.’
‘I’m bankrupt,’ he said. ‘Anything I earn will have to be cash in hand, or in an account with your name on it.’
‘How much do you owe, Alan? If that wife of yours won’t pay the debts, let me make a clean start for you.’
He swallowed hard. ‘It’s a lot. She cleaned me out by over two mill, but that was company money. The mortgage on the house is for just under half a million. If that was paid, I’d be in the clear. They couldn’t take any more from me, and I wouldn’t go to prison. The two million’s gone for good, but I need the mortgage money to put me right.’
Trish lifted her chin. ‘Prison? No man of mine goes inside. Look, I’ll pay the building society and wipe your name off the bad books. You’ll no longer be bankrupt, and you can start again in our joint names. You’ll be able to hold your head up high again, and all I want is to be Mrs Henshaw. How about that?’
She was buying him. In return, he would have to pay via bingo, tea dances, whist and line-dancing. But she could make everything OK. If she did pay off the loan on Tallows, he’d become visible and viable again, but he’d still be trapped in Trish’s simple, childish idea of life. He couldn’t run and wouldn’t run, because whatever else Trish might be, she was loyal. And he was tired.
He took her hand. ‘Trish Styles, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’
She blushed and giggled like a girl. ‘That sounded so old-fashioned.’
‘Then give us an old-fashioned answer, girl.’
‘Yes. Yes, I will marry you.’
Every man had his price, he mused as he sealed the deal with a kiss. And now, with his heart filled with gratitude, he needed to get into the house for a new reason. If he could find enough cash, he would take this good woman to Preston’s of Bolton and buy her the best ring he could afford. Like him, she had known poverty; like him, she had dug her way out of it with the help of her marriage partner. He would take the bingo, the dancing, and even the bloody donkeys, because he was sick of running around, tired of being a wanted man, and fed up with women. This one would be enough. He’d make damned sure she was enough.
The Liverpool Trilogy Page 24
